October 1865 and the party at Harrow House received a letter from Dr Nathaniel Mew, of the Bath & Somerset Antiquarian Society, complaining about manifestations in the town of Glastonbury, including strange lights on Glastonbury Tor and the appearance of the spectre of a woman called the Queen of Sorrow by local inhabitants.
Recent earth tremors have also been reported in the Mendip Hills and a spreading sickness among cattle in the locality.
Research in the library at Harrow House revealed the Queen of Sorrow is also called the Lady of the Vale, the Mourning Queen and the 'true bride of Avalon' by various sources. Some accounts describe her as the spectre of Guinevere herself, queen of King Arthur. Others say she is a spirit of sorrow and hunger once sated in ancient times by marriage and burial rites. The flooded levels around Glastonbury are referred to by Merrow as the Hollow Vale and marked as such on his mystic ley line map.
Merrow also writes of a ritual that can bind the Queen, including the use of a circlet of apple blossoms as a key component.
Little can be discovered in the library about the occult nature of the Mendip Hills other than that it was thought to be an area rife with witchcraft during the Middle Ages and there is a local tradition about an entity called the King of Grief, who "wears a hollow crown" and is meant to be buried there. Some traditions, according to Merrow's research, link him to the Mourning Queen, possibly as her son.
The group travelled to Glastonbury, via Exeter, where they equipped themselves before taking the train across the Somerset levels. Heavy autumn rains have meant the fields around Glastonbury itself are flooded, creating an island effect. The town was busy because of the harvest festival, with a harvest fair set up in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey and hundreds of farmers, tourists, mystics and mountebanks (morris dancers) crowding the streets, despite the rain.
The party met up at the Abbey Inn with Dr Mew. They asked him whether any strange men from Bristol had been in the town recently and he recalled meeting with a Dr Hiram Quill, an antiquarian from Bristol who is staying at the inn. He also discussed the Mourning Queen and revealed that he had read about the need for a mystic stone carved with spirals, which has to be thrown into the waters as part of the binding ritual. He told the party he has a small local library of books and documents belonging to the Bath & Somerset Antiquarian Society. Mew explained that many locals believed the Mourning Queen to be the ghost of Guinevere.
Cedric Fitzpatrick noticed a man in a corner of the bar writing in a notebook and recognised him as Oxford mathematician and writer Charles Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll. The group went to speak with him and Dodgson/Carroll revealed he has been working on a mathematical formula to communicate with the Queen of Mourning using mirrors. He showed them some of his sketches and calculations and said he was going to the Chalice Well at midnight to summon the queen using geometry. He also mentioned that the waters of the well were running red, as if with blood. Lord Fallowdrake insulted him.
Roddy MacLeod went to talk to the innkeeper about Quill, and managed to discover he was out but was staying in room 15 (XV). The innkeeper claimed to have seen William the day before playing the fiddle at the fair and complemented him on his expertise with the instrument, which he said was second to none. William denied it was him.
William and Lord Fallowdrake decided to burgle Quill's room and found he had quite a few books on ley lines and Arthurian mythology. They unearthed a Latin translation on a scrap of paper in one of Quill's books which mentions "the sisters of Avalon" who received Arthur to the island after he was mortally wounded in his final battle, and one sister who alone did not bless him, but wept and covered the dying king with blossoms, to give him eternal sleep. "Thus he shall not rise until she is bound into the earth, or at least released," it says.
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| Lewis Caroll ponders the Queen |
The Chalice Well
As it was getting late, the group decided to head to the Chalice Well. On the way they passed a small group of farmers and heard a little girl with them singing a song - they recognised the lyrics as the ritual the party used to bind the Blossom Queen. The group turned out to be from Wellow. The girl was wearing a crown of dried apple blossom and Lord Fallowdrake managed to buy it off her for a guinea! It has gone into Fitzpatrick's medical bag.
Approaching the well, which sits in a small ornamental garden open to the public, William heard the faint sound of a violin playing a ghostly and haunting melody, coming from the direction of the Tor. He ignored it. Nobody else noticed it.
At the well they found Dodgson had set up a circle of seven mirrors on easels, all facing inwards. Fallowdrake unpacked his new camera which he had bought in Exeter. Fitzpatrick tasted the water in the well, which was blood red (it tasted of iron). He took a sample for later analysis. The rain suddenly stopped, almost on the stroke of midnight and the clouds over Glastonbury parted. This seemed unaturally quick, but the moon shone through the break in the clouds to illuminate the mirrors. The Mourning Queen appeared as a beautiful, veiled woman wearing a crown of flowers, reflected in all the mirrors.
The Queen offered Fitzpatrick power over life and death and to Roddy she promised to reunite him with his fiancee. The men only had to come to her through the glass. To William she said - "One of you is mine still, the other, borrowed light." Poor old Dodgson seemed determined to go to the Queen through the looking glass, but was brutally restrained by William. Having taken a photo of the scene, Fallowdrake shot at the mirror and broke it, whereupon the Queen vanished from the mirrors.
The group decided to pack up the remaining six mirrors in Dodgson's hand cart and take the sobbing mathematician back to the inn, where they plied him with whisky, before putting him to bed. Fallowdrake developed his photograph which revealed a second William in the picture, with dark eyes and holding a violin, standing in the park watching the proceedings. Fallowdrake tried his spirit writing which mentioned the Lament of the Hollow and told him to find "the four witnesses - a widow, a midwife, a priest and a child." An effort was also made to communicate with the ghost of Isaac Merrow, but this failed.
Next time: Curse of the Mourning Queen!
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