‘I wouldn’t’ve said this in front of Sir Peter Carew,’ Cowdray said, ‘but there’s folks here who won’t forget Leland.’
I sighed.
‘Man comes here with his script from the King,’ Cowdray said. ‘Telling everybody how much the King wants to know about all the great writings held in the furthest reaches of his realm. Ten or more years later, he’s back again, and now it’s all in ruins, and he hardly seems to notice. Blethering about making charts. All I’m saying… You’d be well advised not to make a show of your mission. Might be misunderstood.’
‘I can assure you that the Queen’s intentions-’
‘Not as there’s anything left she could do to this town. Nothing left but wool and apples.’
I knew not what to say. When Leland had returned to Glastonbury, some fifteen years ago, it would have been as part of his aim to list the topography of every county in the realm. A task which had proved too massive for him to deal with and may have driven him into his final madness.
That and his scholar’s guilt at the dreadful outcome of his earlier mission. All those books, the first sight of which had raised him into awe and stupor.
‘What did happen to the books in the abbey library?’ I said.
Cowdray massaged his red stubble.
‘A few got took away by the King’s men – the ones with gold bindings, I’d guess. The old black ones… thrown out in a heap. With the monks gone, not many folk left with an interest in books. Well, not in reading them.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘You can get a good fire going with a book.’ Cowdray smiling sadly at my reaction. ‘That distresses you, Doctor?’
I did not say that books had value beyond gold, only nodded wearily.
‘All right, maybe some were saved,’ Cowdray said. ‘Maybe the monks took some. Maybe some were taken to Wells, or further. For safekeeping. Nobody could believe it was all over for ever. Hard for strangers to understand the power the abbey gave out, owning land for miles all around – down in Cornwall, up in Wales. ’Twas like to a great beacon, man, always alight.’
‘You’d’ve supported the appeal to Queen Mary,’ I said, ‘to restore the abbey?’
‘Everybody did. Not for any big religious reasons, most of us. ’Tis just our only hope of returning to any kind of prosperity. Aye, we’re still on the Exeter road, we gets regular traffic through here, travellers stay the night, nobody starves to death. But for those of us who remember the foreign pilgrims throwing their money around, drinking all the wine and cider we could provide.’ Cowdray smiled. ‘Happy times, Doctor. But then… I was a young man then.’
‘The pilgrims,’ I said, ‘came to venerate the bones of the saints. What remains of them?’
‘Pilgrims?’
‘Bones.’
He eyed me with the kind of suspicion that made me glad we had Carew here to vouch for our status.
‘Bones,’ he said. ‘That’s why you’re here?’
‘In part.’
‘I know not where the bones are,’ Cowdray said. ‘Gone. From the earth, anyway.’
‘All of them?’
‘Maybe. There’s people could tell you better than me.’
‘Were they taken by the King’s men or were some… removed to places of safety?’
He was blinking, wary now, and I guessed I could not expect an honest answer.
‘Listen, I’m a lowly civil servant,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to persecute anybody. I won’t be reporting any names. Myself and Master Roberts, our report will simply be a list of what remains and what does not. So tell me… who’d know better than you about bones?’
Cowdray thought for a moment and then shrugged.
‘The bone-man?’
I waited. This might be mockery.
‘Benlow the bone-man,’ Cowdray said. ‘He collects bones. People take him bones and he pays for them and then sells them to the pilgrims. At least, he used to. Obviously, his trade’s not so good nowadays.’
‘He’s known to conduct this trade? Without getting-’
‘Bothered by the law? What crime does he commit? No doubt they could find one if anyone wanted to, but they don’t seem to.’ Cowdray got up to add a log to the fire in the ingle. ‘The more bones, the holier the place looks to pilgrims, and this was the holiest of all.’
I tore off a piece of bread, spread it with white cheese.
‘ You think so?’
‘Christ himself walked these hills. We gotter believe that.’
I watched the new flames licking at the apple logs in the hearth, the sun lighting the flags.
‘The people here must have been sick at heart when the monks were driven away.’ I caught the flicker of alarm in his eyes. ‘It’s all right. You have my word…’
‘Aye.’ Cowdray looked up at the window. ‘The day they took Abbot Whiting to the tor, ’twas like the end of the world. A good man. Not all abbots are good men, I’d be the first to agree that, but he was a mild old feller, and kind. Never turned his back on the town.’
‘You… saw what they did to him?’
‘Saw him lashed to a hurdle, dragged through the high street.’ Cowdray’s grizzled head in a sunbeam, his words coming out of darkness. ‘Bumping along like a deer carcass. An old man, beaten, bruised and cut about like a low-born thief? Where’s the reason in that?’
I said nothing. I was thinking of an amiable man called Barthlet Green who’d shared my chamber in Bonner’s lock-up, before being burned.
‘Don’t think he knew what was happening,’ Cowdray said, ‘or else he’d given up caring. His eyes were closed. ’Course, there were cheers and trumpets all around – like to a holiday. That’s how stupid some folk are. All following him up the tor, half-pissed. I couldn’t take it. Came in and served drinks and kept quiet.’
‘The tor…?’
‘Yon little pointy hill, doctor,’ Martin Lythgoe said. ‘Wi’ a church on top as were brought down by an earth tremble. Too dark for thee to see last night.’
‘Of course.’ I nodded. ‘That’s where the abbot was executed?’
‘Some say ’tis the devil’s own hill,’ Cowdray said. ‘Why they built a church on it, and why the church fell down. They say that next to every holy place there’s a high ground as the devil takes for his watchtower. And, aye, that’s where they hanged the abbot and two good monks. And then they cut him down and hacked his body into four, and the pieces they took…’
‘I know what’s involved.’
‘Is it any wonder he don’t rest?’
‘Mercy…?’
I looked up at a movement and saw that a woman had come in and sat herself down at the smaller board just inside the door. Evidently not a servant; she wore no apron and had entered uninvited.
‘’Tis why folk don’t go in the abbey after dark,’ Cowdray said. ‘Why they ain’t helping theirselves to stone much n’more. They reckon as first you sees the abbot’s candle in the nave. And then, if you got the sense you was born with, you drops your sack of stone and runs like buggery. Or there’s the abbot himself in front of you, in his full robes.’
I saw Martin Lythgoe shudder. The woman in the corner by the door sat motionless, and I wondered if this was Cowdray’s wife. She had long dark hair pushed back over her shoulders, wore a washed-out blue over-dress with a loose girdle around her waist.
‘If you takes a stone from the abbey and puts it into your wall,’ Cowdray said, ‘you should kneel and do penance every morning for seven weeks. Or ’tis likely your house will not be at peace.’
‘As good a means as any,’ the woman murmured, ‘to deter people from stealing the abbey. Especially if they have stiff knees.’
Cowdray turned on his stool.
‘Nel… never heard you come in.’
‘Let me know,’ she said, ‘when you feel your increasing deafness is worth the expense of a consultation.’
‘Ha. How’s Master Roberts?’
‘Sleeping. The more he sleeps now, the better will be his chances.’
The heavy-panelled room seemed to tilt. Even as I was adjusting to the realisation that this young woman must be Dudley’s doctor, I was hearing his voice in my head.