The Bones of Avalon

LV

Tainted

I’ve seen hangings, we all have. Hangings and beheadings and burnings, mostly undeserved. The one which had most affected me was the burning of Barthlet Green. Just a man with whom I’d shared a prison cell. A mild good-natured man.

Who’d burned.

A harder death than hanging. Or so it was said.

But who knew? Who’d ever come back from the flames or the noose?

An unearthly last glare in the west. Amber and white streaks, a dawn sky at night.

Half in this sick world, half in hell, the bookman went scrambling up the flank of the conical hill, legs numbed, hands torn on barbs and briars, print-weakened eyes straining at the glow which fanned around the summit as if the whole hill were opened into the golden court of the King of Faerie.

When, close to the top, I was sinking to my knees in exhaustion, heaving my guts into the mud, her voice came to me, soft and light.

Be not alarmed, Dr John, you’re hardly the first to lose his balance up here.

Tears blinded me.

Why was it not to be done with discretion? Robert Dudley had asked, and now it was. Dawn was become dusk. Misinformation to forestall any outcry from the town, deal with it in darkness then leave the body hanging until it were ripped clean of all womanly beauty and the place where it was done tainted again.

A place which was tainted and tainted and tainted again. A hill persecuted for being different. I scrambled up into a ground mist which seemed to come from within, as if the tor sought to hide itself from man and what he did.

‘May God have mercy on this sinful town! May the light of God shine upon this poisoned place.’

The twisted indignity of it.

The fat vicar of St Benignus with his unwashed robe and his Book of Common Prayer.

I dragged myself to the top, bleeding from both hands, as muted male voices were descending in lumpen amen.

Stood trembling.

A ground mist was rising on the summit, where two blazing torches were lofted on poles bringing the ruined tower of St Michael to an unreal life. There were men with staffs and pikes, but not more than a dozen. One of them the man with grey hair and cracked teeth and a knowledge of death by hanging and why women made not much of a show of it.

The gibbet, maybe ten feet tall, was firmly staked before the tower, like a open doorway, its feet swathed in mist but the top of its frame hard against the lingering light, pink now, like bloodied milk.

Grunts and mutters. The bottom of an orchard ladder could be seen propped against the stock of the gibbet, rising from the brown mist.

Carew stood a few yards away, in leather hat and jerkin, hands linked behind him, rocking back and forth, impatient, and when I ran to him he didn’t look at me, his voice a murmur.

‘God’s spleen, Dee, will I never get you from under my fucking boots?’

‘Sir Peter, I need you to listen to me.’

Was what I meant to say, but the smoke from the torches caught at my throat.

‘Damn mist,’ Carew said. ‘Would’ve had three of ’em brought up if I’d thought.’

‘I must needs tell you-’

‘Never been up for learning, Doctor. Not your kind anyway.’ He turned, a firelit flash of teeth in the beard. ‘If you have any magic to spare to give the poor bitch a swift death, she’d doubtless appreciate it.’ Sniffed the air. ‘Quite a beauty. Hadn’t realised.’

Nodding at the gibbet, a small group of men round it now, the vicar of St Benignus telling us we should not suffer a witch to live, as they brought her out, in her blue overdress, smirched and muddied, though her hair looked combed and drifted behind her shoulders.

‘Stop them… please… for Christ’s sake!’

I think she looked towards me as if she recognised a voice and then turned away as I threw at Carew the only words that might wake him from his mental slumber.

‘It’s part of a papist plot.’

He laughed.

‘You see any papists here?’

‘Yes!’

He looked at me, his curiosity at last alive, but it was too late then.

You forgot how quick it could be.

The torchlight had gone pale with vapour, and of a sudden she was there on the ladder, hands bound behind her, the vicar’s voice floating over her in the dusk.

‘May the death of this sinner bring atonement and cleanse this town forever of all filth and wickedness, idolatry and the worship of all false gods.’

‘That arsehole annoys me nearly as much as you,’ Carew said.

A movement on the ladder, a crisp slap.

‘I swear to God if you touch me there again, I’ll die cursing you to perdition.’

Laughter and coughing in the mist, and someone asked her if she had anything to say before sentence was carried out, and I heard her say with contempt, ‘To you?’

The bookman throwing his gasping, sorry self through flickering air as the short ladder was tipped to the ground and the group of men parted before him to reveal the body of Nel Borrow swaying slowly against the flesh-coloured sky.

The vicar, with his Bible and his back to the hanging woman, singing out.

‘The witch is gone to Satan. May the light of God come to us all.’