A Demon Summer (38 page)

Whatever had happened, Paul himself had fully believed it had been miraculous, to the extent he had given up all hope of an easy life and likely had died a martyr to his new faith. He may have died in Rome during the reign of Nero—a “killer in high places” if ever there were one. As Dame Olive's Leonard Cohen put it, the world collapses,

“While the killers in high places

say their prayers out loud.”

But not much given to prayer had Nero been.

Wishing fervently that the scales might fall from his own eyes, Max replaced the Bible and rose from the pew. He turned round. It would soon be time for the next round of prayers in the abbey's daily cycle of offices, and he wanted to take advantage of the nuns' absence to prowl around on his own. Before the light gave out.

There it was again. That drift of phrase, set to music. “How the light gets in.”

How the light gets in.

Again, the line threaded its way across his mind.

The date was June 21, the day of the summer solstice.

Light and day.

To the medieval mind, there was no guarantee of sunrise, no promise the now unstinting sun would return—all that was left to God's will.

Light flooded in from the window; the sky outside was cloudless, with nothing to block the sun. Max, walking toward the choir with its cartoon-like wooden carvings of St. Lucy's life, noticed that a cushion on one of the pew-seats was askew. It was not something he would normally have noticed, except for the light aiming straight at the seat like an arrow. Bending to straighten the cushion, he saw there was a hinge in the pew. Probably extra hymnal storage, he thought. Out of curiosity he lifted the lid to peer inside.

And saw, much to his surprise, that he had exposed a spiral staircase, coiling tightly down and undoubtedly leading to the crypt beneath the church.

His eyes drifted heavenward. Really, he thought, it was as if God were up there with a pea shooter sometimes, trying to get his attention by sending little hints and bits of information for Max to stitch together. Max offered up a silent word of thanks before turning his attention to the stairs. He supposed it would be too much to ask God to just tell him who the killer was, so he set his mind to examining the find revealed by the light of the summer solstice.

He had read about a similar staircase, discovered on St. Michael's Mount, just off the coast of Cornwall. He felt the natural reluctance of the living to venture into a musty old space, intended for burials and no doubt filled with cobwebs. He thought again of the abbess's tale of the old anchorite. But he was surprised that the expected fusty smell, familiar to him from his explorations of the crypt at St. Edwold's, was not what emerged from the opening. Instead, there was the voluptuous perfume of fresh flowers, along with the same clean scent of detergent and polish that permeated the rest of the convent. There was also the scent of candles and a stronger one of recently burned incense. This was no fusty mausoleum but a recently used space. The smell of the flowers was quite powerful. He was no gardener but he thought it might be gardenia.

What on earth?

Treading carefully, he made his way down the staircase to the vaulted crypt below. All was silence. He supposed someone might be down there cleaning or organizing the sweet-smelling flowers, but the silence was complete, and nothing stirred the air to indicate human occupation.

He crept along, feeling his way. There were no handrails, and what scant light there was poured in through the open lid of the seat in the choir stall. Wall sconces that long ago would have held torches had been modified to hold candles—the source of the flickering light he'd seen through the trapdoor beneath the belfry. He saw a box of matches on a nearby ledge and used them to light one of the candles.

The steps reached a platform, where they widened into a cascading sweep of stairs to the room below. These had recently been extensively repaired or replaced—they were too new and polished to be the originals. Max was starting to see where the money from people like the Goreys, and money intended for the guesthouse, had actually been spent.

The room was framed on two sides by rows of marble-faced columns surmounted by arches supporting the floor above. Max looked at the scripture quotation from Matthew, in illuminated text over the archway nearest him:

~ If thou wilt be perfect, goe and sell that thou hast, and giue to the poore, and thou shalt haue treasure in heauen ~

And under another archway to his right:

~ Dominus illuminatio mea ~

Max translated: The Lord is my light. It was from one of the psalms. It also happened to be the motto of the University of Oxford. He recalled that Frank's preposterous book mentioned some Oxford connection to the abbey, as had Dame Olive. Could there be nuggets of fact in Frank's fantastic tale?

And here there was yet another statue of St. Lucy. He stood looking at the painted plaster statue of the woman known as Santa Lucia in her home country. It was a depiction of a lovely young woman with curly fair hair and a faraway look in her blue eyes, a look that only the truly gifted artist could portray well. This artist had not been so blessed, but had managed nonetheless to avoid the cloying, simpering, or even demented look of most representations of saints. Max recalled now more of the detail of her legend: Lucy had indeed refused to marry a pagan man, who out of spite had turned her over to the authorities for her Christian faith. If she'd ever needed confirmation that her instincts about the guy as marriage material were correct, that had probably sealed it. She had reportedly been blinded as part of her martyrdom, and thus became the patron saint of the blind. Fortunately, the artist had chosen to forgo depicting Lucy with her eyes on a tray—a once-popular representation for an age even more ghoulish than today's.

And the quote carved under statue of St. Lucy was in English:

And Jesus said unto him, Receive thy sight, thy faith hath saved thee.

Of course, what it actually said was:

And Iesus said vnto him, Receiue thy sight, thy faith hath saued thee.

It was the King James Version of the text, and so dating after 1611. Long after the dissolution and King Henry's do-over of all things spiritual.

Another arch, another carving, all quite fresh and new, or newly refurbished:

Sanctae Luciae sanitates credentis.

St. Lucy cures the believer.

But all of this was designed to lead the eye toward the altar, behind which was a stone stairway, which from its location, Max reasoned, had to lead up to the cloistered area of Monkbury Abbey.

The crypt, which undoubtedly predated the present church, held at one end a plain altar with a simple wooden prie-dieu before it, the kneeler covered in a brightly colored needlepoint pillow. Wooden chairs were arranged in rows on either side. Enough chairs, Max gauged, for all the nuns in the small nunnery. A statue, another quite ancient representation of St. Lucy, was nearby, tucked into a side altar behind one of the vaulted arches.

This explained what the mystery person had been doing down here the day he'd had his look around the belfry. They'd been praying, or possibly the sacrist, Dame Olive, had been tidying up after a service. It was a bit unusual that in an abbey named for St. Lucy, there would be this small, hidden area of worship clearly intended in her honor. Especially since the eyesight-restoring miracle worker was well represented in the main part of the church.

But then his eye was drawn to the centerpiece of the room, the clear reason for the room's existence. It was an image in a frame, the frame suspended by a chain from the ceiling of the crypt so that it hung directly behind and above the free-standing altar.

It was a carving done in a shallow bas-relief, and it was an almost modern depiction in stone of a face. The man's eyes were closed, his face bearded. The skill of the carver allowed one to know the eyes were closed in death. The whole was set into the thick wooden frame ornamented with gold leaf and precious and semiprecious stones.

Of course, this was the treasure. Not carved in solid gold. But such men as Clement Gorey had enough gold. Clement would understand the historic value. He would also prize it for the religious value, which was incalculable.

It looked, Max realized, exactly like the face that kept reappearing on the wall of St. Edwold's. The face like that on the Shroud of Turin. The face first spotted by little Tom Hooser.

Not
almost
like. Exactly like.

And if confirmation were needed, hanging suspended by two golden chains from the bottom of the frame was a map, similarly carved in stone in bas-relief. It was a representation of the area in which he stood—that much Max could decipher, even though the names of some places were greatly altered and the topography was crude at best.

Nether Monkslip was on this map, indicated by a star.

The hair on the back of Max's neck stood on end. Nether Monkslip was miles from the Monkbury Abbey, in a part of the world dotted with dozens of little villages. Hundreds. Why would his own Nether Monkslip appear on what clearly resembled a sort of treasure map? “X” marks the spot. Or in this case, a star does. Spot for what, though?

Then he saw the labeling beneath the map that explained it all for him—or rather, added to his puzzlement.

“The Church of St. Edwold's,” it read. “The Place of Miracles.”

His eyes closed in somber reflection, his head bowed.

And when he opened his eyes, he saw that at the foot of the altar were traces of what looked suspiciously like blood.

 

Chapter 33

THE ORDERS OF THE ABBESS

The orders of the Abbess or of those appointed to act in her stead are to be followed without question.

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

“What exactly is going on down there in the crypt?”

Following his discovery, Max had walked straight over to the abbess's lodge. The postulant, Mary Benton, let him in, the smile disappearing from her face as she correctly read that he was in no mood to be asked to cool his heels.

As the abbess walked into the lodge's reception area, he asked the question uppermost in his mind. The blood, if it were blood, put a whole new spin on the case.

The abbess lost not one whit of her composure, but the heightened blush of her English rose complexion, darkening from pink to red, was the chink in her armor.

“You may recall, Father, that I told you the story of our nun found dead in the crypt?”

“Yes,” he said shortly. “I remember you telling me a story.”

“The starving nun that I told you about, who was the voluntary guardian of the crypt?”

“What precisely was she guarding?” demanded Max.

“I think you know, Father. She was guarding our greatest relic, over the centuries the source of our fame, of our prosperity. She was guarding the Face.”

“Tell me,” said Max. “Tell me the whole story.”

“I was just having some tea, Father. Please won't you join me?”

Used to being obeyed, like a queen she swept away into the lodge's dining hall, calling an order to the waiting postulant.

*   *   *

“The Handmaids of St. Lucy routinely hid ‘The Face,' as they called it,” Abbess Justina was saying, moments later. “As we call it still.”

She and Max sat at the same rough-hewn wooden table where they so recently had dined, swapping pleasantries and histories in a getting-to-know-you fashion. But Max realized that in fact, the more Abbess Justina had told him, the less she had said. The strains of the song “Smooth Operator” flitted through his mind.

“In years gone by,” she continued, “the abbess and her cellaress were often the only ones who knew about the Face. Each abbess would inherit a key to unlock a casket where the Face was kept hidden, when it needed to be hidden. They were sworn never to tell anyone, under pain of expulsion. So I didn't tell DCI Cotton.”

“Of course not,” said Max. “Why bother the police with this.”

At least she caught the sarcasm. “How could it have anything to do with murder?”

Max ignored that bit of disingenuousness for now. “They hid it whenever danger approached Monkbury Abbey, which, according to Dame Olive, it did routinely,” he prompted. “Vikings, raiders, soldiers of fortune.”

“Yes.” She took a sip of her herbal tea, calmly setting the cup back in its saucer. It was, he noted, a cup of fine china. Chipped and well-used, to be sure, but not the common pottery the nuns used for their refectory meals. “If you want a quiet life,” she added, giving him the full wattage of her charming smile, “don't ever join a monastery. It's been one thing after another here at Monkbury Abbey, through the centuries.”

“With most of the commotion centered around the Face. The push and pull of commerce, for one thing,” he said. “Yes, I do see.”

“That's right,” she said, not in the least offended. “The Face came to us in the time of the Crusades, and it saved a small struggling house, turning it into one of the magnificent showplace abbeys of its day. It was deposited here for safekeeping by a member of the Knights Templar—a son of the manor house at Nashbury Feathers.”

“An ancestor of Lord Lislelivet's, then. I see. Go on.” Could that be the connection? The reason for Lord Lislelivet's interest in the place? He might have viewed it as his property—even have sought to lay claim to it.

“It seldom was kept on open display,” she went on. “Even though it was known to have miraculous healing properties. That would have been far too dangerous. Crowd control was the biggest job of Dame Sacrist at one time. Only the prescreened were allowed to see it. Security reasons, of course.”

“Of course.” Only the wealthy would have been given access—never the rabble. It made a certain sense, but only if one believed the wealthy were honest and the poor dishonest. Or that only the rich required miracle cures. Still, there had been riots throughout the ages when rumors got started of a miraculous site or relic—a finger bone that cured cancer, a rib that cured gout, a scrap of cloth that aided women in childbirth.