The Brothers of Glastonbury Read Online Free PDF Page A

intervention in my affairs.
    We stopped mid-afternoon to rest and refresh ourselves, buying milk and honey cakes from a beekeeper’s cottage, and turning Barnabas loose to crop the surrounding grass. The sun was long past its zenith, but it was still extremely warm. On a nearby pond, ducks were swimming. One of the females was chasing another, squawking and quacking, neck arched in fury, water flying from the spread and speckled wings in a spindrift of iridescent drops. The fronded reeds, the colour of ripe barley, rippled as they passed. Cicely laughed and clapped her hands, encouraging the aggressor.
    The shadows were beginning to lengthen as, later that afternoon, we made our leisurely way across the lower slopes of the Mendips. Sheep dotted the hills.
    ‘These animals belong to the Pennards,’ Cicely informed me. ‘Peter and Mark buy some of their skins from Anthony and his sons. That is, I expect they do because my uncle always used to do so. This part of the holding is called the Sticks. I don’t know why. That’s the Pennards’ house in the distance, and that’s their shepherd’s hut, there, in that dip below us.’
    As she spoke, both house and hut disappeared from view as we descended into another fold of ground, then reappeared as we mounted the opposite slope. Once more we descended to where the grey stone shelter, with its roof of moss and twigs, stood in the lee of a mound topped by a small, wind-blasted copse, before continuing down the stony track and skirting my home town of Wells.
    We had only some five miles to go now, and every step of the route was as familiar to me as my own name: the receding line of the hills, the raised causeway which carried travellers dryshod across the stretches of waterlogged moorland, and the horizon perpetually dominated by the great, brooding hump of of the Tor. There, throughout the ages, contending religions had struggled for predominance. Our Celtic ancestors had thought it to be the home of Gwyn ap Nudd, King of the Underworld, Lord of the Wild Hunt. Even today some people still believed it to be hollow, the haunt of fairies and hobgoblins. But with the coming of Joseph of Arimathea and, later, Saint Augustine, the Church had claimed it for its own and built the chapel of Saint Michael the Archangel on its summit. Yet who was to say for certain that Christianity had triumphed?
    Hastily suppressing these heretical thoughts, I urged Barnabas to one last effort As we plodded down through Bove Town, past the chapel of Saint James, I asked Cicely the whereabouts of her aunt’s house and shop.
    ‘What?’ She had been strangely silent for the last half-mile or so, her former high spirits quenched. ‘Oh! It’s in the High Street, between Saint John’s Church and the pilgrims’ hostelry. The shop and work rooms are on ground level, with the living quarters over. You can’t miss it; it’s opposite the north gatehouse of the abbey.’
    Indeed, as soon as I saw it, I remembered the place from six years earlier, when I had been a novice at Glastonbury (although I had not known then that it was a parchment maker’s nor anything of its inhabitants). I drew rein, thankful to be at my journey’s end, and slid from the rouncy’s back, reaching up to lift Cicely from the saddle. Hardly had I done so than the street door flew open and a small, birdlike woman emerged, hands fluttering in agitation and violet eyes, a paler version of her niece’s, brimming with tears. I could see at once which member of her family Cicely favoured, and reflected yet again on the amazing diversity of features and stature between siblings.
    ‘Oh my child! My dear child! You managed to get here!’ Dame Gildersleeve flung her arms around her niece’s neck and burst out crying. ‘I didn’t know what to do for the best. I thought about sending Mark or one of the men to Farleigh, but they’re all out looking, and Mark flatly refused to give up the search to fetch you.’ All this was punctuated