A Finer End

How fortunate she was that fate had seen fit to bring them both, like ancient pilgrims washed ashore, to the first Pilton Festival—Glastonbury Fayre. She and Bram had found their destiny in Glastonbury, and had never looked back. Bram had sold her first few canvases on the street. Their success had enabled him to find gallery space for her work. It was not long before he owned the gallery, and in the years since, he’d developed an international clientele for her work and that of other painters he had taken on.

They’d made a good life for themselves, she and Bram, built on their mutual efforts and their love for each other. But sometimes in her dreams she saw that life for the fragile thing it was, and she would wake with a start of fear.

Jack stood, hesitating, before the Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, an ugly square block of a structure built in the 1860s, partly from stone salvaged from the Abbey precincts. Nor was the alleyway that led from the High Street to the building prepossessing in the dusk—it smelled of damp and cat urine, and the tattered shreds of posters pasted to its doors made a sad collage.

But the poster advertising that evening’s event had not yet suffered the ravages of time and weather. Simon Fitzstephen’s ascetic face was familiar—Jack had seen it often enough on Fitzstephen’s book jackets since he had started browsing in Nick Carlisle’s New Age bookshop. An Anglican priest who had given up active ministry to pursue his studies, Fitzstephen’s books were on the more conservative end of the shop’s offerings—the author was a local man, and a respected authority on the early Church and on Grail mythology. What would Fitzstephen think, Jack wondered, if he knew about his correspondence the past few months with a dead monk?

Like a jewel set in the greensward the Abbey lay … a city sufficient unto itself. We entered through the eastern gate … gone now … all gone.…

My father, always sharp in his dealings, meant to make one less mouth to feed and yet cheat the Abbey of his gift, for I was a sickly child and he foresaw I would not reach my manhood. My mother lamented, but my father would not hear her.…

The Abbot blessed me, his hands upon my head. Then they stripped me, washed me, clothed me in the rough brown habit. I was pledged to God, yet I knew nothing.…

So today’s script had read, the first in several weeks. Although it had been almost three months since the strange writings had begun, Jack had yet to tell Winnie about the communications from Edmund of Glastonbury. He feared she’d be appalled by something that smacked of spiritualism—and he felt guilty over the fact that he’d been unable to silence the nagging hope that somehow, sometime, this strange gift would put him in touch with his dead wife.

Tonight, he told himself he had come here merely to satisfy his curiosity—to ask, for instance, when the Abbey’s east gate had fallen into disuse; or when the Church had discontinued the practice of accepting children into the Order as gifts.

But he knew there was more to it than that. He needed to forge a connection with the past: to see the Abbey as the monk Edmund had seen it, to imagine the universe in Edmund’s terms.

Still, he hesitated. This seemed to him a public declaration of intent, as if he were crossing the line that separated skeptic from fool, and if he took that step he could no longer keep his experience secret from all but Nick.

Then he thought of the last line from his pen that day:

I did not weep.

He climbed the steps and pulled open the Assembly Rooms’ door.

CHAPTER THREE

The one test is the quality of the message, whether it be truthful or otherwise, edifying or lacking in helpful qualities.

—FREDERICK BLIGH BOND,

FROM THE GATE OF REMEMBRANCE