A Finer End

Winnie teased him about his students, saying he’d been born in the wrong century. According to her, he’d have made a perfect nineteenth-century gentleman archaeologist, surrounded by rapt disciples, but Andrew thought it unlikely that the coterie of scruffy graduate students who usually staffed his digs could be described as “rapt.”

He and his sister had enjoyed an unusual rapport since childhood. Having lost their parents quite young, they’d become particularly close and when, after five years in London, Winnie had been given a parish near Glastonbury, he had felt his life complete. He supposed he’d taken for granted that things would go on as they were indefinitely—in fact, he’d even considered selling his house on Hillhead and moving into the Vicarage with Winnie. They had always shared interests, particularly their love of music, and it had been their custom to spend their free time together.

But all that had changed since Winnie had become involved with Jack Montfort last winter.

In Winnie’s company, Andrew had been content—with his teaching, his archaeological work, and his activism in the community—but now these once-beloved things seemed pointless.

The Thorn loomed ahead of him, its twisted silhouette a darker shadow against the dusk, and soon afterwards he reached the stile where the path intersected his street. Winnie loved the house on Hillhead, with its sweeping vista of the Somerset Levels, and she had helped him decorate it in a spare style that enhanced the view. Here they had spent many a winter evening in front of the fire, and in summer had lingered past dusk on the terraced patio.

As Andrew entered the house, its emptiness seemed to mock him. He hung Phoebe’s lead neatly on the hook beside the door, then scooped her evening portion of kibble into her bowl. But after a quick perusal of the fridge, he lost any enthusiasm for the preparation of his own meal.

Instead, he poured himself a solitary glass of red wine and took glass and bottle into the darkened sitting room. Through his uncurtained windows, he could see faint lights twinkling in the plain below, as remote as the stars pricking through the velvet expanse of the southern sky.

His life seemed as if it were collapsing around him, forming a dark, cold weight in his chest that gnawed at him like a tumor. He’d tried seeking solace elsewhere—a mistaken attempt with consequences so disastrous he strove to put the incident from his mind.

Never had he dreamed that anything—or anyone—could separate him from his sister, or that he would find her absence so devastating. If ever he had shared Winnie’s faith, this blow would have shattered it—how could any god inflict such loss upon him, after what he had suffered? Nor would any god right it, he thought as he poured another glass of wine. That, he could see clearly now, was entirely up to him.

Fiona Finn Allen had awakened that morning with the smell of her childhood lingering from a half-remembered dream. Crisp and piney-green as the air of a summer morning on Loch Ness, the scent stayed with her throughout the day, tickling the edge of her awareness. It filled her with a deep, almost physical longing to paint, but she resisted the impulse.

In the past few months, whenever she’d touched brush to canvas, she had painted the same thing—a child’s face, a little girl perhaps four or five years old. Where the image came from, or why it persisted, she did not know, but its occurrence left her feeling headachy and ill, and she’d begun to suspect that something was terribly wrong.

Kneeling in the heavily mulched rose bed, she ruthlessly deadheaded the spent blooms and tried to shake off her malaise. Soon she’d go in and put the last touches to her vegetable soup. Her friend Winnie Catesby was coming to lunch.

It was an odd friendship. She had never been able to accept the primary tenets of the Christian faith and Winnie was an Anglican priest, but their relationship was one Fiona had come to treasure in the year since she and Winnie had met at a council meeting. Winnie had the rare gift of making others feel as if they truly deserved her attention, and the time spent in her company had helped Fiona deal with the grief that had colored her life for so long.

That pain not even her husband had been able to heal, although he had given her much joy in other ways. Sitting back in the sun-warmed earth, she thought of how beautiful Bram had been when they had first met, and she smiled.

Even now, with the once-golden locks cut short and thinning, and the inevitable slight softening of the fine features, she found him irresistible.