A Fatal Winter

by G. M. Malliet

  It only went as far as Staincross Minster where more modern connections could be made to the wider world. The train was seldom crowded even though it was small and the service infrequent—there were easier ways for the general populace to travel to Staincross Minster without going via such an obscure place as his village. So difficult was it to get to and from Nether Monkslip, in fact, it was difficult to say quite what the village was doing there. Apart from the presence of the river, significant in terms of early commercial transport, how and why the village had evolved was lost in the mists of time.

  Since few people knew of Nether Monkslip’s existence (which was how the villagers liked it) the little mahogany-paneled conveyance suited the villagers’ purposes exactly. It had a tea trolley (dining cars being nearly a thing of the past) but service was intermittent, and the ride was too short to warrant much more than intermittent.

  Nothing was as it once had been, Max reflected sadly. Hotels, trains. And George had looked to be getting on in years, the movements of the old warrior now stiff, fraught with effort. Arthritis, probably …

  As Max stood in this brooding manner waiting to board at Waterloo, he failed to notice the woman who had actually stopped dead in her tracks to stare at him. Her expression seemed to say: There must be a God if he’s got vicars like you.

  CHAPTER 2

  Upper Crust

  The waiting area at Waterloo had been, for some reason, full of young parents with their caffeinated children; he might have been in Disney World. Now contentedly settled in for the longest stretch of his journey, all was blessed silence except for the soothingly mechanical noises of a train in motion, and he watched mesmerized as the winter-barren landscape rolled past. Max loved above all the wail of a train whistle—a mournful sound that still somehow lifted the heart with hope and anticipation. Anticipation of what, he could not say. Adventure, perhaps, of which he had not been in short supply, before and during his tenure as parish priest.

  Robert Louis Stevenson had written something about the heart being full of the stillness of the country, and that was what Max felt on a train. Even short delays en route didn’t bother him. So long as he had something to read or something to gaze at out the window, he was renewed in spirit by the enforced stillness, even though his mind might be racing.

  They reached Staincross Minster where the last part of his journey by steam engine would begin. There a group of four Japanese tourists walked by, two couples, part of the chaotic scrum of passengers sheltered by the wooden canopy. God only knew what they were doing in this part of the world. Nether Monkslip was a hidden treasure of South West England, although more and more intrepid tourists seemed to find their way there. If these tourists were headed to Nether Monkslip (and there was little point in being on this obscure train route otherwise) then they were in luck: The Horseshoe could just accommodate two couples in its cramped, ancient rooms, provided the couples didn’t take up much space. Max inadvertently tripped up one of the men in the group as he was getting on and with the exquisite politeness of the Japanese, the man apologized, presumably for walking where Max’s foot should not have been. They exchanged little bows and “so sorry’s” and forgiving smiles, and the man rejoined his group, now spilling down the corridor and into one of the antique compartments.

  Max walked on to the next compartment, which happened for the moment to be empty. He was soon followed by an elderly woman struggling with a string bag and an old-fashioned Gladstone large enough to secrete half the contents of the British Library. Max, jumping to offer his aid, discovered it was heavy enough to have actually been used for this purpose, and wondered how on earth the old lady had managed to drag it this far. It was becoming harder each day to find a porter. But once free of her burden she carried herself erectly if stiffly, with the caution of one whose old bones were becoming fragile.

  “Thank you so much,” she brayed in an upper-class accent from behind the netting of her rakishly tilted black hat, which matched the rest of what Max was sure she would call her travel costume. The hat was in fact recently back in style because of the fondness of royalty for these creations, particularly at weddings—a hat with a dotted veil, attached to her head by an ebony hatpin. He’d seen a hat much like it on the head of one of the royals as he’d perused the magazine racks at the station’s newsagent stand. This lady had just managed to avoid the Mad Hatter look the royal family went in for on formal occasions.

  She had a frilly woolen scarf knotted under her chin against the chill of the under-heated compartment. Her jacket with matching skirt was a smart affair—smart for sixty years previous—of tailored wool, cut close to the waist, flared at the hips, and slightly fraying at the cuffs. She carried a lambswool coat slung over one of her fine leather-gloved wrists.

  She was a woman tightly corseted and bound, whose visage brought unavoidably to mind the term “battle-axe.” Perhaps the corseting had something to do with her look of chronic dyspepsia. But she brightened visibly at the sight of Max, standing up a bit taller. She adjusted her round glasses for a closer inspection, and her blue-eyed glance as it alighted on him seemed to say, What luck, a vicar!

  “How wonderful,” she said aloud, settling in a seat opposite his, with a nod in the direction of his collar, “to share my journey with a clergyman. It seems rather providential.”

  Max, seeing the look, smiled politely, said “Hullo,” and seized his day-old newspaper with a show of rabid interest, as if it contained news of no less import than the Second Coming. He rustled it open to an inside page—a page which happened to hold the table tennis news. The rest of the paper seemed to be taken up with intelligence regarding the upcoming royal nuptials—the engagement had been announced mid-November. The new couple apparently were busily preparing for a shared life of ship launchings, hand wavings, sporting events, and tree plantings interspersed with wild nights at members-only nightclubs. An old friend of Max’s from SO14—the Royalty Protection Group of the London Metropolitan Police—had told him watching over the royals was like watching a rugby scrum with carriages.

  But Max well knew the signs his companion was giving off, and although the journey in miles was short the old train would creep along like a geriatric tortoise. The woman didn’t take the message telegraphed by his own body language, of course.

  A young man came down the corridor and peered in the etched glass of the carriage window, a man with large earrings visible, and a tattoo or two that wasn’t, Max imagined. He wore a leatherette jacket; the thinning hair slicked back on his head and the compensatory thick mustache gave him the look of a walrus with an addiction to television shopping. He had wires running from his ears into his music player. Max could see that the earplugs were a gumdrop design. Clever the toys young people had these days, he thought, and wondered exactly when he’d begun to think of himself as outside that group.

  The woman gave the young man a glare and he moved briskly along, having changed his mind about entering the carriage.

  There are certain topics that inevitably arise when a clergyman is forced into close confinement with a member of the curious public for longer than ten minutes. The tale of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes was one. The tangible existence of a hell for sinners in the afterlife was another. But most popular of all was the question of the place of household pets in God’s grand design, invariably accompanied by tributes to a particular pet’s beatific nature. So, expecting the woman to ask if her cat Fortesque Tiggy-Boots might be waiting to one day reunite with his mistress in heaven, Max was surprised when she said, “I imagine it’s quite difficult being in your line of work, in this day and age.” With a delicate cough, she raised a handkerchief to her nose. “So sorry. I seem to have come down with a dreadfully bad cold.”

  “I don’t know that my line of work was ever easy,” said Max agreeably. “Certainly, there’s never a shortage of work for me to do.”

  “Ooooh!” she said. She had a distinctly upper-class voice, full of trills and fruity excl
amations and odd emphases on certain words. “I quite see what you mean. Most amusing. Sin always simply multiplies around one, does it not?”

  “Actually, I had poverty in mind,” said Max.

  Again, the “Ooooh! Quite.” Max, reminded of Eddie Izzard imitating a puzzled Queen Elizabeth confronted by a plumber, half expected the obviously wealthy woman to say, “Poverty? What on earth is that?”

  Instead she said, “But where on earth are my manners? I should have introduced myself. I am Lady Baynard. And you would be Father…?”

  “Father Tudor,” he replied. “Max Tudor. I am the vicar at St. Edwold’s in Nether Monkslip. At your service, Lady Baynard.”

  “Yes, of course. As you can see, I’ve been doing some Christmas shopping,” she informed him, in the least festive, least Christmassy tones imaginable. “In Staincross Minster. Fast Freddie’s Market has the best prices for fruit this time of year. And I had to pick up some things for my plants, you know, and visit the chemist’s. And you? You’ve been in London, perhaps?”

  It was not so much a question as a lucky guess—an opening, nosy sortie. Max suspected she felt it was her right to know where he’d been—in her universe, the local vicar was as much a subordinate as a lady’s maid. One was in charge of her public communications with God, the other in charge of making sure her travel costume was kept in good repair. Both persons greased the wheels of her upper-class existence.

  “Yes, just for a couple of days,” he replied. He summarized his participation in the symposium as briefly as he could, not expecting anyone not immediately involved to care about his roof. Still, she listened with polite interest, only occasionally stopping to snuffle genteelly into her lace handkerchief.

  “So sorry,” she said again. “It’s this frightful cold that’s been going round…” Again she coughed delicately, then blew her nose with a resounding and indelicate honk. She breathed deeply, and the flesh could be seen oozing to the top of her heavily corseted body. It must have been damnably uncomfortable in there. “I can’t wait until it’s time to think of plantings for the garden, come the spring. To start moving things out of the hothouse.”

  Max, hoping the old dear was not contagious, nodded, smiled, and looked with deliberation at his sizzling-with-unread-news paper. Her cold could only get worse, as the heating in the compartment was uncertain: While his feet—indeed, the entire left side of his body—froze, his right forearm and elbow, near the vent that ran along one side of the compartment, felt as if they might ignite. He couldn’t decide whether or not to remove his overcoat and in the end decided to leave it on.

  He took a pen out of his pocket for the crossword and folded the broadsheet pages back with a sharp snap, again as if they contained a matter of some urgency awaiting his immediate attention. But he had abandoned all hope some minutes before.

  “I’ve bought some of my son’s favorite chocolates,” she told him. “Randolph. Randolph, Viscount Nathersby. You may have heard of him? The photographer?”

  “It sounds familiar to me, yes. What is the name of his business?”

  She looked horrified. “It doesn’t have a name. He’s not in trade, you know.” Max gathered that would be considered tacky, this whole working-for-a-living thing. “Well, not precisely in trade,” she amended, clearly deciding it necessary to clarify this difficult point for him. “It’s just that word gets round. Recommendations. A friend of a friend, you know the sort of thing.”

  “Not in trade, then,” said Max, solemn and straight-faced.

  “Oh, my dear man, no. No, indeed! The very idea. He was a Pootle-Fitzbutton on his great-grandmother’s side, you know.”

  “Quite.” He was not quite sure what was “quite” about it but it was a good all-purpose word and he couldn’t think of what else to say. He wanted to sound agreeable without precisely agreeing with her, since he wasn’t listening closely.

  The train was going over the nine-arch viaduct, which meant they were about halfway to Nether Monkslip. Just then a series of musical notes erupted in the close carriage—the ring of a mobile phone. Max automatically reached for his jacket pocket but almost instantly knew it wasn’t his ring.

  With a flustered hoot of apology, Lady Baynard groped around in her capacious bag, finally locating and silencing the device.

  Max thought, Does everyone have a mobile these days? He had recognized the tune, only because it was the ubiquitous “Speak Now.” He thought it a clever song to use for a ringtone, but was astonished someone of Lady Baynard’s generation would choose it.

  She caught his look of faint surprise and said, exasperated, “One of the twins programmed it for me and I don’t know how to change it to something more suitable.”

  And what would that be? Max wondered. “Rule, Britannia!”?

  “Those twins have too much time on their hands. I knew that no good would come of their visit to the castle. Of all their coming.” She harrumphed and snuffled a bit more into the handkerchief, then with a swipe at her nose, carried on: “Visit indeed. More like a siege. The situation is positively brewing. I have had the most frightful sense of foreboding for weeks now. Someone is going to—oh, I don’t know. Be hurt! First my brother is taken ill—he’s never ill. And then…”

  She talked for some time and he listened with but half an ear. The news he’d had from George about Paul’s wife still distracted him, and memories of Paul swirled in his mind like ghosts.

  “… the twins. I tell you, no good can come of it.”

  He’d missed much of what she’d been saying.

  “Twins? And how old are they?” he asked politely, in truth more interested in deflecting the topic of Lady Baynard’s foreboding, which topic he felt might be a lengthy one with many alleys and byways and shuddery detours.

  “Fourteen. They’re my brother’s children. You know how they’re into everything at that age. And these two behave as if they were raised in a barn. I blame the mother. I don’t believe in mixed marriages, never have. No good can come of it. The girl was a commoner, you see. A rackety upbringing, a father in trade! I think she said her mother was a shop clerk. I wonder sometimes if even that is true. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Gwynyth wanted to be a grand lady, of course, but ladies are born, not made.”

  Max struggled to conceal his wonder that someone at Lady Baynard’s evident stage of life—he placed her roughly in her seventies—could be the aunt to children of fourteen. She didn’t appear interested in enlightening him on this subject, instead saying, “Some days, I am just happy both of them are alive and breathing. On others, I have simply given up hope of their making a productive contribution to society. She may be all right, I suppose. Amanda. I’m not certain about him.”

  “Early days, isn’t it?” said Max mildly. “Fourteen is so young. They just don’t know how young it is.” The train was lurching back and forth now, as if the driver were listening to samba music. Max returned his gaze to his newspaper, but still without much hope she would take the hint. People, particularly people of Lady Baynard’s generation and background, tended to gravitate toward members of the clergy, regardless of the setting or circumstance, seeking advice much in the way people, on hearing one is a doctor, will launch into a vivid description of their recent bilious attack or their gallbladder surgery. Frequently, Max found himself called upon for similar ad hoc consultations. Presumably, anything having to do with mortality fell under his purview equally with that of Dr. Winship, the village doctor.

  But this time he was to be spared, after all. Lady Baynard merely said, “Early days? Why, when I was their age I was practically running a household in my mother’s stead. I was married soon after that—none of this business of putting my career first and delaying starting a family and so on. What nonsense! This is a coddled generation, Father. Too coddled. Coddled to the point of uselessness.” There was a bit more of this and then, with a final “Harrumph!” she began scrabbling in her Gladstone bag. As she did, some of her shopping fell out, and Max spent the next
few moments collecting the apples and assorted other goods that rolled under the seats and to the far edges of the carriage. Somehow in the confusion and fluster one apple ended up in Max’s pocket, a fact he didn’t realize until he was back at the vicarage.

  Finally, she subsided into a fluffy white mass of knitting, and began furiously to ply large wooden needles. It looked like she was making a downy pup tent. Max returned to his reading and the rest of the trip passed in relative and amiable silence.

  CHAPTER 3

  At the Maharajah

  Max was on his way to meet Awena Owen for a meal at the Maharajah Restaurant and Takeaway. It was a date he’d made to repay her for the many (organic and wholesomely vegetarian) meals she had cooked for him at her cottage, in order to spare him the depredations of Mrs. Hooser’s cooking.

  Awena had again invited Max for dinner, shortly after his return from London. He’d asked her to meet him at the restaurant instead. Overall, he preferred taking a meal at the Maharajah partly because of the Cavalier’s gossip machine, which was even louder than its new espresso machine. Most villagers were willing to overlook the sometimes glacial service in favor of being at the center of the village’s social networking site.

  “My treat, for a change,” he’d told Awena. “I insist.”

  He had not long before put down the phone from speaking with his mother, who had called from Le Havre. She was on the Queen Mary II, continuing the almost completely peripatetic existence she’d led during her widowhood. She would be spending Christmas in the Caribbean.