A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  Dame Petronilla, for the first time, looked completely stricken. Lord Lislelivet’s death was one thing, but something happening to Sister Rose or old Dame Hephzibah was another matter.

  Sister Rose looked stunned, just realizing her narrow escape. Her dark eyes narrowed in a kind of anguish. Possibly, thought Max, she had thought to be safe here and was just realizing there was no such place, no place of safety out of the line of fire.

  DCI Cotton was wishing Max had shared some of these little investigative insights with him ahead of time. But, noo-o-o. Max, ever the Lone Ranger.

  “So who killed Lord Lislelivet?” demanded Xanda.

  “I think it must have been his mother, don’t you?”

  “What?” This time they all, without exception, looked mystified.

  “His mother, Dame Meredith.”

  Chapter 39

  THE DEVIL YOU SAY

  Verily it is said, give the devil his due.

  —The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy

  “Why don’t you start with the fruitcake, Dame Petronilla?” Max suggested.

  Dame Petronilla heaved a great sigh, exchanging a glance with Dr. Barnard. And turning to Max she began to speak.

  “Yes. It was months ago, on his first visit—his first visit in years. I took one of Dame Fruitcake’s baking pans that she had left sitting out, full of batter, ready to go in the oven. We have a kitchenette over at the infirmary that has a small oven. I—I mixed the berries into the fruitcake batter, baked it, and wrapped it and left it for Lord Lislelivet as a ‘gift.’” She paused, blushing. “I know how petty and small that sounds. How petty and small it was. I could not myself believe that someone such as I, someone whose sole interest was in caring for others, could become so filled with hatred that I … that I did this to him.”

  “With the intent to poison him? To kill him?”

  “No, never—I swear it, Father. I just was so outside of myself. Filled with rage, consumed by it, I didn’t really know what I was doing, but my aim never was to kill or seriously injure him or anyone. His wife or a guest could have died, and that was never, ever my intent. I easily could have killed him if I’d wanted to. I had the knowledge and the resources to do it. But I never wanted…” She turned and looked at Dr. Barnard. “I never wanted this. I may have wished him dead a hundred thousand times, but I could never kill him, or anyone. With my bare hands?” She turned up her palms and looked at them. “Never,” she repeated. “I was trained to heal, not to harm.”

  And Dr. Barnard had sworn to be a healer when he took the Hippocratic Oath, thought Max. It didn’t appear to have stopped him. Max looked at her, at this woman whose life had been dedicated to love and forgiveness. And he thought how difficult those concepts were in practice.

  He believed her. About the berries in the cake, at least, he believed her. He was not sure he believed her disclaimer that she did not know what the doctor might be planning. Did she just convince herself that what she suspected could not be true? She had loved the man once, and she said she loved him still. People in love did all manner of strange things and would believe all manner of stories that would shield them from the knowledge that their beloved was a killer. His mind flashed to his parishioner Chrissa with her abusive husband, a case of love gone wrong if ever there were one. How far would Chrissa’s ego go to shield her from the knowledge she willingly had made a foolish, hideous, life-threatening mistake in marrying such a man?

  Dame Petronilla had told Max she’d given up nursing because it was hard to watch people die. It must have been harder still to have the child in your care disappear into probable danger and you be blamed for it.

  Aloud he said, “There is little doubt Lord Lislelivet came here to do away with Dame Meredith if he couldn’t ‘reason’ with her. Even if she had promised to carry her secret to the grave, could he trust her to keep the promise? But she made no such promise, the woman who stood between him and a fortune. Instead she declared that she must tell the truth, for his sake as well as hers. They were at perfectly opposed purposes, this dying woman of religion and her unholy son.

  “Dame Meredith was ill, but she was not completely bedridden. She was also highly motivated, needing to set things right before she passed. Here is how I reconstruct what happened. Obviously, I must estimate the times in certain instances.” He took his revised timeline from his pocket and read aloud:

  8:00 p.m. – Dame Petronilla goes to gatehouse and doses Dame Hephzibah with belladonna, then returns to the infirmary.

  8:45 – Dame Meredith slips away from her bed to meet her son, Lord Lislelivet, in the church. She knows from eavesdropping that Dame Petronilla has lured him with the promise of showing him the crypt, so Dame Meredith arranges an earlier meeting. She has not taken the usual sleeping powder provided her by Dame Petronilla but has used it to sedate her minder, Sister Rose.

  8:50 – Lord Lislelivet meets Dame Meredith at the top of the crypt stairs. They argue. According to her confession, he slips on the age-worn stone and falls down the spiral stairs to his death. His watch is broken and she adjusts it forward to 9:10, so she and her sisters are alibied. She returns to the infirmary.

  8:50 – Meanwhile, Dr. Barnard, arriving by small boat, has already entered Monkbury Abbey via the black door on the water.

  8:55 – Dr. Barnard, dressed as Dame Petronilla, entering the crypt from within the cloister, goes to keep the meeting with Lord Lislelivet, but finds him dead.

  9:00 – Compline begins. Dr. Barnard goes through with the prearranged plan to take Dame Petronilla’s place in her stall.

  9:30 – Compline ends; the Great Silence begins. Dr. Barnard returns to the infirmary. He tells Dame Petronilla he has found Lord Lislelivet dead. Dame Petronilla, still disguised as Dr. Barnard, gets in the waiting boat and rows to Dr. Barnard’s car, which is parked in the woods.

  10 – Dame Petronilla drives up to the nunnery and obtains the key to a room in the guesthouse from the vision-impaired Dame Hephzibah. Meanwhile Dr. Barnard carries the body of Lord Lislelivet up the stairs and through the cloister garden, and pushes it down the well: the body must not be found within the off-limits cloistered area, which might implicate Dame Petronilla. She returns from the guesthouse to the infirmary. Just before 10:10, Dr. Barnard sets up a hue and cry—a terrified yell, as if Lord Lislelivet were just being murdered.

  10:10 – Hidden by trees, Dr. Barnard returns to the infirmary. He and Dame Petronilla exchange clothing, and she hands him the key to his room in the guesthouse.

  10:20 – Dame Petronilla wakens Sister Rose from her drugged state.

  10:20 – Dr. Barnard loses himself within the abbey grounds, in the confusion of the discovery of the body.

  “Good grief,” said Xanda when he had finished. “Are you sure of all this?”

  “As sure as I can be without confirmation from Dame Petronilla.”

  He looked at her, and she said, “That is more or less correct. I hid an extra habit in the guesthouse so I could change there. It reduced the risk of being caught out in disguise.”

  “So I am right in thinking the plan all along was to kill Lord Lislelivet? Because otherwise, such an elaborate ruse seems totally unnecessary. It’s overkill, if you’ll pardon the expression. Temporarily blinding Dame Hephzibah with eye drops was not just improvised. It was the first step in your plan.”

  “I didn’t mean—” she began, but Max held up a hand to stay her. He had heard enough.

  “And poor Sister Rose,” he said. “She was expecting a major scolding from Dame Petronilla for having fallen asleep, but the scolding never came.”

  “I didn’t understand myself why I would nod off so suddenly and completely,” said Sister Rose, “even given the fact we rise early each day. Now I see…”

  “On top of the early rising,” said Max, “and all the manual labor under a hot sun, you were overdosed with a powerful drug meant to give Dame Meredith several hours respite from her illness. It was enough to fell a ho
rse.”

  Dame Petronilla had pulled out her rosary beads and, eyes downcast, was silently saying over her prayers. A series of thirty-three beads, one for each year of Christ’s life, helped mark her progress. Max’s eye drifted to the distinctive red-and-black beads. He could see that one of a group of seven beads was missing, just as Dame Petronilla seemed to realize that her count was off. She looked down at the strand in her hands, a puzzled look on her face.

  “What is it, Dame Pet?” he asked her, suddenly alarmed.

  “I’m not sure. But one bead is missing. Not to worry. They are quite safe, rosary peas. That is, unless the coating is broken.”

  “And what happens if it is?”

  “Why, if it gets in the bloodstream it is a deadly poison.”

  This woman must be barking.

  Max turned to DCI Cotton. “Get the medical examiner over to the infirmary—now. Say it’s a suspected poisoning. Self-inflicted.”

  “Dame Meredith,” said Cotton.

  It was not a question.

  EPILOGUE

  Max had learned immediately on his return to Nether Monkslip that Chrissa Baker, the woman he’d gone to see in hospital before leaving for Monkbury Abbey, had upon her release returned to her husband, ignoring the temporary safe house Max had arranged for her use until she could find her feet. All the resources of the village would have been at her disposal.

  People who knew Chrissa loved her. No one understood it.

  Max’s heart sank at the news—there was literally a dropping sensation, as if his heart had plunged from a great height. How could she? How could she? And most of all: why? When he had thrown her a lifeline. Why?

  He thought of another Cohen lyric, where Leonard spoke of finally hanging it up—hanging up his robes on a peg at the Buddhist monastery on Mount Baldy and driving down from that particular mountain after five long years:

  “I finally understood

  I had no gift

  for Spiritual Matters.”

  It had been at that moment exactly how Max had felt. What did he know of anything? What ability did he have to absorb, let alone impart wisdom—he who couldn’t even a talk a woman into saving her own life? Into running from the man who was breaking both her body and her spirit?

  At that moment Awena had entered the room. He opened his arms to welcome her.

  “You’ve heard about Chrissa then, have you?” she said, lifting her face to his. She always seemed to know—when he was happy, or when he was distracted, or when he was bereft, as now. He gathered her body to his, holding her tightly, as though his heart really would fall and shatter without her there.

  “Some people have no center to them, Max. And no sense that our time here on earth is short. They cling to any passing branch in the river, never noticing that it’s carrying them straight over a waterfall. I don’t think there is much else you can do for her except to let her know you’re still here.”

  “Until he kills her one day.”

  “He may very well do that. We’ve both known it to happen.”

  “I don’t understand. She’s not a stupid woman.”

  “Of course she’s not. She’s one of the brightest people I know, and the most loving. I will go and see her. But I won’t waste my breath trying to talk her into anything. Just knowing you have people who care can make you stronger. Things may change. We’ll have to wait her out.”

  They sat then on the sofa by the fire and began to knit together their days by talking of many things. The upcoming handfasting ceremony consumed them both, not to mention trying to come up with a name for the baby on the way. They had had little chance to talk about the events at Monkbury Abbey, and Max, still thinking it through, had not been inclined to talk about it.

  “Of course,” Awena said. “Rosary peas. They were originally from Indonesia, but now they grow almost anywhere with a tropical climate.”

  “The nuns got in a shipment of rosaries to the gift shop, made from these rosary peas,” said Max. “The rosaries were made by missionary sisters. Only Dame Petronilla recognized the red-and-black beads for what they were when they arrived. She pulled them from the shop, confiscated and destroyed them, just to be on the safe side, but she kept one set of beads for herself because they were so pretty and unusual. They weren’t dangerous unless they were broken open and ingested, which she had no intention of doing.

  “As I say, only Dame Petronilla recognized the rosary pea for what it was. For the fact is each pea contains a poison even more deadly than ricin. And when Dame Meredith saw them being used by Dame Petronilla, and commented on the pretty beads, Dame Pet told her what they were, never imagining…”

  “And Dame Meredith stole the one when Dame Pet wasn’t looking. Broke it off the chain.”

  “That’s right. Effectively unleashing its poison. They are safe enough left alone, but once the coating is broken … I suspect her idea was to keep it close by—just in case. In case things got to looking too bad. In case the treatments got to be too horrid—or hopeless—for her to endure any more. Or in case she saw everything in her life, past and present, closing in on her. Which is exactly what did happen.”

  “What a completely sad ending to a sad story.”

  He agreed. “It is terribly sad. And they doubt she’ll regain consciousness. A waste of a good person, over a mistake so old.”

  “So, it was really about that horrible old crime that came back to haunt them all?” Awena said.

  “Nearly twenty years on, yes. But we will never know what happened to that small child. That is the one question I wish I could answer, for everyone’s sake, including mine.”

  “And Dr. Barnard and Dame Petronilla—well, we can’t call her that anymore, can we? But—it seems right that they would be together at last. I guess we’ll get used to calling her plain old Petronilla Falcon, now that she has left the order.”

  “Leaving really was the only thing, the best thing she could do. Her vocation, as she now sees it, was not so much one of choice, but of fleeing the world. The nuns talked of that a lot—how a true vocation was a running toward God, not away from man, or words to that effect. I would say running away from yourself fits in there somewhere, too, as not leading to a true calling for the life.”

  “Is that what Dame Meredith was doing, too? Running away?”

  “I suppose. But I like to think she found some contentment. Until … well, anything like contentment was blown apart when Lord Lislelivet came along, desperate to save his title and his money.”

  “Poor woman,” said Awena. “How desperate she must have been.”

  “I think we have to take it as given that she was not herself. She had been writing a letter to leave behind, addressed to the abbess and the community as a whole. If she’d been guilty of murder, I think she would have admitted it—and I for one don’t think she was capable of that. But she admitted to all the old scandal and subterfuge—to the fact that she was Lord Lislelivet’s natural mother and how she had conspired to hide his true origins from her own sister. To the fact that she had betrayed that sister in the first place and then indulged in a cover-up that went on for decades. It must be said: Lord Lislelivet, unpleasant a man as he was, had a right to know who he was. But his father’s telling him, in this case, was a very big mistake.”

  “Just think how the truth all those years ago, as disagreeable as it may have been, would have spared everyone years down the line.”

  Max said, “Dame Meredith was mostly guilty of being naïve. Perhaps it is a trait that overtakes someone in the life there or that was always part of a trusting nature. She actually thought she could convince her son to give up the blood money, as she thought of it—in her letter, she quoted the rich man and the camel passage from the Bible: how it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into heaven. Lord Lislelivet believed without a doubt she would give the game away if he didn’t do something fast, for she had said as much in the letter she wrote to him—to his min
d, she was absolutely unhinged to be talking the way she was. Give away money? Never! He tried ‘coming clean’ with her—at least his distorted idea of coming clean. He told her what he’d done to his baby brother and that he would surely go to prison for it if this all came out, thinking she would want to spare him. Well, that was all she needed to hear to be completely horrified. He overplayed his hand, forgetting that those maternal bonds had never really been forged between her and him. All she could think was of the nightmare her sister had gone through and how she, Dame Meredith, must make it right before her time ran out.”

  “I can see that. Everything in her training, in who she was, and who she was trying to be, cried out for the truth to be told. And the one thing a man like her son feared the most was the truth.”

  “Do you know,” Max added musingly, “I even saw the family resemblance, but at first I wrote it off to the fact the son resembled his father in photographs I’d seen of them both. Dark hair and eyes, and olive-skinned. Both men had the same body type, with the massive chest over an otherwise small frame. Only much later in the case did I realize that what I was noticing also was Lord Lislelivet’s resemblance to his mother. His facial resemblance, in particular, to Dame Meredith. They both had that rather aristocratic cast to their features—her face much thinner and more drawn because of her illness, of course.

  “Without the distractions of hair color and style, what is left are the basics—the planes of the face, the angle of the nose, and the width of the brow. Even then, I missed it. I just had this tantalizing sense that I was seeing a familiar face when I visited Dame Meredith in the infirmary.”

  “There is no question she tried to commit suicide?”

  “None, according to Cotton’s medical examiner. It all just collapsed on her. All of her life. The despair and the weight of guilt overwhelmed her in the end. For there was one added element. During all the medical testing and treatment she had undergone, Dame Meredith learned she carried a gene for a progressively debilitating disease that had likely been passed along to her male child. This as much as anything made her want to have it all come out, to want to tell her son all of the truth. She felt so guilty, not about depriving him of an inheritance—what did a nun care about that, after all?—but of maybe having handed along this disease that amounted to a death sentence. So she thought, ‘I must tell my son the truth; it is the least I can do for him now.’ Unfortunately, she found him to be not grateful but more determined to keep what was ‘his’ at all costs. To keep the truth of his parentage hidden.”