A Finer End

was fingerprint powder everywhere, and the room was a sea of papers. The drawers of Garnet’s desk had been prised open, and all but one drawer was empty.
    Lighting the lamp on the desk, she looked at the contents of the drawer they had left intact. It held a half-dozen spiral notebooks, and as Faith opened them, she saw that each was filled with technical notes on tile making. No wonder the police hadn’t found them useful.
    Garnet had been secretive to the point of paranoia concerning the recipes she used in the glazes on her tiles. She’d insisted that they were what made her work unique, and her restoration techniques possible. In a talkative mood, she had once told Faith that she used only natural materials available to medieval craftsmen, creating the authentic colours that made her tiles so prized.
    But it seemed Garnet’s secrets had not died with her. The journals held not only extensive notes, but accounts of formulas and experiments, failures and successes.
    Faith was so fascinated that she forgot the time, until a glance at the darkening window reminded her that she must keep on. She had meant to be finished and back at the café when Duncan came to collect her, although what she would tell Buddy she had yet to figure out.
    She put the journals back and thought for a moment. The office was a dead end. If there had been anything useful the police would have found it. Slowly, she returned to the kitchen. This was the heart of the house, where Garnet had spent her time when she was not working. Here she had sung while she cooked, she had read, she had rocked in the well-worn rocking chair.
    Faith lowered herself into the rocker. Here she would have rocked her own child, if Garnet had not died. She looked round, trying to see the kitchen from Garnet’s point of view. Garnet hadn’t owned many things, but among her most treasured possessions had been her books, especially her cookbooks. They sat in the small nook above the cooker, apparently untouched by the police maelstrom.
    With a grunt of effort, Faith stood and pulled out one book, then another, swiftly thumbing through them.
    It was in a vegetarian tome Faith had seldom seen Garnet use that she found the papers tucked inside the flyleaf: several sheets of foolscap filled with Garnet’s spiky handwriting, pages torn from a book, and a newspaper clipping, yellowed and brittle with age.
    First she unfolded the printed sheets, her eyes widening with shock as she read. The pages had obviously been torn from a primer on ancient magic, but these were not the gentle ceremonies Garnet had taught her — these were rituals that called the darkest and oldest powers up from the depths, rituals celebrating the Tor as the entrance to the Underworld, the home of the Great Mother. Participants began by walking the ancient spiral maze, the physical manifestation of the vortex of energy that would suck them up to the summit, and then down into the very heart of the Tor. Those who passed through chaos and death would emerge reborn, filled with the power of the Mother.
    As she read, Faith knew with certainty that it was this force that had brought her to the Tor, and that Garnet must have known it too. With unsteady fingers, she opened the handwritten pages.
    She might have been my daughter. She has come to me, a gift from the gods, redemption contained in her innocence. I will bring her child into the world... in return for the child lost, a life for a life... If only I can protect her from the power that awaits this birth.
    So that was why Garnet had watched over her with such fierceness! She had known the thing that pulled and tugged at Faith for what it was; she had meant somehow to shield her from it. Fingers trembling, Faith opened the clipping, peering at the faded newsprint.
    A photo of a child, a little girl, then a headline: TRAGEDY ON THE TOR, beneath which ran an all-too-brief story. Four-year-old Sarah Jane Kinnersley was struck and killed yesterday evening in a hit-and-run accident on the slopes of Glastonbury Tor. The tragedy occurred at dusk in Well-house Lane, just below the Kinnersley farm. Sarah’s parents realized something was amiss when Sarah did not—
    Faith looked up. A sound — she’d heard a sound. The clipping fluttered to the floor as she strained her senses to catch the sound again. But there was nothing but the spattering of rain against the windowpane, and she saw that the lowering sky had obliterated all but the last vestiges of