‘Dr John,’ I said. ‘Of the Queen’s Commission on Antiquities.’
This intelligence was received, I’d concede, with no conspicuous awe.
‘Here on instruction of the Privy Council,’ I said mildly, as if by rote. ‘If you wish to inspect my papers of authority, I have them at the George Inn.’
Well, as you know, I was never good at this. Moving closer to these men to signify that I was not intimidated, I was still unsteady. Aware of the turf lifting with each step and praying that I should not be cast down again by some unaccountable slippage of the air.
‘And your name?’ I said.
‘Fyche. Sir Edmund. Of Meadwell. Owner of this ground.’ A vague gesture toward his monkish companions. ‘Brother Michael, Brother Stephen.’
A greybeard and a thin-faced youth. Connections forming: last night Sir Peter Carew had spoken of a former monk from the abbey using an inheritance to develop a farm and then establishing there a college for the education of the sons of gentlemen.
‘Dr John, if you’ – Mistress Borrow was pointing down the hill towards a wind-bent fence – ‘if you care to consult the records, you’ll find that the estate owned by Sir Edmund stops there. ’
‘However,’ Fyche said politely, ‘the way you came, you would have to cross my land to get here.’
‘Fie!’ Her back arching like a cat’s. ‘’Tis a right of way!’
‘I’ll have its ownership ascertained when I return to London,’ I said briskly. ‘However, as an officer of the Queen’s Commission I can take, with impunity, whichever route be most expedient for the furtherance of my business, which-’
‘Yes,’ Fyche said. ‘Tell us, please, about your particular business.’
His accent was of the west, yet educated. A survivor, Carew had said. Close up, I could see white specks in his beard. His skin was weathered but still taut. He was maybe five and forty years.
I explained that I was charged with a new listing of ancient structures and notation of their surviving contents and prevailing condition.
Fyche’s head tilted.
‘Like Leland?’
A loaded question.
‘Somewhat like Leland,’ I said. ‘But not, of course, with the same masters. What I mean is… no-one here need fear treachery.’
Fyche smiled. The curious mist wove yellowy wreaths around his boots.
‘And how would you know, Doctor? Did Leland realise his purpose when he took his list to London?’
‘I don’t know. Leland died.’
‘Having first gone mad, I’m told. However -’ Fyche raised a thumb to the broken tower – ‘as you can see, this church, despite its dominant situation and its dedication to the Archangel Michael, is ruined beyond easy repair. Does the Queen’s Commission have an answer to that?’
If it did, I couldn’t think of one.
‘Obviously,’ I said, ‘the continued need for a church up here would have to be weighed against other causes. For example… with the Church of the Baptist in the town, would there be much call now for continued worship up here?’
The mist stung my eyes. Fyche’s smile was looking worn.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it certainly goes on.’
‘What does?’
‘Worship,’ Fyche said.
I looked up at the tower, mist oozing from the crack in its side, a jagged tear as if it had been knifed.
‘The witch can tell you,’ Fyche said. ‘If she’s a mind to.’
Instinctively, I turned my head to Mistress Borrow.
Only to see her moving away towards the path winding down, her black cloak pulled around her, its hood up. She didn’t look back, and I felt an uncertainty within me and an unaccountable sense of coldness, longing… and loss.
I spun angrily back at Sir Edmund Fyche, but he’d already turned away.
‘Come with me, Dr John,’ he said, ‘if you have the time.’
Up to the very apex of the Glastonbury Tor. Through an archway into the tower itself. Which was, as it had seemed from afar, as Mistress Borrow had said, all but hollow, a vast chimney. Cracked flags and broken stones around our boots, Fyche kicking at one.
‘Defiled,’ he said.
Far above us, the white sky was stretched like a soiled bedsheet beyond a rotting cross of old timbers.
‘I’m told an earthquake did this,’ I said.
Fyche bent and picked up a dead rook by a black wing.
‘When a church is abandoned,’ he said, ‘it festers like a corpse. And attracts maggots.’
I said nothing, but recalled Mistress Borrow: 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.
‘A mess of them,’ Fyche said. ‘Squirming and roiling. A sickness. Can you not smell it?’
In truth, all I could smell was a Bible man’s soapy odour. Fyche tossed the wretched bird back into the rubble.
‘As a Justice of the Peace, I’m tasked with breaking up all ungodly assemblies. Whether dealing with the instigators myself or handing them over to the Church courts.’
I nodded, wary now. Although the extent of their powers seemed to vary from town to town, a local JP was never someone to be lightly dismissed. He would have firm connections in this county while, with Dudley ill and Carew gone to Devonshire, I had none.
Yet it would not be good to be seen to back down before this man or to appear less than confident in my own authority.
‘This talk of witchcraft… Sir Edmund, Mistress Borrow is simply the physician summoned to treat my colleague – abed with a fever. Nothing she’s done so far suggests devilry.’
He made no response to this, strode back to the archway. I followed him out of the tower, across the springy turf until he stopped on the eastern flank of the tor where the air was clearer. Woodland lay below us dark-haloed by a curling of smoke from tall chimneys.
‘Foul rites,’ Fyche said. ‘Lewd practices.’
‘I see.’
And thought that I did, as he spun at me.
‘No. You do not see. You don’t see the fires in the midnight, you don’t look up and see the maggot-people chattering and squealing to the moon. Nor walk up here the next day to find new-born babes in the grass with their throats cut in sacrifice.’
‘You’re serious?’
I didn’t believe it, of course, thought it a Bible-man’s bullshit. But a Bible man who was also a JP… you did not just walk away.
‘Why was a church built here?’ Fyche said. ‘Hardly an obvious spot. No community here.’
‘Just a hill.’
‘A hill. Exactly. And before the church, right where we’re standing… were stones. High stones. Raised by low men.’
‘You mean Druid stones?’
‘Heathen stones.’
I nodded, feeling the trickle of an old spring in my spine.
‘Paganism,’ Fyche said. ‘Witchery.’
Looking down at the turf, as if something black and noxious might be seen oozing to its surface.
‘Fools say the King of the Faerie, Gwyn ap Nudd, has his chambers here, under our feet. Hence the church’s dedication to St Michael, the warrior angel, to drive out old superstition.’
‘Sadly, no defence against an earthquake,’ Dr John said in his prosaic, list-maker’s way.
While Dr Dee thought, What does this truly mean? Dr Dee, who knew too much to dismiss heathenism as primitivism, aware that these men, these Druids, in their ways, knew more then than we do now about the forces within the land. Or at least experienced more through natural magic, natural science. For these low men, whether they knew it or not, lived in the days when Pythagoras heard the music of the planets.
‘Earthquake?’ Fyche smiled sourly. ‘That was Gwyn ap Nudd shaking the hill in his rage. That’s what the peasants’ll tell you. And in their fear, they’ll make obeisance to him, lest their hovels collapse around them. Encouraged, always, by the witches, who yet come creeping to the tor in the belief that something here empowers them.’
I looked down the hillside with its veil of mist. No sign now of Mistress Borrow. Something tugged in my breast. I wrapped my arms around myself, wanting to be away from here, from this man, to ponder on how this place might yet empower me.