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.
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?
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:
He climbed the steps and pulled open the Assembly Rooms’ door.
CHAPTER THREE
—FREDERICK BLIGH BOND,
FROM THE GATE OF REMEMBRANCE
LIFE, THOUGHT WINIFRED Catesby, has a way of delivering the perfect one-two punch when you’re least expecting it. She was thirty-six years old and single—and it had been at least a decade since she’d seriously contemplated any alteration to that condition. Although Anglican priests could marry, not many men were willing to play second fiddle to God, or even second fiddle to the demands of her job, for that matter. And as Winifred was not beautiful, and she had never been blessed with the gift of flirtation, she’d thought herself fairly well reconciled to celibacy and the comfortable routine she had established with her brother, Andrew.
And then she’d found herself sitting beside Jack Montfort in the choir stall of Wells Cathedral, and nothing since had been the same.
On this June evening they were meeting for dinner at the Cafe Galatea on the High Street, a cheerful restaurant with a decidedly hippie ambience and surprisingly good food. Although Jack teased her good-naturedly about the vegetarian fare, which he referred to as “bird food,” the cafe seemed to have become their regular spot to meet after work.
Coasting to a stop at the Street Road roundabout, she gave herself a swift inspection in the rearview mirror. Hair okay, lipstick okay, nose could definitely be a bit more patrician.… Oh, well, it would have to do, as would her
