The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  Telling him of Monger’s fear that the woman, through pressure upon her family, might well refuse to confirm Matthew Borrow’s story.

  ‘My dear John…’ Dudley ran fingers through his shining hair. ‘I’ll swear that the woman is not yet born who’ll say no to Robert Dudley.’

  We returned, me in slightly better heart, to the George. Dudley went to the stables to have his horse prepared and saddled, while I sought out Cowdray, who’d first directed me to the man who bought and collected bones.

  Found him cleaning up the alehouse, windows flung wide, mopping vomit from the flags.

  ‘Woman’s work.’

  He smiled ruefully, wiping his hands on his sackcloth apron. I pulled out a stool and sat down.

  ‘You’ve known times like this before?’

  ‘Some of them expected free ale,’ Cowdray said. ‘I’ve not known that before.’

  ‘And did they get it?’

  He made no reply.

  ‘They’ve found bones on Nel Borrow’s ground,’ I said.

  ‘What do you want me to say to that, Dr John? Bones everywhere.’

  ‘Is it true what they say about graves being raided?’

  Cowdray shoved his mop into the pail.

  ‘Big Jamey Hawkes. He was dug up. Coffin broken into. Bones defiled.’

  ‘An old grave?’

  ‘Fifteen years. Twenty.’

  ‘The bone—’ I broke off, hesitated. ‘Benlow…’

  ‘Ah.’ An impatient shake of the head. ‘Who can say? Might’ve needed a new thighbone for St Dunstan. Sold that a hundred times over. See, I would’ve made certain things about him clearer when I first mentioned him to you, but I—’

  ‘Knew me not well enough, then, to brand the man a shyster?’

  ‘More or less,’ Cowdray said.

  ‘It’s a risky trade he’s in.’

  ‘Aye. Could be.’

  ‘You might think him lucky to have evaded arrest for so long. In many places, the church courts would take a hard view of it. And even here, in such times as these…’

  ‘Oh, now, he’s a respectable vendor of sheepskins, Dr John.’

  ‘But everyone knows what’s in his cellar.’

  ‘I think what you’re asking me,’ Cowdray said, ‘is… might certain people in authority choose to disregard aspects of Master Benlow’s other trade?’

  ‘In return for… favours?’

  ‘Some may think that.’

  ‘Where’s he get the bones? In general?’

  ‘Dr John—’

  ‘It won’t come back on you, Cowdray, I swear it.’

  ‘Ah…’ He sniffed, wiped the back of a hand across his nose and mouth. ‘Man can spend all his days watching his words.’

  I waited. The fresh sunlight falling through the open window turned even Cowdray’s stubble into gold dust.

  ‘Benlow buys most of his bones,’ he said. ‘Usually from wretched folk whose very poverty presses them to go out at night and dig up graves and break into mouldy tombs. That’s the ones he don’t do himself. For the pleasure of it.’

  ‘Pleasure?’

  ‘Old bones, new bones… he loves them like jewels.’

  ‘He took me into his private charnel house.’

  ‘I’ve been down there but once,’ Cowdray said. ‘’Twas enough. That’s a man not well in his mind. He loves… what should not be loved.’

  ‘Men?’

  ‘If that was the worst of it we’d all know where we were. He loves the dead. Poor family, son or daughter’s died… if it en’t some contagion, he’ll make an offer for the body. To be cut up by medical students in Bristol is what he’ll tell them. Truth is… oft-times the corpse won’t leave his premises. Not for a long time.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Keep out of his bedroom, my advice.’

  I recalled the heavy smell of incense around the foot of the loft ladder. Cowdray went back to the mop, slopping it around in the pail.

  ‘He was in here, Dr John. Asking for you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Couple of times yesterday. Said he thought you’d’ve been back to see him.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Told him if you wanted him you’d know where to find him and to keep out of my inn.’

  Cowdray raised his mop, stabbed it down, water pooling on the flags.

  I didn’t go to find Benlow. If he’d provided the bones to be planted in Nel’s herb garden, the last man he’d admit that to was me. For what remained of the morning, I walked the streets of Glastonbury, mostly alone with my drab thoughts.

  What might I take to Sir Edmund Fyche to induce him to withdraw his factored evidence against Nel Borrow? Only the secret he’d tried to get from Whiting. Somebody had to know the nature of it.

  But if it was too late to withdraw whatever charges had been laid against her, then I must needs go to court – a strange court in a strange city – to present my case to a hostile assize judge already primed by Fyche.

  I leaned against the sun-dappled wall of the abbey, thinking back to my last time in court, when I’d faced charges of attempting to kill Mary by sorcery. Charges built upon spurious evidence and my own reputation as an astrologer, at a time when astrology itself was deemed by many to be a heresy. Realising now, with a barren dismay, that the case against Eleanor Borrow was, by comparison, as solid as the wall against which I rested.

  Unless she knew otherwise.

  Around noon, a clatter of horsemen had me scurrying back to the George, where Carew and three attendants were dismounting by the stables entrance, Carew tossing the reins of his horse to a groom as I hurried across the street.

  ‘How now, Dr John?’

  He seemed happy. Not a good sign.

  ‘You’ve ridden from Wells?’

  ‘Have indeed,’ he said. ‘It was most pleasant. On such a day, the idea that this is Jesu’s chosen bit of England seems credible indeed.’ He didn’t look at me. ‘Suppose you’ll want to know about your meeting with the witch.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tell Cowdray to bring up meat,’ he said to one of the attendants. ‘And best cider, none of his dog piss.’ Then addressing me over a shoulder. ‘I regret… not today.’

  ‘When, then?’

  ‘Nor tomorrow.’

  ‘Carew, for—’

  ‘Nor, come to that, the day after.’ He turned, leaning toward me, teeth agleam through his tarry beard. ‘In fact, not ever.’

  It felt like my heart was afloat in an icy well.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘She doesn’t wish it,’ Carew said gaily. ‘The witch has no desire to speak with you. Or even to see your white scholar’s face.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  I was numbed. One of the attendants drew a sharp breath and took a step back as a horse voided its bowels and Carew’s face went blank, as if wiped like a slate.

  ‘What did you say, then?’

  I walked right up to him.

  ‘You’re such a bastard, Carew. How do I know you’ve even seen her?’

  Carew hardly seemed to have moved, and I was unaware of what had happened until I was in the dirt by his feet, watching him rubbing a fist and feeling that my face had been smashed by a side of beef. Realising through the pain that he’d finally found cause to do what he’d been wanting to do for days.

  ‘How do you know?’ Carew said, ‘Because, Doctor, you hear it from a man of honour.’

  With a small prod of his boot, he put me on my back in a tump of steaming horseshit, and walked past me into the inn.

  XXXIX

  Nothing to Hide

  DR BORROW WAS in his surgery unbinding a goodwife’s broken arm. I sat and waited and watched, questions tumbling one over the other in my crowded mind.

  ‘Best not to lift the child with this one for a while,’ Borrow told the goodwife. ‘I don’t want to see you back here… except with the money, of course. Or, if you don’t have the money, a week’s mi
lk will suffice.’

  He smiled. I knew not how he could be so calm. There was a scar to one side of his mouth, a swollen lip, but I noticed that he never touched either of the wounds with fingers or tongue.

  After the woman had left, he put the stopper into a jar of comfrey, the tangled plant swimming in its own dark brown oil, sunbeams from the mean windows making it look alive. He placed the jar on a shelf in a row of apothecary’s vessels.

  ‘You’ve come to me for balm, Dr John?’

  ‘Um… no.’ I could not but put a hand to the side of my jaw. It hurt to speak now. ‘I lost my footing, and… but that’s not why I’m here. I’ll come directly to the point, Dr Borrow. I’d thought to defend your daughter at the assize.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m schooled in law. Hate injustice. I asked Sir Peter Carew to fix a meeting between us, that we might plan the case. Half an hour ago, he came back from Wells, telling me she’d refused to see me.’

  Borrow nodded, or I thought he did. He seemed to me the very opposite of Carew, a deft and placid man in whom the balance of humours was held secure, although a strong mix of the melancholic and the phlegmatic was apparent in his movements and his speech, neither of which were expansive.

  I said, ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘She hasn’t much money.’

  ‘God’s bones, she healed my friend! I’m not asking for money—’

  ‘I see.’ Borrow rolled up a yard of bandage with long, slender fingers. ‘You must not think this reflects on your abilities, Dr John. Which I’m sure are considerable.’

  He put the bandage on the shelf and then to turned me and sighed – the first sign in him of human frailty.

  ‘She won’t see me either. Won’t see anyone.’

  He looked at me, still-eyed. Here was a man dealing, day to day, with death and mortal sickness, accustomed to setting aside all human response in the cause of cool diagnosis.

  ‘It makes no sense, Dr Borrow. No more than her mother’s refusal to fight for her own life.’

  ‘Ah… Joe Monger told you.’

  I nodded. He waved me to the patient’s stool. I sat down, and he sat on the other side of his trestle board of scrubbed pine.

  ‘He implied that she sought to defend your reputation,’ I said. ‘To keep you out of it.’

  ‘Cate… always made little of her own abilities and too much of mine. It’s true that I’d planned to give evidence on her behalf and question their facile assumptions. But never got the chance.’

  ‘In what way – can I ask?’

  ‘By questioning the primitive nonsense of alleged witchery.’ Borrow was speaking softly, with no sign of animosity. ‘I… don’t know of your own views on this, but reason tells me such nonsense will be consigned to history by the time this century’s out.’

  ‘What will?’

  ‘The question of a deity – that may take longer to depart, but it’s surely already on its horse. The Pope’s had his arse kicked, and the Church of England’s governed by a lay person – and a woman. A woman? Would anyone, even thirty years ago, have believed that would ever happen? Would you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘’Tis all coming apart, Dr John. Mankind coming to its senses.’

  ‘You’re an atheist.’

  ‘Can I be the only man alive who’s observed that man’s greatest achievements have arisen out of the will of an individual? When the expulsion from this country of the papacy itself, the strongest religious fortress the world has known, comes through a rising not of the spirit… but a man’s cock?’

  He smiled at the nonsense of it. Of course, I’d listened to such talk in darkened rooms in Cambridge and Louvain, but that was usually from young and excitable men.

  ‘Let me understand this,’ I said. ‘You would’ve stood up in that courtroom and told them there could be no witchcraft because there is no God, therefore no Satan, and so…?’

  ‘I prefer a quiet life, but –’ he shrugged – ‘I’d’ve done it.’

  ‘Did your wife know this?’

  ‘She knew of my principles.’

  ‘But you go to church…’

  ‘It’s the law.’

  ‘How can you… I mean, this town…’

  ‘How can I live and work in a town like Glaston? Easily. I was born here. A community where few people appear to share a creed only underlines the folly of it all.’

  ‘But your wife…’

  ‘Was, I’m afraid, a perfect example of one who rarely held the same beliefs two days together. I’d tease her, I’m afraid. Always going to find a new cure for this and that – and oft-times did, mind, let’s not forget that. Yet would have made more of her undoubted skills had she not been so easily diverted by dreams of… of a golden age we’ll never have again because it’s an age that never was.’ He stopped, looked at me, sorrow in his eyes. ‘But you’d surely not expect me to speak ill of her.’

  There was a silence, during which Borrow took down a couple of jars from the shelf and held them to the light, and I thought of Nel and wondered what it had been like growing up amid such extremes of opinion.

  ‘To answer your unspoken question,’ he said at last, ‘harmony would always, in the end, prevail, thanks to a shared belief in healing.’

  ‘And how do you feel now?’

  He took in a slow breath, let it out. Was there an element of the shudder in its expulsion? Was there something inside Borrow which roiled and spat? I couldn’t say. I’d met countless men and women, not least Dudley and the Queen, whose spouses or parents had died by execution, and several had exhibited this same calm, but whether it was a sign of acceptance…

  He’d retired again behind his healer’s screen, taking the top off one of the small jars and stirring the contents with a taper of wood. There was something about him… something I’d seen in Monger, only more so. The quality of a priest. In an atheist. As if his atheism had brought him an inner certainty he could draw on, as men drew on their trust in God and the Church.

  ‘You know she’s innocent of this.’ I stood up. ‘And if you don’t believe she can be saved by prayer or faith in a just God… then what’s to be done?’

  He put down the jar and pushed it toward me.

  ‘Contains yarrow and camomile. Make a solution of it with cold water, soak a cloth and hold it where it hurts.’

  ‘I—?’

  ‘Your face,’ he said. ‘Take it. Pay me if it works.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He waved it away.

  ‘And, in the future,’ he said, almost kindly, ‘take care where you tread.’

  But there was no balm for my spirit. Walking down the five steps to the surgery door, I felt more troubled than when I’d gone in

  There was nothing to be read from Matthew Borrow’s face – not yet an old man’s face but possessed of a mature self-knowing. I’d never encountered his like. Here was a man who would never strip back the layers of his dreams in search of meaning nor aspire to measure the dimensions of the universe. A man for whom matters of the hidden were of no consequence, for there was nothing to hide.

  If he had no fear of God, then he feared nothing. His inner calm was remarkable.

  Of course, his anger must have overflowed when Fyche’s mercenaries had taken his daughter. He’d fought them with no regard for himself and been badly beaten for it. Yet had he given up trying to see Nel? I thought not. But whatever he had in mind he didn’t want me involved.

  Did he perchance know who I was? What I was?

  A man who sought to know the mind of God… no-one more worthy of an atheist’s contempt. I was sunk into confusion and despair as I walked down past the Church of St Benignus – how ironic that Matthew Borrow should be living almost directly opposite a church. A man who loved not God and feared not Satan. In this bubbling cauldron of creeds was there a kind of purity to that?

  The thought was so shocking that I broke into a run and, rounding the corner, almost collided with a lean man st
riding down the slope from the George.

  ‘John… where the hell’ve you been? What’s—?’

  ‘Dudley, God…You found her?’

  I fell back, panting against the church wall, two ragged children springing up on the other side and running away, laughing, a smell of fresh shit upon the air.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ Dudley said.

  ‘It’s of no import.’ I held up the jar of balm. ‘From the doctor.’

  ‘Her father?’

  ‘She won’t talk with me,’ I said. ‘She won’t even see me. Or anyone. The woman in Butleigh – have you talked to her? Will she go to the assize?’

  ‘John…’

  ‘You did find her?’

  ‘Let’s go back,’ Dudley said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To the doctor’s. I have questions for him.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake –’ throwing back my head to the sky, greenish clouds sailing in from the coast with a skreeting of gulls, my voice hurled against them – ‘did you find her?’

  A goodwife with a basket of eggs crossed the road, scuttling away from us. Dudley continued down the hill, and I caught up with him.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I spoke there to several people… Notably the smith, to whom I gave money in return for his honesty. And from whom I learned that there’s been no twins born in Butleigh this past year. No twins. Nor, come to that, these past ten years.’

  I moved ahead of him, halting his progress, a flood of bad bile entering my gut.

  ‘You took one man’s word for that?’

  ‘Listen to me. No births at all in more than a month. Including bastards. Confirmed by the minister of the church, who also maintains that no child in recent memory has been delivered there from the belly.’

  Dudley’s eyes were lit with fury.

  ‘Now will you go back and talk to the bloody doctor?’

  XL

  A Different Canon

  DON’T MISUNDERSTAND ME. Robert Dudley was not like Carew. Behind the arrogance, my friend was an educated man with a questing mind. But he was yet a young man, with a young man’s impulse and a soldier’s spine, and there were times when all thought and reason would be kicked aside. And then you’d feel his hand quivering over the hilt of his sword, the air grown thin around him.