4 A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  Suzanna felt this was rather a scattershot approach to healing: If you threw enough runes at a problem something was bound to stick. But she had come to a grudging acceptance of the power of spirituality that seemed to permeate Nether Monkslip via the medium of Awena. And, as Suzanna often said, she was willing to try anything once. She was always rather hoping Awena would offer Tantric sessions at Goddessspell, but so far no luck.

  While loudly maintaining her complete indifference and skepticism, Suzanna had been among the first to sign up for the weekend. Knowing that absence made the heart grow fonder, she thought it was time to put a little distance between herself and Grimaldi the Elder and his beachy waves.

  But as she told her brother, “If I should return home wearing a knitted headband, a cockleshell bracelet, bells on my toes, butterflies in my hair, and bleating about my Spirit Master, please know that you have my advance permission to have me committed.”

  At least it was all grist for the mill of Suzanna’s new position as magazine editor of the St. Edwold’s Parish News, which she had renamed the St. Edwold’s Herald, insisting that it gave the enterprise a more global reach. It was a position of enormous power but one she was determined, she said, not to exploit.

  “There will be no phone tapping on my watch,” she had solemnly assured Max.

  Max hesitated. After all, this was Suzanna. Suzanna who had bribed four-year-old Matt Nathall to vote for her entry in the St. Edwold’s Crumpet Bakeoff.

  “You do realize,” Max had said, “it is a simple matter of announcing local weddings and baptisms and the church flower rota and times for services. There’s nothing global about it, Suzanna.”

  “Oh, but it can be so much more,” Suzanna had replied, eyes aglow with the spirit of tattling pioneers like Pulitzer and Hearst. Her background in journalism made Suzanna a natural for the job, and she looked forward to shining a light on village doings.

  Max, fearing an outbreak of yellow journalism of the worst sort, had emphasized that the position was temporary. It was, in fact, a task he enjoyed doing himself when time permitted, but his other duties continued to encroach. Not to mention his continually being drawn into murder investigations. Not to mention the approaching demands of fatherhood.

  Fortunately for everyone noteworthy in the village, Suzanna, also head of the Women’s Institute, had additional fish to fry. Her planning for the Christmas Fayre was already well underway, spawning deadly strife typical of preparations for the Harvest Fayre, although with nothing to match the lethal animosity of previous years. Unlike her predecessor in the role, Suzanna ruled with a firm but benevolent hand.

  She was just putting the finishing touches to an org chart when Tara Raine went by the Cavalier on her bicycle, headed to teach a class at Goddessspell, a yoga mat tilted at a rakish angle in the bike’s basket. She rang the bike bell as she passed.

  “I should get back,” said Awena, declining Adam’s offer of a chair. “I’ve spent the morning gathering plants from near the Sacred Spring on Hawk Crest. Next to the monastery, it’s the most peaceful spot in the village. I left an offering for Sul.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” said Suzanna. “Sul?”

  “She’s a goddess of fertility and healing. The Celts worshipped her.”

  Suzanna eyed Awena’s stomach.

  “It certainly seems to be working. I’ll stay well clear, thanks for the warning.”

  Awena smiled. “Just don’t drink too much of the spring water. It’s very rich in minerals and needs to be diluted with ordinary water.”

  “No worries.”

  Chapter 3

  MAX AND THE BISHOP

  No one should repeat to those outside the abbey the business of the abbey. Nor should anyone sent to conduct the business of the abbey return with idle tales of what she saw or heard while outside the gates, because that causes the greatest harm to all.

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

  Max had been summoned to the presence of his bishop. It was getting to be a regular routine. Only this time, it appeared, he was not to be probed with uncomfortable questions about either his private life or the little bursts of publicity that had erupted around the various recent murder cases he had helped the police solve. The bishop wanted something from Max, as he had made clear on the telephone. It was a situation so rare as to be both flattering and alarming.

  So Max showered and quickly changed back into his cassock—the one with the egg on it, the lesser of the two evils on offer to him that day. He threw the Land Rover into high gear and set off for Monkslip Cathedral, the seat of Max’s spiritual and temporal leader, the Bishop of Monkslip. Along the way he left the torn cassock for repairs at the Stitch in Time.

  * * *

  “I think you might have some food on your cassock,” observed the Right Reverend Bishop Nigel St. Stephen.

  “Yes, I do apologize,” said Max. “I tried to wash it off, but I’m afraid I made things rather worse. It was the only one I had available…”

  “Your housekeeper … my secretary did mention she seemed a bit vague on the phone.”

  “Mrs. Hooser gets rather overwhelmed,” said Max. In fact she was unsatisfactory in every conceivable way as a housekeeper, but even worse as a mother to two small children. It was for Tom and Tildy Ann’s sake that Max was willing to put up with quite a lot from Mrs. Hooser. The vicarage gave them somewhere to go and be reasonably well-supervised when they were let out of school.

  Max looked around at the spacious headquarters office of the Bishop of Monkslip. The bishop’s office was like a Shangri-la to Max, with all its spiffy new computer equipment twinkling in the sunlight admitted by ancient mullioned windows. The bishop’s screen saver rotated a series of photos of Monkslip Cathedral as it appeared in all seasons. The credenza where slumbered a high-speed printer also held a photo of the bishop’s wife and four daughters, but it was an updated version from the one Max had seen before. In this image, the eldest daughter, her gamine face peering as through a forest of curly auburn hair, looked to be of an age to go to university. Max commented on it.

  “She is going into the theater,” the bishop informed him, “and has applied to the RADA in London. I find it all rather disquieting. I don’t know where she gets this show-biz gene from.”

  Max started to point out that the church with its pomp and circumstance, not to mention its costumes, was not without a theatrical element, but thought better of it.

  “I was hoping she would choose a more stable profession,” the bishop went on. “The thing of it is, she has real talent. If you’d seen her in Troilus and Cressida you’d have been amazed. My little girl! I just don’t want to see her go into a profession where rejection is so much a part of the game.”

  “The urge to protect her must be overwhelming,” said Max. He was thinking of his and Awena’s unborn child, due in mid-September, an event he anticipated with equal parts stark alarm and unbridled happiness. What would he do to protect his child? What wouldn’t he do?

  “It is a constant battle between wanting to let her fight her own battles and wanting to send her off to a nunnery where she might be safe. Might being the operative word. Which brings me to the reason I asked you here, Max. Thank you for being willing to drop everything at a moment’s notice.”

  “Your secretary indicated it was important.”

  “It is. Whether it is urgent, I’m not certain. I hope not.”

  * * *

  “Financial shenanigans?” said Max. “In a nunnery?”

  Five minutes later, the bishop was still filling Max in on why he’d been summoned to Monkslip Cathedral. He’d begun with an introduction to what he thought were the key pieces in an emerging puzzle.

  “I’m afraid so,” said the bishop. “At least, the appearance is of financial shenanigans. Money that was fund-raised to expand and refurbish the Monkbury Abbey Guesthouse has largely disappeared. It is too early to say if or how the money was misappropriated. I’m rather hoping it jus
t got, you know, misfiled somehow. Put into Column A when it should have gone under Column B.”

  Max, reflecting on the books for Nether Monkslip and his other two churches, rather doubted this was possible, but then the nunnery probably had many more revenue streams to account for than his tiny parishes and bigger weekly expenses than facial tissue and antibacterial wipes.

  “And for a nunnery,” the bishop was saying, “just the appearance of such a thing is alarming. If it turns out to be true … well, I don’t have to point out the implications for you. It would tarnish the image not just of Monkbury Abbey but of the entire monastic tradition, which, as you also know, has had a lot of scandal to live down in the past.”

  A dodgy nunnery? Not unheard of historically, as the bishop had said, but surely nowadays …

  Max’s imaginings were gleaned from hazy school lectures, in which out-of-control monks and nuns of the Middle Ages had gone from wealth to decadence, as often happens when power goes unsupervised.

  “I don’t really know a lot about the order,” said Max.

  “You are not alone,” said the bishop. “They are members of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy of the Light, which is an offshoot of the Benedictine tradition. A far-reaching tendril, I might add. They are following many of the precepts of the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict, but for obvious reasons they have had to make some modifications over the centuries. Corporeal punishment, just to mention one thing, is not so much in vogue as once it was. The Lucians used to be considered a bit of a fringe group, actually, but those days are long past.”

  “Yes, now that you refresh my memory, the name sounds familiar,” Max said. “The Lucians. Still, I’ve only just heard of the order.”

  “I am not surprised. They are quite a small group: thirty-one in number, down from hundreds of members in their glory days. Although lately they have established a bit of a presence in the world. I understand recruitment inquiries are up.”

  “It’s quite an ancient order, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. The original Lucians were founded as a double order in the eleventh century by people wanting a simple and secluded way of life. Like many such, they were reactionaries—in revolt against the wealth and worldliness of other orders of the time.”

  “Until corruption crept in again.”

  “Quite. Not all nuns and monks were corrupt, as you know, but Henry the Eighth was nothing if not thorough in putting his own ideas in place. Monkbury Abbey was spared the worst excesses of the Reformation because it was so remote—even dismantling the buildings to repurpose the bricks and stones for other uses, as commonly happened elsewhere, wasn’t all that practical. So large parts of its structures were preserved even though Mother Nature soon took over: the place eventually became overgrown and ramshackle in appearance, the haunt of ghosts, hobgoblins, and the occasional passing hippie.”

  The bishop hesitated, peering at Max. The handsome priest, gregarious in many ways, was strangely reticent in others. He so seldom spoke of his past. The bishop supposed that was part of his MI5 training, but the reluctance to talk of his experiences clearly ran deep. Not surprising, that. Spying was a dangerous and dirty business.

  “You have a relative in the religious life, am I right?” asked the bishop.

  “Yes,” said Max. “An aunt. My father’s sister. I can’t say I know her at all well: her convent is cloistered. For obvious reasons, she wasn’t a big part of my childhood. When we’d visit, we could only see her face through a grille. I remember being frightened of that when I was small, even though she was of course very sweet and kind and made a big fuss over me. It was the situation that worried me: it isn’t natural for an aunt not to be able to hold her own nephew.”

  Max thought how like his father she had seemed. That same ascetic quality as his father’s, given full range. The same reserve and stoicism. An otherworldly cast that he suspected would not have thrived outside the gray walls behind which she continued to live out her days.

  He had been negligent in not having visited her for months, an oversight he vowed to correct soon.

  Bishop St. Stephen studied the priest before him. He hoped he was doing the right thing in taking Max away from his expected duties in Nether Monkslip and sending him off on a mission to, essentially, spy on a religious order. But was there anyone he could think of more readymade for the task? Not a soul. Being MI5 called for a man with chameleon qualities: he not only could tell no one what he did for a living, but he had to make certain what he said he did for a living sounded as boring and ordinary as possible. Even the bishop wasn’t sure what Max had really got up to during those MI5 years. It was undoubtedly better not to know the details. What mattered was the man before him now, whose integrity he never doubted.

  Max prompted conversationally, never dreaming it all would have anything to do with him: “You say there are thirty-one of the sisters? That is a sizable group these days. What do you know of their backgrounds before they came to Monkbury Abbey?” He added, “Please don’t tell me one of them was an accountant.”

  “Actually, one was, but they all share jobs routinely and the nun with a background in accounting doesn’t seem to have been solely in charge of the funds. The job-sharing scheme is meant to keep them both humble and cross-trained, you see. There are a few key positions that remain stationary—the abbess, for one; the cellaress, for another. They mostly came to the religious life after a full exploration of the outside world. When we think of nuns we think of a convent full of virgins singing in the choir and scrubbing stone floors. Even those of us who have been called to religion ourselves—those who should know better. The Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy admits widows and always has, and today it boasts a few of those—several with children living. There are women from the business world, from academia, from all walks of life, really. Abbess Justina, to name one, was quite a London presence in her day.”

  The best leaders of establishments such as Monkbury Abbey, Max knew, combined a generosity of spirit with a steely practicality and a gift for diplomacy. “I would think some experience of the outside world would be a bonus to the nunnery,” he said.

  “Absolutely, it is. And they are not interested in recruiting naïfs who see the nunnery as a place to hide. It is a life to be embraced with joy and in full knowledge of what the postulant is leaving behind.”

  Stopping to adjust the collar at his neck, which looked too tight for such a warm day, the bishop went on: “They lean toward the Anglo-Catholic tradition, but they seem to be more interested in preserving the monastic traditions and rituals of the Middle Ages than in modern religious debate. They emphasize a return to the devotions of old and a wish to abandon the distractions of modern life. Who can blame them? Their main argument is that the earliest members of the C of E had no quarrel with their practices, so why should we?”

  “So I gather there has been some discussion about … let’s say, policy … with the abbess?”

  “Oh, on many occasions. The situation bears watching, but they seem to me to be earnest and devout, avoiding the excesses of the medieval church.”

  “No hair shirts either, then,” said Max. “That’s a relief.”

  “No, no. I should quickly put a stop to any hint of that sort of thing.” He straightened an already immaculate pile of pages on this desk and leaned over to arrange a pencil that leaned lopsidedly in a cup on his desk. “In the past, as now, where monasteries or nunneries got into trouble was usually with the financial situation, which bred envy, which bred … oh, all sorts of ills. Rich benefactors willed them money, wanting special prayers said for their souls. They often ear-marked their bequests for certain parts of the nunnery, such as the infirmary or the guesthouse. Back in the day, the infirmaress, for example, might have control over a sheep farm left to subsidize her part of the operation. You can see where this could lead: perhaps a woman with no experience of sheep was suddenly responsible for their welfare and the milk and cheese they produced. Her duties as estate manager
might take her away from the nunnery for days or even weeks at a time. The fact that she controlled a large portion of the nunnery’s income might create internal conflict and might also lead to serious debt.”

  “No audits?”

  “Finally, yes, that is exactly what had to happen. Annual audits. It is a tradition—a rule, in fact—that is strictly upheld to this day, although I have tried to steer clear of micromanagement. I don’t interfere and I make it a point not to. I have never felt a need to. Not until now, perhaps. Better to delegate authority wherever possible. I see no harm in what they are doing.”

  Max was not certain that religion should follow the latest business management fads. Both as an MI5 agent and as a priest he had seen the theory of delegation of authority deployed with disastrous results. Too often managers had no real idea of the psychological limitations of the young, untried subordinates they were entrusting with other peoples’ lives and welfare.

  “The Abbess Justina,” the bishop was saying, as if tracking Max’s thoughts, “is a sound woman. A good manager who commands respect. She is perhaps a bit vain, I think—she is a tall, handsome woman. The day-to-day operations are in the hands of the cellaress, as is usual, the abbess being the big-picture person. She steps in only when there is something the cellaress can’t sort out herself, which is seldom.”

  Max was still left thinking of cases in his own history where upper management remained clueless while the lunatics one rung below ran the asylum. He had every faith in the bishop’s good judgment, but how often did he see these women?

  “Anyway, Abbess Justina: she offers what I have always regarded as a Ronald Reagan style of leadership. Not unintelligent—far from it—but ten minutes after speaking with her you are not certain exactly what it was she said. Still you feel somehow that everything is going to turn out all right.”