The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  I’d caught his emphasis. ‘You think he didn’t see them at all?’

  ‘I think someone saw them, or heard of it. But I know Moulder as a Bible man who wouldn’t go within a mile of the tor after dark. The truth, more likely, is that they were seen from the Meadwell land. But, this being too close to Fyche, Moulder was ordered – or paid – to say he’d seen them. Put it this way: this came some weeks later, when more evidence was being sought, to support a… a graver charge.’

  And so it emerged. The whole bitter tragedy of it.

  Whether Joan Tyrre had been loose-tongued in the town about Cate’s potion improving her eyes through some inner vision, Monger didn’t know. All he knew for certain was that, within the week, a travelling dealer had called on Dr Borrow offering him a substantial sum of money for a quantity of the dust of vision which could offer glimpses of heaven. He’d sent the dealer away but it seemed the man returned when Matthew was with a patient and Cate was out in her herb garden. Two days later, the potion would sold in the market in Somerton, a town some miles away.

  Which made no sense to me, for if the thief knew not which was the magic potion…

  ‘He took everything he could cram into his bag and sold it all – people’ll buy anything if it’s cheap enough and said to be from abroad. And if just one person achieved a vision of heaven, as a result, that would be sufficient to set up a clamour.’

  The clamour that resulted, however, was not the kind the thief expected.

  ‘As Cate herself told me more than once, what was most important was the quantity in which the potion – the fungus dust and whatever was mixed with it – was administered. The quantity is-’ Monger held a forefinger and thumb barely apart ‘-very, very small.’

  According to Monger, a small flask of the potion had been bought by the sixteen-year-old son of a prominent landowner. The boy had gone out that night, on the roister with some of his fellows. Never came back.

  ‘His companions had left him, in fear at his behaviour,’ Monger said. ‘They spoke of the dreadful convulsions of his body… in a kind of dance. He was screaming that devils were pinching him and his arms and legs were afire.’

  I must’ve shuddered; Monger glanced at me.

  ‘They found his body about a week later, entangled in branches under the river bridge. Thrown himself in the river to put out the fire in his limbs.’

  Monger said the dealer had fled from Somerton but was caught in the hue and cry. In return, Monger guessed, for his life, he confessed to the theft of herbs mixed by Cate Borrow.

  ‘And was this established to be caused by swallowing some of the… the dust of vision?’

  Thinking that I’d heard of something similar in France. ‘Although no-one else died in this way, the boy was the first of several to complain of burning limbs, visions of angels and monsters made manifest under unearthly skies. All had been sold quantities of Cate Borrow’s potion. And then, as she was awaiting trial, word came in of the deaths of infants.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Babes whose mothers, it emerged, had taken the potion to ease the sorrow which can follow childbirth. The wrath of God visited upon them, people cried.’

  Within a day Cate Borrow had been arrested for witchery.

  Within a short time she’d be dead.

  ‘Hanged for mixing herbs?’

  ‘For murder.’

  ‘Any half-competent advocate could take such a charge apart.’

  ‘In London, maybe.’

  His voice riven with bitterness. The window to the high street was murked with dusk now, the fire low and red in the ingle.

  Even in London… I thought back to my own imprisonment. How, through a knowledge of the law, I’d been able to discredit the so-called evidence sworn by the Lord of Misrule.

  Even so, it had been perilously close, and I’d still have gone to the flames had it not been for the curiosity of Bishop Bonner.

  ‘Presumably,’ I said, ‘she couldn’t be tried by Fyche at the quarter sessions… or are things different out here?’

  ‘Oh they’re different. Everything’s different here. But the law’s the same. A crime warranting a death penalty may be tried only by a circuit judge at the assizes.’

  ‘In Wells?’

  ‘The trial was swift,’ Monger said. ‘There was an extra witness, whom no-one had seen here before or saw afterwards, but claimed to have watched Mistress Borrow taking pails of wet earth from new graves. To scatter on her herb garden. These were the darkest days of Mary. Everyone in snare to fear and superstition. So when at last they brought Dick Moulder before the court to say how he’d seen two or possibly three of them with their candles on the tor on All Hallows Eve, recognising Mistress Borrow who oft-times came to pick herbs on his land…’

  There was a crack in Monger’s voice and I sensed his usually placid face becoming knotted with pain at the memory of Cate Borrow standing up in the court and crying out that Moulder must’ve been mistaken, for she was alone that night on the Tor.

  Monger could only guess she’d said this to save her husband. And Joan Tyrre, too, who’d already had one appearance before a church court.

  The hollow silence had been smashed by this man Dick Moulder, rearing up and warding Cate Borrow away with his hands in the air and screaming, If her was alone, then they was spirits!

  ‘And if I tell you,’ Monger said, ‘that at that moment, the wind blew open the courtroom door, and then it slammed. A blast of cold air blowing through the court, and a woman screaming and… the way all that happened, it would’ve been enough to convict the Pope.’

  ‘What about the boy’s death?’ I said. ‘Surely she didn’t admit any blame there?’

  ‘Neither admitted nor denied it. She simply said nothing more. Refused to answer any further questions in the court, only stood there very pale. Ghostly pale, as if she were already passing into another place. I remember Matthew, in his desperation, trying to catch her eye, and she never looked at him. Would not look at him. Never looked at him again. It was the worst thing.’

  ‘Not wanting him to be implicated?’

  ‘As if she was saying, it’s over, nothing to be done. Go back to your work. Forget me.’

  ‘And Eleanor, was she…?’

  ‘Not there. She’d been instructed, in her mother’s best interests, to keep Joan Tyrre well away from the hearing.’

  The next day, Matthew Borrow had led a group of elders from the town to Fyche, at Meadwell, to plead for his wife’s life. Returning encouraged, after Fyche – a former monk, for heaven’s sake – had told them he’d do what he could. Borrow restraining his distraught daughter, assuring her they would find evidence to get the verdict reversed, appeal to Queen Mary…

  The following day, at dawn, Cate Borrow had, without ceremony, been hanged in Wells. Fyche announcing kindly that at least he’d spared the witch’s family a burning. Generously allowing them to collect the body, as long it was not buried in consecrated ground.

  This was not much more than a year ago. Little wonder that Eleanor Borrow could not bear to be in this man’s presence.

  ‘No-one in this town could quite believe it,’ Monger said. ‘A woman of quiet charity who lived for her garden and what she might learn from it. The cures that could be found, the sick people she might help.’

  ‘But… Christ, why did he do it? Why did Fyche want this woman dead?’

  ‘My guess… the dust of vision. It was rumoured his son once took it. I don’t know what happened, but it must have frightened Fyche. He’d see it as dangerous… uncontrollable. An instant religious experience without the discipline of the Church? If she’d made the dust of vision, what else might she be working on?’

  ‘She had to be made an example of and therefore-’

  ‘I can’t say what goes on in the man’s head.’

  ‘And Eleanor?’

  ‘She was not long back from college at this time – Matthew had sent her away a couple of years earlier, to be schooled in medicin
e in Bath. She… always was a gay, laughing child. You always knew what she was thinking. Afterwards… well…’ Monger’s eyes were cast down. ‘You know what’s most bitter about all this? Before the Dissolution, the Justice of the Peace here was the abbot himself. Cate’s friend.’

  I looked to his eyes, but it was as if shutters had been erected. ‘Despite its mysteries, despite its air of spirtual rebellion, this is an unhappy town,’ he said. ‘Why, truly, are you here, Dr Dee?’

  XXV

  Trade

  When Monger had left through the back door, I stood for a while on the edge of the yard, watching the dregs of day soaking into a sad tapestry of cloud around the tower of the Baptist’s church. The sky was darker than it should be at this time: a storm coming. I went back inside and stood in the gloom of the rear passageway and my own lightless thoughts.

  Of the cold ruthlessness of Fyche and the victims of it. Of the doctor, Matthew Borrow and what he had to live with: awakening each day to the memory of his wife’s face in that courtroom, fixed and white. And turned away.

  Would not look at him. Never looked at him again.

  The agony of a non-believer. No consoling dreams of their eyes meeting some day in heaven. Yet Borrow worked on, staying out half the night to save others’ lives, regardless of his own health. Probably not caring if he worked himself into the grave or how soon.

  I could still see him in my head, how he’d stood in that backstreet by the church. A stringy, ashen man in the shadow of the final injustice: his daughter meeting the same fate as his wife, at the same man’s hands.

  The George Inn was silent now around me, the farmers having fled for their homes before the storm, Cowdray likely in his quarters with his kitchenmaid. And she was out there. Nel Borrow, somewhere under the massing sky.

  I ran up the shadowed stairs, paused for only a moment outside the door of Dudley’s bedchamber where, hearing nothing, I went in.

  As the door closed behind me, the air moved. An arm drawn back against the green light in the square panes, a silvery skimming on a long, tapering blade. Its point finishing a foot, at most, from my throat.

  Time suspended in a moment of glittering terror, smelling the diseased sweat. Watching the blade of the soldier’s side-sword quiver once, almost touching my softest skin like a crooked finger under a babe’s chin.

  And then seeing it fall away, clattering to the boards. The tumble of a body on a bed in a room which was as dark as the floor of a pine-forest.

  ‘Christ, John, you could’ve knocked.’

  I took a breath.

  ‘Thought you were asleep.’

  Guessing that he’d been more affeared wafting his blade than I’d been at the point of it. Physical weakness was a condition new to Robert Dudley.

  ‘Can’t take any more sleep. Filthy dreams sucking me in soon as I close my damned eyes. Head feels like a cannon ball.’

  ‘You eaten anything?’

  ‘A little broth. Tasted like piss.’

  ‘The throat?’

  ‘Better. A bit. Maybe. I don’t know. Hate this cell, reminds me of the Tower. You haven’t brought your doctor back with you?’

  ‘No, she…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  But it did, of course. It mattered more than anything.

  ‘We need light,’ I said.

  My innards felt cramped through lack of food, but too much time had been wasted, through concealment. I stumbled to the window, where I found two candles of good beeswax on their trays and took them down the stairs to the panelled room and lit them with a taper from the fire in the ingle. Back in Dudley’s bedchamber, I placed one candle in the window and one on the bedside board.

  ‘I’m not deaf, John.’

  He was sitting upright under the high oak headboard, a pillow doubled at his back, his sword, sheathed, across his knees.

  ‘So you heard the hue and cry,’ I said.

  ‘A murder in the service of Satan?’

  ‘Robbie, this is a man who sees witches and sorcerers under every-’

  ‘And is he deluded?’

  There were no plain answers to this. I sat at the foot of the bed, staring into the white gasses of a candle flame. Telling him about Cate Borrow, what had happened to her. Dudley leaned forward, his face narrow and blotched, his beard ragged. Looking far older than his years, a man stripped of all finery, pretention, status.

  ‘He thinks your doctor’s a witch, by heredity? Is there not good reason?’

  ‘He hanged her mother for, in truth, no good reason.’

  ‘And you’re saying… what was done to Martin Lythgoe, that’s no good reason? Does it look like a random attack, a robbery? What’s the matter with you? It has all the marks of ritual sacrifice. You’ve studied all this.’

  ‘Yes, but-’

  ‘Blood sacrifice, John, is a trade… to summon a demon to do the bidding of the magician.’

  ‘In theory.’

  Oh, I knew all the theory, having dissected in detail the rituals set down in The Key of Solomon and the grimoires of Pope Honorius. All the divers conjurations involving the sacrifice of cockerels and farm animals, the belief in the power of spilled blood to invoke… not the kind of angels with whom I would ever wish to commune.

  Oh, Glastonbury… did I perceive that there were answers here to some of my deepest midnight questions? Maybe. I didn’t know. It was all too immense and complex. Too close to see.

  But Dudley, coherent at last, would not let it go.

  ‘To bring about a death, could not the sacrifice of a good man to the devil or some demon of destruction, in a once sacred place… a once very sacred place… would that not be considered effective?’

  I could hardly deny that a ritual sacrifice in the Abbey of Glastonbury might well be thought to invoke a demon of substance. I considered the sorcerer Gregory Wisdom – also a doctor of physic – hired by Lord Neville to commit murder from afar. And that was merely the most celebrated case of recent times. These things, the abuse of magic, occurred all around us. I considered the way the candle had burned down over Martin Lythgoe’s lips. Had that been in my own warped perception or had it been shaved into a likeness of the tor?

  ‘And the supposed victim is Fyche himself – in revenge for the hanging of her mother? I don’t see that it worked.’

  Dudley snorted.

  ‘So it didn’t work. Or it hasn’t worked yet. Christ, I don’t want it to have been the woman who cured me of the fever. I just want this matter of Martin’s killing… I want it settled, whether by noose or sword, and us out of this stinking little town.’

  ‘And the bones of Arthur?’

  He made no reply. Who could blame him, in his condition, and after all that had happened, for almost forgetting why we were here.

  ‘Give me your opinion of this,’ I said.

  Pulling from my doublet Blanche Parry’s letter and taking it over to the candle in the window, just as there came a blinking of white light and then the first low shuddering of thunder from the east.

  XXVI

  Le Fay

  These things I purport to create, with all my astral charts and maps of the Zodiac, my pages of calculing and configuration… have I ever once been able to state, this will happen?

  And those who do – which books have they read which are not available to me? Is there some holy grail of revelatory knowledge passed from hand to furtive hand? I don’t know. That’s the worst of it. I, who despise ignorance, do not know.

  ‘Who wrote this prophecy, John?’

  Dudley’s face aglow with new sweat in the candlelight. I’d taken the letter to his bedside, and he’d bade me read it out again, but I repeated only those key lines.

  Her nights are tormented and daytimes fraught. She will have no peace from Morgan le Fay until such time as her heroic forefather be entombed in glory.

  ‘All right then,’ Dudley said, ‘who might have written it?’

  ‘Could be one of
ours, could be from abroad. There’s a seer on every corner in London. Europe’s thick with prophets. Especially after what happened with the King of France.’

  Dudley leaned into the light.

  ‘You were there, weren’t you? In France, when that happened.’

  ‘No. But I had an account of it sent to me.’

  By a student who’d attended one of my lectures in Paris. He’d sent it together with a faithful script of the horoscope said to have been sent from Rome – the one warning King Henri to avoid all single combat in an enclosed field, especially around his forty-first year. The one making reference to a head wound which would cause blindness.

  ‘Rome?’ Dudley said. ‘I thought it was all down to this fellow Nostradamus, at the French court.’

  ‘No, it was an Italian, Luca Gaurico. Not personally known to me any more than is Nostradamus – he was asked by the Queen of France to investigate Gaurico and his prophecy. This was after the King chose to laugh and ignore it. I find the whole thing doubtful in the extreme.’

  ‘Oh, well, of course. We all know, John, that you merely indicate the moods of the universe… and would never be so foolhardy as to forecast injury or death.’

  ‘And mistrust those who would.’ I let the sarcasm go, folded Blanche’s letter. ‘I’d understood that was what the Queen found useful in me – an ability to see through the fakery, offer informed advice. Apparently not. It seems she has a secret craving for the sensational.’

  ‘Of course. That’s why she’s so fond of me. But what would you have said about this fellow from Rome… had he heralded her demise? Not possible?’

  I thought of the wax effigy in its coffin in the alley by the river. Had I been too dismissive of that and its power to do harm to the Queen? Did I continually dismiss what I, with all my scholarship, could not think to accomplish?

  ‘I think… that it is possible, but not likely. I believe there are some who see the same stars as I do, draw the same charts and then… either God himself intervenes or some faculty comes into play, some hidden organ of sensing which… doesn’t function in me.’