A Finer End

went inside for his car keys, and set out to pay a visit.
     
    It seemed to Faith that every day it got harder to walk up the bloody hill. The steep incline of Wellhouse Lane was made more treacherous by the slimy mat of dead leaves coating the tarmac, and if she fell she’d be as helpless as an overturned tortoise. The baby’s feet were lodged firmly in her diaphragm, and the pressure of its head on her sciatic nerve sent pain shooting down her thigh — at least that was what Garnet had told her, and Garnet would know.
    Faith stopped, panting, pressing her palm into the small of her back and wiggling feet already swollen from a day of standing behind the cafe’s counter. She could hear the trickle of water beneath her feet. These hills were honeycombed with water — it ran in the culverts laid under the tarmac; it leached from the verges and sprang from every nook and cranny.
    Wood smoke lay heavy on the still, damp air. Garnet would have the stove lit, and Faith imagined the smoke rising from the chimney, spilling down the hillside like a cloak, hiding everything beneath it from mortal sight. But then she had been thinking strange things of late, and her dreams were stranger still.
    It was odd that the nearer she came to having her baby, the more she missed her own mother. Often now, she dreamed she heard her mother’s voice calling her name — sometimes she even felt her mum’s hand on her brow, stroking back her hair — and then she would wake in the silent, cold room, the only living presence the calico cat curled on the foot of her bed.
    Stepping carefully on the slippery tarmac, she began the uphill trudge again. To her left rose the massive cone of the Tor, blotting out the sky. When she had first come to live with Garnet, she’d liked to climb up to the head of the spring above the farmhouse and gaze out over the Levels, imagining centuries Past and the land below her covered with water, Glastonbury an island in the Summer Sea.
    But now the pull of the Tor was too strong — she carried it with her, waking and sleeping. Was this feeling of oppressive power bound up with what Jack and the others were trying to do? Or was it something else entirely, something so old and dark it stretched beyond memory?
    She wished she could talk to Winnie about it. Winnie listened without judging, without trying to make you see things her way. But she was no longer sure she could trust Winnie, after what Garnet had told her. That saddened her, as did her decision not to see her family. As much as she missed them, that was not her path. Faith knew that as surely as she knew she held two lives in her hands.
    The smell of smoke grew stronger as she reached the farmyard gate. The yard was a pool of shadow beneath the peaked slate roof of the house. But as she clicked the gate latch, the door opened. Garnet stood outlined against the kitchen’s warm glow, looking anxiously out into the dusk, and Faith hurried to meet her.
     
    Other than Andrew Catesby, Jack had not met Winnie’s guests before.
    Archdeacon Suzanne Sanborne, Winnie’s immediate superior, was a woman in her forties with short, dark, silver-streaked hair that curled about her square jaw. She had a forthright manner and a talent for putting people at their ease, and Jack knew that Winnie both liked and admired her.
    The Archdeacon’s husband, David Sanborne, was a physician with a busy practice in Street. His mild demeanour made an interesting contrast to his wife’s more forceful personality.
    Both Sanbornes seemed well acquainted with Andrew Catesby, as was Winnie’s friend Fiona Allen and her husband, Bram. The two women listened to Andrew with rapt attention, laughing at his stories on cue, and it seemed odd to Jack that a man so attractive to women had never married. Andrew did a good job of excluding him from the general conversation, but no one else seemed aware of it, and Jack was content to observe until Winnie called the party in to dinner.
    Winnie had painted the dining room the colour of aubergines, which made the large space seem smaller and more intimate. Above the table, she’d hung a Victorian chandelier she’d found in a junk shop, polishing the brass until it gleamed and filling it with candles. The effect was lovely. And Winnie looked lovely herself in the candle glow, in a dress of midnight-blue velvet that set off the blue of her eyes and the creaminess of her skin. Was it Jack’s imagination, or was Andrew watching his sister