Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

A whole immigrant community spurning the bigger pickings of Bristol and London to scratch a living here. Why?

‘Not so simple,’ Monger said.

I heard Fyche again in my head with his talk of the fires in the midnight and the maggot-people chattering and squealing to the moon.

Feeling again the most acute strangeness. Why was Monger telling all this to me, a clerk from London who was almost certainly of the reformed church? It was beginning to make me anxious, but my interest had been trapped, and all caution had long been dismissed by the scholar in me.

Like the woman in the eyepatch, I seemed to have gained entry to an unknown realm.

‘How came you to know these people, Master Farrier?’

‘My trade.’ Monger glided on, not looking at me. ‘The abbey was where I learned my trade. Attending to the horses of visitors and pilgrims – remarkable how little regard the pious may have for their animals. Eventually I was given a forge in the abbey grounds, and now I have one on the other side of the walls. While still keeping a monk’s hours… and – more quietly – a monk’s religious observances.’

‘Without harassment?’

‘A farrier’s an essential man in any community. A good farrier is nigh-on untouchable. And this is still a Catholic town, whichever church its goodfolk attend. The abbey… cast a spiritual light over the place, and there was healing. People who’d limped in on sticks walking out and tossing the sticks over the hedge.’

‘But that’s gone…’

‘No, no… you’re not getting this, are you?’

We’d reached the edge of the market, and the houses were becoming poorer and crumbling into fields and heath, and when the farrier turned to me at last there was a kind of intense serenity in his grey gaze.

‘It’s not gone, Dr John. It was here before the abbey and it’s still here. Do you see? It was always here. ’

I stopped walking, feeling something like a gathering of stars in my abdomen. Oft-times I’d fancied that places where great churches and abbeys were built had some quality, some atmosphere related more to the balance of hills and fields and water than their orientation toward Jerusalem. An eagerness had seized me, but I said nothing.

‘With the abbey itself just a shell,’ Monger said, ‘there’s a need to provide channels for… energies which might otherwise overflow, perchance causing harm.’

Hadn’t Eleanor Borrow said something similar, about the monks being needed to keep a balance? For all my learning, I felt like a child again who saw before him adult human knowledge like an outline of distant mountains.

‘Most of us had little understanding of it at the time,’ Monger said, ‘but if you consider the real function of the abbey was to transform the energy that was there into a Godly substance, and spread it afar. Lay it soft on the land… a spiritual irrigation…’

‘Yes.’

I could see it and hear it. The river of a Gregorian chant, in all its glorious mathematical symmetry.

Ice in my spine.

‘How was this known?’

‘Tradition,’ he said.

‘Not written down?’

‘Some traditions -’ he smiled – ‘are never written down.’

‘Then how…?’

But he’d moved away, holding up both his long hands as if in benediction over the townsfolk clustered below us around the myriad market stalls.

‘Still they come. People in search of something. People who think that just by being here, on this holy soil, their lives will be transformed.’

‘Holy?’

‘A big, bad word,’ Monger said. ‘But everything has its darker side. There are some who would… speed the process.’

‘By sorcery?’

I thought of what Fyche had said about the cockerel in the abbey. And earlier about finding new-born babes in the grass with their throats cut in sacrifice.

‘By the use of ritual magic?’ I said.

‘When the new religion is in disarray, some may turn again to the older ones.’

Monger the farrier gazed placidly down across the huddle of the town. Like the player over the chesstable, and I was the knight, which is moved in such a fashion that he cannot easily see the way ahead.

The farrier turned his grey gaze upon me. ‘Where stand you, Dr Dee?’ he murmured. ‘For this surely is the town in England closest to your own heart.’

Black as Pitch

Sometimes I’d think that, for all my learning, I was still like to an infant, milky-eyed and unknowing. That, being sent early to college and raising my eyes but rarely from printed pages, a whole part of my being was yet undeveloped, leaving me with little understanding of a world so carelessly traversed by the less-educated.

A child of two and thirty. Dudley knew that. However you survived in the cesspits of Paris and Antwerp…

The plain truth being that I’d never been in the cesspits of Paris or Antwerp, only in their lecture halls and libraries.

Now I was walking numbly through the streets, as if naked, following the farrier into a mean, cramped drinking hovel on the upper edge of town.

Huddling in its dark, cider-smelling belly, beside a sooted inglenook with a fire of peat, while the stained ceiling sagged threateningly betwixt beams and my head was swelled with questions I had not the will to ask.

Cowering into the shadows, I watched a wench of about fifteen serving cider from an earthenware jug. Watched Monger waiting in line behind two farmer-looking men, four others sitting around the room on stools. The only talk I could hear was of sheep-prices until Monger returned, setting down two mugs upon the board and himself on the low, three-legged stool opposite me, pushing his thin hair behind his ears.

‘It was Nel,’ he said. ‘What?’

Monger drank some cider with the same restraint that William Cecil had displayed over a glass of fine wine.

‘People here follow your career with interest. Through pamphlets and such passed around amongst the seekers.’

Pamphlets. God help me. ‘Still,’ Monger said, ‘as you must have gathered by now, for a good many in this town, the word conjurer is far from a term of abuse.’

The fire coughed out weak yellow flames. My mouth was dry but I couldn’t drink.

‘A man deep into fever,’ Monger said, ‘is seldom aware of his indiscretions. And is even, in his fuddled state, apt to call out for his friend by name.’

‘Oh.’

I drank some of the strong cider.

‘A name alone being not, of course sufficient,’ Monger said. ‘Many men have the same name. Indeed, poor Nel was at first reluctant to believe her own ears.’

‘Who else has she told?’

‘Only me, after much havering… in the hope that I might be able to confirm it.’

‘Which you seem to think you have.’

‘At some risk, I may say, if you’d turned out, after all, to be an agent of the Queen.’

‘I am an agent of the Queen.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s what we like about you.’

I sensed a smile which it was too dark in here to see.

‘And what, after all,’ Monger said, ‘would a mere clerk know about Agricola the dowser?’

In better circumstance, I might have even been laughing. It was all so clear, to me now, all the traps laid out in my path. The daring talk of Mistress Eleanor Borrow:

’Tis best to sow under a new moon and then to harvest under a full moon… It has a power… Oh, am I stepping close to heresy?

And Monger… would he have revealed Emmanuel Worthy’s magical library to someone who might have regarded the books as heretical? Would he have fingered to me every penny-a-poke street-seer in the Glastonbury market, if not sure of his ground?

‘While both Nel and I accept,’ he murmured, ‘that Dr John Dee is a man of science rather than a procurer of spirits, we still find it curious that someone renowned for the breadth of his learning should arrive in a little town much reduced in its fortunes… merely to make account of what miserable antiquities remain there.’