A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  In one of the history books he collected, there was a photo of a whalebone casket from the eighth century, decorated in both Christian and pagan images. It was a blending that apparently had bothered no one at the time, and it seemed to him he and Awena could arrive at a similar give-and-take balance in their union. Given one day at a time.

  “Do you have children, Father?” Dame Hephzibah asked.

  “The first is on the way,” he told her. “Due mid-September.”

  “Oh!” She beamed. “How nice for you and your wife.”

  How to explain? How to begin to explain his tangled yet wondrous situation to this dear old heart? Max smiled at her and replaced the little gown on the shelf, carefully refolding its tiny lacy sleeves. His fingers were too clumsy for the task and Dame Hephzibah kindly took over for him.

  In one corner a Christmas tree made of twigs and burlap displayed handmade wooden ornaments painted bright colors. There were all the animals of Noah’s ark and stars and flowers and snowflakes. At the foot of the little tree, which stood about three feet tall, was a primitive crèche scene of exquisite workmanship, the figures—Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus; a shepherd and a wise man; the ox and the lamb—made of painted terra-cotta. He couldn’t help but smile looking at Joseph’s concerned expression as he stared awestruck at the child put into his care. Max looked at the price tag on the crèche scene and could not believe his eyes. It belonged in a museum and they wanted only a few pounds for it.

  He walked on. From a branch artfully stuck in a pottery jar hung several dozen rosaries of variously colored beads, positioned to reflect the light. Shelf after shelf along one wall was stacked with jars of honey of every conceivable flavor, like almond or raspberry. The label on the jar of creamed honey told him it had been crystallized into a butter-like spread and was recommended for use on toast or hotcakes. He had just finished breakfast but could not wait to try this delicacy. Surely hotcakes were no challenge to a man who had now mastered the egg?

  There were bundles of herbs hanging from the rafters, as in Awena’s Goddessspell shop. “Herbs from the Physic Garden of Monkbury Abbey,” read their labels. Shelves of books nearby held, in addition to the expected devotional tomes, several rows of books and tracts on cooking with herbs and the medicinal uses of herbs and the use of herbs in the pickling process. To Max, this was all close to necromancy.

  “Our infirmaress is an expert botanist,” Dame Petronilla informed him. “She has written several of those pickling pamphlets. And of course Dame Fruitcake—Dame Ingrid—has some wonderful recipes. Those little booklets are nearly as popular as her fruitcake. Although I am quite convinced, between us, that she keeps her really special secret ingredients to herself.”

  Did she realize what she was saying, Max wondered? For hopefully, none of Dame Ingrid’s special secret ingredients involved poison.

  There were jars of hand creams, and candles, and jams and preserves made of all varieties of fruit. Including, of course, the ubiquitous berries. The labels informed him that the berries were hand-picked on the premises. That, he told himself, might soon no longer be considered a selling point. There also were sweet biscuits of every variety, lumpy with seeds and nuts and—yes—berries again. The orange marmalade containing whiskey looked tempting, and looking at the contents label, he wondered if whiskey on toast in the morning might be a slippery slope. Some of the goods, he noted, like the wines, were imported from St. Martin’s, the order’s motherhouse in France. Dame Hephzibah saw him reading the wine label and said, “We are thinking of expanding into beer production one day, but for wines we still have to depend on the motherhouse. Abbess Genevieve Lacroix is here again to discuss with Abbess Justina ways to strengthen the bonds between our two houses. The French have such a way about them, don’t they?” she added wistfully. “Some of the cosmetics we have on sale are theirs. I gather from our visitors that the face lotions work wonders on wrinkles. For people who worry about such things I am certain that comes as a blessing.” Her face exploded in a smile as she said this, wrinkles radiating in every direction. “But such an enterprise as making beer and wine would mean more involvement with outside vendors. People who sells grapes and suchlike.”

  She shook her head.

  “There is some resistance to the idea?” Max asked her.

  “We like to keep the world at bay, Father. It’s why we came here. Why most of us came here. Although … I have to say it is gratifying to meet the needs of others with our products.”

  Max waited for her to elaborate, but judging by the thin line into which she had drawn her mouth she had said all she had to say on that subject. “However, we may soon open a little restaurant for visitors,” she added, “serving coffee and a cream tea for those who come to visit our church. That sort of hospitality would be more in keeping with the Rule.”

  He came upon a small, hand-lettered sign that declared that the proceeds of sales from the shop went to fund a Christian missionary and orphanage in Africa and to sustain various other good causes, including a rape crisis center. All of this seemed to Max added inducement to help empty the shelves if it would help the good sisters in their work.

  And what a shame if that work were interrupted by some terrible rumor that their goods were tainted.

  Max could understand the demand being created for the nuns’ produce in the outside world, a world with its reborn interest in the natural, the pure, the homemade. Was it somehow an opening for the return to the corruption and vice of religious houses of the past? How much, wondered Max, did the abbey rake in in a year, selling its humble goodstuffs? Surely not all that much. There were too few nuns to work the fields, ply the needles, and stir the pots for homemade jams and jellies. Not to mention, get the famous fruitcake into production.

  But there now were also the Internet sales, which Max gathered were gathering quite a head of steam. He wondered how they managed that, living off the grid as they did, and made a mental note to ask Xanda, who looked like she would be clued into all things Internetty, as opposed to Dame Hephzibah, who did not.

  The sisters were of course most famous for their Boozy Fruitcake, as it had come to be called (Forever Fruitcake as a marketing concept having failed). Max had remembered that an article about this particular abbey product had appeared in the Monkslip-Super-Mare Globe and Bugle and had been picked up by one of the London dailies, and he had searched out and reread the article before setting out for the abbey. An enterprising reporter had given it the boozy name, which had stuck, sending sales rocketing heavenward. St. Lucy’s Boozy Fruitcake was a confection of honey, sherry, and brandy, and unlike the usual regifted doorstop cakes, these were actively sought out by devotees. Demand crashed the convent’s Web site for a time, but the nuns quickly rallied, offering ten percent off and special prayers for those who had been inconvenienced.

  Now they shipped many hundreds of loaves a year, this in addition to their honeys and jams and illustrated pamphlets and the exquisitely embroidered babywear. Famous London babies, he gathered, would not think of being christened in anything but a linen gown from Monkbury Abbey, and having now seen a sample for himself, he could understand why. Even once the nuns realized they could charge the earth for these goods, they kept prices strictly in line with actual costs, allowing only a modest profit, for this was the law as laid down in the Rule of St. Lucy, which governed their lives.

  They also made beeswax candles, offering beekeeping classes on occasion. They had even managed to breed a special type of bee that was less aggressive but more efficient.

  Max thought how fascinated Awena would be by all of this. She claimed her bees were gentle because she talked to them. He had asked her once, half in jest, what she talked to the bees about. She had replied in all seriousness that they seemed to like hearing the weather forecast. He had learned not to challenge her on this sort of thing, for her knowledge seemed sure, born not of whimsy but of unsentimental experience.

  But what, wondered Max, would Miss Pitchford of
Nether Monkslip make of the competition for her own infamous—and some said, lethal—fruitcake?

  Reminded of his mission, he asked Dame Hephzibah to point him in the direction of the abbey kitchen. It was time for a talk with Dame Fruitcake.

  PART V

  None

  Chapter 11

  IN THE CHAPTER HOUSE

  When serious matters confront the nunnery, the abbess shall call the whole community together to take its advice. She shall listen to all, particularly the young, for God often reveals more to them. But the final decision is the abbess’s to make, and all shall obey.

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

  Half an hour before Max’s tour of the gift shop, five women had sat huddled by a small fire in the chapter house, for despite the heat of the day, the ancient walls could hold a morning chill like a damp woolen cloak. The chapter house was not in any case designed for coziness. Situated at the east side of the cloister in the conclave area forbidden to visitors, it was the corporate heart of the abbey, if corporations could be said to have a heart, its narrow, low-reaching windows like the floor-to-ceiling vistas over a modern-day New York skyline. The room was an elaborate gothic chamber ringed by stone-hewn benches, with rib vaults springing from round pillars, a majestic meeting space meant to humble those who gathered there, meant to tame and subdue.

  The room’s vast size was now a rueful reminder of how many nuns the space once had been able to accommodate. Someone had once proposed to move the chapter meetings into the more comfortable warming room, an idea that had quickly been voted down. The cellaress in particular had been adamant that the room would one day again be filled to overflowing if they waited patiently for the void to be filled. It was a somewhat New Age, “if we build it they will come” brand of thinking to which not all subscribed, but Tradition, they all agreed, was Tradition. And Tradition was what mattered.

  The abbess generally sat on a raised seat, but in deference to the informality of this occasion she sat on one of the stone benches, flanked by the others. The nuns’ feet rested somewhat irreverently on the grave of one of the monastery’s medieval greats, Abbess Junella. Her resting place, outlined by an elaborate tomb marker, was a special tribute to a long and peaceful reign and to the wealth of the family from which she had sprung, for generally abbesses were buried in row upon row of sarcophagi in the crypt that ran beneath the church.

  For centuries the serious business of the nunnery had been conducted in the chapter house. Momentous decisions discussed and voted on. Sometimes, voices were raised, and an abbess’s diplomatic skills tested to the limits.

  Here the nuns met daily for a reading of a chapter from the Rule that framed their days. Often, the abbess would expound on that day’s chapter, particularly if it were one of the more problematic rules, difficult to obey and enforce. Infractions against talking during forbidden times were common. Little lapses of behavior, like a show of un-Christian irritation at a sister who was slow or doltish or just always there were common.

  Of course, part of the routine of chapter meetings was for the sisters to confess their faults to one another. The rather devilish part of this routine was that those who failed to acknowledge fault might be publicly accused. There was, in other words, no escape—no rest for the wicked. Unless, of course, one were lucky enough to have been unobserved in a transgression of the rules. Most tended to hope their misdeeds, large or small, would go unnoticed by anyone but God.

  The meeting today was very different, however. Abbess Justina had asked a select few of her nuns to stay behind: the cellaress, the librarian, the cook, and the infirmaress. It was nearly an unprecedented request, and privately they speculated on the occasion for this hush-hush meeting. Especially since the Rule of St. Lucy decried the exclusion of others from important decisions.

  It’s like a cabal, thought Dame Olive, the librarian, mystified. They sat quietly, as they had been trained to do, their faces impassive and their eyes downcast. But their excitement betrayed itself in the rustle of skirts as they wriggled for purchase on the uncomfortable stone bench or in the soft click of prayer beads being sifted through restless hands. Dame Olive knew she wasn’t at the gathering to take notes, her usual role—that was for certain. The abbess had expressly requested that no record be kept of this meeting and that it not be talked about outside these walls. Dame Olive pushed her heavy lenses up the narrow bridge of her nose in consternation. It was all most baffling.

  The cook’s natural humility left her even more mystified than Dame Olive. What, wondered Dame Ingrid, could she possibly have to contribute? Such a small and select group indicated the topic might be financial, and Dame Ingrid would be the first to claim ignorance. The joy of her life was that she had given up daily concerns, like balancing a chequebook, and could devote herself to cooking, which she considered to be a pious offering to God. In part of her mind she struggled against a nagging sense of flattery to have been included in this august company. Then she wondered if that were a fault of pride she’d have to confess later. Probably it was. Bother.

  Unless … unless … She had just had a horrible thought. Unless all this had something to do with the fruitcake? Her famous fruitcake, and that … that little man, with his shocking accusations? The beads dropped into her lap as the train of thought tunneled through her mind, toppling the calming litany of her prayer. Her leg began to throb. Normally, she welcomed this reminder of her sin and just punishment, but today it just plain hurt. It hurt like the devil …

  Meanwhile, the cellaress was thinking, too, about their “special” visitor. Dame Sibil would of course be civil to him but she planned to avoid the pompous little upstart if at all possible. Her forehead beneath her pronounced widow’s peak crinkled into a frown of displeasure. She was a product of the class wars in Britain, the daughter of a mining family that could rightly claim to have gotten the shaft by various British governments. No matter what Lord Lislelivet did, and no matter how long he lived, the fact of his aristocracy damned him forever to a fiery perdition in Dame Sibil’s book. Her own dear father had been a martyr to the cause, dying from pneumonia after a protest fast he was in no condition to undertake. So, a pox on Lord Lislelivet and all his houses, was all Dame Sibil had to say on the matter. If this special meeting were to do with him, and it was difficult to see how it could be. She trained her alert stare on the abbess and waited.

  The cellaress looked like an owl waiting for her night’s prey to emerge, thought the infirmaress. Dame Petronilla, for her part, had a patient to see to and wanted no part in whatever this meeting was about. It was nothing to do with her, she was sure. She had left the postulant in charge, for lack of a better choice, but the girl was such a goose. Dame Petronilla cradled her wide jaw in one hand, a worried expression creasing her narrow forehead. Just as she was about to ask permission to be excused for urgent business, the abbess began to speak.

  And when she spoke it was not about Lord Lislelivet or fruitcakes, although she touched on those topics in passing. Rather, it was about the much-delayed expansion of the new Monkbury Abbey Guesthouse, and the reasons behind the delay.

  First swearing them all to silence, she spoke for twenty minutes without pause. And when she was finished, she made each in turn state aloud their promise. Only the cellaress dared register a protest.

  “I won’t lie,” she said stubbornly. “Especially since I think what is called for here is the opposite of secrecy.”

  “I’m not asking you to lie,” said Abbess Justina, thoroughly affronted. “But if anyone comes to you with questions that make you … uncomfortable, send them to me.”

  And might that someone be the dark and handsome vicar, wondered Dame Olive, who already had caught a passing glimpse of Max Tudor. For even a nunnery dedicated to the Almighty operated on a grapevine of ruthless efficiency, and the arrival of Max with his movie-star looks was news, however one looked at it. And sent by the bishop, no less! The postulant had speculated aloud that Max migh
t be here scouting locations “for some religious movie. You know, like Ben Hur.” It was uncharitable of her even to think it, Dame Olive knew, but the postulant Mary always struck her as being a few peas short of a casserole.

  “Just … say nothing,” said the abbess. “For now. On top of the whole business with the fruitcake, we can’t have this come out. Not now. You do see that. We must stay ahead—what is the phrase, Dame Cellaress?” And she turned to Dame Sibil as to one with vast years of experience of corporations and spin doctors, hoping the flattery might work. It did seem to thaw her, just a notch.

  “You mean that one must stay ahead of the story,” supplied Dame Sibil.

  “That’s precisely it!” exclaimed the abbess.

  They all exchanged glances, but it was Dame Petronilla who readily agreed. The abbess was right: they could only cope with one catastrophe at a time. One, or two.

  “It’s been a secret for so long,” she said. “What do a few months matter?”

  Chapter 12

  THE KITCHENESS

  The kitcheness shall consult with the cellaress over the wise provisioning of the abbey but the cellaress shall have the final word on the amounts and types of food provided to the kitchen.

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

  Dame Tabitha the guest-mistress had greeted Max with a dutiful bow, Dame Hephzibah with a dry little kiss, but Dame Ingrid grabbed his hand fervently in both of hers, pumping it enthusiastically. She looked as though she wanted to clasp him to her ample bosom but thought better of it. She contented herself with a joyous cry of “Thank heaven you’re here!”

  “I am most happy to be here,” Max said politely. But it was only partly true and he did not feel particularly heaven sent.

  “Welcome to the fruitcake factory, Father Max.”

  “I had read of your fruitcakes before I ever came here,” said Max. “You have achieved quite a following. Congratulations.”