by Phil Rickman
LV
Tainted
I’VE SEEN HANGINGS, we all have. Hangings and beheadings and burnings, mostly undeserved. The one which had most affected me was the burning of Barthlet Green. Just a man with whom I’d shared a prison cell. A mild good-natured man.
Who’d burned.
A harder death than hanging. Or so it was said.
But who knew? Who’d ever come back from the flames or the noose?
An unearthly last glare in the west. Amber and white streaks, a dawn sky at night.
Half in this sick world, half in hell, the bookman went scrambling up the flank of the conical hill, legs numbed, hands torn on barbs and briars, print-weakened eyes straining at the glow which fanned around the summit as if the whole hill were opened into the golden court of the King of Faerie.
When, close to the top, I was sinking to my knees in exhaustion, heaving my guts into the mud, her voice came to me, soft and light.
Be not alarmed, Dr John, you’re hardly the first to lose his balance up here.
Tears blinded me.
Why was it not to be done with discretion? Robert Dudley had asked, and now it was. Dawn was become dusk. Misinformation to forestall any outcry from the town, deal with it in darkness then leave the body hanging until it were ripped clean of all womanly beauty and the place where it was done tainted again.
A place which was tainted and tainted and tainted again. A hill persecuted for being different. I scrambled up into a ground mist which seemed to come from within, as if the tor sought to hide itself from man and what he did.
‘May God have mercy on this sinful town! May the light of God shine upon this poisoned place.’
The twisted indignity of it.
The fat vicar of St Benignus with his unwashed robe and his Book of Common Prayer.
I dragged myself to the top, bleeding from both hands, as muted male voices were descending in lumpen amen.
Stood trembling.
A ground mist was rising on the summit, where two blazing torches were lofted on poles bringing the ruined tower of St Michael to an unreal life. There were men with staffs and pikes, but not more than a dozen. One of them the man with grey hair and cracked teeth and a knowledge of death by hanging and why women made not much of a show of it.
The gibbet, maybe ten feet tall, was firmly staked before the tower, like a open doorway, its feet swathed in mist but the top of its frame hard against the lingering light, pink now, like bloodied milk.
Grunts and mutters. The bottom of an orchard ladder could be seen propped against the stock of the gibbet, rising from the brown mist.
Carew stood a few yards away, in leather hat and jerkin, hands linked behind him, rocking back and forth, impatient, and when I ran to him he didn’t look at me, his voice a murmur.
‘God’s spleen, Dee, will I never get you from under my fucking boots?’
‘Sir Peter, I need you to listen to me.’
Was what I meant to say, but the smoke from the torches caught at my throat.
‘Damn mist,’ Carew said. ‘Would’ve had three of ’em brought up if I’d thought.’
‘I must needs tell you—’
‘Never been up for learning, Doctor. Not your kind anyway.’ He turned, a firelit flash of teeth in the beard. ‘If you have any magic to spare to give the poor bitch a swift death, she’d doubtless appreciate it.’ Sniffed the air. ‘Quite a beauty. Hadn’t realised.’
Nodding at the gibbet, a small group of men round it now, the vicar of St Benignus telling us we should not suffer a witch to live, as they brought her out, in her blue overdress, smirched and muddied, though her hair looked combed and drifted behind her shoulders.
‘Stop them… please… for Christ’s sake!’
I think she looked towards me as if she recognised a voice and then turned away as I threw at Carew the only words that might wake him from his mental slumber.
‘It’s part of a papist plot.’
He laughed.
‘You see any papists here?’
‘Yes!’
He looked at me, his curiosity at last alive, but it was too late then.
You forgot how quick it could be.
The torchlight had gone pale with vapour, and of a sudden she was there on the ladder, hands bound behind her, the vicar’s voice floating over her in the dusk.
‘May the death of this sinner bring atonement and cleanse this town forever of all filth and wickedness, idolatry and the worship of all false gods.’
‘That arsehole annoys me nearly as much as you,’ Carew said.
A movement on the ladder, a crisp slap.
‘I swear to God if you touch me there again, I’ll die cursing you to perdition.’
Laughter and coughing in the mist, and someone asked her if she had anything to say before sentence was carried out, and I heard her say with contempt, ‘To you?’
The bookman throwing his gasping, sorry self through flickering air as the short ladder was tipped to the ground and the group of men parted before him to reveal the body of Nel Borrow swaying slowly against the flesh-coloured sky.
The vicar, with his Bible and his back to the hanging woman, singing out.
‘The witch is gone to Satan. May the light of God come to us all.’
LVI
Brown Blanket
A HALF CIRCLE of men were around us, the two torch-carriers standing either side of the gibbet frame, and in the fuzzy light I saw Fyche and his son, Stephen, and Sir Peter Carew, pale-eyed in the thick air. A jabbering amongst them, and then Carew’s voice was lifted above it.
‘Hellfire, let him alone. If he wishes to pull her neck like a chicken, so be it, the end’s the same.’
Still I held her up, arms wrapped about her covered legs, my cheek against a thigh. Could feel the rope that bound her hands. Gripped one of the hands, and it was cold. Prayed, as I’d never prayed before, to God and all the angels, the noise in my head like the bells crashing in the tower from which all the bells were long gone.
‘In fact, give a hand, Simmons,’ Carew said.
The man with cracked teeth moving forward, pushing aside the vicar, who was still bent and retching from my blow to his throat…
…and then stopping.
‘Well, go on, man!’ Carew roared. ‘Before his feeble fucking spine snaps.’
I looked up and saw what the man with cracked teeth saw.
‘Angels!’ he screamed.
But what I saw was a white-gold bird rising from the fire of two torches meeting in the mist with a burst of gases.
Then the rope gave, and she felt into my arms, her body slumped against my head and shoulders. Dead weight but I would not let go, would never let go.
The mist gathering around us, wrapping us in its brown blanket.
‘Say it!’ Dudley snarled. ‘Say what you did.’
Stephen Fyche was backed up against a leg of the gibbet. He stumbled, swore. I had the impression he’d been drinking. His father turned and walked away.
‘You had a nail hammered under his fingernails,’ Dudley said. ‘Then, when he yielded nothing, you started to slit his gut.’
The pikemen’s hands were tensed around their weapons for they knew not this man who’d strode through the mist, his sword out to cut through the hangman’s rope.
‘No…’ Stephen glancing around, maybe looking for his father. He wore his monk’s robe and his new beard looked to have been cut fine and sharp for the occasion. ‘That’s horseshit. Who is this fucking bladder?’
I kept quiet, sitting in the mud under the still-swinging rope, my arms around Nel, listening to her breath coming in harsh snorts. Celestial music.
Fyche was back. Somebody must have told him who Dudley was, most likely Carew.
‘My Lord, before you accuse my son—’
‘Who took out his guts?’ Dudley said to Stephen Fyche. ‘Who took out his heart with the doctor’s tools?’
‘The fucking witch!’
‘Why not the
doctor himself?’
A small sound came out of Nel’s half-strangled throat. Dudley edged closer to Stephen Fyche.
‘Tell us, boy.’
‘Aye,’ Carew said. ‘Maybe you better had.’
‘How…’ Stephen Fyche rose to his full height, swaying. Even I could smell the wine on his breath. ‘How dare you accuse a man of God, sirrah?’
And turned slightly, and I saw that he held a dagger close to his side and that Dudley saw it, too, and his hand was making a familiar short journey to his belt.
‘No trial needed here, then,’ Dudley said.
‘Uh… no.’ Carew gripping his wrist, twisting his sword out of his grasp. ‘Not your place.’
I’d seen something akin to this before.
Carew half turning this time, holding Dudley’s side-sword in both hands, and then the sword was a tongue of flame in the light of the torches and there was a look of faint puzzlement on the youthful face of Stephen Fyche as his body sagged below it.
Carew moved twice more, short hacks, and Stephen’s head seemed, for an instant, to be quite still in the air before it dropped to earth and rolled once into the grass where the body already lay, spouting its blood into the soil.
‘My place, I think,’ Carew said.
The silence on the tor seemed eternal. It was as if it were done by the hill itself. As if, deprived of one life, it had taken another.
LVII
The Void
THE FISH HILL was where Joseph of Arimathea had disembarked, stabbing his staff into the good soil of Avalon.
Soil so good, in fact, that the staff sprouted buds and grew into a thorn bush which yet survived, or descendants of it, and came into flower each Christmas Day.
Joe Monger had told me that. A pretty tale with many echoes, this hill being one of the fishes in the starsign of Pisces, whose age began with the coming of Christianity. I’d sat by this thorn bush before, not knowing of the legend, and sat there again in the chill breeze as the year approached the day when St David died, aged one hundred, a thousand or so years ago.
St David? Oh, yes, he was here too, how could he not have been?
Sitting here, you could see both the abbey and the tor. Maybe this was the medium between the two worlds, Christian and pagan, natural and celestial. He’d known what he did, the abbot, in giving this land to Cate Borrow, for the purpose of healing.
‘The abbot’s thought,’ Nel said, ‘was that if the medical herbs traditionally related to certain starsigns in the sky were to be grown inside the corresponding formations upon the ground… then the healing properties of them would be quite marvellously increased.’
‘She told you this?’
‘Of course not. It came to me when I awoke this morning. I remembered that when a particular herb did well here – yarrow or camomile, I forget which – then she’d say, Aha, this plant is responsive to the sign of the fishes. And I remembered how she’d go off with the abbot to plant herbs in other fields belonging to the abbey and… that’s my guess.’
The logic of it was beyond assail. Cate taken into the confidence of the monks at the abbey who held the secret of the Zodiac. Working with them on a new kind of astrological healing. The implications were fascinating.
‘I suppose ’tis not the only secret of the Zodiac, and far from the most important, but…’
She smiled and squeezed my hand, and I looked at her with longing but no real hope. Though we’d lain together four nights now, I was sensing, in the sweetness of it, a parting rather than a beginning.
It had been nearly a week before she was able to speak without pain. She said this was only because of the burns and the weals yet apparent on her throat despite all the balms and ointments applied to it by Joan Tyrre. But I thought there was more. My feeling was that she’d foresworn all speech until she had an understanding.
She wore the blue overdress and a worn muslin scarf to keep the breeze from her throat. Below us, we could see the tip of the cross marking Cate’s grave, beyond it the abbey laid out like some broken golden coronet.
‘You’re sure you didn’t see him?’ she said. ‘He was standing next to you for several moments.’
I shook my head. I think she meant the abbot. Cowdray had said there were more people seen on the top of the tor that night than had come down from it.
‘I saw only the phoenix made by the torches,’ I said. ‘I’m just a dull and bookish man who has not the sight.’
The laughter came from deep in her throat, which must have hurt.
And I was still wondering what was real, what was dream or the runaway imagination of a man starved of food for a day, and sleep for longer. I’d mentioned to no-one my meeting with Nostradamus, who was gone by the time Carew’s men went into Meadwell. As were all the statues and the tabernacle in the chapel.
Little firm evidence against Fyche himself, Carew claimed, though it was Dudley’s suspicion that Fyche knew too much about Carew for him to be brought before an assize. But his status as Justice of the Peace seemed likely to be short-lived.
His son would be buried without ceremony. Raising a dagger to the Queen’s Master of the Horse? Carew had said mildly. What choice did I have?
I couldn’t help dwelling on the possible reasons for Fyche trying to pass off the malignant Stephen as a monk. Had he actually thought that when Mary was Queen of England, the Pope back as head of the Church and the abbey rebuilt, it might be placed under Stephen’s control?
Madness. But then, many abbots and many bishops had been closer to the devil…
Had Brother Michael returned to France in the company of his old friend, Matthew Borrow? If I were looking for cause to believe that Michel de Nostradame was guilty of epic deceit, I could think of no better evidence than his friendship with Borrow.
What was this man?
Why had neither his wife nor his daughter, even in the shadow of the noose, been prepared to raise voice against him?
In the week since Dudley’s departure, I’d attended Benlow’s burial, along with the re-burial, in the goose field behind the Church of the Baptist, of all the bones in his cellar, and also revisited Mistress Cadwaladr. Now that Borrow was gone from the town and Fyche’s status was in question, many more truths were emerging.
Monger had recalled how, in the early ’30s, not long after the King had proclaimed himself head of the Church, someone had suggested to the abbot that the abbey’s treasures should be sent to France, where they might remain in the care of the Catholic Church. Fyche, the bursar? Almost certainly. But Richard Whiting, an Englishman to his soul, had been unconvinced – still, apparently, believing that the dark hand of Cromwell would never descend upon the fount of English Christianity. And, indeed, it would be five years or more before it did.
From Mistress Cadwaladr, I’d learned of Cate’s first meeting with the man who was to become her husband, when he’d come to the abbey to spear a boil on the abbot’s neck. An unlikely match for the doctor, this recently illiterate kitchenmaid.
For while she was undoubtedly beautiful, Cate was also with child.
Was ever a woman more grateful to a man? Mistress Cadwaladr said. I swear she would have died for him.
And had.
The way I saw it, Borrow had known his mission might take years. He needed a wife to keep the other women and their ambitious fathers from his door. If he turned down too many he’d arouse suspicions. Or be thought a Bessie. He’d be looking for a woman of…
‘Little education,’ Mistress Cadwaladr had said. ‘Knowing her place. No inclination to question his movements. A housemaid with a ring.’
And that, for a number of years, was what he had. I suppose it was learning to read which had begun the change in her, but it was a slow change and a long time before she became a threat to him and his clandestine work for the French. Maybe Cate, working ever closer to her husband, had begun to suspect that he was not all he seemed. Perchance when he’d gone out to see some sick person whom she’d met in the market ne
xt day, perfectly fit, not having seen the doctor in months. She was no longer the woman he thought he’d married. One way or another she’d have found him out. And from then on she’d be marked for death.
The inhumanity of the religious zealot. What were two women’s lives against the delivery of a country back to Rome and the one true Church?
Fyche’s hatred of witches and the dust of vision must have seemed opportune. And I’d bet my library that the theft from the surgery, leading to the death of the boy in Somerton, had somehow been contrived by Borrow.
The wind rattled the thorn tree born of Joseph’s staff. It was grown colder now, in keeping with Benlow’s warning that winter was not yet gone.
Nel said, ‘I was brought up to revere him for his skills and saintly generosity. And not to bother him with childish matters.’
Staring out across the town, her voice even, without heat or bitterness. The voice of a woman who was back from the dead but not entirely. A Persephone who’d left some part of herself in the underworld. I knew then that there were elements of her which would also be beyond the understanding even of a man of science and a student of the hidden.
‘She never told you you were not his child?’
‘She told no-one.’
‘When did you learn?’
‘Not from my mother. Not till after her death.’
‘When Mistress Cadwaladr returned to Glastonbury?’
‘She was only one who knew. The only one who cared to know.’
Nel said nothing for a few moments, then she turned to look at me, hot pain in her eyes.
‘John, it only made me want to be closer to him. I’ve been proud to be the daughter of Matthew Borrow, the finest physician in all Somerset.’
She looked across to the abbey ruins. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘I’ll find him. So many questions.’
It was my hope she’d never find him.