The Bones of Avalon (45 page)

I’d not walk away this time.

‘You need do nothing,’ I said, ‘except arrange for me to ride to Wells and speak with the accused.’

‘
Jesu,
you’re a fucking—’ Carew had turned to the doorway where Dudley now stood, rubbing his eyes. ‘
You
tell him. Tell him of the madness of taking on Fyche on behalf of a witch. ’

‘He serves the Queen, Carew,’ Dudley said. ‘Not Fyche. Nor even you.’

‘He’s a fucking
conjurer
!’

‘But, even if that were true, he’d be
the Queen’s
fucking conjurer. So if I were you – God forbid – I’d be tempted to go along with his proposal.’

‘Tell Fyche my
friend
from the
Commission on Antiquities
deems it his role to represent the woman accused of murdering his colleague’s servant?’

Dudley smiled tiredly.

‘Fix it. Why not?’

Carew stood shaking his head.

‘All right. I’ll help you. I’ll help you see the weakness of your judgement. Show you and the conjurer the truth of what you think to defend.’

In his efforts to sell me a new cloak, Benlow the bone-man had suggested the deepest of winter might be yet to come, but this morning appeared to dispute his forecast. The sun shone stronger than on any day this year, and the Poet’s Narcissus was budding at the roadsides. It was as if the thunderstorm, far from being an expression of God’s ire, had been the herald of an early spring, the gay ghost of some long-dead Mayday dancing in the wasteland of February.

Did I feel Eleanor Borrow with me as we approached her herb garden? Did I sense her presence on this hillside? In truth, I sensed it everywhere, now, as if she were become the spirit of this curious town and all that it had brought to me.

It had taken us no more than ten minutes to walk here from the George. Across the street, to the edge of the town, then over a stile to follow a muddied path on the flank of the long hill which sheltered the town like an arm. Now I stood by a wooden gate, looking up at the strip of land hedged all around, with a fast-flowing stream down one side. Its
mainly empty furrows were neat and drawn as if aligned to the tor, the battlements of whose tower crested the highest horizon. The air was shimmering with bright alchemical dew. And I felt…

What I felt was
naked
. Naked in my emotions. Close to breaking down and had to turn away from Carew and Dudley. Standing there facing the lower skyline, where the sun lit up the channels of water and pale pools all the way to the sea, until I found composure.

‘What does she grow here?’ Dudley asked.

‘Her mother had two hundred kinds of herbs,’ I mumbled, and Carew’s head swivelled.

‘Who told you that?’

‘I… forget. Could’ve been Fyche.’

‘There aren’t two hundred kinds of herbs in the world,’ Carew said.

‘There are far more than that.’

And they’d grow well here… a well-sheltered place, in its way, with good soil and an abundance of water. It moved me to think of what I’d read of the herb garden of the visionary Hildegard of Bingen, a woman well ahead of her time in the relating of science to creation and the use of plants to treat the melancholic condition.

‘You really want to know what she grew here?’ Carew wore a slanting smile. ‘I’ll show you what she fucking grew. Stay
there.
’

He moved off across the land, but I ignored him, walking up the slow slope. Sensing her walking beside me, the swish of her dress in the wet grass, following the winter-brown hedge toward the top of the field, where I’d seen a wooden cross.

There was no name on it, but I knew by its siting.

Felt so safe in her garden. Open to the land all the way to the sea, and the tor rising on the other side and the soaring golden pinnacles of the abbey.

I turned slowly, and it was there below me, its highest arches making gilded loops like dusty sunbeams.
A paradise. Avalon.

This had been the abbey’s ground. Most everything here, for miles around, had belonged to the abbey. And the abbot had given over this
land to Cate Borrow to continue her experiments with plants and herbs. This particular place, so perfect for its views of abbey and tor and the watery lands below… as if it might absorb the influences given off by these holy sites.

And more. A crossing place for all the energies of the earth. A Christian holiness, a pagan sanctity. I felt I’d been here when my mind was given up to the dust of vision. What would have happened had I imbibed the potion here, on such a morning?

It mattered not. The dust of vision had only been the grease to unrust the lock, free the door. There was no need for more; the door was open now… or at least ajar.

Time was suspended for some moments, and I existed in a state of profound yearning, the kind I’d once experienced only when gazing into the infinite vastness of a starlit sky. And I thought of what we were told by the church: that all life is lived for the glory of God, and that any rewards for us would come not in this world but the next.

But people here, in this town where the Saviour walked, and Merlin, did not accept this. Under this canopy of ancient magic, who could blame them for coming to the belief that they could have here – now, in
this
life – a kind of heaven. As if being here could, through prayer and knowledge, endow them with more than what God, according to the Church, allows.

No book, no dogma,
just being here.

This was the Avalon Heresy.

What Fyche hated most.

‘The witch’s grave, eh?’

I turned, and there was Carew, swinging back on his heels, hands behind his back, eyes lit with bright malice. Dudley with him, sombre-faced.

‘Couldn’t have the cow planted in consecrated ground, obviously,’ Carew said.

‘Or maybe,’ I told him, ‘this place is more consecrated, in its way, than either of the churchyards.’

Carew scowled.
This
was heresy. Well, fuck him. Hard to believe that the Queen had put the abbey into this man’s horny hands.

Which now were no longer behind his back, and he was leering through the hole in his black beard, as if in foul imitation of what they held.

Two earth-brown skulls, jawless and broken-toothed.

‘
This
is what she grew,
Doctor,’
Carew said.
‘
She grew death.’

D
UDLEY SAID
, ‘T
HIS
looks not good, John.’

As if it needed saying. We’d watched Carew walking away into the sunlight, with a lightness of step that belied his weight. Spring was in his walk and in the air, but it was a spring smirched now, like his smile, with a cold malevolence.

I moved further up the path, up the hillside, putting more distance ’twixt us and Carew… and also the herb garden, sullied now. I did not want to go back to it.

Carew had assiduously reburied the skulls where he’d uncovered them. Promising, as he walked away, that he’d send word to Wells to arrange a meeting for me with the prisoner – that I might ask her, he said, about all the other body parts which could be unearthed in her garden.

‘I know how it looks,’ I said to Dudley, ‘and I know how it’ll sound to a jury in court, but that doesn’t make it any less of a contrivance. The bones were brought here
not
by Nel Borrow.’

But I was sickened to see that Dudley’s patrician face was marked now with doubt.

‘How do you know that, John? You don’t. You can’t. And didn’t you tell me of evidence brought before her mother’s trial that she fertilised her soil by spreading graveyard earth?’

‘It’s no more true than any of this.’

‘You don’t
know,
though, John.’ Speading his hands in defeat. ‘Do you? And what did this supposed necromancy create but the potion that causes St Anthony’s Fire, which reduces men to tormented, gibbering madness?’

‘No.’ Shaking my head. ‘The dust of vision’s from a mould found on cereal crops. Not grown here.’

‘But still produced by this woman. I know, I know… if taken by a man such as yourself, it may bring forth redemption and cleansing. But, at the end of the day, her mother was hanged as a witch and, instead of renouncing it, your… first love… chose to follow her mother’s path.
That’s
what they’ll say – what a judge will say. And even you can’t deny that.’

‘Healing’s an honourable path.’

We’d come some distance now, were close to the top of the hill which overlooked the town and the abbey. We stopped by a lone thorn tree, where I subsided on to the grass.

‘You think Carew’s part of this?’

Dudley considered, positioning himself ’twixt the roots of the thorn tree.

‘He has a certain blunt integrity. He’ll support Fyche because Fyche is the law. If Fyche put the abbot in the frame on false evidence… well, difficult times, and the abbot
was
a wealthy papist.’

‘But do you see him
involved?’

‘In the stitching up of the abbot?’

‘I’m thinking more of Cate Borrow.’

‘He’s not a schemer. He’ll always prefer action. Though I do see him choosing, when it’s deemed strategic, to look the other way. He’s a soldier. A practical man. It’s all means to an end.’

‘I even know where the bones are from,’ I said.

‘Presumably dug from the graves which Carew told us had been descrated?’

‘More likely procured from Benlow, the bone-seller. I’ll find out.’

‘Beat the truth out of him?’

‘Reason with him.’

‘In that case –’ Dudley stood up, dusting down his doublet – ‘I shall ride to Butleigh, find with the woman who was delivered of twins.’

He’d brushed out his beard, and his moustache was starting to lengthen and curl again, as if this were a sign of regained health.

I said, ‘There may be another problem.’

Telling him of Monger’s fear that the woman, through pressure upon her family, might well refuse to confirm Matthew Borrow’s story.

‘My dear John…’ Dudley ran fingers through his shining hair. ‘I’ll swear that the woman is not yet born who’ll say no to Robert Dudley.’