‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I know what he reckons. Martin… ’ Looking into his eyes and speaking with deliberation in the hope he would get the underlying message that I was engaged in picking up useful intelligence. ‘Doctor Borrow… has shown me the holy well… to get some iron water. To aid Master Roberts’s recovery?’
‘Aye, aye.’ He nodded. ‘Not a problem, sir.’ Straightening his leather jerkin, casting a sideways glance at Mistress Borrow. ‘Anyroad, I think, under t’circumstances, Master Roberts would understand.’
‘Circumstances?’
Martin Lythgoe gave me a discreet… what looked to be a wink.
What?
I felt my cheeks suffused with blood.
‘I’ll leave thee to it, then, sir.’
He beamed.
‘No… Martin…’
‘Aye?’
‘If you want to help me -’ groping wildly for something sounding halfway authoritative – ‘there’s someone you might talk to. Cowdray spoke last night of a former monk from the abbey who’d become a farrier. I thought that, with your own work with horses, you might find a plausible reason to approach him?’
‘I could do that.’
‘You know what we’re looking for. What information we seek, and to what purpose?’
‘Oh, aye.’
‘And could inquire with discretion?’
‘I reckon yer mare could do wi’ some new shoes for t’journey back to Bristol.’
‘That would be a very good reason to make an approach.’
‘Awreet then, I’ll seek out this feller, and I’ll sithee back at th’ inn, Dr John.’
He patted down his haystack hair, nodded to Mistress Borrow and blundered away amongst the guardian apple trees, leaving me struggling to assemble an apologetic smile.
‘My… usual work being with manuscripts and books, my colleagues think me unused to the outside world.’
‘’Tis a real mystery to me how they could think that.’
Lips unsmiling, but her eyes were dancing, and the discomfort in me burst its dam.
‘I’d like to see the church.’
‘Church?’
‘ That church. Upon the tor. The devil’s hill. Whoever the devil may be, in this instance – the wizard Merlin, the King of the Faerie, the… to a Catholic, the Protestants are devils.’
Flinging out too many words, as usual, when I’m in a turmoil.
‘But there’s nothing up there,’ she said. ‘Even the tower’s all but hollow now.’
‘You call the remains of a church nothing? And what’s that terracing around the hill? Like to old fortifications.’
She shrugged.
‘Antiquities are my business,’ I said stiffly. ‘I can’t very well neglect this one.’
Knowing not, in truth, why I had to go up there, to a place that seemed so forbidding. Maybe because it was forbidding. To demonstrate that I was a man unafraid to challenge the devil.
Or even just a man.
‘Very well.’ The doctor gathered up her cloak. ‘This way…’
The path curved, making the ascent less steep than the appearance of the tor suggested. But it still was not a pleasant climb, and all the way I carried a damp and dolorous feeling of what it must have been like for the elderly, aching Abbot Whiting, hauled up on a hurdle to a certain death.
Like to the labouring of Christ, with his cross, up the hill of Calvary, the place of skulls.
Or worse. Close to the summit I stopped and looked back. The path was quite treacherously steep. Imagine pulling an old man all the way up here on a hurdle.
And three men?
Why? Why three?
A trinity.
Why here? Why have a public execution on this most inaccessible of hills? If they’d wanted to make an exhibition of it, entertain a crowd, why not the centre of the town?
The tower began to rise before us, as if it were thrust out of the hill, and the wrongness of everything became blindingly evident. For who in his right mind would build a church upon such an isolated, sharpened point of land? A castle or a fort, but not a place of worship.
As we came closer, the tower was revealed to be of grey-brown stone, and cracked open down one side, a fissure in it like a broken tooth, and the body around it was little more than foundations.
When I clambered to the top of the hill a few yards behind Mistress Borrow, it was like arriving upon a cloud in the sky. And when I stood close to the tower…
‘Do you not feel it relates more to the air than to the earth?’ she said.
‘Yes. Maybe.’
A needle to pierce the heavens and draw down lightning. Illumination.
I looked down, dizzied. Despite a thin mist, the views on offer were unexpected. Not only a vista of the town and the abbey like to a close-sewn crop betwixt the other hills, but of the flatlands to the west, all the way to the grey sea – the level country veined with narrow channels of water, swollen here and there into pools and lakes, and you could feel that it still belonged to the sea and might yet be reclaimed, becoming a true island again. For this, I realised now, was surely the very heart of what remained of the Isle of Avalon.
Merlin’s lair and known to Arthur. An excitement trickled into my spine, like a spring through rocks, and my head was as light as down-feathers. There was a momentary kindling of illumination and then – dear Christ – all my senses were crowding together, dropping as one into the bottom of my gut, where lies the lower mind, the arousal becoming a slow-swelling alarm as all the land fell into a tilt, a vast platter of greens and greys and browns and…
…I found me on my back on the turf, with the tower racing away from me towards a bright hole in the clouds.
‘God!’
Rising up on my elbows, all leaden-headed, dazed and ashamed that such a short climb should have so sapped my strength that I should fall into a womanly faint.
The lightness of her feet over the springy turf as she came to stand above me, arms folded. That cross-toothed smile and a barely veiled merriment in the green eyes.
‘Be not alarmed, Dr John, you’re hardly the first to lose his balance up here.’
Holding out a slender hand to me, but I wouldn’t take it and struggled unaided to my feet and still felt unsteady, cold sweat on my forehead. On the top of a high mountain, it becomes harder to breathe, but this was a mere tump. I was shaken and more than a little afeared that I might be coming down with Dudley’s fever.
‘It’s my fault,’ she said. ‘I should have warned you. As I said, this sometimes-’
‘Not to you,’ I said. ‘Evidently.’
‘No indeed,’ a man’s voice said. ‘How swiftly the devil’s claws reach out to his children…’
I turned.
He had his back to the tower.
His tone was soft and unhurried and weighted with a drawling ennui that spoke more of parts of London or Cambridge than this wild place.
‘Throw a witch into a pond and she’s said to float,’ he observed mildly. ‘Expose a witch to the seething air around Satan’s altar and she’ll gather all the floating imps to her rancid tits.’
XV
Maggots
The mist… I hadn’t noticed how much it had thickened, enclouding the tower and writhing like a living thing around three figures, as if they had arisen with the mist or were formed out of it. Two of them in monks’ habit, hands hidden in conjoined sleeves.
Mistress Borrow addressed the third, a secular man, as tall as me, strong-built and limber as a larch tree, his witch taunt still smeared across the chilled air.
‘And since when’ – facing him, pale-cheeked but not, I thought, with fear – ‘since when has this land been yours, Sir Edmund? Some desperate deal with the Bishop of Wells?’
No response. His hair and beard were as one, close-barbered from the top of his skull to the edge of his full jawline. He wore a dark green doublet and black hose above boots of good leather. Wide belt, a sheathed sword hanging from it.
‘The Bishop of Wells,’ I observed, ‘would seem to be in no position to make deals.’
‘And who would you be, fellow?’
I’d expected a deep, roughened voice, but his was high and clipped. I held my ground. While my dark attire was hardly at the height of fashion, it must be evident that I was not of the peasantry.