A Finer End

encountered. Once or twice he thought he’d glimpsed a spark of possibility in her eyes, before she withdrew again into that calm silence he could not penetrate, and this kept him from giving up.
    Impatiently, he stood and paced the confined area of the garden, stopping again at the well. The cover was pulled to one side, enabling him to peer down into the chamber itself. There was said to be a grotto set into one of the walls, large enough for a man to stand in, but he could see no sign of it. Dropping to his knees for a closer look, he didn’t hear Faith coming until she opened the gate to the well garden.
    ‘Don’t fall in,’ she teased, coming to stand behind him. ‘Garnet says it’s the Goddess’s well, and I doubt She’d like some big bloke splashing about in it.’
    Faith wore a striped football shirt beneath denim dungarees, and her cropped hair and delicate features looked all the more feminine for it. Bugger Garnet, Nick thought savagely, but he didn’t say it aloud. ‘I was duly worshipping. Hands and knees, see?’
    ‘Nick, don’t joke. It’s a sacred place.’
    Rising, he returned to the bench and patted the seat beside him. ‘No offence intended. Come and sit; you stand all day.’
    She obeyed, but kept a chaste distance between them. His desire for her was driving him to distraction, hut he didn’t dare cross the boundaries she’d set, for fear of destroying the friendship they’d forged over the Past months. Yet the thought that she had crossed those harriers with someone else was maddening, and it was a11 he could do not to ask her who... or why she continued to protect him.
    Not that he had much opportunity to be alone with Faith. Garnet Todd had become both mother hen and fieerce watchdog, and she’d made no effort to conceal her disapproval of Nick’s interest. On the few occasions he d ventured up to Garnet’s farmhouse to see Faith after work, he’d sat uncomfortably in the primitive kitchen with the two of them, feeling like an unwelcome Victorian suitor. Hence this morning’s tryst in the garden.
    ‘Some people think this is the garden Malory meant when he wrote that Lancelot retired to a valley near Glastonbury,’ Nick mused, stretching his arm across the bench top, an inch from Faith’s shoulders. ‘Do you suppose this very place is where Lancelot lived out his days, dreaming of Guinevere in her nunnery? They died within months of one another — did you know that?’
    Faith shivered. ‘That’s too sad. This garden isn’t meant to be sad: it’s a healing place.’
    ‘I suppose it was a sort of healing for Lancelot, if he came to terms with his love for Gwen and for Arthur in the time he had left. And if he had been denied the Grail, perhaps living by a spring said to flow with the blood of Christ was some compensation.’
    ‘I can see him here,’ Faith said dreamily, tilting her head back until her hair brushed his arm. ‘With his little hut in the woods, and the spring flowing out of the hillside.’ Her face darkened. ‘But the other spring would have been always below him, reminding him of the darkness to come.’
    ‘The White Spring?’ It flowed from the base of the Tor itself, and if the Red Spring represented the female element, the White Spring was said to represent the male.
    ‘Garnet says it’s the entrance to Annwn, the home of Gwyn ap Nudd, Lord of the Underworld. And I can feel... something there... it’s a dark place.’
    ‘Oh, bollocks, Faith.’ He touched her chin with his fingertips, turning her face towards his. ‘You don’t really believe that, do you? It’s just a fairy story.’
    ‘How do you know?’ She twisted her face away and sat up straight. ‘The Druids were in tune with the earth itself, and there’s nothing more powerful.’
    ‘But it’s myth, Faith! Symbolism. It was their way of explaining the world. No one’s meant to take it literally.’
    ‘Is what’s happened to Jack a myth? Do you not believe that’s real?’
    ‘Yes, but—’
    ‘If Edmund can speak to us across nine hundred years, how can you set limits on what’s true?’ Faith stood and faced him, her eyes bright with anger.
    ‘But that’s different—’
    ‘Is it?’
    ‘Of course it’s different. Glastonbury Abbey was a real place, and monks really did live there. Edmund was a real person—’
    ‘Can you prove it?’
    ‘I don’t need to prove it. I’ve experienced it.’
    ‘Then how can you say other people’s experiences aren’t