The Bones of Avalon (20 page)

‘Why is that?’

In London, water was seldom drunk these days.

‘Because… they say that the holy essence, all the sacred life in this place… flows with the water… underground. Even with the abbey going to ruin, the place itself is still hallowed. There are some things you can’t destroy. Some things about a place that are
in
that place.’

‘They say Our Saviour walked here.’ I handed her the bag. ‘As a young boy.’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s why it’s holy?’

‘Did I say it was holy?’

‘I believe you said
hallowed.
’

‘I meant it has a power,’ she said. ‘Maybe something to do with the flow of water beneath it. Maybe the abbey was only put here because of the unusual… that is, it may indeed be that Our Saviour was only brought here
because
…’ She must have seen the rapt stillness in me. ‘Oh – am I stepping close to heresy?’

Not looking, it must be said, as if she cared. Pulling a small, stoppered jug from her bag, she bent with it to the holy well. Despite the water I’d drunk, my mouth felt dry. Although the sun was still hidden in cloud, the day seemed warmer than any since Christmas. A close and airless warmth. No breeze. Unseasonal. I felt a discomfort. Everything here, in this odd, disfunctioned town, seemed to inflict discomfort.

‘What’s the power you speak of?’

‘I… don’t know. The reasons for it may be long into the past. Perchance you’ll feel it for yourself, when you’ve been here a while. It… alters the sense of things.’

‘I’m told,’ I said, ‘that some people here have had visions.’

She took the vessel from the well and put in the stopper.

‘Who told you that?’

‘I forget,’ I said lamely.

She placed the jug carefully in her bag, tucking it in like an infant.

‘’Tis certain true to say that some men and women here are driven very speedily into madness.’

‘Driven by what?’

‘Maybe by what they see or hear. Maybe no-one’s supposed to be living here. There
are
such places, are there not?’

‘Are there?’

‘Where people find it hard to live an easy life. And monks… monks would seek out such places, would they not?’

‘For a monk –’ an excitement like hot coals in my gut – ‘a monk must needs be challenged in his soul?’

‘Exactly.’

A glowing smile.

‘But now all the monks are gone,’ I said.

‘In which case, it might be thought –’ she brought a knuckle to her chin, as if there were something new here that she was considering for the first time – ‘that we needed the monks here to keep a balance in the place.’

She fell silent. I felt the weight of the hill behind us, had a feeling of the devil’s finger scratching at the clouds, something in me wanting, unaccountably, to cry out.

‘Balance?’

‘To keep the peace. Daily prayer and chanting creating a balm. Lying soft upon the air.’

‘And there’s no peace now? Worship at the Church of the Baptist does not have the same effect?’

‘Dr John,’ she said, ‘don’t make me say these things.’

I said nothing. She would hardly be the first to suggest that the anglicised services of the reformed church were a poor substitute for the older rituals it had discarded.

‘You haven’t been here long enough to know this town,’ she said.

‘Then tell me.’

‘Feelings…’ She sighed. ‘Feelings here run to extreme. When you try to describe it, it sounds like nothing much – bitter quarrels which are not healed…feuds, street fights. Thieving and wife-beating and men killed over very little.
Very
little. But put them all together and sometimes it seems that this place is become like to a wound left open, where there’s gangrene and rot. A mortifying of the flesh.’

My eyes must have widened at her eloquence and the force of her argument. I was thinking of what Cowdray had said about the power the abbey had given out.
Like to a great beacon, always alight.
A calming light. And
the abbey had been here
before
the town, which had grown up to serve it. And now the light had gone out, leaving the town bereft and prey to…

Next to every holy place there’s a high ground as the devil takes for his watchtower.

I’d thought myself well qualified in theology, but this was unfamiliar territory and made me feel as if all my years of learning were of little consequence. I looked down at the holy well, the blood well, the
iron
well, and felt the weight of the strange hill, like the burden of a hunchback.

There are places – I
know
this – where the earth itself speaks to us. In olden times, men were closer to it.
All
men, not only priests. When I think on this, I sometimes feel that even the Bible men might be closer to regaining this lost faculty, yet the rigidity of their beliefs prevent them from the experience of it. I turned to Mistress Borrow.

‘And the visions?’

She drew her cloak over her knees.

‘Who’s to say what are visions and what are signs of an oncoming madness?’

‘Or possession?’

‘Oh yes, there’s much possession in Glastonbury. The demons have a rare freedom here.’

‘Could you –’ my throat was as dry as parched earth – ‘explain this to me?’

‘And this is important, Doctor?’ Looking up at me, of a sudden suspicious. ‘This has an importance for your work in the listing of the Queen’s antiquities?’

As if she were awakening from some daydream… as if we both were held in a spell which she must needs break.

‘I’m interested,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

‘We should go.’ She was looking away, to somewhere beyond the circle of thorn trees, scrambling coltishly to her feet. ‘I have visits to make. To the sick.’

Snatching up her bag before I could reach it, she moved away betwixt the apple trees and was almost in collision with the panting bulk of Dudley’s groom, Martin Lythgoe.

‘Beg mercy, Doctor…’

Red in the face, his thatch of yellow hair standing up in spikes, a ragged scratch scoring one cheek.

‘I’m reet glad to’ve found thee. Me master—’

I leapt up.

‘Is he
worse?’

‘No, he’s… much the same. He were asleep when I left him. It’s just he said – before he become ill, like – as how we should watch out for thee.’

‘Me?’

‘And what do I do, wi’ the master all laid up, but go buggering off checking on th’horses and let yer go wandering off on yer own. Well…’ He looked at Mistress Borrow. ‘Pardon me, I din’t known tha were wi’ him, Doctor.’

If he’d been following me, he must have known, but I let it pass.

‘Martin, I’m a grown man.’

‘Aye, well, I can see that, but me master, he reckons…’

However you survived in the cesspits of Paris and Antwerp without me around to save your sorry arse I shall never know.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I know what he reckons. Martin… ’ Looking into his eyes and speaking with deliberation in the hope he would get the underlying message that I was engaged in picking up useful intelligence. ‘Doctor Borrow… has shown me the holy well… to get some iron water. To aid Master Roberts’s recovery?’

‘Aye, aye.’ He nodded. ‘Not a problem, sir.’ Straightening his leather jerkin, casting a sideways glance at Mistress Borrow. ‘Anyroad, I think, under t’circumstances, Master Roberts would understand.’

‘Circumstances?’

Martin Lythgoe gave me a discreet… what looked to be a wink.

What?

I felt my cheeks suffused with blood.

‘I’ll leave thee to it, then, sir.’

He beamed.

‘No… Martin…’

‘Aye?’

‘If you want to help me –’ groping wildly for something sounding halfway authoritative – ‘there’s someone you might talk to. Cowdray spoke last night of a former monk from the abbey who’d become a farrier. I thought that, with your own work with horses, you might find a plausible reason to approach him?’

‘I could do that.’

‘You know what we’re looking for. What information we seek, and to what purpose?’

‘Oh, aye.’

‘And could inquire with discretion?’

‘I reckon yer mare could do wi’ some new shoes for t’journey back to Bristol.’

‘That would be a very good reason to make an approach.’

‘Awreet then, I’ll seek out this feller, and I’ll sithee back at th’ inn, Dr John.’

He patted down his haystack hair, nodded to Mistress Borrow and blundered away amongst the guardian apple trees, leaving me struggling to assemble an apologetic smile.

‘My… usual work being with manuscripts and books, my colleagues think me unused to the outside world.’

‘’Tis a real mystery to me how they could think that.’

Lips unsmiling, but her eyes were dancing, and the discomfort in me burst its dam.

‘I’d like to see the church.’

‘Church?’

‘
That
church. Upon the tor. The devil’s hill. Whoever the devil may be, in this instance – the wizard Merlin, the King of the Faerie, the… to a Catholic, the Protestants are devils.’

Flinging out too many words, as usual, when I’m in a turmoil.

‘But there’s nothing up there,’ she said. ‘Even the tower’s all but hollow now.’

‘You call the remains of a church
nothing
? And what’s that terracing around the hill? Like to old fortifications.’

She shrugged.

‘Antiquities are my business,’ I said stiffly. ‘I can’t very well neglect this one.’

Knowing not, in truth, why I had to go up there, to a place that seemed so forbidding. Maybe
because
it was forbidding. To demonstrate that I was a man unafraid to challenge the devil.

Or even just a man.

‘Very well.’ The doctor gathered up her cloak. ‘This way…’

The path curved, making the ascent less steep than the appearance of the tor suggested. But it still was not a pleasant climb, and all the way I carried a damp and dolorous feeling of what it must have been like for the elderly, aching Abbot Whiting, hauled up on a hurdle to a certain death.

Like to the labouring of Christ, with his cross, up the hill of Calvary, the place of skulls.

Or worse. Close to the summit I stopped and looked back. The path was quite treacherously steep. Imagine pulling an old man all the way up here on a hurdle.

And
three
men?

Why? Why three?

A trinity.

Why here? Why have a public execution on this most inaccessible of hills? If they’d wanted to make an exhibition of it, entertain a crowd, why not the centre of the town?

The tower began to rise before us, as if it were thrust out of the hill, and the wrongness of everything became blindingly evident. For who in his right mind would build a church upon such an isolated, sharpened point of land? A castle or a fort, but not a place of worship.

As we came closer, the tower was revealed to be of grey-brown stone, and cracked open down one side, a fissure in it like a broken tooth, and the body around it was little more than foundations.