Intrigued, Nick saw that he seemed to be writing or sketching on a pad, and that every few moments he raised visibly trembling fingers to brush a lock of hair from his forehead.
When Nick made his way to the bar for a refill, the blond man was staring fixedly at his beer glass, his pen poised over the paper. Nick glanced at the pad. It held neat architectural drawings and figures, and, scrawled haphazardly across the largest sketch, a few lines in what looked to be Latin. It is for my sins Glaston suffered … he translated silently.
“You’re a classics scholar?” Nick said aloud, surprised.
“What?” The man blinked owlishly at him. For a moment Nick wondered if he were drunk, but he’d been nursing the same drink since Nick had noticed him.
Nick tapped the sketch pad. “This. I don’t often see anyone writing in Latin.”
Glancing down, the man paled. “Oh, Christ. Not again.”
“Sorry?”
“No, no. It’s quite all right.” The man shook his head and seemed to make a great effort to focus on Nick. “Jack Montfort. I’ve seen you, haven’t I? You work in the bookshop.”
“Nick Carlisle.”
“My office is just upstairs from your shop.” Montfort gestured at Nick’s empty glass. “What are you drinking?”
Montfort bought two more pints, then turned back to Nick. Now he seemed eager to talk. “Working at the bookshop—I suppose you read a good bit?”
“Like a kid in a sweetshop. The manager’s a good egg, turns a blind eye. And I try not to dog-ear the merchandise.”
“I have to admit I’ve never been in the place. Interesting stuff, is it?”
“Some of it’s absolute crap,” Nick replied with a grin. “UFOs. Crop circles—everyone knows that’s a hoax. But some of it … well, you have to wonder.… Odd things do seem to happen in Glastonbury.”
“You could say that,” Montfort muttered into his beer, his scowl returning. Then he seemed to try to shake off his preoccupation. “You’re not from around here, are you? Do I detect a hint of Yorkshire?”
“It’s Northumberland, actually. I came for the Festival last year”—Nick shrugged—“and I’m still here.”
“Ah, the rock festival at Pilton. Somehow I never managed to get there. I suppose I missed something memorable.”
“Mud.” Nick grinned. “Oceans of it. And slogging about in some farmer’s field, being bitten by midges, drinking bad beer, and queuing for hours to use the toilets. Still …”
“There was something,” Montfort prompted.
“Yeah. I’d like to have seen it in its heyday, the early seventies, you know? Glastonbury Fayre, they called it. That must have been awesome. And even that didn’t compare to the original Glastonbury Festival—in terms of quality, not quantity.”
“Original festival?” Montfort repeated blankly.
“Started in 1914 by the composer Rutland Boughton,” Nick answered. “Boughton was extremely talented—his opera The Immortal Hour still holds the record for the longest-running operatic production. All sorts of luminaries were involved in the Festivaclass="underline" Shaw, Edward Elgar, Vaughan Williams, D. H. Lawrence. And Glastonbury had its own contributors to the cultural revival, people like Frederick Bligh Bond and Alice Buckton.… And then there was the business of Bond’s friend Dr. John Goodchild and the finding of the ‘Grail’ in Bride’s Well. That caused a few ripples.…” Aware that he was babbling, Nick paused and drank the foam off his pint.
Looking up, he saw that Montfort was staring at him. Nick flushed. “Sorry. I get a bit carried away some—”
“You know about Bligh Bond?”
The intensity in Montfort’s voice took Nick by surprise. “Well, it’s a fascinating story, isn’t it? Bond’s knowledge was prodigious, his excavations at the Abbey were proof of that. But I suppose one can’t blame the Church for being a bit uncomfortable with the idea that Bond had received his digging instructions from monks dead five centuries or more.”
“Uncomfortable?” Montfort snorted. “They fired him. He never worked successfully as an architect again and, if I remember rightly, died in poverty. If the man had had an ounce of bloody sense, he’d have kept his mouth shut.”
“He felt he had to share it, though, didn’t he? I’d say Bond was honest to a fault. And I don’t think he ever actually claimed he’d made contact with spirits. He thought he might have merely accessed some part of his own subconscious.”
“Do you believe it’s possible, whatever the source?”
“Bond’s not the only case. There have been well-documented instances where people have known things about the past that couldn’t be accounted for otherwise.” Glancing at the paper Montfort had partially covered with his hand, Nick felt a fizz of excitement. “But you’re not talking hypothetically, are you?”
“This is”—Montfort shook his head—“daft. Too daft to tell anyone. But the coincidence, meeting you here … I—” He looked around, as if suddenly aware of the proximity of other customers, and lowered his voice.
“I was sitting at my desk tonight, and I wrote … something. In Latin I haven’t used since I was at school, and I had no memory of writing it. I tore the damned thing up.… Then this.…” He ran his fingertips across the scrawl on the sketch pad.
“Bugger,” Nick breathed, awed. “I’d swap my mum to have that happen to me.”
“But why me? I didn’t ask for this,” Montfort retorted fiercely. “I’m an architect, but my knowledge of the Abbey is no more than you’d expect from anyone who grew up here. I’m not particularly religious. I’ve never had any interest in spiritualism—or otherworldly things of any sort, for that matter.”
Nick pondered this for a moment. “I doubt these things are random. Maybe you have some connection to the Abbey that you’re not consciously aware of.”
“That’s a big help,” Montfort said, but there was a gleam of humor in his bright blue eyes. “So how do I find out what it is, and why this is happening to me?”
“Maybe I could help. You know it wasn’t Bond who did the actual writing, but his friend, John Bartlett. Bond guided him by asking questions.”
“You want to play Bond to my Bartlett, then?”
“You said you came from Glastonbury. That seems as good a place to start as any.”
“My father’s family’s been in Glastonbury and round about for eons, I should think. He was a solicitor. A large, serious man, very sure of where he stood in the world.” Montfort took a sip of his beer and his voice softened as he continued. “Now, my mother, she was a different sort altogether. She loved stories, loved to play make-believe with us when we were children.”
“Us?”
“My cousins and I. Duncan and Juliet. My aunt and uncle had a penchant for Shakespeare. We always visited them in Cheshire on our holidays. It was a different world. The canals, and then the hills of Wales rising in the distance.…”
Once more he fell silent, his eyes half closed. Nick was about to prompt him again, when, without warning, Montfort grasped the pen. His hand began to move steadily across the paper.
Nick translated the Latin as the words began to form. Deo juvante … With God’s help … you shall make it right.… Did that, he wondered, apply to him as well? Could he somehow set right what he had done?
In that instant, Nick knew why he had come to Glastonbury, and he knew why he had stayed.
Faith Wills rested her forehead against the cool plastic of the toilet seat, panting, her eyes swimming with the tears brought on by retching. She had nothing left to throw up but the lining of her stomach, yet somehow she was going to have to pull herself together, go out, and face the smell of her mother’s breakfast.