A Finer End (34 page)

She thought she had never worked so well, with such richness of color or delicacy of detail, and for the first time in months the child had not appeared. But she was bone-weary, and when she’d put the final touches on the latest effort, she cleaned her brushes and left her studio.

Bram looked up from the book he was reading, his relief obvious. “Finished, darling?”

Fiona stretched out on the sofa beside him. “I’m knackered.”

“I wish I could help.” He stroked her forehead with his thumb.

“You do, just by understanding.” As a child, she had drawn on walls if no paper was available when the urge came on her—and had not understood when she’d been punished for it. At one point her baffled parents had tried to keep her from drawing altogether, and she had sunk into a state of depression so deep it bordered on catatonia.

“But I feel empty tonight,” she added, yawning and snuggling a little more firmly into his lap. “This may be it for now.”

“Are they good?”

“Brilliant. You’ll like them.” She smiled up at him. “I think I’ll go see Winnie tomorrow, if she feels up to a bit of company.”

“Shall I read to you?”

“What are you reading?”

“William of Malmsbury’s account of his visit to the Abbey in the 1120s. Listen to this. He’s talking about the Old Church.
‘… one can observe all over the floor stones, artfully interlaced in the forms of triangles or squares and sealed with lead; I do no harm to religion if I believe some sacred mystery is contained beneath them.
…’ ”

Was that what Garnet had known? Fiona wondered sleepily, meaning to ask Bram, but the words began to stretch out like shining beads on a string, until they shimmered and faded away.

•  •  •

She woke on the sofa in a darkened room, with a blanket tucked round her and a cushion placed carefully under her head. It was late—or very early—she sensed that by the quality of the light filtering in through the blinds. She sat up, intending to go to bed for what was left of the night, and her dream came back to her in a rush.

The music—she had heard the singing again. Now it dissolved and slipped once more from her grasp.

And she had seen the Abbey, washed in a clear, pale light. But the heavily overgrown ruins had stood in an open, pastoral landscape, rather than their modern-day walled setting. A few thin cows grazed in the foreground, watched over by a man in old-fashioned dress who leaned picturesquely on a shepherd’s staff.

Fiona lay back and pulled the blanket up to her chin, trying to make sense of the disparate elements floating about in her head: the music, Garnet, the beautifully colored tiles in the Old Church, the odd view of the Abbey …

Her last thought, as she drifted off to sleep once more, was that the man with the shepherd’s crook had looked remarkably like Jack Montfort.

F
AITH FELT VERY
odd from the moment she woke on Tuesday morning. She wondered if any of the others sensed the heaviness, the oppression, in the air. She felt an urgency, as well, a sense that her time to take care of unfinished business was swiftly running out. And the baby, so violently active the past few days, was suddenly quiet, giving her only the occasional gentle nudge.

She felt her abdomen carefully, the way Garnet had taught her, but she couldn’t be sure that the baby had dropped. Why wasn’t Garnet here when she needed her? And how was she going to manage without her?

Fighting back tears of anger and frustration, she finished getting ready for work, then went looking for Duncan. She found him in the last bedroom, surrounded by opened boxes, his face already dirty and set in a scowl of discouragement.

Last night Nick had turned up at last, with a curt apology for his absence. He and Simon had joined in the attic search, carrying the smaller items down to Faith and Winnie in the sitting room. After a long evening’s work, they had all declared the attic thoroughly sorted, with a disheartening lack of results. Now Jack and Duncan had begun working their way through the remainder of the house.

“Anything?” Faith asked Duncan, knowing what the answer would be.

“An old album with some photos of my mother as a child. But other than that, no. Are you ready for me to run you to the café?”

They had developed a comfortable routine in just a few short days, and Faith realized with a pang that she would be sorry to see it end. Nor did she like the idea of the deception she meant to practice today, but she could see no alternative. She must find proof that someone besides Nick had had reason to harm Garnet. And Duncan had told her that the police had sealed the farmhouse, so she couldn’t very well ask him to take her to root through Garnet’s things.

“I’ll see you at five,” he said as she climbed out of the car at the café, and she lifted her hand in a wave as he drove away in Gemma’s purple car.

It was a slow morning, much to her relief, because she grew progressively more uncomfortable as the day wore on. Her legs ached, and her pelvis felt as if her ligaments had turned to jelly. Buddy fussed over her, coming in from the shop to give her a hand as often as he could.

After lunch she waited, tidying and watching the clock. When the hands crept round to two, she gave the counter a last wipe and went into the shop.

Buddy looked up from his jewelry counter. His face creased instantly with concern. “Are you okay, kiddo?”

“I’m not feeling very well. Would you mind if I left early today?”
It isn’t a lie
, she told herself.
Just bending the truth a bit
.

“Is it the baby?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said uncertainly. “But I think maybe I should take it easy.”

“Have you called someone to fetch you?”

“Yes,” she lied outright this time, forcing a smile. “I’ll wait outside.”

She slipped on her cardigan and went out into the light drizzle that had kept the climbers away. There was nothing for it but to walk, so she turned resolutely uphill and began.

The pavement grew slicker and the rain heavier as she climbed. By the time she reached the farmhouse she was gasping, and a dull, heavy pain had taken root at the base of her spine. But she had done it! No one had passed her on her way up the hill, but still she looked round furtively as she ducked under the blue-and-white crime-scene tape that had been stretched across the gate.

She picked her way across the yard and unlocked the back door with her key. All three cats trotted hopefully out from the shelter of the barn and she stooped to stroke them as they rubbed about her ankles, purring. “Are you hungry,
poor dears?” she said, and sang the silly little dinner song she had made up for them as she let them in the house.

Every surface in the kitchen was covered with a fine black dust, and the room looked as if a hurricane had raged through it, littered throughout with the objects from the shelves and cabinets. Faith grimaced as she lit the lamp and put food in the cats’ bowls, trying to touch as little as possible. The sight of the casserole Garnet had made the day she died almost undid her.

The evidence of the police search was even more overwhelming in Garnet’s office. There was fingerprint powder everywhere, and the room was a sea of papers. The drawers of Garnet’s desk had been pried open, and all but one drawer was empty.

Lighting the lamp on the desk, she looked at the contents of the drawer they had left intact. It held a half-dozen spiral notebooks, and as Faith opened them, she saw that each was filled with technical notes on tile making. No wonder the police hadn’t found them useful.

Garnet had been secretive to the point of paranoia concerning the recipes she used in the glazes on her tiles. She’d insisted that they were what made her work unique, and her restoration techniques possible. In a talkative mood, she had once told Faith that she used only natural materials available to medieval craftsmen, creating the authentic colors that made her tiles so prized.

But it seemed Garnet’s secrets had not died with her. The journals held not only extensive notes, but accounts of formulas and experiments, failures and successes.

Faith was so fascinated that she forgot the time, until a glance at the darkening window reminded her that she must keep on. She had meant to be finished and back at the café when Duncan came to collect her, although what she would tell Buddy she had yet to figure out.

She put the journals back and thought for a moment. The office was a dead end. If there had been anything useful the police would have found it. Slowly, she returned to
the kitchen. This was the heart of the house, where Garnet had spent her time when she was not working. Here she had sung while she cooked, she had read, she had rocked in the well-worn rocking chair.

Faith lowered herself into the rocker. Here she would have rocked her own child, if Garnet had not died. She looked round, trying to see the kitchen from Garnet’s point of view. Garnet hadn’t owned many things, but among her most treasured possessions had been her books, especially her cookbooks. They sat in the small nook above the cooker, apparently untouched by the police maelstrom.

With a grunt of effort, Faith stood and pulled out one book, then another, swiftly thumbing through them.

It was in a vegetarian tome Faith had seldom seen Garnet use that she found the papers tucked inside the flyleaf: several sheets of foolscap filled with Garnet’s spiky handwriting, pages torn from a book, and a newspaper clipping, yellowed and brittle with age.

First she unfolded the printed sheets, her eyes widening with shock as she read. The pages had obviously been torn from a primer on ancient magic, but these were not the gentle ceremonies Garnet had taught her—these were rituals that called the darkest and oldest powers up from the depths, rituals celebrating the Tor as the entrance to the Underworld, the home of the Great Mother. Participants began by walking the ancient spiral maze, the physical manifestation of the vortex of energy that would suck them up to the summit, and then down into the very heart of the Tor. Those who passed through chaos and death would emerge reborn, filled with the power of the Mother.

As she read, Faith knew with certainty that it was this force that had brought her to the Tor, and that Garnet must have known it too. With unsteady fingers, she opened the handwritten pages.

She might have been my daughter. She has come to me, a gift from the gods, redemption contained in her innocence. I will bring
her child into the world … in return for the child lost, a life for a life.… If only I can protect her from the power that awaits this birth
.

So that was why Garnet had watched over her with such fierceness! She had known the thing that pulled and tugged at Faith for what it was; she had meant somehow to shield her from it. Fingers trembling, Faith opened the clipping, peering at the faded newsprint. A photo of a child, a little girl, then a headline:
TRAGEDY ON THE TOR
, beneath which ran an all-too-brief story.
Four-year-old Sarah Jane Kinnersley was struck and killed yesterday evening in a hit-and-run accident on the slopes of Glastonbury Tor. The tragedy occurred at dusk in Wellhouse Lane, just below the Kinnersley farm. Sarah’s parents realized something was amiss when Sarah did not—

Faith looked up. A sound—she’d heard a sound. The clipping fluttered to the floor as she strained her senses to catch the sound again. But there was nothing but the spattering of rain against the windowpane, and she saw that the lowering sky had obliterated all but the last vestiges of daylight. She felt a rush of panic—was she late? Had she missed Duncan?

Looking at the clock above the stove, she breathed a sigh of relief. It was not yet five o’clock. She was all right. She would go down the hill and she would try to make sense of what she had read. But just now all she wanted to do was get out of the house, so empty without Garnet’s presence, and back to warmth and light.

Her hand was on the kitchen lamp when the sound came again, this time unmistakable—a footstep, the groan of weight on the bottom step. Had Duncan discovered her missing from the café and come looking for her?

But surely she’d have heard the swish of the car on the wet pavement, and the squeak of the gate. There was another creak, and a shadow against the curtained window.

The fear that gripped her was deeper than thought. She looked round wildly for a place to hide, but it was too late.
The door swung open and the last voice she had expected to hear said, “Hello, Faith.”

Gemma had slept fitfully, waking several times to check on Toby, tossing and turning in between. When the dull light that presaged dawn began to filter through her blinds, she gave up trying to sleep.

She sat at the half-moon table in the quiet flat, looking out at the garden, as the sky grew brighter. As she watched the familiar lines of tree and shrub take shape, she thought again about her conversation with Erika Rosenthal.

Dr. Rosenthal was a rational woman, a scholar, and yet she had spoken of Old Gods and elemental powers without reservation. If she were right, Gemma’s perceptions had been more than an overactive imagination, and Faith had indeed been in danger. Yet Faith had been drawn to the Tor before Garnet even knew of her existence; had the danger not been Garnet herself, but something else that had not yet run its course?

That thought made Gemma so uncomfortable that she stood and began to get ready for her day, but she worried at it restlessly throughout the morning. No matter how much she tried to rationalize it, she couldn’t shake the instinct that Faith was still at terrible risk.

At noon, she called in her sergeant and informed him that she would be out for the rest of the day. Her guv’nor was away on a training course—she’d have to explain herself to him when she came back. And Hazel! She would have to ask Hazel to keep Toby for the night.