4 A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  “It seldom was kept on open display,” she went on. “Even though it was known to have miraculous healing properties. That would have been far too dangerous. Crowd control was the biggest job of Dame Sacrist at one time. Only the prescreened were allowed to see it. Security reasons, of course.”

  “Of course.” Only the wealthy would have been given access—never the rabble. It made a certain sense, but only if one believed the wealthy were honest and the poor dishonest. Or that only the rich required miracle cures. Still, there had been riots throughout the ages when rumors got started of a miraculous site or relic—a finger bone that cured cancer, a rib that cured gout, a scrap of cloth that aided women in childbirth.

  “According to the archives, the leper chapel is where they hid the Face most often,” she told him. “Knowing no one would have the courage to go near such a place. The nuns were inured to dealing with the sorriest of the sore-afflicted, men and women both—to comforting those without hope. Leprosy is not highly contagious, but no one knew that then, and the women who volunteered for this service were heroines, pure and simple. Saints, they were. It was rumored to be haunted, that sad little chapel where lepers would drag themselves to pray. The nuns repeated the ghost rumors to keep people out, to keep them from searching.

  “Anyway, once the danger had passed—whatever that danger was: fire, earthquake, marauders, Vikings, Normans, busybody pilgrims, thieves—the nuns would move the Face to the church, where it long remained an object of veneration.”

  “Until it disappeared for good. Or so people thought.”

  She nodded. “More tea, Father? No?” She settled back in her chair. “No doubt Dame Olive mentioned the fire to you. The Great Fire, as it came to be known, for there were many such disasters in the years when fire was in constant use for cooking and warmth.

  “During the Great Fire, the Face was rescued and the nuns, now realizing the danger, realizing what had nearly been lost, decided a permanent place had to be found for it. There was little sense of fire-proofing in those days but they did understand metal and stone had a better chance of survival.

  “Of course, this was early days, and they couldn’t foresee the wholesale destruction to be wrought by Henry the Eighth on the monasteries, but they had had the not dissimilar experience of Viking raids. And so they built a special hiding place for it, in the crypt. The abbey was prosperous enough that routine visits by pilgrims were no longer encouraged or needed. They might bring it out when funds were needed, put it on display for a time.”

  “Like a special exhibit of a Michelangelo or a da Vinci at an art gallery. Understood. Then following the recent earthquake…” began Max.

  “Yes. Following the earthquake. The earthquake brings us up almost to the present day in our history. Until then it had all been long forgotten or passed off as legend. Lost to history. The written sources as to its existence were cryptic, to say the least—please forgive the pun. And then of course there was no nunnery here at all for decade after decade. Just a pile of stones, the beating heart of the place gone when the women were driven underground—temporarily.”

  “The earthquake revealed the bones of the anchoress.”

  “That is correct. A crack opened up in the floor of the church. We got out an electric torch and peered inside. Some of the wall down there had collapsed, probably ages ago. We saw her bones, first.”

  “And the earthquake, it also revealed the Face that she was guarding.”

  “That also is correct.”

  That’s how the light gets in.

  “And the funds for the new guesthouse got diverted to repair the crypt. Actually, from what I saw, it was more than repair work and shoring up. There’s been extensive decorating and enhancement to the crypt, to create a setting for the Face.”

  The English rose complexion kicked up a notch. At least she had the grace to look abashed, if momentarily.

  “None of the money went missing,” she told him. “It’s all there. Just … redistributed a bit.”

  “False pretenses,” he said.

  “No. There were no false pretenses. The fund-raising was officially to benefit the abbey. Full stop. But speaking of fund-raising, according to the cellaress, it appears likely that not all the money intended for us actually reached us. Palmona Green could tell you more about that. I’ll say no more.”

  She was a born politician, all right. When all else fails, point the finger of blame. “Abbess Justina, how many people knew about this? About the crypt?” He just missed saying, “The Secret of the Crypt,” which if it were not the title of a Hardy Boy’s or Nancy Drew mystery, should have been. Frank could use it as a title in an expanded and revised version of Wherefore Nether Monkslip. There was sure to be one, once word of this got out.

  “Apart from my sisters, you mean? My nuns?”

  So they all knew, the nuns. And no doubt were sworn to secrecy. An oath of loyalty, probably sworn when they took their final vows. He should have known.

  … how the light gets in …

  “And who else?” he demanded. “Who else knows about the crypt?”

  “Father Tudor, that is of course precisely what I have been asking myself all this time.”

  Chapter 34

  ALL THE KING’S HORSES

  It is written, that our treasure is to be found in heaven, where thieves cannot break through to steal. Remember: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

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

  Max found Cotton helping supervise a team near the well in the cloister garden. One of the SOCO people, a woman of perhaps sixty with a halo of dandelion hair, was kneeling a few feet from the well, scrutinizing something that had caught her eye. She took a photo and then, using tweezers, extracted whatever it was—perhaps a thread?—from a blade of grass, sealing it in a bag. The sight of the small metal pinchers in her hand sent a little ping of recognition through Max’s memory, one of those sudden bulletins the brain issues without reason or further explanation, and Max could not for the moment imagine the relevance. He continued to watch the woman for a moment and she looked up, giving him a small wave of recognition, for Max Tudor was becoming a familiar sight on these occasions of mayhem. Max returned the wave and went to tell Cotton his tale of the crypt, including the stain he thought might be blood. Cotton’s team now had a whole new area to search.

  Max explained where the entrance could be found in the choir. “The crypt technically is part of the church,” he told Cotton, “not the cloistered nun’s area, so I think you needn’t worry too much about inconveniencing anyone. Although it is evident the crypt connects directly to the cloistered area, via yet another stairway behind the altar down there. The entrance at the bell tower is probably sealed from within the crypt: I’m not sure about that. But it is clear that entrance hasn’t been used in ages.”

  “And Abbes Justina said nothing of this to us. Which makes me think their little conspiracy of silence spreads even further up the ladder.”

  Max shook his head firmly. “The bishop knew nothing of this. Of that I am certain. The abbess admitted that she ‘took full responsibility’ for diverting the funds that were to go to build the guesthouse, using them instead not just to make repairs caused by the earthquake—an understandable emergency, after all—but to enhance the crypt itself. To make a fitting setting for the precious icon that the earthquake had uncovered.

  “The abbess further told me that after the bishop announced his impending visitation to Monkbury, she called the sisters together and basically said that the matter was an internal one that he need not be bothered with. Remember, her word is law. She was buying time. Revealing the existence of the Face would unleash a deluge of publicity. Dame Sibil, now the cellaress, was all in favor of the publicity, and she had her supporters in that. Dame Meredith, cellaress at the time of this discovery, was opposed, by the way. She thought the place would become another EuroDisney, and many agreed with her. They came here, you have to remember, to escap
e the preoccupations of the world outside. Anyway, Abbess Justina became concerned that if the bishop knew, the decision would be taken out of her hands, and she did not want that. So she swore the others to secrecy about the find. As happened at Legbourne.”

  “Legbourne?”

  “Yes. A famous old monastery where things similarly were hidden from the higher-ups and handled internally. Sexual transgressions, most likely. The reasoning went: how much better to fix the problem at a lower level than to kick it upstairs, where the reputation of the entire place might be put at risk once the scandal became common knowledge. It was thought to be a little local matter, and thus it should remain. The fear was that the establishment might even be closed if the transgressions reported were serious enough.

  “That wasn’t going to happen here—it wasn’t as if someone was going to accuse the nuns of idol worship or something like that. No, the concern they had, Abbess Justina in particular, was of losing financial control—the hard-won financial say over how Monkbury Abbey was run. It was a power struggle, really. The nuns have done exceedingly well for themselves without the need to be supervised and told what to do by the bishop. This particular bishop, by the way, seems to have been respectful of their autonomy. He’s been very hands-off in dealing with them, he told me, only occasionally becoming alarmed by their hewing so closely to tradition. Although once he hears of this…”

  “He will lower the boom?”

  “Probably. He won’t be happy, that’s for certain, and no doubt he will be paying much closer attention to everything they get up to from now on.” A fleeting image of his upcoming union with a very pregnant Awena Owen flitted through Max’s mind, a celebration of which the bishop, of course, remained blissfully unaware. It was an exaggeratedly bacchanalian image that came into Max’s mind, and one quickly banished: he would have to worry about that when—if—this case was solved. Which might put the bishop in a better mood.

  Although a still-breathing Lord Lislelivet might have kept him in a better mood.

  “The problem is, and the abbess knows this well, keeping such a find secret from the bishop was wrong of her. Diverting funds that had been raised for one purpose—to build a new guesthouse—to this new ‘secret’ project made it doubly wrong. She claims, quite insincerely, that the money is not exactly missing. It’s just that there will be ‘a little delay’ in breaking new ground on the guesthouse.”

  “I take it that means she floated cash toward the crypt repairs and was hoping to cover the difference via one of the abbey’s different income-producing streams.”

  “Right. Her behavior was unprofessional, to say the least. Faithless or disloyal, as the bishop will see it: so much for vows of obedience. It is very possible he will remove her from her post and initiate proceedings for the election of a new abbess.”

  “And so much for avoiding scandal.”

  “Yes, between the murder and the out-of-control abbess, I’d say the bishop’s equanimity will be completely shattered this week.”

  Max sighed. Probably not the best time to invite him to the handfasting ceremony.

  Max was struck by a sudden, visceral longing to be standing in the garden of his lopsided little vicarage or sitting at his desk before the window, working on his sermon, his dog, Thea, at his side or asleep before the hearth.

  He missed it. He missed everything about St. Edwold’s. He missed going for a stroll and a morning coffee in Elka Garth’s Cavalier Tea Room. He missed the church mouser, Luther, with his preternatural stare. He missed two-year-old Amy McIntosh, who if you took your eyes off her for a moment would draw on the pew seats with her crayons. He missed the church’s dour, ghoulish sexton, with his thundering proclamations of impending doom. In a clear sign of his distraction, he even missed the tryouts for the choir rehearsals and the caterwauling shrieks that generally made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

  Most of all he didn’t see how he’d get through the next twenty-four hours without seeing Awena. What if something went wrong with her or the baby, and they both needed him? God forbid it. He didn’t dare dwell on it …

  “So,” said Max, bringing his attention back to the crime he was anxious to solve quickly. “We find still more layers to this case. I have to wonder whether Lord Lislelivet used his aunt, Dame Meredith, as an excuse to visit or if she was the reason for his sudden visits.”

  “You think he was trying to cajole the information out of her?”

  “Cajole or pressure it out of her. She once had been the cellaress, a person in the know. Would you be surprised to hear he applied some pressure? Even as ill as she was?”

  He and Cotton agreed to meet in one hour. Max wanted a moment to clear his head, and think through what he knew of the case and the suspects. He set off for the stone bench he had seen along the side of the hill, overlooking the river. On his way he passed Dame Hephzibah, who seemed to be trying to avoid him, although she moved so slowly it was a near impossibility. He pretended not to see her, not wanting to add to her distress. This whole mess was surely not how she planned to live out her golden years, the only home she knew being overrun by the authorities, everything turned over, her routine disrupted as suspicion spread through the monastery hallways like a vine growing in time-lapse photography.

  Dame Petronilla emerged from the infirmary. She was talking with the postulant, Mary Benton, both of them looking perturbed.

  He hung back in the shadows, unseen by either of them, and unabashedly listened in to the conversation.

  “How many times?” Dame Petronilla was saying. “You are never to leave her side.”

  The beautifully arched eyebrows over the dark eyes pulled into a frown. “But she told me it was all right,” said Mary.

  “I know some days it seems as if she is on the mend, but she’s not as strong as she thinks she is. Letting her do what she wants will tax her strength, strength she does not really have. The doctor was very clear on this. And lights out means lights out, by the way. She—Oh, there you are, Father,” said Dame Petronilla brightly. “Dame Meredith is asking if she can see you later today.”

  “I’ll make a point of it.”

  “Please get back to your work,” Dame Petronilla said to the postulant, who quickly scuttled off to the infirmary. Max stood back to let her pass. He was still keeping an eye on Dame Hephzibah as she walked toward the gatehouse. He waited until she was out of earshot before he spoke. Even though she was deaf, so that “out of earshot” was quite a relative concept, it was a very long time before Dame Hephzibah had hobbled her way out of what he judged to be hearing range.

  “How old is she?” Max asked.

  Dame Petronilla looked startled. “Do you know, I’m not quite certain. She’s simply always been here, like the stone carvings. May we expect you in the infirmary around four, then, Father?”

  The bell rang for prayer. Immediately she left without waiting for his answer.

  * * *

  Max came to the bench carved into the side of the hill, its center worn by the posteriors of who knew how many generations of nuns and visitors to the nunnery. The bench was in the shade of an overhanging tree, and today afforded a splendid view over the scurrying river below, the fields beyond, and the distant hills. The outline of another tor, its ancient purpose unknown, could clearly be seen as the sun drew shadows on the hill, highlighting concentric terraces.

  He could hear the sound of bleating sheep coming from the pasture, acting as a counterpoint to the chanting of the nuns, the sweet sounds mingling as they were carried faintly to him on a breeze. Both songs were mournful today, strident and anxious. What was known was changing. What the future held was unknowable. He thought sadly of the rubble that was all that was left of Nether Monkslip’s own abbey. Of how nearly Monkbury Abbey had missed the same fate. Noah of Noah’s Ark Antiques lived now in the only building that had been spared, the abbot’s lodge. Noah had turned it into a showcase.

  Everything changing, and the future unknowable. The folly
of man was in thinking he could know the future, could account for every unforeseen event, never taking the cataclysmic into account.

  Max reviewed what he’d learned, turning it over in his mind, deciding how best to approach the matter, knowing what he now knew. For there was no question that he had been dealing with two different-colored threads here. The treasure in the crypt: the nun’s secret. The attempted poisoning and now death of Lord Lislelivet.

  Surely the two things were connected. Surely?

  For sure.

  His eyes rested on the tor in the distance. Just visible along the top were the faint edges of the ruins of a monastery, twin to the nunnery. Tors were an early example of public works projects: the ancients seemed to like hauling earth and stone about. Probably the tor he now sat atop was a burial mound for some forgotten king or wealthy family. The secrets of all these places in England—archeologists were just now scratching the surface, literally, of what the ancients had left behind. The nunnery was not far away from the Cerne Abbas Giant, a hillside chalk drawing of a naked man, another mystifying project of the always-busy ancients. Was it their idea of a joke—a sort of early graffiti? A fertility symbol? A marker for something or someone buried beneath?

  The black and white sheep, as if in some unspoken agreement, began to shamble in his direction. Max thought again of the ewe who had taken on another’s lamb as her own. He smiled at the recollection, then paused. His mind struggled to make a connection—his mind leaping from Cerne Abbas to the lost little sheep. Sheep, lambs—black and white. Nuns … robed in black and white. Except the nuns of Monkbury had added the splash of purple to their ensemble.

  Cerne Abbas.

  What? It was something the novice had told him, that sad story of the lamb’s panic.

  He sat quietly, trying to still his mind. Awena was of course a devotee of meditation, of cultivating, as it were, the art of doing nothing. He supposed it was a matter of finding that “thin place” she had described. It seemed to him it was all another name for what he had done all his life: when he couldn’t see the solution, he would sometimes put it aside, sleep on it, or work on something mindless and repetitive, as removed from thought as he could get. Let his unconscious mind reveal the connections his racing mind could not stop to see.