Wicked Autumn Read online

  The room contained many museum-quality relics, including a Bakelite phone so ancient Max was always astonished when it rang, and tended to shout into it as though, himself ancient and hard of hearing, he was calling to someone cast adrift on a raging sea. Much of the furniture when he’d arrived at the vicarage had been heavy, dark, or ugly—in other words, Victorian—and he’d had a good clearing out. Noah Caraway of Noah’s Ark had taken much of it on commission.

  The windows of the room were swathed by a fusty collection of curtain hangings, relicts of Walter Bokeler, his predecessor. They looked like they might have been made from Queen Victoria’s cast-off undergarments. He always meant to get them changed but the money was always needed in a nobler cause. Leather chairs (his) and a skirted sofa (Bokeler’s) were grouped around the attractive stone fireplace.

  Some of the shelves lining the walls were filled with old volumes of sermons by presumably esteemed and undoubtedly long-dead sermonizers. Most had been privately printed and were expensively bound in dark embossed leather—walls of books that should have warmed the room but instead tended to suggest that the march of history was long, gray, and deadly dull. Max had long wished to rid himself of them, along with the curtains, but who, when it came down to it, would want them? Even the owner of the new-and-used bookshop in the village had politely declined to take the volumes on commission. Repeatedly. As had Noah Caraway.

  The air in the room grew close from the heat. Max walked over and pushed the casement wide, letting into the room the night scents of the plants beneath the window. He saw a sky still and clear, bright with stars. A hint of approaching autumn hung in the air, giving the garden the smell of something just washed with cold rain. Beyond his range of vision, outside the village of Nether Monkslip, were green fields turning yellow as the earth continued its slow tilt away from the sun. It would soon be the autumn equinox, long recognized under different guises and names. In the church, the feast of St. Michael—Michaelmas—had been assigned to mark this all-important shortening of days.

  He decided he was hungry, but could not get excited at the prospect of whatever foil-wrapped packet Mrs. Hooser, the woman who “did” for him (and whom he had inherited, much like the curtains, from Walter Bokeler), had left in the fridge for him to reheat. It was more than likely a rubbery pasta-ish dish smothered in a sauce containing either suspect mushrooms or equally suspect-looking herbs. Mrs. Hooser cooked from store-bought packets for her own children, the extravagantly named Tildy Ann and her younger brother, Tom, which on the whole, Max felt, may have added years to the children’s odds of survival.

  She often brought Tom and Tildy Ann with her to the vicarage on the occasions when her own “help” had failed to materialize. Tildy Ann, a bossy little thing, as vigilant as her mother was feckless, kept Tom on the straight and narrow, held firm in her small iron grip. She was also fiercely protective of him: woe betide anyone who might try to do Tom a harm.

  That Mrs. Hooser was at best an indifferent housekeeper was a fact to which Max had long become resigned. She tended to move and speak with sweeping, theatrical gestures and, as a result, many a vicarage bibelot had met a shattering fate at her hands. With bovine cunning, she would attempt to hide the evidence of the latest catastrophe—the broken crockery, the missing drawer handle—apparently never learning that Max, the most forgiving of employers, was incapable of anything but mild reproof. Mrs. Hooser, with her indifferent hoovering and her doubtful menu selections, had found secure employment at last, had she but known it—an island in the storm-tossed sea of life. She responded to his forbearance with an inflated protectiveness of her own, more or less frisking every visitor to the vicarage. As she was raising the two children alone, Mrs. Hooser had become an obligation Max felt both obliged and (more or less) content to accept.

  She called him Father Tudor, and he knew without trying he’d never be able to persuade her to a less formal mode of address. He in his turn always called her Mrs. Hooser. The “Mrs.” was a courtesy title she had granted to herself, he suspected. If there had ever been either a Mr. Hooser, or a boyfriend, he had long since left the field.

  * * *

  Max Tudor had been at St. Edwold’s nearly three years, a time of relative peace and respite, for himself as well as Mrs. Hooser. He had gathered from various villagers that the search to find a replacement for Walter Bokeler had not gone smoothly, particularly as three joint parishes were involved. In fact, the position had been vacant for several months.

  He had been surprised to learn that many Nether Monkslip villagers had plumped for a female vicar. This seemed daringly forward, looking for what was clearly a hidebound place, even recklessly avant-garde, until someone had explained the reasoning: “You can generally get more work out of a woman.” Others, of course, felt this was the thin edge of the wedge and were vehemently opposed to a female in the role.

  Max also had gathered his single status had been cause for debate until, as has been mentioned, the women of Nether Monkslip got a good look at him. (What the men thought in this regard as in so many others did not really matter.) Even then, the question of whether or not he was professionally celibate and intended to remain so was an argument that had raged long into the wee hours at the Hidden Fox.

  For it was a truth universally acknowledged that a single vicar must be in want of a wife. Someone to make traybakes and scones; someone to teach Sunday school. Of course there were others to fill these roles, but it wasn’t right somehow that there was no one on hand to be officially landed with these jobs. And in some matters, it must be said, it was to a woman the parishioners wanted to unburden themselves. For some of the men and women of the parish, there was an element of embarrassment in confiding one’s troubles to such a handsome male specimen, however kindhearted and well-intentioned he might be.

  But the tide had turned, and those in the “Max Camp” had won out. Over the months leading into years, Max’s genuine and growing affection for the countryside and its people had gone a long way toward wearing away the misgivings that naturally attended on any new incumbent. Max was, luckily, the kind of man also to inspire a fanatic protectiveness amongst all his parishioners, not just Mrs. Hooser. Within a short period of time (short by village standards, which tended to measure things in centuries), Max had become their vicar.

  His enthusiasm for and willing participation in customs such as the upcoming Fayre had only helped in winning them over. The payoff for him—a sense of being vital to the community—was huge. It was nearly a 180-degree change from the frequent isolation, and the secrecy, of his former life.

  The Fayre’s official title was “Harvest Home: A Harvest Fayre”—Max had seen flyers posted with ruthless efficiency by Wanda Batton-Smythe throughout the village (or more likely, by whomever she’d managed to shanghai onto the Fayre publicity committee). The flyer featured an amateurishly drawn collection of apples and gourds, unconsciously phallic in composition and execution. Max gathered that every year for decades there had been great excitement over the Largest Vegetable competition (“That would be my husband,” was the standard comment), which was an adjunct to the Marrow-Growing contest. Both competitions had been known to produce rather strong feelings that could linger for weeks, if not for generations, so those called to judge did not, if they were wise, take their duties lightly. The day also would feature many tests of skill like Ball in the Bottle. (There was, predictably, also a more ribald name for this event.)

  Alongside the competitions, there would be produce stalls selling honey, jam, jelly, chutney, and pickles, in addition to all the usual handcrafted items and the parsley and dandelion wines that had come to typify the offerings of small English villages. Nether Monkslip—a village of professional bakers, tailors, knitters, potters, weavers, and so forth—was subjected to much less of the usual rubbish than other villages, where oddly misshapen baby clothes and jars of stuff teeming with gestating botulism were the norm.

  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.