The Bones of Avalon

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 milk 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 striding 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?’