A finer end - Deborah Crombie [15]
“You wrote the Latin? But that’s not your handwriting. I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table, pushing his wineglass aside. “The first few times it happened I had no awareness of it at all—just had to assume I’d written it because there was no other explanation. I had a few stiff drinks after that, I can tell you.
“But now … especially today—with this one”—he touched the page with his fingertip—“it’s like I’m watching myself from a distance, but I feel disconnected from what’s happening.”
“But you understand what you’re writing—”
“No. Not until afterwards. And then I struggle a good bit with the translation.”
Winnie stared at him. “But surely you can control it if you want—”
“It doesn’t occur to me. You do think I’m daft, don’t you? I can see it in your face.”
She made an effort to collect herself. “No, I … of course I don’t. But you should see a doctor, have a physical. Maybe there’s something—”
“A brain tumor?” He shook his head. “No other symptoms. Nor of any other physical ailment I’ve been able to find. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“Then—”
“I suppose I could be suffering from some sort of mental breakdown, but I seem to be coping well enough otherwise. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Of course,” Winnie hastened to reassure him. He seemed as normal and as capable as anyone she had ever met, and that made his story all the more disconcerting.
“Good. That’s something, anyway,” he said with the ghost of a smile. “Having ruled out physical ailments, I started to research. There are parallels to something that’s happened before.”
Realizing she was still clutching her wineglass, Winnie relaxed her fingers and took a sip, forcing herself to be silent, to let him tell it his own way.
“Does the name Frederick Bligh Bond ring a bell?” Jack continued.
“Didn’t he have something to do with the Abbey? Sorry. That’s all I can come up with.”
“Bond was an architect, like me, and an authority on early church architecture. But he was also an amateur archaeologist, and when the Church of England bought the Abbey from private owners in 1907, Bond got the commission to excavate the ruins. He made some marvelous discoveries, including the existence of the Edgar Chapel. All very respectable, all very aboveboard, until several years into the excavations, when he revealed that his finds were due to instructions from former monks of the Abbey—and that the monks had communicated with him through automatic writing. He was fired, his reputation in ruins, and he never recovered.”
“But if he was familiar with the history of the Abbey, he was most likely just dredging up stuff from his subconscious,” Winnie protested.
“Oddly enough, Bond never claimed otherwise. He believed individual consciousness was merely a part of a transcendent whole—a cosmic memory—and that every person has the power to open a door into that reality. There was a spiritual revival going on in Glastonbury at the time, particularly after the First World War. It attracted all sorts of notables—Yeats, Shaw—Dorothy Sayers even attended one of Bond’s sessions. So the general climate was not averse to Bond’s ideas.”
“So he thought he was tapping into this collective memory as well as his own subconscious?”
“It was Bond’s friend, a Captain John Bartlett, who did the actual writing, but Bartlett knew very little about the Abbey or archaeology—”
“But surely Bond prompted him?”
“Bond asked specific questions,” Jack corrected. “Bartlett’s first few episodes had occurred spontaneously, then Bond suggested that this … conduit … might be directed in a specific way. But often enough they got something completely unexpected.”
Jack’s blue eyes were alight with passion, and Winnie had a sudden chilling thought. He’d never talked about his dead wife—she knew only what had been repeated round the town, that his wife had died in childbirth, along with their infant daughter, only a few months after he’d lost his mother to a prolonged illness and his father to a heart attack. “Jack … you’re not thinking that you can … direct this? That you might … contact