The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  And so till dawn, and the discovery of Sir Peter Carew hefting a flagon of cider in the alehouse, still foul with last night’s sweat and vomit. When I took the opportunity to tell him what I wanted, he said he hoped he’d live to see me crawling up the walls of the Bedlam from the inside.

  ‘This would be your way of saying no, Sir Peter?’

  Carew stroked the back of one roughened hand with the palm of another, fingers curling into a fist, indicating he could think of a more emphatic way. We were never likely to be friends. Maybe he’d glimpsed the writing on the wall which suggested that all those centuries of supremacy by the fighting man were at last yielding to the wiles of the thinking man. But not in his lifetime. Oh no. To Carew, a man without relish for violence was a Bessie.

  I’d not walk away this time.

  ‘You need do nothing,’ I said, ‘except arrange for me to ride to Wells and speak with the accused.’

  ‘ Jesu, you’re a fucking-’ Carew had turned to the doorway where Dudley now stood, rubbing his eyes. ‘ You tell him. Tell him of the madness of taking on Fyche on behalf of a witch. ’

  ‘He serves the Queen, Carew,’ Dudley said. ‘Not Fyche. Nor even you.’

  ‘He’s a fucking conjurer!’

  ‘But, even if that were true, he’d be the Queen’s fucking conjurer. So if I were you – God forbid – I’d be tempted to go along with his proposal.’

  ‘Tell Fyche my friend from the Commission on Antiquities deems it his role to represent the woman accused of murdering his colleague’s servant?’

  Dudley smiled tiredly.

  ‘Fix it. Why not?’

  Carew stood shaking his head.

  ‘All right. I’ll help you. I’ll help you see the weakness of your judgement. Show you and the conjurer the truth of what you think to defend.’

  In his efforts to sell me a new cloak, Benlow the bone-man had suggested the deepest of winter might be yet to come, but this morning appeared to dispute his forecast. The sun shone stronger than on any day this year, and the Poet’s Narcissus was budding at the roadsides. It was as if the thunderstorm, far from being an expression of God’s ire, had been the herald of an early spring, the gay ghost of some long-dead Mayday dancing in the wasteland of February.

  Did I feel Eleanor Borrow with me as we approached her herb garden? Did I sense her presence on this hillside? In truth, I sensed it everywhere, now, as if she were become the spirit of this curious town and all that it had brought to me.

  It had taken us no more than ten minutes to walk here from the George. Across the street, to the edge of the town, then over a stile to follow a muddied path on the flank of the long hill which sheltered the town like an arm. Now I stood by a wooden gate, looking up at the strip of land hedged all around, with a fast-flowing stream down one side. Its mainly empty furrows were neat and drawn as if aligned to the tor, the battlements of whose tower crested the highest horizon. The air was shimmering with bright alchemical dew. And I felt…

  What I felt was naked. Naked in my emotions. Close to breaking down and had to turn away from Carew and Dudley. Standing there facing the lower skyline, where the sun lit up the channels of water and pale pools all the way to the sea, until I found composure.

  ‘What does she grow here?’ Dudley asked.

  ‘Her mother had two hundred kinds of herbs,’ I mumbled, and Carew’s head swivelled.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I… forget. Could’ve been Fyche.’

  ‘There aren’t two hundred kinds of herbs in the world,’ Carew said.

  ‘There are far more than that.’

  And they’d grow well here… a well-sheltered place, in its way, with good soil and an abundance of water. It moved me to think of what I’d read of the herb garden of the visionary Hildegard of Bingen, a woman well ahead of her time in the relating of science to creation and the use of plants to treat the melancholic condition.

  ‘You really want to know what she grew here?’ Carew wore a slanting smile. ‘I’ll show you what she fucking grew. Stay there. ’

  He moved off across the land, but I ignored him, walking up the slow slope. Sensing her walking beside me, the swish of her dress in the wet grass, following the winter-brown hedge toward the top of the field, where I’d seen a wooden cross.

  There was no name on it, but I knew by its siting.

  Felt so safe in her garden. Open to the land all the way to the sea, and the tor rising on the other side and the soaring golden pinnacles of the abbey.

  I turned slowly, and it was there below me, its highest arches making gilded loops like dusty sunbeams. A paradise. Avalon.

  This had been the abbey’s ground. Most everything here, for miles around, had belonged to the abbey. And the abbot had given over this land to Cate Borrow to continue her experiments with plants and herbs. This particular place, so perfect for its views of abbey and tor and the watery lands below… as if it might absorb the influences given off by these holy sites.

  And more. A crossing place for all the energies of the earth. A Christian holiness, a pagan sanctity. I felt I’d been here when my mind was given up to the dust of vision. What would have happened had I imbibed the potion here, on such a morning?

  It mattered not. The dust of vision had only been the grease to unrust the lock, free the door. There was no need for more; the door was open now… or at least ajar.

  Time was suspended for some moments, and I existed in a state of profound yearning, the kind I’d once experienced only when gazing into the infinite vastness of a starlit sky. And I thought of what we were told by the church: that all life is lived for the glory of God, and that any rewards for us would come not in this world but the next.

  But people here, in this town where the Saviour walked, and Merlin, did not accept this. Under this canopy of ancient magic, who could blame them for coming to the belief that they could have here – now, in this life – a kind of heaven. As if being here could, through prayer and knowledge, endow them with more than what God, according to the Church, allows.

  No book, no dogma, just being here.

  This was the Avalon Heresy.

  What Fyche hated most.

  ‘The witch’s grave, eh?’

  I turned, and there was Carew, swinging back on his heels, hands behind his back, eyes lit with bright malice. Dudley with him, sombre-faced.

  ‘Couldn’t have the cow planted in consecrated ground, obviously,’ Carew said.

  ‘Or maybe,’ I told him, ‘this place is more consecrated, in its way, than either of the churchyards.’

  Carew scowled. This was heresy. Well, fuck him. Hard to believe that the Queen had put the abbey into this man’s horny hands.

  Which now were no longer behind his back, and he was leering through the hole in his black beard, as if in foul imitation of what they held.

  Two earth-brown skulls, jawless and broken-toothed.

  ‘ This is what she grew, Doctor,’ Carew said. ‘ She grew death.’

  XXXVIII

  Old Bones, New Bones

  Dudley said, ‘This looks not good, John.’

  As if it needed saying. We’d watched Carew walking away into the sunlight, with a lightness of step that belied his weight. Spring was in his walk and in the air, but it was a spring smirched now, like his smile, with a cold malevolence.

  I moved further up the path, up the hillside, putting more distance ’twixt us and Carew… and also the herb garden, sullied now. I did not want to go back to it.

  Carew had assiduously reburied the skulls where he’d uncovered them. Promising, as he walked away, that he’d send word to Wells to arrange a meeting for me with the prisoner – that I might ask her, he said, about all the other body parts which could be unearthed in her garden.

  ‘I know how it looks,’ I said to Dudley, ‘and I know how it’ll sound to a jury in court, but that doesn’t make it any less of a contrivance. The bones were brought here not by Nel Borrow.’

  But I was sickene
d to see that Dudley’s patrician face was marked now with doubt.

  ‘How do you know that, John? You don’t. You can’t. And didn’t you tell me of evidence brought before her mother’s trial that she fertilised her soil by spreading graveyard earth?’

  ‘It’s no more true than any of this.’

  ‘You don’t know, though, John.’ Speading his hands in defeat. ‘Do you? And what did this supposed necromancy create but the potion that causes St Anthony’s Fire, which reduces men to tormented, gibbering madness?’

  ‘No.’ Shaking my head. ‘The dust of vision’s from a mould found on cereal crops. Not grown here.’

  ‘But still produced by this woman. I know, I know… if taken by a man such as yourself, it may bring forth redemption and cleansing. But, at the end of the day, her mother was hanged as a witch and, instead of renouncing it, your… first love… chose to follow her mother’s path. That’s what they’ll say – what a judge will say. And even you can’t deny that.’

  ‘Healing’s an honourable path.’

  We’d come some distance now, were close to the top of the hill which overlooked the town and the abbey. We stopped by a lone thorn tree, where I subsided on to the grass.

  ‘You think Carew’s part of this?’

  Dudley considered, positioning himself ’twixt the roots of the thorn tree.

  ‘He has a certain blunt integrity. He’ll support Fyche because Fyche is the law. If Fyche put the abbot in the frame on false evidence… well, difficult times, and the abbot was a wealthy papist.’

  ‘But do you see him involved?’

  ‘In the stitching up of the abbot?’

  ‘I’m thinking more of Cate Borrow.’

  ‘He’s not a schemer. He’ll always prefer action. Though I do see him choosing, when it’s deemed strategic, to look the other way. He’s a soldier. A practical man. It’s all means to an end.’

  ‘I even know where the bones are from,’ I said.

  ‘Presumably dug from the graves which Carew told us had been descrated?’

  ‘More likely procured from Benlow, the bone-seller. I’ll find out.’

  ‘Beat the truth out of him?’

  ‘Reason with him.’

  ‘In that case -’ Dudley stood up, dusting down his doublet – ‘I shall ride to Butleigh, find with the woman who was delivered of twins.’

  He’d brushed out his beard, and his moustache was starting to lengthen and curl again, as if this were a sign of regained health.

  I said, ‘There may be another problem.’

  Telling him of Monger’s fear that the woman, through pressure upon her family, might well refuse to confirm Matthew Borrow’s story.

  ‘My dear John…’ Dudley ran fingers through his shining hair. ‘I’ll swear that the woman is not yet born who’ll say no to Robert Dudley.’

  We returned, me in slightly better heart, to the George. Dudley went to the stables to have his horse prepared and saddled, while I sought out Cowdray, who’d first directed me to the man who bought and collected bones.

  Found him cleaning up the alehouse, windows flung wide, mopping vomit from the flags.

  ‘Woman’s work.’

  He smiled ruefully, wiping his hands on his sackcloth apron. I pulled out a stool and sat down.

  ‘You’ve known times like this before?’

  ‘Some of them expected free ale,’ Cowdray said. ‘I’ve not known that before.’

  ‘And did they get it?’

  He made no reply.

  ‘They’ve found bones on Nel Borrow’s ground,’ I said.

  ‘What do you want me to say to that, Dr John? Bones everywhere.’

  ‘Is it true what they say about graves being raided?’

  Cowdray shoved his mop into the pail.

  ‘Big Jamey Hawkes. He was dug up. Coffin broken into. Bones defiled.’

  ‘An old grave?’

  ‘Fifteen years. Twenty.’

  ‘The bone-’ I broke off, hesitated. ‘Benlow…’

  ‘Ah.’ An impatient shake of the head. ‘Who can say? Might’ve needed a new thighbone for St Dunstan. Sold that a hundred times over. See, I would’ve made certain things about him clearer when I first mentioned him to you, but I-’

  ‘Knew me not well enough, then, to brand the man a shyster?’

  ‘More or less,’ Cowdray said.

  ‘It’s a risky trade he’s in.’

  ‘Aye. Could be.’

  ‘You might think him lucky to have evaded arrest for so long. In many places, the church courts would take a hard view of it. And even here, in such times as these…’

  ‘Oh, now, he’s a respectable vendor of sheepskins, Dr John.’

  ‘But everyone knows what’s in his cellar.’

  ‘I think what you’re asking me,’ Cowdray said, ‘is… might certain people in authority choose to disregard aspects of Master Benlow’s other trade?’

  ‘In return for… favours?’

  ‘Some may think that.’

  ‘Where’s he get the bones? In general?’

  ‘Dr John-’

  ‘It won’t come back on you, Cowdray, I swear it.’

  ‘Ah…’ He sniffed, wiped the back of a hand across his nose and mouth. ‘Man can spend all his days watching his words.’

  I waited. The fresh sunlight falling through the open window turned even Cowdray’s stubble into gold dust.

  ‘Benlow buys most of his bones,’ he said. ‘Usually from wretched folk whose very poverty presses them to go out at night and dig up graves and break into mouldy tombs. That’s the ones he don’t do himself. For the pleasure of it.’

  ‘Pleasure?’

  ‘Old bones, new bones… he loves them like jewels.’

  ‘He took me into his private charnel house.’

  ‘I’ve been down there but once,’ Cowdray said. ‘’Twas enough. That’s a man not well in his mind. He loves… what should not be loved.’

  ‘Men?’

  ‘If that was the worst of it we’d all know where we were. He loves the dead. Poor family, son or daughter’s died… if it en’t some contagion, he’ll make an offer for the body. To be cut up by medical students in Bristol is what he’ll tell them. Truth is… oft-times the corpse won’t leave his premises. Not for a long time.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Keep out of his bedroom, my advice.’

  I recalled the heavy smell of incense around the foot of the loft ladder. Cowdray went back to the mop, slopping it around in the pail.

  ‘He was in here, Dr John. Asking for you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Couple of times yesterday. Said he thought you’d’ve been back to see him.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Told him if you wanted him you’d know where to find him and to keep out of my inn.’

  Cowdray raised his mop, stabbed it down, water pooling on the flags.

  I didn’t go to find Benlow. If he’d provided the bones to be planted in Nel’s herb garden, the last man he’d admit that to was me. For what remained of the morning, I walked the streets of Glastonbury, mostly alone with my drab thoughts.

  What might I take to Sir Edmund Fyche to induce him to withdraw his factored evidence against Nel Borrow? Only the secret he’d tried to get from Whiting. Somebody had to know the nature of it.

  But if it was too late to withdraw whatever charges had been laid against her, then I must needs go to court – a strange court in a strange city – to present my case to a hostile assize judge already primed by Fyche.

  I leaned against the sun-dappled wall of the abbey, thinking back to my last time in court, when I’d faced charges of attempting to kill Mary by sorcery. Charges built upon spurious evidence and my own reputation as an astrologer, at a time when astrology itself was deemed by many to be a heresy. Realising now, with a barren dismay, that the case against Eleanor Borrow was, by comparison, as solid as the wall against which I rested.

  Unless she knew otherwise.

&
nbsp; Around noon, a clatter of horsemen had me scurrying back to the George, where Carew and three attendants were dismounting by the stables entrance, Carew tossing the reins of his horse to a groom as I hurried across the street.

  ‘How now, Dr John?’

  He seemed happy. Not a good sign.

  ‘You’ve ridden from Wells?’

  ‘Have indeed,’ he said. ‘It was most pleasant. On such a day, the idea that this is Jesu’s chosen bit of England seems credible indeed.’ He didn’t look at me. ‘Suppose you’ll want to know about your meeting with the witch.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tell Cowdray to bring up meat,’ he said to one of the attendants. ‘And best cider, none of his dog piss.’ Then addressing me over a shoulder. ‘I regret… not today.’

  ‘When, then?’

  ‘Nor tomorrow.’

  ‘Carew, for-’

  ‘Nor, come to that, the day after.’ He turned, leaning toward me, teeth agleam through his tarry beard. ‘In fact, not ever.’

  It felt like my heart was afloat in an icy well.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘She doesn’t wish it,’ Carew said gaily. ‘The witch has no desire to speak with you. Or even to see your white scholar’s face.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  I was numbed. One of the attendants drew a sharp breath and took a step back as a horse voided its bowels and Carew’s face went blank, as if wiped like a slate.

  ‘What did you say, then?’

  I walked right up to him.

  ‘You’re such a bastard, Carew. How do I know you’ve even seen her?’

  Carew hardly seemed to have moved, and I was unaware of what had happened until I was in the dirt by his feet, watching him rubbing a fist and feeling that my face had been smashed by a side of beef. Realising through the pain that he’d finally found cause to do what he’d been wanting to do for days.

  ‘How do you know?’ Carew said, ‘Because, Doctor, you hear it from a man of honour.’

  With a small prod of his boot, he put me on my back in a tump of steaming horseshit, and walked past me into the inn.