The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  XXXIX

  Nothing to Hide

  Dr Borrow was in his surgery unbinding a goodwife’s broken arm. I sat and waited and watched, questions tumbling one over the other in my crowded mind.

  ‘Best not to lift the child with this one for a while,’ Borrow told the goodwife. ‘I don’t want to see you back here… except with the money, of course. Or, if you don’t have the money, a week’s milk will suffice.’

  He smiled. I knew not how he could be so calm. There was a scar to one side of his mouth, a swollen lip, but I noticed that he never touched either of the wounds with fingers or tongue.

  After the woman had left, he put the stopper into a jar of comfrey, the tangled plant swimming in its own dark brown oil, sunbeams from the mean windows making it look alive. He placed the jar on a shelf in a row of apothecary’s vessels.

  ‘You’ve come to me for balm, Dr John?’

  ‘Um… no.’ I could not but put a hand to the side of my jaw. It hurt to speak now. ‘I lost my footing, and… but that’s not why I’m here. I’ll come directly to the point, Dr Borrow. I’d thought to defend your daughter at the assize.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m schooled in law. Hate injustice. I asked Sir Peter Carew to fix a meeting between us, that we might plan the case. Half an hour ago, he came back from Wells, telling me she’d refused to see me.’

  Borrow nodded, or I thought he did. He seemed to me the very opposite of Carew, a deft and placid man in whom the balance of humours was held secure, although a strong mix of the melancholic and the phlegmatic was apparent in his movements and his speech, neither of which were expansive.

  I said, ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘She hasn’t much money.’

  ‘God’s bones, she healed my friend! I’m not asking for money -’

  ‘I see.’ Borrow rolled up a yard of bandage with long, slender fingers. ‘You must not think this reflects on your abilities, Dr John. Which I’m sure are considerable.’

  He put the bandage on the shelf and then to turned me and sighed – the first sign in him of human frailty.

  ‘She won’t see me either. Won’t see anyone.’

  He looked at me, still-eyed. Here was a man dealing, day to day, with death and mortal sickness, accustomed to setting aside all human response in the cause of cool diagnosis.

  ‘It makes no sense, Dr Borrow. No more than her mother’s refusal to fight for her own life.’

  ‘Ah… Joe Monger told you.’

  I nodded. He waved me to the patient’s stool. I sat down, and he sat on the other side of his trestle board of scrubbed pine.

  ‘He implied that she sought to defend your reputation,’ I said. ‘To keep you out of it.’

  ‘Cate… always made little of her own abilities and too much of mine. It’s true that I’d planned to give evidence on her behalf and question their facile assumptions. But never got the chance.’

  ‘In what way – can I ask?’

  ‘By questioning the primitive nonsense of alleged witchery.’ Borrow was speaking softly, with no sign of animosity. ‘I… don’t know of your own views on this, but reason tells me such nonsense will be consigned to history by the time this century’s out.’

  ‘ What will?’

  ‘The question of a deity – that may take longer to depart, but it’s surely already on its horse. The Pope’s had his arse kicked, and the Church of England’s governed by a lay person – and a woman. A woman? Would anyone, even thirty years ago, have believed that would ever happen? Would you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘’Tis all coming apart, Dr John. Mankind coming to its senses.’

  ‘You’re an atheist.’

  ‘Can I be the only man alive who’s observed that man’s greatest achievements have arisen out of the will of an individual? When the expulsion from this country of the papacy itself, the strongest religious fortress the world has known, comes through a rising not of the spirit… but a man’s cock?’

  He smiled at the nonsense of it. Of course, I’d listened to such talk in darkened rooms in Cambridge and Louvain, but that was usually from young and excitable men.

  ‘Let me understand this,’ I said. ‘You would’ve stood up in that courtroom and told them there could be no witchcraft because there is no God, therefore no Satan, and so…?’

  ‘I prefer a quiet life, but -’ he shrugged – ‘I’d’ve done it.’

  ‘Did your wife know this?’

  ‘She knew of my principles.’

  ‘But you go to church…’

  ‘It’s the law.’

  ‘How can you… I mean, this town…’

  ‘How can I live and work in a town like Glaston? Easily. I was born here. A community where few people appear to share a creed only underlines the folly of it all.’

  ‘But your wife…’

  ‘Was, I’m afraid, a perfect example of one who rarely held the same beliefs two days together. I’d tease her, I’m afraid. Always going to find a new cure for this and that – and oft-times did, mind, let’s not forget that. Yet would have made more of her undoubted skills had she not been so easily diverted by dreams of… of a golden age we’ll never have again because it’s an age that never was.’ He stopped, looked at me, sorrow in his eyes. ‘But you’d surely not expect me to speak ill of her.’

  There was a silence, during which Borrow took down a couple of jars from the shelf and held them to the light, and I thought of Nel and wondered what it had been like growing up amid such extremes of opinion.

  ‘To answer your unspoken question,’ he said at last, ‘harmony would always, in the end, prevail, thanks to a shared belief in healing.’

  ‘And how do you feel now?’

  He took in a slow breath, let it out. Was there an element of the shudder in its expulsion? Was there something inside Borrow which roiled and spat? I couldn’t say. I’d met countless men and women, not least Dudley and the Queen, whose spouses or parents had died by execution, and several had exhibited this same calm, but whether it was a sign of acceptance…

  He’d retired again behind his healer’s screen, taking the top off one of the small jars and stirring the contents with a taper of wood. There was something about him… something I’d seen in Monger, only more so. The quality of a priest. In an atheist. As if his atheism had brought him an inner certainty he could draw on, as men drew on their trust in God and the Church.

  ‘You know she’s innocent of this.’ I stood up. ‘And if you don’t believe she can be saved by prayer or faith in a just God… then what’s to be done?’

  He put down the jar and pushed it toward me.

  ‘Contains yarrow and camomile. Make a solution of it with cold water, soak a cloth and hold it where it hurts.’

  ‘I-?’

  ‘Your face,’ he said. ‘Take it. Pay me if it works.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He waved it away.

  ‘And, in the future,’ he said, almost kindly, ‘take care where you tread.’

  But there was no balm for my spirit. Walking down the five steps to the surgery door, I felt more troubled than when I’d gone in

  There was nothing to be read from Matthew Borrow’s face – not yet an old man’s face but possessed of a mature self-knowing. I’d never encountered his like. Here was a man who would never strip back the layers of his dreams in search of meaning nor aspire to measure the dimensions of the universe. A man for whom matters of the hidden were of no consequence, for there was nothing to hide.

  If he had no fear of God, then he feared nothing. His inner calm was remarkable.

  Of course, his anger must have overflowed when Fyche’s mercenaries had taken his daughter. He’d fought them with no regard for himself and been badly beaten for it. Yet had he given up trying to see Nel? I thought not. But whatever he had in mind he didn’t want me involved.

  Did he perchance know who I was? What I was?

  A man who sought to know the mind of God… no-one mor
e worthy of an atheist’s contempt. I was sunk into confusion and despair as I walked down past the Church of St Benignus – how ironic that Matthew Borrow should be living almost directly opposite a church. A man who loved not God and feared not Satan. In this bubbling cauldron of creeds was there a kind of purity to that?

  The thought was so shocking that I broke into a run and, rounding the corner, almost collided with a lean man striding down the slope from the George.

  ‘John… where the hell’ve you been? What’s -?’

  ‘Dudley, God…You found her?’

  I fell back, panting against the church wall, two ragged children springing up on the other side and running away, laughing, a smell of fresh shit upon the air.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ Dudley said.

  ‘It’s of no import.’ I held up the jar of balm. ‘From the doctor.’

  ‘Her father?’

  ‘She won’t talk with me,’ I said. ‘She won’t even see me. Or anyone. The woman in Butleigh – have you talked to her? Will she go to the assize?’

  ‘John…’

  ‘You did find her?’

  ‘Let’s go back,’ Dudley said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To the doctor’s. I have questions for him.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake -’ throwing back my head to the sky, greenish clouds sailing in from the coast with a skreeting of gulls, my voice hurled against them – ‘did you find her?’

  A goodwife with a basket of eggs crossed the road, scuttling away from us. Dudley continued down the hill, and I caught up with him.

  ‘ Tell me.’

  ‘I spoke there to several people… Notably the smith, to whom I gave money in return for his honesty. And from whom I learned that there’s been no twins born in Butleigh this past year. No twins. Nor, come to that, these past ten years.’

  I moved ahead of him, halting his progress, a flood of bad bile entering my gut.

  ‘You took one man’s word for that?’

  ‘ Listen to me. No births at all in more than a month. Including bastards. Confirmed by the minister of the church, who also maintains that no child in recent memory has been delivered there from the belly.’

  Dudley’s eyes were lit with fury.

  ‘ Now will you go back and talk to the bloody doctor?’

  XL

  A Different Canon

  Don’t misunderstand me. Robert Dudley was not like Carew. Behind the arrogance, my friend was an educated man with a questing mind. But he was yet a young man, with a young man’s impulse and a soldier’s spine, and there were times when all thought and reason would be kicked aside. And then you’d feel his hand quivering over the hilt of his sword, the air grown thin around him.

  ‘These knives…’

  Standing now in Borrow’s doorway, shouldering out the sunlight, crisp winter in his voice.

  ‘See me later, please.’ Borrow buckling his leather bag, throwing it over a shoulder. ‘I have sick people to minister to.’

  ‘I’ll see you in hell, Dr Borrow. Where goeth all fucking liars.’

  The space betwixt them throbbing like the hush before a beheading.

  ‘ Who are you, again?’ Matthew Borrow said.

  ‘You know who I am.’

  ‘I know who you claim to be.’ Borrow’s voice was but one notch above disinterest. ‘However, a mere clerk of antiquities would be unlikely, in my experience, to employ a groom. My instinct tells me you’re clad below your status, so if we’re speaking of liars…’

  No movement in his grey eyes; he’d marked Dudley’s mood, yet had no fear of it. Found it, if anything, a sign of weakness.

  And, in some way, this gave me small hope, for the very last thing I wanted was for Borrow to have lied about the bloodied knives. I wanted there to be some reason for them that we’d all missed. Some reason not involving Nel.

  There was a tacit suspension of hostility. Borrow unslung his medical bag, and the tension went out of Dudley, who came into the surgery and closed the door behind him.

  ‘Dr Borrow, tomorrow is Sunday. The day after that, your daughter goes on trial for her life, accused of witchcraft and the murder of my groom. Did she kill him?’

  ‘I’m her father.’

  Borrow opened out his hands, two rings of dull metal on one, the kind employed to dispel cramp.

  Dudley said, ‘Will you plead for her in court?’

  ‘If I’m allowed, I’ll give evidence as to her good character and appeal for her to be cleared of all accusations.’

  ‘And tell the judge and jury the truth about the bloodied surgical tools?’

  Silence.

  ‘What is the truth, Dr Borrow?’

  No reply.

  ‘For God’s sake, Dr Borrow,’ I said. ‘We’re on your side. Your daughter’s side.’

  The look Dudley gave me implied this was not necessarily the case, but my own feelings could never be so easily discarded.

  ‘I swear to you,’ I said with a passion I could not quell, ‘that I’ll move all heaven to have her released.’

  Borrow raised an eyebrow. I breathed in hard against a blush.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Looked at with dispassion, it seems hardly credible that such a big man was killed and butchered by a woman. Nor can credible motive be shown. But the fact remains that, with no Caesarean birth in Butleigh – no birth at all – your explanation for the blood on the knives-’

  ‘Is shown to be a lie.’ Borrow’s hands falling to his sides. ‘Yes. Had I been given notice, I’d’ve come up with a better one.’

  Oh Christ.

  Some of it was true, apparently.

  What he’d said about coming home late, very tired, throwing his tools under the stairs, where both his and his daughter’s were stored.

  His tools which, that night, seemed to have been unused. Borrow threw open a door to show us where they were kept. It was a cramped space, with narrow wooden stairs.

  I said, ‘You had no cause to bring them out next day until-?’

  ‘Why would I? They needed no cleaning. No-one came to my door in need of surgery.’

  ‘So the bloodstained tools…?’

  ‘One of Fyche’s men pulled out the bag and passed it to him and he said, “What are these? Whose is this blood?” And held them up, and I could see that there was blood, and I told him… the first likely explanation that came into my head. But Fyche wasn’t listening anyway. As I told you, he had his evidence. He was satisfied.’

  ‘How do you know the bloodied tools were Nel’s?’

  ‘Mine are still here. Unbloodied.’

  ‘Did you see Nel’s tools there before Fyche took them?’

  ‘No. They were quickly passed hand to hand and out of the door.’

  ‘Then how do you know they were hers? And not some others brought here by Fyche as… as ready-made evidence?’

  Knowing, even before the words were out, that I was grasping at dustmotes in the air.

  ‘In which case… where are Eleanor’s tools?’ Borrow said. ‘Dr John, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I fear your friend is right. I lied… not well enough.’

  Dudley said, ‘Did she kill my servant?’

  Borrow met his eyes at once.

  ‘Of course not. A woman?’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I don’t know…’

  ‘Could she have lent her tools to someone who brought them back in this condition?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘To whom might she lend her tools, Dr Borrow?’

  ‘Master Roberts, if I knew that, I would not hesitate to name them. It must needs be someone she trusted. And maybe that’s why… why she won’t talk to me. Or to anyone.’

  ‘She’s protecting someone?’

  Borrow shrugged. This was my last hope for her innocence, but I could see that it was not much better. She was supposed to have lent out her tools and then taken them home, still smirched with a dead man’s blood?

  ‘Who, hav
ing done this, would not clean them afterwards to remove the evidence?’ Dudley said. ‘Taken them to the river… or any one of these local springs.’

  The Blood Well, I thought bitterly. Borrow looked at Dudley, shook his head.

  ‘Who would she wish to protect?’ Dudley said. ‘Who would she die to protect? Does she have a lover?’

  Not looking at me.

  ‘A father,’ Borrow said, ‘is ever the last to know. Especially a father who seldom has time for chit-chat.’

  Dudley glanced at me. His eyes said that we’d learned all we could and should be away, but I could not.

  ‘Have you told us everything?’ I said. ‘Everything that might help?’

  ‘Dr John…’ A first sign of impatience in Borrow. ‘How would I know what might help?

  I thought back to the stormy night in my chamber, enclosed in what seemed to me now like a golden orb.

  ‘All right… think on this. Nel remains convinced that her mother’s death was engineered because she was believed to possess evidence against Sir Edmund Fyche… maybe evidence that he was responsible for the betrayal of Abbot Whiting.’

  ‘You must have come to know my daughter very well indeed, in a very short time, Dr John.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  He was silent for a moment.

  ‘No… I don’t. Whiting’s death, and the manner of it, would have been ordered by Thomas Cromwell. Fyche was irrelevant. Nor do I think Cate was in possession of any so-called evidence. In the papers she left behind, there was nothing… worthwhile. And she certainly never spoke to me of anything of that-’

  ‘But you are, as you say, a man who works day and night. A man with little time for chit-’

  ‘Don’t insult me,’ he said mildly. ‘She would have told me. I might not have shared much with Whiting in the way of religious belief, but I respected the abbey as a centre of learning.’

  ‘Your wife and the abbey…’

  ‘She owed a debt to them, Dr John, and it was a simple one. She had no education as a child. The monks… taught her to read and write.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘When she was a young woman. She sought to repay them by growing herbs for them. Whiting had an interest in healing, Cate had a rare ability… for making things grow. I’m talking about herbs and fruits which had never been grown here before. Seeds would be brought to the abbey, oft-times from abroad, and she’d sow them and nurture the plants. She seemed to know, by instinct, what conditions would suit them.’