A Finer End

that morning with the smell of her childhood lingering from a halfremembered dream. Crisp and piney-green as the air of a summer morning on Loch Ness, the scent stayed with her throughout the day, tickling the edge of her awareness. It filled her with a deep, almost physical longing to paint, but she resisted the impulse.
    In the past few months, whenever she’d touched brush to canvas, she had painted the same thing — a child’s face, a little girl perhaps four or five years old. Where the image came from, or why it persisted, she did not know, but its occurrence left her feeling headachy and ill, and she’d begun to suspect that something was terribly wrong.
    Kneeling in the heavily mulched rose bed, she ruthlessly deadheaded the spent blooms and tried to shake off her malaise. Soon she’d go in and put the last touches to her vegetable soup. Her friend Winnie Catesby was coming to lunch.
    It was an odd friendship. She had never been able to accept the primary tenets of the Christian faith and Winnie was an Anglican priest, but their relationship was one Fiona had come to treasure in the year since she and Winnie had met at a council meeting. Winnie had the rare gift of making others feel as if they truly deserved her attention, and the time spent in her company had helped Fiona deal with the grief that had coloured her life for so long.
    That pain not even her husband had been able to heal, although he had given her much joy in other ways. Sitting back in the sun-warmed- earth, she thought of how beautiful Bram had been when they had first met, and she smiled.
    Even now, with the once-golden locks cut short and thinning, and the inevitable slight softening of the fine features, she found him irresistible.
    How fortunate she was that fate had seen fit to bring them both, like ancient pilgrims washed ashore, to the first Pilton Festival — Glastonbury Fayre. She and Bram had found their destiny in Glastonbury, and had never looked back. Bram had sold her first few canvases on the street. Their success had enabled him to find gallery space for her work. It was not long before he owned the gallery, and in the years since, he’d developed an international clientele for her work and that of other painters he had taken on.
    They’d made a good life for themselves, she and Bram, built on their mutual efforts and their love for each other. But sometimes in her dreams she saw that life for the fragile thing it was, and she would wake with a start of fear.
     
    Jack stood, hesitating, before the Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, an ugly square block of a structure built in the 1860s, partly from stone salvaged from the Abbey precincts. Nor was the alleyway that led from the High Street to the building prepossessing in the dusk — it smelled of damp and cat urine, and the tattered shreds of posters pasted to its doors made a sad collage.
    But the poster advertising that evening’s event had not yet suffered the ravages of time and weather. Simon Fitzstephen’s ascetic face was familiar — Jack had seen it often enough on Fitzstephen’s book jackets since he had started browsing in Nick Carlisle’s New Age bookshop. An Anglican priest who had given up active ministry to pursue his studies, Fitzstephen’s books were at the more conservative end of the shop’s offerings — the author was a local man, and a respected authority on the early Church and on Grail mythology. What would Fitzstephen think, Jack wondered, if he knew about his correspondence the past few months with a dead monk?
    Like a jewel set in the greensward the Abbey lay... a city sufficient unto itself. We entered through the eastern gate... gone now... all gone...
    My father, always sharp in his dealings, meant to make one less mouth to feed and yet cheat the Abbey of his gift, for I was a sickly child and he foresaw I would not reach my manhood. My mother lamented, but my father would not hear her...
    The Abbot blessed me, his hands upon my head. Then they stripped me, washed me, clothed me in the rough brown habit. I was pledged to God, yet I knew nothing...
    So today’s script had read, the first in several weeks. Although it had been almost three months since the strange writings had begun, Jack had yet to tell Winnie about the communications from Edmund of Glastonbury. He feared she’d be appalled by something that smacked of spiritualism — and he felt guilty over the fact that he’d been unable to silence the nagging hope that somehow,