As they walked up to the admission complex adjoining the entrance to the grounds, Rowan Rover explained that the geography of England does not stay the same. “You remember that St. Michael’s Mount was once a mountain in a forest, and now it is an island in Mount’s Bay. Glastonbury was indeed an island centuries ago. The Celts called it Ynis Witrin, the isle of glass. It was once a towering peak in an inland sea, but now it is surrounded only by Somerset’s flat meadows and marshland, some of which has been drained in modern times, I expect. Progress, you know.”
“No wonder the fairies left England,” muttered Emma Smith, still thinking of The Mists of Avalon. She was looking paler than usual and she seemed irritable.
Rowan Rover showed the group’s admission pass, and led them through the gates and into the grounds of the ruined abbey. A few yards from the iron gates, Rowan stopped beside a spreading tree, about twelve feet in height. “That,” he said, “is the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury.”
Nancy Warren examined a branch with the eye of a practiced gardener. “It’s a hawthorn tree,” she announced.
“A variation thereof,” Rowan agreed. “But this tree flowers in December. A cutting of white flowering branches is sent each year to the royal family as a Christmas gift.”
“It can’t be the original tree,” said Nancy Warren, whose belief in miracles did not extend to botany.
“No, Cromwell’s men cut it down in their usual rage against holy relics. This is descended from a cutting of the original. Now, if you’ll come this way, I’ll tell you what these ruins are and we shall find the grave of King Arthur.”
For a pleasant hour they walked about the spreading green lawn amid the soaring ruins of the abbey. Charles took many pictures, conscious of the deepening twilight that would soon envelop the site. The others wandered around, strangely quiet, trying to imagine the church in all its medieval splendor.
Rowan, consulting his guidebook with great discretion, told them about the twelfth-century historian, William of Malmesbury, who wrote a chronicle of the abbey, placing its founding a thousand years before his time. According to legend, Ireland’s St. Patrick ended his days as abbot of Glastonbury, and St. Bridget and Wales’ patron saint, David, also visited the holy site. The Domesday Book pronounced it free from taxation, and the Viking raiders left it alone. Just after Malmesbury’s time, a fire destroyed the old structures, but even that turned out to be a mixed blessing, because in the old burial ground, the monks discovered two oak coffins, containing the remains of a large man and a woman with strands of golden hair still clinging to her skull. A leaden cross found with them identified the bodies as those of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. The bodies were reburied in a shrine within the church, and the site of that burial was located again in 1934.
“What a lot of famous people have been here!” said Kate Conway. “King Arthur! St. Patrick! Imagine a Grauman’s Chinese Theatre of saints’ footprints!”
“If it’s so important to England, you’d think they’d have taken better care of it,” said Susan disapprovingly. Seeing the others’ frowns, she said, “Well, they restored the shopping mall in Exeter after the Blitz, didn’t they? Why couldn’t they rebuild one old church?”
Rowan Rover closed his eyes and counted to ten in several languages. Finally he glanced at his watch and, with evident relief, announced, “It is nearly six o’clock, ladies and Charles. The grounds are closing, and we are due in Bath this evening. Tomorrow we shall be seeing the ruins of the Roman baths.”
Rowan was looking forward to inspecting the drowning facilities.
By seven o’clock that evening, they had arrived in Bath and had been shown to their rooms in the stately Francis Hotel in the city center. The hotel, an eighteenth-century building overlooking Queen’s Square, adjoined the residence occupied by Jane Austen when she visited that elegant spa of Georgian England. The natural hot springs over which the city is built were much prized by the Romans, who built the spa baths for their soldiers. Taking the waters became fashionable again in the eighteenth century when Beau Nash made London the playground of the aristocracy. Much of the classic Georgian architecture of the time remains, making Bath an architectural treasure, if not an English Lourdes. (“Wait until you taste the waters,” Rowan kept telling them gleefully.)
At eight Rowan had exchanged his khaki windbreaker for a tweed jacket and was waiting for the rest of the party in the dining room, where they were expected for dinner en masse. His head count, though, showed that there were three people missing.
He was just trying to figure out who they were when Maud Marsh appeared in the doorway. “We can go in to dinner now,” she told him. “I’m afraid Miriam and Emma won’t be joining us. Emma is quite ill.”
“There stood arcades of stone, the stream hotly issued
With eddies widening up to the wall,
encircling all.”
– SAXON POEM, EIGHTH CENTURY
CHAPTER 12
BATH
NEITHER EMMA NOR her mother appeared for breakfast the next morning, but since traveler’s tummy was a condition familiar to all of them, no one was particularly worried. They were impressed, though, by the touching concern of Rowan Rover, who appeared genuinely grieved by Emma’s indisposition and who insisted that she have a doctor in to examine her.
“I almost wish that I were the one who was sick,” sighed Kate Conway. “Isn’t Rowan being sweet?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “It is most unlike him.”
“I wonder if Bath’s healing waters would do Emma any good,” mused Maud Marsh.
“I very much doubt it,” said Alice. “Jane Austen must have drunk quite a lot of it and she died of Addison’s disease at forty-two.”
“Well,” said Susan, “I’m still going to drink some of it.”
Alice looked at her with a glint in her eye. “You do that, Susan.”
After he had seen to Emma and her mother, Rowan gulped down his own breakfast, and arrived in the hotel lobby just at ten o’clock to lead the tour of the Roman baths and museum.
“This will take just over an hour,” he told the group, looking particularly at Elizabeth. “After that you may have the rest of the day to sack the city. I’m sure you will make the locals forget the Romans.”
“I’m going to the library,” said Elizabeth, the picture of virtue.
“Before or after you shop?”
“Both.”
As they were leaving the hotel, Elizabeth posted the letters she had written the night before. The one to Cameron was an unfortunate exercise in newlywed purple prose, followed by a cheerful and chatty account of her travels, mentioning the places she’d like to visit again (“Perhaps you ought to check out Dozmary Pool for seals…”). The letter Elizabeth wrote to her brother Bill was also a travelogue, but considerably funnier, mostly at Susan’s expense. She discovered, though, that it was difficult on paper to convey just how annoying Susan really was. Quoted singly, any of Susan’s remarks might seem merely dull, or at best, a trifle eccentric. It was the cumulative effect of the running commentary hour after hour that wore down one’s nerves. Elizabeth felt that she could pass any test devised on the history and geography of Minnesota, or write a Cohen cat genealogy, and she could hear Susan’s voice droning mystery plot summaries in her sleep. All this aggravation would be impossible to impart without a fifty-page transcript of Susan’s endless monologue. She wondered at Rowan’s boundless tact and patience. Susan didn’t seem to annoy him at all. Perhaps he sees all of us that way, she thought with sudden humility.