by Ormond House
Leland. A driven man. Who knew the magic of charts. Vast areas of land and sea reduced to small shapes upon a page, so that our eyes can see it as if from on high. As above, so below, Leland, like me, having studied Plato, Pythagoras and, beyond them, thrice-great Hermes of ancient Egypt.
A driven man. Driven into insanity.
Dudley went out of the room and padded across the passage to the alehouse, leaving me turning over pages, time and time again, in a quiet frenzy. Tilting the notebook on end, almost scorching the thin paper in the candle flames.
Found a second drawing on which the tor was marked. This time, one flank of it, as if seen from above, was picked out in heavy ink and became part of a far bigger shape which resembled what Dudley had thought to be a bird with tail fanned. Within its shape, the outlines of fields were thinly scribed.
Maybe if I was at home in my library, with all that I possessed of Leland’s works, I might make something of this.
Or maybe I’d understand it enough to know that it was of no relevance. The meaningless scribblings of a broken man, blaming himself for all that Cromwell had stolen from Glastonbury.
Dudley set down an ale jug and two mugs – good pewter mugs, I noticed, the first time we’d been given them.
‘Might it be clearer, if you tore out all the pages,’ Dudley said, ‘and put them together? I’m clutching at straws.’
‘If he’d wanted that, he’d’ve done it.’ In truth, I hated to destroy a book. ‘I need time, Robbie.’
‘You don’t have time.’ Dudley drained his mug, then stretched out his arms, yawning. ‘Defeats me. I don’t think myself an idiot, but it defeats me how a man can stand on the ground and chart the land as if he were a bird flying over it.’
‘It’s a long and complicated process involving much walking. Robbie… You’ve been ill. You need rest. Why not go to your bed till dawn?’
He looked down at me, his smile askew.
‘That means you want to be on your own with this, doesn’t it?’
‘Who said I taught you nothing of use?’
I laughed, I suppose a little sadly.
The disappointment over what we’d found must have been etched on my face.
When I awoke, two hours later, head on an arm on the boardtop, three tallow candles had burned to a foul mush, and I was sickened at myself. The logs were all red and ashy in the hearth and I thought of Nel in the dungeon in Wells, another day of it before being hauled before a hanging judge and a jury of self-satisfied, pious minnows.
My apparel was stiff with dried mud. With the first light palely aflare in the northeast, I stood up and went out back for a piss. Listening to the chittering of the early birds and Cowdray calling orders to the maids. In the yard, the ass was watching me benignly from the entrance to his stable.
The moon was yet visible and there was a scatter of stars, the remains of my night garden.
My garden.
John Dee… the greatest adventurer of them all… a man of deepest learning and erudition… her Merlin.
What a deluded fool I was. Nothing, going nowhere. Just a failed bone-collector.
XLIV
Harlot
Cleaned up as best I could, clad in the spare doublet over an old, tattered shirt, I dragged myself to church. Dudley had not emerged from his chamber, and so I went alone: Dr Dee, specialist in matters of the hidden, throwing himself at the mercy of the God whose mind, with unspeakable arrogance, he’d determined to know. Dr Dee, lovesick, bent with sorrow, smirched with sin, in vain hope of absolution.
The morning sky had become very quickly ominous: a fine line of salmon putting a sandy cast upon the long hill before the sun rose but briefly into a mantle of dense cloud which smothered Glastonbury from horizon to horizon.
The beginning of the end of the world, the vicar said. Dear God, what had I expected: calm, fortitude and the sure hope of redemption?
St Benignus, this was, the lesser church. Fyche and Carew, I’d guessed, would be at the more impressive St John’s, and I’d no wish to encounter either of them.
The farmers and their families had come down from the hills and the modern church was packed to the doors, me standing at the very back, where it was darkest.
Hell, in truth, all of it was dark. No candles on the altar, and there’d be no communion, nothing approaching the Mass, no enfolding element of the mystic. And, in this plump Welsh vicar, I heard the voice of an Abel Meadows.
‘At the end of days, it is foretold that the angels of light and the angels of darkness will engage in a great battle, and the field of that battle is the soul of mankind – your souls, my soul. Within every one of us… every one of us – that final battle will be fought. Will you give yourself, body and soul, to God?’
The vicar panting, as he leaned over his pulpit, passing his eyes across all the congregation. I watched men go pale, a woman wring her hands, felt the air go cold with menace.
‘Or will you give your soul away? As some already have done, though they knew it not, by putting their faith in charms and talismans. By opening their mouths to receive potions from a witch’s cauldron. By… sucking the syrup of Satan…’
I pressed myself against the wall in anger, felt that the cultured Abbot Bere, who built this place, would abhor this man.
‘Isaiah saeth, Now is the faithful city become a harlot! It was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers!’
The vicar bulging from his pulpit, wagging a flaccid forefinger.
‘We have not long, I tell you, to purge ourselves and this once-holy town of all sin, unbelief and wrong belief… before that which is foretold at the Bible’s end shalt indeed come to pass. And then shalt them – them as repents not – be embraced by a final darkness!’
A skittering of feet on the flags as a woman collapsed into a faint. I marked Matthew Borrow – doubtless here only to avoid a twelve pence fine – squeezing through the congregation to aid her, his face without expression. I felt a profound guilt at what we’d done to his poor, dead wife, and all for nothing. I would avoid him afterwards.
‘The voice of God is heard in the thunder!’ the vicar roared, bumptious little twat. ‘Yeah, God hath split the night with his mighty voice, commanding us to root out and destroy the evil, before the end of days. And we must not turn our backs from what must be done, or the Lord God…’
The finger scribing a steady line from face to face.
‘The Lord God will know. I say to you, reclaim your souls while there’s yet time!’
I was the first out of there.
Monger came to me at the church gate, still clad in his workaday cut-off monk’s robe. Coming at once to the guts of it.
‘Man’s reading from Fyche’s gospel. Fyche wants a crowd to see Nel hang, and he wants that crowd hungry for it. Only a death-’
‘How can they turn against her? People who’ve been healed by her?’
‘People who thought themselves to have been healed by God? People who’ll now be in terror, having been touched by Satan? A witch amongst them all this time, the spawn of another. You can hear them – Oh, how could we not see what she was? How could we be deceived by her merry manner? Those who were healed are now in fear that they were healed by the foul touch of the deceiver.’
While, in truth, they were deceived by a man who, to my mind, was barely a priest.
‘The woman who collapsed in there?’ Monger said. ‘You know why she fainted? I’ll tell you. Treated of a sore throat by Nel and is now convinced her voice has changed, and deepened, as if a demon speaks through her. You see? Ah… enough of this shit. The word is that Nel won’t see you.’
When I confirmed it, Monger sucked in his lips and led me to the bottom of the street where the green land fell away to the grey and limpid river.
‘Makes no clear sense to me, Dr John. I thought that you and she had… common ground.’
‘Me, also,’ I said. ‘Joe…’
He’d turned away. It was beginning to
rain.
‘’Tis happening again,’ he said. ‘Some perversion of fate. As if she’s inherited some curse.’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe ’twould help if I rode to Wells. But if she’d see neither her father nor you, what hope for a tired old farrier? Can you still plead her innocence at the assize without her agreement?’
‘Would hardly look well, but I hope to try.’
‘Under your own name?’
‘There,’ I said, ‘you have the principal problem.’ But there was another now. ‘Joe… help me. What was Cate Borrow working on before she was arrested?’
‘I don’t know, many things. She lived for her work.’
‘Like?’
‘Long-standing things – she and Matthew were trying for years to find a treatment for wool-sorters’, or the cause of it.’
‘I’m thinking of something related to topography. She worked with Leland, didn’t she, way back?’
Monger began to walk toward the river through the spitting rain, his head half turned – I thought at first to avoid the rain, then realising that the rain was now full in his face. He was turning away from me. I caught up with him.
‘This is important. There was something Cate Borrow had – or knew – that Fyche wanted. Something she’d been working on with Leland.’
‘You should ask Matthew.’
‘I’ve asked him. Leland left her a- some papers. He’d buried them with her because she’d’ve hated them to fall into Fyche’s hands.’
‘Sounds like a private matter. I know nothing about it.’
‘What would an antiquarian want with a gardener?’
He began to stride toward the riverbank so rapidly that I thought he’d walk off the bank.
‘Something to do with charts,’ I said.
Monger stopped, inches from the water, staring into it, as if he might see the shadow of Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, cast away by Sir Bedivere.
‘Leland came after all of us. All who’d been at the abbey and were still in the town. He wanted to know what secret the abbot had failed to disclose under torture that he should be so brutally put to death.’
‘And you told him… what?’
‘We told him nothing. We knew nothing. The ones who might’ve known were long gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘Everywhere. Some to Bristol, London… France even, the more devout of them. Where they might practise their faith unmolested. However, someone must’ve told Leland about all the time the abbot spent with Cate.’
‘So that was how Leland met Cate?’
‘No, they… they’d met before. When he was here to chronicle the antiquities. I believe he’d gone lame in one foot, and she or Matthew attended him. When he returned in forty-five, though, he was a different man. A man possessed. Made a nuisance of himself, I’d guess.’
Can still see his beardless face, all bony like a Roman statue. I remember him shouting, ‘You don’t understand, I’m my own man now.’
Of a sudden, this made sense to me: Leland seeking to assure Cate that he was no longer working for the Crown, that whatever she told him would go no further.
‘When you say possessed…’
‘Only that he was in thrall to this town and its peculiarities.’
I remembered what Nel had told me her father had thought: that Leland’s first visit was to collect treasure, and his second was to collect the place itself. This might simply refer to the notation of its features. Yet knowing of Leland’s interest in the hidden…
‘This secret that Leland believed the monks kept, do you think Cate knew what it was?’
‘I can’t say. She was certainly closer to the abbot than anyone outside the abbey – and closer than most of us in side.’ He wiped rain and maybe sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his dark brown robe. ‘I must needs go back, Dr John. I go to my old mother’s on a Sunday.’
‘Joe… what are you’re not telling me?’
‘Nothing that can help you. Nothing I know. ’
He began to walk away, and although I’d known him only a short time I knew this was not like him. I didn’t move. After about ten paces, he turned back to me. Hesitated for a moment and then cried out quickly, ‘Talk to Joan. Last hovel on the left, top of town, past the alehouse.’
Then turned, stumbling, dragging his cowl over his head and almost running back to the town through the rain, all his old composure gone.
Why?
Joan Tyrre’s house might once – and not too long ago – have been a stable or a winter sheepshed, built of mismatched timbers and rubblestone, with two open doorways and chickens pecking around in the straw. Inside, another door was patched with wads of grey wool, probably plucked from hedgerows and brambles. It opened into the place where Joan lived.
‘Shillin’?’ she said. ‘Seein’ it be Sunday and I don’t work, normal way of it. Howzat zound, Master Lunnonman?’
Bringing down from a niche in the wall above the fire, with some reverance, her skrying crystal. I knew not how a woman of her limited means might have come by it. It was small but of good quality, near as clear as my own. I tried to convey to her that I would not be troubling her for a reading today.
‘Sixpence, then?’
‘Mistress Tyrre…’
I took from my pocket a new shilling, placing it on the boards which made an old manger into a table. The place was cleaner than I might have expected and the strongest smell was from the iron stewpot hanging over a grizzling fire which fugged the air with smoke.
‘Ahaaaah.’ Joan broke out a toothless smile. Then she was putting down the crystal to unwrap her shawl and loosen the faded garment that covered her bosom. ‘ This be what you-’
‘No! I… I just… I just want to talk to you.’
‘Talk?’
‘Talk.’
Joan settled back into the sheepskins lining her bench. Light came through cracks in the shutters and the smoke-hole ’twixt the rafters.
‘You en’t easy with a woman, is you? I feels… a real moylin’ in you. You’ze shook up real bad. Real bad. En’t that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘’Tis a woman, no doubt ’bout that. A woman in there, sure as I be alive.’
‘Mistress Tyrre, I don’t know what you’ve heard…’
Joan pulled her shawl back around her bony shoulders, adjusted her eyepatch, peered at me through the smoke.
‘Joe Monger, he d’say you’ze a gonner plead for Nel.’
‘I’ll do anything that might…’
I swallowed.
‘You’ze a good man,’ Joan said. ‘I feels that. An honest man, if only enough folk knowed it, and a kind, zad face on you. But the zaddest thing…’ She looked up into the smoke, nodding slightly. ‘The zaddest thing of all… they en’t never gonner know, most of ’em. Now.’ She picked up the shilling, sat back in satisfaction, arms folded. ‘You ass me what you wants, boy.’
‘Tell me about the faerie,’ I said, of a sudden.
Not knowing where the question came from. Sometimes there’s an instinct of what will open a door.
XLV
Eye
The faerie were real. As real as the people in the street. As real as her own family. And closer. She’d heard them since… oh, a long time back, maybe since around her first monthly bleeding.
The voices of the faerie.
I said, ‘What kind of voices?’
Joan was hunched like a winter bird on a fence.
‘Man’s voices, woman’s voices. Tellin’ me to do things… things as got me in bother with my mam. ’Tis what they does, the faerie, tests you out, look, puts you on your mettle. And round about then it started. I knowed things…’
She leaned forward, a smell of mint around here.
‘Things as I shouldn’t know. Things what folks done.’
She was enjoying telling of it. It struck me – although I was wrong in this – that nobody had ever asked her these things before. She went and stirr
ed the stew in the pot with a long wooden spoon and tasted some and came back and beamed at me in the meagre firelight, a brown dribble on her chin.
‘My mam, her throwed me out!’ she said proudly. ‘Her said I knowed too much, look.’
‘Because you told her things? Things the faerie had told to you?’
‘Things I knowed. ’ Joan put her face close to mine, the one eye boring into me until I flinched. ‘Only, I said it were the faerie. You gettin’ me? It was what I learned was best, look. Allus tell ’em ’twas the faerie, then you don’t get no blame.’
‘But you knew…’
‘ Pah. I was young. I tells meself it were the faerie. Made it easier. Only it don’t, Master Lunnonman. In the end it surely don’t. You put the blame on the faerie, the faerie an’t gonner like it… then you’re deep in the shitty.’
It had been bad when they took her to the church court in Taunton. All of it thrown at her. What the faerie could do to you if you fell into their thrall. How they could take away your sight. When she confessed all before God and they let her go, folk feared her. Pointing at her in the street. Piles of turds left outside her door. Dead rats.
And the only ones who came to her now were bad folk, who wanted the faerie to harm other folk, exact revenge for some slight. Once or twice, she was so hard up that she took their money. And then whenever folk died and it wasn’t obvious why, they were pointing at her.
And all this time, the voices were at her, chittering in her head, waking her up in the night… and, just like they’d warned her in the church court, her sight growing dim, and then one eye… the faerie took it.
Joan lifted away the eyepatch. There was only a pit of skwidged and puckered skin.
‘Wouldn’t give me no rest, look. Screechin’ do it! Do it! Sendin’ me out in the woods to the faerie tump, and there on the top… nice sharp stick, and I done it there and then! Aaaagh!’
Joan grasping a bony fist with her other hand, slamming it at the ruined eye.
‘Jesu!’
‘Hadda get away, Mr Lunnonman. Went in the night with all I could pack into an ole shawl.’
So this was what came before the flight to what Joe Monger had called the more openly mystical humours of Glastonbury. A town where friendship with the faerie might win you a welcome in some homes.