The Bones of Avalon (32 page)

‘I’ve heard of it.’

I could hear a clanking of flagons from the alehouse, Cowdray’s hoarse laughter.

‘Cate had given him a certain kind of fungus dust,’ Monger said. ‘To be mixed with a large quantity of water, and the results were… frightening. Like an act of God. Powerfully mystical.’

One startling morn, Monger had met the wool-merchant on the fish-shaped hill to the east of the town, and here was a man raising his arms to heaven, extolling all the sublime beauty of creation. Talking of colours he’d never known. Confiding to Monger, later that day, in the George where we sat now, that his spirit had been awakened neither by prayer nor Bible… but by Cate Borrow and her fungus dust.

‘Not only eased the pain in his head, but opened his eyes to a brighter world.’ Monger’s tone was yet drab. ‘A vision of heaven on earth.’

I was intent, for this was said also of the mushrooms which Jack Simm had found for me and which I’d dried and brewed in private. Drinking the brew late at night in my library, amongst my books, surrounded by the wisdom of the ages.

Without any effects, in my case, beyond a mild headache. It was ever thus.

‘There could be considerable demand for such a potion,’ I said cautiously.

‘But, regrettably,’ Monger said, ‘there was – there always is – a hazard. The results were… not predictable. Indeed, rather than a sense of exaltation, there might, oft-times, be visions worse than the blackest nightmare. You see? Heaven or hell. A roll of the dice.’

The
elixir of heaven and hell
. I’d heard some talk of it in the low countries a year or two back, but it was like to the
elixir of life –
you never know how much to believe.

‘So random were its effects,’ Monger said, ‘that Cate Borrow would dispense it only in the most extreme circumstances – that is, for terrible head pains or when she had reason to think someone so deep sunk into misery than he might be about to take a length of rope into the woods.’

‘So, apart from this wool-merchant, who—?’

‘She tried it on herself. But with restraint, in the merest quantities. Matthew took it once – never again, he’ll tell you. When it was used they’d make sure whoever took it was never left alone, lest they might cause harm to themselves.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll come to that.’

‘So these…’ I recalled Cecil’s words. ‘These visions…’

‘I…’ Monger was hesitant. ‘I’ve heard it said that the place where the potion was ingested… might alter the response. And I imagine it would also be affected by the humour of the man ingesting it. Or the woman.’

I waited. So dim was it now that I could barely see his face, let alone read his expression.

‘Joan Tyrre,’ he said. ‘On hearing of the dust of vision, Joan Tyrre… was eager. And thus, in her foolish, innocent way, became the cause of Cate’s downfall.’

Joan Tyrre was herself a herbalist, if hardly in Cate’s company, and years earlier had been making another precarious living, in Taunton, out of her relations with the faerie. Joan apparently naming people the faerie had told her were bewitched and offering them help.

I’d heard of this unsavoury practice, preying upon the poor and desperate, and knew it couldn’t have lasted long before drawing the attention of the Church.

It hadn’t. Brought before the church court, Joan had admitted all and sworn herself to the service of God… while thinking to return, more discreetly, to her former trade in another part of the town when all the fuss had died down. But the faerie do not easily forgive such a betrayal and – or so she’d claim later – would no longer confide in her.

Having also left her near-blind. This was when she’d decided to leave Taunton for what she’d heard were the more openly mystical humours of Glastonbury.

‘She’d seen the tor,’ Monger said. ‘In the distance, magical in the
evening light. And heard the tales of the King of the Faerie, Gwyn ap Nudd, still in residence in the heart of it.’

Thinking that the great Gwyn might be responsive to her urgent pleas, Joan had walked to Glastonbury, joining a band of travellers for protection. In a wood near the foot of the tor, she’d fashioned for herself a rude shelter out of bent saplings and thatch. It was summer, and she’d slept there for some weeks, praying that she might be taken into the hall of the faerie.

‘So Joan’s relations with the faerie,’ I said, ‘were not just…’

‘Of her own invention?’ Monger said. ‘Many people say she’s mad as a hare, and yet…’

Weeks had passed. Joan had been chilled to the bone by the winds of autumn, no illumination to warm her nights. Joe Monger himself had found her one day, collapsed in her shelter, half-starved. Bringing her into town and taking her to Matthew Borrow, who gave her a bed in the ante-chamber of his surgery, sometimes used as a hospital. When she was recovered, the Borrows had found her a position as housekeeper to an old woman who shared her fascination with the faerie.

But Joan was still cast down, and her sight was worse. Hearing of the experience of Monger’s friend, the wool-merchant, she’d returned, in despair, to Cate Borrow, begging her to disclose the herbal ingredients of the powder which offered entry to the very Garden of Eden, with its skies the colour of green apples and the forests all blue like some distant sea. Or, as
she
would see it…

‘The land of faerie?’ I said. ‘Cate Borrow, of course, refused, deeming Joan to be a woman of unsound temper who might be left sorely damaged. But Joan wouldn’t leave her alone. Her proposal was to go one last time to the top of the tor and dose herself with the dust of vision, there before the ruins of the church of St Michael.’

‘A bold woman.’

‘Moonstruck,’ Monger said. ‘She’d stopped eating by then. Starved herself for weeks. If you think she’s thin now… my God. Clothes hanging off her, hair falling out. Opening her arms to death. In the end… Cate relented. On condition that she and Matthew should
accompany Joan to the tor and remain with her while she took the potion. Matthew having resisted it to the end, of course, repelled by thoughts of Joan Tyrre screeching to the sky in helpless ecstasy in possibly the most visible place in all Somerset. Then finally accepting that it should be done on All Hallows Eve.’

I shrank back.

‘Quite,’ Monger said. ‘Matthew, however – you should know that Matthew goes to church just enough to avoid penalty and only too glad to be called away to a case of sickness in the middle of it. His science is, I would say, a narrower science than yours.’

‘You mean he has no belief in God or the spiritual?’

‘No faith I’m aware of, no fear. Matthew fears only men – unlike most others here, as you can imagine. On All Hallows Eve, the town lights its lamps, bars its doors and firmly turns its back on the tor.’

‘The devil’s hill.’

‘This might be the one night they could be sure to be alone there. Or that anyone else up there’ – I sensed a rueful smile from Monger – ‘would be too far gone in madness to pay heed to Joan Tyrre.’

‘Or, presumably, that Joan would, on the eve itself, be too affeared to go on with the venture and…’

‘Exactly that,’ Monger said. ‘Matthew said that if Joan backed away now, at least that would be an end to it.’

I sat and waited for Monger to tell me what had happened in the end, but he became reticent, saying only that Joan did not back away, with the result that they went, the three of them, on All Hallows Eve, to the tor.

To my own mind, having myself been aware of the strange air upon the tor, Joan Tyrre was either very brave, very mad or very sure of the nearness of another sphere of existence. And of its charity towards her.

‘All I know,’ Monger said, ‘is that Joan claimed that from the following morning her sight – in her best eye at least – had begun to improve by degrees.’ He shrugged. ‘But we have only her word for that.’

‘You didn’t talk to the Borrows about it?’

‘The Borrows spoke of it to no-one, until much later. Matthew, needless to say, remains convinced that whatever Joan had seen was within her own head. The worst of it, you see, John… the very worst of it is not
what they saw, but that
they
were seen. The three of them. Ascending the tor, on the night when the dead are abroad.’

‘Who saw them?’

‘A tenant farmer, Dick Moulder, looking for some runaway ewes,
stated
that he watched them ascending the tor with lighted candles in the dusk and later saw them clustered near to the church ruins. Dancing and chanting to the moon, he said.’

I’d caught his emphasis. ‘You think he didn’t see them at all?’

‘I think
someone
saw them, or heard of it. But I know Moulder as a Bible man who wouldn’t go within a mile of the tor after dark. The truth, more likely, is that they were seen from the Meadwell land. But, this being too close to Fyche, Moulder was ordered – or paid – to say he’d seen them. Put it this way: this came some weeks later, when more evidence was being sought, to support a… a graver charge.’

And so it emerged. The whole bitter tragedy of it.

Whether Joan Tyrre had been loose-tongued in the town about Cate’s potion improving her eyes through some inner vision, Monger didn’t know. All he knew for certain was that, within the week, a travelling dealer had called on Dr Borrow offering him a substantial sum of money for a quantity of the dust of vision which could offer glimpses of heaven. He’d sent the dealer away but it seemed the man returned when Matthew was with a patient and Cate was out in her herb garden. Two days later, the potion would sold in the market in Somerton, a town some miles away.

Which made no sense to me, for if the thief knew not which was the magic potion…

‘He took everything he could cram into his bag and sold it all – people’ll buy anything if it’s cheap enough and said to be from abroad. And if just one person achieved a vision of heaven, as a result, that would be sufficient to set up a clamour.’

The clamour that resulted, however, was not the kind the thief expected.

‘As Cate herself told me more than once, what was most important was the quantity in which the potion – the fungus dust and whatever was
mixed with it – was administered. The quantity is—’ Monger held a forefinger and thumb barely apart ‘—very, very small.’

According to Monger, a small flask of the potion had been bought by the sixteen-year-old son of a prominent landowner. The boy had gone out that night, on the roister with some of his fellows. Never came back.

‘His companions had left him, in fear at his behaviour,’ Monger said. ‘They spoke of the dreadful convulsions of his body… in a kind of dance. He was screaming that devils were pinching him and his arms and legs were afire.’

I must’ve shuddered; Monger glanced at me.

‘They found his body about a week later, entangled in branches under the river bridge. Thrown himself in the river to put out the fire in his limbs.’

Monger said the dealer had fled from Somerton but was caught in the hue and cry. In return, Monger guessed, for his life, he confessed to the theft of herbs mixed by Cate Borrow.

‘And
was
this established to be caused by swallowing some of the… the dust of vision?’

Thinking that I’d heard of something similar in France. ‘Although no-one else died in this way, the boy was the first of several to complain of burning limbs, visions of angels and monsters made manifest under unearthly skies. All had been sold quantities of Cate Borrow’s potion. And then, as she was awaiting trial, word came in of the deaths of infants.’

‘What?’

‘Babes whose mothers, it emerged, had taken the potion to ease the sorrow which can follow childbirth. The wrath of God visited upon them, people cried.’

Within a day Cate Borrow had been arrested for witchery.

Within a short time she’d be dead.

‘Hanged for mixing herbs?’

‘For murder.’

‘Any half-competent advocate could take such a charge apart.’

‘In London, maybe.’

His voice riven with bitterness. The window to the high street was murked with dusk now, the fire low and red in the ingle.

Even in London… I thought back to my own imprisonment. How, through a knowledge of the law, I’d been able to discredit the so-called evidence sworn by the Lord of Misrule.