Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

This is the great unspoken. The laws of man, held up as the laws of God, are just more tools in the practised hands of the powerful.

‘It would not be a good thing, mistress,’ I said softly, ‘for you to be known to talk like this.’

‘I seldom do. Unless in the presence of someone I trust -’ she hesitated – ‘in some odd way, as I would my own kin.’

I felt a light inside, as small and strange as a glow-worm.

‘Mistress Borrow, I’m-’

‘Oh, there are divers kinds of kinship. At college in Bath, I read some of your papers. Also met people who’d had dealings with you in Louvain, where they said all talk just ran free. I formed the impression that you were a man for whom knowledge and spirit were as one. And also -’ hands entwining in her lap – ‘also I know that you were once close to a death which… would’ve been worse than my mother’s.’

‘It doesn’t compare,’ I said gently. ‘Because it didn’t happen.’

I’d made known to her what Joe Monger had told me about the trial and execution of Cate Borrow, a woman who evidently had shared my own curiosity about the limits of the natural world. Was this what her daughter meant by kinship? I’d have to admit a certain disappointment if it was.

‘Tell me about Fyche,’ I said. ‘Why, after what was done to your mother, he yet seeks to damage you.’

‘No mystery there. He looks at me and he sees… her.’

‘You mean it’s a reminder of what he did?’

‘No, no!’ Shaking her head hard, hair swinging across her cheeks. ‘That would imply a sorrow over my mother’s death, and there is none. He sees another woman with the eyes of Cate Borrow and an education.’

‘A threat.’

‘Dr John, let me tell you about this man who was a monk at the abbey in the last days. Then had this land granted to him. And the money to farm it and build upon it.’

‘He inherited the land… from an uncle?’

‘An uncle!’

‘Did he not?’

‘It was gifted to him, I’d bet all I own on it.’

‘Gifted by whom?’

‘Who gifts land?’ Her body rocked. ‘ Who gifts land?’

‘Mistress Borrow-’

‘Eleanor.’ Tossing back her hair. ‘Nel. Call me Nel. It takes up… far less time.’

Nel.

There was a sense of energy in the chamber. Moisture in the palms of my hands. And the thunder was coming so frequent now that it was like to being inside some vast drum of war. But not so loud as my own heart, the pounding of my blood.

‘Dr John…’

She was looking into my eyes, and I wanted to whisper to her, John, just John, and could not. That toss of her hair… dear God. I pulled my robe across my knees.

‘…if this makes it any more plain,’ she said, ‘you should know that much of what is now Fyche’s land was once abbey property.’

‘You mean land which was taken by Thomas Cromwell on behalf of the King? Which, from then on, was the King’s to place in whoever’s hands he wished?’

We were upon dangerous ground.

‘My father knows more than I do,’ she said. ‘The house, Meadwell, was on the edge of the abbey grounds and had become derelict. And then… well, all that was known in the town was that, some years after the Dissolution of the abbey, this abandoned farmhouse was suddenly being rebuilt in grand style. And that Edmund Fyche, a former monk, was in residence there. And then he was Sir Edmund.’

‘Is all this widely known in the town?’

‘Well, it’s known, but makes no odds. Fyche, as well as the voice of the law, is seen as a benefactor. A poor harvest now, no-one starves, as many did after the abbey went. What you have now is more than half the people here thinking him a good presence… or the lesser of several possible evils.’

I nodded, could have named a dozen landowners, here and in Europe, who’d bought themselves popularity with which to turf over past misdemeanours.

But one question stood out here like a robed bishop in a brothel. ‘Why would the donor of the land have so favoured a former monk?’

‘Why indeed?’

‘You think your mother knew something of this? Knew what Fyche did for Cromwell and Fat Harry to earn such a lavish reward?’

A sudden apprehension enfolded me and I looked around. Stood up, went barefoot to the door and opened it and looked out, and then walked to the top of the stairs and looked down. In the well of the stairs, pale lighting flickered from doorway to doorway as if men were signalling to one another with lamps and blankets to cover the light.

But there was no-one about, and I came back and shut the door as the thunder broke, feeling embarrassed in my night-attire, wishing I was full-dressed. I pulled my robe across my bare knees again and sat back on the bed, in deepest shadow.

‘All quiet,’ I said. ‘All… under the sky.’

‘Good.’

Falling into an easy intimacy I’d never before felt with a woman. All the more rare, when you considered the hellish nature of what we were approaching.

‘So the Abbot of Glastonbury,’ I said, ‘is taken up to the top of the tor and hanged before the ruined church. And drawn and quartered. And, afterwards, one of his lowly monks becomes a wealthy man.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the crux of it.’

There must have been more lightning, more thunder, but for several minutes I was unaware of either.

‘You can have no idea what it was like then,’ Nel Borrow was saying. ‘I was only a child, but some of my earliest memories are of a pervading fear and misery – all these dull-clad, stooping figures, their eyes cast down. The skull still up on the gatehouse. Nobody was asking questions then, lest their own heads be struck off.’

I was thinking on it. Laying it all out. The charges against Abbot Whiting, as I recalled, were that he secreted items away when Cromwell’s men came, including a gold chalice. Also, that writings of his were found that were disloyal to the King. Critical of the King.

Found by whom? Who could say? But it would be a good deal less easy for an outsider to put his fingers on such items than someone who was resident at the abbey.

‘Fyche betrayed his abbot,’ I said.

‘It was more than betrayal.’

A pivotal role in the stitching-up of Whiting for theft and treason. Had to be, for Fyche to be rewarded with land and money and position, a small slice of the most succulent monastic pie in England.

Unless… unless this rare and lovely woman lied. Or was deluded by grief. Dear God, I didn’t want to think on either of these, but you learn that survival in this dark world means that all things, however painful, must needs be considered.

‘You might also ask yourself,’ she said, ‘why it was felt necessary to have the abbot killed.’

‘To make an example of him.’

‘Oh? For what purpose… at this stage of the game?’

She was right. Glastonbury had been among the last abbeys to be taken by the Crown. It was not as if there was a dangerous army of rebellious priests out there to quell by intimidation. The ceremonial slaughter of the abbot, the division and display of the body… it seemed gratuitous, even for the times.

To silence him, then? And then cover the deed with bloody spectacle?

Again – why? And yet… whilst I couldn’t doubt, from what she’d told me, that Fyche had indeed conspired in Whiting’s downfall, did it follow that he’d fashioned charges of witchcraft and murder against Cate Borrow merely to gag someone who suspected him of it? It must have been clear she was not alone in her suspicions, but no others had died… had they?

As if she’d seen my thoughts, Nel was half risen from her chair.

‘I’m aware that there’s more to know…’ She sat down again, shaking her head. ‘If we but knew where to look.’