A Demon Summer (20 page)

The sheep ignored him, continuing their preoccupied bleating, but the goats stared, an audience awaiting its speaker. There was something, Max had always thought, rather uncanny about goats, something knowing and otherworldly and very ancient in their gaze. He agreed with Xanda that they were ever-so-slightly creepy. They watched him closely as he passed, a human-like grin on their bearded, whiskery faces and amusement in their pale eyes—eyes with those strange, horizontal pupils. It was little wonder pagans had adopted them as symbols of wickedness; Christians associated the goat with the Devil himself.

Max thought of the herd mentality, wondering if the nuns, living in such close proximity, could anymore see and think as individuals. Did they all just look to the abbess for guidance, a practice that had become automatic with the years? She exuded a certain comforting presence, an assurance that all would be well. Max had felt it himself the night before at her dinner table.

The more he thought of it, the more it was difficult to see any of them operating independently. But surely committing a crime like attempted murder required a certain gift for autonomy, a certain willingness to step outside the herd, a turning away from convention and toward chaos.

Hearing the sound of feet softly disturbing the grass, he turned.

The novice, as he could see she was by the abbreviated skirt and white veil of her habit, walked over to him. Her name, as he knew from the information provided him by the bishop's office, was Sister Rose. Watching her approach—she had a steady marching stride, as if she were on parade—he searched his mind for her last name and came up with Rose Tocketts. She had not yet taken vows, at which point she would adopt her religious name, the name under which she would live the rest of her life, the name that would appear on her gravestone when she came at last to be buried under the yews in Monkbury Abbey cemetery. The “Tocketts” would disappear.

“You have a long day,” Max greeted her. “I didn't expect to see anyone for a while.”

“Do we?” she asked, brushing some dirt off of her hands and then peering up at him, shading her dark eyes against the sunlight. She had a square face with broad, flat cheekbones. Max thought she might be of Eurasian heritage.

“I don't really notice it anymore. One day is much like the last, and one gets used to waking up early. In fact, I have come to like that feeling we have of being quite alone in the world in the early hours. In the Army I often worked the midnight shift, so it feels familiar.”

“You never take a break?”

She nodded. “We do. In the summer, if it is very warm, we are allowed to take a little nap in the afternoon. So far this year we've been spared the flooding of last year, but have been given a bit too much heat instead. I can only hope St. Swithin will come through for us in moderation this time.”

She was referring to the belief that if it rains on St. Swithin's day, July 15, it will rain for forty days afterwards.

In the county of Monkslip, rain would be most welcome. They had had sun—too much sun. The sort of unrelenting, moist, beating-down heat that made people wonder why, oh why, was nothing being done about global warming?

“I wonder what it is like here in winter,” he said.

“I have only spent one winter here. It was harsh.”

“But not harsh enough to deter you.”

She lifted her shoulders in a shrug, and flipped one end of her veil back over her shoulder. “They give you a lot of time to decide whether you are really cut out for this life. I think I am. But it is easy to delude oneself. The others are an inspiration. They are all so different, from such different backgrounds. And yet they have that serenity…” Her voice trailed off wistfully, as though that were an unheard-of gift she was waiting to have bestowed.

“I've noticed it too,” he said. “They seem to carry that certain belief that God always has your back.”

She turned to him with a start. “The last time someone said that to me, I was shot at the next day. I was spared, obviously, but it turned out not to be true for my brothers in arms. God didn't have their backs.”

He'd often seen that reaction among soldiers come back from Iraq—the instant return to the moment when life hung by a thread, as if no time at all had passed. She was right back there.

He noticed she carried a gardening basket and shears. To divert her from her melancholy, he pointed and said, “Roses instead of guns, now. Much better.”

“A thousand times better. It's my turn at arranging flowers for the refectory table,” she said, positioning the stems. “Another thing I'm not particularly good at—give me an engine to take apart any day, and I'm happy.” She walked toward the edge of the field, where a colorful wave of summer wildflowers had made their bright appearance. A hare crossing the field stopped in its tracks.

“Is it all that you expected?” Max asked, following her. “The religious life?”

“No,” she said, without hesitation. “You think you know, you think you're ready. But every day I seem to fu—I mean, mess!
Mess
up. I seem to mess something new up. I think what comes hardest for me is the isolation—being the new girl, apart from Mary. That and the stillness.”

“And maybe the language?” he asked, teasing her, for he sometimes still had the same problem, matching his vocabulary to fit his new station in life.

She laughed, piercing the air with a great shout. The sheep, startled, turned small faces as one in her direction. Nothing seemed to upset the goats, who continued their disinterested assessment of her and Max.

“Thank you for understanding that,” she said. “In the Army everybody just blew off steam with the foulest language imaginable. I wasn't one of the worst offenders, but I'm afraid some of it rubbed off. I've had to really watch myself since I've been here. Bad habits die hard, you should forgive the pun. Anyway, the stillness, when you're used to being rousted at all hours and sent running about shouting, generally to no purpose—well, it is just takes getting used to.”

“It's a sea change, yes.” Thinking of his MI5 days, he said, “I think I can relate.”

“We are given many opportunities for quiet reflection,” she went on, “and a part of me says, ‘Oh,
no
! Not quiet reflection again! Let me weed the garden or milk the sheep or even scrub floors or something, but not
that
.'”

Max smiled. “I can imagine it all takes getting used to. The cycling down when you're used to being on alert all the time. So tell me: what is your typical day like here?”

“Well … it starts early, as you know. But the day doesn't really get going for me until we assemble in the chapter house in the morning, after prayer. The abbess presides, and that is where we get our marching orders for the day. We take turns reading a chapter from the Rule, and the abbess will give a little talk on the meaning of that particular rule. Then the practical matters are discussed—the status of the various projects we have going, how sales are going, which items are being discontinued. It is very like a sales meeting in the outer world, I would imagine—not something I know a lot about. In chapter is also when we confess our shortcomings. That takes quite a while in my case—the breaches of the Rule. And we're given a penance.”

“Do the sisters ever report each other for breaking the rules?” Max knew in some orders that was required by custom. It had always struck him as a recipe for disaster.

“You mean, rat someone out?” she asked. “Yes, in theory, chapter would be the place to bring up little lapses they may have witnessed in others. But it's like casting the first stone, isn't it? I've never known it to happen, not since I've been here. We all confess our own lapses—mind our own business.”

It had been, thought Max, rather a long shot, that one of them might have seen or heard something untoward and brought it up during the confession period of the chapter meeting.

“Besides,” she said, “for anything that happened that was really out of line, we can talk with the abbess about it, in private. That seems infinitely preferable to ratting each other out in public.”

They looked out over the enclosure where the sheep were grazing. He asked her what breed they were. “I'm city bred,” he apologized. “I can still tell you where to get the best table in London at the last minute and how much to tip the maître d', but I've no clue when it comes to sheep.”

“Those ones over there are Friesians,” she told him. “I didn't know that either, when I first came here. They use their milk to make soap. They've also started a little trade in farmhouse cheese.”

“They,” not “we,” he noted—she had slipped back into the “they.” He wondered how long it would take for her to feel at home enough to start talking automatically of “we,” like Dame Olive.

“Don't they have the most wonderful faces?” she asked him. “You wish they could speak. I suspect they talk about us behind our backs.” One of the sheep walked over to the fence. She stretched out a hand, which it nuzzled.

“And those in the further pasture are Jacob sheep,” she said. “We breed them for their fleece—it's so soft, like nothing you've ever felt. We sell it to hand spinners.”

“You never breed them for food, then?”

“Heavens, no. I couldn't bear the idea, really, once I got to know them all.”

Max thought of Lily Iverson back in Nether Monkslip—Lily who bred her sheep for their silky wool, which she knitted into award-winning sweaters and rugs. Lily would entirely have understood Sister Rose.

He asked her if it were true that a ewe could be tricked into accepting the offspring of another sheep as her own.

“I've heard of it. I guess sheep are the dumb blondes of the animal kingdom. Very sweet, not awfully bright. The lambs bleat when their mothers are taken away to be shorn—as you can hear. They have to be weaned, the lambs, but they keep the bleating up all day. They'll bleat until their little voices give out, some of them. The mothers cry as well, but not all. Some don't seem to care. If the mum is shorn sometimes her lamb doesn't recognize her when she's brought back. As I say, they're not very bright, poor things. But very dear, they are.”

Sister Rose, under the competent exterior, struck him as a bit of a softy, at least when it came to animals. She confirmed his impression by telling him, “This one I've named Ethel. We never slaughter them, absolutely not ever,” she assured him again.

“After chapter, what comes next for you?” he prompted.

“We have a time where we can work or study until the bell rings for Sext at midday. In the old days, the abbey employed servants to do the heavy lifting—I don't think I'd have enjoyed it here so much then. There were a lot of grand ladies swanning about, who seemed to treat the place like a spa or a great library. Those who could read and write were probably very happy with the solitude and the relative freedom. They were sent here by their families if for some reason or other a husband couldn't be found for them. And not all of them, I'm sure, saw that as such a bad tradeoff. When you stop to survey the field of what passed for an eligible male back in the middle ages—I mean, please. Women just didn't have a whole lot of choice in those days, or control over their own lives. The nunnery gave them, especially the high-born ones, a ticket out.”

Her white skirt caught on a bramble as they walked. She stopped to extricate herself, and went on to say: “Between the noon meal and evening Vespers, there is more time for work and study, although of course we pause for prayer in mid-afternoon, as well.”

“For None,” he supplied.

“Yes. All that takes getting used to, including just getting the names for things right.”

They came to a fence, over which an elderly horse had poked his head. She stopped to rub the blaze of white on his forehead, as if for good luck. He nuzzled her hand, looking for a carrot, which she produced like a conjurer from a hidden pocket.

“Domino,” she said. “We keep him for a neighbor when he travels. Domino is a gentle old soul. The neighbor's little girl rides him.”

Max indicated the pasture and farmland beyond the river surging below the monastery walls.

“All that is yours, too?” There were largish black and brown lumps gathered under a tree in the distance that he figured must be cows, although at this distance it was hard to tell.

“Since time out of mind,” she told him. “It's a fraction of the holdings Monkbury used to call its own.”

“And the river…”

“Sometimes I just stand here watching it flow, and before I know it twenty minutes have passed. I suppose that is another infraction of the Rule.”

“Somehow I doubt it,” said Max. “Not of the
spirit
of the Rule.”

“It wasn't always like this,” she told him. “Until not all that long ago, they routinely dumped waste into the river. Abbey infirmaries traditionally were built near the river so the worst things you can imagine could be dropped straight into the water. It's a wonder they didn't all die of some dread disease. Come to think of it, many of them did.”

Turning from the fence, she returned to the topic that seemed to preoccupy her.

“The most common offense we tell on ourselves in chapter is that of not stopping what we are doing when the bell calls us to prayer. It seems I just get rolling with something I'm working on and I'm called away. Half the time, I seem to tune out the sound.”

“I would think that was impossible,” said Max.

“I know, it is a very loud sound, but when you're focused on something else.… Anyway, that is definitely my weak spot. One of many. The others also forget to pull their hoods over their heads when they enter the church.”

“I'm sure it will come in time,” said Max. “You seem a very determined person to me.” He meant it as a compliment, but even as he spoke recalled the havoc determined people could cause if they kept only their own goals in mind.