The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘Fyche betrayed his abbot,’ I said.

  ‘It was more than betrayal.’

  A pivotal role in the stitching-up of Whiting for theft and treason. Had to be, for Fyche to be rewarded with land and money and position, a small slice of the most succulent monastic pie in England.

  Unless… unless this rare and lovely woman lied. Or was deluded by grief. Dear God, I didn’t want to think on either of these, but you learn that survival in this dark world means that all things, however painful, must needs be considered.

  ‘You might also ask yourself,’ she said, ‘why it was felt necessary to have the abbot killed.’

  ‘To make an example of him.’

  ‘Oh? For what purpose… at this stage of the game?’

  She was right. Glastonbury had been among the last abbeys to be taken by the Crown. It was not as if there was a dangerous army of rebellious priests out there to quell by intimidation. The ceremonial slaughter of the abbot, the division and display of the body… it seemed gratuitous, even for the times.

  To silence him, then? And then cover the deed with bloody spectacle?

  Again – why? And yet… whilst I couldn’t doubt, from what she’d told me, that Fyche had indeed conspired in Whiting’s downfall, did it follow that he’d fashioned charges of witchcraft and murder against Cate Borrow merely to gag someone who suspected him of it? It must have been clear she was not alone in her suspicions, but no others had died… had they?

  As if she’d seen my thoughts, Nel was half risen from her chair.

  ‘I’m aware that there’s more to know…’ She sat down again, shaking her head. ‘If we but knew where to look.’

  I saw that she was shivering freely. She had no real evidence against Fyche and knew it, but the last thing I wanted was to appear to be turning away from her at such a time. Nevertheless, another matter must needs be approached – questions that Robert Dudley would be asking when, on the morrow, I would have to put all this before him.

  ‘When Fyche talks of witchcraft at the tor, sorcery and the sacrifice of new-born babes-’

  ‘He said that?’

  Her eyes were wide.

  ‘Spoke of people massing like maggots on the hill,’ I said, ‘chattering and screaming to the moon. Babes with their throats cut.’

  ‘Christ help us all.’ She bent to the cloak folded on top of her doctor’s bag. ‘All right, yes, I know where this comes from. A babe was found there last year. Still-born. One babe. It happens. And yes, obviously there has been old worship to the sun and moon, if you can call it worship. Usually no more than superstitious pleas thrown out in poverty and desperation. But not blood rites, Dr John. Not any more. I swear to you.’

  ‘Except,’ I said, ‘in the abbey?’

  The thunder now was like to a blind giant blundering around in the high street. Nel was shivering freely.

  ‘No, look…’ She pulled her cloak around her shoulders. ‘What happened to your servant… yes, that was terrible almost beyond belief, and more so because he seemed a most decent man. But all this talk of devil magic, sacrifice…’

  ‘It’s said that there’s no more effective place for the summoning of devils than a holy place in ruins.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Dr John, we’d know! I tell you, if there were people like that here, we’d know. ’

  ‘ We? ’

  ‘There are those here’ – her eyes were cast away towards the window -

  ‘who would know.’

  ‘But none of them,’ I said, ‘is Justice of the Peace.’

  Now she was tightening her fists.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘ I know it’s nothing to do with you. This hounding of you… this is all madness.’

  ‘ Not madness.’ A sudden fury. ‘Were you not listening to me? This is contrivance. Fyche spreads these lies – this smoke – only to cover something darker. He shows this picture of himself as a Godly man in combat with the forces of Satan, and at the core, I’ll swear… that’s where you’ll find the real evil.’

  I didn’t understand. ‘Nel, we live in enlightened times – relatively. What happened to your mother, that’s not going to happen again. Burnings, even hangings, for heresy and witchcraft are to be avoided. That’s the policy now. The Queen’s ever mindful of the way such retribution gathered pace during the last reign. She won’t go down that dark road, and this is being made known throughout the realm.’

  Nel Borrow opened her eyes as the thunder resounded, and I saw that her eyes were weeping and my heart strained in my breast.

  ‘We’ll get help for you!’ Hoarse with desperation. ‘I’m schooled in the law…’

  She looked at me through the screen of her tears, and it was not scorn, but it was not faith either and who could blame her? I wanted to tell her that my companion was – potentially, at least – one of the most powerful men in the realm. That we were in a position to call down support from the very highest quarter.

  Yet were we? I thought of Robert Dudley and his growing suspicions of the motives of Sir William Cecil. He has his own script. Thought of the Great Unspoken.

  And then, worst of all, I thought of those surgeon’s knives all conveniently coated with gore, as if circumstance itself were bending to contrivance. I doubted that Nel Borrow even knew about the bloodied knives, not having seen her father since last night, and I did not think it would help to tell her.

  ‘You said there was a chamber made ready for you here,’ I said. ‘For the night.’

  ‘If I need it. But if I’m found there, it’ll come down on Cowdray. Don’t want that.’

  She rose. I wanted to cry out to her: Stay here and let it all come down on me! But said nothing and dared not even stand, for fear that my basest desires would be insufficiently concealed by the threadbare robe across my knees.

  She began to lace her cloak together at the neck.

  ‘Perhaps it were best if I left.’

  ‘Where will you go? They’ll be watching your father’s house.’

  ‘Joan Tyrre will take me in. It’s no more than a hovel, but better than a dungeon.

  ‘It’s late. She’ll be abed.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Nel smiled. ‘Not tonight, Dr John. Not in a storm. Joan will be in her doorway looking out over the tor… watching for the King of Faerie and his hounds.’

  ‘The Wild Hunt?’

  Remembering my tad terrifying me as a child with his tales of the Hounds of Annwn. The faerie king and his white hounds with red ears, reputed to ride the storm in search of lost souls.

  Nel said, ‘Joan has ever hoped that one stormy night he’ll take her to his hall, to be his earthly bride.’

  She laughed, the crossing of her teeth disclosed like a confidence as she began to draw up her hood.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I said.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  I said, ‘Stay here.’

  She looked up at the ceiling ’twixt the oaken beams, her half-smile rueful now.

  ‘It was kindly of Cowdray to offer, but I’d rather not. The attic chamber here…’

  ‘Is probably cold and damp. However-’

  ‘And most severely disturbed. Or so they used to say, the pilgrims and the travellers. Doors which go banging in the night when there’s no wind. A babe’s whimpers. Boards that creak as if someone walks across them, though there’s no-one there.’

  ‘Haunted?’

  ‘So ’tis said.’

  I must have thought on this for all of a second.

  ‘Then you should stay here in this chamber,’ I said, ‘and I shall see out the night up there.’

  XXIX

  The Storm

  The wall was lit white again, and new thunder seemed to break before it had faded into shadow, huge and exultant in its violence and loud enough to be directly above us.

  Maybe in the attic. Always one floor beyond me, these manifestations of the spiritual. It was ever thus. I felt like a clown, and all of it was apparent, all my folly lit by the unsparing sky.


  ‘And you wouldn’t be afraid,’ she said, ‘to pass the night up there all alone?’

  ‘My life’s experience tells me that ghosts tend to avoid me.’

  She looked at me, with her hands hidden inside her cloak and her doctor’s bag at her feet. The hood had fallen away and her head was tilted to one side, as if inspecting some rarity.

  ‘Perchance, because you try too hard to know them?’

  In my head, Dudley’s voice: I think if I were a ghost, the very last man on earth I’d want appear before would be John Dee.

  ‘It’s rather,’ I said sadly, ‘because I’m a dull and bookish man who has not the sight.’

  Standing up at last, for the shame of it had diminished me. I recalled Dudley sprawled in his barge: is not John Dee the greatest adventurer of them all? A man prepared… to venture beyond this world!

  The unwaxed truth was that I was a sham, a hollow man with a big library, and the only time Dudley had spoken with any real honesty was when, in faking my arrest, he’d hissed, Take this fucking impostor away!

  ‘There,’ I said, wearied. ‘The secret’s out. A man oft-times accused of conjuring who can’t even see what he’s supposed to have conjured. Others might be witness to the seepage ’twixt spheres. Not me.’

  I suppose it was the first time I’d disclosed this directly to anyone and, in the silence which followed, I regretted it. Although doubtless mumbled miserably, it had sounded to my ears like strident organ chords swelled with bitterness.

  ‘ Tush, Dr John.’

  Nel Borrow’s head was still atilt. She made a small, soft bud of her lips. It might be pity or it might be mockery, neither of these much to be desired. She leaned back against my bed.

  ‘Remember when you first came to the tor and set foot on the top…’

  ‘I fell over.’

  ‘But if I’d said to you, Oh, have a care, for you might fall over due to the strange force of the place… then you might not have fallen over.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You think too much. Weighing every new thing against all the volume of knowledge you hold in your head. In fact, it might even be said that you know too much.’

  ‘Mistress, most of the time, I think I know not half enough. If you’re saying that in order to see and feel what’s hidden I must needs forget myself and all that I’ve learned-?’

  ‘Forget yourself? No. It’s probably necessary that you should remember yourself.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  And, God help me, I didn’t.

  Light flared like laughter on the wall.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘’tis something I find hard to achieve myself for longer than a few moments. To grow quiet inside and become aware of my thoughts and my feelings… but to be no longer one with these earthly things. To become separate. To stand apart from who I think I am. In such a state… things may be received. So they say.’

  ‘Who say? Where did you learn of this?’

  ‘There are still a few people who come here on pilgrimage.’

  ‘What I mean is… this is not Christian, is it?’

  A cautious observation, her reply less so, as the thunder cracked. But the air betwixt us was calm. She placed her palms together.

  ‘Did I say Christian pilgrimage?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘There are those who occasionally travel here from… distant places I’ve never heard of. Further than France or Spain or the low countries, anyway. Further even than the Arimathean travelled, I suppose.’

  ‘The East?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘You mean holy men? Magi?’

  ‘On – what is it – camels? All in silk robes?’ She laughed. ‘Rags, more like, and on foot. Not wealthy, except in spirit. We feed them and we give them shelter, and they take our air. Visit our high places, drink from our wells. And share with us their… ways of being.’

  ‘Does Fyche-?’

  ‘Good God, no. Although some of them came to the abbey, in the old days. To meet with the abbot and senior monks.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  I moistened my dry lips. ‘What was she growing, Nel?’

  ‘Collecting, mainly. She collected from the fields and hedgerows more than she grew. In search of cures – smallpox, wool-sorters’ disease. Her ambition was quietly boundless.’

  ‘And the dust of vision?’

  The first splotter of slow rain came on the window glass.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘ that.’

  ‘Maybe I’ve also been sent here to learn.’

  She made no reply.

  ‘If I’d been here in your mother’s day I suppose I might’ve gone pleading to her, like Joan Tyrre, for a little flask of…’

  Nel unlaced her cloak with a small pull and it slid from her shoulders. My hands shook.

  She bent to dip a hand into her cloth bag. When it emerged it was holding a small, stoppered earthenware pot.

  ‘This?’

  Now the storm was all around us.

  You think me mad to trust this woman with the sovereignty of my senses?

  Maybe you’re right. Maybe there was a madness in me that night, born of years of unsatisfied longing. All I can say is that, as soon as I’d heard of it, I knew that if it were still to be found in Glastonbury, this dust of vision, then I could not leave the town without having tested it upon myself.

  Never thinking for one minute, though, that Nel Borrow would carry it around in her bag.

  ‘It’s been found to help pregnant women,’ she said, ‘when the child won’t come. And for the relief of those who bleed too much afterwards.’

  ‘Is this the common use?’

  ‘And also for the severe head-pains with bright lights and no cause.’

  ‘Your mother discovered it?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s been around, in one form or another, since the most ancient of days. I’m surprised you haven’t come across it in your studies.’

  ‘In truth,’ I said, ‘I think I have.’

  It all came back to me now, watching Nel Borrow laying out an array of items from her bag on the candlelit board. I hadn’t read of it, merely been told, and what was not put down in a book was always suspect to me, but what else could it be?

  Ignis sacer.

  A small but severe plague of it had been spoken of when I was in France last year. Many people had died, but from the disease itself rather than its effects on their minds, the survivors speaking of visions both dreadful and exultant.

  The holy fire.

  The disease was a burning from within: terrible agonies, convulsions, loss of all control over movement. A dance, Monger had called it, and this would certainly have described what happened in France, where the talk had been of the wrath of God visited upon a faithless community. I hadn’t read of it, so I’d dismissed it as exaggeration to frighten people into some religious conformity.

  Nel had spread out a clean white cloth over the board. Brought out a small knife and a wooden spoon. There was also a flask of water which reddened when shaken, leading me to suppose it from the Blood Well.

  Then a crystal goblet, a scrap of paper. An apple and a small wooden cup.

  She unstoppered the earthenware pot.

  I said, ‘Tell me what this is.’

  ‘The powder? ’Tis ground from a fungus. It grows on grain. In this case, barley. Hangs from it like a black ear. My mother would pound it in a pestle with… other herbs.’

  ‘She showed you how to make it?’

  ‘No. Never. It took me over a year to get it right – driven, at the time, by the need to relieve the suffering of our neighbour, Alice – aching head. Keeping the whole street awake, with moans all through the night. Some strange cries, indeed, the night Alice took-’ She looked up at me. ‘Are you sure about this?’

  I nodded decisively. There’d be no chance of trying it when Dudley was up and about again.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘It w
ill probably have no effect.’

  Telling her of the night I’d brewed some powder of the mushrooms gathered in our orchard by Jack Simm. The little mushrooms that come in the autumn.

  ‘This was in London?’

  ‘In my library in Mortlake. Thinking that if I were surrounded by all the wisdom of the ancients, its effects might be… why are you smiling?’

  ‘No reason, Dr John. No reason at all.’

  I was able to smile, too. But had not Monger, speaking of the dust of vision, told me: I’ve heard it said that the place where the potion was ingested might condition the response?

  ‘Where’s it best to drink this?’ I asked her, for I was anxious now for it to be done before I could change my mind. ‘Should I take it outside?’

  ‘In the storm? I think not. I heard of a man once for whom the falling rain turned to a hail of arrows.’ She looked at me. ‘You’ll have no control.’

  ‘Is that not the point of it?’

  ‘It’s just that you strike me as a man for whom a degree of self-control-’

  ‘May be the cause,’ I said, almost breathless, ‘of all my deficiences. As you’ve implied.’

  Yet had not the man of science in me already dwelt on the possibilities for further research if I could obtain some of the potion to take back to London? Was I not already wondering how its effects might be conditioned by the movement of seasons or the positioning of stars at the time it was ingested?

  Nel Borrow was bent over the board, spooning something from the earthenware pot onto the paper.

  ‘The quantity must be so small as to be almost invisible to the untutored eye, else the consequences… God only knows how much that boy in Somerton swallowed.’ She looked up. ‘Have you ever heard the affliction called by the name St Anthony’s Fire?’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Though I don’t know why. Did St Anthony have visions?’

  ‘All saints seem to have had visions.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but are visions that come as a result of taking a potion… are they still what you would call sacred?’

  ‘I know not,’ I said. ‘And there may lie more heresy.’

  There was a silence, even the rain holding back. Or so it seemed from this golden sanctum.