The Bones of Avalon

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.

‘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?’

‘And this is important, Doctor?’ Looking up at me, of a sudden suspicious. ‘This has an importance for your work in the listing of the Queen’s antiquities?’

As if she were awakening from some daydream… as if we both were held in a spell which she must needs break.

‘I’m interested,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

‘We should go.’ She was looking away, to somewhere beyond the circle of thorn trees, scrambling coltishly to her feet. ‘I have visits to make. To the sick.’

Snatching up her bag before I could reach it, she moved away betwixt the apple trees and was almost in collision with the panting bulk of Dudley’s groom, Martin Lythgoe.

‘Beg mercy, Doctor…’

Red in the face, his thatch of yellow hair standing up in spikes, a ragged scratch scoring one cheek.

‘I’m reet glad to’ve found thee. Me master-’

I leapt up.

‘Is he worse?’

‘No, he’s… much the same. He were asleep when I left him. It’s just he said – before he become ill, like – as how we should watch out for thee.’

‘Me?’

‘And what do I do, wi’ the master all laid up, but go buggering off checking on th’horses and let yer go wandering off on yer own. Well…’ He looked at Mistress Borrow. ‘Pardon me, I din’t known tha were wi’ him, Doctor.’

If he’d been following me, he must have known, but I let it pass.

‘Martin, I’m a grown man.’

‘Aye, well, I can see that, but me master, he reckons…’

However you survived in the cesspits of Paris and Antwerp without me around to save your sorry arse I shall never know.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I know what he reckons. Martin… ’ Looking into his eyes and speaking with deliberation in the hope he would get the underlying message that I was engaged in picking up useful intelligence. ‘Doctor Borrow… has shown me the holy well… to get some iron water. To aid Master Roberts’s recovery?’

‘Aye, aye.’ He nodded. ‘Not a problem, sir.’ Straightening his leather jerkin, casting a sideways glance at Mistress Borrow. ‘Anyroad, I think, under t’circumstances, Master Roberts would understand.’

‘Circumstances?’

Martin Lythgoe gave me a discreet… what looked to be a wink.

What?

I felt my cheeks suffused with blood.

‘I’ll leave thee to it, then, sir.’

He beamed.

‘No… Martin…’

‘Aye?’

‘If you want to help me -’ groping wildly for something sounding halfway authoritative – ‘there’s someone you might talk to. Cowdray spoke last night of a former monk from the abbey who’d become a farrier. I thought that, with your own work with horses, you might find a plausible reason to approach him?’

‘I could do that.’

‘You know what we’re looking for. What information we seek, and to what purpose?’

‘Oh, aye.’

‘And could inquire with discretion?’

‘I reckon yer mare could do wi’ some new shoes for t’journey back to Bristol.’

‘That would be a very good reason to make an approach.’

‘Awreet then, I’ll seek out this feller, and I’ll sithee back at th’ inn, Dr John.’

He patted down his haystack hair, nodded to Mistress Borrow and blundered away amongst the guardian apple trees, leaving me struggling to assemble an apologetic smile.

‘My… usual work being with manuscripts and books, my colleagues think me unused to the outside world.’

‘’Tis a real mystery to me how they could think that.’

Lips unsmiling, but her eyes were dancing, and the discomfort in me burst its dam.

‘I’d like to see the church.’

‘Church?’

‘ That church. Upon the tor. The devil’s hill. Whoever the devil may be, in this instance – the wizard Merlin, the King of the Faerie, the… to a Catholic, the Protestants are devils.’

Flinging out too many words, as usual, when I’m in a turmoil.

‘But there’s nothing up there,’ she said. ‘Even the tower’s all but hollow now.’

‘You call the remains of a church nothing? And what’s that terracing around the hill? Like to old fortifications.’

She shrugged.

‘Antiquities are my business,’ I said stiffly. ‘I can’t very well neglect this one.’

Knowing not, in truth, why I had to go up there, to a place that seemed so forbidding. Maybe because it was forbidding. To demonstrate that I was a man unafraid to challenge the devil.

Or even just a man.

‘Very well.’ The doctor gathered up her cloak. ‘This way…’

The path curved, making the ascent less steep than the appearance of the tor suggested. But it still was not a pleasant climb, and all the way I carried a damp and dolorous feeling of what it must have been like for the elderly, aching Abbot Whiting, hauled up on a hurdle to a certain death.

Like to the labouring of Christ, with his cross, up the hill of Calvary, the place of skulls.

Or worse. Close to the summit I stopped and looked back. The path was quite treacherously steep. Imagine pulling an old man all the way up here on a hurdle.

And three men?

Why? Why three?

A trinity.

Why here? Why have a public execution on this most inaccessible of hills? If they’d wanted to make an exhibition of it, entertain a crowd, why not the centre of the town?

The tower began to rise before us, as if it were thrust out of the hill, and the wrongness of everything became blindingly evident. For who in his right mind would build a church upon such an isolated, sharpened point of land? A castle or a fort, but not a place of worship.

As we came closer, the tower was revealed to be of grey-brown stone, and cracked open down one side, a fissure in it like a broken tooth, and the body around it was little more than foundations.

When I clambered to the top of the hill a few yards behind Mistress Borrow, it was like arriving upon a cloud in the sky. And when I stood close to the tower…

‘Do you not feel it relates more to the air than to the earth?’ she said.

‘Yes. Maybe.’

A needle to pierce the heavens and draw down lightning. Illumination.

I looked down, dizzied. Despite a thin mist, the views on offer were unexpected. Not only a vista of the town and the abbey like to a close-sewn crop betwixt the other hills, but of the flatlands to the west, all the way to the grey sea – the level country veined with narrow channels of water, swollen here and there into pools and lakes, and you could feel that it still belonged to the sea and might yet be reclaimed, becoming a true island again. For this, I realised now, was surely the very heart of what remained of the Isle of Avalon.

Merlin’s lair and known to Arthur. An excitement trickled into my spine, like a spring through rocks, and my head was as light as down-feathers. There was a momentary kindling of illumination and then – dear Christ – all my senses were crowding together, dropping as one into the bottom of my gut, where lies the lower mind, the arousal becoming a slow-swelling alarm as all the land fell into a tilt, a vast platter of greens and greys and browns and…

…I found me on my back on the turf, with the tower racing away from me towards a bright hole in the clouds.

‘God!’

Rising up on my elbows, all leaden-headed, dazed and ashamed that such a short climb should have so sapped my strength that I should fall into a womanly faint.

The lightness of her feet over the springy turf as she came to stand above me, arms folded. That cross-toothed smile and a barely veiled merriment in the green eyes.

‘Be not alarmed, Dr John, you’re hardly the first to lose his balance up here.’

Holding out a slender hand to me, but I wouldn’t take it and struggled unaided to my feet and still felt unsteady, cold sweat on my forehead. On the top of a high mountain, it becomes harder to breathe, but this was a mere tump. I was shaken and more than a little afeared that I might be coming down with Dudley’s fever.

‘It’s my fault,’ she said. ‘I should have warned you. As I said, this sometimes-’

‘Not to you,’ I said. ‘Evidently.’

‘No indeed,’ a man’s voice said. ‘How swiftly the devil’s claws reach out to his children…’

I turned.

He had his back to the tower.

His tone was soft and unhurried and weighted with a drawling ennui that spoke more of parts of London or Cambridge than this wild place.

‘Throw a witch into a pond and she’s said to float,’ he observed mildly. ‘Expose a witch to the seething air around Satan’s altar and she’ll gather all the floating imps to her rancid tits.’