The Chalice

TEN

Verity lit a candle for the Abbot.

Its light might have created the illusion of a warm area at the heart of ancient Meadwell. It didn't. The light was as wan and waxy as a lone snowdrop in cold earth.

The silver candlestick and a dusty wine bottle, two crystal wine glasses and two pewter plates rested at the top of the oak dining table, which was as crude as an upturned barge.

On one was a salmon steak. They ate mainly fish, the monks, Colonel Pixhill had told her.

From the other plate, at the bottom of the table. Verity (who had never before sat alone here, who habitually ate in the kitchen listening to The Archers) was picking at a green salad, which, in this sparse light, looked grey.

She was perched like a sparrow on the oak settle under the window recess. At the top end of the table, behind the candlestick, was a high-backed oak chair with arms. The chair sat before the platter of salmon. There was a knife, but no fork.

The Colonel had said they did not use forks.

Oh, let this soon be over.

Verity chewed on a lettuce leaf which felt like crepe paper in the desert of her mouth. Among beams and pillars of oak, huge shadows shifted sluggishly, like black icebergs. The lump of fish islanded by juices on the Abbot's plate looked – although she squashed the thought at once – like some grisly organic remains on a surgeon's tray.

The curious thing was that Verity had searched through all the records, the Church histories, the local histories – and there had been many of them, as writer after writer sought to explain the holy glamour of Glastonbury – without ever finding documentary evidence that Abbot Richard Whiting had eaten such a meal, or indeed that his last, sombre night upon this earth had been spent at Meadwell.

Colonel Pixhill, you see, had always said it was so. After the Dinner, relaxing a little with a small Panatella, the Colonel would ruminate on the Abbot's fate.

Of course, quite apart from his differences with the church over, er, marital matters, Henry VIII was an extravagant blighter. Never had enough money. And there was, Glastonbury, wealthiest religious house in Britain outside Westminster. Had to get his hands on that wealth somehow. Greed – that's the orthodox version. That devil Thomas Cromwell, Henry's hatchet man, as it were… only a matter of time before he was ordered to focus his scheming brain on Avalon…

The Colonel would pour red wine, brought up that evening from the cellar. Tonight Verity also had a bottle ready. Such a terrible waste, she drank hardly at all and hated the cellar. She'd taken the biggest flashlight in the house, but its beam down there had been but a flimsy ribbon. A cobweb was still laced around the bottle of vintage claret she'd snatched from the nearest rack, ramming it under her arm to grope for the iron handrail to the cellar steps.

But, of course, it was more than money. Henry was capturing Jerusalem, do y'see? Jerusalem Builded Here, as Blake was to put it, on England's green and pleasant land. How could the king break from Rome, establish himself as the head of the Church, if he didn't smash the power of the place where… where those Feet walked in ancient times. And old Whiting would've realised this, of course he would, and suspected his own days were numbered, poor chap. But he stayed, and he waited. For a miracle. How could God possibly permit the very Cradle of Christianity to fall?

For Verity, the Colonel had illuminated the history of Glastonbury as no book ever had. She pictured the great Abbey soaring, in all its golden splendour, into a flawless blue heaven. Who, indeed, could have imagined it then as broken and derelict? Certainly not the Abbot.

At last, laying down her knife and fork – she could not eat with only a knife, like the Abbot – Verity composed herself and said, in a tiny, tremulous voice like the tink of china, the words enunciated for so many years by Colonel Pixhill.

'Have courage, have fortitude, My Lord Abbot. We are…'

She paused to correct herself, nervously fiddling with the lace handkerchief in the sleeve of the woollen pinafore dress she wore against the cold in here. For November, it was quite a warm night. Outside.

'I mean, I am…'

No! She had to believe that Major Shepherd was here at the table and so was Colonel Pixhill himself. Had to believe she was not alone.

'We are with you this night.'

The candle flame swayed to the left, as if a fresh draught had spurted into the room. Verity sat very still and did not See.

… no possible escape, of course. Royal Commissioners searching the old boy's chamber and coming up with writings critical of the king's divorce – as if anyone would commit such things to parchment. Plus a book about – Ha', that other famous cleric with the temerity to criticise his kind, Thomas Becket. And then they find a gold chalice hidden away and accuse Whiting of robbing his own abbey!

The first time she heard this, Verity had asked hesitantly, Might this not have been…? I mean, a precious chalice that he was so anxious to hide…?

The Grail, Verity? I hardly think so. If the cup from the last supper was indeed preserved, it was surely not precious in that sense. Certainly not made of gold. Wood or earthenware, more likely.

The Colonel had raised his glass, peered into the clouded wine, repeating,

We are with you, Lord Abbot. With you this night.

Drawing an obvious parallel with the Abbot's own last supper.

In October 1539 – Verity remembered all the dates as clearly as if she had been there – Thomas Cromwell, the King's agent, had ordered that Richard Whiting, a kind old man who was always mindful of the poor and the sick and known for his generosity, should be 'tried and executed'.

The 'trial' took place at Wells, where the Abbot and two monks said to be his 'accomplices' were swiftly sentenced to death and brought immediately back to Glastonbury. This was November 14.

The following day, the Abbot was brutally stretched and bound to a wooden hurdle, dragged through the streets by horses past helpless, horrified townsfolk, past the forlorn Abbey.

And so to the Tor.

Verity now rose among the shadows, poured wine into the Abbot's crystal glass and a little drop to moisten her own parched lips. It tasted bitter and salty, like blood.

There was a hazy- necklace of light around the St Michael tower, just where it sprang free of the watery mist that rose from the Levels and gathered on the sides of the Tor.

Clutching her shawl around her, Diane stepped off the bus platform. Somewhere, a sheep bleated, a rare sound at night outside the lambing season.

It was OK; this was ordinary light. Perhaps a circle of candles. It wouldn't be visible at all from the edges of the town. So they were all up there, doing whatever they'd come to do. Gwyn the Shaman presiding. With his ceremonial sickle.

That had been a pretty scary moment. All alone, and raising his sickle to the moon.

Another reason to get out of here. This was not the convoy she'd joined.

She moved silently across the grass, careful not to bump into any vehicles, always a risk when there was so much of you.

She'd moved her van closer to the field gate, knowing she'd probably be leaving before the others, knowing Juanita would let her stay at the flat for a couple of weeks while she sorted herself out.

Mort's hearse loomed in from of her. Love is the law, love over death. She'd seen another, unpleasant side of Mort tonight. Another side of all of them. She stopped. There was the glow of a cigarette.

The thin moonlight showed her the hateful Hecate, sitting on the bonnet of the hearse. Her van was on the other side of the hearse. She couldn't possibly reach it unseen.

Well, gosh, what did that matter? She could leave if she wanted to. Don't be pathetic!

But she was pathetic. She imagined getting into the van, trying to start the engine which always took absolutely ages to fire. And Hecate standing there watching her, this large, strong and horribly precocious child smoking a joint. Opening the van door, which she could do because its lock was broken, and dragging her out, the younger children hearing the noise and coming to join in, black gnomes swarming over her.

Shivering, Diane crept back to the bus. She'd wait until Hecate had gone – for a pee or something – and then creep past the vehicles to the gate and go on foot to Wellhouse Lane and the town. Knock on Juanita's door, beg for sanctuary.

She sat in the front of the bus, in the driver's seat. A night breeze awoke and made the bus rattle; more sheep began to bleat. Diane felt like a solitary spectator on the perimeter of an enormous stadium, the landscape primed as if for some great seasonal festival, Samhain, Beltane or whatever they called midsummer night.

November 14? A day, surely, of no particular import in the Celtic calendar. Not even a full moon. November 14…

And then, in the sky over the Tor, she saw a light.

Not a torch, not a lamp, not a fire.

It hung there for a moment and then went out. Diane caught her breath.

When she was very young she used to go all trembly and run downstairs, and Father snorted impatiently and the nannies said. Nonsense, child, and felt for a temperature.

Nannies.

There was a certain sort of nanny – later known as a governess – which Father expressly sought out. Nannies one and two, both the same, the sort which was supposed to have yellowed and faded from the scene along with crinolines and parasols. The sort which, in the 1960s, still addressed their charges as 'child'. The sort which, as you grew older, you realised should never be consulted about occurrences such as lights around the Tor.

And then there was the Third Nanny.

Her memories of the Third Nanny remained vague and elusive. She remembered laughter; the Third Nanny was the only one of them that ever smiled. And one other thing: she would sit on the edge of the bed but never left a dent in the mattress when she arose.

She knew now what the Third Nanny was.

Diane tensed. Behind the Tor, the whole of the sky was now growing lighter. Like a dawn. But it couldn't be dawn; it was quite early in the night.

The light spread behind the Tor like a pale sheet. It was grey and quietly lustrous, had a sheen like mother-of-pearl. She wondered if Hecate could see it and suspected not.

Diane had certainly never seen a light like this before. The lightballs she'd watched as a child had fascinated her. They were benign, they filled your head with a fizzy glow – like champagne. This light was ominous, like a storm cloud, and it stroked her with dread.

She wanted to turn away. She couldn't. She couldn't even blink.

Two dark columns had appeared either side of the silhouetted tower of St Michael. Rising above the tower into the lightened sky like arms of smoke culminating in shadow-hands, cupped.

And in the cup, a core of intense and hideous darkness.

We are with you this night.

But who was with him, Verity wondered, when they dragged him on his hurdle up the side of the Tor? The mud besmirching him, the bleak November wind in his face bringing water from his eyes so that it would appear he was weeping.

All the accounts said that Abbot Whiting went to his death with dignity and stoicism.

But the very act of hauling him up the steep cone of the hill, the violence of it! And at the summit, under the tower, the waiting nooses – three of them, an obscene parody of the execution, on another hill, of Christ.

The other two 'convicted' monks were Roger lames and John Thorne, treasurer of the Abbey and a skilled carpenter and furniture-maker. All three went quietly to their God. But the humiliation of Abbot Whiting did not end with his hanging.

Took off his head. Soon as they cut his dead body down, they look off the Abbot's head… to be displayed upon the Abbey gate, a trophy, a warning. Final evidence that Roman Catholicism was terminated in Glastonbury, that the Church belonged to the Crown. Imagine the impact of that on a little town in the sixteenth century. It must have felt like Armageddon.

Colonel Pixhill could never go on beyond this point, but Verity knew the Abbot's body had been drawn and quartered, sections of his poor corpse sent for exhibition at Bath, Wells, Ilchester and Bridgwater.

Where did they carry out this butchery? Where did they take the axes or cleavers to the body? Not, surely, on the Tor. More likely indoors… somewhere.

Here? This was the inference, wasn't it. That the Abbot was drawn and jointed in this house.

And if not at this very table, which was insufficiently ancient, then perhaps on another table standing where this one now stood.

There had been a body here. It was here that the Colonel had lain in his coffin, for three days, as stipulated in his will. People had said how brave she was to stay in the house alone with the corpse, but it had been a comfort to her, a period of adjustment, of coming to terms with it.

Verity stared down into the well of shadows around her feet. Why was she doing this to herself, as if she was obliged to unravel every last strand of sadness and horror from the unhappy tapestry? She was unable to suppress the sickening image of the Abbot's body, chopped into crude joints of meat, and her eyes rose inevitably to the lump of red salmon on the plate and saw… that it had gone.

The Abbot's pewter plate was clean.

Verity felt her mouth tighten into a rictus; both hands grabbed at her face like claws, eyes closing as her nails pierced her forehead and cheeks in a sudden, raging fever of fear.

She stayed that way for over a minute, rocking backwards and forwards on the settle, feeling her chest swelling… but she must not scream, must not… moaning feebly through her fingers, not daring to open her eyes, because the membrane of darkness shut in by her eyelids, that at least was her darkness, not Meadwell's.

She should not have to go through this. Her fear was spiked with an anger now at Major Shepherd for being so ill, too ill to realise what it took out of her. It's my duty to receive the Abbot, she'd told Juanita Carey, almost gaily! In truth, it would be upsetting enough for anyone, woman or man, to prepare a meal for a person long dead and then sit down to dine. Alone. With that person's spirit.

Oh, but she was getting old. She'd be with them all soon, the Abbot and the Colonel and Captain Hope her almost-lover who had died of peritonitis in 1959.

Telling herself again that the Abbot was such a kind man, known for his generosity towards the old and the sick, Verity rocked more slowly and became calmer, pulling her hands away from her face, making them relax on her knees under the table, retracting her claws like a cat. Of course the plate was not empty. With the worry and tension of the Abbot's dinner, anyone could be subject to minor hallucinations.

Why, the ancient stone and timbered dining hall was quite normal: silent and cold and still. Quite normal.

Until the very moment that Verity opened her eyes. When, as abruptly as if someone had plucked out the snowdrop or flattened it between two clapping hands, the candle went out.

And when the room was fully in darkness, not even the ghost of the flame still discernible, the Abbot's chair creaked. The way that a chair creaks when someone rises from it.

And Verity, alone in the reaching darkness – where it no longer mattered that she Did Not See – gave in at last to the pressure of that long-withheld scream.