In Prior's Wood

by G. M. Malliet

  “They never figured out what happened to Viola?”

  Awena shook her head. “No. She may have been abducted by a passing stranger but they never found any evidence for or against that theory. The family believed she had run away and wanted to low-key the whole affair.”

  “What a sad story,” said Destiny. “You always think children will be safer in the country, don’t you? When I think of the worry I put my parents through, staying out all hours at that age, I want to write them a letter of apology. Can you pass me more of the bread, please?”

  “There is nothing bucolic about country life,” said Awena. “Once you scratch the surface it’s a struggle for survival straight down the line—at least, among the farmers and those trying to make a living off the land.”

  “I wonder,” said Destiny, continuing her train of thought, “how Poppy is faring over there at Hawthorne Cottage. With Netta gone, it’s just her and Jane. I should stop by.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Max. “I’ll be seeing Jane soon, I would imagine. With Colin. About the arrangements for Netta, you know. It seems an age since I’ve seen Jane; we did invite her for dinner one night but she couldn’t make it.”

  “I saw her this afternoon coming out of the Cut and Dried Salon,” said Awena. “It’s sweet, her wanting to look nice for Colin’s return.”

  “I imagine Poppy has missed her father while he’s been gone,” said Max.

  “Enormously,” said Awena. “There’s a bit of hero worship going on there, if you ask me.”

  “It does seem a lot of people go missing hereabouts,” Destiny remarked, absently slathering butter on a slice of the homemade wholegrain bread.

  “It’s true,” admitted Max. “It’s a low-density population, then as now, to have so many people unaccounted for.” He might have added that a lot of murders had been committed in and around Nether Monkslip in recent years—that there’d been quite an alarming spike in the numbers of those cases. That the murders seem to have started when Max came on the scene as vicar was something he chose not to dwell on. His bishop seemed to think there was a connection, that Max had been sent by Providence to deal with an outbreak of evil. As if crime solving were some new form of pastoral care.

  Max wasn’t himself sure if Providence might see him as the cure or the cause. Or if it weren’t all pure coincidence.

  “Which is why,” Awena said, “when farmer Johnson’s wife disappeared about the same time as Kevin, the man from the local gardening center, everyone began rehashing the tale of the missing Viola. But remote as we are, you can’t keep a secret in this village for long: the couple was spotted in London years later, living together quite happily.”

  “When did this happen?”

  Awena paused to sip her water as she totted up the years. “It’s been ten years or so, I think. Miss Pitchford would know. She keeps a diary of such things. Let’s hope she never decides to publish it.”

  It was unspoken, but it never needed to be said: Miss Pitchford knew where all the bodies were buried.

  Awena put down her fork to stare at Max. “I never put it together before now. It is an awful lot of women gone missing from one area, not counting Judith Johnson and Kevin. The Victorian girl, and Lord Duxter’s nun, and the other nun up on Hawk Crest.”

  “And those are just the ones we know of,” said Max. “I doubt Lord Duxter would like the nun thought of as ‘his,’ but perhaps I’m wrong about that. It makes a good story to lure writers to his retreats.”

  “I hear he turned the little priory church into a sort of writers’ chalet after it was deconsecrated,” said Destiny. “Nice and spooky. Perhaps someone will write another Frankenstein there.”

  Max nodded. “Perhaps. Now, who would like cream with their coffee?”

  The talk drifted over to Lord and Lady Duxter and their renovation of the priory. The clock on the mantelpiece struck the hour.

  “That can’t be right!” said Awena. “Max, what’s the time?”

  He looked at his watch.

  “It’s nine o’clock. The night is still young.”

  “I’ll stay just a while if I’m not intruding,” said Destiny. “I’ve got nothing on the schedule until nine tomorrow morning.”

  “You’re more than welcome,” said Awena. “We don’t get nearly enough chances.”

  As Max poured brandy, Destiny offered to help serve the individual blackberry tarts. Awena sat staring into the fire, recalling a conversation she’d had not long before with another of Lord Duxter’s authors. They had met signing books at a library conference and had shared a coffee afterward. Dominique le Grande, not her real name, was a writer of what used to be called potboiler romances—stories that kept food on the table for the author because of the sheer volume of books she was able to produce in a year. Dominique was in fact one of Wooton Press’s success stories. She was a comfortable woman of fifty or so years, smartly dressed, never married, pretty in a faded-pink way.

  “Didn’t he start a charitable foundation?” Dominique had asked Awena.

  “Yes, it’s called the Wooton Wishing Well. It provides books to schools. It’s one of the reasons he was made an OBE, for services to publishing and charity.”

  “Ah, yes. An Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.” She’d put a mocking emphasis on the word “excellent.” “It’s funny, but Lord Duxter never struck me as being a man often in the grip of charitable impulses.”

  “Well, no,” said Awena. “He doesn’t strike me that way, either. Of course it is a tax haven of sorts but I do think a well-intended one. At least, it does no real harm and it may do some good.”

  “And of course, it provides some good publicity for him and his publishing interests, too.”

  “Yes, there’s that.” She peered closely at her new friend. “You don’t like him, do you?”

  Dominique, blushing, busied herself with the little sugar packets, rearranging them in their holder by color and type. Awena, abundantly gifted with sixth sense, intuited what the matter was. Dominique had had an affair with Lord Duxter—an affair that probably had ended badly, as had several of his affairs before. Awena acknowledged that this intuition was more along the lines of a lucky if logical guess: Lord Duxter was known to have a roving eye.

  “It’s neither here nor there if I do,” said Dominique. “He’s a businessman. Businessmen have to be, well, ruthless to succeed. Don’t they?”

  “I’m a businesswoman and I haven’t found that to be the case, no. Quite the opposite. I wouldn’t last in business very long if no one trusted me to be honest and to deal fairly with them.”

  “Well, Awena, there’s you, and then there is the rest of the world. People like our David keep an eye on the main chance.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Awena. “Was he quite rotten to you?”

  “He let me down,” she had said with a shrug. But it was a dismissal of feeling that seemed to cost her dearly. “Led me on, and let me down. And of course, the irony is that now I have to produce gushing romances for his sodding publishing company, so he can get rich. Richer. Oh, I’m not explaining this well!” A tear had sprung to her eye and she paused to dab a paper serviette at her running makeup. “I hate him, that’s all. And there’s nothing to be done. I knew he was married, so what did I think would happen? My bad choices do me in every time. Such selfish foolishness is a curse. Let’s talk of something else.”

  Awena never repeated this conversation to Max or to anyone. It would be, she decided, carrying tales. Even in days to come, when Lord Duxter’s character would be held under a microscope, Awena saw nothing to be gained by bringing up past indiscretions.

  Chapter 6

  THE EMPEROR AND EMPRESS

  The object of the after-dinner conversation among Max, Awena, and Destiny was at that moment at the large oak desk in his study at Wooton Priory, choosing the list of titles he would publish for next year.

  The whole business of book publishing was a matter of luck, it had al
ways seemed to Lord Duxter. Pure, blind, stupid luck. Who could have predicted the Hilary Mantel phenomenon? Those Shades of Grey books? Stieg Larsson? Assuredly not Lord Duxter, who to his everlasting chagrin had declined to publish all those books and authors. The Lord Duxter whose personal tastes in reading inclined toward nonfiction titles on business and finance and fly fishing was not a man often found to have his finger on the pulse. He regarded the whole enterprise of publishing as a gamble, almost an addiction, and a dangerous one at that. He tended to put everything to win on either black or red and to close his eyes tightly as the croupier spun the wheel of fortune. It sometimes worked, and he’d got lucky in the case of Awena, and that Dominique romance person, and Carville Rasmussen the Insufferable, his bestselling crime writer.

  He picked up a piece of paper outlining a proposed fiction series and tried to concentrate, adjusting his glasses higher on his nose. Some author wanted to write about a vicar who was formerly an agent for MI5. Well, that sounded boring as hell. He started wadding up the proposal to aim it at the trash bin beside his desk when he stopped midgesture. Wasn’t there a sort of rock-star vicar in nearby Nether Monkslip who was rumored to be MI5? In fact—yes, of course. He was married to Awena. How could he have forgotten? Well, he wasn’t sure he wanted to publish a book about a vicar. That sort of religious twaddle never sold well. Readers today wanted—what was it readers today wanted? Damned if he knew. Action, flashing lights, car chases, dismembered corpses. Quaint Canadian villages seemed to be popular, though. He wondered if he could persuade the author to switch locales and have the vicar be a former Mountie. It was a thought.

  He struggled to recall something that John le Carré had written in The Pigeon Tunnel. Pushing himself away from the desk, he trundled across the room of linen-fold paneled walls to take the book down from the shelves, wishing he had been able to woo le Carré to his stable—another missed opportunity, but Lord Duxter knew he’d made a lowball bid there. Yes, there it was: “Spying and novel writing are made for each other. Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal.” Aloud he muttered the phrase, “many routes to betrayal,” never imagining it had anything to do with him. He wondered if he could persuade this vicar fellow to try his hand at writing a spy novel. Or perhaps a crime story, to give Rasmussen some competition to worry about. The vicar would probably jump at the chance. Those sorts of people were always as poor as church mice and probably bored with little to do, as well.

  He smoothed out the wrinkles he’d created in the proposal and put it atop a small stack on the left side of the desk.

  And so we find Lord Duxter. Aged fifty-two years and six months. Balding and with a cherubic face and twinkly blue eyes. The face and eyes are deceptive, however. When he is angry the eyes turn to splinters of glassy blue ice refracting sunlight. And his face turns red, like a balloon about to burst, the veins around those eyes looking set to explode. He is on the thin side and rangy so that in approach he might appear quite fit and trim but that, too, is deceptive, for he carries before him a pot belly, largely hidden from world view by expert tailoring.

  He wears glasses in trendy frames, for he is near-sighted from decades of reading small print. Tonight’s glasses have red frames but when he is photographed, which is often, he wears dark frames that make him look, he hopes, like Arthur Miller. Now if only Lady Duxter looked like Arthur’s Marilyn Monroe—now, that would be something.

  He attended Eton and Cambridge but he had dropped out after two years to travel the world. No one in his bewildered and exasperated family could stop him and really it was just as well. He was taking up space that perhaps a more deserving and diligent student could put to good use. Eventually he returned to England and his travels brought him to the county of Monkslip on a hiking trip, and thus to Wooton Priory. His mind then began to play with various schemes for turning a profit on the falling-down, empty buildings. Using his connections in the Church of England, in academia, and in his gentlemen’s club, he pulled things and people together and made the place a going concern.

  Now, Lord Duxter was rather bored and looking for new worlds to conquer. Not in a literary sense but in a personal one. His marriage to Marina, now Lady Duxter, was one of convenience, although he often had to wonder who was being convenienced by their union. She cost him a packet, she did, for her wardrobe alone. She might sometimes remind him that it was her own money she was spending but after so many years together it was their money, surely, and he was doing her a favor by helping her keep tabs on it. The medical bills were what he had not bargained for, not at all. Nor the long, sulky silences shot through with moments of hysteria. Nor the nights spent alone. Incredibly, it was his own father who had talked him into the match. He’d thought Marina was classy, as well as rich.

  On being awarded the OBE Lord Duxter had felt he’d reached the pinnacle of everything he’d ever striven toward. He was a man who liked honors, being unable to gauge his own worth without such outward signs and reassurances. Long before he had been named Lord Duxter of Monkslip he had picked out the name, writing it on the flyleaf of the first book he’d acquired for his fledgling publishing company. That one author of his who believed in manifesting good luck would have said he had manifested his OBE. Actually, if he were manifesting anything it would be a hereditary peerage—one of his fantasies was of rescuing the Queen when she’d fallen off her horse or a madman had barged into her bedroom or something; in gratitude she would create a new peerage just for him. It could happen. “Ask, Believe, Receive,” right? But he declared himself satisfied with having risen so far above a rather dodgy upbringing, emotionally speaking. It was no good getting greedy. His father, Monty Bottom, had worked in trade, as had his father before him. The publishing trade, to be sure—the family owned several large printing presses. But Lord Duxter liked to tell people his father had worked in publishing and few were interested enough to parse the actual truth behind that statement. Marina had only found out after their marriage, for example. If she felt she had bought a pig in a poke, well. Everyone knew the buyer must beware.

  Besides. Marina should consider herself damned lucky to have him.

  * * *

  Several doors down, Marina, Lady Duxter, sat at the vanity table in her dressing room applying face powder to her forehead, her nose, her chin, her décolletage, and much of the tabletop. She applied it rather too liberally, and ended up ghostly pale with powder settled into the wrinkles around her eyes because her mind was not on her task. She was thinking of him. It was as if he blotted out the sun, and had become all she could see before her. The laughter in his eyes, the way he loved to make her laugh. When was the last time a man had made her laugh—intentionally, that is?

  It was like that whenever he came near—a sort of electricity shot through her being until only he was left in her world. He brought her out of herself, and in her experience, few people could be bothered to take the time. Certainly her husband could not be bothered. As to making her laugh—well. She supposed there was humor in David’s pompous self-absorption, but it was not humor of the laugh-out-loud variety.

  She sat back in the little pink satin chair, closing her eyes, almost liquid with longing. She remembered, she could sense again, the warmth of his skin against hers, the feel of his strong, muscular arms as he held her close. How good it felt to be in his embrace, how safe; how comforting was his deep voice in her ear as he said “It won’t be long now, darling.” She said the words aloud for what must have been the hundredth time, as if she could make it all come true, as if she could conjure him up. “It won’t be long.” Like she could be a magician and make him appear before her now! But he was so far away, so very far away in spirit, not just in physical distance, and she reminded herself she must be careful. No one must know. Not yet. There would be scenes, recriminations, probably a messy and costly divorce, no matter how she struggled to rise above her opponent—her husband—and not to stoop to his level, to what were sure to be his dirty tactics. B
ut how she longed for this distance to dissolve and for him—him, the dearest darling of her heart!—to be in this room, right now, standing beside her, his hands caressing her shoulders until she would stand and turn and fling herself into his waiting arms, surrendering again and again to his kiss. She’d be seeing him soon; David would be in London meanwhile, and they’d be free—free!

  She sighed, a deep and melancholy sigh. She hadn’t felt like this since she was a girl in school, just setting out in the world and full of dreams of what was possible, thinking everything was possible, and all at once. Not knowing anything about the world, alas. Life wasn’t like one of the romances in the books she read. No. Life was, well it was like one of the day’s headlines, full of despair, and people making awful, foolish choices. People dying, dying because they could stand no more …

  She opened a drawer in the vanity table and rooted around among the several plastic containers inside. Choosing one, she took out of it one of her antidepressant pills and washed the little capsule down with wine. She hesitated but a brief moment and shook another capsule out of the container.

  This was not good. She’d told herself—how many times?—she would stop this, she would start taking better care of herself. That she could get through a day without a pill or a drink to bolster her. Some days she lasted as long as noontime before she caved in to the mind-numbing anxiety that ruled her days.

  She wanted to weep—not an unusual feeling for Marina, Lady Duxter. The only time she didn’t want to weep was when he was around, holding her close. Then she would soar.

  She wondered if there weren’t time left for her, for her to start her life again. Was having a child even possible? Movie stars older than she were doing it, probably with a surrogate or some hormone therapy or other. But it was possible.