Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel) (3 page)

Rushing now,

Your loving Gabby xox

Writers’ Square

Thursday, March 22, 7:15
P.M.

Later that same evening, Adam Birch was telling his fellow members of the Writers’ Square the story of Nunswood, the thicket near the ancient menhirs up on Hawk Crest, and how it came by its name. He held the legal pad on which he had been writing all that afternoon, clutching his pen tightly in his fist like a child learning to write, a picture of concentration as the words had spilled from the pen.

“They say the nun was a ‘real’ sister of one of the monks at the abbey—his blood relative, you see—and she passed through Nether Monkslip with a group of nuns on their way to found a nunnery near Temple Monkslip. The legend is she’s buried on Hawk Crest, with its steep, winding path leading to the top—buried at a secret location within Nunswood. Her grave is rumored to be not far from the menhirs, near the healing spring.”

“Not quite healing enough, then, was it?” said Suzanna. “If she died, I mean.”

“They say she was murdered,” said Adam. “There’s no cure for being murdered.”

The members of the Writers’ Square sat in one of the many homey nooks of Adam’s bookshop, The Onlie Begetter, where stacks of old books were used as table legs, and coffee-table books were used as tables, lending a new meaning to the term. They gathered around a real table, a square wooden one—a coffee table scattered with pens and notebooks and novels and magazines, and illuminated by two Tiffany-style lamps and by the golden, cozy glow of the fireplace. The shop, offering both new and “antiquarian” books, featured a stained-glass window of Saint Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writing. Local antiquarian Noah had rescued the ancient find from a church scheduled for demolition.

The Writers’ Square group had been named after
much
heated discussion, and in the end took its name from the square table they used for their meetings. Besides, it sounded so much more avant-garde than “Writers’ Circle.” They were determined, Frank in particular, to be avant-garde if at all possible.

Adam had been unusually busy that day, as the deadline loomed for the monthly magazine he used to promote his shop; he wrote it all himself, and set the pages using the desktop publishing software that had come bundled with his computer. Suzanna often was heard to remark that it looked as if the layout had been done by a man wearing sunglasses in a darkened, windowless room, with crooked columns of text unevenly spaced, sentences that mysteriously disappeared in mid-flow, and uncaptioned photos having no evident bearing on the topic at hand. A review of the latest legal thriller, for example, might be illustrated by a photo of a wild boar. It was called the
Village Voice
and it was hugely popular amongst the habitués of the Hidden Fox, the Cavalier, and the Horseshoe.

Waiting for Adam to put out the
CLOSED
sign on the shop door, Suzanna Winship and Elka Garth had poured themselves coffee in the shop’s little kitchen alcove.

“Have you been to Cut and Dried since Gabby started working there?”

Suzanna shook her head.

“You should give her a try,” said Elka. “She’s very trendy.”

“Since when is blue hair trendy?”

“Well, her own hair
is
bluish, but that’s just her style. It’s that white so white, it looks blue in certain lights—very flattering. She’s really good at sizing you up.”

Suzanna leveled a gaze out of her chocolate brown eyes. “No one is good at sizing me up.” She examined one manicured hand. “Many are called; few are chosen. That place is like something out of Miss Pitchford’s day—she who, by the way, would call it ‘the hairdresser’s.’ These days, except for an emergency updo, I go to Alfonse at the Do or Dye in Monkslip-super-Mare.”

“You should try Gabby,” Elka repeated. “Remember when I tried to cut my own fringe a few weeks ago? I looked like I’d had my head half chewed off by a wild animal. Gabby’s the one who fixed it. Free of charge.” She fluffed out the hair now lightly feathered across her forehead. “She’s ever so good.”

Suzanna eyed her critically. Apart from the half-inch outgrowth of white root showing skunklike at the part, Elka’s hair was showing vast improvement lately. Elka worked long hours, seldom taking time out for herself. She even looked as though she might have dropped half a stone from around her middle. She was wearing her jumper turned inside out, and one of her hoop earrings was on backward, but even so …

“We’ll see.” Suzanna, in jeggings, heels, and an oversized cashmere jumper, settled against the cushions on one of the sofas. “But Alfonse is just getting used to me. It’s hard to make a change. One feels one is being unfaithful somehow.”

“Oh, I do know what you mean. It’s like a divorce, isn’t it? You simply—”

Frank Cuthbert had sat quietly throughout this discussion in an overstuffed chair by the fireplace, scanning his notes and sipping his glass of red wine. He wore rose-tinted glasses and a turtleneck under his tweed sports jacket, and his bristly white beard and hair had gone uncombed in his haste not to be late for the meeting. He looked like a bereted woodland creature emerging from the brambles after some sort of massive literary struggle for survival. Sadie, his bichon frise, lay somnolently at his feet, nose buried in her paws.

“Ladies, if you wouldn’t mind…” he interrupted importantly, as Adam joined them. “Your pages?”

Pages
was a professional term Frank had heard used somewhere. He liked tossing it into the conversation, along with the word
script,
which he condescendingly had explained to the group was short for
manuscript.

Suzanna took a seat and began leafing through a copy of
Write What You Know
magazine. “There’s an ad in here for a ‘Certified Poetry Therapist,’” she said, briefly turning the open magazine so they all could see. “I never heard of such a thing, have you? What next, a comic book therapist?” She held the periodical at arm’s length, reading aloud. “‘Poetry can be a powerful tool for unleashing secret healing and creative forces in the psyche.’”

“You can be certified to do that?” asked Elka.

“I think one had probably better be, don’t you? I wouldn’t want amateurs probing around
my
psyche.”

“I’m sure that’s all well and good for some,” said Frank brusquely. “But poetry is beyond the realm of our expertise in this group. Now, ladies, if I could just—”

“I don’t think you need expertise. I think you only need a heart,” said Elka earnestly.

“If having a heart were the only qualification, we’d all be famous,” said Frank.

Elka hesitated. “I was encouraging Gabby to join us, you see. She told me she writes poetry sometimes.”

Frank was hugely reluctant. “We’d have to put it to a vote.”

“There are only four of us, with Awena gone.” Awena, always a leavening influence, was absent because of her class at Denman College. With the group’s encouragement, she was writing a book that encompassed her philosophy, her seasonal tips, her recipes, and her herbal remedies. Suzanna was predicting an Oprah endorsement. “We’d need a tiebreaker,” said Elka. “As you know, we’ve had some attrition lately … the Major.”

The Major lived alone now, surrounded by Benares brass, his retirement activities supervised with languid contempt by a Persian cat. He had dropped out of the group some time ago, as he found writing interfered with his golf game. He had been working on a military history of the world and had found this to be a mushrooming project. But the chapters he had shared with the group, characterized as they were by sweeping yet achingly dull summaries of historic events, would remain with them forever, as Suzanna had observed.

Similarly, Melinda Bottle, not long ago arrived in Nether Monkslip, had participated in the group when it had met on Saturdays, although
participated
might be too strong a term, since she seemed to have only a nodding acquaintance with the written word. She once submitted for the group’s consideration an index card containing a home recipe for an avocado face mask. Elka had correctly surmised that the group meetings were an excuse for Melinda to get out of the house and away from her husband, who was reputed to be somewhat of a tyrant.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Suzanna, after some further discussion. “If Elka vouches for Gabby, that’s good enough for me. A poet would provide a nice sort of balance.”

Adam now picked up his legal pad to continue his read-aloud. The Writers’ Square did not exist, as it might first appear, as an arena for its members to get on one another’s nerves. These budding authors were, for the most part, extremely gentle with one another’s creations. Anything that seemed to imply criticism generally came from one source, and that source was similarly accepted (for the most part) as just being true to itself.

“You don’t feel,” said Suzanna, when Adam had stopped to draw breath, “that the phrase ‘blue as the sky’ has been just a tad overused in describing the color of someone’s eyes?”

“Yes, yes,” said Adam. “I rather thought so, too. But it’s deucedly hard to describe eyes, when you think about it. How would you have handled it?”

“I would have said her eyes were blue,” answered Suzanna.

“And you call yourself a romance writer?” asked Frank.

“I take your point,” said Suzanna. “Steamy blue eyes, then. My hero has steamy blue eyes, but go ahead and borrow that if you like.”

“But you can’t—” began Elka.

“What can’t I?”

“Your hero is already steaming quite a lot, from what I’ve read of your book. He steams and smolders throughout. I would use another word for his eyes.”

Suzanna gave this some thought.

“Moldering, then.”

“Is that a word?”

“Yes. It means disintegrating,” Adam said. “I don’t quite think that’s the word you want in this instance.”

And so it went, throughout the long evening, a perfect illustration of why so little actual writing got done in the Writers’ Square.

*

“‘And on winter nights,’” Adam read, “‘when the wind is heard in the trees, it is her voice calling for her lover, whom in life she darest not name.’”

They were all nicely settled into the session now, coffee cups or wineglasses full, and eyes bright, in the case of Suzanna and Frank, like owls on the alert for stray field mice or, in Frank’s case, the stray comma. Adam flipped over another page of his pad and cleared his throat. The brown cardigan he wore in the shop as a sort of dust jacket had been replaced, in deference to the cool weather and the bookish occasion, with a fisherman’s knit jumper and a wool scarf looped artfully around his neck. In summer, it would be a Hawaiian shirt, his trousers held up with striped braces. Befitting his profession, Adam had a domed Shakespearean forehead, basset-hound eyes, and a quiet, scholarly manner. He had been amicably divorced for many years and seemed untouched by the general downturn in the book trade. He went to book sales and had uncovered a few gems, relying on instinct as much as knowledge. He sold mostly through an online presence these days, but he was a book lover to his fingertips and too often couldn’t bear to part with his signed treasures.

Adam had set aside the other novel he’d been writing for years, having given up on a creation in which the literary world had shown either no interest or an active dislike. It had been a modern novel, experimental—so much so as to be incomprehensible. Suzanna described it as the written equivalent of a whistle only dogs could hear. Now he was writing something “popular,” and was thinking of calling it
A Death in Nunswood.

“‘And now she lives the life beyond the veil, the veil we darest not pierce.’” Adjusting his rimless spectacles, Adam peered about the group, to see how they were taking this. “Future generations have called the spot haunted, and on All Hallows’ Eve, few darest approach Nunswood at night.”

It was all too much for Suzanna. From where she sat on the overstuffed chintz-covered sofa, feet tucked beneath her, she drawled, “Adam, darest I interrupt you to ask whether
darest
is a word?” She turned inquiringly toward Frank, their resident pedant. “I don’t think
darest
is a word, do you?”

Frank pulled thoughtfully at his beard. “It
was
a word at one time.”

“So was
codpiece,
” said Suzanna. “Unless we’re writing a historical novel about the Cultural Revolution of Henry the Eighth, I don’t think we need to revive the worst of the old language.”

“It is Poetry,” said Adam. The uppercase
P
was clearly implied. “I am using Poetic License.” Ditto the
L.

“It’s a word if it has letters,” said Frank. Suzanna looked at him, for once not quite knowing what to say.

“DKNY has letters,” said Elka Garth doubtfully. Elka was writing a cookbook, a collection of baking recipes. She was hamstrung by the fact that her methods and measurements were intuitive, honed over years of operating the Cavalier Tea Room. She could eyeball with scientific precision how much flour to pour into the “big chipped yellow bowl,” for example, but she had had trouble translating this into grams.

“Hmm,” said Frank and Suzanna together.

“Let Adam go on,” suggested Elka. “I like this story.”

Adam, a gentle soul, his petals easily crushed, looked gratefully at Elka, his brown eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses.

“Go on,” said Suzanna, but in a low voice. “It might cure my insomnia.”

“Is there really a magical spring where a murder was committed?” asked Elka. “Formed at the spot where the nun’s blood was shed?”

“That depends on who you darest ask,” replied Suzanna.

“Whom,” corrected Frank automatically.

“What?” said Suzanna.

“That depends on
whom
you ask,” said Frank.

“
Real
ly?” Suzanna managed to pack quite a bit of feeling into the two syllables. “Then I’ll ask the right person next time,” she said. “And the spring,” she continued, turning away from Frank, the Grammar Czar, “has been around since anyone can remember. It used to be called ‘Blood Spring.’ Still is, by some of the village wrinklies. Its healing properties have been well known for centuries.”