The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘With the abbey itself just a shell,’ Monger said, ‘there’s a need to provide channels for… energies which might otherwise overflow, perchance causing harm.’

  Hadn’t Eleanor Borrow said something similar, about the monks being needed to keep a balance? For all my learning, I felt like a child again who saw before him adult human knowledge like an outline of distant mountains.

  ‘Most of us had little understanding of it at the time,’ Monger said, ‘but if you consider the real function of the abbey was to transform the energy that was there into a Godly substance, and spread it afar. Lay it soft on the land… a spiritual irrigation…’

  ‘Yes.’

  I could see it and hear it. The river of a Gregorian chant, in all its glorious mathematical symmetry.

  Ice in my spine.

  ‘How was this known?’

  ‘Tradition,’ he said.

  ‘Not written down?’

  ‘Some traditions -’ he smiled – ‘are never written down.’

  ‘Then how…?’

  But he’d moved away, holding up both his long hands as if in benediction over the townsfolk clustered below us around the myriad market stalls.

  ‘Still they come. People in search of something. People who think that just by being here, on this holy soil, their lives will be transformed.’

  ‘Holy?’

  ‘A big, bad word,’ Monger said. ‘But everything has its darker side. There are some who would… speed the process.’

  ‘By sorcery?’

  I thought of what Fyche had said about the cockerel in the abbey. And earlier about finding new-born babes in the grass with their throats cut in sacrifice.

  ‘By the use of ritual magic?’ I said.

  ‘When the new religion is in disarray, some may turn again to the older ones.’

  Monger the farrier gazed placidly down across the huddle of the town. Like the player over the chesstable, and I was the knight, which is moved in such a fashion that he cannot easily see the way ahead.

  The farrier turned his grey gaze upon me. ‘Where stand you, Dr Dee?’ he murmured. ‘For this surely is the town in England closest to your own heart.’

  XXII

  Black as Pitch

  Sometimes I’d think that, for all my learning, I was still like to an infant, milky-eyed and unknowing. That, being sent early to college and raising my eyes but rarely from printed pages, a whole part of my being was yet undeveloped, leaving me with little understanding of a world so carelessly traversed by the less-educated.

  A child of two and thirty. Dudley knew that. However you survived in the cesspits of Paris and Antwerp…

  The plain truth being that I’d never been in the cesspits of Paris or Antwerp, only in their lecture halls and libraries.

  Now I was walking numbly through the streets, as if naked, following the farrier into a mean, cramped drinking hovel on the upper edge of town.

  Huddling in its dark, cider-smelling belly, beside a sooted inglenook with a fire of peat, while the stained ceiling sagged threateningly betwixt beams and my head was swelled with questions I had not the will to ask.

  Cowering into the shadows, I watched a wench of about fifteen serving cider from an earthenware jug. Watched Monger waiting in line behind two farmer-looking men, four others sitting around the room on stools. The only talk I could hear was of sheep-prices until Monger returned, setting down two mugs upon the board and himself on the low, three-legged stool opposite me, pushing his thin hair behind his ears.

  ‘It was Nel,’ he said. ‘What?’

  Monger drank some cider with the same restraint that William Cecil had displayed over a glass of fine wine.

  ‘People here follow your career with interest. Through pamphlets and such passed around amongst the seekers.’

  Pamphlets. God help me. ‘Still,’ Monger said, ‘as you must have gathered by now, for a good many in this town, the word conjurer is far from a term of abuse.’

  The fire coughed out weak yellow flames. My mouth was dry but I couldn’t drink.

  ‘A man deep into fever,’ Monger said, ‘is seldom aware of his indiscretions. And is even, in his fuddled state, apt to call out for his friend by name.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I drank some of the strong cider.

  ‘A name alone being not, of course sufficient,’ Monger said. ‘Many men have the same name. Indeed, poor Nel was at first reluctant to believe her own ears.’

  ‘Who else has she told?’

  ‘Only me, after much havering… in the hope that I might be able to confirm it.’

  ‘Which you seem to think you have.’

  ‘At some risk, I may say, if you’d turned out, after all, to be an agent of the Queen.’

  ‘I am an agent of the Queen.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s what we like about you.’

  I sensed a smile which it was too dark in here to see.

  ‘And what, after all,’ Monger said, ‘would a mere clerk know about Agricola the dowser?’

  In better circumstance, I might have even been laughing. It was all so clear, to me now, all the traps laid out in my path. The daring talk of Mistress Eleanor Borrow:

  ’Tis best to sow under a new moon and then to harvest under a full moon… It has a power… Oh, am I stepping close to heresy?

  And Monger… would he have revealed Emmanuel Worthy’s magical library to someone who might have regarded the books as heretical? Would he have fingered to me every penny-a-poke street-seer in the Glastonbury market, if not sure of his ground?

  ‘While both Nel and I accept,’ he murmured, ‘that Dr John Dee is a man of science rather than a procurer of spirits, we still find it curious that someone renowned for the breadth of his learning should arrive in a little town much reduced in its fortunes… merely to make account of what miserable antiquities remain there.’

  Now here was trouble. If I failed to quench the farrier’s curiosity, he could expose me to whoever he liked. Might, indeed, choose to enlighten Sir Edmund Fyche, for whom the distinction ’twixt science and sorcery would be a line not so much fine as imperceptible.

  ‘It’s not so far removed from the truth,’ I said.

  And, in the hope that the fevered Dudley had not announced himself as the Royal Master of the Horse, was about to tell him more of the truth… when the door of poor planks creaked and opened to a slit of light.

  A shadow fell across the crack, as if an eye was peering in, and then the door opened just wide enough for a woman to slip inside.

  Shutting it rapidly behind her, pushing it tight with her arse, wild grey hair springing from a ragged coif.

  ‘Pour’s a big one, Sal! Us could be deep in the shitty yere, girl.’ Eyepatch.

  Monger raised himself from his stool.

  ‘Joan. Over here.’

  ‘Zat you, Brother Joe? Be hard enough to zee in this hole with both fuckin’ eyes.’

  ‘Mug of strong cider for Mistress Tyrre!’ Monger called out, as she came bundling herself towards our board, bony white hands groping the air like it was muslin. ‘Something amiss, Joan?’

  ‘Constables. Zo-called. They’ze everywhere. Big bazzards on big ’osses. Weren’t good to trade n’ more today, Joe, we come outer there damn quick, look.’

  I dragged over another stool for her and she peered around the room with her one eye and then lifted her skirts and sat down with her knees shamelessly apart.

  ‘Normal thing, they comes nozyin’ around, you offers ’em a readin’ for free or a feel o’ your tits, and they’s sweet as you likes. But not today, not today, boy.’

  ‘Man was murdered, Joan,’ Monger said. ‘That’s probably-’

  ‘Howzat tie up with the likes of us? I never kilt ’im.’ She stiffened at the sight of me in the recess. ‘Whozis?’

  ‘A friend. Dr John, over from London.’

  ‘Wozze do?’

  ‘Works for the Queen, Joan.’

  ‘ Do he? Well, that’s all well and fin
e, Joe, but I en’t gonner truss no bugger today. There’s a funny air, look. Dark as you likes.’ Wrapping her twig-thin arms around herself as if all warmth were fled from the room. ‘Black as pitch over the tor. Somethin’ a’ comin’. You zee it a’ comin’? You zee- Oh fuck and buggery…’

  A flash of brightness as the door shuddered open. At once, a couple of the farmers were putting down their mugs, shambling quietly to their feet, placing themselves flat to the wall.

  Two men black against the light.

  ‘Joan Tyrre?’

  ‘Shitty,’ Joan breathed. ‘Coulder sweared they fuckers en’t follered me.’

  ‘Over there.’

  One of the men was pointing at our board. Now the other was coming over slowly and Joan Tyrre was rising, putting the legs of her stool out in front of her.

  ‘Now then, you boys, you juss keep away, yer knows I en’t done nothin’, look-’

  ‘Only led us a merry bloody chase, you old puttock.’

  Throwing out his arms as a barrier, Joan skipping from side to side, laughing, jabbing the stool at him until he snatched it away from her.

  ‘Enough! Don’t you think to go nowhere, Joannie. You know what we wants.’

  ‘What? Front of all these folks?’

  Joan cackling, dodging nimbly as he hurled the stool at her, and it splintered on the wall behind.

  ‘Where’s the woman calls herself a doctor?’

  I went rigid.

  ‘ You was with her earlier, we knows that. Where is she?’

  ‘How’ze I gonner know that?’ Joan Tyrre said. ‘How’ze a poor ole bag like me gonner pay for a doctor?’

  ‘You’ll talk fuckin’ civil to us or I’ll-’

  Making a lunge for her, and Joan was leaping back, but not quite quick enough.

  ‘Get yer gurt hands off of me, you- uh!’

  Her head whipping to one side as the second man struck her with full fist on the side of the face.

  Joan’s head hanging now like a broken doll’s, and I came to my feet, but Monger grabbed my arm, hissing into my ear.

  ‘Don’t make this worse…’

  XXIII

  Lowest Form of Doctoring

  The only sound was the dribble of ale over the edge of our board from an overturned mug. Joan Tyrre was down on the flags, squirming away, an arm raised to protect her face. The two constables standing over her, silent now.

  ‘The doctor-woman, Mistress Tyrre. If you please.’

  The one who spoke now, the one who’d struck her, he was just a boy, with a boy’s voice.

  ‘En’t seen her.’ Joan mumbling into the stone flags, her eyepatch all askew. ‘Swearder God.’

  ‘Where’d you see her last?’

  ‘Don’t recall.’

  ‘Think harder.’ Bringing back his boot. ‘This help?’

  ‘All right! Bazzard! Her was off to zeein’ to a man in the George.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘Man who’s lyin’ there.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘All I knows, swearder God.’

  ‘Better be true.’

  ‘’ Tis true.’

  He kicked her hard in the side. A sliver of light from the doorway opened up a cold grin like a gash in his face, and it seemed like a face I’d seen before.

  Joan made small moans but didn’t move until they’d left, the alehouse door swinging and the farmers coming away from the walls and calmly taking their seats again as if this happened every day. Maybe it did.

  ‘Man with the fever!’ Joan screamed from the floor. ‘And I hopes by the Lord Gwyn as you both fuckin’ gets it off of he an’ dies afore the morrow!’

  Monger helped her to her feet and she stood feeling at her jaw with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘En’t broke, anyways. Do it look broke?’

  ‘You need to see Nel.’

  ‘Sounds like everyfucker needs to see her today.’

  ‘So where is she?’

  ‘Dunno, Joe. Out of town, she got any sense.’

  ‘What do they want with her?’

  ‘They gonner tell me that?’

  ‘ Could she have gone back to see the man at the George?’

  ‘Dunno. He’s from Lunnon, en’t he, so they can beat the piss out of him, all I cares.’

  ‘I see.’ Monger turned to me. ‘She won’t have gone home. If she knows they’re looking for her, the last thing she’ll want is to bring any of this down on her father. Joan, where else might she be?’

  Joan Tyrre said, ‘Where’s my drink?’

  She’d swallowed two mugs of ale, not touching her jaw again. A bruise was beginning, green and purple in the firelight like a bad sky.

  Joe Monger had made her promise to send for him at any time if she suffered any further ill-effects of the beating. He’d questioned her about the number of constables on the streets; she reckoned there must be over a dozen of them, and more seen riding down from the Mendip Hills.

  ‘Joan might well have counted the same man three times,’ Monger said. ‘But, all the same, this doesn’t look good. If either of us had intervened back there, they’d have summoned others at once. We’d all have been beaten, arrested… the place smashed up.’

  He beckoned me to follow him outside, where we stood for a moment blinking in the harsh white light. Market stalls were being hurriedly taken down, carts loaded.

  All of it done in near silence. Monger looked around.

  ‘This is Fyche. He’s long been looking for an excuse to move against the… the worshippers of the stars and the stones.’

  ‘The maggots,’ I said.

  ‘Mercy?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘So if the constables have gone to the George…?’

  ‘That’s not a problem,’ Monger said. ‘Cowdray will deal with it. When they find out Nel’s patient’s the man from London, they’ll back off. They won’t go far away but they won’t seek open confrontation in front of an officer of the Crown.’

  I was still sickened by the two constables’ treatment of Joan Tyrre and felt responsible, having told Fyche where I’d last seen Martin Lythgoe – Fyche seizing upon the fact that Eleanor Borrow had been with me at the time. I related to Monger what had occurred ’twixt Nel Borrow and Fyche upon the tor.

  ‘And that was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘I searched for her afterwards, but…’

  I felt like shit. Yet how, within all reason, could Fyche claim that what had been done last night to Martin Lythgoe had been done by a woman?

  ‘Master Monger,’ I said, ‘why did Fyche hang Mistress Borrow’s mother?’

  ‘He told you that?’

  ‘Without explanation.’

  Monger strode away across the street. ‘This isn’t London,’ he said over a shoulder. ‘It’s easier here.’ Determined to learn the facts of this, I followed him down the hill through the dispersing crowd toward the centre of the town. He kept close to the wall around the abbey grounds, past the gatehouse.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  He pointed to the modern church near the bottom of the town, its tower more modest than St John the Baptist’s. I drew level with him under a sky now as tight and dark-flecked as a goatskin drum.

  ‘Tell me about Fyche, Master Farrier.’

  ‘I don’t know Fyche.’

  ‘Was he not at the abbey the same time as you?’

  ‘That doesn’t make me his friend. The abbot was happy for me to work at my forge. Tended to meet the others only at prayer. Monks don’t talk much at prayer.’

  ‘He’s a Protestant now.’

  ‘Or finds it appropriate to look like one. During the last reign, when there was hope of money to restore the abbey, he’d become a good Catholic again. Such conversions happen in a flash, as you know.’

  We’d come to a narrow street behind the church. Its dwellings were mean, but it was surprisingly dry underfoot – in London, the gutters would have been ripe with shit.

 
‘Fyche’s proposed college of monks,’ I said. ‘You weren’t invited to join them?’

  ‘They’d want a farrier?’ Monger sniffed. ‘Anyway, there are few monks from the abbey at Meadwell. Most are come from outside – learned men. Heavyweights. God’s army, Fyche’ll tell you, against the rise of an evil older than Christianity.’

  ‘Evil? Joan Tyrre and her faerie? The men who find wells with a forked twig? Why should he fear these people?’

  ‘What makes you think it’s fear?’

  ‘Trust me, Master Monger,’ I said. ‘It’s always fear.’

  We’d arrived at the end house, near the church. It was bigger and in better repair than the others, its timber-framing oiled. The man in the doorway wore an apron, faded but clean, and a skullcap the colour of old parchment over stiff white hair.

  ‘They’ve been, then,’ Monger said.

  A tightening of the man’s lips and a nod so small and cautious that it barely happened.

  ‘How many, Matthew?’

  ‘Three. Including Fyche himself.’

  This man’s voice was dry as ash, his face taut and unfleshed, his eyes watchful.

  Monger said, ‘But Nel wasn’t with you?’

  ‘Must’ve left early, Joe. I know not where to.’

  ‘But she was here last night?’

  ‘I don’t…’ The man’s shoulders sagged. ‘I was out till late. Delivery of twins at a farm towards Butleigh, and I had to cut them out or they’d be dead and the mother with them. I thought Nel to be abed when I got back. And then… out before I was up.’

  Monger turned to me. ‘This is Nel’s father – Dr Borrow. Matthew, this is Dr John, a visitor to the town, for reasons… yet to be established. But who can, I think, be trusted. What did Fyche say?’

  ‘Not much. He just looked everywhere in the house, having his men empty lockers, sweep the content of shelves to the floor.’

  I remembered his daughter’s jest about the elixir of youth – ninety but looked fifty. Probably was fifty, but had a sinewy, capable look.

  ‘And that was it?’ Monger said.