A Demon Summer (46 page)

“Were the lies surrounding his birth made manifest in the man he grew to be?

“She saw less and less of him as the years passed. And perhaps she told herself everything would be all right. But then came his sudden devotion, his intense interest in his dying ‘aunt.' Maybe she also believed he was mostly after the ‘gold treasure' buried in the crypt, for that would have been in keeping with what she had grown to know of him.

“Then when he began pressing her—Had she told anyone? Whom had she told? Had she confessed? Was there any record of her confession?—I think she realized. In fact I know she suspected him. And she wrote out her confession to the affair, to the illegitimate birth, and to her suspicions about Ralph.

“He came here to kill her,” continued Max, “never knowing that she had outwitted him.

“I am very glad at least for that. She saw through him.”

Max paused and looked around the room, at all the waiting faces. Some puzzled, some concerned, and two with the look in their eyes of something very old that had caught up with them at last. The expression in those eyes was of sorrow, and relief.

Xanda again was the one who voiced the question in most of their minds.

“And his mother never knew?—I mean, Lady Lislelivet, the woman who raised him?”

“No. The woman who raised him as his mother never realized she was raising her husband's child. His hair and eye coloring were dark—like his father's, in fact—and she never looked beyond that vaguely Hispanic surface appearance. She was too elated at having a child at last to ask too many questions. Sometimes, one just does not want to face the truth. There was a family resemblance that I think she willfully ignored. A suspicion of her husband's infidelity with another woman was one thing. The sure knowledge of his infidelity? And with her own sister?
That
her mind would refuse to accept, even had such an idea occurred to her.

“And so the years passed, and one day she found herself, to her great joy and amazement, pregnant with her own child. The joy was short-lived, because that child was kidnapped—a crime that exhausted the resources of the police and of MI5. I remember the case well—as a young man I wanted so much to be a part of the investigation and was frustrated to be assigned to a different department at the time. It was
the
case every man and woman in law enforcement wanted to solve.”

“And the baby was never found? That poor woman. The poor father!” This from Oona, who seemed genuinely distressed. A mother's heart, imagining what that worry would have been like, what the loss of this small and much-longed-for child would have been like. Max warmed to Oona for the first time.

Max thought of his own unborn child, his and Awena's, and the anguish he would feel in similar circumstances, and he thanked God the child would never be a vulnerable target the way Lord and Lady Lislelivet's child had been a target. He or she would be an ordinary child—at least in the eyes of the world, ordinary—never to be exposed to vultures as this young innocent had been.

He shook his head. “Not a trace was ever found, no. The kidnappers were thugs like the Lindbergh kidnappers, but they had probably learned from the mistakes of the original kidnappers, too. The ransom money was picked up, but the baby was never returned. The chances were great that the child was already dead, as is nearly always the case, sadly. And its father and mother, after weeks of worry and anguish, just collapsed from grief.”

“The father had a stroke and lingered a short while,” said Dr. Barnard. “The mother died of a heart attack. But there was not a doctor in the world who would not blame their breakdown on grief.”

Max nodded, locking eyes with the doctor. “However, they did not die before everyone associated with that house was dispersed, in a spurt of fury by the fourteenth earl. The gardener, the maids, the cooks—and of course, the nanny. Everyone leaving under a cloud of suspicion. He couldn't stand to have any one of them around. You can sort of see his point. The man was driven to the edge.

“But the saddest story of all was the butler. After repeated questioning by the authorities, who became convinced he had deliberately left a window unlocked to aid the kidnappers, the poor man shot himself. There is to this day no evidence he had anything to do with it, or even that he was the one who left the window unlocked. But he cracked under the strain, and the certain knowledge his career, in which he took immense pride, was over.

“So, there you have it. Is it a coincidence the nanny would end up in the same convent as the birth mother of Lord Lislelivet? Not at all. Consider the fame of this nunnery, and its proximity and long historical ties to the manor house where all these sad events took place.”

He looked at Dame Petronilla as he said this. She shut her eyes tightly as if the dim light in the room were too harsh, and he thought he saw a nearly imperceptible nod. So many years of carrying that burden of grief and guilt, thought Max. How wrong, wrong,
wrong
it all was.

“So who killed Lord Lislelivet?” said Oona. “Was it some sort of conspiracy?”

Max answered obliquely. “Dame Meredith could easily have drugged him to render him weak and helpless—she had access, there in the infirmary, and knowledge. All the nuns have some knowledge of ‘nature's remedies.'

“But I think it was Dame Petronilla, the real expert on plant poisons, who had a hand in this.” He made the statement and waited. She would not meet his eyes, so he said, gently, “When the motive is love, there is no force stronger. How far would you go to protect a loved one? To avenge the harm done to them?”

“But, why?” asked Xanda.

But Dame Petronilla answered, “Because, child, I loved him once. I love him still.”

“Pet, don't—”

“No,” she said to Dr. Barnard. “It's over.”

 

Chapter 38

TIES THAT BIND

Detachment is all.

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

“I saw Lord Lislelivet by chance when he visited the monastery,” began Dame Petronilla. “Normally my duties keep me in the infirmary, separate from the main compound. And in choir, our view of visitors is deliberately cut off by the screen. So I don't see the guests as a rule, even at meals—they are seated apart, as you know, and more often than not when I have a patient I take my meals privately in the infirmary.

“But on this day, I was free. Dame Meredith was in hospital receiving treatment and, God be praised, all the other sisters were in good health. So I had all day to work in the herb garden. I was in heaven.

“And then he came wandering by. While I knew
someone
from the peerage was staying with us, for the abbess announces the weekend's visitors in the chapter meeting, I never expected Lord Lislelivet—the man I knew as plain old Ralph Perceval. Of course, he was the sort of man to use his title from the moment he came into it, and on every occasion. But on seeing him, I recognized who it was right away.

“He, of course, did not recognize me, had no need to, for I wasn't important then or now. I was the hired help. He never visited the nursery and never set eyes on me except in a grainy, long-shot newspaper photograph or two from the time. And in any event the years and the habit and the lack of makeup made me, I daresay, unrecognizable from the woman I was back then. I had been a redhead then. But when I saw him I quickly pulled the cowl over my head and moved away before he could see me plainly.”

“Everything about your persona had changed with the years, I daresay,” said Max.

She nodded. “We leave everything about our old lives behind. Or we try to. We try very hard…”

“So you called Dr. Barnard. And you told him that by some unthought-of, unlooked-for chance, Lord Lislelivet—Ralph Perceval—was at Monkbury Abbey. The man who had falsely accused not only you but many others, derailing careers and causing a suicide, a man who for the most purely evil motives had altered the course of all your lives.”

She nodded. “Perhaps … perhaps if you had known the butler—his name was Phil Jamison—if you had known him you would have known what a tragedy atop a tragedy his death was. He was simply the nicest man. Leroy—Dr. Barnard—and I were just devastated when he killed himself. We both came undone. He was going to be best man at our wedding. He was so dear, so excited about it—do you remember?” She turned toward the doctor, her eyes welling with tears as they sought his. Her voice caught as she tried to continue; they all waited quietly. The only sound to be heard, coming from the open window, was the lazy droning of the bees, cruising from flower to flower. “On top of everything else,” she said, “it was too much to bear. And when he died, the press was so cruel. ‘The Butler Did It!'—that was too easy a joke for simple minds not to make a play on it.”

Max prompted her, “So you called Dr. Barnard.”

“Yes. I called him from the cellaress's office.”

“And you told him to get out to Monkbury Abbey as soon as he could, on whatever pretext.”

“Yes. I simply—” She turned to the abbess, her handsome face now haggard, the picture of distress. “I know how utterly and completely wrong I was in all of this, Abbess. I have broken so many rules. I, who was committed to comfort and healing—that I should have stooped to this. I am deeply, deeply sorry. For all of it.” Max knew she must be reliving the disgrace of those days, the shame she had been made to feel by unthinking persecutors who told themselves they were simply doing their jobs. And he was sorry for it.

“Tell us everything you know, Dame Pet,” said Abbess Justina. Relief showed on the infirmaress's face at the use of the nickname, at the compassion and implied forgiveness. “We will worry about what to do about all of it later. Right now it is more important that the whole truth come out.”

Max, picking up the thread of her story, said, “The phone call brought the doctor out here. Of course, he would move heaven and earth for you, wouldn't he? But maybe you only wanted to talk, perhaps to have your sighting confirmed, to speculate on what could have brought your mutual, mortal enemy, the former Ralph Perceval, here. He could, after all, have come looking for you, for some obscure reason of his own.

“But Dr. Barnard thought he knew what brought him here. And that gave him an idea.”

The pair exchanged glances.

“Or was it you, Dame Petronilla, who had the idea? I think perhaps it was, since you knew about the icon. That it was real. And you told the doctor. And no doubt like you, Dr. Barnard saw a way to get what he had long wanted more than anything in this life: a confession—even an apology. Ridiculous hope, that, but it seemed a heaven-sent situation. Dr. Barnard would promise his enemy secret access to the icon, dangling this precious artifact before the eyes of Lord Lislelivet in exchange for the truth of what had happened to that poor child that fateful night. He wanted above anything the admission of the elder brother's participation in that nefarious scheme. I am perhaps giving you too much the benefit of the doubt, but isn't that what you had in mind, Dr. Barnard? To extract the truth from him, promising your silence, in exchange for your revelation of where the icon was hidden?”

Dr. Barnard, staring at his folded hands with their white knuckles, would not answer.

“I prefer to believe that is how it happened,” said Max softly. “At least, at first, wasn't that the plan? Of course, you could not know that the icon was not really uppermost in his mind. You could not know his real and deeply wicked reason for being at Monkbury Abbey.”

Dr. Barnard would not look up, perhaps unwilling just yet to seize the lifeline Max was trying to throw his way.

“He must have laughed at you. I would imagine that is what he would do. You had it all so wrong. And it was such a hopeless idea, idealistic in the extreme, to try to make a pact with a demon like Lord Lislelivet. But perhaps the chance to bargain, to use this one bargaining chip you had, blinded you to the fact that you were dealing with a man so dishonest that he would never allow you to walk away, knowing the truth. Perhaps you struggled, and in the struggle he was killed?”

“No,” Dr. Barnard said simply.

“Is that what happened, Dr. Barnard?” Max persisted. “Because otherwise, I have to believe you came here to murder cold-bloodedly the man who had ruined your life and the life of your beloved. The man who had in fact taken away the blissful union you had planned to have together. The children you might have had, the house and home. Not to mention the career that had been derailed by this man who dared put himself above all the rest of us. Who had achieved the pinnacle of respectable society by having had kidnapped, and possibly having had killed, his own half-brother.”

“You must leave her out of this,” said Dr. Barnard, his voice ragged with urgency.

“Would that I could,” said Max. “Once she had tipped you off that Lord Lislelivet was here, how could thoughts of revenge not inevitably follow? You'd be less than human had such thoughts not flitted through your mind. Perhaps she begged you to do nothing. But she did agree to admit you to the grounds by leaving the black door over the river unlocked or by admitting you herself. I might believe you if you said you told her only that you had a plan to expose Lord Lislelivet, to wring a confession from him, but that was only to gain her cooperation in this scheme. You wanted most of all to be sure no blame would attach to Dame Petronilla.”

“I—” she began.

“No,” the doctor interrupted. “Say nothing. Please, say nothing more.”

“How could you not know what was in his heart?” Max asked her.

She did not reply, studying her tightly folded hands. Max had the impression she did not herself know the answer.

Barnard said, “She knew nothing of my plans, I tell you.”

Max waited, looking patiently to her for an answer. Finally she turned to Max and said, “I thought we could expose him for the horrible fraud he was. I knew Lord Lislelivet had some financial motive or other in being here—he worshipped no god but mammon. It was also certain that whatever light of publicity he chose to shine on the abbey, it would be to the detriment of our peace here and to the advancement of his own career. I didn't think he was above stealing the Mandylion if he thought it was worth a lot. Fortunately, the rumors of its being pure gold were false. The value was in its antiquity, its—its very mysteriousness and rarity. Its possible holiness. And its newfound ‘celebrity,' if I may use the term, brought about by that silly book.”