A Demon Summer (15 page)

“Anyway, I was her personal chef for about three years. She liked me to cook healthy foods, which she would wash down with a quart of scotch a day. Go figure. I stayed until the children left for university, and then I left, too. I suppose that sounds heartless?” she asked. “I often think about it … about her…”

This time the rush of blood to her face definitely was not from the heat of the room, but from a memory that still seemed to pain her, no matter how many times she may have talked of it or thought it over. And Max had the idea she often thought of it and wanted finally to hear that the voice in her mind saying she had behaved selfishly was wrong.

Max shook his head. “I don't see how your staying would have made any difference. If she one day decides she's had enough, that day will not arrive because you or anyone scolded her into it or protected her from the inevitable day of reckoning.” A vision of his parishioner Chrissa Baker crossed his mind just then. “It is too bad for the children, though. It was kind of you to stay for their sake, until they were launched.”

The relief on her face, and her wobbly smile, told him how long she had worried over what she surely saw as her defection from the household.

“That is true: if you are determined on destruction, no one can protect you.”

“Do you ever see the children?”

“Oh, yes. They come to visit me here sometimes—not often. I suppose in my heart I adopted them as my own and I do miss them. One can't help it.”

Max hesitated, wondering how to bring the subject round to the main purpose of his visit to Dame Fruitcake in her abbey kitchen.

“The recent events…” he began. “Lord Lislelivet…”

Again the flush of color. He felt he could monitor her blood pressure if only he had a detailed color chart. She was just saved from plainness, he realized, by that high coloring and by the attractive hazel spark in her eyes. He could see her in another life, away from here, sitting before her own hearth and surrounded by very tall children and grandchildren, perhaps getting ready to prepare a meal for her own family. Again he marveled at the sacrifices so willingly made by these women.

For her part, Dame Ingrid was thinking: Were we not supposed to notice how handsome Father Tudor was? Well, we might be the sisters of St. Lucy, patroness of the blind, but we aren't blind. She smiled in a flustered way and said, “You'll be wondering about those berries. Believe me, I have wondered, too.”

“Where did they normally come from? Were they imported from elsewhere?” That might be too much to hope for, but he thought it was worth a shot.

“As much as possible, we harvest them ourselves. But the demand has been so great, we've had to augment our supplies. The cellaress orders the quantities I tell her I need. We recently took in a shipment from the motherhouse in France.”

“You say everyone helps out in the kitchen?”

“Oh, yes. They all take turns. Everyone except the abbess is required to help, according to the Rule. But Abbess Justina does not excuse herself. She likes to pitch in, now and again.”

“It is hard to imagine her having the time.”

“It is harder to imagine the cellaress having the time. But the abbess very wisely insists we all be treated the same, as much as is humanly possible.”

“I can see why that would be necessary. The emphasis on fairness.”

She stirred her tea, spooning in more syrup from a little white jar labeled
AGAVE
in neat cursive script.

She said, “St. Benedict was so wise about the ways of humans. He understood anger, and envy, and ego. He understood that danger could come as easily from within a community as without. He understood above all that we can't choose where we love: that seems somehow preordained. Some may call it heresy but I've always thought it to be true. We don't choose in these matters, which is why we so often see these oddly matched couples out there in the world: beauty hand in hand with beast; genius conquered by the pure of heart. It makes no sense—probably not even to the couples themselves.”

Max smiled, thinking life would be so much easier and, at the same time, so not worth living were he facing a future with a woman more “suitable,” more “mainstream,” than the endlessly fascinating Awena.

“Anyway,” continued Dame Ingrid, “the abbess is no different from any other human being. She is bound to have her favorites. But it is fatal to the community to let those favorites be known. The trust is gone once you show that sort of fallibility.”

“It's lonely at the top then,” said Max.

“If it's not, it should be,” she asserted, and Max was struck again by the savvy of this otherwise humble and unworldly woman. “Anyway, in the old days, the cellaress would have been in charge of the kitcheness, and I would have reported to her. But when it is Dame Sibil's turn to help out in here, things are the other way round, and she is to be guided by me.”

“Oh?” Max had picked up a certain wry note in her tone, noticing the topic of favoritism had led her directly to comment on the cellaress. “And how does that work out?”

She smiled. “Not all that well. Dame Cellaress—that is, Dame Sibil—is used to being in charge. Old habits die hard. No pun intended.”

Max returned the smile.

“What did she do in her life before the nunnery?”

“I'll tattle no tales, Father,” she said. “Really, I don't know the specifics. I gather she was a big noise in the City, but we don't reminisce about such things here.”

“Even though you've lived together for years, some of you? Known each other for years?”

She nodded. “We simply don't talk about personal things. We certainly don't talk much about the past—that is forbidden by the Rule. Talking to you as I have done is a different thing, but even there—it doesn't do to wallow, even under the guise of unburdening one's soul to a priest. But maintaining privacy about the past is the only way we can shuffle along together in peace in such a small community.

“We had an American postulant here once who tended to ‘over-share'—her term. And then she would thank us for sharing, almost regardless of what we said to her. ‘Pass the butter' or whatever. And the questions! Why this, and why that. She was a lovely girl with a big heart and a true vocation to serve, but she didn't last long here—she did not understand it when no one reciprocated her rather gushy fervor by baring their souls in return. It was partly British reserve, I suppose, but partly the psychology of being packed in together like commuters on a crowded train. We know that the only way we survive here is by erecting a privacy fence around ourselves. Anyway, she left us finally, and I heard she went on to become a missionary with another order, out in Africa somewhere, which work I think would suit such an outgoing type very well. Our more shuttered way of life requires that we maintain our own boundaries.

“Christ alone,” she concluded, “knows the secrets of our hearts. More tea, Father?”

 

Chapter 13

THE LIBRARIAN

Books are to the soul what food is to the body. Let the sister in charge of the scriptorium be alive to the rare sanctity of her duty.

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

Max left Dame Ingrid soon afterwards. He knew she had limited time for chitchat, much as she had seemed to be enjoying herself. He first asked about the nunnery's archivist, knowing they must have one.

“You'll be wanting Dame Olive, our librarian,” she told him. “She's forgotten more about the place than most of us will ever know.” And finding a small scrap of paper in the pocket of her work apron, she drew a map to guide him to the library and scriptorium.

“I'll send word ahead that you're on the way,” she said.

*   *   *

Dame Olive's face, a pale oval swathed in white linen, floated toward him out of the darkness of the library stacks.

It was a delicate face, the perfect egg shape of the head emphasized by the cruelly taut wrapping of the coif under her chin. Heavy dark-framed glasses overwhelmed her small features; Max could see the red marks on her nose where the frame weighed too heavily. Her hands as they constantly adjusted the frames were as small, precise, and tidy as a dormouse's. The coif seemed to bother her, and her fingers slipped often beneath the fabric to hold it away from her skin. Max wondered if she might have been allergic either to the fabric or to the detergent used to wash it. If so, it would be like wearing a hair shirt. Did she need to wear it quite so tightly wound?

Like Dame Ingrid, Dame Olive greeted Max with an enthusiastic if more demure, “Thank heaven you're here!”

Max felt his fame as a sleuth had somehow preceded him. Flattering as it was, he hope the nuns weren't overestimating his ability to get to the bottom of their public-relations crisis.

She stood back and gestured him to a seat across from her oak desk. The cavernous stone room was lined floor to ceiling with books, most of them leather-bound and creaky with antiquity. Library ladders ran on rails the length and depth of the wood-paneled room.

Dame Olive herself looked comfortable in her domain, as if she had somehow always been there, a guardian at the fount of knowledge. They exchanged the usual pleasantries, and Max said, “What an impressive collection you have here.”

“We have a small assortment of books that can be borrowed, but the archives date back centuries, and they of course cannot be removed,” she told him, as if forestalling any plans he might have to run amok in the stacks. He saw that many of the older volumes were chained in place, a holdover from centuries past when hand-copied books were worth their weight in gold.

He commented on the chains, saying: “I would imagine much that is here is valuable?”

“It's all valuable to me,” she replied. “But thieves, then as now, have always been drawn by the notorious riches of Monkbury Abbey. The gold and silver plate, as well as the books.”

“Thieves?” asked Max.

“Oh, I didn't have anyone specific in mind. No indeed. I was talking of the past.” She adjusted the heavy glasses against her nose. “At Monkbury Abbey, much of the income once was generated by providing access to relics and objects of veneration—that was the case in religious houses everywhere. There was—usually—nothing cynical in this. We had our own miraculous relic in the church—a femur said to belong to St. Lucy, as well as part of her shin bone—but the casket and most of its contents were destroyed by King Henry's men.”

“So the visiting throngs of pilgrims vanished overnight,” he said. “It's a shame, really.” He was thinking more of the casket, no doubt a work of art made of gold and silver and inlaid with jewels. Whether its contents had ever had anything to do with St. Lucy was doubtful. Relics were a dime a dozen in the medieval church, and many were of uncertain provenance. But simply counted as a loss to the historical record, the devastation was sad to witness at places like Rievaulx and Whitby. For Dame Olive, no doubt an historian at heart, the damage must be particularly galling.

“Not just the religious relics—the saints' bones and bits of cloth from their cowls and so on—but many of the books of the time were destroyed,” she said. “And not all of them religious tomes. There came a point where the destruction was indiscriminate. But someone managed to preserve some Anglo-Saxon poetry that is really quite … erm …
earth
y. No one knows how it came to be at the abbey.” She smiled. She had a big wide smile, almost too wide for the small features, so tightly wrapped. With her smile, the linen seemed to cut into the skin.

“But are they valuable, the poems? Or is anything else in the archives?” he asked. He was thinking of Piers, with his shiny Regency tresses and his interest in things ancient, and of Lord Lislelivet, with his beady eyes and his sudden interest in things monastic.

And of the Goreys, who for all their generosity had an evident interest in things financial.

“That depends on whom you ask, Father. As Stephen King has said, ‘Books are a uniquely portable magic.' And as I've indicated, value is in the eye of the beholder.” Max muffled his surprise that she would quote the master of horror tales.

“What is your own favorite reading?” he asked. Not
Carrie
, surely.

She sat back, unused to such questions. “We aren't exactly encouraged to read for pleasure, Father. Nor do we have scads of leisure time. But I would have to say I have a fondness for poetry, a fondness which has never left me.”

“Ah. Who is your favorite poet?”

“Oh, I have too many favorites to name just one. I'm reading Leonard Cohen at the moment.”

Max smiled. Cohen was a poet and songwriter who'd written extensively about religion, having been ordained a Buddhist monk while retaining his ties to his own Jewish faith. He'd also had a lot to say about women and sex, which mysteries seemed to confound him.

“Surely,” he said, “the Rule of St. Lucy would allow for a little poetry in your lives.”

“It would, in balance and moderation,” she replied. “St. Benedict was big on balance and moderation.” She hesitated, adding, “But even so, his own monks tried to poison him.”

“I've never quite understood why they did that. They could have just asked him to leave.”

She smoothed the fine light wool of her voluminous skirt. “I suppose they felt he would not listen. Saints are like that.”

Did he imagine it, or was she hinting at something? For the reference to poison seemed deliberate. No doubt it was a subject uppermost in all their minds. But try as he might, Max could not see parallels between a sixth-century religious reformer, annoyingly righteous as he may have been, and a twenty-first-century British lord with a reputation for fast cars, fancy women, and underhanded dealing. And yet both had survived attempted poisonings by people they had in some way provoked.