A Finer End

Nor of any other physical ailment I’ve been able to find. Believe me, I’ve tried.’
    ‘Then—’
    ‘I suppose I could be suffering from some sort of mental breakdown, but I seem to be coping well enough otherwise. Wouldn’t you say?’
    ‘Of course,’ Winnie hastened to reassure him. He seemed as normal and as capable as anyone she had ever met, and that made his story all the more disconcerting.
    ‘Good. That’s something, anyway,’ he said with the ghost of a smile. ‘Having ruled out physical ailments,
    I started to research. There are parallels to something that’s happened before.’
    Realizing she was still clutching her wineglass, Winnie relaxed her fingers and took a sip, forcing herself to be silent, to let him tell it his own way.
    ‘Does the name Frederick Bligh Bond ring a bell?’ Jack continued.
    ‘Didn’t he have something to do with the Abbey? Sorry. That’s all I can come up with.’
    ‘Bond was an architect, like me, and an authority on early church architecture. But he was also an amateur archaeologist, and when the Church of England bought the Abbey from private owners in 1907, Bond got the commission to excavate the ruins. He made some marvellous discoveries, including the existence of the Edgar Chapel. All very respectable, all very above board, until several years into the excavations, when he revealed that his finds were due to instructions from former monks of the Abbey — and that the monks had communicated with him through automatic writing. He was fired, his reputation in ruins, and he never recovered.’
    ‘But if he was familiar with the history of the Abbey, he was most likely just dredging up stuff from his subconscious,’ Winnie protested.
    ‘Oddly enough, Bond never claimed otherwise. He believed individual consciousness was merely a part of a transcendent whole — a cosmic memory — and that every person has the power to open a door into that reality. There was a spiritual revival going on in Glastonbury at the time, particularly after the First World War. It attracted all sorts of notables — Yeats, Shaw — Dorothy Sayers even attended one of Bond’s sessions. So the general climate was not averse to Bond’s ideas.’
    ‘So he thought he was tapping into this collective memory as well as his own subconscious?’
    ‘It was Bond’s friend, a Captain John Bartlett, who did the actual writing, but Bartlett knew very little about the Abbey or archaeology—’
    ‘But surely Bond prompted him?’
    ‘Bond asked specific questions,’ Jack corrected. ‘Bartlett’s first few episodes had occurred spontaneously, then Bond suggested that this... conduit... might be directed in a specific way. But often enough they got something completely unexpected.’
    Jack’s blue eyes were alight with passion, and Winnie had a sudden chilling thought. He’d never talked about his dead wife — she knew only what had been repeated round the town, that his wife had died in childbirth, along with their infant daughter, only a few months after he’d lost his mother to a prolonged illness and his father to a heart attack. ‘Jack... you’re not thinking that you can... direct this? That you might... contact... Emily?’
    He regarded her, unblinking. ‘I had considered it,’ he answered at last. ‘And I have to admit the idea that the dead are perhaps... not so far away is... comforting. But it’s not that simple, Winnie. I think it’s a case not of what I want from him, but rather what he wants from me!
    ‘Him?’
    ‘It seems to be a ”he”. ”Edmund”. A monk of Glastonbury Abbey, although I haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact time frame,’
    ‘That’s why you were interested in Simon Fitzstephen,’ Winnie exclaimed.
    ‘I went to hear him speak the other night. If I could arrange to meet Fitzstephen, give him specific details, perhaps he could help me.’
    ‘Jack—’ Winnie didn’t want to encourage his association with Simon Fitzstephen, but couldn’t think of a concrete objection that wouldn’t require her to expose her past dealings with the man.
    Misinterpreting her hesitation, Jack said, ‘I can’t blame you for being sceptical. I don’t know what the explanation is — only that it’s not going away. If you feel you can’t go on seeing me—’
    Winnie took his hand, holding it tightly in both of hers. ‘Now you are talking daft. Of course I’m not going to stop seeing you. And I’ll do whatever I can to help you. You know