A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  “Anyway, the next thing you know, Lord Lislelivet is staying at Monkbury Abbey on what he calls a religious retreat. The doctor knows Lord Lislelivet well enough, as does the whole English-speaking world, to know he must be up to something. The doctor, making the logical leap, thinks he is probably after the icon.

  “Lady Lislelivet doesn’t know what her husband was up to, but she reaches the same conclusion. Lord Lislelivet got awfully keen on a return visit to the abbey, despite the apparent danger to himself.

  “But in fact, and Dr. Barnard was not to know this at first, Lord Lislelivet had a more sinister motive.

  “Still, whatever he was up to, it is enough to alarm the doctor, to have Lord Lislelivet in such close proximity to the doctor’s beloved Petronilla. It doesn’t mean she’s in danger, necessarily. It is probably more in his mind that he can’t stand the thought of this man anywhere near someone as innocent and unspoiled as he knew his old love to be.

  “And perhaps … perhaps the good doctor thinks he has a chance to set things right, to undo history. To win her back by slaying the dragon—this time. To do the thing he had, in his own mind, singularly failed to do when he had the chance years before.”

  There was a slight, almost imperceptible nod of the doctor’s head.

  “I still don’t get it,” said Xanda. “What does this have to do with the kidnapping?”

  “When it comes to the topic of greed, Xanda, I’m afraid it has everything to do with it. Greed on a monstrous scale, surpassing any sort of passing interest Lord Lislelivet may have had in the icon. For this greed involved the betrayal of innocents, the destruction of the family that raised and nurtured him. The greed of the viper in the nest.”

  “I still don’t—” began Xanda.

  “The inheritance,” said Max simply. “The inheritance that, in the mind of the man who organized the scheme, was worth any amount of betrayal of those who had cherished and sustained him. An inheritance worth killing for, to his twisted way of thinking. Not only were money and land attached to the inheritance, but prestige. Perhaps above all—prestige. There was a title belonging to one of the most noble of ancient families in Great Britain. And having carried the title so long, Lord Lislelivet, as we will continue to call him for now, was not about to relinquish it. Not when just one woman of no consequence to him stood in his way.

  “Even if that person was the woman who had given him life.”

  “You mean, Dame Meredith?”

  “Yes. Of course. Sadly—of course.

  “Dame Petronilla, now the infirmaress, was a nanny at the time of the famous kidnapping, when the nearly newborn son of the fourteenth earl was taken from his crib. The accusations flew, and a close rereading of the news stories of the time shows that behind every accusation and innuendo stood the young Ralph Percival. His father, the fourteenth earl, still being alive, Ralph, then aged twenty, was the heir presumptive. He was a spendthrift, an alcoholic, and a drug user; a liar, a thief, and a complete wastrel, but he was the heir, and unless he became completely unable to function in any capacity, he would remain the heir. The Lislelivets were not the first nor the last family of noble blood to have to deal with a black sheep, of course. The dissolute heir has been a staple of some of England’s livelier spots of history.

  “But these accusations, as I say, all from the same source, were so unrelenting the nanny and the doctor came to suspect what I know from Dame Meredith was the truth. They suspected young Ralph, the heir presumptive, of masterminding the kidnapping, enlisting and paying off some of his connections in the London drug trade. The few thousand pounds he spent were as nothing stacked against what he was going to lose.”

  “But—why would he do that?” Xanda asked. “And how did Dame Meredith know Lord Lislelivet was behind the kidnapping?”

  “It may be hard for you or anyone normal to understand, but Ralph was livid when the child was born. There was probably a lot of plain old jealousy behind this reaction. His mother—meaning, the woman who had raised him, the then Lady Lislelivet—had been barren all her adult life and was thought to be well past her childbearing years. I am certain it never entered Ralph’s mind there might one day be competition for him, the only child of this couple. That he might be given a brother, when suddenly new medical techniques allowed this baby to come along with the potential to snatch away the title from twenty-year-old Ralph. For the woman who had raised Ralph believed he bore no trace of the Lislelivet bloodline, and his father knew of course that the boy he had raised as his son was illegitimate. The parents’ joy at this new arrival—the legitimate heir, mind—must have been enormous. Like Elizabeth in the Bible, who thought she was barren and who greeted her miraculous pregnancy with such happiness.

  “But then … the parents both started to think in terms of how they were locked into this deception, a deception that was no longer necessary. Remember, she had only pretended to have given birth to Ralph. A real heir existed now. A real fifteenth earl of Lislelivet. Could they legally undo what had been done?

  “This idea Ralph Percival could not bear. What if his parents went so far as to tell the truth, at least so far as Lady Lislelivet knew it—that the woman who had raised him had not given birth to him. Then under the terms of the estate he would be ousted, and his newborn brother inherit. Of course his parents wouldn’t toss Ralph out on the street, nothing so melodramatic as that. In fact, Ralph would continue to live in what to most of the world was unthought-of splendor, riding his horse around the rolling green hills of the estate. But he wouldn’t inherit the title, and he wouldn’t be able to pass it on to his heirs. He wouldn’t be able to enjoy the pomp and ceremony, the bowing and scraping, to which he was entitled as the fifteenth earl.

  “So he did what any lunatic would do. Cold-bloodedly, cold-heartedly, but probably also in a mindless fit of jealousy and pique, he arranged to have the baby kidnapped. I don’t think he knew or cared what happened to the child—it may have been spirited out of the country and put up for adoption somewhere where few questions would be asked. Once the baby was legally declared dead, Ralph could reign unchallenged—he remained the fifteenth earl of Lislelivet in place of his brother. His mother, the woman who raised him, died shortly afterwards, preceded in death by her husband, the fourteenth earl. The only living witness to the entire scheme, and the only person who suspected Ralph of complicity in his brother’s too-convenient disappearance, was his birth mother, Dame Meredith, who years before had taken the veil. But even she could not really grasp that her own son was capable of such an evil deed. Certainly she had no sense of danger when she asked him to come and visit her. She was dying anyway—who would harm her? A sick woman with weeks to live, at best?

  “Unfortunately the answer was her own son would try to harm her. Her very own flesh and blood. The boy she had dotingly treated as her nephew, never telling him the truth, telling herself that she had secured his fortune with this deception. But the deception and the fact she had evaded scandal—had evaded ownership of the wrong she had done to her own sister—that weighted more heavily with every passing year.

  “Were the lies surrounding his birth made manifest in the man he grew to be?

  “She saw less and less of him as the years passed. And perhaps she told herself everything would be all right. But then came his sudden devotion, his intense interest in his dying ‘aunt.’ Maybe she also believed he was mostly after the ‘gold treasure’ buried in the crypt, for that would have been in keeping with what she had grown to know of him.

  “Then when he began pressing her—Had she told anyone? Whom had she told? Had she confessed? Was there any record of her confession?—I think she realized. In fact I know she suspected him. And she wrote out her confession to the affair, to the illegitimate birth, and to her suspicions about Ralph.

  “He came here to kill her,” continued Max, “never knowing that she had outwitted him.

  “I am very glad at least for that. She saw through him.”

  Max paused a
nd looked around the room, at all the waiting faces. Some puzzled, some concerned, and two with the look in their eyes of something very old that had caught up with them at last. The expression in those eyes was of sorrow, and relief.

  Xanda again was the one who voiced the question in most of their minds.

  “And his mother never knew?—I mean, Lady Lislelivet, the woman who raised him?”

  “No. The woman who raised him as his mother never realized she was raising her husband’s child. His hair and eye coloring were dark—like his father’s, in fact—and she never looked beyond that vaguely Hispanic surface appearance. She was too elated at having a child at last to ask too many questions. Sometimes, one just does not want to face the truth. There was a family resemblance that I think she willfully ignored. A suspicion of her husband’s infidelity with another woman was one thing. The sure knowledge of his infidelity? And with her own sister? That her mind would refuse to accept, even had such an idea occurred to her.

  “And so the years passed, and one day she found herself, to her great joy and amazement, pregnant with her own child. The joy was short-lived, because that child was kidnapped—a crime that exhausted the resources of the police and of MI5. I remember the case well—as a young man I wanted so much to be a part of the investigation and was frustrated to be assigned to a different department at the time. It was the case every man and woman in law enforcement wanted to solve.”

  “And the baby was never found? That poor woman. The poor father!” This from Oona, who seemed genuinely distressed. A mother’s heart, imagining what that worry would have been like, what the loss of this small and much-longed-for child would have been like. Max warmed to Oona for the first time.

  Max thought of his own unborn child, his and Awena’s, and the anguish he would feel in similar circumstances, and he thanked God the child would never be a vulnerable target the way Lord and Lady Lislelivet’s child had been a target. He or she would be an ordinary child—at least in the eyes of the world, ordinary—never to be exposed to vultures as this young innocent had been.

  He shook his head. “Not a trace was ever found, no. The kidnappers were thugs like the Lindbergh kidnappers, but they had probably learned from the mistakes of the original kidnappers, too. The ransom money was picked up, but the baby was never returned. The chances were great that the child was already dead, as is nearly always the case, sadly. And its father and mother, after weeks of worry and anguish, just collapsed from grief.”

  “The father had a stroke and lingered a short while,” said Dr. Barnard. “The mother died of a heart attack. But there was not a doctor in the world who would not blame their breakdown on grief.”

  Max nodded, locking eyes with the doctor. “However, they did not die before everyone associated with that house was dispersed, in a spurt of fury by the fourteenth earl. The gardener, the maids, the cooks—and of course, the nanny. Everyone leaving under a cloud of suspicion. He couldn’t stand to have any one of them around. You can sort of see his point. The man was driven to the edge.

  “But the saddest story of all was the butler. After repeated questioning by the authorities, who became convinced he had deliberately left a window unlocked to aid the kidnappers, the poor man shot himself. There is to this day no evidence he had anything to do with it, or even that he was the one who left the window unlocked. But he cracked under the strain, and the certain knowledge his career, in which he took immense pride, was over.

  “So, there you have it. Is it a coincidence the nanny would end up in the same convent as the birth mother of Lord Lislelivet? Not at all. Consider the fame of this nunnery, and its proximity and long historical ties to the manor house where all these sad events took place.”

  He looked at Dame Petronilla as he said this. She shut her eyes tightly as if the dim light in the room were too harsh, and he thought he saw a nearly imperceptible nod. So many years of carrying that burden of grief and guilt, thought Max. How wrong, wrong, wrong it all was.

  “So who killed Lord Lislelivet?” said Oona. “Was it some sort of conspiracy?”

  Max answered obliquely. “Dame Meredith could easily have drugged him to render him weak and helpless—she had access, there in the infirmary, and knowledge. All the nuns have some knowledge of ‘nature’s remedies.’

  “But I think it was Dame Petronilla, the real expert on plant poisons, who had a hand in this.” He made the statement and waited. She would not meet his eyes, so he said, gently, “When the motive is love, there is no force stronger. How far would you go to protect a loved one? To avenge the harm done to them?”

  “But, why?” asked Xanda.

  But Dame Petronilla answered, “Because, child, I loved him once. I love him still.”

  “Pet, don’t—”

  “No,” she said to Dr. Barnard. “It’s over.”

  Chapter 38

  TIES THAT BIND

  Detachment is all.

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

  “I saw Lord Lislelivet by chance when he visited the monastery,” began Dame Petronilla. “Normally my duties keep me in the infirmary, separate from the main compound. And in choir, our view of visitors is deliberately cut off by the screen. So I don’t see the guests as a rule, even at meals—they are seated apart, as you know, and more often than not when I have a patient I take my meals privately in the infirmary.

  “But on this day, I was free. Dame Meredith was in hospital receiving treatment and, God be praised, all the other sisters were in good health. So I had all day to work in the herb garden. I was in heaven.

  “And then he came wandering by. While I knew someone from the peerage was staying with us, for the abbess announces the weekend’s visitors in the chapter meeting, I never expected Lord Lislelivet—the man I knew as plain old Ralph Perceval. Of course, he was the sort of man to use his title from the moment he came into it, and on every occasion. But on seeing him, I recognized who it was right away.

  “He, of course, did not recognize me, had no need to, for I wasn’t important then or now. I was the hired help. He never visited the nursery and never set eyes on me except in a grainy, long-shot newspaper photograph or two from the time. And in any event the years and the habit and the lack of makeup made me, I daresay, unrecognizable from the woman I was back then. I had been a redhead then. But when I saw him I quickly pulled the cowl over my head and moved away before he could see me plainly.”

  “Everything about your persona had changed with the years, I daresay,” said Max.

  She nodded. “We leave everything about our old lives behind. Or we try to. We try very hard…”

  “So you called Dr. Barnard. And you told him that by some unthought-of, unlooked-for chance, Lord Lislelivet—Ralph Perceval—was at Monkbury Abbey. The man who had falsely accused not only you but many others, derailing careers and causing a suicide, a man who for the most purely evil motives had altered the course of all your lives.”

  She nodded. “Perhaps … perhaps if you had known the butler—his name was Phil Jamison—if you had known him you would have known what a tragedy atop a tragedy his death was. He was simply the nicest man. Leroy—Dr. Barnard—and I were just devastated when he killed himself. We both came undone. He was going to be best man at our wedding. He was so dear, so excited about it—do you remember?” She turned toward the doctor, her eyes welling with tears as they sought his. Her voice caught as she tried to continue; they all waited quietly. The only sound to be heard, coming from the open window, was the lazy droning of the bees, cruising from flower to flower. “On top of everything else,” she said, “it was too much to bear. And when he died, the press was so cruel. ‘The Butler Did It!’—that was too easy a joke for simple minds not to make a play on it.”

  Max prompted her, “So you called Dr. Barnard.”

  “Yes. I called him from the cellaress’s office.”

  “And you told him to get out to Monkbury Abbey as soon as he could, on whatever pretext.”


  “Yes. I simply—” She turned to the abbess, her handsome face now haggard, the picture of distress. “I know how utterly and completely wrong I was in all of this, Abbess. I have broken so many rules. I, who was committed to comfort and healing—that I should have stooped to this. I am deeply, deeply sorry. For all of it.” Max knew she must be reliving the disgrace of those days, the shame she had been made to feel by unthinking persecutors who told themselves they were simply doing their jobs. And he was sorry for it.

  “Tell us everything you know, Dame Pet,” said Abbess Justina. Relief showed on the infirmaress’s face at the use of the nickname, at the compassion and implied forgiveness. “We will worry about what to do about all of it later. Right now it is more important that the whole truth come out.”

  Max, picking up the thread of her story, said, “The phone call brought the doctor out here. Of course, he would move heaven and earth for you, wouldn’t he? But maybe you only wanted to talk, perhaps to have your sighting confirmed, to speculate on what could have brought your mutual, mortal enemy, the former Ralph Perceval, here. He could, after all, have come looking for you, for some obscure reason of his own.

  “But Dr. Barnard thought he knew what brought him here. And that gave him an idea.”

  The pair exchanged glances.

  “Or was it you, Dame Petronilla, who had the idea? I think perhaps it was, since you knew about the icon. That it was real. And you told the doctor. And no doubt like you, Dr. Barnard saw a way to get what he had long wanted more than anything in this life: a confession—even an apology. Ridiculous hope, that, but it seemed a heaven-sent situation. Dr. Barnard would promise his enemy secret access to the icon, dangling this precious artifact before the eyes of Lord Lislelivet in exchange for the truth of what had happened to that poor child that fateful night. He wanted above anything the admission of the elder brother’s participation in that nefarious scheme. I am perhaps giving you too much the benefit of the doubt, but isn’t that what you had in mind, Dr. Barnard? To extract the truth from him, promising your silence, in exchange for your revelation of where the icon was hidden?”