The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘And this well is where?’

  ‘Master Cowdray’s boy will show your servant.’

  ‘I think,’ I said, not quite knowing why I spoke thus, ‘that I’d like to see it for myself.’

  ‘Well…’ She paused. ‘I suppose I could take you. It isn’t too far from here.’

  No doubt the time spent on guiding me to this holy well would be added to her charges. But I was sensing that it might be worth it in other ways, for it was beginning to seem that this young woman was not such an orthodox piss-sniffer after all.

  ‘Thank you. Mistress…?’

  ‘Borrow.’ She shook out her cloak, spun it about her shoulders. ‘Eleanor Mary Borrow. Do you wish to call your servant to accompany us?’

  ‘He’s not my servant.’

  Martin Lythgoe had gone up to check on his master, leaving me to pay the doctor. I’d get the money back when Dudley was well enough to undo his purse.

  Mistress Borrow bent to pick up her cloth bag, but I’d reached for it first.

  ‘Might I… carry this for you?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘If you wish.’

  In London it would be considered unseemly for a man to walk in such isolation with a young woman he’d barely met, but it seemed to worry this one not at all. Being a doctor, I supposed.

  The bag must have had pouches inside for the potions and the leeches or whatever she carried around, for it didn’t rattle when I slung the strap over my shoulder.

  ‘I’ve nothing in there to hide,’ she said. ‘if that’s what you were thinking.’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t…’ Even my attempts at crude chivalry were ever misinterpreted. ‘Where did you train, mistress?’

  ‘Oh…’ She was walking swiftly across the yard towards the rear gate. ‘I’ve studied for many years.’

  ‘You don’t look old enough’ – catching up with her – ‘to have studied for many years.’

  She stopped at the gate, a hand on the bolt, and looked up at me, her eyes widening.

  ‘I don’t look sixty years old?’ Her head on one side. ‘What a marvellous thing is my father’s elixir of youth.’

  ‘Little short of miraculous. How old’s your father?’

  ‘Oh… he must be near to ninety years, now. Though looks barely fifty.’

  Turning quickly away, Mistress Borrow drew back the bolt with a clank which almost, but not quite, obscured what I thought might be laughter.

  ‘You’re following your father’s trade?’ I said.

  ‘And my mother’s,’ she said. ‘Though my poor mother’s been dead for…a while.’

  The gate had opened on to a patch of greensward, grazed by half a dozen geese, behind the high street. I followed Mistress Borrow onto an earthen path alongside it.

  ‘Both your parents were doctors?’

  ‘My father still is – he’s the finest doctor in the west. Would have come with Master Cowdray to your friend but had been summoned to the bedside of an old woman about to quit this world. No, my mother grew herbs. My father uses them.’

  ‘And you grow them still?’

  ‘I borrow them – from the land.’

  Oh, these clearly were not physicians as I was used to them in London. This sounded to me like a cunning man married to a wise woman. Which was like a breath of air to me, but Mistress Borrow could not know that.

  Ahead of us, pale as ash, rose a high and elegant tower. The church of St John the Baptist, I imagined, having read of it in my research. Leland calls it fair and lightsome.

  ‘A proud tower,’ I observed.

  ‘Built by Abbot Selwood a century ago.’

  ‘And who cares for it now?’

  ‘Who cares for anything?’

  She walked on, head down, dark brown hair flowing behind her, unrestrained by cap or coif. We passed through the churchyard, emerging at last on to the high street, where I saw a baker’s shop doing good business and a man having less success selling sheep fleeces from a cart. I followed Mistress Borrow along the street, which wound uphill past a building site backing onto the abbey wall – doubtless the plan was to use this as a supporting wall for new homes, but nobody was working on the site, and I recalled Cowdray:

  If you takes a stone from the abbey and puts it into your wall, you should kneel and do penance every morning for seven weeks. Or ’tis likely your house will not be at peace.

  But back at the inn Mistress Borrow had sounded sceptical. I caught up with her again.

  ‘The ghost of Abbot Whiting… do you not believe he’s seen?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said that such rumours might be employed to deter people from stealing stone.’

  ‘Then do you believe that he’s seen?’

  ‘It doesn’t surprise me. The poor man has little cause for rest. But as I don’t go in there it isn’t my business.’

  ‘You don’t sound afraid.’

  ‘Because I remember the abbot. From… when I was a small child. I remember him walking through the town, not far from here. He stopped to talk to us, my mother and me. His face… I remember his wrinkly smile, and his eyes had a kindness, like…’ She looked up at me. ‘For a long time, I thought I’d seen the face of God.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Three or four years.’

  People passed us, entering the pale Church of the Baptist. Outside, on the edge of the street, a young man was plucking discordantly upon a patched lute, another slapping at a goatskin drum, chickens pecking in the mud around them. It seemed to me, for a curious moment, as if the people were behaving as though in a play and feigning ordinary life. That the real life here happened on some other level.

  ‘At least, unlike the abbey, the church is in full daily use,’ I said. ‘Does it have a library?’

  ‘I don’t know. Should it?’

  ‘Everywhere should have a library.’

  ‘Why?’

  Walking faster, now she was away from the town centre.

  ‘Because -’ feeling the pull of my breathing as I kept up with her pace – ‘only through learning can we hope to attain…’

  The words unaccountably dying on me. I felt suddenly foolish. And inadequate, somehow, as Mistress Borrow stopped at the entrance to a narrow track, tall, bare trees on either side, and turned to look down at me.

  ‘And is learning acquired only from books?’

  She turned away again and began ascending the track.

  ‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘but the process of learning is surely much hastened. Is it not remarkable that, by means of a book, one man’s whole lifetime of learning can be passed to another in a matter of hours?’

  ‘All learning can be passed this way?’

  ‘Most of it. In my experience.’

  She stopped at a low wall with a stile. Stepping away from it and waiting while I climbed up and jumped down on the other side. Giving her my hand, to help her down. Her own hand was bare, not like the Queen’s rose-petal glove. I experienced a most disturbing reaction and let go of it quickly when she was down from the stile, and turned away, feeling the warm blood suffuse my cheeks.

  ‘The well is that way,’ she said

  Pointing towards a wood, a well-trodden path leading through it, and I had the sense of a mocking laughter rising within her. A laughter that seemed to be translated into a sudden, raucous cawking of crows, which caused me to look up in a hot displeasure mixed with apprehension and thus, through a gap in the trees, to espy, almost directly above us, a green mound like to a gigantic mole’s tump.

  A stone tower projecting from its summit, like a stalk from an apple and black against the cloud.

  XIV

  A Mortifying of the Flesh

  The clouds behind the jutting tower were a strange and blinding white, the hill itself a more vivid green than was common in February. A shock to the senses, and I felt a momentary separation that I liked not.

  Division: part of me longing to go rushing to its summit, another part hissing, turn away.r />
  ‘So close to the town,’ I said, ‘and yet…’

  ‘Not of it,’ Mistress Borrow said. ‘It is its own place.’

  We stood on the edge of the wood in full silence. No birdsong. The hill, I saw, was ridged, had terraces approaching the summit, like the mounds of the castles in my family’s country burned down in the Glyndwr wars. But no castle mound I’d seen was so imposing, so steep or quite so startlingly conical. It was utterly strange, as if it were planted here, constructed by men – or angels – for some purpose.

  And I felt, oddly, as if some inner part of me was already familiar with it.

  Most likely from an engraving in a book.

  I said, ‘So an earthquake brought down the church.’

  ‘Nigh on three hundred years ago. Except for the tower. The church was rebuilt after the quake, but after that it never seemed happy to be more than a tower. After the Reform and what happened to the abbot up there, the church was abandoned, and they took away the bells. Now it is… as some say it began.’

  ‘As what?’

  Her eyes sparkled.

  ‘What brought about the earthquake? Was the church cleft to the bone by an act of God, or was it the work of Satan?’ She pointed upwards to the tower, shrunken now by our nearness to the hill. ‘Is it not become the finger of Satan?’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  A faint, serpentine mist was apparent around the tower, the white sky grained as if lightly dusted with soot. As if the tower was a chimney for some fire within the hill.

  ‘Like to a standing stone,’ she said. ‘A Druid stone? ’Tis well known that in the years before Our Saviour, this was a place of Druid worship. ’Tis said that Merlin’s own stronghold was there.’

  A throb in my chest.

  ‘Arthur’s Merlin?’

  ‘’Tis also said that inside the hill was the great gathering hall of the King of the Faerie, who rides the stormy sky with the hellhounds of the wild hunt. So, you see, to the religious, that tower is the finger of Satan.’ Mistress Borrow let her arm fall, then turned away. ‘The holy well’s along here.’

  Most holy wells I knew had stonework, crude statuary. This one was entirely unadorned. Twisted apple trees had grown around it in a rough circle, their branches curling into a protective nest.

  When I leaned to it, I heard the water threshing and tumbling with a rare power. Dark red in my cupped hands. I brought some to my mouth and tasted it: iron, as I’d expected. Iron for strength.

  ‘Many people have been cured by it.’ Mistress Borrow knelt in the damp grass. ‘Many pilgrims.’

  ‘And local people?’

  ‘Even local people. The most effective medicines come free from rocks and hedgerows. But you can see why this well’s best called holy .’

  I looked into her green eyes and tried not to blink.

  ‘ Is it called holy?’

  ‘No.’ She smiled. ‘They call it the Blood Well.’

  ‘Whose blood?’

  ‘Ah…’

  A finger to her lips. I felt a pulsing inside me.

  ‘What kind of doctor are you?’

  ‘Oh… some would say, not a doctor at all, compared with my father who trained at good colleges. What do I know of leeches and the balancing of the humours? Not much at all. Only of crude surgery. And herbs. Which are more important, for all plants hold life and the energy of dew. Some more than others. If we know where and how to grow them. And when.’

  ‘And what mean you by that?’

  I’d felt a real quickening of interest, now. Mistress Borrow was winding a strand of her brown hair around a forefinger, looking suddenly and startlingly young. Must be a few years over twenty, but seeming no older, at this moment, than my mother’s housekeeper, Catherine Meadows.

  There was… a certain not-quite symmetry in her features which made me want to study them at length, calcule their proportions.

  ‘How do you know,’ I asked softly, ‘when it’s best for certain herbs to be grown?’

  She looked wary for a moment, and then her shoulders went loose and out it came.

  ‘Some ’tis best to sow under a new moon and then to harvest under a full moon. Or the other way around. Or cultivation may be more profitable when certain heavenly bodies are in certain portions of the sky. Also the curative qualities of some planets may be improved under certain planetary… what’s the matter?’

  ‘Where did you learn of this?’

  ‘From my mother, but -’ her eyes, of a sudden, sharpening with a defiant light – ‘I’ve also read books.’

  ‘And where did you obtain such books?’

  Thinking: the abbey library, which left Leland in awe.

  ‘Pass me my bag,’ she said. ‘There’s a flask inside which we can fill with water for your friend. You should give it to him sparingly, betwixt larger quantities of ordinary, pure water. Not that much of the water in Glastonbury is truly… ordinary.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  In London, water was seldom drunk these days.

  ‘Because… they say that the holy essence, all the sacred life in this place… flows with the water… underground. Even with the abbey going to ruin, the place itself is still hallowed. There are some things you can’t destroy. Some things about a place that are in that place.’

  ‘They say Our Saviour walked here.’ I handed her the bag. ‘As a young boy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s why it’s holy?’

  ‘Did I say it was holy?’

  ‘I believe you said hallowed. ’

  ‘I meant it has a power,’ she said. ‘Maybe something to do with the flow of water beneath it. Maybe the abbey was only put here because of the unusual… that is, it may indeed be that Our Saviour was only brought here because…’ She must have seen the rapt stillness in me. ‘Oh – am I stepping close to heresy?’

  Not looking, it must be said, as if she cared. Pulling a small, stoppered jug from her bag, she bent with it to the holy well. Despite the water I’d drunk, my mouth felt dry. Although the sun was still hidden in cloud, the day seemed warmer than any since Christmas. A close and airless warmth. No breeze. Unseasonal. I felt a discomfort. Everything here, in this odd, disfunctioned town, seemed to inflict discomfort.

  ‘What’s the power you speak of?’

  ‘I… don’t know. The reasons for it may be long into the past. Perchance you’ll feel it for yourself, when you’ve been here a while. It… alters the sense of things.’

  ‘I’m told,’ I said, ‘that some people here have had visions.’

  She took the vessel from the well and put in the stopper.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I forget,’ I said lamely.

  She placed the jug carefully in her bag, tucking it in like an infant.

  ‘’Tis certain true to say that some men and women here are driven very speedily into madness.’

  ‘Driven by what?’

  ‘Maybe by what they see or hear. Maybe no-one’s supposed to be living here. There are such places, are there not?’

  ‘Are there?’

  ‘Where people find it hard to live an easy life. And monks… monks would seek out such places, would they not?’

  ‘For a monk -’ an excitement like hot coals in my gut – ‘a monk must needs be challenged in his soul?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  A glowing smile.

  ‘But now all the monks are gone,’ I said.

  ‘In which case, it might be thought -’ she brought a knuckle to her chin, as if there were something new here that she was considering for the first time – ‘that we needed the monks here to keep a balance in the place.’

  She fell silent. I felt the weight of the hill behind us, had a feeling of the devil’s finger scratching at the clouds, something in me wanting, unaccountably, to cry out.

  ‘Balance?’

  ‘To keep the peace. Daily prayer and chanting creating a balm. Lying soft upon the air.’

  ‘And there’s
no peace now? Worship at the Church of the Baptist does not have the same effect?’

  ‘Dr John,’ she said, ‘don’t make me say these things.’

  I said nothing. She would hardly be the first to suggest that the anglicised services of the reformed church were a poor substitute for the older rituals it had discarded.

  ‘You haven’t been here long enough to know this town,’ she said.

  ‘Then tell me.’

  ‘Feelings…’ She sighed. ‘Feelings here run to extreme. When you try to describe it, it sounds like nothing much – bitter quarrels which are not healed…feuds, street fights. Thieving and wife-beating and men killed over very little. Very little. But put them all together and sometimes it seems that this place is become like to a wound left open, where there’s gangrene and rot. A mortifying of the flesh.’

  My eyes must have widened at her eloquence and the force of her argument. I was thinking of what Cowdray had said about the power the abbey had given out. Like to a great beacon, always alight. A calming light. And the abbey had been here before the town, which had grown up to serve it. And now the light had gone out, leaving the town bereft and prey to…

  Next to every holy place there’s a high ground as the devil takes for his watchtower.

  I’d thought myself well qualified in theology, but this was unfamiliar territory and made me feel as if all my years of learning were of little consequence. I looked down at the holy well, the blood well, the iron well, and felt the weight of the strange hill, like the burden of a hunchback.

  There are places – I know this – where the earth itself speaks to us. In olden times, men were closer to it. All men, not only priests. When I think on this, I sometimes feel that even the Bible men might be closer to regaining this lost faculty, yet the rigidity of their beliefs prevent them from the experience of it. I turned to Mistress Borrow.

  ‘And the visions?’

  She drew her cloak over her knees.

  ‘Who’s to say what are visions and what are signs of an oncoming madness?’

  ‘Or possession?’

  ‘Oh yes, there’s much possession in Glastonbury. The demons have a rare freedom here.’

  ‘Could you -’ my throat was as dry as parched earth – ‘explain this to me?’