A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  “She’ll have left the novice in charge of patients while she tends her plants. Well, the one patient of the moment: Dame Meredith. You will remember to go and talk with her, Father? It’s the cancer, you know. Right now she’ll be recovering from her latest hospital visit, so perhaps tomorrow afternoon would be a better time. It is in the afternoons that time hangs heavy for her, and she becomes prey to worry. Nighttime is even worse.”

  Max assured her he would visit the next afternoon, and thanked her again for allowing him the run of the place. He put from his mind for the moment the idea that she had opened up the archives to him as a way to keep him off the subject of recent abbey history.

  The library opened onto a wooded area, and a gravel path took him past the abbess’s lodge, which he could glimpse through the trees, and on past the infirmary, which at the moment housed only Dame Meredith and the novice keeping watch over her. As he breached a small hill beyond the cemetery, the gardens came into view, a splendid green Technicolor against which a nun in white wielded a hoe. The narrow woven circlet sitting atop her veil made her look from a distance like an Arab sheik. The white was probably in homage to her nursing duties, but he thought it probably was welcome under the hot sun.

  * * *

  She looked up to welcome him, her face with its wide jaw and narrow forehead emerging from the enveloping fabric. The coif was slightly askew and he could see the tan line where sun never reached the sides of her face.

  “You may call me Dame Pet, Father, if you like. Everyone does.”

  But the informality didn’t suit her, somehow. Behind the friendly smile, he sensed a well of reserve. Of course, his mission was to spy, which, if she knew it, hardly made him a welcome addition to her daily routine.

  He said, indicating the rows of healthy plants and blooming flowers: “This is amazing, the variety you have here.”

  She looked with pleasure over her work. “I like to grow not just ‘useful’ things like herbs but things of beauty. St. Francis said there should always be space set aside for flowers, particularly sweet-smelling ones, to remind people of the sweetness of the Lord. Have you seen the cloister garden yet?” Max nodded. “It is my pride.”

  She removed her gardening gloves, and dabbed at her face with a clean white handkerchief. “St. Francis used to preach to the flowers, too.”

  Max smiled at this. Some of his parishioners in their pews were like potted plants during his sermons, now he came to think of it. “G. K. Chesterton thought St. Francis did not want to see the wood for the trees,” he told her. “I have always thought that was rather a perfect line.”

  “Chesterton. Of course—he wrote the Father Brown mysteries. I read all of those when I was a girl. I trained as a nurse, you know, and during the long night watches I read mysteries to stay awake. We all did.”

  They had fallen into step on a grassy verge around one of the planted beds. She stopped to pull a weed that had dared encroach.

  “I imagine you keep a doctor on call?” Max asked her.

  “Of course. Dr. Barnard. But we bring him in only if someone falls seriously ill or if they present with symptoms that stump me.”

  “Ah,” said Max. “But you are formally trained in medicine?”

  Dame Petronilla nodded. “And I’ve taught myself a lot about herbal and holistic medicine since I came to Monkbury. Still, I wouldn’t presume to make medical decisions outside my scope. We have one sister who is quite ill, and of course we take her to hospital for treatment. The best we can do for her here is offer palliative care.”

  “I wonder that you didn’t choose a nursing order. That didn’t appeal?”

  She shrugged, her eyes surveying a distant past. “I think, Father, that what interested me most was the cure rather than the patient. I mean that the healing properties of plants are so fascinating, and so miraculous, I felt I could study them endlessly. And of course, plants don’t complain. They die, alas, as patients do—I had a hard time with losing patients.” She paused, and again Max had that sense of something held in reserve. “A very hard time.”

  He decided not to press her. Instead he said, “Dame Hephzibah told me you know a great deal about botany—I saw some of your pamphlets in the gift shop. I suppose you know that I am here at the bishop’s request to find out what I can about this—well, about this fruitcake situation.”

  “Yes, we all know. The abbess told us in chapter.” Dame Petronilla, tucking her gardening shears in her basket with her gloves and her collection of herbs, said, “I wonder why they used tutsan. That is very odd.”

  Really, the grapevine here was a match for Miss Pitchford’s in Nether Monkslip. “How did you—?”

  “The abbess told us.”

  Max assumed the abbess’s information came from the bishop via DCI Cotton. “Why do you say it’s an odd choice?” he asked her.

  She massaged her wide jaw with one hand, thinking. He was reminded of the actress Minnie Driver, with her triangular face. Finally Dame Petronilla said, “Tutsan is not an efficient choice. Not at all what I would have chosen to do away with someone—may God forbid I should ever wish to do such a thing.”

  “I’m certain you never would think of it. But why do you say that—about the inefficiency, I mean?”

  “Because if someone were bent on killing, something like black bryony would be a lot more effective than tutsan for their purposes. Or yew berries for that matter—absolutely deadly. And of course, we have yew trees growing in abundance in the cemetery—nothing could be easier to find anywhere in England. Whoever it was chose to use a berry that was not necessarily going to kill anyone, not unless they ate a lot of it, or were susceptible in some way to it. One might almost say…”

  “Yes?”

  “One might almost say the wish was to sicken, not to injure seriously.”

  She stopped to run the handkerchief beneath the edges of her coif, pulling the fabric from her face as she did so. The sky they stood beneath was slightly overcast but it had turned into a sultry, too-hot day for gardening. Her enveloping garments couldn’t have helped much.

  “What is tutsan, anyway?” He knew the answer, as he’d looked it up at the vicarage on the Internet, but he suspected Dame Petronilla had a knowledge of such things more encyclopedic and accurate than any search engine’s.

  “It’s a member of the St. John’s wort family,” she told him. “Its proper name is Hypericum androsaemum. It grows in the woods near here; it’s a sort of shrub. It’s also called sweet amber—it’s quite a pretty plant when in bloom. We use the leaves as an herbal medicine, but it is meant to be applied topically—to treat wounds, you understand. It is not meant to be eaten like an ordinary berry. Certainly no one in their right mind would put the berries in a fruitcake. And that is what this inquiry is about, is it not?” She observed him shrewdly. “Whether we are dealing with someone in their right mind? And whether they might not, in true G. K. Chesterton fashion, strike again?”

  Max turned his head, ignoring the sudden blaze of interest from her canny blue eyes.

  “When does tutsan come into season?” he asked.

  “It blooms from June to August, and then its berries appear. They start out green, and turn red. When fully ripe they are a deep purple color.”

  So, thought Max. The berries involved in the fruitcake poisoning were likely harvested in the fall of last year. That fit the timing of Lord Lislelivet’s visit to Monkbury Abbey. Whoever did this would not have had access to the berries before then, unless of course the berries came from the previous fall, which seemed unlikely. As it was, the fruitcake sat around untouched for a long time, as fruitcake is wont to do—if tightly packaged it could last on the shelf for years. Max sighed. No one would ever be able to figure out who was responsible for the poisoning, since all of this had been set in motion so long ago. It was in its little way the perfect crime.

  “Now,” she said, “the yew, or Taxus baccata—if that had been used we’d have a different story. The red berries of the
yew are, as I say, pure poison. To be specific, the inner seed of the berry is poisonous. Every child has been warned since ancient times not to eat the berries.”

  Max knew the yew was poisonous and certainly felt he had always known this, although he couldn’t credit a particular adult with passing along that tidbit. His parents were the last sort of people to possess folkloric knowledge of this nature, neither his charmingly ethereal mother nor his intellectual father. Perhaps whoever did this just didn’t know enough to commit an effective poisoning.

  He was not sure he himself would recognize black bryony unless it wore a sign, and the same went for tutsan. But the odds of Dame Ingrid the kitchener not knowing her berries? A million to one against, he would wager. Having produced so many fruitcakes in her day using her super-secret pineapple formula, could she help but notice that one of her staple ingredients had changed its size, shape, smell, or color, if even slightly? But that hadn’t happened. She had noticed nothing and reported nothing unusual.

  “There is one possibility,” Dame Petronilla was saying. “Someone may have mistaken the tutsan for belladonna—for deadly nightshade, that is. Both are plants that produce black or very dark berries—at least at their final stages of growth, the tutsan berries are dark, and although their shapes are different, someone without my knowledge … well, they might mix them up. When they are in flower, now, that is a different thing. Tutsan and belladonna are quite different and only someone with no knowledge whatsoever could mistake one for the other.”

  She added gloomily, surveying the perfection of her garden: “As few as two berries of belladonna can kill. If that is what they thought they were dealing with, Father—well, that is quite a different matter.”

  “What would be the symptoms of belladonna poisoning?” he asked.

  She returned her gaze to him. “Visual distortion, rapid heart rate. Women used to use it to enhance their looks—it dilates the pupils, you see. Makes them big and dark, like doll’s eyes. Why that would be thought to be attractive to men I cannot say. Women silly and vain enough to use it cosmetically over a period of time were running the risk of blindness.”

  A bee buzzed between them, and Max became aware of a row of hives a short distance away. Dame Petronilla, unperturbed, watched the bee going about its propagating business.

  “We grow the berries near the beehives to ensure a good harvest—the bees do all the work. Shall I show you?” She motioned him nearer a forested area, where bushes and shrubs of berries were being cultivated.

  He recognized plump blackberries being trained upwards in a shaded area. She gestured to a sunny spot several yards away, where a post-and-wire system supported raspberries, and pointed out currants growing on bushes, without the need of support.

  “We use a natural insecticide made from dried chrysanthemum,” she told him. “Everything we grow is as natural as we can make it. Raspberry beetle can be a plague.”

  He did not fail to take in her familiarity with poisons. Still, what would kill a beetle might not harm a man.

  “So you see, Father, we grow all sorts of berries—edible ones, that is. Raspberries and blackberries. Also red, black, and white currants. For jams and jellies. And, of course, for the fruitcakes,” she added. “We have to hire outside help for the picking and pruning, but we do as much as we can ourselves.

  “It’s a miraculous system,” she added. “The way the bees and berries support one another, I mean. Nature is genius.”

  Max, who had never much enjoyed the company of bees, nodded his agreement, while gently coaxing another one off his sleeve.

  “They only sting if agitated,” she warned him.

  “Yes, I—ouch.” He looked at his hand. Bees were like cats, he decided. They always knew where they were least welcome.

  “I have a salve for that in the infirmary,” Dame Petronilla said. “I’ll have some delivered to your room. It’s made from lavender oil. You can also rub some honey on the sting. No one understands why, but it seems to neutralize the pain.”

  Max thanked her, adding absently, “It seems to me most of the berries here are deliberately planted. So it’s unlikely someone could accidentally harvest anything … untoward, like tutsan.”

  “Precisely. We use wildberries too, of course, in a lot of the baked goods and preserves that come out of the abbey kitchen. But tutsan? No one would knowingly grow tutsan with a view to harvesting it. Those berries that sickened Lord Lislelivet grew wild. I can show you where they—Oops! I guess I’m a suspect now.”

  “No one has ruled out accident, Dame Petronilla.”

  “Dame Pet. Please.”

  Had someone deliberately tried to poison Lord Lislelivet? It seemed to Max the answer hinged on how well acquainted the poisoner was with the different berries growing on the property.

  He looked past Dame Petronilla to a far grove. “I see you’re growing apples, too. There is a woman in my village who sells apple cider in her shop—all different ciders made from specific apple varieties, like using different grapes for different wines.”

  “What a delightful idea. Maybe one day … we just don’t have enough people to take on any more ambitious projects right now. Producing cheese is stretching our limits at the moment. So many things require a fulltime commitment.”

  “That seems to be a recurring theme. That there is a battle between bringing income to the abbey and having enough people to handle the workflow.”

  “It’s more than that, Father, although ‘battle’ may be too strong a word. ‘Conflict,’ perhaps. We are conflicted. Every project that takes time away from prayer and contemplation is at odds with our true mission.”

  “Yes, yes, I see how that could happen.”

  Chapter 15

  THE ABBESS

  The abbess shall be set above all, and above all others shall she be wise, fair, and loving, tempering her sound judgment with mercy.… The abbess should gladly welcome guests and travelers to her table.

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

  He returned to his room via the guesthouse kitchen, where he stopped to apply a spot of honey to the bee sting. He was not surprised that it helped.

  At the small desk in his room, he took out his notebook and began jotting down his impressions so far. An hour later, the notes covered less than two pages but showed him two patterns. One pattern had to do with wealth. It was clear that although the nuns were stretched as to resources, they were doing very well in terms of sales to the outside world.

  The other pattern, a mere suggestion so far, indicated that not everyone was as thrilled by this success as they might have been. Dame Hephzibah was content in her little showroom of a gift shop, and Dame Ingrid was happy in her kitchen. Dame Sibil, the cellaress, was all in favor of progress and was a champion of the Internet, or so he gathered. But Dame Olive, the librarian, had indicated oh-so-delicately that there was some friction between what Max thought of as the traditionalists versus the go-getters. Dame Petronilla, the infirmaress, had mentioned this as well.

  He had the idea they all might have wanted to say more but were held back by vows that prohibited them from breaking rank or discussing outright the business of the nunnery. Indulging in idle gossip was also forbidden, and he supposed all of this might fall into that category. Priest he might be, but he was an outsider who would, with any luck, go away soon and leave them to get on with it.

  He became aware of a slight movement outside his door, and as he watched, an envelope appeared, slipped over the sill. He sat a moment, expecting a knock or other communication to accompany the delivery. None came, and whoever left the note had crept silently away by the time he opened the door. He saw just the hem of a skirt disappearing around the corner.

  He opened the thick envelope, embossed on the flap with the abbey’s ancient seal. This depicted a woman wearing a heavenly crown, presumably the Virgin Mary or perhaps St. Lucy herself. The envelope contained an invitation to dinner from the abbess of Monkbury Abbey. It was
handwritten in blue-black ink with a thick-nibbed pen.

  DEAR FATHER TUDOR: PLEASE COME TO DINE WITH ME THIS EVENING AT SEVEN P.M. I LOOK FORWARD TO MEETING YOU. YOURS IN CHRIST, ABBESS JUSTINA

  Max rubbed a hand across his chin and decided he needed a shave, because of course he would obey the polite summons. Gathering up his kit and a change of clothing, he made his way down the chilly hallway of the men’s section of the guesthouse, following the signs to the bath facilities. As he had already discovered, these were spotless and seemed newly spruced up—indeed, they still smelled of paint, and one sink still had the manufacturer’s warranty and instructions attached to its pipes by a plastic string. The water in the shower, a built-in modular affair, was as scalding as he chose to make it, so the various “green” devices the nuns had installed for generating electricity and heating seemed to be working. He toweled off with a white towel, thinned by repeated washings, and prepared to meet the abbess of Monkbury.

  * * *

  Of necessity the abbey cloister did not tidily enclose a traditional flat square: the grounds stepped down or rose up or even halted abruptly to fit the space allotted on the mountain perch. The design owed much to the Roman country villa plan, being built with covered walkways around a central plaza-like area designed for quiet comfort, for reading and reflection, with benches and nooks under shaded trees. Traces of the Romanesque could be seen in the fantastical carvings of animals and demonic creatures on the cloister arcades and the central wellhead.

  Max skirted the edge of the cloister garth, heading toward the abbess’s lodgings in the southeast corner of the compound. He could hear the River Easewinter below, rumbling its way to the sea. It would branch off into the smaller River Pudmill on the way, the river that ran beneath the jagged brow of Hawk Crest in Nether Monkslip. If he’d had a boat he could have jumped in and been home with Awena in a few hours. She’d be cooking her evening meal right about now, something wholesome and cruelty free, and saying over her food a prayer of thanks to the universe for sharing its abundance. Max sent up a similar prayer with the wish to rejoin her soon.