A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  “Again, in the case of Paloma Green, it was not greed so much as the fact her gallery’s reputation was on the line.”

  “Thanks very much,” she said. “And too right, too. As I told you already, I organized the fund-raiser. Piers and I both had a lot at stake.”

  “Your gallery couldn’t take another blow right now,” Max nodded. “And Piers had even more at stake than you knew.”

  Piers shrugged noncommittally, but he turned his full attention to Max now, hanging on his words as if to memorize them.

  “Was it a sort of lust for the icon that brought Lord Lislelivet here?” Max went on. “He said it was to see his aunt, but he was always snooping around the place, so we assume, knowing something of his nature, that the desire to own—to steal—this most rare artifact brought him here.

  “But what if that weren’t the whole story? Even more to the point: what if he were telling the truth for once, or part of the truth—that he was here to see Dame Meredith?”

  They all exchanged puzzled glances.

  “I have told you this was a tale with themes of greed and revenge.

  “But there was yet a third motive—the most powerful motive in the world.

  “And that motive was love.

  “Lord Lislelivet came here to see Dame Meredith, to be sure. He was summoned here, in a letter she wrote him. But Dame Meredith was not his aunt.”

  “So, who was she?” Paloma asked.

  Max turned to a certain face in the audience.

  And looked across the room, to a second face.

  “She was his mother.”

  There was rather a shocked recoil at this. Max gave them a moment to absorb the implications.

  “Lord Lislelivet was the natural son of Dame Meredith. And Dame Meredith, knowing she hadn’t long to live, wanted to tell the truth at the last, to clear her conscience. She was set to ‘spill the beans’ to Lord Lislelivet about his true provenance—how he came to be in this world. How she was his mother.

  “Worse, from his point of view, she wanted to tell everyone affected by his birth the truth. To set things right, before she went to meet her maker. She had a tremendous need to unburden herself, having carried this secret too long.

  “But what she didn’t know was that the person she ‘confessed’ to initially in order to ‘do the right thing’—her own son, a man who was her own flesh and blood, mind—was an avaricious, unfeeling monster. She had summoned him to her bedside, and he had arrived knowing full well what the subject of their discussion would be. He knew this because his own father had told him the truth and had sworn him to secrecy. And Lord Lislelivet, being the sort of man he was, had come prepared to make sure Dame Meredith wouldn’t—or couldn’t—tell the truth to ease her conscience. Because the truth would mean he was not the legitimate heir to his father’s estate and fortune. According to a formula used by the family since the dawn of time, only males of the legitimate bloodline could inherit. Illegitimate children, and I gather there were dozens of those over the years, could not inherit. Female heirs were always left out in the cold. Funny how no one had a problem with that except, presumably, the females concerned. The true motive for Lord Lislelivet was less about the icon than about covering up the fact that Dame Meredith—his aunt—was in fact his mother. And that he was the product of an illicit liaison between his biological father and the woman who had been Meredith Fitzwilliam in her former life, before she became a nun.”

  There were several shocked intakes of breath at this, several hands that flew to cover mouths fallen open in amazement. Even nuns long schooled in serenity and calm were too shaken by this revelation not to let it show. This was their own quiet Dame Meredith who had dwelt with many of them for years, for decades. This would take some getting used to.

  Max went on. “Meredith Fitzwilliam was the younger of the two Fitzwilliam sisters. Her sister married but it seemed she could not have children. The terrible irony was that Meredith’s affair with her sister’s husband produced a son. The longed-for son to inherit the title. But the problem of course was that it was an illegitimate child.

  “So after much anxiety and unhappiness on the part of the father, he hits upon a scheme: since the child is his own, and he sees no reason why it shouldn’t inherit, he persuades Meredith not to give the child up for open adoption, but to allow himself and his wife to raise the child as their own. There is one catch, and that is that Meredith must never name him as the father. Of course, to protect her sister, she agrees to keep this secret. She has many a chance to regret it, but keep her promise she does.

  “She doesn’t agree because there is money riding on it, but because she knows how much her sister wants a child. Guilt no doubt played a huge role here. And so she went abroad somewhere, and when she had given birth, her sister and brother-in-law—”

  “Adopted it.” Xanda cut into his narrative. “Adopted the baby. Wow. It’s like something out of Dickens.”

  “Not adopted, no,” said Max. “Not in the legal sense you mean. To the world, the child is presented as the natural child of Lord and Lady Lislelivet. Not the adopted child, but the natural one.”

  “But how—?”

  “Lady Lislelivet, the sister of Meredith, simply went away with her husband on a long tour of Europe and the Middle East. She returned with a child. No one questioned it. Why would they?

  “Had the woman who raised Lord Lislelivet been duped—or had she chosen to believe what she wanted to believe, as people so often do? That her husband was guilty of such a monstrous fraud would have been difficult to accept, perhaps especially when a much-wanted child was offered to fill what she felt was a void in her life.

  “The thin ice of a marriage such as theirs might require a suspension of disbelief—a refusal to look down, knowing how fatal that look might be.

  “Apart from the longing of Lady Lislelivet for a child, the question has to be why the elaborate deception was needed. And the answer is the child’s grandfather. He had been despondent at not having an heir, and this seemed like a godsend. He was not, of course, to be made aware that the child was not legitimate.

  “Meredith takes the veil soon afterward, and her sister—who doesn’t know the awful truth, that her husband is the father of the child—thinks only that Meredith got in trouble and she, Lady Lislelivet, is helping her out.

  “Time passes. And the more it passes, the more Dame Meredith wants to spill the beans on this setup. Not just because of her guilt at the part she played—deceiving her sister, denying her own child—but because of the way this son was turning out. She saw when he visited over the years, as a child, and a young man, how he had become corrupted by this wealth. She came to see the money as evil, even as a sort of punishment. She had sinned with the child’s father and here standing before her was the sorry result. Might he have been a more worthwhile human being had she raised him herself? These were the kinds of questions with which she tormented herself.”

  “What would have happened to the estate if the ruse had been discovered?” asked Oona Gorey.

  “That is a very good question, for it cuts to the heart of the matter. The estate would pass to an heir of the Montague family.

  “To Piers Montague, to be precise.”

  “You are joking,” said Piers. “You must be joking.”

  Max shook his head. “This subterfuge took place for the silliest of reasons—the Montague family was considered ‘common’ and decadent, and they did not want Piers, the only viable candidate, the nearest legitimate, blood heir, to inherit the stately home and all that went with it. It was thought he would never amount to anything and would waste the inheritance.”

  Max turned to a dumbstruck Piers. The hand that had been poised to smooth back his hair had stopped midair, and he seemed not to realize it. “I am sorry at the way this sounds,” said Max. “I am only describing how Lord Lislelivet—father and son—thought about the situation.

  “So Ralph Perceval succeeds in due course to the title and th
e estate, becoming the fifteenth earl of Lislelivet. But that is just the beginning. I know many of you remember the famous kidnapping case out of Nashbury Feathers.”

  “Of course,” said Clement Gorey. “It was tabloid fodder for ages. Dozens of books have been written about it.”

  Max nodded. “The baby who was the only legitimate heir to the title—although no one apart from his father realized it at the time—was kidnapped. The younger brother who was a late and unexpected arrival when Ralph (let’s call him Ralph, for clarity)—when Ralph was twenty. Ralph had this baby kidnapped. Ralph knew the sort of people who would do that for the price of a meal, let alone for a handsome fee.”

  “How can you possibly know about this?” demanded Piers.

  “Stay with me,” said Max, resuming his narrative: “Why the kidnapping? Again, the title and attendant properties had to go to legitimate offspring only. The remaining legitimate heir would be Piers, a distant relative—a cousin thrice removed or something of that sort. And Meredith, dying, knows this, and summons Piers to the nunnery.”

  Paloma looked at Piers. “You didn’t tell me?”

  “Frankly, I thought she was batty. She didn’t say anything about any inheritance. She just sent a message, asking me if I would come and see her ‘to discuss a matter to my advantage.’ It was a tremendously old-fashioned summons, and I was intrigued.”

  Max pictured the dying nun, drugged on a dozen medications, penning the fatal, melodramatic summons. How was she to know it would lead to murder?

  He said, “Ralph comes to hear of the cryptic summons via the letter Dame Meredith sent him, knows full well what it is about, and races to Monkbury Abbey, despite the poisoning attempt—to do whatever it takes to keep Piers in the dark about his inheritance. Kill Piers or kill Meredith. Or both. Ralph may even, in a state of heightened paranoia, have associated the poisoning attempt with an effort to get him out of the picture so Piers could inherit.”

  “How do you know all this?” demanded Abbess Justina.

  Max reached inside his jacket and pulled out a thin sheaf of onionskin paper, covered from side to side in small, spidery handwriting.

  “This is the handwritten testimony of Dame Meredith Fitzwilliam. It is what she herself calls her dying confession. She wanted the truth to come out, before the entire world. In this document she tells of the events that brought her here. Of the guilt that tormented her, making her conscience work overtime. Her ‘sin’ was nothing new: that of conceiving a child out of wedlock and giving it over to be raised by her own sister. That her sister had no idea the child was her husband’s—that was what Dame Meredith could not forgive herself for.

  “The cover-up was not that unusual, either: many grand families have gone to great lengths to keep their estates and bloodlines intact. What was unusual was the level of deception. That is what Dame Meredith berates herself for the most: that she betrayed her own sister with this illicit liaison and then compounded the error with this monstrous substitution and all the lies that attended on it.”

  “And Dame Pet?” asked the abbess now, more softly. “How does Dame Pet and the poison fit into this story? Or, does it?”

  “Dame Petronilla. Yes. For that story we also have to reach back into the past, to a time when Dame Petronilla was Miss Petronilla Falcon, a young nanny in the charge of a small baby born at Nashbury Feathers, ancestral home of the Lislelivet family. The baby named Fontaine Perceval.”

  “The baby who was kidnapped?” This was Clement Gorey. He looked to his wife for confirmation. She nodded. “When was it this happened? Fifteen years ago or more, right?”

  “Closer to eighteen,” Max answered him. “It was a case often compared with the 1930s kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., the son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The tragic difference being that while the Lindbergh baby’s little body finally was discovered, two months after the ransom had been paid, there was no such closure, no such small, cold comfort, for the Perceval family—Lord Lislelivet and his wife. The ransom was paid as demanded, but after detectives had been led on a wild chase over the countryside, the baby never was found, dead or alive.

  “As is often the case, the blame for this tragedy spread quickly, and many innocent people suffered. The nanny, for instance, was accused of neglecting her duty, being otherwise occupied with her fiancé, when she should have been watching the baby. A charge, I hasten to add, that was baseless, but a charge that was trumpeted repeatedly by Ralph Perceval, the heir to the family’s fortune. The engulfing investigation burned everything in its path, and when it was over—when the media had found new stories to cover—it had changed many lives. Many of the people who worked for the family suddenly found themselves let go, and then found themselves unemployable. No one was willing to take a chance on them, you see. Probably most particularly in the case of a nanny. The ‘what ifs?’ loomed too large. What if the accusations were true? The same was the case with her fiancé, who was studying to be a doctor, a pediatrician, in fact, and who was suspected—and cleared—of being in collusion with the nanny. The child had been ailing with a mild cold, and the doctor-in-training had looked in on him once or twice. The innuendo in this sort of case is always enough to destroy lives, particularly in the case of a nanny and pediatrician—what parent would ever entrust either of them with the care of a child?

  “His career was derailed as much by the ruin to his reputation as by the emotional wear and tear of the repeated dunning by the press, who blithely and irresponsibly repeated Ralph’s accusations, working the sensational story for all it was worth. Imagine opening each day’s news to find vile, baseless allegations printed against oneself?

  “The implication was that the young, attractive nanny had been too busy cavorting with her fiancé to attend to her duties. But the baby was asleep—it was nighttime—and she told investigators no sound came through the baby monitor.

  “So what she was expected to do other than what she did do is a mystery. Still this all got twisted into a seedy story of a licentious woman abandoning her responsibilities to a helpless child. The voice of reason, as so often happens, got shouted down. It was so ugly a story it is perhaps no wonder she chose entering a nunnery as the only way to prove she was the person she always had been: diligent, hardworking, smart, loyal—and deeply religious.

  “The truth is the nanny loved the child, stolen as she slept. But the truth was no match for Ralph Perceval, the victim’s brother. He kept saying the kidnappers entered the house while she was ‘otherwise engaged.’ The words were neatly strung together to imply, without actually saying, that she was busy entertaining her fiancé. But denials were fruitless. Otherwise, there was no juicy story to run repeatedly in the morning and evening news. Ralph Perceval even tried to claim she had left the window unlocked so her lover could enter, and that is how the kidnappers got in afterwards. Ridiculous. But it was necessary to make everything sound demeaning, and tawdry.”

  Dame Petronilla looked up from studying her tightly clenched hands. “I couldn’t afford a solicitor on the wages he paid,” she said. “So I just took the abuse. I never should have done that. But I thought it would all go away, it was so ridiculous. Accusations not worth responding to. Until you’re there, you’ve no idea how insidious that kind of lie and suspicion can be.”

  Max paused, as if she might go on, but from her expression, she had retreated back into the memories of those life-altering days. After a few moments, he continued: “When first we spoke, you mentioned that you had some training as a nurse, not that you had been a nanny.”

  “I know,” she acknowledged. “The glib lie. How easy it is to fall into the custom of eliding over the entire truth. I was hoping, of course, that no one would make the connection between me and Nashbury Feathers. Then when Lord Lislelivet was killed…”

  “It was inevitable it would come out,” Max finished her thought. Resuming his tale, he said, “So after a time of what I think we can rightly call persecution, you joined th
e nearby nunnery. And your fiancé, broken by the whole thing, left for the United States to finish his training, in a different area of specialization.

  “But he couldn’t stay away long. When he had completed his studies he returned and set up shop in the village of Temple Monkslip, to be near the woman he could not forget. Perhaps he carried with him the misguided hope they could reignite the old flame. He had given up a promising Harley Street career—been forced to give it up, actually, because of the taint of scandal that followed him everywhere. And so he became a G.P. in a small village and called himself content, although he was hardly that. He never married, still carrying this torch for Petronilla Falcon, the woman he had loved. He would come to the nunnery on occasion, eventually becoming the official doctor for the place. But his former fiancée avoided him and begged him to stay away from her. Loving her still, he did as she asked.”

  By this point in Max’s narrative, all eyes had swiveled toward Dr. Barnard, who kept his own gaze straight ahead, his face revealing nothing.

  “Then one day, Dr. Barnard heard of Lord Lislelivet’s interest in the nunnery. There is one watering hole in Temple Monkslip, the Running Knight and Pilgrim, and Lord Lislelivet’s staying there was news in a small village where nothing much happens. Every word of Lord Lislelivet’s conversation got repeated, particularly the fact that he seemed as fascinated by the icon—the Face—as anyone else. One of the men who worked on the wall repairs had a story to tell, and tell it he would, to any and all comers, for the price of a pint. For the price of several pints, he would talk of vast golden treasure, precious beyond counting.

  “He was making it up as he went, of course. The nuns would never have allowed him to set eyes on the Face. During the repairs, they found another, temporary hiding place.