The Bones of Avalon (64 page)

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.’

A
HALF CIRCLE
of men were around us, the two torch-carriers standing either side of the gibbet frame, and in the fuzzy light I saw Fyche and his son, Stephen, and Sir Peter Carew, pale-eyed in the thick air. A jabbering amongst them, and then Carew’s voice was lifted above it.

‘Hellfire, let him alone. If he wishes to pull her neck like a chicken, so be it, the end’s the same.’

Still I held her up, arms wrapped about her covered legs, my cheek against a thigh. Could feel the rope that bound her hands. Gripped one of the hands, and it was cold. Prayed, as I’d never prayed before, to God and all the angels, the noise in my head like the bells crashing in the tower from which all the bells were long gone.

‘In fact, give a hand, Simmons,’ Carew said.

The man with cracked teeth moving forward, pushing aside the vicar, who was still bent and retching from my blow to his throat…

…and then stopping.

‘Well, go on, man!’ Carew roared. ‘Before his feeble fucking spine snaps.’

I looked up and saw what the man with cracked teeth saw.

‘Angels!’ he screamed.

But what I saw was a white-gold bird rising from the fire of two torches meeting in the mist with a burst of gases.

Then the rope gave, and she felt into my arms, her body slumped against my head and shoulders. Dead weight but I would not let go, would never let go.

The mist gathering around us, wrapping us in its brown blanket.

‘Say it!’ Dudley snarled. ‘Say what you did.’

Stephen Fyche was backed up against a leg of the gibbet. He stumbled, swore. I had the impression he’d been drinking. His father turned and walked away.

‘You had a nail hammered under his fingernails,’ Dudley said. ‘Then, when he yielded nothing, you started to slit his gut.’

The pikemen’s hands were tensed around their weapons for they knew not this man who’d strode through the mist, his sword out to cut through the hangman’s rope.

‘No…’ Stephen glancing around, maybe looking for his father. He wore his monk’s robe and his new beard looked to have been cut fine and sharp for the occasion. ‘That’s horseshit. Who
is
this fucking bladder?’

I kept quiet, sitting in the mud under the still-swinging rope, my arms around Nel, listening to her breath coming in harsh snorts. Celestial music.

Fyche was back. Somebody must have told him who Dudley was, most likely Carew.

‘My Lord, before you accuse my son—’

‘Who took out his guts?’ Dudley said to Stephen Fyche. ‘Who took out his heart with the doctor’s tools?’

‘The fucking
witch!’

‘Why not the doctor himself?’

A small sound came out of Nel’s half-strangled throat. Dudley edged closer to Stephen Fyche.

‘Tell us, boy.’

‘Aye,’ Carew said. ‘Maybe you better had.’

‘How…’ Stephen Fyche rose to his full height, swaying. Even I could smell the wine on his breath. ‘How dare you accuse a man of God, sirrah?’

And turned slightly, and I saw that he held a dagger close to his side and that Dudley saw it, too, and his hand was making a familiar short journey to his belt.

‘No trial needed here, then,’ Dudley said.

‘Uh… no.’ Carew gripping his wrist, twisting his sword out of his grasp. ‘Not your place.’

I’d seen something akin to this before.

Carew half turning this time, holding Dudley’s side-sword in both hands, and then the sword was a tongue of flame in the light of the torches and there was a look of faint puzzlement on the youthful face of Stephen Fyche as his body sagged below it.

Carew moved twice more, short hacks, and Stephen’s head seemed, for an instant, to be quite still in the air before it dropped to earth and rolled once into the grass where the body already lay, spouting its blood into the soil.

‘My
place, I think,’ Carew said.

The silence on the tor seemed eternal. It was as if it were done by the hill itself. As if, deprived of one life, it had taken another.

T
HE FISH HILL
was where Joseph of Arimathea had disembarked, stabbing his staff into the good soil of Avalon.

Soil so good, in fact, that the staff sprouted buds and grew into a thorn bush which yet survived, or descendants of it, and came into flower each Christmas Day.

Joe Monger had told me that. A pretty tale with many echoes, this hill being one of the fishes in the starsign of Pisces, whose age began with the coming of Christianity. I’d sat by this thorn bush before, not knowing of the legend, and sat there again in the chill breeze as the year approached the day when St David died, aged one hundred, a thousand or so years ago.

St David? Oh, yes, he was here too, how could he not have been?

Sitting here, you could see both the abbey and the tor. Maybe this was the medium between the two worlds, Christian and pagan, natural and celestial. He’d known what he did, the abbot, in giving this land to Cate Borrow, for the purpose of healing.

‘The abbot’s thought,’ Nel said, ‘was that if the medical herbs traditionally related to certain starsigns in the sky were to be grown inside the corresponding formations upon the
ground
… then the healing properties of them would be quite marvellously increased.’

‘She told you this?’

‘Of course not. It came to me when I awoke this morning. I remembered that when a particular herb did well here – yarrow or camomile, I forget which – then she’d say, Aha, this plant is responsive to the sign of the fishes. And I remembered how she’d go off with the abbot to plant herbs in other fields belonging to the abbey and… that’s my guess.’

The logic of it was beyond assail. Cate taken into the confidence of the
monks at the abbey who held the secret of the Zodiac. Working with them on a new kind of astrological healing. The implications were fascinating.

‘I suppose ’tis not the only secret of the Zodiac, and far from the most important, but…’

She smiled and squeezed my hand, and I looked at her with longing but no real hope. Though we’d lain together four nights now, I was sensing, in the sweetness of it, a parting rather than a beginning.

It had been nearly a week before she was able to speak without pain. She said this was only because of the burns and the weals yet apparent on her throat despite all the balms and ointments applied to it by Joan Tyrre. But I thought there was more. My feeling was that she’d foresworn all speech until she had an understanding.

She wore the blue overdress and a worn muslin scarf to keep the breeze from her throat. Below us, we could see the tip of the cross marking Cate’s grave, beyond it the abbey laid out like some broken golden coronet.

‘You’re sure you didn’t see him?’ she said. ‘He was standing next to you for several moments.’

I shook my head. I think she meant the abbot. Cowdray had said there were more people seen on the top of the tor that night than had come down from it.

‘I saw only the phoenix made by the torches,’ I said. ‘I’m just a dull and bookish man who has not the sight.’

The laughter came from deep in her throat, which must have hurt.

And I was still wondering what was real, what was dream or the runaway imagination of a man starved of food for a day, and sleep for longer. I’d mentioned to no-one my meeting with Nostradamus, who was gone by the time Carew’s men went into Meadwell. As were all the statues and the tabernacle in the chapel.

Little firm evidence against Fyche himself, Carew claimed, though it was Dudley’s suspicion that Fyche knew too much about Carew for him to be brought before an assize. But his status as Justice of the Peace seemed likely to be short-lived.

His son would be buried without ceremony.
Raising a dagger to the Queen’s Master of the Horse?
Carew had said mildly.
What choice did I have?

I couldn’t help dwelling on the possible reasons for Fyche trying to pass off the malignant Stephen as a monk. Had he actually thought that when Mary was Queen of England, the Pope back as head of the Church and the abbey rebuilt, it might be placed under
Stephen’s
control?

Madness. But then, many abbots and many bishops had been closer to the devil…

Had Brother Michael returned to France in the company of his old friend, Matthew Borrow? If I were looking for cause to believe that Michel de Nostradame was guilty of epic deceit, I could think of no better evidence than his friendship with Borrow.

What
was
this man?

Why had neither his wife nor his daughter, even in the shadow of the noose, been prepared to raise voice against him?

In the week since Dudley’s departure, I’d attended Benlow’s burial, along with the re-burial, in the goose field behind the Church of the Baptist, of all the bones in his cellar, and also revisited Mistress Cadwaladr. Now that Borrow was gone from the town and Fyche’s status was in question, many more truths were emerging.

Monger had recalled how, in the early ’30s, not long after the King had proclaimed himself head of the Church, s
omeone
had suggested to the abbot that the abbey’s treasures should be sent to France, where they might remain in the care of the Catholic Church. Fyche, the bursar? Almost certainly. But Richard Whiting, an Englishman to his soul, had been unconvinced – still, apparently, believing that the dark hand of Cromwell would never descend upon the fount of English Christianity. And, indeed, it would be five years or more before it did.