A Demon Summer (44 page)

Max smiled his benign and patient smile. “Belief is a miracle worker, no question about it. The placebo effect is always quite real.”

“It is real
in and of itself
,” insisted Dame Sibil. Obviously taking up a cudgel that had been used many times before, she turned to the abbess and said, “And it is wrong of us to hide it.”

“Sisters, we must leave that for another day,” said Max. “Only indirectly does it have anything to do with the murder. Now, where was I? Yes: renovations and groundbreaking on the new guesthouse are delayed, while the abbess pretends there is resistance among the nuns and among the villagers to the modern plans for the building. While the abbess and Dame Sibil, in particular, debate what to do about the find. How much to tell the world, if anything.”

Abbess Justina looked suitably abashed at her part in this cover-up, as well she might. She was not the first nor the last person, thought Max, to overstep her authority, telling herself she was acting for the greater good. No doubt she felt she was protecting the integrity of the nunnery, of its great standing in the history of the region. No doubt she was. And no doubt she was concealing the truth not only from donors, but from the bishop—definitely forbidden.

“Then of course,” said Max, “to add to this mix, we had Lord Lislelivet's sudden interest in all things holy, an interest that given his character we assumed could only be finance-based. He joined a crowd of other people whose real interest in the abbey lay not in its holiness.

“Paloma Green was here to protect her involvement in the fund-raising scheme that entangled the Goreys and others: a significant amount of the money raised at her fancy fund-raiser appears to be missing. Paloma had suffered a scandal recently in which the provenance of one of her acquisitions was questioned—an old religious icon from Russia. It turned out to have been stolen years before from a church. So she couldn't have another scandal following so soon on the heels of the last, and the donors who bought paintings and photographs from her shop were starting to ask awkward questions. Like the Goreys, Paloma wanted to know where the money went.

“Piers Montague was here for much the same reason—it was his donated photos that were auctioned off and he wanted to know that the money went where he was told it would go. Beyond that, he was here on a treasure hunt with Mary Benton.

“This case had more than a few layers of greed. There was a monetary motive in connection with the Goreys, the Americans.” As Clement Gorey looked set to protest, Max held up a forestalling hand. “But it was not greed so much in their case. It was more of an honest bafflement about where their money had gone, if not into the new guesthouse. And an interest in the Face, to be sure.

“Again, in the case of Paloma Green, it was not greed so much as the fact her gallery's reputation was on the line.”

“Thanks very much,” she said. “And too right, too. As I told you already, I organized the fund-raiser. Piers and I both had a lot at stake.”

“Your gallery couldn't take another blow right now,” Max nodded. “And Piers had even more at stake than you knew.”

Piers shrugged noncommittally, but he turned his full attention to Max now, hanging on his words as if to memorize them.

“Was it a sort of lust for the icon that brought Lord Lislelivet here?” Max went on. “He said it was to see his aunt, but he was always snooping around the place, so we assume, knowing something of his nature, that the desire to own—to steal—this most rare artifact brought him here.

“But what if that weren't the whole story? Even more to the point: what if he were telling the truth for once, or part of the truth—that he was here to see Dame Meredith?”

They all exchanged puzzled glances.

“I have told you this was a tale with themes of greed and revenge.

“But there was yet a third motive—the most powerful motive in the world.

“And that motive was love.

“Lord Lislelivet came here to see Dame Meredith, to be sure. He was summoned here, in a letter she wrote him. But Dame Meredith was not his aunt.”

“So, who was she?” Paloma asked.

Max turned to a certain face in the audience.

And looked across the room, to a second face.

“She was his mother.”

There was rather a shocked recoil at this. Max gave them a moment to absorb the implications.

“Lord Lislelivet was the natural son of Dame Meredith. And Dame Meredith, knowing she hadn't long to live, wanted to tell the truth at the last, to clear her conscience. She was set to ‘spill the beans' to Lord Lislelivet about his true provenance—how he came to be in this world. How she was his mother.

“Worse, from his point of view, she wanted to tell everyone affected by his birth the truth. To set things right, before she went to meet her maker. She had a tremendous need to unburden herself, having carried this secret too long.

“But what she didn't know was that the person she ‘confessed' to initially in order to ‘do the right thing'—her own son, a man who was her own flesh and blood, mind—was an avaricious, unfeeling monster. She had summoned him to her bedside, and he had arrived knowing full well what the subject of their discussion would be. He knew this because his own father had told him the truth and had sworn him to secrecy. And Lord Lislelivet, being the sort of man he was, had come prepared to make sure Dame Meredith wouldn't—or couldn't—tell the truth to ease her conscience. Because the truth would mean he was not the legitimate heir to his father's estate and fortune. According to a formula used by the family since the dawn of time, only males of the legitimate bloodline could inherit. Illegitimate children, and I gather there were dozens of those over the years, could not inherit. Female heirs were always left out in the cold. Funny how no one had a problem with that except, presumably, the females concerned. The true motive for Lord Lislelivet was less about the icon than about covering up the fact that Dame Meredith—his aunt—was in fact his mother. And that he was the product of an illicit liaison between his biological father and the woman who had been Meredith Fitzwilliam in her former life, before she became a nun.”

There were several shocked intakes of breath at this, several hands that flew to cover mouths fallen open in amazement. Even nuns long schooled in serenity and calm were too shaken by this revelation not to let it show. This was their own quiet Dame Meredith who had dwelt with many of them for years, for decades. This would take some getting used to.

Max went on. “Meredith Fitzwilliam was the younger of the two Fitzwilliam sisters. Her sister married but it seemed she could not have children. The terrible irony was that Meredith's affair with her sister's husband produced a son. The longed-for son to inherit the title. But the problem of course was that it was an illegitimate child.

“So after much anxiety and unhappiness on the part of the father, he hits upon a scheme: since the child is his own, and he sees no reason why it shouldn't inherit, he persuades Meredith not to give the child up for open adoption, but to allow himself and his wife to raise the child as their own. There is one catch, and that is that Meredith must never name him as the father. Of course, to protect her sister, she agrees to keep this secret. She has many a chance to regret it, but keep her promise she does.

“She doesn't agree because there is money riding on it, but because she knows how much her sister wants a child. Guilt no doubt played a huge role here. And so she went abroad somewhere, and when she had given birth, her sister and brother-in-law—”

“Adopted it.” Xanda cut into his narrative. “Adopted the baby. Wow. It's like something out of Dickens.”

“Not adopted, no,” said Max. “Not in the legal sense you mean. To the world, the child is presented as the natural child of Lord and Lady Lislelivet. Not the
adopted
child, but the natural one.”

“But how—?”

“Lady Lislelivet, the sister of Meredith, simply went away with her husband on a long tour of Europe and the Middle East. She returned with a child. No one questioned it. Why would they?

“Had the woman who raised Lord Lislelivet been duped—or had she chosen to believe what she wanted to believe, as people so often do? That her husband was guilty of such a monstrous fraud would have been difficult to accept, perhaps especially when a much-wanted child was offered to fill what she felt was a void in her life.

“The thin ice of a marriage such as theirs might require a suspension of disbelief—a refusal to look down, knowing how fatal that look might be.

“Apart from the longing of Lady Lislelivet for a child, the question has to be why the elaborate deception was needed. And the answer is the child's grandfather. He had been despondent at not having an heir, and this seemed like a godsend. He was not, of course, to be made aware that the child was not legitimate.

“Meredith takes the veil soon afterward, and her sister—who doesn't know the awful truth, that her husband is the father of the child—thinks only that Meredith got in trouble and she, Lady Lislelivet, is helping her out.

“Time passes. And the more it passes, the more Dame Meredith wants to spill the beans on this setup. Not just because of her guilt at the part she played—deceiving her sister, denying her own child—but because of the way this son was turning out. She saw when he visited over the years, as a child, and a young man, how he had become corrupted by this wealth. She came to see the money as evil, even as a sort of punishment. She had sinned with the child's father and here standing before her was the sorry result. Might he have been a more worthwhile human being had she raised him herself? These were the kinds of questions with which she tormented herself.”

“What would have happened to the estate if the ruse had been discovered?” asked Oona Gorey.

“That is a very good question, for it cuts to the heart of the matter. The estate would pass to an heir of the Montague family.

“To Piers Montague, to be precise.”

“You are
joking
,” said Piers. “You must be joking.”

Max shook his head. “This subterfuge took place for the silliest of reasons—the Montague family was considered ‘common' and decadent, and they did not want Piers, the only viable candidate, the nearest legitimate, blood heir, to inherit the stately home and all that went with it. It was thought he would never amount to anything and would waste the inheritance.”

Max turned to a dumbstruck Piers. The hand that had been poised to smooth back his hair had stopped midair, and he seemed not to realize it. “I am sorry at the way this sounds,” said Max. “I am only describing how Lord Lislelivet—father and son—thought about the situation.

“So Ralph Perceval succeeds in due course to the title and the estate, becoming the fifteenth earl of Lislelivet. But that is just the beginning. I know many of you remember the famous kidnapping case out of Nashbury Feathers.”

“Of course,” said Clement Gorey. “It was tabloid fodder for ages. Dozens of books have been written about it.”

Max nodded. “The baby who was the only legitimate heir to the title—although no one apart from his father realized it at the time—was kidnapped. The younger brother who was a late and unexpected arrival when Ralph (let's call him Ralph, for clarity)—when Ralph was twenty. Ralph had this baby kidnapped. Ralph knew the sort of people who would do that for the price of a meal, let alone for a handsome fee.”

“How can you possibly know about this?” demanded Piers.

“Stay with me,” said Max, resuming his narrative: “Why the kidnapping? Again, the title and attendant properties had to go to legitimate offspring only. The remaining
legitimate
heir would be Piers, a distant relative—a cousin thrice removed or something of that sort. And Meredith, dying, knows this, and summons Piers to the nunnery.”

Paloma looked at Piers. “You didn't tell me?”

“Frankly, I thought she was batty. She didn't say anything about any inheritance. She just sent a message, asking me if I would come and see her ‘to discuss a matter to my advantage.' It was a tremendously old-fashioned summons, and I was intrigued.”

Max pictured the dying nun, drugged on a dozen medications, penning the fatal, melodramatic summons. How was she to know it would lead to murder?

He said, “Ralph comes to hear of the cryptic summons via the letter Dame Meredith sent
him
, knows full well what it is about, and races to Monkbury Abbey, despite the poisoning attempt—to do whatever it takes to keep Piers in the dark about his inheritance. Kill Piers or kill Meredith. Or both. Ralph may even, in a state of heightened paranoia, have associated the poisoning attempt with an effort to get him out of the picture so Piers could inherit.”

“How do you know all this?” demanded Abbess Justina.

Max reached inside his jacket and pulled out a thin sheaf of onionskin paper, covered from side to side in small, spidery handwriting.

“This is the handwritten testimony of Dame Meredith Fitzwilliam. It is what she herself calls her dying confession. She wanted the truth to come out, before the entire world. In this document she tells of the events that brought her here. Of the guilt that tormented her, making her conscience work overtime. Her ‘sin' was nothing new: that of conceiving a child out of wedlock and giving it over to be raised by her own sister. That her sister had no idea the child was her husband's—that was what Dame Meredith could not forgive herself for.

“The cover-up was not that unusual, either: many grand families have gone to great lengths to keep their estates and bloodlines intact. What was unusual was the level of deception. That is what Dame Meredith berates herself for the most: that she betrayed her own sister with this illicit liaison and then compounded the error with this monstrous substitution and all the lies that attended on it.”