Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘The quantity must be so small as to be almost invisible to the untutored eye, else the consequences… God only knows how much that boy in Somerton swallowed.’ She looked up. ‘Have you ever heard the affliction called by the name St Anthony’s Fire?’

‘Have you?’

‘Though I don’t know why. Did St Anthony have visions?’

‘All saints seem to have had visions.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but are visions that come as a result of taking a potion… are they still what you would call sacred?’

‘I know not,’ I said. ‘And there may lie more heresy.’

There was a silence, even the rain holding back. Or so it seemed from this golden sanctum.

‘Would it not be possible’ – Nel Borrow held the flask before the candles, and the liquid turned to amber – ‘that the senses, through the action of the herbs, might be awakened to the spiritual?’

The liquid was lit red-gold. Her eyes were amber green. The admonishing rain was coming hard now at the window as she lifted the paper betwixt her fingers and funnelled powder into the little wooden cup. Adding a little water and pouring more into the crystal goblet.

Could the pathway to divinity be glimpsed through the bottom of a goblet? Or the road to hellfire…

And what, oh my God, was to be be glimpsed behind those lustrous green eyes?

What followed had a certain sense of the Mass, in which I still strongly, if quietly, believe, for it surely is an ancient, alchemical formula for the highest transformation.

She handed me the goblet.

‘This is from the Blood Well. And this… is for you to hold.’

A stone. A pale brown pebble, as if from a riverbed, near the size of a hen’s egg. It felt cool in my hand.

‘What is it?’

‘I found it inside the tower on the tor.’ With the knife, she was cutting the apple in half. ‘It will ground you.’

I nodded, kept the stone in my hand as I raised the goblet to my lips.

She said, ‘Wait…’

When I put the vessel down, some of the fluid was spilled across the boardtop.

‘You’re afraid,’ she said. ‘Your hand’s trembling.’

‘It’s the cold.’

‘’Tis not good to do this when you’re afraid.’ She took my hand; I shuddered at the warmth and energy in her fingers. ‘John… I think… I feel that you don’t need to do this. You, of all people, must know that there are other ways. Think about it.’

‘Am I not the man who thinks too much?’

She said, ‘What have you not told me?’

I wanted so much to turn over my hand to grip hers, but her face was so solemn. Instead, I drew a hard, slow breath, bad memories hauled in on a long, frayed rope.

‘I have dreams,’ I whispered. ‘Recurring dreams.’

Didn’t go on. Didn’t tell her about the dreams of fire, my arms and legs as blackened twigs. I felt apart from myself now, but maybe not in the way she’d spoken of. Recalling how, watching the parade of townsfolk before the Baptist’s Church the other day, I’d imagined them in a play, their bodies feigning ordinary life, while their real lives were happening on some other level. Now I felt I was to become part of that play. Was given the means to enter that other reality.

‘Listen…’ She leaned forward. ‘There are other ways. We’ll work together on the other ways.’

She reached out for the goblet, but I snatched it up and turned away and drank down the liquid, all of it.

The thunder was dying, now, but maybe the storm had only just begun.

Like to the Sun

I went to sit on the edge of the bed, and we talked. Or she did. I only sat and listened to the soft, sad music of her voice as she spoke of her father and how, after her mother’s execution, he’d thrown himself into his work, riding out each night to care for the sick, spending no more waking minutes than he needed in the bed where his wife would lie no more.

The tragedy of it was so extreme and there was such physical pain in my heart that I began to weep into my hands.

‘Damn,’ Nel Borrow murmured. ‘What do you do to lose the cares of the day, Dr John?’

‘Cares?’ Wiped my eyes on my sleeve, dragging out a smile. ‘There are no cares if I’m working. Did your mother have cares when she was tending her garden?’

‘She had -’ a wistful smile – ‘two hundred kinds of herbs. They took a lot of care. If life were only work and we were allowed to do it unmolested…’

‘Then there’d be no sorrow, for some of us.’

And no joy either, my mother would snap back, she who understood not the heady pleasures of scholarship.

‘Felt so safe in her garden,’ Nel said. ‘Open to the land all the way to the sea, and the tor rising on the other side and the soaring golden pinnacles of the abbey. It was a paradise. Avalon.’

I thought of my own garden in the sky, its constellations laid out like arrangements of flowers in a fine elusive symmetry that awoke in me a yearning deeper than the night.

‘You still maintain her garden?’

‘Well… best I can. Fewer than half as many herbs now. When the abbey was alive, she’d have help. Even the abbot… the abbot came and went and they’d go for long walks through the fields and along the marshland, by the river, gathering plants…’

As she talked, I could see the shining river as in summer, the strips of water shimmering on the edges of the fields, blue-white mist rising like the ghost of the long-departed sea.

‘…and also Master Leland, for a while.’

I looked up.

‘ John Leland? John Leland the antiquarian?’

I began pinching my lower thigh to confirm that I was not yet taken into some other sphere.

‘And maker of charts. Recorder of topography.’

‘John Leland worked with your mother and the abbot?’

‘Not with the abbot. I think the abbot was wary of him. He came sometimes and walked with my mother. Poor Master Leland.’

She sighed, and the sigh became a tapestry of shadows drawn around her. Her body was outlined with quiet light against the umber shades of the woods in the tapestry, and I had to turn my eyes away. Knowing nothing of Leland’s interest in herbs. Only old manuscripts and the arrangement of the land.

‘So this was not on Leland’s first visit to the town.’

‘He came back.’

‘I know. After the Dissolution.’

Dissolution. The word bubbling out of me, a pelucid stream over pebbles. I bent and let it ripple over my fingers.

‘I’ve a memory of Master Leland coming to our house. Can still see his beardless face, all bony like a Roman statue. I remember him shouting, “You don’t understand, I’m my own man now.” He kept saying that.’

‘What did he mean? Was he in his right mind? Because-’

‘How would I know? I was young.’

Still young.

I gazed into the core of the candlefire, where small, tight flames were coalescing into a single body of light like to a full and golden moon, and I felt my heart swelling in my breast like a blood-red poppy close to exploding from its bud.

But stop. Dear God. Think.

I looked up, which seemed to take a very long time.

‘You know that, in the end, John Leland went mad?’ Feeling my body begin to list I put out a hand to the nearest bedpost. ‘It was said that his mind was overloaded with the magnitude of his obsession… his task of chronicling the topography of the whole country?’

‘All I know is my father mistrusted him. Said his first visit was to collect treasure, and his second was to collect… the place itself.’

The stone moved in my hand.

‘My father says that on that last visit he went in search of former monks from the abbey. He went looking for them.’

‘Leland?’