Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘Robbie, I doubt you’re even well enough to be-’

‘The hell with me. Go the fuck in.’

I nodded. Stepping unwillingly inside the hut, breathing through my mouth.

It was, in truth, no bloodier than a butcher’s shop, but the sight of remains such as these will always bring me to the brink of despair. Hard not to feel that the spirit itself has not been forever extinguished and, after all I’d seen this past night, what a grievous loss that would be.

The body of Martin Lythgoe lay upon a board made from two mangers. It was dull and did not glisten. The candle had been knocked away from the mouth and lay beside the body, no longer spectral and nothing of the tor about it now. Merely a squalid insult to life and humanity.

‘What can I…?’ I was near to tears, shaking my head in despair at my uselessness. ‘What can I tell you, Robbie… more than you can see for yourself?’

The right arm bridged the yawning chasm of the chest, and inside its elbow was lodged the crushed and shrivelled orb of Martin’s heart. I remembered the phantasm of him I’d seen through the dust, trying to hold it all in, and he hadn’t spoken then, and he wasn’t speaking now.

The left arm dangled over the side of the board, and Dudley lifted it, supporting the hand, free by now from rigor mortis.

‘What do you make of this?’

I bent over, with some reluctance, holding my breath.

‘Oh.’

Wouldn’t normally have noticed it. You’d see the invaded chest, the ripped-out heart, and would turn away sickened before you’d mark the small but meaningful smitterings of dried blood on the fingertips, the blackened, broken nails.

‘The middle finger, John. The way the nail’s been all but torn away. See?’

‘Done as he fought back?’ I squatted down on the greasy straw on the floor, took up the cold, marbling hand at eye-level. ‘Or maybe it suggests the body was moved after death?’

‘Either of those is possible,’ Dudley said. ‘But I think it’s something worse. Look again. Closer.’

‘What’s this…?’

Brown flakes which had fallen into my palm. Seemed unlikely to be dried blood.

‘Rust.’ Dudley knelt beside me. ‘It’s from an old iron nail. See it?’

‘Where… Oh, Jesu-’

The length of it was wedged hard under the split and blackened fingernail, all the way to its root, where the point stuck out. I let the hand fall, in horror, wincing.

‘Hammered in,’ Dudley said. ‘Under his nail, until the head of it broke off.’

‘Then this is…?’

‘Torture,’ Dudley said. ‘Before he died, this poor bloody man was tortured.’

I came weakly to my feet, trying to think of another explanation and could not.

‘Why?’

‘Why are men usually tortured?’

‘To make them confess to…’

‘Uh huh.’ Dudley shaking his head. ‘To make them talk.’

‘About what? What would he know? He was a stranger here. He only came because of…’

‘Us. He came with us. He knew who we were and why we were here.’

‘And is that to kill for?’

Dudley looked at me as if I were a child, while the eyes of Martin Lythgoe, cold as pebbles, gazed forever into the cobwebbed dark.

‘We need a witness to this,’ Dudley said. ‘Is Carew here yet? Or where’s… that other fellow?’

‘Fyche.’

Shows this picture of himself as a Godly man in combat with the forces of Satan, and at the core, I’ll swear… that’s where you’ll find the real evil.

‘We don’t talk to Fyche,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure we even talk to Carew.’

Dudley looked at me with narrowed eyes.

‘Take my word,’ I said.

‘All right. Fetch Cowdray, then.’

‘No… That is… there’s someone more qualified.’

Clawing aside cobwebs hanging thick as ship’s rigging and stumbling to the doorway for air.

A Man’s Path

An element of self-interest. I’ll admit that. Matthew Borrow, a medical man and surgeon, would be the best witness to confirm what had been done to Martin Lythgoe. But he might also know where his daughter was to be found.

I ran.

Nel: my body still shivering with soft and slippery memories of hers.

And anxiety.

The sky was brightening, near cloudless, as I moved fast and hard away from the abbey, splashing through streets still pooled and roiled with red mud from the storm. Part of me wanting to go on running, between the two church towers at either end of the town, out into the wettened fields towards the sun.

Until I became aware that something was wrong, and slowed.

The air was colder and refreshed from the storm yet, past eight, noone save me appeared to be out in it.

I stopped and looked around: stone houses, wattle houses, the smoke of awakened fires. It was as if I saw the town for the first time, how sporadic and ill-structured it was now the abbey lay in ruins. A dead planet with no sun, all the energy gone to the tor.

Gone back to the tor. And the tor, while it could be serene and hazed with a kind of holiness… that holiness, that magic, had not the formality and discipline of the abbey. It was the magic of chaos.

Of a sudden, a cold vision was upon me. For a moment, it was as though I were seeing Glastonbury as it were seen by Sir Edmund Fyche. Feeling what he felt. A sense of loss. A vacuum filled now with a sense of rage.

It came to me that I was watched, and I spun. Began to mark dull faces in doorways and windows and the furtive parting of shutters.

A mute fear.

News travels apace in a small town, as does sound. As if by instinct, I fled into the back streets and the alleys. By the time I reached the street under the solid new church of St Benignus, I could hear the voices unravelling like shrill ribbons. And then ‘Stop them!’

The woman’s scream bringing me up sharp, flattened against a flimsy wall of bared wattle, peering with caution around its corner. The air down here was murked with smoke from morning fires. Figures dancing in it, agitated like puppets, under the new church tower.

‘Stay back!’ A voice like a scourge. ‘Next one moves goes with us.’

Edging to the end of the wall, choking back a cough, I saw a score of people: goodwives and children and old men lining the street, as if for a parade.

In the road, I saw two men holding a third, an older man struggling vainly against them. As I watched, a man in a leather jerkin arose from behind, on the steps of a house, and appeared to strike him several times with a short stick, and he crumpled to the cobbles, as if his strings were cut.

‘ Jes – Stop!’

The beaten man, once down, tried to roll away. It was Dr Borrow. A foot seemed aimed at his exposed head. Me screaming, starting forward.

‘Stop this! Stop it now, you bastards, in the Queen’s name!’

A silence. The boot frozen in the air.

‘Stay out of it.’ Broken teeth framed in greying beard. ‘Whoever the fuck you are.’

A glimpse of blade half pulled from the leather jerkin. Much attention on me now, squirmings in the smoke, and I saw that there were five of them, and I was in deepest shit for the townsfolk knew me not and would make no move to save me.

‘We’re the law, fellow,’ the leather man said. ‘You don’t even think to fool with us.’

Found myself standing alone in the road and shrugging.

‘And I’m Dr John, of the Queen’s Commission. Rode here with Sir Peter Carew. If this man’s sorely hurt, I’ll see it comes back on you. All of you. You understand?’

Watching out of the side of an eye as Matthew Borrow dragged himself away.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Let him go.’

My voice low, but it seemed to carry. I felt an unaccustomed calm in me. I stared at the man in the leather, able, somehow, to hold the silence for long moments before I spoke again.