A Finer End

She stood, closing the lid on the piano keys with a thump. It wouldn’t get easier, so she might as well stop making excuses and get on with it. Tomorrow, first thing, she would take him aside and say what she must. And then she would face the consequences.

From where Andrew Catesby stood, on the summit of Wirral Hill, he imagined he could just make out the estuary of the River Brue, the slight dip in the land that marked the gateway to the sea. To the north rose the Mendips, to the south the lesser Polden Ridge, and to the west, between him and the sea, stretched the wide, flat expanse of the Somerset Levels. Just when, he wondered, had he lost all joy in the prospect? Was there nothing safe from the anger that seemed to seep from him, staining all it touched?

Beside him, Phoebe, his spaniel, tugged at her lead, and Andrew freed her for a brief run before the light faded altogether. He turned, looking down at the lights of the Safeway on the Street Road, and beyond it the rising flank of the town itself, and behind that, the ever-present shadow of the Tor. Glastonbury was not really an island, of course; it had not been one within the span of human memory. It was a peninsula, linked to the higher ground to the east by a neck of layered limestone. But there had been many times when Glastonbury must have seemed an island to those travelers arriving from the west—even now, with the sea-water contained by extensive seawalls and deep-cut rhynes, heavy rains could bring the waters lapping once more at the foot of Wirral Hill. Andrew much preferred that appellation to the more commonplace Wearyall Hill, a direct reference to the Joseph of Arimathea myth. Below him on the slope grew the famous Glastonbury Thorn—a dubious tourist attraction, in his opinion.

After the Crucifixion, according to legend, Joseph brought twelve companions by sea to Glastonbury. The long, humped back of the hill proved the travelers’ first sight of land, and as a grateful and weary Joseph climbed ashore, he planted his staff of hawthorn in the earth of the hillside. The staff took root and a flowering tree burst forth, a sign to Joseph and his companions that here they should build a temple, the first Christian church in England.

Of course, the original thorn had long since died, replaced by a spindly, windswept shrub Andrew had difficulty believing could inspire awe in the most gullible pilgrim. But then, he dealt in facts, not fiction; he preferred things that could be measured, sampled, and recorded.

It seemed to him that the history of Glastonbury was so rich that it needed no embellishing with myths and questionable fables, and that the archaeology of the area provided an endless—and verifiable—source of discovery. The casual way his students accepted the blatant rubbish circulated about Glastonbury infuriated him. If it was drama they wanted, he’d give them the savage execution of the last abbot of Glastonbury, Richard Whiting, hanged on the Tor by Henry VIII’s henchmen. As soon as Whiting was dead, his head was struck off and his body cut into quarters, one to be displayed at Wells, one at Bath, one at Ilchester, and one at Bridgwater. His severed head the king’s men placed over the great gateway of the Abbey itself.

Whiting had been a kindly old man, an unlikely candidate for fate to choose as a martyr to a king’s greed, but the abbot had gone to his death with quiet dignity. Andrew never climbed the Tor without thinking of Richard Whiting’s execution, and he resented bitterly those who would make a theme park of one of Glastonbury’s most sacred spots.

In this he had his sister Winifred’s support. As an Anglican priest, she found the New Age marketing of Glastonbury as difficult to deal with as he did. Of course, both town and Abbey had a long history of embellishment, ending with the scam of all time, the digging up in 1191 of King Arthur’s and Queen Guinevere’s supposed bones from the Abbey churchyard.

Winnie, always one to see the best in people, insisted that the Abbey monks had acted in good faith, but Andrew was more cynical. After the devastating fire of 1184, the Abbey had been in dire need of funds for rebuilding. The “newly” discovered relics meant pilgrims—and therefore revenue. Human nature had not changed that much in eight hundred years, he thought grimly.

Realizing it was almost fully dark, Andrew whistled for Phoebe and reclipped her lead as he turned to retrace their path down the hill. Phoebe picked her way through the tussocky grass, and as Andrew followed he considered the lecture he needed to prepare for tomorrow’s sixth-form history class. Sixth-formers were always difficult—full of their own importance as they neared freedom and university—but he had hopes for one girl in particular, a scholar with an interest in archaeology, but then he had been disappointed before. It didn’t pay to invest oneself too deeply in adolescents.