A Finer End

She had put off too long her visit to Simon, and what Jack had told her last night made it imperative that she talk with him. But first, she said her Morning Office; then, when she had dressed and breakfasted, she wheeled her old bike from the garden shed and cycled the two miles into Glastonbury. She reached the Abbey at half past nine, just as the gates were opening. Here she would be able to collect herself, to work out just what she meant to say.

Stowing her bike in the rack, she paid her admission and pushed through the turnstile. The museum exhibits were artfully done and informative, but she passed them by and exited through the glass doors that led to the Abbey grounds.

There, she stood on the step, transfixed. The sky was a perfect robin’s-egg blue, the emerald grass sparkled with moisture from the night’s rain, and the stone walls of the Abbey ruins shone golden in the morning sun.

This was why she had come. Once she was inside the Abbey precinct, the very air and light seemed different. It was as if she had stepped into an illuminated page of a manuscript, and the sweet, unlikely scent of apple blossoms filled the air. It came to her that for a short while, she might, if she chose, transcend time and season.

Winnie stepped down into the grass, unmindful of the damp that immediately began to soak into her shoes. Before her lay the exquisite Lady Chapel, its moss-grown walls casting lengthy black shadows on the grass.

But that was not what she had come to see. The Lady Chapel dated from just after Edmund’s time, and she was searching for a physical, concrete link to Edmund. She turned to the east, with the orchard on her right. There, ridges in the grass marked the monks’ kitchen; a fragment of a wall, the refectory. In her mind, Winnie began to restore it. Stone by stone, the walls went up, the long oak tables filled with brothers in their coarse brown robes. They ate in silence. From a raised lectern at one end of the hall, a monk read to them, so that their minds might be nourished as well as their bodies.

Winnie moved on, into the square depression in the grass that had been the cloisters. There, the monks were busy at their tasks, and on the north side, where the light was best, the copyists and illuminators worked in their carrels. And there, that was Edmund, bent over a page of vellum, inking the glowing design of a capital with a fine and steady hand. Had he been tall and fair, like Jack? Had his hands ached from cramp and cold as he worked through the brief winter days? For a moment, she imagined that he might look up and meet her eyes, and know her, but the image faded and she saw only the windswept grass.

From the cloisters she entered the nave of the Great Church, drawn, as she’d known she would be, towards the Choir. Passing through the ruined and jagged buttresses of the north and south transepts, she saw it as it had been. Here it was that a great scissor arch had thrust skyward, supporting the vault. The weathered stone of the remaining walls gleamed with gilt, the gaping windows glittered with the jewel colors of glass, stalls of rich, dark oak filled the empty greensward. And in the stalls, monks, possessors of a chant kept secret through centuries.

It was their voices she could hear, lifted in praise, weaving a tapestry of joy more real than the stones that surrounded them.

In that instant, she knew the chant for what it was. She knew why the monks had been willing to die for it, and she knew, too, why Edmund and those like him had reached out across the centuries in an effort to restore it.

For centuries people had searched for a thing, a cup—had even claimed to have found it here in Glastonbury, secreted away in the holiest eyrth in England—not realizing that the Grail was only a symbol of something too immense to contain in a physical vessel.

Winnie sat in the Café Galatea, her icy hands wrapped round a mug of steaming tea. She had no recollection of leaving the Abbey, but she must have, for here she was, and with her old bike propped against the front window. She felt oddly detached from herself, as if she had been ill for a long time and forgotten how to use her limbs. Her vision had already begun to fade and she wanted desperately to hold on to it as tightly as she clutched the cup in her hands, but at some level she knew this was not possible. It was too much for an ordinary person to bear for any length of time—after all, hadn’t Galahad died from the rapture of it? And he had been prepared for miracles.

She had an image of herself glowing so fiercely from the inside that any sudden movement might split a seam and release the radiance within. This made her laugh aloud, and the waiter—a man with a ponytail and a round, freckled face—looked at her and smiled. He probably thought she was tipsy, and as if to prove it, she hiccuped. Smiling back at him, she rose and left coins on the table to cover tea and tip.