She did not mention family visitors, he noticed. The abbey probably had come to be her family after so many years.
“Their voices are indeed beautiful. I suppose the perfect harmony comes from long practice.”
“Saint Augustine said that singing is ‘praying twice.’ Chanting has medical benefits, you know. Scientists have found it alters the brain waves. Haven’t you ever noticed how long-lived people in monastic life tend to be? Present company excluded, of course.”
Max gave her hand a squeeze. If Dame Hephzibah was any guide, they would all outlive him. He had himself experienced the calming effect of chant early on, as he had sat listening to the King’s College Choir singing Gregorian chant or just listening to his Trio Mediaeval CDs.
He looked at Dame Meredith, at the face that belied her years, despite her suffering. He knew she was in her sixties. There must be something to this life they led in granting them that serene composure.
She was saying, “Saints live closer to the divine than we mere mortals can. Not since Abbess Iris passed have we had a true mystic in our midst. She walked with a glow surrounding her. Light seemed to shine out of her pores. You won’t believe me, but it’s true.”
“A bit different from Abbess Justina, then,” he said. It was not a question.
“Chalk and cheese,” she replied. “Don’t misunderstand, but Abbess Justina is a … a figurehead merely. Charismatic, inspiring, and everything you could want in a leader. But Abbess Iris was—I don’t know. Perhaps not of this earth. I’d have done whatever she said, because I felt she was speaking from a higher authority. Even when she insisted on changing the design of our habit. A little thing like that, and no one questioned that it needed to be done, and immediately.”
“Because she said so,” Max nodded, adding: “Some people have a heightened ability to tune out the world—artists and creators and inventors. And saints. It sounds as if your Abbess Iris was one of them.”
“But now—here you are, investigating poison,” she said. “Impossible to think of such a thing happening in her day, really. What has happened? What has gone wrong?”
“I hope to find out. What can you tell me?” He glanced back at the postulant-duena, but she seemed absorbed in her task. Indeed, at that moment, she let out a muffled yelp of exasperation as she stabbed herself with the needle. There might have been a mild swear word, too.
Dame Meredith shook her head against the pillow in frustration. “I don’t,” said Dame Meredith, “understand this whole thing about the poisoning. We had a bout of food poisoning not long ago. Nothing too serious, although Dame Hephzibah was taken quite ill and at her age that sort of thing can be dangerous.”
“What was the source of the poisoning?”
“We were never certain. We thought something might have crept into the mushroom soup that shouldn’t have been there. Some strains of mushrooms are of course not edible—it happens all the time that someone will innocently pick something out of their garden that is better left alone. I’m sure this business with the berries was a similar mistake. Otherwise, you have to believe someone here—at Monkbury Abbey!—has come completely unhinged. It doesn’t bear thinking about in such a small, tight community as this.”
Max sat back, thinking about that, about the search for perfection that had brought so many of them here. The taming of the spirit and body by denial. The monastic life was built upon the famous words reported by Matthew, in which Christ told a rich man, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” Could this striving for perfection have turned into a literally poisonous pursuit, a vile intoxication? At what point might seeking to deny every normal human impulse toward desire and self-interest, twenty-four hours a day, tip over into madness?
“Anyway,” Dame Meredith was saying, “if you’re here to prevent a murder—and that is why you’re here, isn’t it, Father?—you can be sure I’m not the target. Surely seeing one’s enemy die of this horrid disease would be revenge enough to satisfy anyone—assuming someone is after revenge. It is also difficult to see how any of the sisters here could provoke anyone to murder. I would look to the guesthouse for potential victims if I were you.”
The postulant Mary was definitely eavesdropping, thought Max, and had pricked up her ears on the word “murder.” Naturally enough, he supposed. It was one of the most loaded words in the English language. But Max thought a change of subject was in order, so he led Dame Meredith away from the topic of likely targets.
“How did you come to be here?” he asked her. “To discover you had a vocation?”
Again, the weary look came into her eyes, and Max asked if he were tiring her.
“Not at all,” she said. “This is more novelty than I’ve had in an age. The doctor is due any minute, though. He comes to check up on me—a complete waste of time. He’s a good man, though. Devoted to Dame Pet. Anyway, you ask about my vocation. It was more that a vocation seemed unavoidable in the end. I was raised Roman Catholic, in the stream of theology that held that pretty much anything enjoyable was punishable. My parents were so strict. I sometimes wondered why they had children, since my brother and I seemed to be nothing but obstacles to their salvation.
“By the time I left home and school I was in search of a place where I was welcome—not a place where I was judged and found wanting, but a place that welcomed me, as a woman, as a human being. And one Sunday when I was feeling down, I went to an Anglican service where the priest said that all were welcome to partake. That got to me. There was no one excluded, and I thought to myself that Christ would have said exactly that. All are welcome to sit at his table. From there it wasn’t a far distance to feeling at home here at Monkbury. I came here on a retreat, and I kept coming back.”
The same as Dame Fruitcake, thought Max.
“I took to the life, to the order and to the love. The ready forgiveness of transgressions—I think Mary here can tell you how that comes in handy, every single day.”
Mary looked up from her work, a white cloth dotted with red spots that surely were blood, and lifted her eyebrows in sardonic acknowledgement.
“Never mind,” Dame Meredith told her. “Everything washes out.” To Max, she said, “Anyway, before long I was elected cellaress. And I loved it. Every moment. I think sometimes that is why I stayed, even when the dawn awakenings were killing me. I had a job I loved, and people around me who seemed to love and need and appreciate me. We didn’t have all this buying and selling to the outside world back then. The Internet! The cellaress we have now, Dame Sibil, is … But there, I must not carry tales nor stand in the way of progress as I do it.”
“Oh, go ahead,” said Max. “Just this once.”
That made her laugh. “I thought you were supposed to be a good influence, Father. Anyway, I was only going to say that Dame Cellaress now plans to open up the abbey to the world, more and more, in the spirit of capitalism. That is not what we religious are about. It is in fact the very thing that got monasteries into trouble, when they became too worldly. Oh, I shouldn’t say anything, but what is freeing about this ruddy disease is one feels one can do and say what one wants, at long last.”
Was there professional jealousy behind her words? From what he had seen, the abbey was a great commercial success, putting them on a solid financial footing, enabling rebuilding and recruitment efforts. But she was dying of a disease that was slowly eradicating anything that marked her out as unique and gifted, death being the great equalizer. Perhaps her opposing stance in this one area gave her something she could call her legacy.
There was a knock on the outer door, and Mary Benton put aside her work to answer.
“That’ll be Dr. Barnard. You’ll be all right, Dame Meredith? I’ll be right back.”
“And I am just leaving,” said Max. In truth, he wanted a word with the doctor just to be able to tick that box and say that he had interviewed everyone with even a passing attachmen
t to the nunnery.
Dame Meredith nodded. As the door closed behind Mary, she told Max: “She won’t make it. She’s too secular, too attached to the world, and too quick to anger over small things. If you see your life here as nothing but a series of sacrifices, if you think only of what you’ve given up to be here, you won’t make it. Those of us who chose this life don’t see anything but the joy. We’re given a glimpse of heaven just often enough that thoughts of the past are uninteresting, if not positively unappealing.”
She added, surprising him, “We get many treasure seekers, you know. A rather silly book was published about the place by a local fellow who needs his head examined. It’s brought day-trippers and a surge in applications to stay in the guesthouse. Those who pretend to be here for spiritual solace—hah! There is treasure in the church, but not of the kind they mean.”
Her fingers plucked at the bedclothes. It was the first sign of agitation she’d shown, and Max wondered if she had a particular solace-seeker in mind. But she had closed her eyes, as if exhausted, her chest barely lifting with each breath.
Max said a quiet prayer over her. Then without a good-bye he slipped out into the corridor.
* * *
He waylaid the doctor as he was about to enter Dame Meredith’s room, gesturing him toward the small infirmary kitchen.
“I’d have been here earlier,” the doctor told Max, “but five miles out the weather has broken loose. I was soaked to the skin just getting into the car. I thought I’d have a quick shower in the guesthouse to warm up. One of the good sisters is bringing me some hot soup and bread to eat. God bless all their hearts, although I suppose they’ve already got that covered.”
Dr. Barnard was in his mid-forties, running a bit too fat at the waist but otherwise fit and hardy. He had all the brisk and competent demeanor one would hope for in a physician. His dark hair was slicked back in a rather old-fashioned cut, parted in the middle. It was a style that cried out for a handlebar moustache, but Dr. Barnard was clean shaven. His brown eyes brimmed with good health and intelligence. Max was reminded of Bruce Winship, the village doctor of Nether Monkslip. Competent, questing, with a healthy or unhealthy interest in the workings of the mind of a murderer—Max was never sure which. This doctor was, for one thing, older than Bruce Winship and, for another, gave off a certain Harley Street air that Bruce for all his competence lacked. Like a prize hunter, Dr. Barnard was burnished with the polish of breeding and pedigree, and he exuded a confidence in his own abilities that must have gone down well with his wealthy patients. He carried about him an assurance that any bodily invasion of virus or tumor could be routed and excised with minimal effort if only the sufferer would hand himself over to Dr. Barnard unquestioningly. Those wealthy patients probably came to his house for little cocktail parties and belonged to the same clubs, rode to the same hounds, dined at the same grand tables, which would groan under the weight of fatted calves and forbidden fruits.
Max pulled himself out of this culinary reverie to say, “I’m afraid I’ve upset Dame Meredith a bit. My role was really just to listen, but once we got onto the topic of the church—something about treasure and treasure hunters ruining the place. She is longing for the good old days—you know the sort of thing.”
“Oh!” Dr. Barnard laughed. “Many of the nuns feel the same. You’d have to have seen what a backwater Monkbury Abbey was, even a year ago. Dame Meredith ran the show then, you know. She was second in command, as cellaress. You wouldn’t believe it now, poor thing.”
“There’s no hope?” asked Max. “I have seen miracles, in some cases.”
“I never discount miracles,” said the doctor, “for I’ve seen them, too. And I never discount the power of mind over matter. Not ever. In this case, however—no.”
“How long does she have?”
He shrugged in a “who-knows?” gesture. “Weeks. Days.”
“You’ve been attending her how long?”
“Forever, in a manner of speaking. I am formally attached to the nunnery, as was my father before me. I am called in for anything serious that they can’t handle themselves, which almost never happens with this lot. Dame Meredith of course is being treated at a nearby hospital. They and she have agreed, though, that enough is enough.”
“So she told me.”
“I am just here to see that she doesn’t suffer unduly. It’s such a shame. She seems a thoroughly nice woman, and she doesn’t seem to have anyone in the world. Well, the one nephew who visits on occasion, if you can count him.”
“That would be Lord Lislelivet?”
“Yes. A self-serving little jer … erm. A self-serving little man if ever there was one. Whatever brings him here, it’s not devotion to his aunt, I can tell you that. More likely he’s one of the thrill-seeking hordes hoping after treasure.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, Father? She’s expecting me.”
Chapter 18
THE ABBESS GENEVIEVE
Speak ill of no one.
—The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy
Upon leaving the infirmary, Max came across a bit of a vision—a throwback to the days when religion reigned supreme, and many heads of religious orders lived as potentates. This could only be Abbess Genevieve Lacroix, a conclusion he reached as much from her regal bearing as from her ornate pectoral cross and the perfect drape of her voluminous habit.
“Good afternoon, Abbess Genevieve,” he greeted her.
A majestic nod of the head.
“Father.”
“Father Max Tudor, at your service.” Without thinking, he had slipped into the courtier role that she seemed to expect, this woman from another time. Almost another planet, an impression she reinforced with her next words.
“I am come from the Mother Ship, St. Martin’s. I conduct business with the Abbess Justina. We are selling her convent’s goods and vice versa. They have had great success with our face cream.”
“Ah,” said Max. She meant of course the motherhouse, but her impish expression hinted at the joke. She was perhaps fifty, perhaps eighty—like most of the sisters, who with the exception of Dame Hephzibah appeared to be ironed free of wrinkles, he had a difficult time telling. He could have sworn Abbess Genevieve was wearing a light scent, or perhaps had used a perfumed soap. Surely that was an infraction of the Rule? Or did she have her own rules? It was an idea she seemed to confirm with her next words.
“Never underestimate the reviving and healing power of a nice fragrance,” she said. “And of a little pampering with handmade products. I bring this for Dame Meredith.” She held up for his inspection a small package, exquisitely wrapped in linen and lace and decorated with a sprig of lavender. “So much better than things produced in enormous factories.”
“I congratulate you on your successful alliance with Monkbury.”
She nodded, modestly accepting the tribute as hers alone.
Max noted that French women even managed to wear a wimple and veil with a certain style and—dare it be said?—sex appeal. It must be some manual the women over there were issued at birth. Her habit was different from that of the other nuns, so apparently the satellite abbey here in England was free to do as it wished with regard to fashion statements. It was of a dark blue, almost black, and while her manner was a model of correct austerity she managed to comport herself with a certain élan that was missing in the other nuns. She stared directly into Max’s eyes, taking his measure. Apparently liking what she saw, she answered, “Thanks to God. We have a most successful partnership now. All the rancor of the past, it is forgotten.”
“And may I ask how long you have been here?”
“Not long enough to be of value to you in your investigation,” she said quickly. “I only arrived last week.”
Certainly, word of his mission had spread—not, Max supposed, that it had been any secret.
“So you weren’t here last fall, when the unpleasantness seems to have originated?”
“No. I would have put a st
op to it.”
“How so?”
“Mon Dieu. I would not have allowed that horrid man such access to the nunnery for more than a day. Yes, we are to welcome all, but the maker of trouble? C’est un homme pas sympathique. Some exceptions even to Christian charity must be made for the spirit who brings nothing but disturbance. Do we welcome the devil? Non. Such a man I fear is this nettlesome sprig of the aristocracy. But I see you do not agree with me, Father.”
Max studied her, without seeming to stare, taking in that serene visage, that calm, competent expression that seemed to admit of no trouble, no turmoil. A more sane and rational-looking person would be hard to imagine. Granted, one first had to look past the medieval costume in which she had shrouded herself head to foot. Look past the choice of a lifestyle that rejected much of what was deemed pleasurable or “normal” to the outsider. She had willingly chosen celibacy, poverty, obedience to the Rule—obedience to the call of the bells that told her where to be and when. She had chosen not to have a family, apart from the “sisterhood” that surrounded her. Surely as with any other family, there were members here she would not have chosen to associate with on the outside, but here was forced to get along with day by day, unto death.
She had even chosen to forego the little pleasures most women would allow themselves: a new dress, a new hairstyle, gossip with girlfriends over a cuppa. The scented lotion or whatever she was wearing was surely the limit to the rebellion she permitted herself.
Was this normal?
What was normal? Max in his job sometimes had to distinguish true piety from mental illness, a surprisingly challenging task. One man’s vision, as one of his Oxford dons had liked to say, was another man’s brain tumor.
“Is there a particular reason for your visit, Abbess Genevieve? I mean, at this particular time?”
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