A Fatal Winter (7 page)

“I don’t know that my line of work was ever easy,” said Max agreeably. “Certainly, there’s never a shortage of work for me to do.”

“Ooooh!” she said. She had a distinctly upper-class voice, full of trills and fruity exclamations and odd emphases on certain words. “I
quite
see what you mean. Most amusing. Sin always simply
multiplies
around one, does it not?”

“Actually, I had poverty in mind,” said Max.

Again, the “Ooooh! Quite.” Max, reminded of Eddie Izzard imitating a puzzled Queen Elizabeth confronted by a plumber, half expected the obviously wealthy woman to say, “Poverty? What on earth is
that
?”

Instead she said, “But where on
earth
are my manners? I should have introduced myself. I am Lady Baynard. And you would be Father…?”

“Father Tudor,” he replied. “Max Tudor. I am the vicar at St. Edwold’s in Nether Monkslip. At your service, Lady Baynard.”

“Yes, of course. As you can see, I’ve been doing some Christmas shopping,” she informed him, in the least festive, least Christmassy tones imaginable. “In Staincross Minster. Fast Freddie’s Market has the best prices for fruit this time of year. And I had to pick up some things for my plants, you know, and visit the chemist’s. And you? You’ve been in London, perhaps?”

It was not so much a question as a lucky guess—an opening, nosy sortie. Max suspected she felt it was her right to know where he’d been—in her universe, the local vicar was as much a subordinate as a lady’s maid. One was in charge of her public communications with God, the other in charge of making sure her travel costume was kept in good repair. Both persons greased the wheels of her upper-class existence.

“Yes, just for a couple of days,” he replied. He summarized his participation in the symposium as briefly as he could, not expecting anyone not immediately involved to care about his roof. Still, she listened with polite interest, only occasionally stopping to snuffle genteelly into her lace handkerchief.

“So sorry,” she said again. “It’s this frightful cold that’s been going round…” Again she coughed delicately, then blew her nose with a resounding and indelicate honk. She breathed deeply, and the flesh could be seen oozing to the top of her heavily corseted body. It must have been damnably uncomfortable in there. “I can’t wait until it’s time to think of plantings for the garden, come the spring. To start moving things out of the hothouse.”

Max, hoping the old dear was not contagious, nodded, smiled, and looked with deliberation at his sizzling-with-unread-news paper. Her cold could only get worse, as the heating in the compartment was uncertain: While his feet—indeed, the entire left side of his body—froze, his right forearm and elbow, near the vent that ran along one side of the compartment, felt as if they might ignite. He couldn’t decide whether or not to remove his overcoat and in the end decided to leave it on.

He took a pen out of his pocket for the crossword and folded the broadsheet pages back with a sharp
snap
, again as if they contained a matter of some urgency awaiting his immediate attention. But he had abandoned all hope some minutes before.

“I’ve bought some of my son’s favorite chocolates,” she told him. “Randolph. Randolph, Viscount Nathersby. You may have heard of him? The photographer?”

“It sounds familiar to me, yes. What is the name of his business?”

She looked horrified. “It doesn’t have a
name
. He’s not in
trade
, you know.” Max gathered that would be considered tacky, this whole working-for-a-living thing. “Well, not
precisely
in trade,” she amended, clearly deciding it necessary to clarify this difficult point for him. “It’s just that word gets round. Recommendations. A friend of a friend, you know the sort of thing.”

“Not in trade, then,” said Max, solemn and straight-faced.

“Oh, my dear man,
no
. No, indeed! The very i
de
a. He was a Pootle-Fitzbutton on his great-grandmother’s side, you know.”

“Quite.” He was not quite sure what was “quite” about it but it was a good all-purpose word and he couldn’t think of what else to say. He wanted to sound agreeable without precisely agreeing with her, since he wasn’t listening closely.

The train was going over the nine-arch viaduct, which meant they were about halfway to Nether Monkslip. Just then a series of musical notes erupted in the close carriage—the ring of a mobile phone. Max automatically reached for his jacket pocket but almost instantly knew it wasn’t his ring.

With a flustered hoot of apology, Lady Baynard groped around in her capacious bag, finally locating and silencing the device.

Max thought, Does everyone have a mobile these days? He had recognized the tune, only because it was the ubiquitous “Speak Now.” He thought it a clever song to use for a ringtone, but was astonished someone of Lady Baynard’s generation would choose it.

She caught his look of faint surprise and said, exasperated, “One of the twins programmed it for me and I don’t know how to change it to something more suitable.”

And what would that be? Max wondered. “Rule, Britannia!”?

“Those twins have too much time on their hands. I knew that no good would come of their visit to the castle. Of
all
their coming.” She harrumphed and snuffled a bit more into the handkerchief, then with a swipe at her nose, carried on: “Visit indeed. More like a siege. The situ
a
tion is positively
brew
ing. I have had the most
fright
ful sense of foreboding for weeks now. Someone is going to—oh, I don’t know. Be hurt! First my brother is taken ill—he’s never ill. And then…”

She talked for some time and he listened with but half an ear. The news he’d had from George about Paul’s wife still distracted him, and memories of Paul swirled in his mind like ghosts.

“… the twins. I tell you, no good can come of it.”

He’d missed much of what she’d been saying.

“Twins? And how old are they?” he asked politely, in truth more interested in deflecting the topic of Lady Baynard’s foreboding, which topic he felt might be a lengthy one with many alleys and byways and shuddery detours.

“Fourteen. They’re my brother’s children. You know how they’re into
every
thing at that age. And these two behave as if they were raised in a barn. I blame the mother. I don’t believe in mixed marriages, never have. No good can come of it. The girl was a
common
er, you see. A rackety upbringing, a father in trade! I think she said her mother was a shop clerk. I wonder sometimes if even that is true. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Gwynyth wanted to be a grand lady, of course, but ladies are born, not made.”

Max struggled to conceal his wonder that someone at Lady Baynard’s evident stage of life—he placed her roughly in her seventies—could be the aunt to children of fourteen. She didn’t appear interested in enlightening him on this subject, instead saying, “Some days, I am just happy both of them are alive and breathing. On others, I have simply given up hope of their making a productive contribution to society.
She
may be all right, I suppose. Amanda. I’m not certain about
him
.”

“Early days, isn’t it?” said Max mildly. “Fourteen is so young. They just don’t know how young it is.” The train was lurching back and forth now, as if the driver were listening to samba music. Max returned his gaze to his newspaper, but still without much hope she would take the hint. People, particularly people of Lady Baynard’s generation and background, tended to gravitate toward members of the clergy, regardless of the setting or circumstance, seeking advice much in the way people, on hearing one is a doctor, will launch into a vivid description of their recent bilious attack or their gallbladder surgery. Frequently, Max found himself called upon for similar ad hoc consultations. Presumably, anything having to do with mortality fell under his purview equally with that of Dr. Winship, the village doctor.

But this time he was to be spared, after all. Lady Baynard merely said, “Early days? Why, when I was their age I was practically running a household in my mother’s stead. I was married soon after that—none of this business of putting my career first and delaying starting a family and so on. What nonsense! This is a coddled generation, Father. Too coddled. Coddled to the point of
use
lessness.” There was a bit more of this and then, with a final “Harrumph!” she began scrabbling in her Gladstone bag. As she did, some of her shopping fell out, and Max spent the next few moments collecting the apples and assorted other goods that rolled under the seats and to the far edges of the carriage. Somehow in the confusion and fluster one apple ended up in Max’s pocket, a fact he didn’t realize until he was back at the vicarage.

Finally, she subsided into a fluffy white mass of knitting, and began furiously to ply large wooden needles. It looked like she was making a downy pup tent. Max returned to his reading and the rest of the trip passed in relative and amiable silence.

CHAPTER 3

At the Maharajah

Max was on his way to meet Awena Owen for a meal at the Maharajah Restaurant and Takeaway. It was a date he’d made to repay her for the many (organic and wholesomely vegetarian) meals she had cooked for him at her cottage, in order to spare him the depredations of Mrs. Hooser’s cooking.

Awena had again invited Max for dinner, shortly after his return from London. He’d asked her to meet him at the restaurant instead. Overall, he preferred taking a meal at the Maharajah partly because of the Cavalier’s gossip machine, which was even louder than its new espresso machine. Most villagers were willing to overlook the sometimes glacial service in favor of being at the center of the village’s social networking site.

“My treat, for a change,” he’d told Awena. “I insist.”

He had not long before put down the phone from speaking with his mother, who had called from Le Havre. She was on the
Queen Mary II
, continuing the almost completely peripatetic existence she’d led during her widowhood. She would be spending Christmas in the Caribbean.

She sounded the same, lovely and otherworldly, but changed since his father died—more outgoing, more adventurous. Max didn’t like putting it this way, but she seemed to have come into her own with his father’s passing. Max regretted how little he saw of her but realized there was little point to guilt—her active social life made her hard to reach anymore. On the phone, she mentioned as she often did how relieved she was to know he had a nice, safe job at last—she had understood vaguely that before he was involved in “police work” but not that he had been MI5.

After saying his good-byes he’d taken care of some accumulated paperwork, caught up with various e-mails, and then taken Thea for a long walk. She’d been cooped up with Luther during much of the time Max had been in London and he felt it was the least he could do to make it up to her. Dogs are generally eager to please but he sensed Thea might be close to a prolonged pout. As Max had sat down at his desk, the dog asleep beside him, an unholy yowl had emerged from the cushion at his back: Luther shot out from behind like toothpaste out of a tube and executed a stuck landing on Thea’s back. As the dog began racing around the room, Luther reared up on his haunches, clawing the air for balance in a bronco-like effort as ill-conceived and doomed as some of the early Scottish border excursions into England. Fortunately, Thea, who rather tended to expect the best of everyone, remained more baffled than offended by these attacks.

He walked with her until they came to a rest at the top of Hawk Crest, in the copse the villagers called Nunswood. This was Thea’s favorite leisurely walk, full of exciting detours. They stood near the menhirs, all that remained of an ancient culture where human sacrifice may have played a role in appeasing whatever gods existed then. At least, that was what the innkeepers liked to tell the tourists, who listened, wide-eyed and gullible, like children being told a ghost story at bedtime.

Beneath the Crest ran the River Puddmill, which rambled by the cottages and ended in a splashy marriage with the English Channel at a scenic falling off not far from where he stood. Today the sea was visible, and in the far distance he could see the dark outline of the towers of Chedrow Castle. Max was reminded of his recent travel companion, now tucked safely away in her stronghold. Man and dog stood in companionable silence, enjoying the changing landscape, the castle appearing and disappearing in the mist like something out of a Grimm Brothers’ tale. The scent of snow, slightly chemical but clean as fresh linen, was in the air—the tang of winter was like a tonic, invigorating but also infusing Max with a dreamy nostalgia. It was his favorite time of year.

Thea’s too, apparently. With her long black-and-tan tresses ruffled by the wind, her eyes searching the horizon, head lifted high and backlit against the dying light, Thea reminded him as she often did of some film star posed for a movie still. Today it was Scarlett O’Hara, challenging God and nature, and vowing never to be hungry again.

Max ran a hand over the knobby silken smoothness of Thea’s head. She was one of the most good-hearted of dogs in a kingdom full of good-hearted dogs. He had adopted her when he first came to the village, but soon realized the process was in fact mutual. Irrationally or not, he felt that Thea had chosen him.

“OK, girl, it’s dinnertime. I get it. Let’s go.”

He returned home to feed both animals (which he had learned to do in separate rooms, Luther soon adding “food bandit” to his CV) then he took a quick shower. As he was buttoning a clean shirt he was reminded of his recent conversation with George Greenhouse. For the first time since he’d moved into the vicarage, he thought to look for Paul’s shirt in the top of his closet.

And he couldn’t find it where he knew he had left it. He had moved house several times in the years since the tragedy but he knew he wouldn’t ever throw out that shirt.

He went to find Mrs. Hooser. As usual, much like the cartoon character Pig-Pen, she could easily be located by the cloud of dirt and dust and racket she created wherever she happened to be. This time, he followed the trail of hoovering noises interspersed with the crash of falling objects to his study.