The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘No.’

  Monger waited in silence, arms hanging by his side.

  ‘My instruments,’ Dr Borrow said. ‘Didn’t get in until nigh on three of the clock. Went straight to bed, having thrown my bag of instruments… just, you know, in the corner. Which is where one of Fyche’s men found them. When they picked up the bag, I never gave a thought to it at first. More concerned that they shouldn’t find the wrong… the wrong books.’

  I was guessing he meant the books from which his daughter had learned of the science of stars. More books rescued from the abbey, maybe.

  Saw Monger’s jaw jut and stiffen.

  ‘Your surgical instruments?’

  ‘’Tis my normal habit, Joe, to clean them soon as I get home. Pulling out a blade in front of a new patient when it’s all splattered with the blood of the last one, that’s… never helpful. But I was too damn tired to think.’

  ‘Let me get this right,’ Monger said. ‘Your surgeon’s knives. You’re saying they found a surgeon’s knives with blood-?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes…’ Borrow’s eyes squeezing shut. ‘I’m afraid that’s what they found, yes.’

  ‘They accused you?’ Monger said. ‘Of butchering this man?’

  ‘I wish they had accused me. They asked if Eleanor had ever performed surgery.’

  A stone in my gut.

  I said, ‘Has she?’

  ‘Only when there’s been no better way.’

  Surgery: the lowest form of doctoring, next to butchery in anyone’s book. I turned to Monger, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes, and Dr Borrow, evidently in near despair, if reluctant to show it, was looking down at the holes in his boots, while Joan Tyrre cackled in my head about the darkness over the tor.

  ‘I told Fyche why there was blood on the tools. I don’t think he even listened.’ Dr Borrow said. ‘Picks up the bag, thrusts it at a constable to take them all away. Evidence, he says.’

  ‘All the evidence he’d need,’ Joe Monger said.

  How swiftly everything changes when the heart holds sway, altering the order of need. When people had spoken of the heart torn assunder, I’d known not, until now, what emotion they were trying to illustrate.

  Or maybe it was all heightened here in Glastonbury, where the very air seemed to hone the perceptions like a whetstone to a knife, sharpening the colours of thoughts, the tastes in the mouth, the pictures which are seen when the eyes are shut.

  Leaning back into the oak settle in the panelled room at the George, I could see the outline of the sun pushing vainly at crowding clouds. And then there she was inside my head, sitting amongst the big stones by the iron well, inside the circle of bare thorn trees: the emerald eyes, the faded blue dress, sleeves pushed up exposing, oh God, those brown speckled arms.

  ‘How can we stop this?’ I said.

  Monger was silent for a long moment, sitting opposite me in the square, panelled chamber.

  ‘We?’ he said. ‘Are you sure of this?’

  Me looking down to hide a coming blush and banishing her, with her green eyes and her haunting, crossed-tooth smile, lest I give away too much.

  ‘I should also ask you about a carpenter. A coffin-maker. A gravedigger. Vicar.’

  ‘All that can be done tomorrow,’ Monger said. ‘I’ll send them to you. Although I gather you may have to wait for the return of Carew before they’ll release the cadaver.’

  When we’d arrived back at the George, Cowdray had told us that Fyche himself had been here, insisting on questioning Master Roberts in his chamber. But Dudley had been sweating again, his eyes full of heat, his sickness beyond dispute, and Fyche had not ventured beyond the threshold, for fear of contagion.

  ‘Don’t expect Carew to take a different stance,’ Monger said. ‘There’s no harder reformer in the west. If Carew’s given good evidence, he won’t prolong things any more than Fyche would.’

  ‘Carew has real power here? A sheriff ’s power?’

  ‘As much power as he wants. Senior knight in Devonshire, owns the abbey and its lands. Has more power here, I’d guess, than he would have in a similar role in London, where knights, I’m told, are two a penny.’

  ‘She’s a healer,’ I said, wanting to scream it to the beams. ‘In the real sense. Not like the piss-sniffers in their masks. What about the mother of those twins? The woman whose life was saved, and her babes, she’ll surely state before a court that Dr Borrow had to cut into her belly. That it was her blood on the knives?’

  ‘If she survives. Wounds like that oft-times turn bad. And, anyway, she’ll say what her husband wants her to say. And her husband… The farmers out towards Butleigh they’re all tenants and struggling. They’ll state, albeit with regret, what suits their lord. I know him, too, shoe the horses for his hunt – with which his neighbour rides now and again. His neighbour, who also happens to be the local JP.’

  ‘Fyche?’

  ‘You never know when you’re going to need a JP, do you, Dr John?’

  ‘My colleague,’ I said, with care, ‘has influence. He’ll talk to Carew.’

  Monger looked pained.

  ‘You don’t understand, do you? The poison’s spreading as we speak. A man precisely disbowelled and laid out like a decorated altar? The older townsfolk will already be quaking behind their doors. Who’ll be next? And who’ll be accused? So Fyche puts out a name… and those will emerge who’ll state before a judge that when they couldn’t afford to pay Nel’s doctor’s bill, their cattle died. I tell you in sorrow… it doesn’t take much.’

  ‘She’s a doctor.’

  ‘She’s a doctor who’s become too much associated with the worship-pers of the stars and the old stones.’

  I shut my eyes, remembering how swiftly all the apocryphal tales had arisen of Anne Boleyn’s dark ways after her husband had first denounced her as a witch.

  ‘What you must needs understand, Dr John, is that these people – the seekers – there’s still only a few of them compared with the old families of Glastonbury. The old families who hold tight to a Godly fear of the power of this place… who’ll turn their backs upon the tor at certain seasons. Who are afraid of what meddlers like poor mad old Joan might cause, through their meddling, to happen.’

  ‘Another earthquake?’

  ‘You may laugh, in your learned, London way…’

  ‘If you think I laugh at such things-’

  ‘Mercy.’ Holding up his hands. ‘Yes, I know, of course, where your interests lie. What I’m trying to explain is that most folk here are not men of science and inquiry, all they want is a quiet life and bread on the board. They don’t meddle. For all the talk of treasure, you won’t find hill-diggers on the tor, for ’tis said that when a man once took a hammer to the tower, thinking to obtain stone, the heavens were suddenly aflame with lightning. Out of a cloudless sky. One bolt strikes the hammer, man falls down dead.’

  ‘This is fact, or legend?’

  ‘In Glaston… no division. They say that if you put your hands on a certain buttress on a corner of the tower you’ll feel the shock of the thunderbolt.’

  ‘There’ll be an explanation.’ Recalling my own fall on the tor. ‘Through science. If I had the time here-’

  ‘Then you, too, would very swiftly fall foul of the old families. They don’t welcome pokers into the unknowable. What you call science.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Nel was tempted onto a path which is… unstable.’

  ‘Like her mother?’

  Monger smiled his unhappy, priestly smile.

  ‘Cate Borrow dug her own pit. Through kindness, perhaps, but she dug it none the less.’

  It was growing dark. From behind the oaken panels, Cowdray and his maids could be heard serving cider to the farmers and maybe a constable or two. But the room was reserved for overnight guests, and we were yet alone.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me about her.’

  XXIV

  Fungus Dust

  She was a gardener.

 
Two acres of land reclaimed from the sea, down towards Wells – this was where she was most at peace, passing the lengthening days among its fragrances, harvesting herbs to eat: carrots and onions and leeks, cabbages and beans, to be sold at Glastonbury market.

  And also herbs for healing. Behind her husband’s surgery, near the Church of St Benignus, she had a little workroom where they were hung and dried and ground into powder. A quiet woman, who preferred her husband to take the credit for balms and ointments, the cure of infected wounds and upset guts.

  ‘I knew her first more than a score of years ago,’ Monger said, ‘when I was at the abbey. This was when she worked in the abbot’s kitchen. Before she took the eye of the new physician and learned the arts of herbs and the growing of them… and then became the abbot’s friend.’

  After the Dissolution of the abbey, she’d continued her work with curative plants, if less openly, occasionally helped by a woman who’d been a cook at the abbey. And then, in the boy Edward’s reign, the years of the protectorate, there was more tolerance, and this was when Cate had found the freedom to experiment in areas where doctors of physic seldom strayed.

  ‘Not all ailments,’ Monger said, ‘are physical.’

  Telling me of a certain man – a wool-merchant, therefore not without money – who, after the death of his wife and daughter in a house fire, had lost his faith in God and was so cast down that he was near to taking his own life.

  ‘Also suffering from blinding pains in the head,’ Monger said, ‘ not a result of dousing his sorrow in wine, I should say – this was the kind of agony that comes out of nowhere with flashing lights, and no darkened chamber can bring ease.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it.’

  I could hear a clanking of flagons from the alehouse, Cowdray’s hoarse laughter.

  ‘Cate had given him a certain kind of fungus dust,’ Monger said. ‘To be mixed with a large quantity of water, and the results were… frightening. Like an act of God. Powerfully mystical.’

  One startling morn, Monger had met the wool-merchant on the fish-shaped hill to the east of the town, and here was a man raising his arms to heaven, extolling all the sublime beauty of creation. Talking of colours he’d never known. Confiding to Monger, later that day, in the George where we sat now, that his spirit had been awakened neither by prayer nor Bible… but by Cate Borrow and her fungus dust.

  ‘Not only eased the pain in his head, but opened his eyes to a brighter world.’ Monger’s tone was yet drab. ‘A vision of heaven on earth.’

  I was intent, for this was said also of the mushrooms which Jack Simm had found for me and which I’d dried and brewed in private. Drinking the brew late at night in my library, amongst my books, surrounded by the wisdom of the ages.

  Without any effects, in my case, beyond a mild headache. It was ever thus.

  ‘There could be considerable demand for such a potion,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘But, regrettably,’ Monger said, ‘there was – there always is – a hazard. The results were… not predictable. Indeed, rather than a sense of exaltation, there might, oft-times, be visions worse than the blackest nightmare. You see? Heaven or hell. A roll of the dice.’

  The elixir of heaven and hell. I’d heard some talk of it in the low countries a year or two back, but it was like to the elixir of life – you never know how much to believe.

  ‘So random were its effects,’ Monger said, ‘that Cate Borrow would dispense it only in the most extreme circumstances – that is, for terrible head pains or when she had reason to think someone so deep sunk into misery than he might be about to take a length of rope into the woods.’

  ‘So, apart from this wool-merchant, who-?’

  ‘She tried it on herself. But with restraint, in the merest quantities. Matthew took it once – never again, he’ll tell you. When it was used they’d make sure whoever took it was never left alone, lest they might cause harm to themselves.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll come to that.’

  ‘So these…’ I recalled Cecil’s words. ‘These visions…’

  ‘I…’ Monger was hesitant. ‘I’ve heard it said that the place where the potion was ingested… might alter the response. And I imagine it would also be affected by the humour of the man ingesting it. Or the woman.’

  I waited. So dim was it now that I could barely see his face, let alone read his expression.

  ‘Joan Tyrre,’ he said. ‘On hearing of the dust of vision, Joan Tyrre… was eager. And thus, in her foolish, innocent way, became the cause of Cate’s downfall.’

  Joan Tyrre was herself a herbalist, if hardly in Cate’s company, and years earlier had been making another precarious living, in Taunton, out of her relations with the faerie. Joan apparently naming people the faerie had told her were bewitched and offering them help.

  I’d heard of this unsavoury practice, preying upon the poor and desperate, and knew it couldn’t have lasted long before drawing the attention of the Church.

  It hadn’t. Brought before the church court, Joan had admitted all and sworn herself to the service of God… while thinking to return, more discreetly, to her former trade in another part of the town when all the fuss had died down. But the faerie do not easily forgive such a betrayal and – or so she’d claim later – would no longer confide in her.

  Having also left her near-blind. This was when she’d decided to leave Taunton for what she’d heard were the more openly mystical humours of Glastonbury.

  ‘She’d seen the tor,’ Monger said. ‘In the distance, magical in the evening light. And heard the tales of the King of the Faerie, Gwyn ap Nudd, still in residence in the heart of it.’

  Thinking that the great Gwyn might be responsive to her urgent pleas, Joan had walked to Glastonbury, joining a band of travellers for protection. In a wood near the foot of the tor, she’d fashioned for herself a rude shelter out of bent saplings and thatch. It was summer, and she’d slept there for some weeks, praying that she might be taken into the hall of the faerie.

  ‘So Joan’s relations with the faerie,’ I said, ‘were not just…’

  ‘Of her own invention?’ Monger said. ‘Many people say she’s mad as a hare, and yet…’

  Weeks had passed. Joan had been chilled to the bone by the winds of autumn, no illumination to warm her nights. Joe Monger himself had found her one day, collapsed in her shelter, half-starved. Bringing her into town and taking her to Matthew Borrow, who gave her a bed in the ante-chamber of his surgery, sometimes used as a hospital. When she was recovered, the Borrows had found her a position as housekeeper to an old woman who shared her fascination with the faerie.

  But Joan was still cast down, and her sight was worse. Hearing of the experience of Monger’s friend, the wool-merchant, she’d returned, in despair, to Cate Borrow, begging her to disclose the herbal ingredients of the powder which offered entry to the very Garden of Eden, with its skies the colour of green apples and the forests all blue like some distant sea. Or, as she would see it…

  ‘The land of faerie?’ I said. ‘Cate Borrow, of course, refused, deeming Joan to be a woman of unsound temper who might be left sorely damaged. But Joan wouldn’t leave her alone. Her proposal was to go one last time to the top of the tor and dose herself with the dust of vision, there before the ruins of the church of St Michael.’

  ‘A bold woman.’

  ‘Moonstruck,’ Monger said. ‘She’d stopped eating by then. Starved herself for weeks. If you think she’s thin now… my God. Clothes hanging off her, hair falling out. Opening her arms to death. In the end… Cate relented. On condition that she and Matthew should accompany Joan to the tor and remain with her while she took the potion. Matthew having resisted it to the end, of course, repelled by thoughts of Joan Tyrre screeching to the sky in helpless ecstasy in possibly the most visible place in all Somerset. Then finally accepting that it should be done on All Hallows Eve.’

  I shrank back.

  ‘Quite,’ Monger said. ‘Matthew, however –
you should know that Matthew goes to church just enough to avoid penalty and only too glad to be called away to a case of sickness in the middle of it. His science is, I would say, a narrower science than yours.’

  ‘You mean he has no belief in God or the spiritual?’

  ‘No faith I’m aware of, no fear. Matthew fears only men – unlike most others here, as you can imagine. On All Hallows Eve, the town lights its lamps, bars its doors and firmly turns its back on the tor.’

  ‘The devil’s hill.’

  ‘This might be the one night they could be sure to be alone there. Or that anyone else up there’ – I sensed a rueful smile from Monger – ‘would be too far gone in madness to pay heed to Joan Tyrre.’

  ‘Or, presumably, that Joan would, on the eve itself, be too affeared to go on with the venture and…’

  ‘Exactly that,’ Monger said. ‘Matthew said that if Joan backed away now, at least that would be an end to it.’

  I sat and waited for Monger to tell me what had happened in the end, but he became reticent, saying only that Joan did not back away, with the result that they went, the three of them, on All Hallows Eve, to the tor.

  To my own mind, having myself been aware of the strange air upon the tor, Joan Tyrre was either very brave, very mad or very sure of the nearness of another sphere of existence. And of its charity towards her.

  ‘All I know,’ Monger said, ‘is that Joan claimed that from the following morning her sight – in her best eye at least – had begun to improve by degrees.’ He shrugged. ‘But we have only her word for that.’

  ‘You didn’t talk to the Borrows about it?’

  ‘The Borrows spoke of it to no-one, until much later. Matthew, needless to say, remains convinced that whatever Joan had seen was within her own head. The worst of it, you see, John… the very worst of it is not what they saw, but that they were seen. The three of them. Ascending the tor, on the night when the dead are abroad.’

  ‘Who saw them?’

  ‘A tenant farmer, Dick Moulder, looking for some runaway ewes, stated that he watched them ascending the tor with lighted candles in the dusk and later saw them clustered near to the church ruins. Dancing and chanting to the moon, he said.’