The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘So the ground.. the herb garden.’

  ‘Given to her by the abbot. The abbot was impressed by her abilities. Thought them -’ Borrow’s lips turned down – ‘ God -given.’

  Dudley said, ‘You say she left some papers behind?’

  ‘They’re gone.’

  ‘What was in them?’

  ‘If she’d wanted me to see them, she’d have shown them to me.’

  ‘You weren’t curious?’

  ‘There are matters,’ Borrow said, ‘about which I have no curiosity whatsoever. For I know it to be a mess of myth to keep the vulgar people in their place. There was a middle ground on which we’d talk all night, Cate and I – the curative properties of plants, the quantities in which they…’ He slapped a hand at the air. ‘ Tchah! The idea that these curative properties were instilled into each plant by some god… as part of some divine plan for the great cathedral universe…’

  I saw Dudley blink. Saw what Monger had meant when he’d said that Dr Borrow’s science was of a different canon to mine.

  ‘Yours is a lonely voice,’ I said, ‘in this town.’

  ‘Which is why I stay silent much of the time. I seek no conversions. I wouldn’t wish, Dr John, to start a religion.’

  ‘But you must know… that the legends here have a power. And if it were felt that your wife was party to some secret knowledge-’

  Like the rope tethering a boat to a storm-battered harbour, his restraint snapped at last.

  ‘Knowledge? You call this superstition knowledge? The belief that there’s a great secret here, preserved by the monks… that while the abbey might be left in ruins, the secret yet remains…? As if Cromwell and King Harry were not the winners because they never learned the secret? You truly think that’s any more than balm for the dispossessed? It’s like the foolish resentment of Wells because Wells has its cathedral and all the wealth that brings, and Glastonbury has only ruins.’

  It was my turn to hold the calm. One way or another, I’d pursue this matter to an end.

  ‘What do you know of this so-called secret?’

  He took a steadying breath and then let it out.

  ‘Dr John, how can I best convey my contempt for such talk? Except to say that if she hadn’t been drawn into this nonsense, Cate would be alive today.’

  ‘Drawn into it how?’

  ‘The abbot… all these people. They led her into areas of madness and then abandoned her.’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘ All of them. Everyone who ever trod these hills in a robe. She was an expert grower of herbs, like no-one else, but she had to let herself be led down blindingly foolish pathways. And then people died.’

  ‘The dust of vision? That’s what you’re-’

  ‘You think she wasn’t encouraged in that venture? As if every damned, deluded monk who ever lived didn’t aspire to some visionary experience… whether it’s from whipping his own flesh raw or fasting to the point of starvation. All the years she spent trying to gratify their impractical urges… it sickened me.’

  He half rose, both hands on his board, his breathing harsh. Dudley was silent, intent.

  After she was hanged,’ Borrow said, ‘Fyche came with his men – as I knew he would – to turn over the house, take possession of all her potions.’

  ‘In search of the dust?’ I said.

  ‘So that all the ingredients of the mixture that caused the burning might be destroyed, was how he put it.’

  ‘And what do you think he was most scared of – the burning or the vision?’

  ‘He didn’t see it as vision. He saw it as opening people to possession by demons. So he took everything away, everything he could find in her workshop, the flasks, the weights, potions, papers, recipes – once she’d learned to write, Cate took great pleasure in committing everything she could think of to paper. I like to think of Fyche and his scholars spending many fruitless weeks poring over them in search of… secrets.’

  ‘Secrets…’ I looked hard at Borrow. ‘The secrets she’d learned from the monks?’

  ‘This is what you’re here for, is it?’ he said. ‘These antiquities. The Queen, or someone close to her, has heard of secrets here and must, therefore, possess them.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘My own belief, for what it’s worth, is that any secret ever supposed to have been held by the monks of Glastonbury was a secret invented for the creation of wealth.’

  I was in no mood to dispute it.

  ‘So Fyche took everything?’

  ‘Everything he could find. Some documents I removed from the house. I had no interest in them, but they were close to her heart and head. All that, in my opinion, reduced her. I had no wish to see any of it again, but I wasn’t about to hand them to Fyche.’

  ‘And what was this?’

  ‘Something I neither understood nor would wish to. Too many lives wasted.’

  I stared at the shelf of apothecary’s jars. The sun gone now, the jars did not shine. I listened to Nel’s voice in my head.

  All the treasure was long gone.

  But treasure did not simply go, transformed to vapour like the dew. It merely changed hands.

  I said, ‘Whatever it was… did you not think to give it to Nel?’

  ‘Why would I…?’ He looked at me as if I were mad. ‘Put the source of my wife’s downfall into the hands of my daughter?’

  ‘Someone did.’

  ‘The dust?’ he said. ‘Are we talking of the dust?’

  ‘She knows how to make it. I’d guess not many people do. The various outbreaks of St Anthony’s Fire seem to have been caused by accidental ingestion of the mould. Someone who knows what amounts may be used and mixed with whatever other ingredients, to produce the visions without the bodily harm… that would be valuable knowledge, would it not?’

  ‘She worked it out for herself,’ Dr Borrow said. ‘But it’s dangerous knowledge.’

  ‘Then, is this one of the secrets? Is this something which may have been known here for many years, passed down? But perchance the factoring of it… the practical details… had been forgotten. Did she help the monks rediscover what had been lost?’

  ‘Proving that the legendary magic of the place is no more than a form of intoxication? An appealing idea, Dr John.’

  It wasn’t at all what I’d meant to imply; I would never have wished to see the spirit of this place so diminished. But I’d give him no argument, being afraid that we’d lose him… that he would see us as no more than vulgar treasure-seekers.

  ‘So this was not the formula for the dust?’

  No reply.

  ‘Dr Borrow,’ I said, ‘I’m looking for something – anything – to give me leverage on Fyche.’

  ‘Fyche has ambition. Understand that about him and you have the measure of the man.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘I’ve tried to hate him,’ Borrow said, ‘but I’m not sure I have the right. Fyche looks around and sees the same madness that I see. The difference in us being that I see all religions conspiring to destroy any hope of mankind’s progress in this world… while Fyche believes that if all men were bent to a single religion and all knowledge guarded by men of his own class-’

  ‘His own class?’

  ‘That is, not the-’

  ‘Maggots?’

  ‘He’s an intelligent man, in his way, the abbey bursar once, who would probably have become abbot had Reform not come.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘He sought it. As I say, he’s ever had ambition.’

  I tried again.

  ‘So if not for the dust of vision…?’

  ‘Nothing so useful,’ Borrow said. ‘She was a friend of John Leland’s, you know, the…’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘When he died, he left some of his papers to her. Of course, he died insane, leaving a mess behind him, and it was years before someone thought to send them.’

  ‘And what… what were they?’

>   ‘Shit. Worthless. Occultism. The man was a slave to all that drivel. Astrology, alchemy… I’m afraid she seemed to set great store by them. Poring over them for hours in her last… few weeks.’

  A tingling in me.

  ‘You know what they’re about.’

  ‘I’m afraid I have better things…’

  ‘Could I see them?’

  ‘Hardly.’

  Borrow laughed bleakly. Dudley leaned forward.

  ‘Dr Borrow… this is what’s thought to be the treasure… is it?’

  ‘It’s shit.’

  ‘If neither Fyche nor your daughter possesses this… treasure… then who does?’

  Borrow shook his head sadly, then sat down again, clasping his long hands together as if in parody of prayer.

  ‘Cate,’ he said, ‘Cate has it yet.’

  XLI

  Who Fears For His Immortal Soul…

  The third time I awoke, I lay staring at the ceiling until its oaken beams were full manifest in the moonlight, like the bars of a prison.

  The prison of this world.

  I lay thinking for long minutes, until the weight of it was all so intense upon my chest that I thought a seizure were come upon me and almost cried out, throwing myself from the bed into the merciless cold.

  Wide awake, now. Standing at the window, looking out over the empty street and the night-grey ghost of the abbey just barely outlined under a misted moon. Then I was sinking to my knees and praying that, if only this once, I might know the mind of God. Asking, in essence, if I should take it that this third awakening was a dark summons into a deeper dark.

  The idea of it filling me with such dread that it could only be countered by thoughts of Nel Borrow lying sleepless in some stinking, half-flooded dungeon, with the damp and the cold, the scurrying and the despair.

  Having been, just once, consigned to such a place, I could not bear this and felt that I’d do anything. Wept over my praying hands before the abbey’s shell, the tears pouring out of me like lifeblood.

  Blood.

  What are these? Whose is this blood?

  Fyche, gleefully, to Borrow, holding aloft his bag of clanking evidence.

  All bloodied. Could be pig’s blood, chicken’s blood. Dear God.

  Stood up, moving slowly at first and then in a frenzy, pulling on my old brown robe.

  Going at once to Dudley’s chamber.

  Not even thinking, in my haste, that he might have his sword at the ready again.

  Not this time, though. This time he slept.

  ‘Robbie…’

  If not deeply.

  ‘Well, well.’ No movement in him. ‘John Dee. What took you so long?’

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘The surgical knives. They didn’t bring the knives with them.’

  ‘Knives?’

  ‘Fyche. He didn’t bring them. The knives were Nel’s knives, and the blood… the blood might even have been Martin Lythgoe’s, but they-’

  ‘Where’s the point of this?’

  ‘They didn’t bring the knives… they brought the blood. They brought the blood that it might be spread on something… anything… during their search. Clothing – who can say? A bottle of blood. And the discovery of the knives… that must’ve seemed like a Godsend.’

  ‘John-’

  It’s what he does. Stitches people up – the abbot and the chalice, Cate Borrow and the false witness and the grave dirt… Fyche contrives evidence. ’

  ‘When did this come to you?’

  ‘Just now. I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘So you thought to share the burden of it. So generous.’

  ‘In case I… should forget.’

  ‘Oh, go to,’ Dudley said wearily. ‘You know you’ll never prove it, and we both know why you’re here.’

  Heaving himself up in the bed, the cover falling away, and I saw by the thin moonlight that he was full-dressed in his day apparel.

  ‘Get your coat, you mad bastard,’ he said. ‘If it must be done, best t’were finished before sunrise.’

  Not asking you to go out with a spade and a muffled lantern, Cecil had said.

  It took us a while to find a spade. Cowdray must have locked up all the best tools. The only one we could lay hand on was old and rusted, with a split in the shaft. Short of breaking into one of the outbuildings, it was the best we were going to get, and it made a certain poetic sense that this should not, in any way, be easy.

  But there could be no more poetry in this.

  ‘You could at least have made preparation,’ Dudley said.

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Yes you bloody did. We both did. We just dared not speak of the unspeakable.’

  And spoke not again until the houses were behind us, the sweet scent of apple-smoke gone from the air. I’d found an oil-lantern and lit it from the alehouse fire before we left. Kept it muffled until we’d left the town for higher ground, with the waxing moon all wrapped in mist and the air alive with moisture.

  We found the stile without difficulty.

  Dudley set foot on it and then came down again. Laughter on his breath.

  ‘Know you what hour this is?’

  ‘It’s a long way from dawn, that’s all that matters, but if you press me…’ I looked up at where the moon stood. Few stars were visible, but I made out Jupiter in the south. ‘I’d say approaching midnight.’

  Thinking that if this was London the Watch would be out, with his staff and his dog.

  Twelve of the clock, look well to your locks

  Your fire and your light and God give you goodnight.

  Goodnight. A comfort. In Glastonbury, there was only the owls and us, and I drew no comfort from anywhere. I was a city man, particularly after dark, when even Mortlake…

  ’Tis said that no man who fears for his immortal soul oughta go past your place beyond sunset, nor walk in Mortlake churchyard lest graves be open.

  My God, if Jack Simm could but see me now, all ready to embrace the taint of necromancy.

  ‘We’re upon the cusp of Sunday, is what I meant,’ Dudley said. ‘We’re doing this on the sabbath.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d ask for God’s blessing, but I rather fear that would be a blasphemy in itself.’

  The wooden cross was not quite where I’d remembered it, but the eyes cannot be trusted at night. I looked down upon it and wondered how often Nel had knelt here and the horror and revulsion she might feel if she knew what we were about to do.

  The high-born gentleman and the low conjurer. God forgive me.

  Knowing that I should be the one to begin this, I set the lantern upon the grass, reached down the bars of the cross and pulled. It was not deeply embedded and came away easily, with a small squelch.

  ‘Water down there?’ Dudley said.

  ‘Water everywhere, here.’

  I laid the cross beside the grave. Looked around. The woods round the herb garden were like the shadow of an army in the hushed moments before a battle. I could hear stirrings. Animals hunting, or the restless spirits of the people whose bones had recently been scattered over this land like horseshit? I lifted the spade and stood looking down at the grass in the greasy lamplight.

  ‘What if he’s lying?’ I said. ‘He’s lied before.’

  ‘Oh, he lies well,’ Dudley said. ‘One of the skills of his profession. Of course I’ll make you better… The important question is, what kind of man buries his dead wife’s most private documents without even finding out what they contain?’

  ‘A man who knows what’s inside. Or thinks he does. An embittered non-believer. A man who’s both stricken with loss and cold with anger. A man blaming his dead wife for her own misfortune.’

  ‘And what do we think we might find in them?’

  ‘We might find nothing of consequence,’ I said. ‘Or we just might find the true reason for Fyche’s persecution of Cate Borrow and Eleanor Borrow.’

  From a neighbouring field came the barking cough of an old ewe. Mi
ght be interpeted as encouragement or outrage.

  ‘Do it,’ Dudley said.

  I stabbed the spade into Cate’s grave.

  XLII

  Twin Souls

  In my questioning of mortality, I’ve watched the sexton who digs the graves at Mortlake; this was not the same. Churchyard earth is oft-times dry, tired soil, gritty with fragments of brown bone: burial upon burial, death upon death, the ground cleared, start again… But this was rich growing land, ripe with humus, warm down there and hungry.

  Unused to this kind of work, a couple of feet down we stopped to rest. My throat was dry as tinder, but we hadn’t thought to bring ale or cider, neither of us being exactly a labouring man.

  Dudley said, ‘If Martin Lythgoe were here…’

  ‘Then we would not be.’

  ‘True.’

  A movement, and both of us were looking down the herb garden, where a rabbit bobbed. No… a night hare. It hopped away, disappeared under the hedgerow and into the mist of its own mythology.

  This night of all nights, I would not look for omens.

  ‘How should his heart be taken to London?’ Dudley said. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’

  ‘You need a wooden casket. Something like a reliquary. I’d suggest going to Benlow the bone-man, but whatever he provided…well, you wouldn’t know what had been in it before. Best to talk to the vicar at St John’s or St Benignus. They’ll charge you dear, but that’s the way of it.’

  ‘Normal life, I’d just give an instruction, a wave of the hand and it would be done.’ Dudley pushed both fists into his spine, rocking back. ‘Jesu, look at me… out at midnight with grave dirt all over my hands. The great quest. Tell me where in Malory are Arthur’s knights reduced to unearthing the dead.’

  He pulled down his hat as a white owl passed overhead in graceful silence.

  ‘You know she gave me an abbey? A monastery, anyway.’

  ‘Another one?’