by Phil Rickman
‘Stop them!’
The woman’s scream bringing me up sharp, flattened against a flimsy wall of bared wattle, peering with caution around its corner. The air down here was murked with smoke from morning fires. Figures dancing in it, agitated like puppets, under the new church tower.
‘Stay back!’ A voice like a scourge. ‘Next one moves goes with us.’
Edging to the end of the wall, choking back a cough, I saw a score of people: goodwives and children and old men lining the street, as if for a parade.
In the road, I saw two men holding a third, an older man struggling vainly against them. As I watched, a man in a leather jerkin arose from behind, on the steps of a house, and appeared to strike him several times with a short stick, and he crumpled to the cobbles, as if his strings were cut.
‘Jes— Stop!’
The beaten man, once down, tried to roll away. It was Dr Borrow. A foot seemed aimed at his exposed head. Me screaming, starting forward.
‘Stop this! Stop it now, you bastards, in the Queen’s name!’
A silence. The boot frozen in the air.
‘Stay out of it.’ Broken teeth framed in greying beard. ‘Whoever the fuck you are.’
A glimpse of blade half pulled from the leather jerkin. Much attention on me now, squirmings in the smoke, and I saw that there were five of them, and I was in deepest shit for the townsfolk knew me not and would make no move to save me.
‘We’re the law, fellow,’ the leather man said. ‘You don’t even think to fool with us.’
Found myself standing alone in the road and shrugging.
‘And I’m Dr John, of the Queen’s Commission. Rode here with Sir Peter Carew. If this man’s sorely hurt, I’ll see it comes back on you. All of you. You understand?’
Watching out of the side of an eye as Matthew Borrow dragged himself away.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Let him go.’
My voice low, but it seemed to carry. I felt an unaccustomed calm in me. I stared at the man in the leather, able, somehow, to hold the silence for long moments before I spoke again.
‘You’ll walk away now, all of you. Or you’ll be back before you know it, to your old life of stale crusts and petty thieving.’
Maybe it was the tone – a tone I hardly knew – but he very nearly did step back, his eyes swivelling, as if I’d made a move on him. Then he shook his head.
‘’Tis your word, friend. Your word against mine – and his –’ thumb jerked toward his companions. ‘And his.’
‘You count for nothing,’ I said quietly. ‘Any of you. You’re no more than a hired mob. Expendable.’
I doubt he understood the word, and although my face was unshaven, my apparel in disarray, he’d marked an element of threat and a confidence that even I could not explain. He sneered, but his eyes would no longer meet mine. At length, he sniffed, pushing the blade back into his jerkin, while I stood and waited and felt… felt apart from me. The dust rising. It was as if I stood in the air, looking down on this scene and all the poor houses and rubbish-strewn yards.
‘Piss off,’ I said. ‘Before I think to remember your faces.’
The man in leathers signalled briefly to his companions and made to push roughly past me, and I didn’t move and caught his shoulder hard with mine, which was painful, but I felt a curious elation as he stumbled.
Resisting the urge to rub my shoulder, I watched his hands as he straightened up, but the dagger didn’t reappear. Looking straight ahead, oblivious of him, I saw a young man watching me, as if puzzled and, for a moment, I was also puzzled for I’d seen him before, though not in jerkin and hose.
Two women, one of them Joan Tyrre, were helping Matthew Borrow up the steps to his house, but he clearly had no wish to go in. He was looking up the street past the church, his right arm hanging like an empty scabbard.
I went to him.
‘Dr Borrow, what in God’s name was this about?’
He began to cough. The woman with Joan Tyrre turned to me.
‘They was outside at dawn, sir, banging on the door, demanding to search the premises.’
‘Bazzards,’ Joan said.
‘Take him inside, Joan,’ the woman said. ‘Do what you can, I’ll be with you now, Matthew.’ Her accent was of Wales, the south. She turned to me. ‘I live across, by there. Vicar’s wife. I saw them go in. Had him up against the wall they did, before the door was full open.’
‘But they know him. He probably healed their—’
‘No,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘They don’t know him. These are not men of Glaston. The people here don’t know any of them.’
No surprise. Some men would travel miles to join a hue and cry, just for the chase and the violence of it and what they might steal, who they might rape.
‘The town’s overrun with them, it is,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘They was in the taverns last night through the storm. Dozens of them.’
‘Bazzards,’ Joan said.
‘Dozens?’ I followed the vicar’s wife down into the street. ‘What did they want here?’
She looked at me, with uncertainty. A stout woman, fawn-coloured hair under the coif.
‘It weren’t no normal night, Master. My husband, the vicar, he’s been at the altar since first light, praying for forgiveness. The weight of sin lies heavy on us all.’
‘Joe Monger,’ I said, ‘will vouch for me. What did they want here, Mistress?’
‘They got what they wanted,’ she said. ‘But ’twasn’t enough. Well, they knowed he wouldn’t take it quietly, and when he come running out after her, they laid about him. ’Twasn’t his fault she was bred from his loins.’
‘Beg—’
‘Why she came back I’ll never know.’
‘Who?’ It was as if cracks were forming in the sky; I almost seized her by the shoulders. ‘Tell me.’
‘They must’ve been watching the house, all night, all I can think.’
The sky began to fall.
She said, ‘You didn’t see them take her?’
‘Christ…’
She stared at me, appalled at my profanity and I wanted to shake her, shake out all the false piety which had replaced thought and reason.
‘Tell me!’
My whole head felt to be alight, and I think she saw the madness in my eyes and backed away. I saw the young man again, watching us, and realised it was Brother Stephen, the younger of the two monks who’d been with Fyche when first I’d met him, on the tor.
The vicar’s wife pushed straying hair back under her coif.
‘Said she— Well, we heard her, we all did. Shouting down the stairs as how she’d go quietly if they left her father alone. ’Course, soon as they had her out of sight…’
I turned to look up the street, the gathering of people dispersing now. Felt my mouth moving but it could shape no words.
‘En’t fair for a man to get beaten for the sins of his daughter,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘Is it?’
I stared at her.
‘Sins?’
‘She never said they was wrong when they read out the charge to her face. When they said she was a witch and a murderer, she never said they was wrong. Folks here, they’ve seen this coming – a young woman who thinks she can walk a man’s path when she should be married and keeping a man’s home.’
‘Mistress,’ I said, ‘for God’s sake, if a woman has skills…’
But her face had fallen into an expression of blankness, a self-preserving forced indifference I’d seen too many times in this divided land.
From the heart of the town, I heard whoops and jeering.
XXXIV
Venus Glove
‘YOU COULD BE a dead man.’
Thickbuilt, uncompromising, beard like strings of peat. Sir Peter Carew, senior knight, seeking to wither me with his contempt.
‘You could be lying like offal in the mud. You realise that?’
I made no reply.
‘And all for an old cunning man and a witch,�
�� Carew said. ‘Tales of your learning would appear to be exaggerated. Your brains are soft as shit.’
He and his company had ridden in, mid-morning, from Taunton where they’d passed the night. He and Dudley and I were alone in the dimness of the panelled room at the George, flagons of rough cider before us. I hadn’t touched mine. Carew spat out a mouthful of his onto the stone flags.
‘You think this shithole’s like London. Do you?’
‘Observing its present condition,’ Dudley murmured, ‘I doubt that’s a mistake anyone would make.’
‘The law here comes with rough edges, Lord Dudley, that’s all I’m saying. Rough edges.’
The sweat was cooling on me. Clothed in what remained of the fraying fabric of delusionary vision, I’d run blindly through the streets, from the foot of the town to its summit, past the Church of the Baptist, until the tor was swelling up ahead of me. Half convinced that if only I could catch them I could stop them. Bring her back.
But they were gone. She was gone, and now I wanted to throw myself at Carew, rip out his beard, strand by strand.
Felt Dudley’s warning gaze upon me. Dudley thinking, no doubt with some reason, that Carew would welcome any opportunity to batter me into the flags.
I effected a calmness.
‘Before the dissolution of the abbey, Sir Peter, I understand justice was administered by the abbot. How many witches did he arrest?’
Dudley frowned at me.
‘This is not the answer,’ I said. ‘Fyche sees himself as appointed by God to control the practice of religion in this town, and that’s a dangerous—’
‘Control the spread of sorcery,’ Carew said. ‘Surely?’
I could not this day face another futile argument on what constituted sorcery.
‘Look, Doctor,’ Carew said. ‘In my experience, nobody tried for witchcraft is ever entirely innocent.’
‘That’s—’
‘Hear me out. They ask for it. Can’t keep their fingers out of God’s pot.’ He eased back, hands on his thighs. ‘From where I sit, Doctor, life and religion, since we ditched the Bishop of Rome, are simple and equitable. You go to church on the Sabbath, spend an hour or so on your knees thinking about your next night’s jelly-jousting and – unless you’re a vicar or a bishop – that’s it. I’ve no time for any man or woman for whom this world, so long as they’re yet in it, is not enough. And in the case of this bitch…’
He turned away in disgust. Dudley’s expression, eyelids lowered, said, Do not rise to this. He shifted in his chair as a roar went up from the street, glanced up at the window but didn’t move.
‘All I’d say, Carew,’ he said mildly enough, ‘is that if it were demons this woman employed to chase away my fever, it beats leeches any day of the week.’
He meant well, but talk of demons was no help. Voices were still raised in the street and I rose to peer out of the window, but the glass was poor and milked. Neither of the other two moved.
‘Wasn’t thinking of you so much as this fellow,’ Carew said. ‘Truly, how helpful would it be for a man with a conjurer’s reputation to be seen attempting to intervene on behalf of a proven necromancer?’
I sat down, hard.
‘No-one here knows who John is,’ Dudley said with menace. ‘And if his true name were to become common knowledge, I’ll know that it would’ve come from only one—’
‘Why necromancer?’ I said.
Carew faced me at last, a gap-toothed smile blooming in the murk of his beard.
‘You know nothing of this, Doctor?’
‘Neither of us knows of it,’ Dudley said quickly.
‘Even though it centres on the slaughter of your servant? Ah, but… you’ve been unwell, haven’t you, my lord?’
‘Well enough now, Carew.’
‘Necromancy,’ I said.
Carew sat up, folded his arms.
‘I’m not such an expert as you, Doctor, but if the use of a newly murdered corpse to procure spirits—’
‘What proof is there that this woman was in any way concerned with that?’
‘They have the fucking murder weapons, man! The blood still on them!’
‘Yes, but whose blood? These were her father’s tools, were they not? And he’d done surgery that night.’
Carew looked at me with curiosity.
‘Tell me, why does it concern you so, Doctor?’
This was dangerous ground, but I didn’t care any more.
‘I’ll tell you why—’ I began, but Dudley broke in.
‘No, I’ll tell you why, Carew. Because this is a new age. Because both the Queen and Cecil are wary of religious persecution.’
‘The Queen,’ Carew said heavily, ‘is yet a young woman. Who one day will learn that what you call persecution and I might call an element of discipline is the only way to keep the lid on the kind of insurgency that could yet unthrone her. Added to which, this is an investigation of murder.’
‘A murder used to instigate a witch hunt. Witchcraft being such an easy charge, much exploited in past times, as we all know. But these are enlightened times, and the broadening of human study makes what once would have been dismissed as devilry…’
Dudley broke off to drink some cider, winced at its bitterness, wiped his mouth.
‘Two days ago,’ he said, ‘I thought I’d die, and I was healed through this woman’s knowing of herbs. So you may say it’s me. Me who finds concern about her arrest.’
I looked to Dudley in gratitude, but he didn’t meet my eyes.
‘Then what if I were to tell you there’s more?’ Carew said. ‘What if I were to talk of other corpses – dug from graves?’
‘Where?’
‘Behind St Benignus, so I’m told. Corpses dug up by night.’
I remembered that Fyche had spoken of this. Also using the word necromancy. I liked not the sound of this, but must not show it.
‘And how is this linked with the woman?’
‘You’d need to talk to Fyche.’
Dudley said, ‘The abbey’s in your charge, Carew.’
‘And the law’s in his,’ Carew said. ‘You’ll pardon me – I believe I have a cadaver to inspect, in my abbey.’
We went with him to the outhouse. I didn’t go in. Carew had appeared to treat his inspection of the corpse as a formality, and Dudley told me later he’d decided to say nothing about the suspected marks of torture. He was now agreeing with me that we should not make simple assumptions about this man’s allegiances. I couldn’t help recalling poor Lythgoe’s own comments as we rode through the bitter weather to Glastonbury and Carew had belittled me as a man who’d never borne arms for his country. Yon bugger’s fought for too many countries, you ask me, Dr John.
Later we went upstairs to my bedchamber to talk, Dudley having demanded of Cowdray that his own be stripped and purged of all that remained of his sickness. It lingered still, though, in the glaze of sweat that shone on his face in the window light.
‘All right, tell me,’ Dudley said. ‘Leave nothing out.’
I shut the door, stood with my back to it.
‘The surgeon’s tools are her father’s, used that same night to deliver twin babes the Caesarean way. That accounts for the blood.’
‘And that can be shown?’
‘He’ll tell you.’
‘He’s her father.’
‘She’s no witch.’
Who was I seeking to convince? Witchcraft: what was it? Where were its boundaries?
Dudley crooked an arm around one of the bedposts, the loose one which, just a few hours ago, the dust of vision had turned into an apple tree.
‘John, if this Fyche is determined to show she deals with demons, he’ll do it. He’s a JP. He knows the courts, he knows the judges. He’ll get what he seeks. She’ll hang.’
‘Unless someone—’
I broke off, feeling almost nauseous as I recalled my own words to Nel last night: We live in enlightened times – relatively. What happened to your mother,
that’s not going to happen again.
‘People hang for less every week,’ Dudley said. ‘She must know that. Why the hell did she walk into their hands? Why didn’t she just move to another town? She has skills which would surely—’
‘Because of her father.’ I moved, in agitation, to the window. ‘It’s why she went home last night. She fears for her father. Her mother was hanged by Fyche, for reasons no more solid than…’
But we’d dealt with that. I stood gripping the window sill, looking down into the high street, where people had gathered around the bakery where fresh mutton pies were sold on market days and the baker studied old magic and dreamed of making gold from lead.
‘Carew’s a crude bastard,’ Dudley said, ‘but he knows how the world works. His warning to you… there’s clearly some substance in that. If you’re seen to be pleading for a witch’s life and your true identity should ever be disclosed, then you’re in the shit, John.’ He shrugged. ‘Both of us, for that matter.’
It was true. May have been because of his known association with me, but his own name had been placed more than once, in gossip and the pamphlets, on the threshold of sorcery. Something which men at Cecil’s level made light of.
Had made light of. It came back to me what Dudley had said last night about Sir William Cecil, who was his friend yet deplored his intimacy with the Queen. How far would Cecil risk his own position by protecting Dudley if he were seen to be implicated in a scandal involving witchcraft and the murder of his groom?
Traps everywhere. I sank into the chair by the window. In the space of a few hours, my life had been lifted up higher than I could have dreamed and then brought down and smashed before my eyes.
My life – that scholar’s dim-lit, book-lined existence. I lowered my head into my hands, and green eyes stared up at me through the fingers. Dudley was my friend, the best I had at court, through whose support and influence I’d won the Queen’s approval. Should I now further complicate his life by reporting what Nel Borrow had told me last night about her suspicions that Fyche had obtained wealth and position through the betrayal of his abbot?
