The Secret of Excalibur

‘I know, but I . . . I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t want her to see me in this state.’

‘In what state? Drunk?’

Chase looked up. ‘No, Christ, she’s seen me drunk before. No, I mean . . . you know.’ His voice fell to little more than a whisper, the admission struggling to be heard over the noise of the room. ‘Weak.’

Mac leaned closer, fixing Chase with an intense gaze. ‘Eddie, you’re going to get married. She’s going to see you in every state, whether you like it or not. “For better or for worse”, I remember. And you were married to Sophia, for God’s sake - you know there are always going to be fights in a marriage. There’s nowhere to hide - you either have to face any problems head-on, or walk away from them. And you’ve never struck me as the kind to walk away from anything. As I said in the Regiment, “Fight to the end.” And you always did.’

‘Not always,’ Chase said, another quiet confession. ‘Not until you taught me. There was one fight before I met you that I . . . that I walked away from. And I shouldn’t have done.’ He sat up, contemplative. ‘Nina was right.’

‘About what?’

‘About family. She said it was a shame I didn’t get on with mine. And it didn’t have to be like that.’ He straightened. ‘Yeah, I need to talk to Nina, and I will. But there’s someone else I need to talk to first.’

‘Who?’

‘My sister. All this’s made me realise I need to tell her something. Face to face.’ He glanced at his glass. ‘I’ll have to take the train, though. Might have a problem hiring a car if I turn up pissed - assuming anyone’ll even let me after what happened to the last one.’

16

Warm late afternoon sun, a perfect clear blue sky, and dazzlingly verdant surroundings . . . yet they were just the icing on the cake for Nina as she took in the ruins at the heart of the parkland. ‘This is beautiful!’

‘Bit of a fixer-upper, though,’ Mitchell joked.

They stood within the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey, an oasis of tranquillity surrounded beyond its walls by Glastonbury itself. The village, about 120 miles west of London, was an odd mix of the everyday and the exotic, ordinary shops and businesses sharing streets with outposts of New Age expression and outright tourist traps, jugglers and street musicians and hippies mingling with residents carrying their groceries, who ignored the colourful strangeness around them with traditional British reserve.

But the abbey, or what remained of it, had an atmosphere of nothing but calm, the grey stone walls so weathered by time they felt almost a natural part of the landscape, as integral as a rock or a river. ‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ said their companion. Dr Chloe Lamb was a rosy-cheeked, broad-hipped woman slightly older than Nina, straw-coloured hair tied back almost in a copy of Nina’s own ponytail. ‘So tragic that it was destroyed. Henry the Eighth may have been one of England’s most important monarchs, but he was a disaster for monastic architecture!’

‘It’s still pretty incredible,’ Nina said, pausing to take a photo as they passed between the remains of two still-towering pillars into the abbey’s former vaulted choir. Where there had once been stone flags was now just grass, a neatly mown lawn leading to the broken stubs of the eastern walls.

‘But it hardly compares to some of the other places you’ve been,’ said Chloe. ‘I mean, Atlantis! You turned the studies of history and archaeology on their heads overnight - and then you did it again when you discovered the Tomb of Hercules!’ Her already pink cheeks flushed a little more. ‘To be honest, I was surprised the IHA asked for my help. I have to admit that I feel a little intimidated by you.’

‘Oh, God, please don’t be!’ Nina said, laughing. ‘When it comes to Arthurian legend, I’m only really a step above anyone who’s watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.’ That was false modesty, considering her recent immersion in the subject, but she decided the self-conscious academic would benefit from an ego boost. ‘We needed help from someone who specialised in that area - particularly with regard to Glastonbury.’

Chloe smiled. ‘Well, hopefully I can provide it. And this is the ideal place to start.’ She indicated a sign at the head of a stone rectangle marked in the grass.

‘“Site of King Arthur’s tomb,”’ Mitchell read. ‘“In the year 1191 the bodies of King Arthur and his queen were said to have been found on the south side of the Lady Chapel . . .” Only “said” to have been found?’

‘Unfortunately, there’s an awful lot “said” about King Arthur here at Glastonbury. The abbey monks were . . . well, notorious,’ Chloe said conspiratorially, as if concerned they would somehow overhear her. ‘They were extremely good at turning legend into gold. For example, the Holy Grail is now intimately entwined with Arthurian myth - but the two weren’t even remotely connected until the twelfth century, when Robert de Boron wrote Joseph d’Arimathie.’

‘Not the Joseph, surely?’ Mitchell asked. ‘As in Mary and Joseph?’

Nina shook her head. ‘Joseph of Arimathea was the man who donated his own intended tomb to bury Jesus after the crucifixion. He was sent the Grail by a vision of Christ and brought it to Britain as a pilgrim.’

Chloe nodded. ‘Since the abbey was already connected with Joseph because of the story of the Holy Thorn,’ she glanced towards the part of the abbey grounds where a hawthorn tree was said to have been planted by the pilgrim, ‘the monks took advantage of that to join two entirely separate legends, both of which conveniently happened to cross paths right here, into one.’

‘So they got a twofer,’ Mitchell realised. ‘The Christians come in the footsteps of Joseph, the Brits want to pay respect to their legendary king - and both groups give generously to the abbey.’

‘Absolutely. Glastonbury was second only to Westminster Abbey in terms of wealth.’ Chloe looked at the sign again. ‘And now the legends are inseparable. But so much of what we now think of as Arthurian legend is just the same - either merged with material from other sources, or simply made up by the twelfth-century romantic writers.’

‘Things like Lancelot,’ Nina said.

‘Lancelot wasn’t real?’ asked Mitchell.

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Chloe. ‘He first appeared in a poem by Chretien de Troyes in the 1160s - no mention of him anywhere before then.’

‘Huh.’ He sounded disappointed. ‘So much for the legends. Next you’ll be telling me the Round Table wasn’t real either.’ Both women looked at him apologetically. ‘Aw, come on!’

‘It didn’t appear until 1155, in Robert Wace’s Roman de Brut,’ said Chloe.

‘And the knights didn’t eat ham and jam and Spam a lot?’

‘Sorry,’ Nina replied with a grin. She turned back to Chloe. ‘But as for the aspects of the legends that do have a historical basis . . . how does Glastonbury Tor tie in with the story of King Arthur?’

‘Ah!’ said Chloe. She led them out of the ruined abbey, strolling across the rolling parkland. ‘Now Glastonbury Tor really does have an interesting part to play in the mythos.’ She swept a hand towards the flat, lush English countryside to the south. ‘You see, this whole region is a flood plain. Until the marshes were drained for farmland, it would only need a small rise in the water level for it to disappear under water.’

‘How deep?’ Mitchell asked.

‘Not much, maybe as little as a couple of feet. But it would make almost the entire area inaccessible for a good part of the year. Glastonbury, and the abbey, were high enough to escape most of the floods.’

Nina tried to picture her idyllic surroundings as they would have looked over a thousand years earlier. ‘So where we are right now, it would have been an island?’

‘Yes. Although sometimes even this might have been at risk from flooding. But there’s one place the water could never reach.’ She stopped, pointing east. Their walk had taken them past a line of trees, giving them a clear view of . . . ‘Glastonbury Tor.’

Seen for real rather than framed within a photograph, the hill seemed to Nina even more out of place, rising up with the unexpectedness of a child’s lone sandcastle on an otherwise flat beach. The lowering sun gave its terraces an even more exaggeratedly unnatural look, the hillside striped in alternating shades of green. The isolated tower on its peak only increased the almost fairytale feel of the landmark.

‘It’s been associated with English folklore since even before the time of King Arthur,’ Chloe explained. ‘A lot