But the doctors said she was fine now. Rather, she would soon be fine. Whether she would ever regain that unflappable grace and composure was anyone’s guess. Being on the receiving end of rampant and mindless cruelty had a way of changing one’s belief in one’s fellow man.
“By the way. It’s a very odd thing…” Essex began.
“What?”
“Nothing really. I hesitate to bring it up. But that face on the wall? Or the ‘Face,’ as some would have it?” Essex made quotation marks in the air with her fingers. “I went by St. Edwold’s the other day to talk with the sexton. There’s been a crush of visitors to the site. ‘Pilgrims,’ as he calls them. He’s asking us to help with security.”
“Yes? He’ll be lucky. We’re short-staffed as it is.”
“Yes. Well. It seems to be sort of knitting itself back together.”
“What does?”
“The face. Where Konstantin put a bullet through the center. The damage is shrinking, like a wound or scar healing.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Cotton. The whole conversation was starting to irritate him. “The sexton or somebody has been busy with a plaster knife.”
She moved the salt shaker a fraction out of true. “Do you really think so?”
EPILOGUE
Max had looked at the wailing bundle thrashing in his arms that day in St. Edwold’s and wondered what on earth he would do.
He spent the ensuing months in a constant shuttle between the hospital and home and the vicarage or—when Awena was released at last—working in Owen’s nursery, next to their bedroom and sleeping on a cot outside the door, so he and the baby wouldn’t disturb her. He could hear her cry out in her sleep, something she’d never done before. That was probably the worst sign, that Awena’s impenetrable serenity had been shattered.
But she was alive, and for a long time that was all that mattered.
One way or another, every waking moment was spent praying for Awena. Bargaining with God, at times pleading, at times angry.
For Awena was his alpha and omega. And life without her could not be endured.
The most bizarre thing was the impulse he kept having while she was in the hospital to pick up the phone to talk with her, to share some trivial event from his day. To tell her of Eugenia’s newfound celebrity, or to update her on Owen’s astonishing progress.
To sit alone without her in the evening was agony. The nights never seemed to end, and only remembering he had to keep his health for Owen’s sake helped him catch what hours of sleep he could. More days than not, he greeted the dawn as Nether Monkslip slipped into winter. Her sisters arrived in rotation to help him out—a godsend, all of them. They fed him until he thought he’d burst, plying him with calming teas and root-vegetable soups, which they claimed held the secret to his own recovery. Seeing how completely Awena and Owen were safe in their hands, he began to sleep at last.
He began praying to the face on the wall, sitting in a nearby pew for hours on end, asking for a miracle. Sometimes young Tommy would join him, silently, harnessing all his powers of stillness, extraordinary for a boy not yet five.
Max realized his pleading went against all he’d been taught by his religion, the teaching that he must accept whatever happens, whatever God has sent. One day in the gloaming light, he thought he saw the eyes of the face flash open. It startled but did not frighten him, and he sat for a long while, staring until his own eyes watered, forcing himself not to blink. It was as if this were his new standard, that the laws of physics should be upended in this way, for his benefit. This was his new normal. But he blinked at last and he saw the eyes were closed, as they had always been. As they were.
A visual distortion, merely.
A hallucination brought on by worry, by lack of sleep.
Someone had left behind in the pew a fine leather-bound copy of the psalms. It fell open in his hands to Psalm 85: “Righteousness shall go before him, and peace shall make a pathway for his feet.”
Peace eluded him.
He had often thought he would give anything to see the man who had killed Paul punished. He had got his wish, but what he had nearly lost was Awena.
I can accept anything, he thought, but not that. Never that.
Awena recovered completely; in fact, she healed so quickly that her doctor called it a “miracle.” When he said that to Max, when he used that word, Max had had to bite back the hysterical laughter that threatened to escape him. For how to explain to the man that of course, of course it was a miracle?
Wasn’t it a given that Awena, the healer, would herself be healed?
Thank God. He should have known.
Yet in the end, he found he could not accept any of what had happened: how near he had come to losing her. Only Awena could have achieved that quietude and stillness—Awena, who had somehow mastered the art of taking the world as it was, of people as they were. Of accepting everything and not trying to change anything. And despite all the evidence for ill and evil in the world, still seeing the beauty everywhere.
She also long ago had mastered the art of forgiveness, and Max struggled and prayed and found he could not.
It was some weeks later when he picked up the phone and rang his bishop.
And then he rang his old boss at MI5.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
G. M. Malliet won the Agatha Award for best first novel for Death of a Cozy Writer, which was nominated for the Anthony, Dilys, and Macavity, among numerous other crime novel awards. All the books in the Max Tudor series—Wicked Autumn, A Fatal Winter, Pagan Spring, and A Demon Summer—have been nominated for the Agatha Award. She and her husband live in the mid-Atlantic United States and travel frequently to the UK, the setting for her novels. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY G. M. MALLIET
A Demon Summer
Pagan Spring
A Fatal Winter
Wicked Autumn
Death at the Alma Mater
Death and the Lit Chick
Death of a Cozy Writer
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Cast of Characters
Epigraphs
Prologue: Destiny
2. Breakfast at Totleigh Hall
3. Lady Bountiful
4. Max and the Lord of the Manor
5. The Hon. Son
6. Murder in the Woods
7. DCI Cotton Takes the Case
8. Max and the Butler
9. Second Nanny
10. First Nanny
11. Suzanna and the WI
12. Noah’s Ark
13. Destiny Remembers
14. St. Edwold’s
15. The Duck Race
16. Max and the Bishop
17. Strangers on a Train
18. Max and Cotton
19. Max and the Lady
20. Max and the Dowager
21. Destiny Remembers II
22. Gaslight
23. Red Herrings
24. Connections
25. Born and Bred
26. Awena
27. Aftermath
28. From Russia with Love
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by G. M. Malliet
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of
St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
THE HAUNTED SEASON. Copyright © 2015 by G. M. Malliet. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover illustration by Rob Wood/Wood Ronsaville Harlin, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Malliet, G. M.
The haunted season: a Max Tudor novel / G. M. Malliet. — First edition.
p. cm.
“A Thomas Dunne Book.”
ISBN 978-1-250-02144-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-02143-4 (e-book)
I. Title.
PS3613.A4535H38 2015
813'.6—dc23
2015022072
e-ISBN 9781250021434
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First Edition: October 2015