The Bones of Avalon (29 page)

‘I guess she thought it best to leave Taunton for a place where such peculiar talents might be not wholly condemned. ’Tis said that if she takes off the eyepatch what she sees through that blinded eye is not of this… Ah… now… observe that woman over there.’

A gentlewoman in a grey cape was bending to speak with a younger woman with a faded red shawl over her hair and shoulders, sitting on a step with a basket of pink ribbons in her lap. As I watched, she stood up with her basket and the gentlewoman followed her into an alleyway.

‘In the bottom of the basket,’ Monger said, ‘under the ribbons, lies a much-prized skrying crystal.’

I said nothing. Back in Mortlake I had five of them. From a stall, I
bought two winter-withered apples and gave one to Monger, and we moved towards the top of the town, where he pointed out a woman who, he said, read the mystic cards from France which foretold destiny. Then he nodded to a man with two terrier dogs.

The man grinned.

‘Just off home for my ole stick, Joe. Case I runs into a feller with horns and claws drippin’ blood.’

He was short, with a cloud of hair and a beard white as a napkin to his chest and eyes that glinted like chips of quartz. Monger smiled thinly at him.

‘A touch more discretion may be called for this day, Woolly. Even for you.’

‘Oh ar? I’m supposed to join the hue and cry in pursuit of whoever they decides cut up this Lunnon feller? Well, you know what I says to that, Joe, man? I says they can
piss off
.’

He nodded, patting his thigh, and the terriers followed him into the throng.

‘Like so many of them,’ Monger said, ‘that fellow gets away with it because he’s useful. Hired by Fyche to find the original well at Meadwell, and he found two.’

‘Found?’

‘By use of the forked twig that jumps in the hand.’

‘A water diviner.’

‘A water
witcher
, some called it.’

They did. Once outlawed as witchcraft, but always far too useful to be banned for long, and I only wished I could do it myself. I shook my head.

‘It’s science, Master Farrier. Science we don’t yet understand. There’s a man named Agricola, who is said to be able to find metal ore in the ground by similar means. You’d think it were not possible.’

‘Most things are possible,’ Monger said. ‘And some things which are not possible are
said
to be possible… here. Especially those involving water, for we’re yet an island. Avalon, in spirit.’

He continued to stroll placidly, almost gliding, through the market, walking like a monk. As if he still were a monk and protected.

‘All gone!’ An old man in an apron stood in the doorway of a baker’s shop, waving his arms at the queue outside. ‘Bloody constables took a whole batch, look, nothing I could do.’

‘Pies,’ Monger said. ‘Master Worthy makes the finest mutton pies in Somersetshire.’

As the queue dispersed, muttering, Monger led me into the shop.

‘All gone, Joe,’ the baker said. ‘I just—’

‘Yes, we heard. Master Worthy, I’d like you meet Dr John, from the Queen’s Commission on Antiquities, here to make account of what remains from the abbey.’

The old baker, plump and bald, I’d guess, beneath his cap, went conspicuously stiff.

‘Dr John seeks only assurance,’ Monger said, ‘that such items that were not destroyed are… in good hands. You have nothing to fear.’

I looked at Monger. How could
he
be sure that this man had nothing to fear from me? He knew me not.

Something here was not right.

When we emerged, the tip of the tower upon the tor had appeared ’twixt two market stalls, lit by a sudden angel-fan of creamy light.

‘And this is it?’ I said. ‘These are Fyche’s sorcerers?’

In a hole in the wall, concealed behind a disused oven, several old books had been hidden, the finest of them being the first volume of
Steganographia,
the masterwork on magic and cypher by Johannes Trithemius, the late Abbot of Sponheim. It could only have come from the abbey, and you could have locked me in that bakery with it for a week.

‘Emmanuel Worthy fancies himself as an alchemist,’ Monger said. ‘For no reason other than the possession of those books with their arcane diagrams that he’ll never understand. But I could point you to others more potent. A healer who cures through the toes in the old Egyptian way. A seventh child of a seventh child who foresees the future. At least five people who insist they can commune with the dead. Oh, and a maker of charms from the wood of the cross – though I might take issue with that.’

‘But all known to—’

‘All known to one another, yes. Even scattered over the town and various of the outlying villages, they’re a community. Some of them will gather together later, when the market’s spent. At least –’ Monger glanced over his shoulder – ‘they would usually gather. Tonight, things may be different.’

‘Were they here when you were a monk at the abbey? Did you know then who and what they were?’

‘Some were here. Not so many as now. Or maybe it was just that we didn’t notice them the same because we, the pious brethren, were in the majority then.’

I learned that many of these seekers – Monger could only call them that – had journeyed here from the ends of the country, and some from abroad. When the abbey flourished, this had gone, if not unnoticed, at least uncommented on. The town was growing and always full of pilgrims. It was only after the fall of the abbey and the exodus of the wealthy and the pious that people began to notice the nature of the incomers who did not leave… who, in fact, began to increase their numbers, some arriving like poor travellers, living in camps and abandoned houses. Attending church only as much as was necessary to avoid prosecution, for their own religious obediences clearly belonged… elsewhere.

A whole immigrant community spurning the bigger pickings of Bristol and London to scratch a living here. Why?

‘Not so simple,’ Monger said.

I heard Fyche again in my head with his talk of the fires in the midnight and the maggot-people chattering and squealing to the moon.

Feeling again the most acute strangeness. Why was Monger telling all this to me, a clerk from London who was almost certainly of the reformed church? It was beginning to make me anxious, but my interest had been trapped, and all caution had long been dismissed by the scholar in me.

Like the woman in the eyepatch, I seemed to have gained entry to an unknown realm.

‘How came you to know these people, Master Farrier?’

‘My trade.’ Monger glided on, not looking at me. ‘The abbey was where I learned my trade. Attending to the horses of visitors and pilgrims – remarkable how little regard the pious may have for their animals. Eventually I was given a forge in the abbey grounds, and now I have one on the other side of the walls. While still keeping a monk’s hours… and – more quietly – a monk’s religious observances.’

‘Without harassment?’

‘A farrier’s an essential man in any community. A
good
farrier is nigh-on untouchable. And this is still a Catholic town, whichever church its goodfolk attend. The abbey… cast a spiritual light over the place, and there was healing. People who’d limped in on sticks walking out and tossing the sticks over the hedge.’

‘But that’s gone…’

‘No, no… you’re not getting this, are you?’

We’d reached the edge of the market, and the houses were becoming poorer and crumbling into fields and heath, and when the farrier turned to me at last there was a kind of intense serenity in his grey gaze.

‘It’s not
gone,
Dr John. It was here before the abbey and it’s
still
here. Do you see? It was always
here.
’

I stopped walking, feeling something like a gathering of stars in my abdomen. Oft-times I’d fancied that places where great churches and abbeys were built had some quality, some atmosphere related more to the balance of hills and fields and water than their orientation toward Jerusalem. An eagerness had seized me, but I said nothing.

‘With the abbey itself just a shell,’ Monger said, ‘there’s a need to provide channels for… energies which might otherwise overflow, perchance causing harm.’

Hadn’t Eleanor Borrow said something similar, about the monks being needed to keep a balance? For all my learning, I felt like a child again who saw before him adult human knowledge like an outline of distant mountains.

‘Most of us had little understanding of it at the time,’ Monger said, ‘but if you consider the
real
function of the abbey was to transform the energy that was there into a Godly substance, and spread it afar. Lay it soft on the land… a spiritual irrigation…’

‘Yes.’

I could see it and hear it. The river of a Gregorian chant, in all its glorious mathematical symmetry.

Ice in my spine.

‘How was this known?’

‘Tradition,’ he said.

‘Not written down?’

‘Some traditions –’ he smiled – ‘are
never
written down.’

‘Then how…?’

But he’d moved away, holding up both his long hands as if in benediction over the townsfolk clustered below us around the myriad market stalls.

‘Still they come. People in search of something. People who think that just by being here, on this holy soil, their lives will be transformed.’

‘Holy?’

‘A big, bad word,’ Monger said. ‘But everything has its darker side. There are some who would… speed the process.’

‘By sorcery?’

I thought of what Fyche had said about the cockerel in the abbey. And earlier about finding new-born babes in the grass
with their throats cut in sacrifice.

‘By the use of ritual magic?’ I said.

‘When the new religion is in disarray, some may turn again to the older ones.’

Monger the farrier gazed placidly down across the huddle of the town. Like the player over the chesstable, and I was the knight, which is moved in such a fashion that he cannot easily see the way ahead.

The farrier turned his grey gaze upon me. ‘Where stand
you
, Dr Dee?’ he murmured. ‘For this surely is the town in England closest to your own heart.’

S
OMETIMES
I’
D THINK
that, for all my learning, I was still like to an infant, milky-eyed and unknowing. That, being sent early to college and raising my eyes but rarely from printed pages, a whole part of my being was yet undeveloped, leaving me with little understanding of a world so carelessly traversed by the less-educated.

A child of two and thirty. Dudley knew that.
However you survived in the cesspits of Paris and Antwerp…

The plain truth being that I’d never been in the cesspits of Paris or Antwerp, only in their lecture halls and libraries.

Now I was walking numbly through the streets, as if naked, following the farrier into a mean, cramped drinking hovel on the upper edge of town.

Huddling in its dark, cider-smelling belly, beside a sooted inglenook with a fire of peat, while the stained ceiling sagged threateningly betwixt beams and my head was swelled with questions I had not the will to ask.

Cowering into the shadows, I watched a wench of about fifteen serving cider from an earthenware jug. Watched Monger waiting in line behind two farmer-looking men, four others sitting around the room on stools. The only talk I could hear was of sheep-prices until Monger returned, setting down two mugs upon the board and himself on the low, three-legged stool opposite me, pushing his thin hair behind his ears.

‘It was Nel,’ he said. ‘What?’

Monger drank some cider with the same restraint that William Cecil had displayed over a glass of fine wine.

‘People here follow your career with interest. Through pamphlets and such passed around amongst the seekers.’

Pamphlets.
God help me. ‘Still,’ Monger said, ‘as you must have gathered by now, for a good many in this town, the word
conjurer
is far from a term of abuse.’

The fire coughed out weak yellow flames. My mouth was dry but I couldn’t drink.