A Finer End

eagerly, her eyes alight.
    ‘Oh, yes. We’ve made progress at last. Yesterday, Jack and Simon learned that Edmund was there when Thurstan, the first Norman abbot, had some of the monks murdered in the church itself. The one place they were assured sanctuary, and their own abbot...’ She shuddered. ‘I can’t imagine how terrible it must have been.’
    ‘We learned about that when I did archaeology at school,’ Faith said, frowning. ‘It’s the only time blood was shed in the history of the Abbey — unless you count Richard Whiting. But then Whiting was executed on the Tor, wasn’t he?’ For a moment the girl seemed far away, wrapped in something Winnie couldn’t see, then she looked up and met Winnie’s gaze again. ‘But I can’t remember why Abbot Thurstan had the monks killed.’
    ‘It was the chant. The monks refused to give up their sacred chant. We think—’
    The bells hung on the café door chimed as it swung open, and Faith sloshed her tea, startled. Garnet Todd stood in the doorway, wrapped in a long cloak.
    ‘Hullo, Winnie,’ Garnet said with a pleased smile; then it seemed to Winnie that a shadow fell across her face. She stepped down and strode across the damp flagged floor, her cape streaming behind her. She, too, looked drawn and tired — what on earth was wrong here?
    ‘I was just telling Faith we’ve missed you both.’ Winnie tried to mask her concern. ‘Why don’t you come to Jack’s with me? We could catch up on our news while we wait for him to get back from Bath.’
    ‘I—’ Garnet seemed to hesitate, then shook her head. ‘I wish we could, but I’ve an appointment — a delivery. Soon, though, we’ll all get together.’ She put a hand on Faith’s shoulder. ‘But just now I’d better run Faith home. It’s too hard a climb up the hill for her these days.’
    ‘And I’ve got to lock up,’ said Faith, rising awkwardly. ‘Then I’ve some studying to do.’ Faith cleared their tea things without meeting Winnie’s eyes, and Winnie knew then the rapport of moments ago had shattered.
    Shrugging, she said, ‘Right. Soon, then.’ At the door, however, she turned back. ‘You will take care, won’t you? Both of you?’
    Once outside, she stood her bike upright, then paused. There was a sharpness to the air that matched the clarity of the magenta sky above the Tor, and from somewhere she could have sworn she heard the faint thread of pipes. She felt again the temporal dislocation that Glastonbury sometimes engendered, as if the centuries had eased their boundaries and bled into one another.
    Then the sensation passed, and the images of the morning rushed back into her mind with such force that she felt breathless. She must talk to someone about what she had experienced. With sudden resolution, she began pushing her bike up the lane towards Fiona’s house.
     
    Nick Carlisle struggled to conceal his impatience with the elderly woman who couldn’t make up her mind between a book on the Glastonbury Zodiac and one proclaiming the Return of the Goddess. In the end, having spent half an hour dithering, she put down both books and smiled beatifically at him, saying, ‘I think I’ll come back another day, dear.’
    Nick summoned a smile and locked the door after her. It was already well past closing. He might have sold her the Goddess book if he’d pushed a bit, but he had no stomach for such things these days.
    He wandered towards the back of the shop, checking the tables for out-of-place material, stopping only when he reached the small nook that held Dion Fortune’s books. Running his fingertip along the spines, he frowned.
    Fortune had acknowledged the old gods, but she had understood the need for balance between the Christian and the pagan, the Abbey and the Tor. What would she have thought of the pagan revival creeping through Glastonbury like a stain?
    Lately, there was a darkness in the more bizarre fringe in Glastonbury, an underlying rumble of destructiveness that made him apprehensive. It didn’t do to place too much credence in rumours in Glastonbury, but there had been hints of rituals, a whisper of sacrifice and of a growing desire to unleash old energies long held in check. If this was the Old Religion Garnet Todd was teaching Faith, the latter could be in grave danger.
    It had been weeks since he’d seen Faith. Garnet kept her sequestered in that old wreck of a farmhouse, and when he had tried to see her at the café, Garnet had turned up as if