Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

Which made no sense to me, for if the thief knew not which was the magic potion…

‘He took everything he could cram into his bag and sold it all – people’ll buy anything if it’s cheap enough and said to be from abroad. And if just one person achieved a vision of heaven, as a result, that would be sufficient to set up a clamour.’

The clamour that resulted, however, was not the kind the thief expected.

‘As Cate herself told me more than once, what was most important was the quantity in which the potion – the fungus dust and whatever was mixed with it – was administered. The quantity is-’ Monger held a forefinger and thumb barely apart ‘-very, very small.’

According to Monger, a small flask of the potion had been bought by the sixteen-year-old son of a prominent landowner. The boy had gone out that night, on the roister with some of his fellows. Never came back.

‘His companions had left him, in fear at his behaviour,’ Monger said. ‘They spoke of the dreadful convulsions of his body… in a kind of dance. He was screaming that devils were pinching him and his arms and legs were afire.’

I must’ve shuddered; Monger glanced at me.

‘They found his body about a week later, entangled in branches under the river bridge. Thrown himself in the river to put out the fire in his limbs.’

Monger said the dealer had fled from Somerton but was caught in the hue and cry. In return, Monger guessed, for his life, he confessed to the theft of herbs mixed by Cate Borrow.

‘And was this established to be caused by swallowing some of the… the dust of vision?’

Thinking that I’d heard of something similar in France. ‘Although no-one else died in this way, the boy was the first of several to complain of burning limbs, visions of angels and monsters made manifest under unearthly skies. All had been sold quantities of Cate Borrow’s potion. And then, as she was awaiting trial, word came in of the deaths of infants.’

‘What?’

‘Babes whose mothers, it emerged, had taken the potion to ease the sorrow which can follow childbirth. The wrath of God visited upon them, people cried.’

Within a day Cate Borrow had been arrested for witchery.

Within a short time she’d be dead.

‘Hanged for mixing herbs?’

‘For murder.’

‘Any half-competent advocate could take such a charge apart.’

‘In London, maybe.’

His voice riven with bitterness. The window to the high street was murked with dusk now, the fire low and red in the ingle.

Even in London… I thought back to my own imprisonment. How, through a knowledge of the law, I’d been able to discredit the so-called evidence sworn by the Lord of Misrule.

Even so, it had been perilously close, and I’d still have gone to the flames had it not been for the curiosity of Bishop Bonner.

‘Presumably,’ I said, ‘she couldn’t be tried by Fyche at the quarter sessions… or are things different out here?’

‘Oh they’re different. Everything’s different here. But the law’s the same. A crime warranting a death penalty may be tried only by a circuit judge at the assizes.’

‘In Wells?’

‘The trial was swift,’ Monger said. ‘There was an extra witness, whom no-one had seen here before or saw afterwards, but claimed to have watched Mistress Borrow taking pails of wet earth from new graves. To scatter on her herb garden. These were the darkest days of Mary. Everyone in snare to fear and superstition. So when at last they brought Dick Moulder before the court to say how he’d seen two or possibly three of them with their candles on the tor on All Hallows Eve, recognising Mistress Borrow who oft-times came to pick herbs on his land…’

There was a crack in Monger’s voice and I sensed his usually placid face becoming knotted with pain at the memory of Cate Borrow standing up in the court and crying out that Moulder must’ve been mistaken, for she was alone that night on the Tor.

Monger could only guess she’d said this to save her husband. And Joan Tyrre, too, who’d already had one appearance before a church court.

The hollow silence had been smashed by this man Dick Moulder, rearing up and warding Cate Borrow away with his hands in the air and screaming, If her was alone, then they was spirits!

‘And if I tell you,’ Monger said, ‘that at that moment, the wind blew open the courtroom door, and then it slammed. A blast of cold air blowing through the court, and a woman screaming and… the way all that happened, it would’ve been enough to convict the Pope.’

‘What about the boy’s death?’ I said. ‘Surely she didn’t admit any blame there?’

‘Neither admitted nor denied it. She simply said nothing more. Refused to answer any further questions in the court, only stood there very pale. Ghostly pale, as if she were already passing into another place. I remember Matthew, in his desperation, trying to catch her eye, and she never looked at him. Would not look at him. Never looked at him again. It was the worst thing.’

‘Not wanting him to be implicated?’

‘As if she was saying, it’s over, nothing to be done. Go back to your work. Forget me.’

‘And Eleanor, was she…?’

‘Not there. She’d been instructed, in her mother’s best interests, to keep Joan Tyrre well away from the hearing.’

The next day, Matthew Borrow had led a group of elders from the town to Fyche, at Meadwell, to plead for his wife’s life. Returning encouraged, after Fyche – a former monk, for heaven’s sake – had told them he’d do what he could. Borrow restraining his distraught daughter, assuring her they would find evidence to get the verdict reversed, appeal to Queen Mary…

The following day, at dawn, Cate Borrow had, without ceremony, been hanged in Wells. Fyche announcing kindly that at least he’d spared the witch’s family a burning. Generously allowing them to collect the body, as long it was not buried in consecrated ground.

This was not much more than a year ago. Little wonder that Eleanor Borrow could not bear to be in this man’s presence.

‘No-one in this town could quite believe it,’ Monger said. ‘A woman of quiet charity who lived for her garden and what she might learn from it. The cures that could be found, the sick people she might help.’

‘But… Christ, why did he do it? Why did Fyche want this woman dead?’

‘My guess… the dust of vision. It was rumoured his son once took it. I don’t know what happened, but it must have frightened Fyche. He’d see it as dangerous… uncontrollable. An instant religious experience without the discipline of the Church? If she’d made the dust of vision, what else might she be working on?’

‘She had to be made an example of and therefore-’

‘I can’t say what goes on in the man’s head.’

‘And Eleanor?’

‘She was not long back from college at this time – Matthew had sent her away a couple of years earlier, to be schooled in medicine in Bath. She… always was a gay, laughing child. You always knew what she was thinking. Afterwards… well…’ Monger’s eyes were cast down. ‘You know what’s most bitter about all this? Before the Dissolution, the Justice of the Peace here was the abbot himself. Cate’s friend.’

I looked to his eyes, but it was as if shutters had been erected. ‘Despite its mysteries, despite its air of spirtual rebellion, this is an unhappy town,’ he said. ‘Why, truly, are you here, Dr Dee?’

Trade

When Monger had left through the back door, I stood for a while on the edge of the yard, watching the dregs of day soaking into a sad tapestry of cloud around the tower of the Baptist’s church. The sky was darker than it should be at this time: a storm coming. I went back inside and stood in the gloom of the rear passageway and my own lightless thoughts.