‘A proud tower,’ I observed.
‘Built by Abbot Selwood a century ago.’
‘And who cares for it now?’
‘Who cares for anything?’
She walked on, head down, dark brown hair flowing behind her, unrestrained by cap or coif. We passed through the churchyard, emerging at last on to the high street, where I saw a baker’s shop doing good business and a man having less success selling sheep fleeces from a cart. I followed Mistress Borrow along the street, which wound uphill past a building site backing onto the abbey wall – doubtless the plan was to use this as a supporting wall for new homes, but nobody was working on the site, and I recalled Cowdray:
If you takes a stone from the abbey and puts it into your wall, you should kneel and do penance every morning for seven weeks. Or ’tis likely your house will not be at peace.
But back at the inn Mistress Borrow had sounded sceptical. I caught up with her again.
‘The ghost of Abbot Whiting… do you not believe he’s seen?’
‘I didn’t say that. I said that such rumours might be employed to deter people from stealing stone.’
‘Then do you believe that he’s seen?’
‘It doesn’t surprise me. The poor man has little cause for rest. But as I don’t go in there it isn’t my business.’
‘You don’t sound afraid.’
‘Because I remember the abbot. From… when I was a small child. I remember him walking through the town, not far from here. He stopped to talk to us, my mother and me. His face… I remember his wrinkly smile, and his eyes had a kindness, like…’ She looked up at me. ‘For a long time, I thought I’d seen the face of God.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Three or four years.’
People passed us, entering the pale Church of the Baptist. Outside, on the edge of the street, a young man was plucking discordantly upon a patched lute, another slapping at a goatskin drum, chickens pecking in the mud around them. It seemed to me, for a curious moment, as if the people were behaving as though in a play and feigning ordinary life. That the real life here happened on some other level.
‘At least, unlike the abbey, the church is in full daily use,’ I said. ‘Does it have a library?’
‘I don’t know. Should it?’
‘Everywhere should have a library.’
‘Why?’
Walking faster, now she was away from the town centre.
‘Because -’ feeling the pull of my breathing as I kept up with her pace – ‘only through learning can we hope to attain…’
The words unaccountably dying on me. I felt suddenly foolish. And inadequate, somehow, as Mistress Borrow stopped at the entrance to a narrow track, tall, bare trees on either side, and turned to look down at me.
‘And is learning acquired only from books?’
She turned away again and began ascending the track.
‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘but the process of learning is surely much hastened. Is it not remarkable that, by means of a book, one man’s whole lifetime of learning can be passed to another in a matter of hours?’
‘All learning can be passed this way?’
‘Most of it. In my experience.’
She stopped at a low wall with a stile. Stepping away from it and waiting while I climbed up and jumped down on the other side. Giving her my hand, to help her down. Her own hand was bare, not like the Queen’s rose-petal glove. I experienced a most disturbing reaction and let go of it quickly when she was down from the stile, and turned away, feeling the warm blood suffuse my cheeks.
‘The well is that way,’ she said
Pointing towards a wood, a well-trodden path leading through it, and I had the sense of a mocking laughter rising within her. A laughter that seemed to be translated into a sudden, raucous cawking of crows, which caused me to look up in a hot displeasure mixed with apprehension and thus, through a gap in the trees, to espy, almost directly above us, a green mound like to a gigantic mole’s tump.
A stone tower projecting from its summit, like a stalk from an apple and black against the cloud.
XIV
A Mortifying of the Flesh
The clouds behind the jutting tower were a strange and blinding white, the hill itself a more vivid green than was common in February. A shock to the senses, and I felt a momentary separation that I liked not.
Division: part of me longing to go rushing to its summit, another part hissing, turn away.
‘So close to the town,’ I said, ‘and yet…’
‘Not of it,’ Mistress Borrow said. ‘It is its own place.’
We stood on the edge of the wood in full silence. No birdsong. The hill, I saw, was ridged, had terraces approaching the summit, like the mounds of the castles in my family’s country burned down in the Glyndwr wars. But no castle mound I’d seen was so imposing, so steep or quite so startlingly conical. It was utterly strange, as if it were planted here, constructed by men – or angels – for some purpose.
And I felt, oddly, as if some inner part of me was already familiar with it.
Most likely from an engraving in a book.
I said, ‘So an earthquake brought down the church.’
‘Nigh on three hundred years ago. Except for the tower. The church was rebuilt after the quake, but after that it never seemed happy to be more than a tower. After the Reform and what happened to the abbot up there, the church was abandoned, and they took away the bells. Now it is… as some say it began.’
‘As what?’
Her eyes sparkled.
‘What brought about the earthquake? Was the church cleft to the bone by an act of God, or was it the work of Satan?’ She pointed upwards to the tower, shrunken now by our nearness to the hill. ‘Is it not become the finger of Satan?’
‘Meaning what?’
A faint, serpentine mist was apparent around the tower, the white sky grained as if lightly dusted with soot. As if the tower was a chimney for some fire within the hill.
‘Like to a standing stone,’ she said. ‘A Druid stone? ’Tis well known that in the years before Our Saviour, this was a place of Druid worship. ’Tis said that Merlin’s own stronghold was there.’
A throb in my chest.
‘Arthur’s Merlin?’
‘’Tis also said that inside the hill was the great gathering hall of the King of the Faerie, who rides the stormy sky with the hellhounds of the wild hunt. So, you see, to the religious, that tower is the finger of Satan.’ Mistress Borrow let her arm fall, then turned away. ‘The holy well’s along here.’
Most holy wells I knew had stonework, crude statuary. This one was entirely unadorned. Twisted apple trees had grown around it in a rough circle, their branches curling into a protective nest.
When I leaned to it, I heard the water threshing and tumbling with a rare power. Dark red in my cupped hands. I brought some to my mouth and tasted it: iron, as I’d expected. Iron for strength.
‘Many people have been cured by it.’ Mistress Borrow knelt in the damp grass. ‘Many pilgrims.’
‘And local people?’
‘Even local people. The most effective medicines come free from rocks and hedgerows. But you can see why this well’s best called holy .’
I looked into her green eyes and tried not to blink.
‘ Is it called holy?’
‘No.’ She smiled. ‘They call it the Blood Well.’
‘Whose blood?’
‘Ah…’
A finger to her lips. I felt a pulsing inside me.
‘What kind of doctor are you?’
‘Oh… some would say, not a doctor at all, compared with my father who trained at good colleges. What do I know of leeches and the balancing of the humours? Not much at all. Only of crude surgery. And herbs. Which are more important, for all plants hold life and the energy of dew. Some more than others. If we know where and how to grow them. And when.’
‘And what mean you by that?’
I’d felt a real quickening of interest, now. Mistress Borrow was winding a strand of her brown hair around a forefinger, looking suddenly and startlingly young. Must be a few years over twenty, but seeming no older, at this moment, than my mother’s housekeeper, Catherine Meadows.