A Demon Summer Read online

  The results were predictably appalling, but there had been moments of a sort of goofy charm, especially for the parents who had invested heavily in some expensive instrument or other for their offspring. Who knew there were so many nascent trombone players in the small world of Nether Monkslip? Or that cymbals were making such a comeback? Die-hard music lovers found excuses to leave early, but Max was duty-bound to stay, an expression of astonished delight pasted onto his face. Even he, being somewhat tone-deaf, grasped intuitively that this was not the sort of music designed to soothe the savage breast.

  Still wondering how he might diplomatically break the news that there might not after all be room for everyone who wished to participate in the band, Max dressed quickly, discovering in the process that his best cassock had not come back from the dry cleaner’s, leaving him with a choice between a torn cassock and one with yesterday’s egg down the front. As he was to learn later, his housekeeper Mrs. Hooser had forgotten to hand in his order when Fred Farnstable came by to collect the dry cleaning. Fortunately the vestments he wore for the service would cover the spillage, but he’d have to return to the vicarage to change into civilian clothes before starting his morning rounds. He had promised to drop in on Mrs. Arthur at the urging of a social worker from the school in Monkslip-super-Mare, who suspected Mr. Arthur had begun using the children’s lunch money to finance his rounds at the local pub.

  He made toast and carefully boiled an egg in the vicarage’s archaic, stone-floored kitchen. After a quick glance at the headlines (a Shiite group calling itself the “League of the Righteous” was operating is Iraq; one had to admire the staggering humility in the choice of a nom de guerre), he set off along Church Street to take the early service. The day was warm and sunny, with flowers spilling from window boxes wherever he looked, the weather nicely cooperating to lift his mood.

  But the morning was not done with him yet. He and the acolyte looked high and low in the St. Edwold’s vestry but could not find the gluten-free wafers. Mrs. Penwhistle was allergic to gluten, and as she was a regular at the early service Max always made this concession for her. Finally, Elka Garth at the Cavalier had to be prevailed upon to provide a small loaf of gluten-free bread for Max to bless.

  On his return to the vicarage an hour later, he found a note on his desk in Mrs. Hooser’s scrawling hand: “Call your Bishop.”

  Oh, fine, thought Max. The bishop seldom rang unless he had a bone to pick. In fact, he rarely telephoned at all. Which is what made this sudden directive rather alarming. Max considered asking Mrs. Hooser if she knew what the man wanted but was stopped by the utter futility of the idea. Mrs. Hooser’s weakness—her refuge, in fact—was that she lived in a state of blissful unawareness: she simply did not notice much of anything that went on around her.

  He put the note aside for the moment, in favor of the even more dreaded task of going over the accounting books for St. Edwold’s and the two other churches in his care. There was an unexplained spike in expenditures under the “Misc” column. He saw it was for antibacterial wipes and realized it was for the OCD family group that had started meeting at St. Cuthburga’s in Middle Monkslip. There were the normal expenses for facial tissues for the Al-Anon meetings, where a certain amount of tearful sentiment was to be expected. Max had always thought it interesting the AA meetings, by way of contrast, went through far fewer tissues.

  This minor sort of expense was meant to be offset by donations from the group members themselves, but times were hard and the donations voluntary, so Max had become adept at shoving money from one fund to another to cover the cost. He also had been known to dip into his own pocket when all else failed. He couldn’t allow a few pounds to keep anyone from getting the help they needed.

  Having exhausted all diversions, and knowing it couldn’t be delayed forever, he reached for his phone to call the Bishop of Monkslip.

  * * *

  A few steps away from the vicarage, Elka Garth worked behind the counter of the Cavalier Tea Room and Garden. Her cotton sweater was smeared with flour and blueberries, and it was buttoned crookedly, possibly because the top button was missing, anyway. She had tied back her hair in a bright paisley scarf to keep it out of her eyes as she worked, and she had made a rare experiment with makeup. With her eyelids dusted with lavender to go with the purples and reds in her scarf, she looked, thought her friend Suzanna, lounging over her second cup of coffee, rather pretty, if in a hectic sort of way. Almost as if she were planning a night on the tiles—which was out of the question, if one knew Elka.

  It was too bad she led such a difficult life, keeping the shop and her son alive single-handedly, but the beauty of the woman was that she seldom complained. She just created her glorious pies and biscuits and her marzipan creatures—the tiny owls and geese and hedgehogs and mice lovingly crafted and generally sold online, to be shipped off in their little individual nests of glittery paper—and somehow in this endeavor reality seemed to get pushed aside, to be dealt with on another day. Her current passion was for perfecting a shortbread recipe that incorporated dried lavender flowers.

  Elka’s young assistant Flora was either contributing to or mitigating the chaos in the kitchen, it was difficult to say. But in any event Flora’s apron, unlike her employer’s, always was pristine, devoid of flour or batter.

  Elka seemed to have a talent for surrounding herself with young people who did not like pulling their own weight, thought Miss Agnes Pitchford, watching the scene with her gimlet-eyed stare. Miss Pitchford, long retired after terrorizing generations of youth in the village school, sat near a window of the shop, reading that day’s news and maintaining a running commentary on the inbred foolhardiness of Britain’s elected leaders. Miss Pitchford was an anachronism, a throwback to the era of the sedan chair—a living testament to a time when elderly spinsters were borne about in boxes to attend missionary teas and strew their visiting cards about the village. They might make the occasional brief stop to administer relief to the ungrateful poor of the village, but more often their aim was to attend a private Bible exposition or violin solo or some similarly gay and carefree pastime. That they did all this dressed head to toe in draperies and scarves and hats with feathers and netting and hatpins and other impediments to comfort, regardless of the season, was probably a testament to their inner and outer fortitude. England was built upon the steely backbone of such stalwarts as Miss Pitchford and her kind.

  Much else in the village had not changed—had refused to change. The Nether Monkslip Parish Council, in particular, was fearless in standing in the way of progress. Much of the struggle against modernity was to no avail. But that didn’t prevent the villagers from fighting the good fight, at home and in the trenches.

  Suzanna Winship, sister of the local doctor, shared a table with Miss Pitchford in surprising peace and equanimity, for two personalities more diametrically opposed would be difficult to imagine. Suzanna, outrageously gorgeous and sexy Suzanna, had been one of Max Tudor’s most ardent admirers in the days before Max and Awena had so clearly staked their claims to each other.

  Max’s arrival in the village some years before had electrified the female population of Nether Monkslip, for Father Max Tudor was everything they could have wished for: kind and decent (basic requirements, of course, for a vicar), handsome and youngish (both huge bonuses), rumored to be a former MI5 agent (so daring and mysterious!), and most of all, unattached and, to all appearances, available. A lamb ripe for sacrifice on the marital altar.

  The women got busy, either throwing themselves at his feet or pushing their nieces, daughters, and best friends at his feet. Church attendance skyrocketed, along with volunteerism for the little chores that needed doing around the church—cleaning the brass and silver, preparing the vessels for the Eucharistic services—that might bring them into closer proximity with Max.

  But Max remained steadfastly uninterested. Oddly oblivious to the frenzy of self-sacrifice and do-goodery he had unleashed. Perhaps he thought it mere coincidenc
e that the St. Edwold’s Altar Guild suddenly had more helpers than it could accommodate, all of them female, and all of them jostling for a slot in the rotation. The church flower rota became a free-for-all, with the altar bouquets growing more grandiose and extravagant with each passing week.

  Max remained clueless to all the passionate storms of hope and speculation. And just when the women’s bafflement and frustration at his cluelessness reached a fever pitch (particularly in the case of the village’s anointed vixen, Suzanna Winship), it was noticed that Max was to be seen more and more often having dinner at the home of Awena Owen, the owner of Goddessspell. Or seen having dinner with her in one of the handful of restaurants in Nether Monkslip. These occasions became so frequent, no branch of the village grapevine could for long accept the “maybe they’re just friends” theory that was tentatively bruited about. Finally at Awena’s winter solstice party, it became glaringly apparent that Max and Awena could not keep their eyes off each other. When Awena’s pregnancy began to show a few months later, it became apparent they could not keep their hands off each other, either.

  The village phone wires lit up. It was a cause célèbre, of course, and a bit of a scandal, but that it did not become fodder for malicious gossip was a testament to the high esteem in which both parties were held. The villagers loved both Max and Awena (by now dubbed “Maxena”) and could only wish them well. The villagers even managed to conduct a rare conspiracy of silence, for Max’s bishop had so far been spared the news that his most charismatic priest was in a now-permanent relationship with the village’s only neo-pagan. What the bishop might have done had he known, no one could guess, but no one, not even the scandalized Miss Pitchford, was going to help the man out with a “thought-you-should-know” telephone call. Adopting an atypical transcendent detachment, the villagers decided as one to let the fates handle it.

  Elka Garth of the Cavalier Tea Room and Garden had been much surprised at Suzanna’s easy capitulation to the situation. It was not as if the High Street of Nether Monkslip was littered with highly eligible bachelors.

  “It’s nice of you to be so gracious about it,” Elka had said after Awena’s winter solstice party, when the attraction between Max and Awena had been evident to the most obtuse observer.

  “Why are you surprised?” Suzanna had demanded. “I can be gracious. I can out-gracious the Queen when I feel like it. Goddammit.”

  Alrighty, then. A little more work on the self-awareness front and Suzanna might be good to go, thought Elka. But she did seem to have recovered from the “loss” of Max, whom she had never in fact stood a chance of winning over. The arrival of Umberto Grimaldi in the village to open the White Bean restaurant with his brother had created a much-needed diversion. Fortunately Suzanna’s interest in Umberto seemed to be reciprocated, even though the late hours he necessarily kept at the restaurant were a frequent source of complaint.

  Miss Pitchford had at this point in her reading reached the lines describing the less-than-altruistic activities of a peer known frequently—too frequently, it was felt—to darken the doorway of the House of Lords.

  “Lord Lislelivet,” she said, “certainly is a mover and a shaker; I’ll say that much for him. I knew his mother. Lovely woman. Breeding tells. I am not certain he is all that he could be in the scrupulousness department, however.” Her voice trilled the vowels in “scrupulousness,” like an opera singer going for the high notes. “But that I suppose is too much to ask these days. The noble families are all going to rot. Why, in my day…”

  But no one paid her any mind. The name Lislelivet only had meaning for people like Miss Pitchford, who read her Debrett’s the way she read her Bible. “How do you say ‘jackass’ in French?” Suzanna was asking Adam Birch, owner of The Onlie Begetter bookshop, who sat beside her. They had been talking of a recent resident of Nether Monkslip, a man with a flawless French accent, now sadly deceased, although whether sadness was called for in this particular man’s case remained a point of debate.

  “I’m not sure,” said Adam, turning to Mme Lucie Cuthbert, who squared the table where they sat. “Comment dit-on ‘jackass’ en français?”

  “I think it’s just ‘jackass,’ but you should wave your hands about as you say it, holding a Gitane.”

  “Ah.”

  Elka, from behind the counter, paused long enough in her trek to and from the kitchen to ask, “Has anyone seen Awena today? I wanted to ask her about food for the ceremony.”

  “I saw her working in her garden on my way over here,” said Suzanna. “She said she’d probably join us for elevenses.”

  “You’re talking about the…” Miss Pitchford stopped on a deep breath, finding it difficult to go on. “The public union of Max Tudor and Awena Owen, of course?” She was not at all certain how she felt about these loosey-goosey, New Agey goings-on, and would in fact have roundly condemned them as a travesty had she not been as fond of both Max and Awena as she was. The whole situation was a scandal that would not have been tolerated in her day. A travesty up with which no self-respecting Anglican bishop should put. But it was, she had to concede, a new day.

  Elka nodded, smiling as she dried her hands on a linen dishtowel worn through to near transparency. “The handfasting ceremony. I wouldn’t miss being there for the world.”

  “People will come from miles around,” Suzanna agreed. “Umberto is taking me—I managed to get him to agree to one day away from the restaurant. Besides, he’s donating some of the food.”

  Miss Pitchford sniffed loudly and went back to her reading. The duke of York was rumored to be getting remarried, and the duchess was at long last to be given the old heave-ho from the marital home. As a scandal, The Situation between Max and Awena simply paled by comparison.

  “I thought you had decided never to trust a man with beachy waves in his hair,” said Elka. Suzanna had expressed certain doubts over whether Umberto really was spending all his free time in the White Bean.

  “I came to realize that was natural. Can he really help it if he has better hair than I do? Besides, that was all just a misunderstanding.”

  “I am so glad to have lived to see the day,” said Adam. “Max and Awena. Such a perfect couple. And with a baby on the way!”

  A sound between a sniff and a snort erupted from Miss Pitchford. This situation with the baby was too much for her, and she looked sternly over the top of her newspaper to indicate that a change of topic would be quite in order.

  “At least there is one thing we can be sure of: she’s not after his money. Vicars don’t make any money,” said Suzanna.

  “I shouldn’t think that was the primary consideration on either side,” said Elka. “It’s obviously a true love match.” And she sighed, releasing a little cloud of organic coconut flour into the air.

  Five minutes later, they looked up as one as Awena Owen came gliding in. She did not waddle, noted Suzanna, the way most women in the advanced stages of pregnancy would waddle. Due in September, now mere weeks away, she moved like a train on a track, her long skirts hiding her locution. Or like a tugboat pulling an invisible ship into harbor. That she managed to look both womanly and, yes, sexy in this inflated condition was completely galling to Suzanna, who admitted no competition in the sexy department.

  Still, it was Awena, and even Suzanna found it hard to hold a grudge where the much-beloved neo-pagan was concerned.

  “May I have a glass of kale juice, Elka—if it’s not too much trouble?”

  Elka had begun offering fresh-squeezed juices like kale, cucumber, spinach, celery, and carrot. After some initial reluctance (“I don’t eat anything green that doesn’t come with dressing,” Suzanna had said, speaking for many), most of the villagers had been won over. While Elka’s pastries would never be resistible, the sales of healthier choices were gaining ground. Elka herself had lost a stone, most of it around her middle. Just the week before she had introduced shots of fresh ginger, wheat grass, and acai juices. Awena was her best customer in the wholesome juices
department.

  Nothing about her delicate condition had slowed Awena down—in fact, she was busier than ever, sought after by the BBC and by publishers wanting her to write a tie-in cookbook. But Awena, rather than reading the contracts on offer, had spent much of the past several days harvesting chamomile flowers and raspberries to dry for the tea she shared with Max and sold in her shop.

  She’d spent the evening before blessing and packing a collection of oils and botanical bath salts, the blessing meant to revive any plant spirits dampened during processing. Nothing shipped out of Goddessspell without an earnest Goddess-speed from its owner. It was rather as if she cracked open a bottle of organic champagne against the side of all her offerings to the public.

  In May, Awena had held a special candlelight “Pray for Peace” ceremony in the room at the back of her shop, an observance in honor of Vesak, more commonly known as Buddha’s Birthday. Awena had on several occasions lured a young Buddhist monk to make the journey to Nether Monkslip to lead a meditation class. In the beginning, he had caused a genteel commotion on the steam engine train from Staincross Minster in his orange robes, his demeanor unruffled as he was transported in silent dignity, his eyes closed, but now the regular passengers were used to him and asked after him to the conductor if he didn’t make an appearance on a given Saturday.

  Recently, Awena had been helping Tara Raine prepare for a weekend of rest and rejuvenation at the meditation retreat being hosted by Goddessspell at a nearby seaside resort. They would be offering heart-centered yoga asanas, deep relaxation via yoga nidra or “yogi sleep,” blissful harmony of One-Being using the chants of nada yoga, peaceful integration of the soul through guided imagery, healthful walks along the sunlit shore in honor of the goddess Shakti Vahini, and wholesome balanced meals. “A regular Tie-Died Hippie Granola Bliss-out,” as Suzanna had described it to her brother. A feature at the retreat would be a healing session using the techniques of energy medicine of the Peruvian Andes, along with a session of rune healing as practiced by the ancient Norse people.