Wicked Autumn (3 page)

And of course there was Wanda Batton-Smythe leading the charge of the Women’s Institute, to insure that all went well—if not, they’d have Wanda to answer to.

The Women’s Institute, reflected Max, settling back into his chair. That backbone of English village life, founded nearly one hundred years ago and still responsible for much kindhearted do-gooding in the world. Because of a paucity of volunteers, many other groups had died out; the WI had assumed disproportionate status, especially in such a small village as Nether Monkslip. The Fayre, along with the various Christmas festivities, had likewise come to assume monumental importance, with the responsibility for its success falling to the women and to whatever men could be dragooned into helping with the heavy lifting. Max, while aware of the stressors inherent in the situation, and somewhat ill at ease because of them, could see no way, or any real reason, to stop it.

In any event, his duties for the Fayre were not onerous, consisting of an opening blessing, judging the Largest Vegetable competition (despite his many protests, he had not been spared), and preventing various members of the choir, recruited as entertainment, from strangling Wanda Batton-Smythe to death.

Max’s mouth twitched into a wry, complacent grin. It was all so predictable. All the usual harmless fun. Somehow this year’s Fayre seemed to him a significant milestone, an outward sign of his successful entry into his new life. A good, solid case of “As ye sow
,
so shall ye reap.”

He found he was actually looking forward to it.

CHAPTER 3

The Village

The village of Nether Monkslip nestled with its narrow river beneath a high ridge called Hawk Crest. A steep and winding path led to the brow of this promontory, which was the site of the gap-toothed remains of an ancient stone circle. A visitor on first reaching the top of the Crest, as villagers called it, and seeing the village below, might catch his or her breath in wonder that anything so pristine could have survived into the twenty-first century.

At a distance to the south, just visible and twinkling like a mirage, was the sea, and on a clear day one could glimpse the Monkslip-super-Mare lighthouse. A few inhabitants commuted to this nearby town for jobs, but by and large Nether Monkslip was self-sustaining. London, two hours and more away, depending on the humor of those who ran the train, remained a remote place for “special” shopping or for taking in the occasional play, nearly as exotic and remote a place to villagers as Marrakech.

The village had cottages of stone, of timber, and of brick, in a salvaged mix of styles—Saxon, Norman, and medieval—giving it the rakish charm of a place that had evolved in periodic, spontaneous bursts of energy and affluence over centuries. These homes and shops, many with steeply pitched thatched roofs, sat surrounded by flowers in summer, jewel-like in their lush, ornate settings. It looked like every English village and like no other village on earth—a jumble of buildings sited haphazardly and expanded organically, to pleasing effect.

The High Street of Nether Monkslip was intersected by a secondary road and numerous lanes and alleyways. Buildings meandered away from the High, trickling up or down ancient dirt tracks that over centuries of use and custom had hardened into lanes, side streets, and cobbled alleyways. Most, like Sheep Lane, had names which had long since outlived their original meaning or purpose; nearly all the houses had names rather than numbers.

The High itself began well—a straight shot from the Hidden Fox, running east past St. Edwold’s Church and the Old Vicarage; past the fishmonger’s, the baker’s, and the candlemaker’s, to the one-man train station near the Horseshoe pub. At the stone bridge over the river it began to roam, as if by this point completely distracted from the straight and narrow path by the lush beauty of the countryside. By the river ranged the old almshouses.

To the southwest of the village proper lay the ruins of a Benedictine abbey (partially destroyed during a courtesy visit from Cromwell’s men), which was to be the site of the upcoming Harvest Fayre. The parish church of St. Edwold’s—balanced, as it were, between the very ancient abbey and the more ancient vestiges of differing beliefs represented by the Crest and its healing spring—had always seemed to villagers to act as a sort of religious fulcrum.

The region surrounding Nether Monkslip had indeed long been a matrix for religions both contemporary and long forgotten, boasting a circle of menhirs in addition to the Abbey Ruins. Its lure might have had something to do with the light—that eerie luminosity that had begun attracting artists in an organized way since the 1920s, and in a disorganized way for centuries. The light that shone like a carpet of diamonds on the distant sea. Many claimed the light rivaled anything Cornwall had to offer.

For the manorial history buff, Totleigh Hall was nearby; a bit further afield lay Chedrow Castle, actually a fortified manor house, and still home to the Footrustle family.

Tourists drawn by these sights tended to visit in summer, but since the only inn in the village, the Horseshoe, was too small to house more than two (small) couples, the village never achieved the kind of destination status that most of the villagers didn’t want, anyway. In warm weather there might be at most a few visitors of the caravan-and-tent variety.

The village’s isolation was reinforced by the lack of transport options, although there was a village taxi for those who could afford it, and it did have that rail station boasting a single employee. The occasional train would chug by randomly to collect and deposit mail and passengers, but with a punctuality so rare as to call for little hoots of celebration from its weary and sorely vexed customers. A bus service trundled the villagers about, particularly to and from Monkslip-super-Mare, via a winding, narrow road lined with unyielding stone walls cleverly concealed behind harmless-looking hedgerows.

In other words, you had to really want to get to Nether Monkslip, in the worst way, and were often accommodated in your heart’s desire by washed-out roads and sheep and herds of cattle making sudden, unrehearsed appearances in your path. This inaccessibility went a long way toward preserving the chocolate-box charm of the village.

The children in the population tended to grow bored and leave as soon as they were able, like raucous guests departing after a late-night party. They were sent to Monkslip-super-Mare for their schooling in the meanwhile. (The Mothers’ Union had once had a small toehold in Nether Monkslip, but Wanda Batton-Smythe had pressured the young women until, outflanked and outmaneuvered, they had either retreated, taking their prams with them, or had gone over to the enemy.)

Because of its bucolic charm and low cost of living, the village had in recent years begun to attract escaping yuppies from London. The Internet had aided this transformation by allowing villagers like Felicity Gates and Adam Birch to set up shop as potters and booksellers, respectively, and sell online what goods they could not sell in their stores. Even Elka Garth, the owner of the bakery and tearoom, did rather a brisk side business shipping out tiny animals made of marzipan, her ark centerpiece being much in demand for children’s parties. Most of all, objects from Awena Owen’s Goddessspell flew off the shelves. So to speak.

So while some traditional trades—malster and blacksmith, saddler and wheelwright—had declined or vanished, they had been replaced by others, many of them efforts New Agey, Back-to-the-Land, and Save-the-Planet in nature. The villagers quickly had discovered that city dwellers would pay almost any price for a product labeled “organic” or “handmade.”

It helped tremendously that most of these shop owners were able to draw on pensions and savings accumulated during their (in some cases) rapacious careers in London, so that a dry spell in sales didn’t matter. The parish was wealthy in comparison with most, although the drives for repairs to the church roof were never-ending, and proceeds from efforts such as the Harvest Fayre were a definite boon.

There
was
a fly in this sweet-smelling ointment: apart from Maria Delacruz, who owned the thriving Our Ladies of Perpetual Help maid service and worshiped at St. Mary’s in Monkslip-super-Mare, and Mr. Vijay, who ran the Maharajah Restaurant and Takeaway, Nether Monkslip was noticeably lacking in ethnic and religious diversity. The unsightly little Methodist chapel, defiantly plain and squat, had long ago fallen into disuse.

Preparing to charge into the midst of this bucolic scene was a further sign of underlying discord and imbalance: Wanda Batton-Smythe.

CHAPTER 4

Out …

Wanda sat in front of her computer at Morning Glory Cottage. Having once again gone over her to-do list for the Fayre, now mere days away, she was idly checking headlines, a rare lapse in her otherwise tightly stacked day. Reminded by one tragic headline or another of a recent, keenly felt disappointment in her own life, she navigated over to the online bookstore she occasionally used when she couldn’t get into Monkslip-super-Mare to the chain booksellers. (She had long ago feuded her way into a permanent rift with Adam Birch, owner of The Onlie Begetter, vowing never to set foot in his shop again. His evident relief at her declaration of war still rankled.)

But now: the last book she had ordered online, a much-lauded Booker Prize winner, had arrived with a cover ever-so-slightly dented at one corner, despite the seller’s extravagant use of Bubble Wrap.
Someone
would have to pay for this negligence. In truth, Wanda had found the book, a novelization of the lives of the Mitford sisters, rather heavy going. In no year, in fact, had she enjoyed reading any of the Booker winners, but she felt honor-bound to read them, and to drop into conversation the fact that she was reading them. Navigating over to the page for the book, she gave it, anonymously, a one-star review, writing a brief, maundering, and venomous note that explained, at least to her own satisfaction, her unhappiness. Satisfied with her work for the day, Wanda hit the submit button and logged off the computer. She’d return the book once she’d finished reading it. That way she only had to pay for postage. She looked at her watch, a small diamond-studded affair she’d inherited from her mother: still a while before the Major returned home from whatever occupation he’d ginned up for himself that morning. He’d said something about the golf course. Golf was a hobby Wanda regarded as nothing more than a costly waste of time involving thrashing about with expensive equipment. But at least, she thought, it gets him out of my hair for part of the day.

She tapped the fingers of one hand against the desk. Normally, Wanda was invigorated by the kind of exchanges she’d had recently with the various denizens of the village, and the chance to vent her spleen over the damaged Mitford book had helped a little, but now she felt a slight soreness in the muscles of her neck. No doubt the tension of having to handle everything for the Fayre herself, she thought. The best management advice suggested delegation, but when one was surrounded by imbeciles … Really, it was too much for one human being to bear. If you want something done right … Now it was all giving her a headache. If only she had someone to talk to, but it was too early in the day … Rubbing her forehead, she went to find the aspirin.

She had had the bathroom of Morning Glory Cottage specially renovated into something suitable for a modern-day Cleopatra, knocking out two walls to create a single room of sumptuous proportions, and destroying much of the character of the old house in the process. She’d mounted an enormous mirror over the sink; arranged all along its sides were globe lights, such as an actress might have backstage in a West End theater. She’d also removed the claw-footed bathtub, an act of vandalism that had broken the heart of Noah Caraway, the local antiques dealer, especially as he had not had the chance to retrieve the item before it was removed by the rubbish collectors.

In its place was a faux-marble fitted tub “suitable for bathing an extra large porpoise of no taste or discernment,” so Noah, still bitter, had been heard to say.

Now Wanda scrambled for the aspirin in the newly installed cabinet that ranged across one wall. She pushed aside a stack of new, pink Turkish towels and a set of hot rollers, in the process dislodging two auto-injectors of epinephrine. They skidded onto the floor and Wanda, swearing under her breath as she stooped to retrieve them, returned the lifesaving injectors safely to a top shelf. It was the one terror in her otherwise fearless existence, that she might accidentally ingest peanuts and be stranded without recourse to the injection that would almost certainly save her life.

After swallowing the aspirin, she paused to peer at her gray eyes in the mirror, for the first time noticing that she may have overdone it a bit with the new eyeliner. Dampening a ball of cotton with lotion, she wiped away the errant traces of Midnight Vamp. She stood back to enjoy the effect. Hers, she knew, was a strong face of good bones, and she enjoyed studying it from all angles. As she prepared for bed each night, her hair done up in twists with hairpins, applying Pond’s cold cream followed by one of the new antiwrinkle creams from Boots, she would study her image critically in the mirror, defying any new wrinkles to appear. The Major, waiting for her in the marital bed, proof of the tenacity of hope over experience, more often than not fell asleep.

She adjusted the pearls at her neck, wishing anew that she had a daughter to leave her jewelry to. Sons were less satisfactory in some regards. She leaned into the mirror. Was that a new wrinkle?
Dab
,
dab
went the eye cream.

Just as she was taking a brush to the thick corrugation that was her hair, the Major came in the front door of the cottage, making his usual racket as he juggled several packages he’d picked up on Wanda’s orders.

“I’m home,” he shouted down the hallway, as he always did. (Then: “Damn it!” as a bag slipped from his grasp and a tin of tomatoes rolled noisily across the floor.)

Where else would you be, thought Wanda, setting down the brush with a sharp crack against the sink. Charm school?