Missing Susan

got into a little boat and if you just crossed the river-or whatever the water was-you ended up in Glastonbury, but if you got into the boat and said the magic words, you ended up on the magic island of Avalon!”

“It’s a very holy place for the Church, too,” said Rowan, postponing the answer to Maud’s question and the inevitable reaction. “Joseph of Arimathea is said to have brought the Holy Grail here, and when he planted his staff in the earth, it grew into the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury.”

“You might want to explain who Joseph of Arimathea was,” Elizabeth whispered to the guide.

“Nonsense!” said Rowan. “Everybody knows that!”

“They’re Californians,” said Elizabeth gently.

“Who was Joseph What’s-His-Name?” asked Kate Conway, looking blank and beautiful.

Rowan sighed. “He was the man who gave the tomb in which Jesus was buried after the Crucifixion. Legend has it that Joseph was in possession of the Holy Grail-that’s the cup used by Christ during the Last Supper, for those of you who didn’t see Paul Newman in The Silver Chalice.” By this time Bernard had found a public parking lot on the brick-lined high street of a small country town. He was pulling the coach into a space near a cluster of other tour vehicles. “Here we are,” he announced. “Abbey is just to the left there.”

Radiating astonishment, Maud Marsh peered out the window. “This is Glastonbury?” she demanded.

“Right.”

“It isn’t an island?”

“No.”

“Damned English. They lie about everything!”

As they walked up to the admission complex adjoining the entrance to the grounds, Rowan Rover explained that the geography of England does not stay the same. “You remember that St. Michael’s Mount was once a mountain in a forest, and now it is an island in Mount’s Bay. Glastonbury was indeed an island centuries ago. The Celts called it Ynis Witrin, the isle of glass. It was once a towering peak in an inland sea, but now it is surrounded only by Somerset’s flat meadows and marshland, some of which has been drained in modern times, I expect. Progress, you know.”

“No wonder the fairies left England,” muttered Emma Smith, still thinking of The Mists of Avalon. She was looking paler than usual and she seemed irritable.

Rowan Rover showed the group’s admission pass, and led them through the gates and into the grounds of the ruined abbey. A few yards from the iron gates, Rowan stopped beside a spreading tree, about twelve feet in height. “That,” he said, “is the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury.”

Nancy Warren examined a branch with the eye of a practiced gardener. “It’s a hawthorn tree,” she announced.

“A variation thereof,” Rowan agreed. “But this tree flowers in December. A cutting of white flowering branches is sent each year to the royal family as a Christmas gift.”

“It can’t be the original tree,” said Nancy Warren, whose belief in miracles did not extend to botany.

“No, Cromwell’s men cut it down in their usual rage against holy relics. This is descended from a cutting of the original. Now, if you’ll come this way, I’ll tell you what these ruins are and we shall find the grave of King Arthur.”

For a pleasant hour they walked about the spreading green lawn amid the soaring ruins of the abbey. Charles took many pictures, conscious of the deepening twilight that would soon envelop the site. The others wandered around, strangely quiet, trying to imagine the church in all its medieval splendor.

Rowan, consulting his guidebook with great discretion, told them about the twelfth-century historian, William of Malmesbury, who wrote a chronicle of the abbey, placing its founding a thousand years before his time. According to legend, Ireland’s St. Patrick ended his days as abbot of Glastonbury, and St. Bridget and Wales’ patron saint, David, also visited the holy site. The Domesday Book pronounced it free from taxation, and the Viking raiders left it alone. Just after Malmesbury’s time, a fire destroyed the old structures, but even that turned out to be a mixed blessing, because in the old burial ground, the monks discovered two oak coffins, containing the remains of a large man and a woman with strands of golden hair still clinging to her skull. A leaden cross found with them identified the bodies as those of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. The bodies were reburied in a shrine within the church, and the site of that burial was located again in 1934.

“What a lot of famous people have been here!” said Kate Conway. “King Arthur! St. Patrick! Imagine a Grauman’s Chinese Theatre of saints’ footprints!”

“If it’s so important to England, you’d think they’d have taken better care of it,” said Susan disapprovingly. Seeing the others’ frowns, she said, “Well, they restored the shopping mall in Exeter after the Blitz, didn’t they? Why couldn’t they rebuild one old church?”

Rowan Rover closed his eyes and counted to ten in several languages. Finally he glanced at his watch and, with evident relief, announced, “It is nearly six o’clock, ladies and Charles. The grounds are closing, and we are due in Bath this evening. Tomorrow we shall be seeing the ruins of the Roman baths.”

Rowan was looking forward to inspecting the drowning facilities.

By seven o’clock that evening, they had arrived in Bath and had been shown to their rooms in the stately Francis Hotel in the city center. The hotel, an eighteenth-century building overlooking Queen’s Square, adjoined the residence occupied by Jane Austen when she visited that elegant spa of Georgian England. The natural hot springs over which the city is built were much prized by the Romans, who built the spa baths for their soldiers. Taking the waters became fashionable again in the eighteenth century when Beau Nash made London the playground of the aristocracy. Much of the classic Georgian architecture of the time remains, making Bath an architectural treasure, if not an English Lourdes. (“Wait until you taste the waters,” Rowan kept telling them gleefully.)

At eight Rowan had exchanged his khaki windbreaker for a tweed jacket and was waiting for the rest of the party in the dining room, where they were expected for dinner en masse. His head count, though, showed that there were three people missing.

He was just trying to figure out who they were when Maud Marsh appeared in the doorway. “We can go in to dinner now,” she told him. “I’m afraid Miriam and Emma won’t be joining us. Emma is quite ill.”

“There stood arcades of stone, the stream hotly issued

With eddies widening up to the wall,

encircling all.”

– SAXON POEM, EIGHTH CENTURY

CHAPTER 12

BATH

NEITHER EMMA NOR her mother appeared for breakfast the next morning, but since traveler’s tummy was a condition familiar to all of them, no one was particularly worried. They were impressed, though, by the touching concern of Rowan Rover, who appeared genuinely grieved by Emma’s indisposition and who insisted that she have a doctor in to examine her.

“I almost wish that I were the one who was sick,” sighed Kate Conway. “Isn’t Rowan being sweet?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “It is most unlike him.”

“I wonder if Bath’s healing waters would do Emma any good,” mused Maud Marsh.

“I very much doubt it,” said Alice. “Jane Austen must have drunk quite a lot of it and she died of Addison’s disease at forty-two.”