“Shakespeare was a glover’s son, they say.”
“There you are,” she replied, clapping the flat of her hand against the chair arm, as if that settled the matter conclusively. Absurdly pleased, Max felt as if he’d been given a gold star for the correct answer. “Jasper was more inclined to oil and watercolor painting than to poetry, but the principle’s the same, you see.”
Max, recalling the paintings on the walls of the Batton-Smythe sitting room, felt certain now that they were Jasper’s. He’d have to ask, or go in for a closer look at the signature next time he was at the house.
“You say he was wild…” Max spoke quietly, and yet Agnes Pitchford seemed to sense something forbidding about the man who sat before her. Her next words were spoken tentatively, as if examined with great care before being released into the room.
“Ye-s-s. The wanderlust showed up early. He loved picture books, you know. Travel books. France, Italy, Peking, Sophia. Bombay was a favorite. Of course, he had the usual problems of a youth living in a small village or on a remote farmstead. It is isolating for youngsters, and for those who have some difficulty making friends … well, for them there can be special problems to overcome. I think the other children found Jasper a bit of a wet fish—is that expression still used?” Max nodded. “That is why programs like the Young Farmers’ Clubs are such a blessing,” she added brightly. “Brings them all together, so they can mix. I remember he made friends with young Larry Hawker—his parents kept the Sumner farm outside the village until they sold up and moved away. Couldn’t make a go of it.” There was a pointed emphasis to her words; Max wondered if she was indicating that a farmer’s son was slumming it for Jasper. “So, Vicar, what exactly have you learned from the police?”
Max dodged the bullet as best he could. “It is difficult to know,” he said. “Most people are accounted for, if only somewhat accounted for. They were manning the stalls or browsing around the stalls, or trying the tests of strength, or simply sampling the food.”
This was greeted with a puzzled stare. “The what, dear?”
“The food.”
“I thought you said ‘the mood.’ Well, not quite all,” said Miss Pitchford demurely.
“What do you mean?”
“Well. It’s just that I…”
“Go on,” Max said flatly, keeping the eagerness from his voice and hoping it didn’t show on his face.
“It’s just that I wanted to buy a knitted tea cozy—one of those designed to look like a head of lettuce, so clever—but no one was at Lily’s stall. There was a handwritten sign propped up there that read BACK IN TEN MINUTES. However, that’s just one example of someone who was not where she was expected to be the whole time,” she added. “I’m sure there were a few others.”
Max sighed. He was sure there were.
“You yourself were at the Fayre all day?”
“Most of it,” she replied, not apparently offended by the hidden question as to her own whereabouts. “Even though Saturday is normally my baking day. One has to make allowances for a special event like Harvest Fayre. I did my baking the day before. On cleaning day,” she added, to clarify this difficult point for him.
Indeed, DCI Cotton had told Max he had been most persistent, slogging through the details of Miss Pitchford’s activities, all, according to her, of a nature not only innocent but irreproachably civic-minded. Looking about him at her clearly seldom-used front room (there had been much internal debate, he was certain, as to whether the discussion of Wanda’s passing merited such formality), Max’s eye fell on her collection of seaside souvenirs as internally he marveled at their sheer volume and dreadfulness.
“I don’t suppose…” he began. How to ask this? “I don’t suppose any of your baking involved peanuts?”
She surprised him with a girlish, trilling giggle. For a moment he could see the young woman she had once been. “You are a devil, Vicar. Yes, as a matter of fact, I did make some biscuits with peanuts. Is it being said I tricked Wanda into eating one? Perhaps got her to look the other way and then stuck one in her mouth?”
He grinned somewhat sheepishly. “I suppose it is absurd of me to ask.” Although this he didn’t suppose for a moment. The deadly biscuit had come from somewhere, from someone’s kitchen.
“Of course, I did see her, and few other people did. Or, will admit that they did.”
That was precisely true. How many might be out there unwilling to come forward, for whatever reasons? He looked about him, at the cherished accumulations of a lifetime, at the bookshelves stuffed with her favorite reading, so indicative of personality: Austen, Dickens, and the Brontë sisters, of course, along with what looked to be the complete works of several French authors—Flaubert, Maupassant, Proust.
Not everyone was like Miss Pitchford, who would see it as a moral obligation to report all she knew to the police.
“Can you tell me how it was you came to see her?” he asked now.
“I had to answer,” and here she blushed prettily again, “a call of nature. I wasn’t going to use one of those horrible portable things they’d set up for the Fayre. No indeed. The spread of germs—well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. So I was headed toward home and who should I see but Wanda?”
“Really? What time was this?”
“Just before noon. She was headed toward the Village Hall—must have been. I was just starting to walk down St. Edwold’s Road, from the fields.”
“Did she speak to you?”
“That nice detective asked me the same. So dashing! No, she didn’t. She was completely preoccupied. Rummaging in her handbag for her key.”
“So she said nothing to you?”
“No, she was just muttering about her key.”
“How did she look?”
“The same as always—but rather flushed and flustered. She didn’t even see me, I’m certain of it, and I didn’t want to see her, if you know what I mean. She’d try to corral me into doing something or other. So I picked up my pace and made my escape.”
Max sat, very still, suddenly alert. The onset of a vague unease caught him by surprise, but it was tinged with a familiar harking back to his old training. Something she had said … a disconnect somewhere … The cat, sensing a kindred spirit, opened her eyes wide, and cocked her head for a better view of a fellow natural-born hunter.
“What?” said Max.
“Wanda always reminded me of women in wartime,” Miss Pitchford was saying. “One just had to get on with it. People’s feelings didn’t matter—there was no time for that.”
“Surely, though, Harvest Fayre … It’s hard to see that in a national context.”
“Oh, certainly you’re right. Wanda always was one to overdo. No harm in her, really, although…”
“Although?”
“Well, she generally ended up doing a lot of harm. There are people like that, you know.”
“Thousands, actually.”
“Quite.”
“Most of them in politics, or government.”
She nodded.
“Won’t you have another slice of cake, Vicar?”
The conversation moved on to matters ecclesiastical (Miss Pitchford was against most of the encroaching inroads of secularism, as she called them) and it was half an hour before Max could say his final good-byes on the doorstep.
He had eaten far more than he’d intended. Miss Pitchford had a mean way with a Dundee cake, one that included a large splash of brandy in the ingredients. Apparently she felt no need to warn anyone of this beforehand, and Max suspected it was part of her arsenal for extracting information from her visitors. She also had in her repertoire a dandelion wine that tasted like water used to boil cabbage but that had brought grown men to their knees. It had been, he recalled, in great demand at Harvest Fayre.
He said his farewells in an effusion of tipsy goodwill, forgetting his umbrella in the process (which item she would hold hostage until he agreed to another visit) but only later realizing the reason for
his cheery bonhomie.
He had the niggling sense that one or two interesting points had emerged from the conversation, but for the moment, what they could be, and whether they got him any further, he couldn’t have said. But something the redoubtable Miss Pitchford had told him didn’t match what he felt he knew to be true.
* * *
Miss Pitchford stood and fondly watched Max make his moseying way in the general direction of the vicarage. She was essentially an observer, a village spy whose coin of exchange was information. She would have been most at home in Elizabethan England, employed, like Chris Marlowe, in skullduggerous affairs of state. Nether Monkslip, she had often thought regretfully (in an unconscious echo of the thoughts of Wanda Batton-Smythe), offered too small a canvas for the full display of her talents.
The woman who ran the newsagent’s fondly believed she was the hub at the spoke of village information. Miss Pitchford was magnanimous in letting her think so.
Usually Miss Pitchford was content to wait like a hatchling for tidbits of data and gossip to be delivered to her chintzy, slip-covered nest, but this was too much excitement to be contained. Feet on the ground—that’s what was called for.
Setting her felt hat atop her head and throwing on her cape, grabbing her shopping basket to disguise her true intent, she set out for the village at the brisk pace of a woman half her age. Not knowing, she often thought, was the worst, and this was far beyond the usual parish-pump type of event. She’d pick up both word of mouth and a few papers at the newsagent’s—and some milk, while she was at it. Nether Monkslip being in the national news didn’t happen every day, after all.
It was one for the scrapbooks, she thought. It certainly was.
CHAPTER 21
Goddessspell
Another Sunday had arrived, passing without incident, unless one counted the religious revival that had gripped Nether Monkslip: attendance at St. Edwold’s continued to break records. Now, tired from a long week in the village spotlight, Max was nearly late for drinks at seven, dinner at eight. This time it was an invitation of short standing, from Awena Owen.
When she had telephoned him earlier at the vicarage, she was clearly in search of information. Max was happy to oblige, since he hoped for information from Awena in exchange, much as he had done with Miss Pitchford. An added inducement, however, was that Awena was an excellent, adventurous cook, and Max was always grateful for a reprieve from Mrs. Hooser’s cholesterol-laden idea of what constituted a proper British meal. It helped that he’d dined at Awena’s on several occasions in the past, without its giving rise to scandal: her solid reputation in the village was such that even the villagers saw no reason for pointed comment on these unchaperoned meetings.
But in the early days of his arrival in the village, he’d been a hard sell, rejecting her invitations less because of concerns about his reputation or hers, but from a fear the menu would consist of something made only of beans. Perhaps legumes ground into a fine paste, molded, and artfully painted to resemble a rack of lamb.
“No, no,” he’d murmured, hoping he did not sound as deeply wary as he felt. “I have … things … at the vicarage. Things to eat.”
“Like what?” Awena demanded.
Like what? That was quite a good question, actually, he’d realized. Normally, Mrs. Hooser would leave him some mystery odds and ends wrapped in foil to reheat in the oven. He had even been known to whip up some beans on toast for himself. But his larder had been unusually empty at the time, the housekeeper distracted by an outbreak of measles in the Hooser household. Moldy bread loomed large in his gastronomic future.
Awena had said, “Come on. I’m quite a good cook, if I say it myself. And you look like you could use a good meal.” With her usual uncanny ability to intuit the truth of a situation, she said, “I doubt Mrs. Hooser, for all her good intentions, and in the best of circumstances, is much of a chef.”
And so she had surprised him, seduced him, even, into a rustic way of eating that would have astounded his friends from his gluttonous-gourmet life in London. He was a carnivore, as Awena was not, but she had demonstrated to his admiring satisfaction that she gave up nothing in the way of flavor by her diet. That night, long ago, seeing his look as she brought out the main course, a pasta dish made with spinach, goat cheese, and pine nuts, she had said, “I know what you were thinking. It would be a meal of roots and shrubs or, at best, berries and stinging nettles, all gathered at the full of the moon. Which it happens to be tonight. A full moon. No nettles, however.”
He smiled self-consciously.
“Something like that. Sorry.”
“No need to be sorry. People don’t half think the most absurd kind of rot about people of my persuasion. I’m quite used to it, actually.”
Tonight he walked the few minutes to her house under gray clouds as a cool breeze played at his back. The moon was again full, appearing intermittently as the clouds shredded and regrouped.
Leaded-glass windows lined either side of Awena’s door, where she had hung an intricately woven wreath of grasses, leaves, and ribbons to celebrate the season of harvest. The wreath surrounded a brass door knocker, representing the face of a Celtic warrior-goddess. Awena’s own face appeared in one of the door windows as she checked to see who it was before opening. This was new behavior, and undoubtedly a reaction to the recent murder. His heart sank to realize how much Wanda’s death had changed things.
Awena herself could only be described as an earthy type of woman, and past experience of her had shown Max that for all her otherworldly preoccupations, she had a healthy skeptical streak. He imagined that running a business as successful as Goddessspell required ballast to stabilize her clearly genuine preoccupation with the well-being of her soul. Today she was looking particularly priestessy in a robe of a deep saffron color, gathered at the waist by a belt of red beads—the usual high-waisted style she wore to accentuate her buxom figure. Her dark hair was held back by a matching band that caught the light as she moved. She had a slow walk, as if perpetually on pilgrimage; she might have been starring in a singularly campy revival of The Phoenician Women. Her face was, as usual, devoid of makeup—not that she needed to enhance the creamy English rose complexion: her plump rosy cheeks, red lips, and blue eyes were striking left as they were.
He handed her the wine he’d brought as a gift, and she showed him into the sitting room, a space she’d filled with good-quality furniture with clean, modern lines and upholstered in cheerful patterns and colors. The art was Art Deco by way of China and India, the walls hung with bright woven tapestries and the floors thick with beautiful rugs. Max had the idea that Noah might have given his eyeteeth for just one of the rugs. All in all, the place was an unusual but pleasing mixture of Spartan ethos and homey charm.
She left him to fetch the before-dinner drinks, soon returning from the kitchen with a lacquered tray, her voluminous dress billowing out behind her. The tray held bottles of homemade hawthorn wine, a specialty of hers, and a wine from Montepulciano—not from Mme Cuthbert’s shop, then, for Madame recognized no other wine than French. Max had thought he’d never see the day, but he found himself choosing the hawthorn wine.
“Dinner will be ready in a few minutes,” she told him.
He knew from previous visits there was an atrium at the back of the house that she had turned into a sort of prayer space, filled with luxuriant green plants, a small tinkly fountain, and an altar of sorts on which candles, flowers, seashells, and polished stones were arranged. The room smelled of incense and the oils that she used in whatever rituals she performed as part of her prayer and meditation. She had explained to him that the objects in the room—the incense, candles, the fountain, and the plants—were there to represent air, fire, water, and earth.
The Anglican Church stretched wide to embrace all points of view, but Max had wondered if it would reach to encompass Awena’s gently wacky worldview, a view that included all manner of things that went bump in the night. Taking in the beautiful
and peaceful atrium, he had expressed his skepticism, but politely—a skepticism both inbred and reinforced by the orthodoxy of his theological training. Awena had merely turned to him and quoted, “‘It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.’ That’s Pascal, if you didn’t know.”
He had been struck by her calm assurance as she went on that night to talk of something she called rhamanta, a method of finding omens by surrendering the self to nature—a listening to the heart in stillness until a sign was revealed.
“I suppose much like the monks that used to live on Noah’s property,” he had said.
“What do you mean, used to?” she asked him. She had been smiling … but a seriousness underlay her words. “Just wait until Halloween. If ever a place was haunted, it’s the Abbey Ruins. I don’t know how Noah gets any sleep.”
Despite this kind of thing, or because of it, of all the people in the village, he had come closest to unguarded friendship with Awena. He recognized the attractiveness of her person and her personality, while acknowledging their differences in outlooks, in approaches to this world (and the next). These differences seemed to him insurmountable, particularly for someone in his position. Knowing this, he did not dare risk—realized he was afraid to risk—the friendship in an attempt to replace it with something more. Awena was too important to him.
But even given his trust of her, he found it impossible to pierce the veil he had drawn across his former life. How to tell her why he’d left his old life behind, or even to tell her a fraction of what he’d witnessed and helped perpetuate? In polite conversation, it just didn’t fit anywhere. Awena hardly came from a background of protected privilege—her father, he knew, had been a Welsh fisherman, and she had told Max something of the man’s struggle to raise a large family on his own. Presumably she knew something of the occasional brutality of real life—of strife and hard times. But there was a level at which it seemed impossible to expect anyone to understand what he himself had once been paid to do.
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