Nel said, ‘I was brought up to revere him for his skills and saintly generosity. And not to bother him with childish matters.’
Staring out across the town, her voice even, without heat or bitterness. The voice of a woman who was back from the dead but not entirely. A Persephone who’d left some part of herself in the underworld. I knew then that there were elements of her which would also be beyond the understanding even of a man of science and a student of the hidden.
‘She never told you you were not his child?’
‘She told no-one.’
‘When did you learn?’
‘Not from my mother. Not till after her death.’
‘When Mistress Cadwaladr returned to Glastonbury?’
‘She was only one who knew. The only one who cared to know.’
Nel said nothing for a few moments, then she turned to look at me, hot pain in her eyes.
‘John, it only made me want to be closer to him. I’ve been proud to be the daughter of Matthew Borrow, the finest physician in all Somerset.’
She looked across to the abbey ruins. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘I’ll find him. So many questions.’
It was my hope she’d never find him.
‘Your mother…Could she not see the void in him where the heart should be?’
‘She owed him her life. Don’t you see? Whatever the reason for it, all the good that had ever come of her life… she owed to him.’
‘She wouldn’t look at him in the court. She turned her eyes away.’
‘Maybe she had no wish to see the…’ She looked down the field to where stood the wooden cross. ‘’twas not something to take to your grave.’
She began to weep and I held her to me, and time passed, and I tried to understand and could not. Both of us knowing the question I must needs ask or be forever tormented.
At last, she said, ‘She must have felt the wind of it. I was home from medical school, and my mother said – not a week before her arrest – that when I was qualified I should go far from here. London… anywhere. As soon as I left the college. I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing her again. But she made me promise.’
‘And you promised?’
She stiffened.
‘I would not. I laughed. And it haunts me. It haunts me that she thought her own death might make me realise. Maybe she thought me cleverer than I turned out to be. Something always drew me to him. This… this saintly man who…’ She seized my hand hard enough to stop the blood. ‘When I was held at Wells… they told me he’d confessed to save me.’
‘Who? Who told you?’
‘The gaoler. The woman gaoler. She said he’d told them- Said they were his knives with all the blood over them.’
‘They were… God damn it, they were his knives.’
‘I’d watched him fighting them when they came to take me. They knocked him down. He lay in the street, they dragged him up…’
I saw some of that too, as I and everybody in that street was meant to. A play. A masquerade. He was good at that. The next time I’d seen him, in his surgery, he’d been working through the pain, and I – and doubtless the whole town – had thought him brave and selfless, like the women who’d thought they’d loved him… if not for himself, then for what he was.
Thought they should love him.
A man so cold and remorseless that he’d betray his country and then, to conceal his treachery, dispose of his wife of convenience. And then, a year later, seize an opportunity to do away with the young woman who was not his daughter.
‘It was made clear to me in the prison in Wells,’ Nel said. ‘Made clear that it would be either me… or him.’ She was staring right through me. ‘What had I done that he wanted me dead?’
I said nothing. He’d seen his chance, that was all. He’d been called in to get Stephen Fyche out of trouble, to make a disposal after torture look like a ritual killing, and the cold bastard had seen his chance.
‘At least,’ I said, ‘you now know who your father was.’
She plucked grass from her dress. ‘He dined at the abbey, with the abbot. The abbot had fine meals prepared. Salmon and trout. He was, it seems, charmed by the maid who’d served it.’
‘And he didn’t know… about you? I mean, when he returned after the sacking of the abbey…?’
‘My mother was a respectable married woman by then, with a child and an education. Their relations were good… but of a different kind.’
I looked into her green eyes. She tossed back her hair against the wind. She’d lived nearly all her life under a lie and very nearly died under one.
‘Poor Leland,’ she said.
ENDWORD
September 1560
I do not understand the efforts of certain people who rise up against me.
Monas Hieroglyphica.
Another dawn. I sit at my mother’s board in the window of our parlour with the letter from my stricken friend.
God help me, John, but I had no part in it. I say this to you, who have least cause to believe me. I place my hand upon my Bible and I swear it over her poor dead body, through my tears…
Could sleep hardly at all last night after reading this five times, six times… more… The wind was up and the river was high and I’m lying open-eyed and cursing fate.
If fate it was. All London talks of black sorcery. The steeple of St Paul’s is gone to ashes these past two months, struck by summer lightning. An earth trembling was recently felt in London, causing panic in the streets.
Two days ago, I was summoned to Cecil’s house in the Strand where he received me in a private garden with high hedges. An afternoon of sultry heat but little sunshine.
‘The end of days,’ he said. ‘There’s been much talk of it.’
‘Except in the night sky,’ I assured him. ‘The stars have nothing to say about the end of days.’
‘And the Second Coming. The Queen makes light of it but is nonetheless perturbed.’
‘Nor do the stars herald another Christ.’
‘Who speaks of Christ?’ The Queen’s chief minister handed me a pamphlet. ‘This comes to us from Paris.’
It was in French. I was permitted to sit down at the garden table to read it. At first, I was inclined to laugh, but a sight of Cecil’s face warned against.
ENGLAND AWAITS THE CHILD OF SATAN
The pamphlet said that the magicians in England were now claiming London, the fastest-growing city in the world, to be the New Jerusalem.
In fact, London’s growth was as a centre of evil, its cold and smoky streets filled with murder, robbery, whoring and all the disfiguring diseases known to man. All this having begun with the rejection of the Church of Rome, the plunder of God’s holy houses throughout the kingdom, the slaying of priests and the occupation of the throne by the repellant daughter of the union of a wife-murderer and a witch.
No wonder, the pamphlet went on, that the stars foretold that London expected soon to welcome a dark messiah, whose birth was to be kept secret until such time as the child was grown.
The coming of Satan incarnate. And if London was the satanic Jerusalem then the black Bethlehem, where the child would be born, was the town of Glastonbury, celebrated as the birthplace of Christianity in England until its abbey, founded by St Joseph, uncle of Christ, was torn down and its streets filled not with pilgrims but witches and sorcerers.
Just as the first Tudor to usurp the throne had ensured that his first son was born in Winchester, claimed for the court of the great King Arthur, so this child would be born in the town of Arthur’s death.
Born to Elizabeth, the witch queen.
The pamphlet reported that England’s most notorious black sorcerer, ‘Dr’ John Dee was himself just returned from a visit to Glastonbury to meet the circle of witches there and make preparation for the birth of the child. The sorcerer having journeyed to Glastonbury with the child’s…