The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  Monger helped her to her feet and she stood feeling at her jaw with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘En’t broke, anyways. Do it look broke?’

  ‘You need to see Nel.’

  ‘Sounds like everyfucker needs to see her today.’

  ‘So where is she?’

  ‘Dunno, Joe. Out of town, she got any sense.’

  ‘What do they want with her?’

  ‘They gonner tell me that?’

  ‘Could she have gone back to see the man at the George?’

  ‘Dunno. He’s from Lunnon, en’t he, so they can beat the piss out of him, all I cares.’

  ‘I see.’ Monger turned to me. ‘She won’t have gone home. If she knows they’re looking for her, the last thing she’ll want is to bring any of this down on her father. Joan, where else might she be?’

  Joan Tyrre said, ‘Where’s my drink?’

  She’d swallowed two mugs of ale, not touching her jaw again. A bruise was beginning, green and purple in the firelight like a bad sky.

  Joe Monger had made her promise to send for him at any time if she suffered any further ill-effects of the beating. He’d questioned her about the number of constables on the streets; she reckoned there must be over a dozen of them, and more seen riding down from the Mendip Hills.

  ‘Joan might well have counted the same man three times,’ Monger said. ‘But, all the same, this doesn’t look good. If either of us had intervened back there, they’d have summoned others at once. We’d all have been beaten, arrested… the place smashed up.’

  He beckoned me to follow him outside, where we stood for a moment blinking in the harsh white light. Market stalls were being hurriedly taken down, carts loaded.

  All of it done in near silence. Monger looked around.

  ‘This is Fyche. He’s long been looking for an excuse to move against the… the worshippers of the stars and the stones.’

  ‘The maggots,’ I said.

  ‘Mercy?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘So if the constables have gone to the George…?’

  ‘That’s not a problem,’ Monger said. ‘Cowdray will deal with it. When they find out Nel’s patient’s the man from London, they’ll back off. They won’t go far away but they won’t seek open confrontation in front of an officer of the Crown.’

  I was still sickened by the two constables’ treatment of Joan Tyrre and felt responsible, having told Fyche where I’d last seen Martin Lythgoe – Fyche seizing upon the fact that Eleanor Borrow had been with me at the time. I related to Monger what had occurred ’twixt Nel Borrow and Fyche upon the tor.

  ‘And that was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘I searched for her afterwards, but…’

  I felt like shit. Yet how, within all reason, could Fyche claim that what had been done last night to Martin Lythgoe had been done by a woman?

  ‘Master Monger,’ I said, ‘why did Fyche hang Mistress Borrow’s mother?’

  ‘He told you that?’

  ‘Without explanation.’

  Monger strode away across the street. ‘This isn’t London,’ he said over a shoulder. ‘It’s easier here.’ Determined to learn the facts of this, I followed him down the hill through the dispersing crowd toward the centre of the town. He kept close to the wall around the abbey grounds, past the gatehouse.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  He pointed to the modern church near the bottom of the town, its tower more modest than St John the Baptist’s. I drew level with him under a sky now as tight and dark-flecked as a goatskin drum.

  ‘Tell me about Fyche, Master Farrier.’

  ‘I don’t know Fyche.’

  ‘Was he not at the abbey the same time as you?’

  ‘That doesn’t make me his friend. The abbot was happy for me to work at my forge. Tended to meet the others only at prayer. Monks don’t talk much at prayer.’

  ‘He’s a Protestant now.’

  ‘Or finds it appropriate to look like one. During the last reign, when there was hope of money to restore the abbey, he’d become a good Catholic again. Such conversions happen in a flash, as you know.’

  We’d come to a narrow street behind the church. Its dwellings were mean, but it was surprisingly dry underfoot – in London, the gutters would have been ripe with shit.

  ‘Fyche’s proposed college of monks,’ I said. ‘You weren’t invited to join them?’

  ‘They’d want a farrier?’ Monger sniffed. ‘Anyway, there are few monks from the abbey at Meadwell. Most are come from outside – learned men. Heavyweights. God’s army, Fyche’ll tell you, against the rise of an evil older than Christianity.’

  ‘Evil? Joan Tyrre and her faerie? The men who find wells with a forked twig? Why should he fear these people?’

  ‘What makes you think it’s fear?’

  ‘Trust me, Master Monger,’ I said. ‘It’s always fear.’

  We’d arrived at the end house, near the church. It was bigger and in better repair than the others, its timber-framing oiled. The man in the doorway wore an apron, faded but clean, and a skullcap the colour of old parchment over stiff white hair.

  ‘They’ve been, then,’ Monger said.

  A tightening of the man’s lips and a nod so small and cautious that it barely happened.

  ‘How many, Matthew?’

  ‘Three. Including Fyche himself.’

  This man’s voice was dry as ash, his face taut and unfleshed, his eyes watchful.

  Monger said, ‘But Nel wasn’t with you?’

  ‘Must’ve left early, Joe. I know not where to.’

  ‘But she was here last night?’

  ‘I don’t…’ The man’s shoulders sagged. ‘I was out till late. Delivery of twins at a farm towards Butleigh, and I had to cut them out or they’d be dead and the mother with them. I thought Nel to be abed when I got back. And then… out before I was up.’

  Monger turned to me. ‘This is Nel’s father – Dr Borrow. Matthew, this is Dr John, a visitor to the town, for reasons… yet to be established. But who can, I think, be trusted. What did Fyche say?’

  ‘Not much. He just looked everywhere in the house, having his men empty lockers, sweep the content of shelves to the floor.’

  I remembered his daughter’s jest about the elixir of youth – ninety but looked fifty. Probably was fifty, but had a sinewy, capable look.

  ‘And that was it?’ Monger said.

  ‘No.’

  Monger waited in silence, arms hanging by his side.

  ‘My instruments,’ Dr Borrow said. ‘Didn’t get in until nigh on three of the clock. Went straight to bed, having thrown my bag of instruments… just, you know, in the corner. Which is where one of Fyche’s men found them. When they picked up the bag, I never gave a thought to it at first. More concerned that they shouldn’t find the wrong… the wrong books.’

  I was guessing he meant the books from which his daughter had learned of the science of stars. More books rescued from the abbey, maybe.

  Saw Monger’s jaw jut and stiffen.

  ‘Your surgical instruments?’

  ‘’Tis my normal habit, Joe, to clean them soon as I get home. Pulling out a blade in front of a new patient when it’s all splattered with the blood of the last one, that’s… never helpful. But I was too damn tired to think.’

  ‘Let me get this right,’ Monger said. ‘Your surgeon’s knives. You’re saying they found a surgeon’s knives with blood—?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes…’ Borrow’s eyes squeezing shut. ‘I’m afraid that’s what they found, yes.’

  ‘They accused you?’ Monger said. ‘Of butchering this man?’

  ‘I wish they had accused me. They asked if Eleanor had ever performed surgery.’

  A stone in my gut.

  I said, ‘Has she?’

  ‘Only when there’s been no better way.’

  Surgery: the lowest form of doctoring, next to butchery in anyone’s book. I turned to Monger, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes, and
Dr Borrow, evidently in near despair, if reluctant to show it, was looking down at the holes in his boots, while Joan Tyrre cackled in my head about the darkness over the tor.

  ‘I told Fyche why there was blood on the tools. I don’t think he even listened.’ Dr Borrow said. ‘Picks up the bag, thrusts it at a constable to take them all away. Evidence, he says.’

  ‘All the evidence he’d need,’ Joe Monger said.

  How swiftly everything changes when the heart holds sway, altering the order of need. When people had spoken of the heart torn assunder, I’d known not, until now, what emotion they were trying to illustrate.

  Or maybe it was all heightened here in Glastonbury, where the very air seemed to hone the perceptions like a whetstone to a knife, sharpening the colours of thoughts, the tastes in the mouth, the pictures which are seen when the eyes are shut.

  Leaning back into the oak settle in the panelled room at the George, I could see the outline of the sun pushing vainly at crowding clouds. And then there she was inside my head, sitting amongst the big stones by the iron well, inside the circle of bare thorn trees: the emerald eyes, the faded blue dress, sleeves pushed up exposing, oh God, those brown speckled arms.

  ‘How can we stop this?’ I said.

  Monger was silent for a long moment, sitting opposite me in the square, panelled chamber.

  ‘We?’ he said. ‘Are you sure of this?’

  Me looking down to hide a coming blush and banishing her, with her green eyes and her haunting, crossed-tooth smile, lest I give away too much.

  ‘I should also ask you about a carpenter. A coffin-maker. A gravedigger. Vicar.’

  ‘All that can be done tomorrow,’ Monger said. ‘I’ll send them to you. Although I gather you may have to wait for the return of Carew before they’ll release the cadaver.’

  When we’d arrived back at the George, Cowdray had told us that Fyche himself had been here, insisting on questioning Master Roberts in his chamber. But Dudley had been sweating again, his eyes full of heat, his sickness beyond dispute, and Fyche had not ventured beyond the threshold, for fear of contagion.

  ‘Don’t expect Carew to take a different stance,’ Monger said. ‘There’s no harder reformer in the west. If Carew’s given good evidence, he won’t prolong things any more than Fyche would.’

  ‘Carew has real power here? A sheriff ’s power?’

  ‘As much power as he wants. Senior knight in Devonshire, owns the abbey and its lands. Has more power here, I’d guess, than he would have in a similar role in London, where knights, I’m told, are two a penny.’

  ‘She’s a healer,’ I said, wanting to scream it to the beams. ‘In the real sense. Not like the piss-sniffers in their masks. What about the mother of those twins? The woman whose life was saved, and her babes, she’ll surely state before a court that Dr Borrow had to cut into her belly. That it was her blood on the knives?’

  ‘If she survives. Wounds like that oft-times turn bad. And, anyway, she’ll say what her husband wants her to say. And her husband… The farmers out towards Butleigh they’re all tenants and struggling. They’ll state, albeit with regret, what suits their lord. I know him, too, shoe the horses for his hunt – with which his neighbour rides now and again. His neighbour, who also happens to be the local JP.’

  ‘Fyche?’

  ‘You never know when you’re going to need a JP, do you, Dr John?’

  ‘My colleague,’ I said, with care, ‘has influence. He’ll talk to Carew.’

  Monger looked pained.

  ‘You don’t understand, do you? The poison’s spreading as we speak. A man precisely disbowelled and laid out like a decorated altar? The older townsfolk will already be quaking behind their doors. Who’ll be next? And who’ll be accused? So Fyche puts out a name… and those will emerge who’ll state before a judge that when they couldn’t afford to pay Nel’s doctor’s bill, their cattle died. I tell you in sorrow… it doesn’t take much.’

  ‘She’s a doctor.’

  ‘She’s a doctor who’s become too much associated with the worship-pers of the stars and the old stones.’

  I shut my eyes, remembering how swiftly all the apocryphal tales had arisen of Anne Boleyn’s dark ways after her husband had first denounced her as a witch.

  ‘What you must needs understand, Dr John, is that these people – the seekers – there’s still only a few of them compared with the old families of Glastonbury. The old families who hold tight to a Godly fear of the power of this place… who’ll turn their backs upon the tor at certain seasons. Who are afraid of what meddlers like poor mad old Joan might cause, through their meddling, to happen.’

  ‘Another earthquake?’

  ‘You may laugh, in your learned, London way…’

  ‘If you think I laugh at such things—’

  ‘Mercy.’ Holding up his hands. ‘Yes, I know, of course, where your interests lie. What I’m trying to explain is that most folk here are not men of science and inquiry, all they want is a quiet life and bread on the board. They don’t meddle. For all the talk of treasure, you won’t find hill-diggers on the tor, for ’tis said that when a man once took a hammer to the tower, thinking to obtain stone, the heavens were suddenly aflame with lightning. Out of a cloudless sky. One bolt strikes the hammer, man falls down dead.’

  ‘This is fact, or legend?’

  ‘In Glaston… no division. They say that if you put your hands on a certain buttress on a corner of the tower you’ll feel the shock of the thunderbolt.’

  ‘There’ll be an explanation.’ Recalling my own fall on the tor. ‘Through science. If I had the time here—’

  ‘Then you, too, would very swiftly fall foul of the old families. They don’t welcome pokers into the unknowable. What you call science.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Nel was tempted onto a path which is… unstable.’

  ‘Like her mother?’

  Monger smiled his unhappy, priestly smile.

  ‘Cate Borrow dug her own pit. Through kindness, perhaps, but she dug it none the less.’

  It was growing dark. From behind the oaken panels, Cowdray and his maids could be heard serving cider to the farmers and maybe a constable or two. But the room was reserved for overnight guests, and we were yet alone.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me about her.’

  XXIV

  Fungus Dust

  SHE WAS A gardener.

  Two acres of land reclaimed from the sea, down towards Wells – this was where she was most at peace, passing the lengthening days among its fragrances, harvesting herbs to eat: carrots and onions and leeks, cabbages and beans, to be sold at Glastonbury market.

  And also herbs for healing. Behind her husband’s surgery, near the Church of St Benignus, she had a little workroom where they were hung and dried and ground into powder. A quiet woman, who preferred her husband to take the credit for balms and ointments, the cure of infected wounds and upset guts.

  ‘I knew her first more than a score of years ago,’ Monger said, ‘when I was at the abbey. This was when she worked in the abbot’s kitchen. Before she took the eye of the new physician and learned the arts of herbs and the growing of them… and then became the abbot’s friend.’

  After the Dissolution of the abbey, she’d continued her work with curative plants, if less openly, occasionally helped by a woman who’d been a cook at the abbey. And then, in the boy Edward’s reign, the years of the protectorate, there was more tolerance, and this was when Cate had found the freedom to experiment in areas where doctors of physic seldom strayed.

  ‘Not all ailments,’ Monger said, ‘are physical.’

  Telling me of a certain man – a wool-merchant, therefore not without money – who, after the death of his wife and daughter in a house fire, had lost his faith in God and was so cast down that he was near to taking his own life.

  ‘Also suffering from blinding pains in the head,’ Monger said, ‘not a result of dousing his sorrow in wine, I should say – this was t
he kind of agony that comes out of nowhere with flashing lights, and no darkened chamber can bring ease.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it.’

  I could hear a clanking of flagons from the alehouse, Cowdray’s hoarse laughter.

  ‘Cate had given him a certain kind of fungus dust,’ Monger said. ‘To be mixed with a large quantity of water, and the results were… frightening. Like an act of God. Powerfully mystical.’

  One startling morn, Monger had met the wool-merchant on the fish-shaped hill to the east of the town, and here was a man raising his arms to heaven, extolling all the sublime beauty of creation. Talking of colours he’d never known. Confiding to Monger, later that day, in the George where we sat now, that his spirit had been awakened neither by prayer nor Bible… but by Cate Borrow and her fungus dust.

  ‘Not only eased the pain in his head, but opened his eyes to a brighter world.’ Monger’s tone was yet drab. ‘A vision of heaven on earth.’

  I was intent, for this was said also of the mushrooms which Jack Simm had found for me and which I’d dried and brewed in private. Drinking the brew late at night in my library, amongst my books, surrounded by the wisdom of the ages.

  Without any effects, in my case, beyond a mild headache. It was ever thus.

  ‘There could be considerable demand for such a potion,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘But, regrettably,’ Monger said, ‘there was – there always is – a hazard. The results were… not predictable. Indeed, rather than a sense of exaltation, there might, oft-times, be visions worse than the blackest nightmare. You see? Heaven or hell. A roll of the dice.’

  The elixir of heaven and hell. I’d heard some talk of it in the low countries a year or two back, but it was like to the elixir of life – you never know how much to believe.

  ‘So random were its effects,’ Monger said, ‘that Cate Borrow would dispense it only in the most extreme circumstances – that is, for terrible head pains or when she had reason to think someone so deep sunk into misery than he might be about to take a length of rope into the woods.’