Phil Rickman - The Chalice

'Listen, you have to get your act together, Joe. You read the stuff, yet?' Dan Frayne didn't sound right, lacked coherence. 'Her…you know… letters?'

'I've been a bit busy.'

'For fuck's sake, Joe. Listen, the thing is, I can't go down there, you know that I have to be in New York next week anyway.'

Powys felt he was missing something. 'Why do either of us have to go? Where's the urgency?'

There was a ragged pause. Then Dan told him, his voice like there was a dry twig stuck in his throat.

'I nearly missed it. Wouldn't have known. It only made a couple of paragraphs in the national papers. I mean, there are lots of fatal fires all over the place. They didn't have any names at that stage, anyway. Relatives hadn't been told.'

'I'm really sorry, Dan.' Powys knew there were a lot of questions he should be asking, but this wasn't the time.

Giving him a big brown Jiffy bag containing the collected letters of Juanita Carey, Frayne had said, 'Written to me at least three times a year for twenty years. If I wasn't here, I think she'd still write, to unload the shit. Read and I guarantee you'll see the book mapped out before your eyes.'

Powys read for nearly two hours, Arnold lying gloomily across his feet, sleety rain coming like tin-tacks at the cottage window.

He read about the people of present-day Avalon, as seen by Juanita Carey.

June, 1989 News just in: Alice Flood, the curate's wife, has left her husband for the guy who runs the Wearyall Wine Bar. The proposed Astral Festival has been attacked by one of those fundamentalist Christian sects claiming it'll attract satanic influences. One of the women at the tourist office in the Tribunal building has resigned because she says it's being haunted by a ghost in monk's robes and… Oh hell, just another week in bloody Avalon.

Powys smiled sadly, went back to the earliest letter, April 1975, and discerned a different tone, less cynical, more wide-eyed. Mrs Carey was writing it while listening to Alan

Stivell's 'totally transcendent' Breton harp music. She was organising an earth mysteries book fair in Glastonbury and was a little nervous about inviting the bigger names. Did Danny think Colin Wilson might be persuadable?

You never found out whether the book fair had been a success; Mrs Carey's next letter was about a relationship she was developing with an astrologer called Matt Rutherford who was 'a bit magnetic around the eyes'. The Matt thing lasted, on and off, nearly seven years, though Juanita didn't write much about it. Powys could imagine Dan Frayne seething with jealousy. But the general mood was changing.

In the eighties, the Thatcher subtext – greed is patriotic – was penetrating Glastonbury. Shops hadn't actually been selling chunks of holyest erthe in cans, but the possibility was in the air. There were now people in town who were seeing the New Age as New Money, and one of them was Matt Rutherford, who set up an agency offering astrological services to industry, star screening employees and job applicants to calculate their suitability for particular posts.

Juanita Carey had been furious to think that Rutherford was getting people fired because Pluto and Venus happened to be badly aligned when they were born.

Exit Matt.

Quite right too, Powys thought. Mercenary bastard.

He became aware that the letters were laying out for him a ground-plan of post-Fortune Glastonbury. He could see High Street, with all the New Age shops clustering at the bottom of the hill, near the ancient George and Pilgrims. He could see the lofty tower of St John's with the war memorial outside, where the hippies gathered to play and sing with guitars and whistles. He had a sense of the Abbey ruins amid hidden green acres enclosed by streets full of shops and strange music. And, on the edge of the town, the tunnel lanes leading to the pagan enigma of the Tor.

I suppose this means you'll be going now, then, Powys? After what's happened.

'I suppose so, Arnold.'

Powys sighed. On the evidence of the Carey letters, the contrasts and tensions of Glastonbury hadn't actually altered much in the sixty-odd years since Uncle Jack had fluttered the dovecotes: commercial interests squeezing into bed with the spiritual, a lot of seriously screwed-up people and frustrated visionaries, endless petty disputes, and maybe a wriggling vein of kinky sex.

In the mid-eighties, after Matt Rutherford had left town to pursue his business interests in – where else? – Los Angeles, Juanita rarely referred to men.

The last letter – very recent – was a cool and cynical overview of New Age Glastonbury. It also discussed the problems of a scatty female of semi-noble birth called Diane Ffitch and the publication of the gloomy diaries of a certain Colonel Pixhill.

There was a copy enclosed. It was a dismal dark green with no picture on the front. Dan had said he really couldn't face reading it.

Joe Powys had another look at the photo of the girl in the white dress, Juanita Carey: iridescent, mesmeric… If you looked closely you could make out some kind of amulet around her neck. If you held the picture away from you you were even more dazzled by the wide, white smile and the laughing brown eyes.

More than all this, Powys had liked her style.

He was deeply sad that she couldn't help him now.

The caller said, 'This is Lord Pennard. I wish to speak to my daughter. Now.'

No question, it definitely was him, voice straight out of the freezer compartment. Sam Daniel, the printer, had seen him around, as you might say, heard him ordering his huntsmen about. Very big man in these parts, and oh yes, this was definitely Lord P on the phone, no doubt about that.

'Sure it is,' Sam said. 'And I'm the Pope. Now piss off and stop bothering us or I'll call the police.'

Diane looked up from the oldest and simplest of Sam's office word-processors.

'Your old man,' Sam said. 'And not a happy old man, if I'm any judge. What if he shows up at the door?'

'He's left a couple of messages on the answering machine at the shop,' Diane said. 'I just wipe them off. He won't come here. He's always employed people to show up at doors for him.'

'Fair enough.' Sam turned back to his computer screen. He was laying out this illustrated feature piece by Matthew Banks, one of the five million local herbalists, about the Glastonbury Thorn. It listed all the Holy Thorn trees in and around the town, suggesting which was the oldest and examining the case for the various thorns being actual descendants of the staff of Joseph of Arimathea.

Complete load of old horseshit, in Sam's view, but Diane said the Thorn was a potent symbol which united the Alternative types and the locals. Local people were proud of the Thorn, Diane said. Well, Samuel Mervyn Daniel was about as local as you could get, and proud was putting it a bit strong.

Paul's digital clock said 8.20. Twenty past bleeding eight and they'd been at work for over an hour, marking up copy, transferring it to the computer, experimenting with layouts.

It hadn't even been light when he'd unlocked the print-shop. He hadn't had a shave for two days, nor a proper meal, nor seen any telly, nor been in any fit state to do much with Charlotte.

The upper classes. Always been good at getting the peasants working the clock round for a pittance.