“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 allayin
g 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.
Pausing, she checked automatically for oncoming traffic, even though she could not have failed to hear a car on such a still night. The lane was dark as a tunnel now, visible only by the layer of mist that had settled near the ground.
She stepped out, pushing the bike, and a light came out of nowhere, dazzling her, blinding her. Throwing up her arms as she heard the roar of an engine, she sensed a rush of movement towards her.
Just before impact, some tiny fragment of her consciousness noted that there had been no squeal of brakes.
PART II
CHAPTER EIGHT
… it yet raises the little limited self to the consciousness of a possibility, awful and beautiful, of a contact with something greater than itself, and yet akin; and to the dignity of a mystical fellowship in which isolation ends, and Past and Present are seen as parts of a living whole; points in the circumference of a circle whose radius is Life beyond these limitations.
—FREDERICK BLIGH BOND,
FROM THE GATE OF REMEMBRANCE
THE MUSIC CHANGED, slowly; the joyous melody faded, softening, until it became a lament. Fiona sensed an immense sorrow for a passing, an ending, of something precious beyond human understanding, but more than that she could not tell.
At last there was only a hollowness in her head, and beyond the glass there was nothing but darkness and the faint lights of the town across the Coombe. She put down her brush, exhausted. She had no idea of the time—she never kept a clock in the studio—but she could tell by the cramp in her hand and the ache in her back that she’d been painting several hours.
Stepping back, Fiona surveyed the canvas. She, herself, never named the creatures that came to her, but the critics referred to them as sprites, spirits, or sometimes, angels. Tonight, to her surprise, she had painted them within a framework of greensward and ruined stone walls—the gates of the Abbey itself—and for the first time, the spirits seemed to hold the now-familiar little girl within their protection.
It was only blocked in, of course. She would finish it tomorrow, if there were no more visions. Now she needed rest; but first, a walk, to clear her head.
The house was quiet, breathing in its midnight rhythm, and when she peeked into the bedroom she saw the humped shape of Bram’s body under the duvet.
Grabbing an old Barbour off a peg, she let herself out the front door and stood for a moment, breathing the frosty air. To her left lay Wick Hollow; to the right Bulwarks Lane gave an open view of the Coombe to the west. Threading her way through the garden, she turned to the right, and when she had passed the house a break in the canopy of leaves above her gave a view of the stars.
As she walked, she became aware of movement in the woods, an agitation more intense than the usual nocturnal shufflings of badgers and rabbits. Fiona stopped, listening, wondering what could be disturbing the woodland creatures on such a calm and beautiful night. “What is it?” she whispered, but there was no response. Feeling uneasy, she continued onwards, but more cautiously.
When a tendril of wind moved down the lane, disturbing a bit of rubbish, she started, then chided herself. It was only a supermarket carrier bag, and as she watched it blew a few more feet, lodging against something larger in the road, a dark shape, perhaps a fallen branch, and beside it a longer, more solid object. Drawing closer, she saw that the more solid shape was oddly human. Another trick of perception, she decided. Her steps slowed until she came to a halt beside the thing.
Not until she knelt and touched the form was she convinced that what she saw was real. It was a woman, her upturned face a pale smudge, and beside her not a branch, but a fallen bicycle. Fiona pulled her small torch from the pocket of her jacket, then gasped as it lit the woman’s face.
Jack Montfort came to a halt a yard inside the intensive-care unit, overwhelmed by the sight of the machines and tubes surrounding Winnie’s slight, still form. Why hadn’t they told him she would look like this—alien, and frail beyond hope? A tube ran into her nose, another into her mouth, and on a shaved strip of her scalp the angry edges of a wound were held closed with clips.
“You’re here to see Winifred, aren’t you, dear?” a soft Irish voice said beside him.
Jack turned, barely registering scrubs, a friendly smile, and a name badge that read “Maggie.” He nodded, not trusting his voice.
“You’re her ‘friend,’ I take it? Her brother came in a bit ago. Took one look, turned green, and bolted, poor man.”
“Did he?” Jack’s resolve not to do the same strengthened, as he suspected she had intended.
“It’s all these high-tech doodads give folks the willies. But don’t let them frighten you. They’re just keeping her comfortable, and letting us know how she’s doing.”
“How—how is she?”
“We’ve got her warm and toasty now, and resting quite comfortably. She was hypothermic when they brought her in, and her heart was a bit dicky, but she’s stable now—”
“Heart?” A fresh jolt of fear shot through him.
“A bit of cardiac arrhythmia, due to the warming process. All perfectly normal. She’s a lucky girl, your Winifred. Do you know where she was found exactly?”
“In Bulwarks Lane, below Glastonbury Tor.”
“On the tarmac itself? Probably saved her life, then. The tarmac would have held the day’s heat. A few feet either way into the grass or the ditch …” Maggie shook her head ominously.
It had been Suzanne Sanborne who had rung Jack in the early hours of the morning. He had been increasingly uneasy about Winnie—it wasn’t like her not to let him know her whereabouts—but he had told himself that she must have had an emergency. He had, in fact, imagined her sitting at the bedside of an ill or dying parishioner. That was an irony too painful now to contemplate.
In a daze, he had driven the thirty miles to the hospital in Taunton. While Andrew Catesby acknowledged him with a tight-lipped nod, Suzanne told him that the police believed Winnie must have been on her way to visit her friend Fiona Allen when she had been struck by a hit-and-run motorist. It had been Fiona who had found her, rung for police and medical aid. Fiona had then rung Andrew, who in turn had called Suzanne. How like Andrew, t
hought Jack, not to have rung him.
By daybreak, they had still not been allowed to see Winnie and Suzanne had been unable to stay longer. Left alone with Andrew Catesby, who glared at him from across the waiting room, Jack had left the hospital and driven to police headquarters in Yeovil. There he had seen Detective Inspector Alfred Greely, the officer who had taken the call on Winnie’s accident. Greely, a phlegmatic man with a farmer’s face and a West Country burr, held out little hope that the driver of the car could be traced. There were no witnesses, and little, if any, possibility of forensic evidence on the bike—their only avenue lay with Winnie herself, if she should awaken and remember something vital.
Now, looking down at her smooth face, calm in a repose more profound than sleep, Jack asked Maggie, “Can I speak to her? Will she know me?”
“Of course, you can, dear, and the more the better. And it’s a good bet that when she wakes up, not only will she remember that you’ve been here, she’ll remember everything you’ve said to her.” Maggie fetched a hospital-issue chair that looked too insubstantial to support Jack’s large frame and placed it next to the bed. “She’ll need you to anchor her, give her consciousness a focal point. Talk to her, touch her, hold her hand. Tell her what’s happened to her.”
When Jack took Winnie’s hand between both of his, it felt cool and unresponsive. “Winnie, it’s me, Jack,” he began awkwardly. “You’ve had a bit of a bump on the head, but you’re going to be fine, love.”
“You just keep talking to her,” Maggie instructed when he paused, “and I’ll give you a few more minutes.” She moved away to attend another patient, her face impassive.
Jack fumbled in his pocket for the prayer book the hospital staff had found in Winnie’s handbag and began to read, hoping the familiar and comforting words would somehow reach her. “O Lord our heavenly Father, Almighty and everlasting God, who has safely brought us to the beginning of this day: Defend us in the same with thy mighty power; and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger; but that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance.…” His voice broke; he bowed his head and closed the small leather-bound book with its gilt-edged pages. It was Winnie’s, a gift from her parents upon her confirmation, she had told him once. They had been killed in a boating accident shortly afterwards, and the book had become one of her treasures.
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