The Bones of Avalon

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 the 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.’

‘So, apart from this wool-merchant, who-?’

‘She tried it on herself. But with restraint, in the merest quantities. Matthew took it once – never again, he’ll tell you. When it was used they’d make sure whoever took it was never left alone, lest they might cause harm to themselves.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll come to that.’

‘So these…’ I recalled Cecil’s words. ‘These visions…’

‘I…’ Monger was hesitant. ‘I’ve heard it said that the place where the potion was ingested… might alter the response. And I imagine it would also be affected by the humour of the man ingesting it. Or the woman.’

I waited. So dim was it now that I could barely see his face, let alone read his expression.

‘Joan Tyrre,’ he said. ‘On hearing of the dust of vision, Joan Tyrre… was eager. And thus, in her foolish, innocent way, became the cause of Cate’s downfall.’

Joan Tyrre was herself a herbalist, if hardly in Cate’s company, and years earlier had been making another precarious living, in Taunton, out of her relations with the faerie. Joan apparently naming people the faerie had told her were bewitched and offering them help.

I’d heard of this unsavoury practice, preying upon the poor and desperate, and knew it couldn’t have lasted long before drawing the attention of the Church.

It hadn’t. Brought before the church court, Joan had admitted all and sworn herself to the service of God… while thinking to return, more discreetly, to her former trade in another part of the town when all the fuss had died down. But the faerie do not easily forgive such a betrayal and – or so she’d claim later – would no longer confide in her.

Having also left her near-blind. This was when she’d decided to leave Taunton for what she’d heard were the more openly mystical humours of Glastonbury.

‘She’d seen the tor,’ Monger said. ‘In the distance, magical in the evening light. And heard the tales of the King of the Faerie, Gwyn ap Nudd, still in residence in the heart of it.’

Thinking that the great Gwyn might be responsive to her urgent pleas, Joan had walked to Glastonbury, joining a band of travellers for protection. In a wood near the foot of the tor, she’d fashioned for herself a rude shelter out of bent saplings and thatch. It was summer, and she’d slept there for some weeks, praying that she might be taken into the hall of the faerie.

‘So Joan’s relations with the faerie,’ I said, ‘were not just…’

‘Of her own invention?’ Monger said. ‘Many people say she’s mad as a hare, and yet…’

Weeks had passed. Joan had been chilled to the bone by the winds of autumn, no illumination to warm her nights. Joe Monger himself had found her one day, collapsed in her shelter, half-starved. Bringing her into town and taking her to Matthew Borrow, who gave her a bed in the ante-chamber of his surgery, sometimes used as a hospital. When she was recovered, the Borrows had found her a position as housekeeper to an old woman who shared her fascination with the faerie.

But Joan was still cast down, and her sight was worse. Hearing of the experience of Monger’s friend, the wool-merchant, she’d returned, in despair, to Cate Borrow, begging her to disclose the herbal ingredients of the powder which offered entry to the very Garden of Eden, with its skies the colour of green apples and the forests all blue like some distant sea. Or, as she would see it…

‘The land of faerie?’ I said. ‘Cate Borrow, of course, refused, deeming Joan to be a woman of unsound temper who might be left sorely damaged. But Joan wouldn’t leave her alone. Her proposal was to go one last time to the top of the tor and dose herself with the dust of vision, there before the ruins of the church of St Michael.’

‘A bold woman.’

‘Moonstruck,’ Monger said. ‘She’d stopped eating by then. Starved herself for weeks. If you think she’s thin now… my God. Clothes hanging off her, hair falling out. Opening her arms to death. In the end… Cate relented. On condition that she and Matthew should accompany Joan to the tor and remain with her while she took the potion. Matthew having resisted it to the end, of course, repelled by thoughts of Joan Tyrre screeching to the sky in helpless ecstasy in possibly the most visible place in all Somerset. Then finally accepting that it should be done on All Hallows Eve.’

I shrank back.

‘Quite,’ Monger said. ‘Matthew, however – you should know that Matthew goes to church just enough to avoid penalty and only too glad to be called away to a case of sickness in the middle of it. His science is, I would say, a narrower science than yours.’

‘You mean he has no belief in God or the spiritual?’

‘No faith I’m aware of, no fear. Matthew fears only men – unlike most others here, as you can imagine. On All Hallows Eve, the town lights its lamps, bars its doors and firmly turns its back on the tor.’

‘The devil’s hill.’

‘This might be the one night they could be sure to be alone there. Or that anyone else up there’ – I sensed a rueful smile from Monger – ‘would be too far gone in madness to pay heed to Joan Tyrre.’

‘Or, presumably, that Joan would, on the eve itself, be too affeared to go on with the venture and…’

‘Exactly that,’ Monger said. ‘Matthew said that if Joan backed away now, at least that would be an end to it.’

I sat and waited for Monger to tell me what had happened in the end, but he became reticent, saying only that Joan did not back away, with the result that they went, the three of them, on All Hallows Eve, to the tor.

To my own mind, having myself been aware of the strange air upon the tor, Joan Tyrre was either very brave, very mad or very sure of the nearness of another sphere of existence. And of its charity towards her.

‘All I know,’ Monger said, ‘is that Joan claimed that from the following morning her sight – in her best eye at least – had begun to improve by degrees.’ He shrugged. ‘But we have only her word for that.’

‘You didn’t talk to the Borrows about it?’

‘The Borrows spoke of it to no-one, until much later. Matthew, needless to say, remains convinced that whatever Joan had seen was within her own head. The worst of it, you see, John… the very worst of it is not what they saw, but that they were seen. The three of them. Ascending the tor, on the night when the dead are abroad.’

‘Who saw them?’

‘A tenant farmer, Dick Moulder, looking for some runaway ewes, stated that he watched them ascending the tor with lighted candles in the dusk and later saw them clustered near to the church ruins. Dancing and chanting to the moon, he said.’

I’d caught his emphasis. ‘You think he didn’t see them at all?’

‘I think someone saw them, or heard of it. But I know Moulder as a Bible man who wouldn’t go within a mile of the tor after dark. The truth, more likely, is that they were seen from the Meadwell land. But, this being too close to Fyche, Moulder was ordered – or paid – to say he’d seen them. Put it this way: this came some weeks later, when more evidence was being sought, to support a… a graver charge.’

And so it emerged. The whole bitter tragedy of it.

Whether Joan Tyrre had been loose-tongued in the town about Cate’s potion improving her eyes through some inner vision, Monger didn’t know. All he knew for certain was that, within the week, a travelling dealer had called on Dr Borrow offering him a substantial sum of money for a quantity of the dust of vision which could offer glimpses of heaven. He’d sent the dealer away but it seemed the man returned when Matthew was with a patient and Cate was out in her herb garden. Two days later, the potion would sold in the market in Somerton, a town some miles away.

Which made no sense to me, for if the thief knew not which was the magic potion…

‘He took everything he could cram into his bag and sold it all – people’ll buy anything if it’s cheap enough and said to be from abroad. And if just one person achieved a vision of heaven, as a result, that would be sufficient to set up a clamour.’

The clamour that resulted, however, was not the kind the thief expected.

‘As Cate herself told me more than once, what was most important was the quantity in which the potion – the fungus dust and whatever was mixed with it – was administered. The quantity is-’ Monger held a forefinger and thumb barely apart ‘-very, very small.’

According to Monger, a small flask of the potion had been bought by the sixteen-year-old son of a prominent landowner. The boy had gone out that night, on the roister with some of his fellows. Never came back.

‘His companions had left him, in fear at his behaviour,’ Monger said. ‘They spoke of the dreadful convulsions of his body… in a kind of dance. He was screaming that devils were pinching him and his arms and legs were afire.’

I must’ve shuddered; Monger glanced at me.

‘They found his body about a week later, entangled in branches under the river bridge. Thrown himself in the river to put out the fire in his limbs.’

Monger said the dealer had fled from Somerton but was caught in the hue and cry. In return, Monger guessed, for his life, he confessed to the theft of herbs mixed by Cate Borrow.

‘And was this established to be caused by swallowing some of the… the dust of vision?’

Thinking that I’d heard of something similar in France. ‘Although no-one else died in this way, the boy was the first of several to complain of burning limbs, visions of angels and monsters made manifest under unearthly skies. All had been sold quantities of Cate Borrow’s potion. And then, as she was awaiting trial, word came in of the deaths of infants.’

‘What?’

‘Babes whose mothers, it emerged, had taken the potion to ease the sorrow which can follow childbirth. The wrath of God visited upon them, people cried.’

Within a day Cate Borrow had been arrested for witchery.

Within a short time she’d be dead.

‘Hanged for mixing herbs?’

‘For murder.’

‘Any half-competent advocate could take such a charge apart.’

‘In London, maybe.’

His voice riven with bitterness. The window to the high street was murked with dusk now, the fire low and red in the ingle.

Even in London… I thought back to my own imprisonment. How, through a knowledge of the law, I’d been able to discredit the so-called evidence sworn by the Lord of Misrule.

Even so, it had been perilously close, and I’d still have gone to the flames had it not been for the curiosity of Bishop Bonner.

‘Presumably,’ I said, ‘she couldn’t be tried by Fyche at the quarter sessions… or are things different out here?’

‘Oh they’re different. Everything’s different here. But the law’s the same. A crime warranting a death penalty may be tried only by a circuit judge at the assizes.’

‘In Wells?’

‘The trial was swift,’ Monger said. ‘There was an extra witness, whom no-one had seen here before or saw afterwards, but claimed to have watched Mistress Borrow taking pails of wet earth from new graves. To scatter on her herb garden. These were the darkest days of Mary. Everyone in snare to fear and superstition. So when at last they brought Dick Moulder before the court to say how he’d seen two or possibly three of them with their candles on the tor on All Hallows Eve, recognising Mistress Borrow who oft-times came to pick herbs on his land…’

There was a crack in Monger’s voice and I sensed his usually placid face becoming knotted with pain at the memory of Cate Borrow standing up in the court and crying out that Moulder must’ve been mistaken, for she was alone that night on the Tor.

Monger could only guess she’d said this to save her husband. And Joan Tyrre, too, who’d already had one appearance before a church court.

The hollow silence had been smashed by this man Dick Moulder, rearing up and warding Cate Borrow away with his hands in the air and screaming, If her was alone, then they was spirits!

‘And if I tell you,’ Monger said, ‘that at that moment, the wind blew open the courtroom door, and then it slammed. A blast of cold air blowing through the court, and a woman screaming and… the way all that happened, it would’ve been enough to convict the Pope.’

‘What about the boy’s death?’ I said. ‘Surely she didn’t admit any blame there?’

‘Neither admitted nor denied it. She simply said nothing more. Refused to answer any further questions in the court, only stood there very pale. Ghostly pale, as if she were already passing into another place. I remember Matthew, in his desperation, trying to catch her eye, and she never looked at him. Would not look at him. Never looked at him again. It was the worst thing.’

‘Not wanting him to be implicated?’

‘As if she was saying, it’s over, nothing to be done. Go back to your work. Forget me.’

‘And Eleanor, was she…?’

‘Not there. She’d been instructed, in her mother’s best interests, to keep Joan Tyrre well away from the hearing.’

The next day, Matthew Borrow had led a group of elders from the town to Fyche, at Meadwell, to plead for his wife’s life. Returning encouraged, after Fyche – a former monk, for heaven’s sake – had told them he’d do what he could. Borrow restraining his distraught daughter, assuring her they would find evidence to get the verdict reversed, appeal to Queen Mary…

The following day, at dawn, Cate Borrow had, without ceremony, been hanged in Wells. Fyche announcing kindly that at least he’d spared the witch’s family a burning. Generously allowing them to collect the body, as long it was not buried in consecrated ground.

This was not much more than a year ago. Little wonder that Eleanor Borrow could not bear to be in this man’s presence.

‘No-one in this town could quite believe it,’ Monger said. ‘A woman of quiet charity who lived for her garden and what she might learn from it. The cures that could be found, the sick people she might help.’

‘But… Christ, why did he do it? Why did Fyche want this woman dead?’

‘My guess… the dust of vision. It was rumoured his son once took it. I don’t know what happened, but it must have frightened Fyche. He’d see it as dangerous… uncontrollable. An instant religious experience without the discipline of the Church? If she’d made the dust of vision, what else might she be working on?’

‘She had to be made an example of and therefore-’

‘I can’t say what goes on in the man’s head.’

‘And Eleanor?’

‘She was not long back from college at this time – Matthew had sent her away a couple of years earlier, to be schooled in medicine in Bath. She… always was a gay, laughing child. You always knew what she was thinking. Afterwards… well…’ Monger’s eyes were cast down. ‘You know what’s most bitter about all this? Before the Dissolution, the Justice of the Peace here was the abbot himself. Cate’s friend.’

I looked to his eyes, but it was as if shutters had been erected. ‘Despite its mysteries, despite its air of spirtual rebellion, this is an unhappy town,’ he said. ‘Why, truly, are you here, Dr Dee?’