The Bones of Avalon

LII

Abominations

What had I expected? Maybe not the severity of it.

For those of a certain wealth, as I’ve said, this is the first age of light. Big houses have big windows.

Not like the mean mullions at Meadwell. I stood in the gateway. Noone in attendance, the house rearing before me, like a cliff face in the dusk.

The gates were open. I’d not expected that either, imagining myself accosted by some surly jobsworth and having a message sent to Carew who, in his own good time, would emerge before me, angry or sneering. But he’d be forced to listen. By Christ, I’d make him listen. And an execution would, by God’s good offices, be halted pending an inquiry which might take many weeks and end with different necks in nooses elsewhere.

I wanted Carew, not Fyche. Out here.

But only the owls were out. Fluting across the valley behind me, in a sky which, perversely after such a day, was clearing.

No stars yet, though. I was on my own. Kept on walking.

It had not entered my mind that Carew himself might be party to any of this. He was not, in essence, that complicated. True, he’d served different kings in Europe, fought at different times with opposing armies. But since returning to England he seemed solely committed to England’s interests, Protestant to his spine, an adventurer, not a conspirator.

Not that I could ever like the oaf. But he’d been given the abbey by the Queen or Cecil, and the owner of the abbey was yet the owner of this sorry town.

I thought to call out for Carew but, in the end, simply walked up to the house, until I came to a door of green oak, set into the stone wall without porch or overhang. Hardly the main entrance, but it would do. I banged upon it with a fist, twice.

No response. No echo within.

Standing there, unsure, for some moments before twisting the iron ring above the keyhole, somehow knowing that it would not be locked.

I’d gone back to Cowdray. Nobody knew more about a town than its principal innkeeper, observing who came and who went, listening to all the careless words which fell nightly from lips loosened by drink.

First, I’d taken the letters I’d found in Borrow’s surgery and hid them under a beam high in the ass’s stable. Asses could keep secrets.

Then I’d beckoned Cowdray from the alehouse – filling up now, much talk of the execution on the morrow.

You couldn’t find Meadwell, Dr John?

Not even tried yet. We don’t have much time. Dr Borrow – when did he leave the town, as a boy?

Which was how I’d learned about Borrow’s father, a wealthy wool-merchant and prominent Catholic, who’d done much of his trade in France and found the humours there more to his liking.

In the ’20s, this was, when there was no inkling of Reformation and King Harry was safely wed to his brother Arthur’s widow, Catherine.

The only one who came back was Matthew, as a qualified doctor. A fine doctor, as he soon proved. Glastonbury had been grateful to have him. And many of the wealthier merchants and landowners in the area, Cowdray said, would have been grateful to have him wed their daughters.

But, to the dismay of the merchants and their daughters, Borrow took up with an orphan who’d become a kitchen maid at the abbey.

She was beautiful, mind, Cowdray said. But, obviously, she had no money. Nobody could understand it.

Some houses, whatever the season, are colder inside than the open air. Without coat or cloak and or even food that day, I stiffened at the chill of Meadwell.

No candles or lamps, no flicker of fire or scent of woodsmoke.

Only a passage. I stood, quiet and without obvious direction, while the foolish lower mind was conjuring its own steps down to the dungeons, which would, of course, be unguarded, a bunch of keys hanging, in full view, from a nail.

And then what? Run away from here with Nel Borrow, hand in hand? Flee the country together?

Life would never be that simple any more, not for anyone. I turned to the left, there being more light that way, from high slit windows. I surely could not be alone in here and thought to call out. But what if it were Fyche? What I needed was a servant whom I could bid fetch me Carew.

The passage ended in a T and a door was facing me, so I simply opened it. As far as it would go, which was not far. I thought at first that the resistance was someone pushing from the other side and sprang back, and there was a toppling sound which I recognised at once.

Books. A long room full of books. A smell of old leather and damp.

Not a library, though. All the books, none of the shelves. Books in squalid piles on the floor. Good books, well bound, in incredible quantity. At the far end, a window gave into a high-walled yard, and almost the first title I was able to discern through its meagre light was at once familiar.

Euclidis Elementa Geometrica

My God.

Within a few minutes, I’d happened upon Alberti Magni Minerarium and then Aquinas’s Quaestionum Disputartarum and divers other scientific and philosophical volumes, copies of which were in my own humble collection at Mortlake.

All of these leaving me in little doubt that I’d found a large part of the library which had aroused such awe and stupor in Leland at Glastonbury Abbey in the days of Abbot Richard Whiting.

Yet unshelved, uncatalogued. Haphazardly stored, mainly uncared for, some thick with dust and eroded with damp. A veritable charnel house of knowledge.

With all the books, I’d failed to notice that the room also contained divers items of furniture: chairs and screens and chests, all of an ecclesiastical appearance. I opened the nearest chest and found there, wrapped in cloths, two silver platters and a cup with handles.

Books and furniture and altar goods.

This was not goods being stolen and accommodated into the fabric and furnishings of someone’s house. This was the abbey in storage.

Did Carew know of this?

His abbey, his property.

Unlikely. While I myself might have spent the next five years here, books of any kind would have little appeal for a notorious truant who legend said had threatened to jump from Exeter city wall rather than be hauled back to school.

I neither knew nor cared which way I went after that. Stumbled through walkways and doorways, under arches where the mortar seemed barely dry. If this place would ever be a college, it was unlike any I’d known.

Came at last to a dead-end. A door to either side of it. The one on the left had a window with bars. The cells? The armoury, more like.

The door on the right opened into a short passage, with almost no light. I edged my way slowly along the left-hand wall.

Steps. Narrow steps leading down. From the stairwell, the faintest of glows.

Was this the way to the dungeons? Was my phantasy to be realised? I held down the brief flaring of excitement. It could never be so easy.

And then, as I descended slowly, there was a voice, yet some distance away. A single voice, a low and rhythmic mumble. One voice, no exchange, just one man addressing not another man but… his God?

In Latin, I thought then, which is my own second language and the language in which God was habitually addressed.

Sometimes, we find ourselves in situations which seem to have been fore-planned by some greater agency. I may have written earlier of the feeling of becoming a chess piece upon a board, moved by a player in some bigger game whose rules I could not yet comprehend, and I had the sense of it again – that sense of the predestined – as I walked softly towards the sound of the voice.

And also the only light. Reaching an archway of stone, beyond which candles glimmed piercingly upon what looked to be an altar.

In a niche above the altar was a statue of Mary, the Virgin. The kind of statue which, all too recently, was torn from the walls of churches throughout the land. A man was kneeling before it, arms at his sides, head bent, and the litany he was chanting came not from our Book of Common Prayer but from something older that lived in his head.

Its language proving not to be Latin after all, but French. My third language, or possibly fourth.

I stood and watched and listened for what must have been over a minute. And then, for some reason, I felt obliged to cough.

At which the man arose, quite slowly, and turned in the stone space, the prayer continuing to issue from his lips.

Not a prayer, nor a voice I’d heard before.

Nor expected to, from a deaf mute.