The Bones of Avalon

XV

Maggots

The mist… I hadn’t noticed how much it had thickened, enclouding the tower and writhing like a living thing around three figures, as if they had arisen with the mist or were formed out of it. Two of them in monks’ habit, hands hidden in conjoined sleeves.

Mistress Borrow addressed the third, a secular man, as tall as me, strong-built and limber as a larch tree, his witch taunt still smeared across the chilled air.

‘And since when’ – facing him, pale-cheeked but not, I thought, with fear – ‘since when has this land been yours, Sir Edmund? Some desperate deal with the Bishop of Wells?’

No response. His hair and beard were as one, close-barbered from the top of his skull to the edge of his full jawline. He wore a dark green doublet and black hose above boots of good leather. Wide belt, a sheathed sword hanging from it.

‘The Bishop of Wells,’ I observed, ‘would seem to be in no position to make deals.’

‘And who would you be, fellow?’

I’d expected a deep, roughened voice, but his was high and clipped. I held my ground. While my dark attire was hardly at the height of fashion, it must be evident that I was not of the peasantry.

‘Dr John,’ I said. ‘Of the Queen’s Commission on Antiquities.’

This intelligence was received, I’d concede, with no conspicuous awe.

‘Here on instruction of the Privy Council,’ I said mildly, as if by rote. ‘If you wish to inspect my papers of authority, I have them at the George Inn.’

Well, as you know, I was never good at this. Moving closer to these men to signify that I was not intimidated, I was still unsteady. Aware of the turf lifting with each step and praying that I should not be cast down again by some unaccountable slippage of the air.

‘And your name?’ I said.

‘Fyche. Sir Edmund. Of Meadwell. Owner of this ground.’ A vague gesture toward his monkish companions. ‘Brother Michael, Brother Stephen.’

A greybeard and a thin-faced youth. Connections forming: last night Sir Peter Carew had spoken of a former monk from the abbey using an inheritance to develop a farm and then establishing there a college for the education of the sons of gentlemen.

‘Dr John, if you’ – Mistress Borrow was pointing down the hill towards a wind-bent fence – ‘if you care to consult the records, you’ll find that the estate owned by Sir Edmund stops there. ’

‘However,’ Fyche said politely, ‘the way you came, you would have to cross my land to get here.’

‘Fie!’ Her back arching like a cat’s. ‘’Tis a right of way!’

‘I’ll have its ownership ascertained when I return to London,’ I said briskly. ‘However, as an officer of the Queen’s Commission I can take, with impunity, whichever route be most expedient for the furtherance of my business, which-’

‘Yes,’ Fyche said. ‘Tell us, please, about your particular business.’

His accent was of the west, yet educated. A survivor, Carew had said. Close up, I could see white specks in his beard. His skin was weathered but still taut. He was maybe five and forty years.

I explained that I was charged with a new listing of ancient structures and notation of their surviving contents and prevailing condition.

Fyche’s head tilted.

‘Like Leland?’

A loaded question.

‘Somewhat like Leland,’ I said. ‘But not, of course, with the same masters. What I mean is… no-one here need fear treachery.’

Fyche smiled. The curious mist wove yellowy wreaths around his boots.

‘And how would you know, Doctor? Did Leland realise his purpose when he took his list to London?’

‘I don’t know. Leland died.’

‘Having first gone mad, I’m told. However -’ Fyche raised a thumb to the broken tower – ‘as you can see, this church, despite its dominant situation and its dedication to the Archangel Michael, is ruined beyond easy repair. Does the Queen’s Commission have an answer to that?’

If it did, I couldn’t think of one.

‘Obviously,’ I said, ‘the continued need for a church up here would have to be weighed against other causes. For example… with the Church of the Baptist in the town, would there be much call now for continued worship up here?’

The mist stung my eyes. Fyche’s smile was looking worn.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it certainly goes on.’

‘What does?’

‘Worship,’ Fyche said.

I looked up at the tower, mist oozing from the crack in its side, a jagged tear as if it had been knifed.

‘The witch can tell you,’ Fyche said. ‘If she’s a mind to.’

Instinctively, I turned my head to Mistress Borrow.

Only to see her moving away towards the path winding down, her black cloak pulled around her, its hood up. She didn’t look back, and I felt an uncertainty within me and an unaccountable sense of coldness, longing… and loss.

I spun angrily back at Sir Edmund Fyche, but he’d already turned away.

‘Come with me, Dr John,’ he said, ‘if you have the time.’

Up to the very apex of the Glastonbury Tor. Through an archway into the tower itself. Which was, as it had seemed from afar, as Mistress Borrow had said, all but hollow, a vast chimney. Cracked flags and broken stones around our boots, Fyche kicking at one.

‘Defiled,’ he said.

Far above us, the white sky was stretched like a soiled bedsheet beyond a rotting cross of old timbers.

‘I’m told an earthquake did this,’ I said.

Fyche bent and picked up a dead rook by a black wing.

‘When a church is abandoned,’ he said, ‘it festers like a corpse. And attracts maggots.’

I said nothing, but recalled Mistress Borrow: 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.

‘A mess of them,’ Fyche said. ‘Squirming and roiling. A sickness. Can you not smell it?’

In truth, all I could smell was a Bible man’s soapy odour. Fyche tossed the wretched bird back into the rubble.

‘As a Justice of the Peace, I’m tasked with breaking up all ungodly assemblies. Whether dealing with the instigators myself or handing them over to the Church courts.’

I nodded, wary now. Although the extent of their powers seemed to vary from town to town, a local JP was never someone to be lightly dismissed. He would have firm connections in this county while, with Dudley ill and Carew gone to Devonshire, I had none.

Yet it would not be good to be seen to back down before this man or to appear less than confident in my own authority.

‘This talk of witchcraft… Sir Edmund, Mistress Borrow is simply the physician summoned to treat my colleague – abed with a fever. Nothing she’s done so far suggests devilry.’

He made no response to this, strode back to the archway. I followed him out of the tower, across the springy turf until he stopped on the eastern flank of the tor where the air was clearer. Woodland lay below us dark-haloed by a curling of smoke from tall chimneys.

‘Foul rites,’ Fyche said. ‘Lewd practices.’

‘I see.’

And thought that I did, as he spun at me.

‘No. You do not see. You don’t see the fires in the midnight, you don’t look up and see the maggot-people chattering and squealing to the moon. Nor walk up here the next day to find new-born babes in the grass with their throats cut in sacrifice.’

‘You’re serious?’

I didn’t believe it, of course, thought it a Bible-man’s bullshit. But a Bible man who was also a JP… you did not just walk away.

‘Why was a church built here?’ Fyche said. ‘Hardly an obvious spot. No community here.’

‘Just a hill.’

‘A hill. Exactly. And before the church, right where we’re standing… were stones. High stones. Raised by low men.’

‘You mean Druid stones?’

‘Heathen stones.’

I nodded, feeling the trickle of an old spring in my spine.

‘Paganism,’ Fyche said. ‘Witchery.’

Looking down at the turf, as if something black and noxious might be seen oozing to its surface.

‘Fools say the King of the Faerie, Gwyn ap Nudd, has his chambers here, under our feet. Hence the church’s dedication to St Michael, the warrior angel, to drive out old superstition.’

‘Sadly, no defence against an earthquake,’ Dr John said in his prosaic, list-maker’s way.

While Dr Dee thought, What does this truly mean? Dr Dee, who knew too much to dismiss heathenism as primitivism, aware that these men, these Druids, in their ways, knew more then than we do now about the forces within the land. Or at least experienced more through natural magic, natural science. For these low men, whether they knew it or not, lived in the days when Pythagoras heard the music of the planets.

‘Earthquake?’ Fyche smiled sourly. ‘That was Gwyn ap Nudd shaking the hill in his rage. That’s what the peasants’ll tell you. And in their fear, they’ll make obeisance to him, lest their hovels collapse around them. Encouraged, always, by the witches, who yet come creeping to the tor in the belief that something here empowers them.’

I looked down the hillside with its veil of mist. No sign now of Mistress Borrow. Something tugged in my breast. I wrapped my arms around myself, wanting to be away from here, from this man, to ponder on how this place might yet empower me.

And to find her.

‘It would seem to me,’ I said, ‘that if this hill is become infested with heathen practices since the collapse of its church, then the surest way to keep the evil at bay would be to… rebuild the church?’

Fyche shook his head.

‘Maybe. In good time. Not yet. Before any restoration is even attempted – yet again – the area around and beneath the stones, the very earth, must needs be cleansed.’

‘How?’ I said. ‘By blessing?’

‘And prayers, thrice daily. I’m also seeking leave, through the Church courts, to have all access to the tor prohibited… for laymen… until such times as we learn how best to re-sanctify it.’

‘This is why you surround yourself with religious men?’

I considered the two monks, only one of whom remained: the elder seated on the grass some yards away, reading from a small book, the title of which I could not make out.

‘Dr John,’ Fyche said. ‘Let there be no doubt. I am a religious man. The law of the land and the law of God are, at last, as one, and I’m called to uphold them both.’

I had answers to this, but Dr John had none.

‘When I was a young monk,’ Fyche said, ‘at the abbey, in its latter days, my older brothers would look over here – to the tor – and they’d shudder and say, Who’ll keep back the darkness when we’re gone?’

‘Knowing what was to come to the abbey?’

‘We all knew it would come.’ Fyche breathed in slowly. ‘I thought myself, at the time, to be more fortunate than most of my brothers, having inherited this land from an uncle. Not realising, at first, that this came with a terrible burden of responsibility. God… places us in the roles where we can most effectively do his work.’

The mist had thickened and with it came confusion. I’d begun to see Fyche as a man reborn into puritanism’s narrow passageway, but nothing here was simple.

‘This is the most sacred place in England,’ he said. ‘Blessed by Our Lord Himself, and thus invested with a rare spiritual power. Which others seek to corrupt to gratify their earthly lusts and base desires. In the absence of the abbey, there must needs be a bastion against this, or the town will become a pit of filth.’

‘Yes.’

No-one could deny the sense of this, but…

‘I met with some of my former brothers, and we prayed together. And then, in answer to those prayers, other men of God travelled to join us. It was interpreted to us that God wanted us to collect all the knowledge that might have been lost.’

An aim, I’d admit, not far removed from my own in establishing a national library.

‘Were you among the monks who petitioned Queen Mary for a restoration of the abbey?’

‘Not the answer,’ Fyche said. ‘Times change. God shows us new ways.’

‘A school?’

While monasteries fell, schools and colleges survived and prospered. As a graduate of Cambridge and Louvain, I knew how influential a cluster of powerful minds could be. And, on occasion, how disruptive.

‘Sons of the nobility were sent from all Europe to study at the abbey. We plan to restore that tradition… from a different viewpoint, obviously. While it’s true that we began with the blessing of the Bishop of Wells – who, as you noted, Dr John, is now in disfavour – I can assure you that every man here has put papacy well behind him and is ready to swear allegiance to the Queen as his spiritual-’

‘Not my business, Sir Edmund.’

If there were cause to suspect his loyalty, he’d hardly have remained a JP. And it would hardly be the role of Dr John, the antiquary, to question his religious allegiance.

‘As regards your own assignment,’ Fyche said, ‘I’d suggest that what was important about the monasteries was not so much the buildings nor the treasures they held, which are now scattered to the winds. It was the depth of knowledge and wisdom retained by the monks themselves. Which should and will be passed on.’

Dr Dee would agree with fervour; Dr John said nothing. The older monk was standing now, peering over his book, smiling gently. He wore a soft black hat and his beard was like to a pointed spade.

‘He can’t hear us,’ Fyche said. ‘Brother Michael is deaf and mute. The story is that he awoke from a beatific dream one morning, with neither hearing nor speech. Since then, with no men’s talk to distract him, he hears only the voices of angels. Thus, as you may imagine, his moral and spiritual judgement is… much valued.’

‘So he’s one of the men whose vision…?’

‘No-one,’ Fyche said, ‘should ignore the words of angels.’

At once, I wanted to know more of this. Wondered if the day would come when I would be willing to sacrifice my own speech and my ears for an inner communion with the higher spheres. Recalling nights when I’d been in such frustration and despair that I might happily have made the deal before dawn.

‘So…’ Fyche had come closer. ‘Would you care to search my buildings, Dr John?’

‘Sir Edmund-’

‘My farm? The school? Are you thinking that some of the monks here came with treasures from the abbey? Could we, perchance, be serving small beer from the Holy Grail?’

‘Thus turning it into the finest wine?’

He didn’t laugh.

‘There’s no gold here, Dr John. Only a treasury of learning. And the desire to contain what must be contained.’

I stepped back from him, thinking hard. There might never be a better opportunity to approach the matter of the bones of Arthur. Of a sudden, I felt tinglingly close to an elusive mystery. Yes, the real treasure here, in a landscape where spheres of being might merge one with another, would indeed be more elusive than gold. But what, in the material sense, might be inside this too-perfect conical mound?

However, Dr Dee must needs conceal his esoteric interests. While Dr John would be yet wary of this one-time monk turned lawman. As for the other person within me…

Oh yes, there was another, now. A third person.

One who, looking down towards the path, wanted nothing so much as to be on it, and running. For inside this third person something was fluttering like to a trapped bird.

The mist had thinned again, as if some old enchantment had been broken, or a new one formed. And it was the third man who spread his hands to prevent them shaking and prepared to lie.

‘Sir Edmund… even if there were cause to suspect you or your establishment of concealing treasure-’

Fyche watching me steadily, like to a hawk upon a bough.

‘Then what could I do,’ I said, ‘but take my suspicions to a… Justice of the Peace?’

His eyes widened momentarily, then dulled, and he smiled. Knowing now what he was dealing with: a jobbing servant of the Crown who’d muddy no pools and was, like most of his kind, corruptible. There was even a kind of contempt in that smile. I was glad to observe it and made a small bow.

‘And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I should go and inquire about the health of my colleague.’

Fyche nodded.

‘If I were you, Dr John, I’d set about finding him a qualified physician. If the witch has dosed him with nightshade, you’ll never prove it once he’s dead.’

‘We needed a doctor,’ Dr John said humbly. ‘And were told that, apart from Mistress Borrow, there was no-one.’

‘Then, trust me, Dr John,’ Fyche said. ‘No-one would have been the safer choice. Good day to you.’

He nodded a stern farewell, his face quiet, then turned and walked away, and I headed for the footpath. I would not give way to the third man and go looking for Mistress Borrow, I would continue with my mission and seek out the bone-seller mentioned by Cowdray.

But then, at the footpath’s edge, I stopped, of a sudden, as if both my legs were seized, and looked back at Fyche over my shoulder, calling to him.

‘Would it be permissible, Sir Edmund, to ask what evidence there is against Mistress Borrow?’

He stopped.

‘In the matter of witchcraft?’ I said.

Fyche turned, remaining a good twenty yards away, fingering his jaw, considering. Then he approached slowly, until he stood before me again.

‘Dr John, you might think me a harsh man. But our roles in life alter, according to the will of God. Until the Dissolution of the abbey, I was a monk. Now I’m the father of two sons. A landowner. A Justice of the Peace. The words justice and peace being at the very heart of God’s teaching.’ He paused for a moment. ‘The main evidence against Eleanor Borrow would be of birth and circumstance.’

I waited. The ruin of the church tower shimmered in the lightening mist, spectral. As if it were of the mist. Or made of glass.

‘I was obliged,’ Fyche said, ‘to hang her mother.’

Yes, I could have taken this further, but that would have meant pursuing him, maybe revealing too much. I’m not good at this.

I walked away, slowly.

At first.

Until I was out of sight of Fyche and the monks, and then there was a green-grey blurring of turf and sky as I went stumbling in a frenzy down the devil’s hill, eyes flicking this way, that way, ignoring the path, tripping twice before ground level, then tumbling over the stile to the holy well, wood-splinters piercing the soft, white flesh of my bookman’s hands.

Calling out for her, an owl-screech in my head yet still deafening in its intensity.

Eleanor!

And even once…

Nel…

No-one there. Only the powerful hiss of the blood water racing through the veins of the sacred earth.

’Tis certain true to say that some men and women here are driven very speedily into madness.

How speedily? Two hours? Three hours? Or had whole weeks and months gone by since I first walked with her – as with men and women captured and taken into the faerie world?

Now I was falling, near-sobbing, to the ground, splashing the blood-water on my face, into my eyes.

Jesu, what am I become?