Wicked Autumn

by G. M. Malliet

  Awena sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  “I’m sorry, Awena, but—”

  “And you are quite right, of course.” She dusted crumbs from a sampled and discarded biscuit off her lap. Really, it was a wonder Mrs. Hooser hadn’t accidentally poisoned the poor man. “It’s just that that bloody woman does get up my nose. I guess I just wanted someone to listen while I let off some steam.”

  He didn’t feel he could mention this to Awena, but there was a further reason that prevented Max from weighing in. In his prior dealings with Wanda, she had turned on him, quite unprovoked, a heavy-handed coquettishness, smiling a fearsome smile and waving a perfumed handkerchief about like the fading star of some forties film. It was so at odds with her usual sergeant-major approach to life and leadership as to be quite unsettling, making him doubt her sanity.

  Awena paused in petting the dog, who was leaning heavily against her knee.

  “Thea,” she said, gazing into the sherry-colored eyes. “What a beauty she is. Short for Theadora?”

  “No—just Thea.”

  “Ah. It means ‘goddess,’ you know. Which is kind of funny, when you think about it.”

  Max grinned. “I know. She came with the name and it just suited her somehow. No question she agrees it suits her.”

  He had not had a pet since childhood; the unpredictable schedule of his former life had not permitted it. Nearly his first act on arriving in Nether Monkslip had been to adopt the young Thea, he supposed in some outward display of his desire for normalcy, for routine.

  “Anyway,” Awena said, revisiting her previous refrain, “I still think Wanda might listen to you. In fact, I think you’re the only one who could penetrate that almighty, know-everything façade.”

  Max hesitated. There were some situations—more situations than were acknowledged—where doing nothing was the better course. A patient willingness to wait was both part of his nature and ingrained from his old training in surveillance, in analysis and code-breaking—in watching and waiting for patterns to emerge.

  The Zen-like approach, as he thought of it, had much to recommend it. This, he felt, might be one of those times. Provoking Wanda, after all—what good could it do? It might be cowardice on his part, but still …

  Much later he was to wonder, more than once, if he’d been wrong.

  CHAPTER 7

  Harvest Fayre

  In the week leading up to the Fayre, the Reverend Max Tudor had been kept busy doing this or that church business at this or that church in his care. Not until the dawning of the day of the Fayre itself did he think to utter a little prayer that his parishioners would behave themselves. Failing that, that a posse had not already been dispatched to take out Wanda Batton-Smythe.

  With the approach of fall, the trees around the village were starting to shed their finery, dropping apples and leaves to the ground. The fields had been cut back to an ochre stubble and the harvest mice, exposed, would soon shelter in the hedgerows. The spinney atop Hawk Crest would stand out like a thinning thatch of hair on an old man’s head. As it was, some trees had already been stripped bare in a recent storm; the Crest had always been vulnerable to the freak storms that had beset Nether Monkslip from time immemorial. The equinox heralded more to come as the days began their slow creep toward winter, the austere white light of summer shading to an autumnal gray. It was the time, Max knew, that Awena Owen called Mabon: the celebration of the second harvest and the start of winter preparations.

  All the same, for him and for her, and all different. The Christians had wisely chosen (in most cases) not to eradicate the pagan celebrations but to wrap them up with new paper and ribbon into a palatable offering. The solstices and equinoxes, the all-important movements of the planets, the timing of the plantings and the harvests and the full rush of seasons, the return of the sun after its long, cold, and frightening retreat—these observances wisely were not eradicated by those newly in power, but absorbed into items on the Christian calendar. The Harvest Fayre was a remnant of the old days, and still vital in modern times. The equinox had been melded onto Michaelmas, the feast of the Archangel Michael, now three days away. Time to get the harvest in and settle accounts.

  Max crossed Church Street and walked over to the Fayre grounds, greeting villagers as he went. Everywhere over the past few days there had been signs of change: the monarchs, blown off their usual course and supping gracefully on the butterfly bush; the drowsing bees, so recently a menace, the cooler air taking the zip out of their movements. The green tomatoes, the gold chrysanthemums. The eerie harvest moon, which soon would hang low in the sky.

  Proud of his newfound rustic ability to name a few basic flowers, Max noted with pleasure the Michaelmas daisies and the last of the yellow St. John’s wort. He breathed deeply of the sweet decay that was autumn; his heart lifted as he felt on his skin the slight nip in the air that signaled the shortening of days. The marquee erected on the grounds of the old Abbey came into view. Use of the land had been donated for the day by Noah Caraway, collector of art and antiques, bon vivant, general man about Europe, and owner of Abbot’s Lodge.

  Approaching the tended grounds of Abbot’s Lodge and the ruins of the old Abbey, Max briefly stood back to survey unobserved the essentially pagan scene. The Fayre preparations already were in full swing, even as visitors began to arrive, and from his vantage point, the villagers had the aspect of a Bruegel painting—decked out in the bright colors of autumn, reds and golds and the occasional flash of green. The smoky smells of autumn were more concentrated here, mingling with the fruits of the harvest, and there was a bank-holiday feel to the day, of cares set aside, and work delayed for pleasure. The sway of the spoilsport Puritans—they who had banned maypoles, dancing, and secular singing, and who treated this type of festival as dangerous superstition—was mercifully long over. Max thought it a wonder their humorless reign of forbidden amusements had lasted as long as it had.

  Yet the stark, somber Abbey Ruins with their few remaining trefoil windows always struck him as immeasurably sad, and today were a pronounced contrast with the villagers’ gaiety. By unvoiced consent, out of respect and/or superstitious fear of the violated monks, the inner areas of the ruins—the inner sanctums, as it were, especially the chancel with its “bare ruin’d choirs”—were never lightly breached. The stalls for selling the villagers’ various wares thus were ranged along the outside of the Abbey Ruins, interspersed with the gooseberry bushes that seemed to thrive in this particular spot. There was a surfeit of apple products for sale, he saw at a glance—cider, of course, and jam, and wine, and both traditional and caramel apple cake with clotted cream.

  A tent had been erected in case the weather failed to cooperate, but it had been universally agreed the weather would not dare cross Wanda any more than anyone else would.

  * * *

  As Max entered the area set aside for the stalls, he noticed the subtle adjustments villagers seemed to make as he approached. Cheerful congregants became just that much more cheerful, children were tugged at to stand up straighter, men called out hearty hellos, and many women pretended not to notice him at all until he made a pointed hello, at which point they assumed a posture of great surprise at seeing him. Max’s nascent rock star status had, as has been said, led to fierce and sustained infighting over the church flower rota. Such interest was not precisely sexual in nature—at least, not always. It was more that scraps of information about the new vicar were a commodity in high demand for gossip sessions at the Cavalier Tea Room.

  On his arrival in the village, rampant speculation over many an afternoon tea had included that he was MI5—Military Intelligence, Section 5—and posted as a special guard to Queen Elizabeth. No, said someone: MI5 weren’t used for that—he was posted in Iraq, some top secret mission thingie at the highest level. No, said someone else: they only used MI6 for those foreign le Carré–style missions, not MI5—everyone knew that. But he was wounded somewhere, that was definite. Where? demanded another.
His leg, I think. There’s nothing the matter with his legs, either of them. Besides, I meant, where in the world was he wounded? Oh, in Iraq, wasn’t it?

  * * *

  His days as an MI5 officer had not been wreathed in glory. The nature of the business was of course that things happened behind the scenes, the route of history altered minutely, with no one to thank or blame when the mission was over—whatever his part in the mission had been. He had been recruited by a talent spotter while an undergraduate student at Oxford, where the cold fog off the Isis leant itself to those kinds of mysterious goings-on, and had joined MI5 at the age of twenty-one—such a baby’s age he could hardly credit that they thought him worth troubling with. Perhaps his youth made him malleable, and that was what they most needed, that malleable quality.

  No doubt that was it.

  They called them Spooks, these members of Her Majesty’s Security Service, the men and women of MI5 or simply Five, devoted to ferreting out internal threats to the safety of Britain.

  He had had perhaps a dozen aliases in the course of his career, so many legends to remember—a legend being the make-believe history and background that people had to be convinced to believe, and that he himself, most importantly, had to believe. He’d be grilled on this legend by his handlers, repeatedly asked the same questions in different ways until he had the story down pat. He’d generally be issued records showing he’d been born in a country where no official birth records were kept—millions of children born worldwide went undocumented, and he’d simply, temporarily, joined the ranks of these stateless unfortunates. His curriculum vitae was a list of spurious jobs at no-longer-existing companies—there being a never-ending supply of defunct companies for MI5 to appropriate to its purposes.

  False IDs were a part of his life, and he quickly began to master the ability to lose himself completely in his various roles. It was the only way to keep it all straight in his mind. He wondered sometimes if he’d missed a career on the stage. But the incentive to maintain a false identity was so much more than matinee entertainment, and the driving force, the need to stay alive, was incentivizing in the extreme. He’d played the roles of bank manager and schoolmaster, of politicized student and cagey estate agent and dodgy car salesman. No one had suspected a thing. He still wasn’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed of that.

  A job with Five was often boring, often heart-stopping, most often requiring an ability to wait endlessly. September 11 raised the stakes considerably. In response, they now had SOCA, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, Britain’s version of the FBI, an organization, merged from others, whose priorities were drug trafficking and organized immigration crime. Terrorists were not a stated target, but it was generally impossible to differentiate dirty money from the unclean uses to which it was put.

  It was interesting work on some days; mostly, it was just his job. The way other people worked at a dry cleaners, he went to work for MI5 every day. He might have gone on forever had it not been for the Russian.

  * * *

  His approach now never went unnoticed, and he reveled (modestly, he hoped) in the happy greetings and the goodwill of the people he had promised to serve. The fresh air, the beguiling smoky smell of early fires hanging over all, the camaraderie …

  It was a peaceful scene, only now broken by a loud noise, as of a loud trumpeting … surely not—yes—

  Wanda’s foghorn voice could be heard, as if from a great distance. Moses rallying the Israelites.

  “Come on, people! For the love of heaven! We don’t have all day! Shift it! Shift it! Oh, hello, Vicar. Just in time. We need a big strong man like yourself to…” Eyelashes working overtime, she launched into a tedious and complicated request having to do with trestle tables and a placard advertising the location of the tea tent. Today she again wore her brogues, and another outfit that might have been issued by the Palace, this time in deep violet. A large, old-fashioned brooch representing a bumblebee seemed to crawl toward her left shoulder. Max good-naturedly allowed himself to be volunteered, if only to keep her quiet for a moment, and give someone else a respite.

  She plowed on to other fields of endeavor, ignoring anger or opposition as they were encountered, occasionally bending an ear to the urgent request of an underling. She was bold and decisive in her decisions, or so her self-satisfied expression suggested, apparently missing the looks of bafflement and frustration she often left in her wake. She paused in her supervisory duties on one return pass only long enough to lean in confidingly and say, “Would you believe it, Vicar? Mrs. Percy has dropped out of the rota for the Pickles and Preserves table. ‘Death in the family,’ she says.” Wanda sniffed. It was clear that no death in Mrs. Percy’s tribe would be cause for protracted sorrow. “That could wait, couldn’t it?” she demanded. “I mean, they’re not going to get any warmer if she drops everything and races to the bedside, are they?”

  Max, taken aback, allowed as how they probably were not.

  “Still…”

  “Still nothing!” Wanda blared. “Besides, funerals are for the living. Now that’s interesting…” She seemed to change topics, distracted by something seen in the distance. Her eyes took on the cast of an old sailor seeing a mythical, long-sought-after whale. “Well, well,” she said slowly. “Someone will need to be told.”

  “What’s that?” asked the Vicar, himself distracted by a splinter that had found its way painfully into his thumb.

  “Oh, nothing to bother you with, Vicar, at least not yet.” Here she turned on the spigot marked “Flirtation with Handsome Vicar” and fiercely batted her eyes. He noticed she once again had lined her lashes, with none too steady a hand, using some murky and dark substance, like the leavings found in a coal scuttle. “I have to follow the dictates of my conscience, I suppose,” she added. But she frowned, as if for once she was not sure what her conscience might dictate. Then, recalling that she had a Fayre to run, and no doubt an insurrection or two to quell, she visibly composed herself, adjusting the fingers of her cotton gloves one by one, pressing the cloth into the valleys between her pudgy digits.

  * * *

  Max had returned to his assigned chores when, some minutes later, Wanda shot briefly into view again. “Time to man the braces!” she cried. Max, who had never expected to hear anything like that outside of a Horatio Hornblower novel, grinned across the trestle table at Guy Nicholls, a new fellow recruit in Wanda’s War, as it was now being called.

  “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” muttered Guy under his breath.

  Max shook his head.

  “Wrong battle.”

  “Do you think she makes a distinction? All life’s a battle. She seems to meld the different branches of service, too.”

  Wanda briefly disappeared down the side of a small hillock, a faint cry trailing her like a flag: “I swear, you lot couldn’t run a whelk stall without me!”

  No doubt this was true. It was strange, Max reflected, how this truth didn’t go very far toward endearing her to those who hastened to do her bidding.

  CHAPTER 8

  Harvest Fayre II

  Max had to credit Wanda in this much: the Fayre was an enormous undertaking, and as it got underway, the seams involved in putting together such a large display virtually had disappeared.

  Stalls seemed in the past half hour to have exploded in number. Those selling home produce predominated, as farmers came in from miles around for this event. There were also stalls selling knitwear (Lily’s offerings putting all others in the shade) and children’s wear. Teas and coffees and herbs were available in sweet-smelling abundance, and secondhand toys and games changed hands for probably the fifth time in a generation. There were displays of wrestling and tests of strength for the men, and antiques that verged on rubbish for sale, and rubbish from attics that might include a pirate’s treasure—one never knew. The siren call of the undiscovered hoard hung thick in the air, and Noah Caraway—round, balding, ebullient—reigned in that department, offering la
mps with mismatched lampshades, rusting garden equipment and furniture, tablecloths with three matching napkins, dog-eared books and photo albums of the long-deceased—sadly, with no relative left to claim them, these studio portraits and snapshots became mere curiosities, reduced for quick sale.

  Max gave Noah a friendly wave as he passed. He had his own rubbishy things to unload, and was afraid of collecting someone else’s, like lint, if he came too near. In the distance, the church choir was launching into “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” This song never being one of his favorites, Max veered left and walked on, walked on with hope in his heart, until he came face-to-face with Wanda’s soul mate: the Major.

  The Major was in theory manning a stall (he seemed to be selling ball bearings, but Max felt overall that that couldn’t be right), but in actuality he was reading a book as he perched on his ubiquitous shooting stick, pointedly ignoring all inquiries of passersby as to his wares. But as Max approached, he made an exception, for the Major approved of the “New Padre,” as he always called him. “A fighting man to his fingertips; you can always tell,” he would say. In the Major’s estimation there was no higher tribute: it was as if Max could fly.

  “It’s a biography of King Æthelfrith,” he told Max now, flipping the book over to display the cover. “Mighty warrior—gave the Britons a jolly good trouncing. Interesting note for you, Padre: at one point he killed the monks who were helping the Britons by praying for them. Hah! Æthelfrith. Not a name you’d want to attempt with a lisp, eh?” In a typical non sequitur, he added, “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’—what a load of American codswallop.”

  The Major was a great rumbling bear of a man given to using words like trouncing and balderdash, as if he were forever starring in some drawing-room comedy of the 1930s. Rather than say, “Where are you?” he would demand to know, “What are your coordinates?” But he was almost a Dickensian character, wearing brocaded waistcoats in all seasons and with a Rudolph-like red nose that could nearly light the way in the holiday pageant. He had dark eyes, close-cropped white hair, a flourishing mustache, and a somewhat gray complexion. He was still able to wear the belts of his youth, only now they hugged the underside of a prominent paunch rather than circling a waist rendered taut by daily sit-ups. Today’s wide belt, slung low on his hips, gave him the appearance of a portly gunslinger.