The Bones of Avalon

XLIV

Harlot

Cleaned up as best I could, clad in the spare doublet over an old, tattered shirt, I dragged myself to church. Dudley had not emerged from his chamber, and so I went alone: Dr Dee, specialist in matters of the hidden, throwing himself at the mercy of the God whose mind, with unspeakable arrogance, he’d determined to know. Dr Dee, lovesick, bent with sorrow, smirched with sin, in vain hope of absolution.

The morning sky had become very quickly ominous: a fine line of salmon putting a sandy cast upon the long hill before the sun rose but briefly into a mantle of dense cloud which smothered Glastonbury from horizon to horizon.

The beginning of the end of the world, the vicar said. Dear God, what had I expected: calm, fortitude and the sure hope of redemption?

St Benignus, this was, the lesser church. Fyche and Carew, I’d guessed, would be at the more impressive St John’s, and I’d no wish to encounter either of them.

The farmers and their families had come down from the hills and the modern church was packed to the doors, me standing at the very back, where it was darkest.

Hell, in truth, all of it was dark. No candles on the altar, and there’d be no communion, nothing approaching the Mass, no enfolding element of the mystic. And, in this plump Welsh vicar, I heard the voice of an Abel Meadows.

‘At the end of days, it is foretold that the angels of light and the angels of darkness will engage in a great battle, and the field of that battle is the soul of mankind – your souls, my soul. Within every one of us… every one of us – that final battle will be fought. Will you give yourself, body and soul, to God?’

The vicar panting, as he leaned over his pulpit, passing his eyes across all the congregation. I watched men go pale, a woman wring her hands, felt the air go cold with menace.

‘Or will you give your soul away? As some already have done, though they knew it not, by putting their faith in charms and talismans. By opening their mouths to receive potions from a witch’s cauldron. By… sucking the syrup of Satan…’

I pressed myself against the wall in anger, felt that the cultured Abbot Bere, who built this place, would abhor this man.

‘Isaiah saeth, Now is the faithful city become a harlot! It was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers!’

The vicar bulging from his pulpit, wagging a flaccid forefinger.

‘We have not long, I tell you, to purge ourselves and this once-holy town of all sin, unbelief and wrong belief… before that which is foretold at the Bible’s end shalt indeed come to pass. And then shalt them – them as repents not – be embraced by a final darkness!’

A skittering of feet on the flags as a woman collapsed into a faint. I marked Matthew Borrow – doubtless here only to avoid a twelve pence fine – squeezing through the congregation to aid her, his face without expression. I felt a profound guilt at what we’d done to his poor, dead wife, and all for nothing. I would avoid him afterwards.

‘The voice of God is heard in the thunder!’ the vicar roared, bumptious little twat. ‘Yeah, God hath split the night with his mighty voice, commanding us to root out and destroy the evil, before the end of days. And we must not turn our backs from what must be done, or the Lord God…’

The finger scribing a steady line from face to face.

‘The Lord God will know. I say to you, reclaim your souls while there’s yet time!’

I was the first out of there.

Monger came to me at the church gate, still clad in his workaday cut-off monk’s robe. Coming at once to the guts of it.

‘Man’s reading from Fyche’s gospel. Fyche wants a crowd to see Nel hang, and he wants that crowd hungry for it. Only a death-’

‘How can they turn against her? People who’ve been healed by her?’

‘People who thought themselves to have been healed by God? People who’ll now be in terror, having been touched by Satan? A witch amongst them all this time, the spawn of another. You can hear them – Oh, how could we not see what she was? How could we be deceived by her merry manner? Those who were healed are now in fear that they were healed by the foul touch of the deceiver.’

While, in truth, they were deceived by a man who, to my mind, was barely a priest.

‘The woman who collapsed in there?’ Monger said. ‘You know why she fainted? I’ll tell you. Treated of a sore throat by Nel and is now convinced her voice has changed, and deepened, as if a demon speaks through her. You see? Ah… enough of this shit. The word is that Nel won’t see you.’

When I confirmed it, Monger sucked in his lips and led me to the bottom of the street where the green land fell away to the grey and limpid river.

‘Makes no clear sense to me, Dr John. I thought that you and she had… common ground.’

‘Me, also,’ I said. ‘Joe…’

He’d turned away. It was beginning to rain.

‘’Tis happening again,’ he said. ‘Some perversion of fate. As if she’s inherited some curse.’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe ’twould help if I rode to Wells. But if she’d see neither her father nor you, what hope for a tired old farrier? Can you still plead her innocence at the assize without her agreement?’

‘Would hardly look well, but I hope to try.’

‘Under your own name?’

‘There,’ I said, ‘you have the principal problem.’ But there was another now. ‘Joe… help me. What was Cate Borrow working on before she was arrested?’

‘I don’t know, many things. She lived for her work.’

‘Like?’

‘Long-standing things – she and Matthew were trying for years to find a treatment for wool-sorters’, or the cause of it.’

‘I’m thinking of something related to topography. She worked with Leland, didn’t she, way back?’

Monger began to walk toward the river through the spitting rain, his head half turned – I thought at first to avoid the rain, then realising that the rain was now full in his face. He was turning away from me. I caught up with him.

‘This is important. There was something Cate Borrow had – or knew – that Fyche wanted. Something she’d been working on with Leland.’

‘You should ask Matthew.’

‘I’ve asked him. Leland left her a- some papers. He’d buried them with her because she’d’ve hated them to fall into Fyche’s hands.’

‘Sounds like a private matter. I know nothing about it.’

‘What would an antiquarian want with a gardener?’

He began to stride toward the riverbank so rapidly that I thought he’d walk off the bank.

‘Something to do with charts,’ I said.

Monger stopped, inches from the water, staring into it, as if he might see the shadow of Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, cast away by Sir Bedivere.

‘Leland came after all of us. All who’d been at the abbey and were still in the town. He wanted to know what secret the abbot had failed to disclose under torture that he should be so brutally put to death.’

‘And you told him… what?’

‘We told him nothing. We knew nothing. The ones who might’ve known were long gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘Everywhere. Some to Bristol, London… France even, the more devout of them. Where they might practise their faith unmolested. However, someone must’ve told Leland about all the time the abbot spent with Cate.’

‘So that was how Leland met Cate?’

‘No, they… they’d met before. When he was here to chronicle the antiquities. I believe he’d gone lame in one foot, and she or Matthew attended him. When he returned in forty-five, though, he was a different man. A man possessed. Made a nuisance of himself, I’d guess.’

Can still see his beardless face, all bony like a Roman statue. I remember him shouting, ‘You don’t understand, I’m my own man now.’

Of a sudden, this made sense to me: Leland seeking to assure Cate that he was no longer working for the Crown, that whatever she told him would go no further.

‘When you say possessed…’

‘Only that he was in thrall to this town and its peculiarities.’

I remembered what Nel had told me her father had thought: that Leland’s first visit was to collect treasure, and his second was to collect the place itself. This might simply refer to the notation of its features. Yet knowing of Leland’s interest in the hidden…

‘This secret that Leland believed the monks kept, do you think Cate knew what it was?’

‘I can’t say. She was certainly closer to the abbot than anyone outside the abbey – and closer than most of us in side.’ He wiped rain and maybe sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his dark brown robe. ‘I must needs go back, Dr John. I go to my old mother’s on a Sunday.’

‘Joe… what are you’re not telling me?’

‘Nothing that can help you. Nothing I know. ’

He began to walk away, and although I’d known him only a short time I knew this was not like him. I didn’t move. After about ten paces, he turned back to me. Hesitated for a moment and then cried out quickly, ‘Talk to Joan. Last hovel on the left, top of town, past the alehouse.’

Then turned, stumbling, dragging his cowl over his head and almost running back to the town through the rain, all his old composure gone.

Why?

Joan Tyrre’s house might once – and not too long ago – have been a stable or a winter sheepshed, built of mismatched timbers and rubblestone, with two open doorways and chickens pecking around in the straw. Inside, another door was patched with wads of grey wool, probably plucked from hedgerows and brambles. It opened into the place where Joan lived.

‘Shillin’?’ she said. ‘Seein’ it be Sunday and I don’t work, normal way of it. Howzat zound, Master Lunnonman?’

Bringing down from a niche in the wall above the fire, with some reverance, her skrying crystal. I knew not how a woman of her limited means might have come by it. It was small but of good quality, near as clear as my own. I tried to convey to her that I would not be troubling her for a reading today.

‘Sixpence, then?’

‘Mistress Tyrre…’

I took from my pocket a new shilling, placing it on the boards which made an old manger into a table. The place was cleaner than I might have expected and the strongest smell was from the iron stewpot hanging over a grizzling fire which fugged the air with smoke.

‘Ahaaaah.’ Joan broke out a toothless smile. Then she was putting down the crystal to unwrap her shawl and loosen the faded garment that covered her bosom. ‘ This be what you-’

‘No! I… I just… I just want to talk to you.’

‘Talk?’

‘Talk.’

Joan settled back into the sheepskins lining her bench. Light came through cracks in the shutters and the smoke-hole ’twixt the rafters.

‘You en’t easy with a woman, is you? I feels… a real moylin’ in you. You’ze shook up real bad. Real bad. En’t that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘’Tis a woman, no doubt ’bout that. A woman in there, sure as I be alive.’

‘Mistress Tyrre, I don’t know what you’ve heard…’

Joan pulled her shawl back around her bony shoulders, adjusted her eyepatch, peered at me through the smoke.

‘Joe Monger, he d’say you’ze a gonner plead for Nel.’

‘I’ll do anything that might…’

I swallowed.

‘You’ze a good man,’ Joan said. ‘I feels that. An honest man, if only enough folk knowed it, and a kind, zad face on you. But the zaddest thing…’ She looked up into the smoke, nodding slightly. ‘The zaddest thing of all… they en’t never gonner know, most of ’em. Now.’ She picked up the shilling, sat back in satisfaction, arms folded. ‘You ass me what you wants, boy.’

‘Tell me about the faerie,’ I said, of a sudden.

Not knowing where the question came from. Sometimes there’s an instinct of what will open a door.