There was… a certain not-quite symmetry in her features which made me want to study them at length, calcule their proportions.
‘How do you know,’ I asked softly, ‘when it’s best for certain herbs to be grown?’
She looked wary for a moment, and then her shoulders went loose and out it came.
‘Some ’tis best to sow under a new moon and then to harvest under a full moon. Or the other way around. Or cultivation may be more profitable when certain heavenly bodies are in certain portions of the sky. Also the curative qualities of some planets may be improved under certain planetary… what’s the matter?’
‘Where did you learn of this?’
‘From my mother, but -’ her eyes, of a sudden, sharpening with a defiant light – ‘I’ve also read books.’
‘And where did you obtain such books?’
Thinking: the abbey library, which left Leland in awe.
‘Pass me my bag,’ she said. ‘There’s a flask inside which we can fill with water for your friend. You should give it to him sparingly, betwixt larger quantities of ordinary, pure water. Not that much of the water in Glastonbury is truly… ordinary.’
‘Why is that?’
In London, water was seldom drunk these days.
‘Because… they say that the holy essence, all the sacred life in this place… flows with the water… underground. Even with the abbey going to ruin, the place itself is still hallowed. There are some things you can’t destroy. Some things about a place that are in that place.’
‘They say Our Saviour walked here.’ I handed her the bag. ‘As a young boy.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s why it’s holy?’
‘Did I say it was holy?’
‘I believe you said hallowed. ’
‘I meant it has a power,’ she said. ‘Maybe something to do with the flow of water beneath it. Maybe the abbey was only put here because of the unusual… that is, it may indeed be that Our Saviour was only brought here because…’ She must have seen the rapt stillness in me. ‘Oh – am I stepping close to heresy?’
Not looking, it must be said, as if she cared. Pulling a small, stoppered jug from her bag, she bent with it to the holy well. Despite the water I’d drunk, my mouth felt dry. Although the sun was still hidden in cloud, the day seemed warmer than any since Christmas. A close and airless warmth. No breeze. Unseasonal. I felt a discomfort. Everything here, in this odd, disfunctioned town, seemed to inflict discomfort.
‘What’s the power you speak of?’
‘I… don’t know. The reasons for it may be long into the past. Perchance you’ll feel it for yourself, when you’ve been here a while. It… alters the sense of things.’
‘I’m told,’ I said, ‘that some people here have had visions.’
She took the vessel from the well and put in the stopper.
‘Who told you that?’
‘I forget,’ I said lamely.
She placed the jug carefully in her bag, tucking it in like an infant.
‘’Tis certain true to say that some men and women here are driven very speedily into madness.’
‘Driven by what?’
‘Maybe by what they see or hear. Maybe no-one’s supposed to be living here. There are such places, are there not?’
‘Are there?’
‘Where people find it hard to live an easy life. And monks… monks would seek out such places, would they not?’
‘For a monk -’ an excitement like hot coals in my gut – ‘a monk must needs be challenged in his soul?’
‘Exactly.’
A glowing smile.
‘But now all the monks are gone,’ I said.
‘In which case, it might be thought -’ she brought a knuckle to her chin, as if there were something new here that she was considering for the first time – ‘that we needed the monks here to keep a balance in the place.’
She fell silent. I felt the weight of the hill behind us, had a feeling of the devil’s finger scratching at the clouds, something in me wanting, unaccountably, to cry out.
‘Balance?’
‘To keep the peace. Daily prayer and chanting creating a balm. Lying soft upon the air.’
‘And there’s no peace now? Worship at the Church of the Baptist does not have the same effect?’
‘Dr John,’ she said, ‘don’t make me say these things.’
I said nothing. She would hardly be the first to suggest that the anglicised services of the reformed church were a poor substitute for the older rituals it had discarded.
‘You haven’t been here long enough to know this town,’ she said.
‘Then tell me.’
‘Feelings…’ She sighed. ‘Feelings here run to extreme. When you try to describe it, it sounds like nothing much – bitter quarrels which are not healed…feuds, street fights. Thieving and wife-beating and men killed over very little. Very little. But put them all together and sometimes it seems that this place is become like to a wound left open, where there’s gangrene and rot. A mortifying of the flesh.’
My eyes must have widened at her eloquence and the force of her argument. I was thinking of what Cowdray had said about the power the abbey had given out. Like to a great beacon, always alight. A calming light. And the abbey had been here before the town, which had grown up to serve it. And now the light had gone out, leaving the town bereft and prey to…
Next to every holy place there’s a high ground as the devil takes for his watchtower.
I’d thought myself well qualified in theology, but this was unfamiliar territory and made me feel as if all my years of learning were of little consequence. I looked down at the holy well, the blood well, the iron well, and felt the weight of the strange hill, like the burden of a hunchback.
There are places – I know this – where the earth itself speaks to us. In olden times, men were closer to it. All men, not only priests. When I think on this, I sometimes feel that even the Bible men might be closer to regaining this lost faculty, yet the rigidity of their beliefs prevent them from the experience of it. I turned to Mistress Borrow.
‘And the visions?’
She drew her cloak over her knees.
‘Who’s to say what are visions and what are signs of an oncoming madness?’
‘Or possession?’
‘Oh yes, there’s much possession in Glastonbury. The demons have a rare freedom here.’
‘Could you -’ my throat was as dry as parched earth – ‘explain this to me?’
‘And this is important, Doctor?’ Looking up at me, of a sudden suspicious. ‘This has an importance for your work in the listing of the Queen’s antiquities?’
As if she were awakening from some daydream… as if we both were held in a spell which she must needs break.
‘I’m interested,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
‘We should go.’ She was looking away, to somewhere beyond the circle of thorn trees, scrambling coltishly to her feet. ‘I have visits to make. To the sick.’
Snatching up her bag before I could reach it, she moved away betwixt the apple trees and was almost in collision with the panting bulk of Dudley’s groom, Martin Lythgoe.
‘Beg mercy, Doctor…’
Red in the face, his thatch of yellow hair standing up in spikes, a ragged scratch scoring one cheek.
‘I’m reet glad to’ve found thee. Me master-’
I leapt up.
‘Is he worse?’
‘No, he’s… much the same. He were asleep when I left him. It’s just he said – before he become ill, like – as how we should watch out for thee.’
‘Me?’
‘And what do I do, wi’ the master all laid up, but go buggering off checking on th’horses and let yer go wandering off on yer own. Well…’ He looked at Mistress Borrow. ‘Pardon me, I din’t known tha were wi’ him, Doctor.’
If he’d been following me, he must have known, but I let it pass.
‘Martin, I’m a grown man.’
‘Aye, well, I can see that, but me master, he reckons…’
However you survived in the cesspits of Paris and Antwerp without me around to save your sorry arse I shall never know.