The Wounded Thorn

by Fay Sampson

  ‘The iron might actually do us good.’

  Hilary strode on uphill, past another Glastonbury Thorn, in the direction of the Chalice Well. When she reached the circular enclosure, she paused. She hadn’t been sure what to expect. A stream gushing out of the hillside? Or bubbling up out of the ground?

  The reality was neither. Within a circle of low walls, a vertical shaft was protected by a grating. Plants showed a vivid green below the rim. The well cover was thrown back, to reveal that same pattern of interlacing circles, this time pierced by a lance. The cobbled pavement around it was studded with ammonites.

  But standing in front of it was a figure Hilary had least expected to see: a small woman covered by a blue burka, which hid everything but her eyes. Hilary stopped dead in surprise.

  Hands emerged from within the blue cloth. From under the folds of her burka the woman drew a notebook. She looked at the well in front of her and the surrounding stonework and flower beds. She made rapid notes and sketches. Then she turned, almost bumping into Veronica and Hilary behind her. For a moment, the eyes in the slit of her veil looked startled.

  ‘Sorry! Didn’t hear you coming.’

  The voice did not have the accent Hilary had anticipated. It bore the strong nasal twang that could only come from Birmingham. The eyes that regarded them through the narrow opening were blue.

  She swept her skirts aside as she moved around them and hurried off down the path, brushing purple alliums and yellow tulips as she passed.

  ‘Well!’ Hilary let out a long breath. ‘I didn’t expect that.’

  Veronica was only half-listening. She knelt down beside the well and dipped her fingers through the grille. ‘It’s too far down to reach, but they say the spring is warm.’

  ‘Another indication of the mystical. Like the hot springs at Bath. Hot red water. Got to be a supernatural explanation. But tell me, what’s a devout Muslim woman doing at a Christian and New Age shrine?’

  ‘The same as we are?’ Veronica sat back on her heels and smiled up at her. ‘Satisfying her curiosity about one of the foremost sacred sites of Glastonbury? Enjoying the peace and beauty of the gardens? Why not?’

  ‘Hmm,’ Hilary snorted again. ‘I’m not sure it fits. Whatever it was that brought her here, she was keen to make notes about it.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s a writer. Collecting ideas for an article.’

  Hilary turned her head and watched the shapeless figure of the woman disappearing back down the path to the entrance.

  Veronica knelt for a while before the spring. Hilary seated herself on the low wall.

  Presently they took a more meandering way back to the exit, pausing in a meadow facing Glastonbury Tor. They found a bench and let the peace of the late afternoon sink into them.

  As they rejoined the path, Hilary scanned the scattering of visitors still coming towards the well: foreign tourists, a family party, people she judged from their ethnic clothing and esoteric pendants to be New Age devotees, more conventionally dressed women about their own age, who seemed as interested in the planting of the flowers and shrubs as the sacred significance of the site.

  ‘Oh, no!’ she groaned. ‘Spare us.’

  Prancing along the path came a motley figure who would not have looked out of place on the fringes of a Morris dance. His multicoloured clothes hung in tatters. His battered tall black hat nodded with feathers. He wore a jester’s shoes with up-curled toes. There were tattoos on his hands and his face was smudged with soot. He danced towards them to the sound of bells held between his fingers and his palms.

  When he was a few paces away he swept off his hat and bowed deeply. Mockingly? Hilary wondered.

  ‘So you’re here to be blessed by the sacred spring? How does it make you feel? Rejuvenated? Uplifted? Did you see visions in the healing pool on your way here? Have you drunk the water yet? You really should. You can feel the power washing through you. The blood of Christ or the milk of the Goddess. Who’s to say?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Hilary interrupted firmly. ‘We’ve done everything we need to. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re on our way to the exit.’

  ‘Don’t forget the shop. They have, if I may be so immodest as to mention it, a book of mine. Dancing with the Divine. Rupert Honeydew at your service.’ He flourished the feathered hat again.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll see it.’ Hilary was aware that Veronica at her side was stifling giggles. ‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind …’

  Rupert Honeydew stood aside with exaggerated politeness.

  Veronica waited until he was out of earshot before she gurgled, ‘Don’t look so disapproving, Hilary. You should see yourself. It all adds to the gaiety of life, don’t you think?’

  Hilary turned to her with surprise. ‘I should have thought you would be the one to resent having the peace disturbed by a self-important clown like him.’

  ‘He’s harmless. And certainly colourful. I think there has to be room for eccentrics. And if he’s had a book published, he can’t be completely mad.’

  ‘Hmm. Nowadays any idiot with a word processor and a few spare quid can get themselves into print.’

  The exit was, predictably, through the gift shop. Hilary looked around the narrow space at the crystal pendants, the Vesica Piscis-themed jewellery, the gift cards with images of the Chalice Well and its gardens, bottles of Chalice Well essence. Some of it, she admitted grudgingly, was decent enough.

  Veronica went straight to the bookshelves. The titles, as Hilary had expected, covered a wide range of tastes and beliefs. From Arimathea to Avalon; The Moon and the Mother; Sacred Wells of the British Isles; The Buddhist Way of Meditation.

  ‘Here it is,’ Veronica cried. ‘He wasn’t joking.’ She pulled off a high shelf a rather larger and glossier hardback than Hilary had imagined. The cover showed an ethereal woman in a flimsy gown dancing beneath a full moon.

  ‘Pagan rubbish!’ said an unexpectedly deep voice beside her. ‘Look at it! This place is full of it. Blasphemy!’

  Hilary was startled to find a large red-faced man in tweeds uncomfortably close to her as he peered forward at the book in Veronica’s hands. He waved at the rest of the merchandise with a hand dangerously close to Hilary’s nose.

  ‘George!’ said a small, square-faced woman behind him. ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘It’s a free country and I’ll say what I like. It’s my country. A Christian land, or it used to be. I’ll not have it fouled by all this fancy foreign rubbish. Moon worship! Healing crystals! Eastern mumbo-jumbo.’

  His voice reverberated through the shop. People stopped to listen. Hilary wished she could get Veronica away from him and Rupert Honeydew’s book.

  Veronica was doing her best to argue. ‘But the gardens here are lovely. And the Chalice Well. Does it really matter if some of the people who find peace here believe different things from us?’

  ‘Does it matter! Do you want them to go to hell? Glastonbury used to be a Christian place, when I was a young man. The streets weren’t filled with all this nonsense. Now, I’d like to put a bomb under the lot of it.’

  ‘George.’ His wife was tugging at his sleeve. ‘You’re making a scene.’

  A nervous-looking shop assistant was making her way towards them. She flinched as George’s fist collided with a glass-fronted case of perfume bottles.

  Hilary took the book from Veronica’s hands and replaced it firmly on the shelf. She steered her friend away from the confrontation.

  Out of the corner of her eye, a flicker of blue snagged her attention. The woman in the burka was watching from the card rack at the back of the shop.

  The shop assistant was arguing with the man in the tweed jacket, trying to persuade him to leave quietly.

  ‘I’ll say what I like,’ he roared at her. ‘I’m an Englishman and a Christian. I’ve more right to my say than these pagan foreigners.’

  His voice faded as Hilary tugged Veronica outside.

  ‘Well!’ she exploded. ‘You thought I was sceptic
al, but it’s really got under his skin. Why come here, if he feels that strongly?’

  ‘I suppose he thinks that, underneath all the esoteric stuff, the Chalice Well is what it’s always been. A sacred place in the Christian story of this country. I remember when these gardens weren’t open. The spring flowed out to the street through a hole in the wall. But there was always something special about it.’

  ‘Well, so much for peace and meditation. And I was beginning to get a fondness for the place.’

  ‘Hilary.’ Veronica’s voice sounded tentative, but pleading. ‘Would you mind very much? I did feel peace when I was kneeling at the Chalice Well. Now it feels – I don’t know – shattered, dirtied somehow. Would it be too much trouble if I went back there for a few moments? Just to regain what I found? I won’t be long, I promise.’

  Hilary caught back the sceptical comment she had been about to make. It was only six months since Andrew had died. She tried to imagine the emptiness she would feel if she lost David.

  ‘Of course.’ Her voice softened. ‘Take your time. We’re not in a hurry to go anywhere else.’

  She followed Veronica as the smaller woman made her way more rapidly this time up the sloping paths to the wellhead. She stood back to allow Veronica the privacy of communion with whatever she had found beside the pool. Steps led up to a seat within an arbour. She climbed them and sat down. Her eyes roamed over the gardens beyond. There was no one else in sight.

  It was only when she allowed her gaze to drop again to the circular enclosure around the well that she saw it. From here, she was behind the well cover, which was thrown back to display its decoration. It was propped against a tall stone shaft.

  Between the lid and this pillar was something that she had not seen before. A canvas strap with a buckle. She moved down a few steps to see further. It was attached to a small black knapsack, which had been pushed out of sight into the shadows. She stared at it idly for a moment before a lump rose in her throat, threatening to choke her.

  ‘Veronica! Get back! Now!’

  THREE

  Veronica looked round, her small face startled. When she saw the urgency with which Hilary was rushing towards her, she scrambled to her feet. Hilary grabbed her arm and hauled her away.

  ‘No, I’m not mad. You didn’t see it. Someone’s left a knapsack hidden behind the lid of the well.’

  Veronica looked over her shoulder as Hilary dragged her further down the path.

  ‘It’s probably some kid who put it down and forgot it.’

  ‘It’s very neatly tucked away out of sight. I was looking at the scene around you for some time before I noticed a bit of the strap poking out.’

  Veronica stopped and shook off the hand Hilary had clamped on her arm. ‘You don’t seriously think someone would plant a terrorist bomb at the Chalice Well? Why?’

  ‘How do I know? Why would anyone destroy the Glastonbury Thorn? The world’s full of nutters. Or people with a grudge against society. There was that loud-mouthed type in the shop. Didn’t he say he’d like to put a bomb under the lot?’

  ‘It was just a way of talking. If he really was a bomber, he’d hardly be likely to advertise the fact to everyone within hailing distance.’

  ‘Could be a double bluff?’

  Hilary had her phone out.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Calling nine-nine-nine.’ She made the call and at the operator’s prompt said curtly, ‘Police.’

  A group of Japanese tourists was approaching along the path. Hilary covered the phone with her hand and snapped, ‘Stop them.’

  Against the background of Veronica’s gentle remonstrations with the group leader, she explained briefly to the police her discovery of the abandoned knapsack behind the lid of the Chalice Well. The response from the other end was non-committal about the chances of it containing a bomb, but she was relieved that they were taking her seriously enough to send officers in response.

  ‘How far do you think the blast from one of those would reach?’ she muttered. The tour group was chattering with excitement and questions. Should she urge them further back?

  It seemed a blessedly short time before she heard the whine of a police siren in the distance. It stopped out of sight at the entrance. In the silence that followed the Japanese leader began to herd his group away along the path by which they had come. He seemed to be communicating the news to others they met. Hilary and Veronica were left alone, a prudent distance from the wellhead but still within sight.

  At last Hilary saw what she had been hoping for. Coming up the now-deserted path between the flower beds were two police officers in fluorescent jackets.

  ‘Which of you is Hilary Masters?’ the taller one asked, looking from Veronica to Hilary.

  ‘I am. I phoned you. There’s a very suspicious-looking bag hidden behind the lid of the Chalice Well.’

  ‘Clear the area,’ the policeman said to his colleague. ‘And seal the entrance. If there’s anything in this, we’ll want to question everyone we can about what they saw.’

  ‘Will do, Sarge. But I expect the bomber will have legged it by now.’

  ‘Someone may have seen him with a knapsack.’

  ‘Or her.’

  ‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind,’ the police sergeant said to the two women, ‘we’ve got an explosives specialist on the way. If you’d just follow my colleague back to the entrance, and wait in the shop, we’ll need statements from both of you.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Hilary said.

  She cast a regretful look over her shoulder as the officer began to unroll police tape and cordon off the area. She would have liked to see how the explosives expert dealt with the suspect package.

  As they retraced their steps down the path the heady excitement of her discovery was beginning to fade. What if she were wrong? What if Veronica’s innocent explanation of a child carelessly leaving a bag behind were true? She felt hot with embarrassment at the thought of all those police officers racing to the scene, the tape saying DO NOT CROSS, the penning of potential witnesses in the gift shop. All because of her over-dramatic imagination.

  ‘You know,’ Veronica was saying, ‘I hate to sound as though I’m jumping to some sort of racial stereotype, but there was that woman in the burka. I wondered at the time what she could be doing here. Christians and pagans, yes. Or maybe Buddhists. But it seemed out of place for a Muslim.’

  ‘I know,’ Hilary agreed. ‘I’m trying not to think in clichés. Islamic terrorists carrying knapsacks on board the Tube and letting off explosions. But you can’t help wondering. She didn’t leave straight away, though. I saw her again in the shop. And we’d spent quite a long time sitting on that bench in the meadow before we went back to the exit.’

  ‘You think she might have been waiting to see what happened?’

  ‘Criminals often do wait to see the effects of their crime.’

  ‘If it is a bomb, would it be on a timer, do you think? Or triggered remotely?’

  ‘How would I know? It might have gone off while you were kneeling there. Almost within reach of it. It makes me sick to think about it.’

  ‘Or that couple with the two little children. Unless it was timed to go off after closing time, when nobody was about.’

  ‘You’re too innocent for your own good, Veronica. People who let off bombs are not going to worry about casualties. Too often, that seems to be the intention.’

  They walked the rest of the way to the entrance in silence.

  There were more police at the gatehouse. Hilary had been dimly aware of the repeated sound of sirens as she discussed the grim possibilities with Veronica. They were directed into the gift shop.

  It was crowded now. Anyone still on the premises had been corralled here.

  ‘I’m not going to be the world’s favourite person if this is all a hoax,’ Hilary muttered.

  ‘The shop assistant is looking distinctly nervous. With this crowd, anything could vanish off the shelves.’

  ‘A
t least our friend in the tweed jacket isn’t here. He’s made good his escape.’

  ‘I really don’t think he’s a suspect. Too obvious. And he wasn’t carrying a knapsack.’

  ‘He could have dumped it before we met him. We took our time coming back. Anyone could have been up to the wellhead in the meantime.’

  ‘She’s still here,’ Veronica whispered.

  The young woman in the burka – Hilary felt sure from that glimpse of her eyes that she was young – was pressed uncomfortably against a display of Vesica-shaped jewellery. She looked as if she was trying unsuccessfully to avoid contact with the press of bodies around her.

  ‘Madness and mayhem!’ sang a voice above the noise of many people. ‘It’s full moon tonight. Beware the werewolves.’

  ‘Saints preserve us. Not him again. That’s all we need.’ She could only glimpse the feathered hat of Rupert Honeydew above the crowd, but his exuberant presence seemed to fill the crowded shop. ‘For heaven’s sake, I hope they get him out of here first.’

  But the voice of authority that called from the door summoned the first witness to be interviewed. ‘Is there a Hilary Masters here, please?’

  CID had taken over the meeting room in the stone and timber gatehouse. Two plain-clothes officers sat behind the desk.

  ‘Mrs Masters? Or is it Miss?’ asked the older one.

  ‘Mrs Have you found out yet whether it is a bomb?’

  Disregarding her question, he held up his warrant card. ‘Detective Sergeant Wills, and this is Detective Constable Fielding. Please sit down.’

  Hilary felt a surprised resentment that the case – her case – was being dealt with by a sergeant, and not a more senior detective. But perhaps there was an inspector somewhere, leaving his juniors the unglamorous job of taking witness statements.

  ‘Now, Mrs Masters, if you’d take us through the events of this afternoon. Try to remember as much as you can. You never know what may prove relevant.’

  Hilary thought back to their walk out of town and their arrival at the gatehouse. ‘We weren’t really paying much attention to the other visitors, I’m afraid. Not at that stage. So many people carry knapsacks nowadays, it wouldn’t have seemed out of the ordinary. I’ve got one myself. It wasn’t until we got to the wellhead and …’ She hesitated.