The Chalice by Phil Rickman Page B

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