Wicked Autumn (6 page)

“I admit her techniques are a bit … draconian, at times.”

“May the gods defend us,” said Awena solemnly, “from the energetic ‘do-gooder.’” She shook out a fold in her skirt; the light caught the sparkle of gold thread in the weave. “If she’d confine it to the constant nagging and wheedling, I could cope,” she added. “What I cannot abide is when wheedling is abandoned in favor of more direct devices, like threats, intimidation, and humiliation.”

“Under what conditions, one wonders, and in what kind of home, was the woman raised?”

“I would wonder that, if I had time, and a shred of compassion left. You are too forgiving, Vicar.”

“I’m not, as a matter of fact,” he said, thinking fleetingly of his days undercover when he had ruthlessly tamped down any such dangerous emotion, “but remember that it’s in the job description—forgiveness.”

She looked at him levelly: at the attractive crinkle of lines around his slightly downturned eyes, at the normally good-humored curve of his mouth with its lopsided, roguish grin. It was the roguishness of the grin that nearly did for the women of the village, she reflected.

“There hasn’t been such a kerfuffle,” said Awena, giving up on Mrs. Hooser’s boiled coffee and putting the cup well aside, “since Ben Standon’s goat ran amok during the Blessing of the Animals five years ago. It’s been the talk over at the Cavalier for weeks now. Wanda, I mean.”

Max thought of the Cavalier as the start of many a barium meal—an MI5 expression for starting a false rumor so its path could be traced. But in this case the rumors were probably based in fact. Wanda could be a handful.

“You really must have a word with her,” Awena continued. “I think she’d listen to you. You may be the only one she’d listen to.”

He considered inviting Wanda to the vicarage for a chat, a prospect that held all the appeal of being coated with honey and tied to an anthill. He acknowledged his own cowardice without an inward blush. He had faced down drug-addled criminals bent on revenge, or simply high on their own malevolence, but a representative from the Women’s Institute in full flood was more terrifying, particularly this representative. He thought over what little he knew of Wanda, what leverage there might be in personal data. He really only knew the gossip: she and her husband the Major had one son to whom they routinely sent money, whether as a bribe to stay away or an incentive to return home was not clear. In any event, the son was said to have made no appearance in the village since his eighteenth birthday—close to fifteen years hence. This was somehow tied up in Max’s mind with Elka Garth and her son, but he couldn’t have said why.

Apart from his personal feelings of inability to deal with this particular crisis was the practical question of how to get Wanda inside the vicarage undetected. Mrs. Hooser had conceived a violent dislike of her, and on the occasion of Wanda’s last visit (a complaint about the sermon) had made such a commotion in the kitchen with the pots and pans he daren’t, he felt, repeat the experiment. Although Mrs. Hooser was a diabolical cook and slapdash cleaner at best, it was not as if he were spoiled for choice in the village. Well-trained daily help was courted assiduously and, once won over, shamelessly coddled by the homeowners of Nether Monkslip. He paid Mrs. Hooser what little he could afford, and tipped her even when some days it seemed to him the financial arrangement should be reversed.

“Don’t you have some magic potion or other you can spray on her?” he asked, goaded into uncharacteristic exasperation. “Some ritual you can perform?”

“Don’t you?”

“I mean, why me? I hardly am holding the whip hand here.”

Max found that, as so often happened, he was being catapulted into the role of diplomat, mediator, and pourer of oil on troubled waters. As much as he wanted to take sides, he knew that in what was essentially an unimportant clashing of egos (or so he told himself at the time), he would be unwise in the extreme to be seen to intervene or to support one side over the other. In a case of moral certainty, he felt later, he would have known that intervention was the only choice. But this seemed trivial—one of those instances where his focusing attention on it would give it more importance than it was due. Best to let it blow over. He said this last aloud.

Awena sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

“I’m sorry, Awena, but—”

“And you are quite right, of course.” She dusted crumbs from a sampled and discarded biscuit off her lap. Really, it was a wonder Mrs. Hooser hadn’t accidentally poisoned the poor man. “It’s just that that bloody woman does get up my nose. I guess I just wanted someone to listen while I let off some steam.”

He didn’t feel he could mention this to Awena, but there was a further reason that prevented Max from weighing in. In his prior dealings with Wanda, she had turned on him, quite unprovoked, a heavy-handed coquettishness, smiling a fearsome smile and waving a perfumed handkerchief about like the fading star of some forties film. It was so at odds with her usual sergeant-major approach to life and leadership as to be quite unsettling, making him doubt her sanity.

Awena paused in petting the dog, who was leaning heavily against her knee.

“Thea,” she said, gazing into the sherry-colored eyes. “What a beauty she is. Short for Theadora?”

“No—just Thea.”

“Ah. It means ‘goddess,’ you know. Which is kind of funny, when you think about it.”

Max grinned. “I know. She came with the name and it just suited her somehow. No question
she
agrees it suits her.”

He had not had a pet since childhood; the unpredictable schedule of his former life had not permitted it. Nearly his first act on arriving in Nether Monkslip had been to adopt the young Thea, he supposed in some outward display of his desire for normalcy, for routine.

“Anyway,” Awena said, revisiting her previous refrain, “I still think Wanda might listen to you. In fact, I think you’re the only one who could penetrate that almighty, know-everything façade.”

Max hesitated. There were some situations—more situations than were acknowledged—where doing nothing was the better course. A patient willingness to wait was both part of his nature and ingrained from his old training in surveillance, in analysis and code-breaking—in watching and waiting for patterns to emerge.

The Zen-like approach, as he thought of it, had much to recommend it. This, he felt, might be one of those times. Provoking Wanda, after all—what good could it do? It might be cowardice on his part, but still …

Much later he was to wonder, more than once, if he’d been wrong.

CHAPTER 7

Harvest Fayre

In the week leading up to the Fayre, the Reverend Max Tudor had been kept busy doing this or that church business at this or that church in his care. Not until the dawning of the day of the Fayre itself did he think to utter a little prayer that his parishioners would behave themselves. Failing that, that a posse had not already been dispatched to take out Wanda Batton-Smythe.

With the approach of fall, the trees around the village were starting to shed their finery, dropping apples and leaves to the ground. The fields had been cut back to an ochre stubble and the harvest mice, exposed, would soon shelter in the hedgerows. The spinney atop Hawk Crest would stand out like a thinning thatch of hair on an old man’s head. As it was, some trees had already been stripped bare in a recent storm; the Crest had always been vulnerable to the freak storms that had beset Nether Monkslip from time immemorial. The equinox heralded more to come as the days began their slow creep toward winter, the austere white light of summer shading to an autumnal gray. It was the time, Max knew, that Awena Owen called Mabon: the celebration of the second harvest and the start of winter preparations.

All the same, for him and for her, and all different. The Christians had wisely chosen (in most cases) not to eradicate the pagan celebrations but to wrap them up with new paper and ribbon into a palatable offering. The solstices and equinoxes, the all-important movements of the planets, the timing of the plantings and the harvests and the full rush of seasons, the return of the sun after its long, cold, and frightening retreat—these observances wisely were not eradicated by those newly in power, but absorbed into items on the Christian calendar. The Harvest Fayre was a remnant of the old days, and still vital in modern times. The equinox had been melded onto Michaelmas, the feast of the Archangel Michael, now three days away. Time to get the harvest in and settle accounts.

Max crossed Church Street and walked over to the Fayre grounds, greeting villagers as he went. Everywhere over the past few days there had been signs of change: the monarchs, blown off their usual course and supping gracefully on the butterfly bush; the drowsing bees, so recently a menace, the cooler air taking the zip out of their movements. The green tomatoes, the gold chrysanthemums. The eerie harvest moon, which soon would hang low in the sky.

Proud of his newfound rustic ability to name a few basic flowers, Max noted with pleasure the Michaelmas daisies and the last of the yellow St. John’s wort. He breathed deeply of the sweet decay that was autumn; his heart lifted as he felt on his skin the slight nip in the air that signaled the shortening of days. The marquee erected on the grounds of the old Abbey came into view. Use of the land had been donated for the day by Noah Caraway, collector of art and antiques, bon vivant, general man about Europe, and owner of Abbot’s Lodge.

Approaching the tended grounds of Abbot’s Lodge and the ruins of the old Abbey, Max briefly stood back to survey unobserved the essentially pagan scene. The Fayre preparations already were in full swing, even as visitors began to arrive, and from his vantage point, the villagers had the aspect of a Bruegel painting—decked out in the bright colors of autumn, reds and golds and the occasional flash of green. The smoky smells of autumn were more concentrated here, mingling with the fruits of the harvest, and there was a bank-holiday feel to the day, of cares set aside, and work delayed for pleasure. The sway of the spoilsport Puritans—they who had banned maypoles, dancing, and secular singing, and who treated this type of festival as dangerous superstition—was mercifully long over. Max thought it a wonder their humorless reign of forbidden amusements had lasted as long as it had.

Yet the stark, somber Abbey Ruins with their few remaining trefoil windows always struck him as immeasurably sad, and today were a pronounced contrast with the villagers’ gaiety. By unvoiced consent, out of respect and/or superstitious fear of the violated monks, the inner areas of the ruins—the inner sanctums, as it were, especially the chancel with its “bare ruin’d choirs”—were never lightly breached. The stalls for selling the villagers’ various wares thus were ranged along the outside of the Abbey Ruins, interspersed with the gooseberry bushes that seemed to thrive in this particular spot. There was a surfeit of apple products for sale, he saw at a glance—cider, of course, and jam, and wine, and both traditional and caramel apple cake with clotted cream.

A tent had been erected in case the weather failed to cooperate, but it had been universally agreed the weather would not dare cross Wanda any more than anyone else would.

*   *   *

As Max entered the area set aside for the stalls, he noticed the subtle adjustments villagers seemed to make as he approached. Cheerful congregants became just that much more cheerful, children were tugged at to stand up straighter, men called out hearty hellos, and many women pretended not to notice him at all until he made a pointed hello, at which point they assumed a posture of great surprise at seeing him. Max’s nascent rock star status had, as has been said, led to fierce and sustained infighting over the church flower rota. Such interest was not precisely sexual in nature—at least, not always. It was more that scraps of information about the new vicar were a commodity in high demand for gossip sessions at the Cavalier Tea Room.

On his arrival in the village, rampant speculation over many an afternoon tea had included that he was MI5—Military Intelligence, Section 5—and posted as a special guard to Queen Elizabeth. No, said someone: MI5 weren’t used for that—he was posted in Iraq, some top secret mission thingie at the highest level. No, said someone else: they only used MI6 for those foreign le Carré–style missions, not MI5—everyone knew that. But he was wounded somewhere, that was definite. Where? demanded another. His leg, I think. There’s nothing the matter with his legs, either of them. Besides, I meant, where in the
world
was he wounded? Oh, in Iraq, wasn’t it?

*   *   *

His days as an MI5 officer had not been wreathed in glory. The nature of the business was of course that things happened behind the scenes, the route of history altered minutely, with no one to thank or blame when the mission was over—whatever his part in the mission had been. He had been recruited by a talent spotter while an undergraduate student at Oxford, where the cold fog off the Isis leant itself to those kinds of mysterious goings-on, and had joined MI5 at the age of twenty-one—such a baby’s age he could hardly credit that they thought him worth troubling with. Perhaps his youth made him malleable, and that was what they most needed, that malleable quality.

No doubt that was it.

They called them Spooks, these members of Her Majesty’s Security Service, the men and women of MI5 or simply Five, devoted to ferreting out internal threats to the safety of Britain.

He had had perhaps a dozen aliases in the course of his career, so many legends to remember—a legend being the make-believe history and background that people had to be convinced to believe, and that he himself, most importantly, had to believe. He’d be grilled on this legend by his handlers, repeatedly asked the same questions in different ways until he had the story down pat. He’d generally be issued records showing he’d been born in a country where no official birth records were kept—millions of children born worldwide went undocumented, and he’d simply, temporarily, joined the ranks of these stateless unfortunates. His curriculum vitae was a list of spurious jobs at no-longer-existing companies—there being a never-ending supply of defunct companies for MI5 to appropriate to its purposes.