A Finer End (15 page)

But more and more often she found herself snapping at the girl, even when she knew the real target of her anger was her own sense of inadequacy. She’d stopped Faith climbing the hillside above the farmhouse; between them she and Buddy kept an eye on her as best they could; and yet every day Faith seemed to feel the pull of the Tor more strongly.

What else could she do to protect this child who had
come to mean so much to her? She had thought about enlisting Winnie Catesby, but no—that way was closed to her now. If Winnie knew the truth about the child, she could not be trusted, and if not, Garnet could not tell her.

That left her one option: she must try to set right the sins that had haunted her for so long. Perhaps that would stop the buildup of forces whose unleashing could only result in another tragedy.

Her ruined tiles forgotten, Garnet gathered her cloak from its hook and set off to pay a call on an old friend, knowing that her visit would not be welcome.

Winnie wheeled the bike to a stop in front of Jack’s house and gazed down the drive. His Volvo was nowhere in sight. She felt an instant’s rush of disappointment, then chided herself. Surely he would be back soon—it was almost five o’clock. She’d get herself some tea and have a word with Faith while she waited.

Hopping back on the bike, she cycled round the corner into Wellhouse Lane. She left the bike against the ribbon-decorated tree in the café’s forecourt and went inside. There were no other customers, and for a moment she thought the small kitchen empty as well. Then Faith’s shorn head appeared above the serving bar as she said, “Sorry. Can I—Winnie!”

“How are you, dear? Can a person get a cup of tea in this place?” Winnie asked cheerfully, hoping she hadn’t let her shock show. Gone was the rosy bloom Faith had exhibited through most of her pregnancy. The girl looked utterly exhausted, and her skin had an unhealthy pallor. “Why don’t you make yourself a cuppa and sit down with me? Where’s Buddy this afternoon?”

“Gone to the superstore for groceries. He didn’t like to leave me—you’d think I couldn’t manage the place by myself.” Faith turned and busied herself with kettle and mugs. When she had the tea ready, she came round the bar
and set their mugs down at the table. The girl looked ungainly now, Winnie saw, her arms and legs too thin in contrast to her distended abdomen.

“Are you feeling all right, Faith?”

“I’m not sleeping too well these days.” Faith attempted a smile. “The baby presses on my diaphragm when I lie down—makes me feel I can’t breathe.”

“Have you been to the clinic, had a checkup?”

The girl shook her head adamantly. “Garnet says it’s perfectly normal. And I’ve only a few weeks to go now.”

“But—” Winnie saw Faith raise her chin in the familiar stubborn gesture, and subsided into silence. She took a sip of her tea, then tried again. “We’ve missed you. You haven’t come to see us lately.”

“Is there anything new … with Edmund?” Faith asked 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 visiting 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 rumors 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 she had radar. Or second sight.

He’d thought of going to the police, but Faith was legally an adult, living with Garnet by choice, and if he told them he thought she was being hypnotized, or coerced by dark magic, he’d merely make himself look barmy.

Although Winnie Catesby had refused to give him Faith’s parents’ address, he’d found it easily enough on his own. One day in the café, when Faith had been talking to Buddy in the shop, Nick had peeked at the ID card in her wallet.

He had traced her family to Street; he had even sat at the
top of the close, watching the house, looking for some trace of Faith in that sterile cul-de-sac. He could go to her parents now, tell them where Faith was, but they had no power to make her come home. And Faith would know he had betrayed her. That would surely end any hope he might have of continuing as her friend.

Nothing in the past few months had turned out the way he’d imagined—not with Faith, nor with Jack.

Simon Fitzstephen seemed to take up all Jack’s free time—and what had Nick Carlisle to offer Jack compared to the renowned Fitzstephen? The bitterness of it burned in Nick’s throat, but he knew there was more to his unease than that. The excitement of discovering Jack’s gift, the sense of adventure, of mission, had given way to a tension, a foreboding, that made him feel almost physically ill.

He’d thought about chucking it all, leaving Glastonbury, getting a proper job. Once he’d got so far as stuffing his meager belongings into a duffel bag … and once, on a very bad day, he’d even thought about going home to Northumberland and facing the music.

Lifting the Dion Fortune book to slot it back into the shelf, he glanced at her photo on the dust jacket. She had understood the power of evil, and had faced it with strength and good sense. If only there were someone like Fortune he could talk to, someone who would not instantly dismiss what he sensed about Garnet, or attribute it to a maladjusted childhood. A priest, perhaps—

Winnie Catesby, of course! It had been right under his nose all along, but somehow he’d never thought of Winnie in her professional capacity. How could he have been so blind?

He would talk to Winnie, tell her the suspicions he had hardly dared to formulate. Then together they could confront Faith, get her to agree to leave Garnet before the baby came. She wouldn’t have to go back to her parents; he and Winnie could find a safe place for her.

Locking the shop behind him, he retrieved his motorbike
and headed south through the dusk towards Compton Grenville. His heart lifted when he saw Winnie’s small car parked in the gravel drive of the Vicarage.

But there was no answer at the front door, nor did his knocking at the kitchen door bring any response. The house remained dark and silent, and he shivered with more than the chill of evening. He knew, with a sickening sense of urgency he could not explain, that he must find Winnie Catesby, and soon.

“You all right, Fi?” Bram Allen looked up from the remains of his supper.

“Bit of a headache,” she said. He had always seemed to know, with some uncanny sixth sense. “I think I may be … painting … when you get back from your council meeting.” She did not acknowledge her hope that this time it might be different. A few days ago, she had asked him to hang some of the recent canvases in the gallery. He had done so under protest, and the resulting awkwardness between them had not been improved by his comments at Winnie’s the previous evening.

“Do you want me to stay?” he asked.

“No. I’ll be fine.” They both knew that the onset of her visions could be unpredictable, but even as a child Fiona had taken up crayons, then paints, as a means of dealing with it. If she transferred what she saw to paper, the visions no longer terrified her.

Fiona wandered down the corridor to her studio. Bram had built it for her, a glass-walled room on the back of the house, overlooking the deep hollow of Bushy Coombe. Fiona turned on the small lamp that lit only her blank canvas and her palette. She opened her paints and took up a brush.

The voices were clamoring now in her head, and when she looked up the shapes were thronging outside the glass—luminous, winged, half-human creatures; they beckoned to
her, and the night sky beyond the glass had become a deep and iridescent blue.

Images began to take shape on the canvas, faces impossibly radiant and severe, and in their midst, the child. At some point Fiona sensed Bram’s presence as he stood watching from the doorway, but he did not disturb her, and when she looked round he had gone.

Then all her awareness of things beyond brush and canvas vanished. The tumult of sound had become more distinct, as if someone had fine-tuned a radio, and she realized the voices were singing, singing to her, and the clear melody soared and leapt inside her until she feared her head would burst.

The last color faded from the sky and wisps of fog began to form in the dips and hollows beneath the Tor. A dilapidated white van hurtled by Winnie—Garnet’s, with Faith in the passenger seat, heading up the hill towards the farmhouse.

Rather than allaying her worry, Winnie’s visit with the girl had only increased her concern. She would have to manage a word with Garnet in the next few days about Faith’s health; perhaps Garnet could shed some light on her emotional state.

And why had Faith seemed suddenly to shut her out, back in the café, refusing even to meet her gaze? Was it something she’d said?

As Winnie went back over their conversation, something odd struck her. Faith had said she’d done archaeology at Somerfield, which meant she must have been one of Andrew’s students. But in that case, why had he never mentioned her? Surely the disappearance of a bright student, a girl in her final year and destined to go on to greater things, would have concerned him? But then lately he had seemed to scorn all his pupils—what had happened to his love of teaching?

Reaching the entrance to Lypatt Lane, Winnie pushed the bike into the narrow opening. The lane would take her into Bulwarks Lane, which overlooked the steep fall of Bushy Coombe, and at its end lay Fiona Allen’s house. The sky made a paler channel between the hedges rising high on either side of the lane. A bit of azure lingered in the west, but above her the first brittle stars had appeared. She switched on her bicycle lamp, but it flickered wanly, then went out.

As she picked up her pace, Winnie continued to puzzle over Andrew’s odd behavior. It occurred to her for the first time that perhaps she didn’t know her brother at all. The thought alarmed her, and she suddenly longed for Jack’s company, for his calm and commonsense response. Surely he would be home by the time she reached Fiona’s; she’d ring him from there and ask him to come and collect her.

She reached the little jog where the footpath that ran round the back side of Chalice Hill met Lypatt Lane. Beyond the jog the track became Bulwarks Lane, and she felt an unexpected stirring of relief that she had almost reached her destination.