Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘You’ll walk away now, all of you. Or you’ll be back before you know it, to your old life of stale crusts and petty thieving.’

Maybe it was the tone – a tone I hardly knew – but he very nearly did step back, his eyes swivelling, as if I’d made a move on him. Then he shook his head.

‘’Tis your word, friend. Your word against mine – and his -’ thumb jerked toward his companions. ‘And his.’

‘You count for nothing,’ I said quietly. ‘Any of you. You’re no more than a hired mob. Expendable.’

I doubt he understood the word, and although my face was unshaven, my apparel in disarray, he’d marked an element of threat and a confidence that even I could not explain. He sneered, but his eyes would no longer meet mine. At length, he sniffed, pushing the blade back into his jerkin, while I stood and waited and felt… felt apart from me. The dust rising. It was as if I stood in the air, looking down on this scene and all the poor houses and rubbish-strewn yards.

‘Piss off,’ I said. ‘Before I think to remember your faces.’

The man in leathers signalled briefly to his companions and made to push roughly past me, and I didn’t move and caught his shoulder hard with mine, which was painful, but I felt a curious elation as he stumbled.

Resisting the urge to rub my shoulder, I watched his hands as he straightened up, but the dagger didn’t reappear. Looking straight ahead, oblivious of him, I saw a young man watching me, as if puzzled and, for a moment, I was also puzzled for I’d seen him before, though not in jerkin and hose.

Two women, one of them Joan Tyrre, were helping Matthew Borrow up the steps to his house, but he clearly had no wish to go in. He was looking up the street past the church, his right arm hanging like an empty scabbard.

I went to him.

‘Dr Borrow, what in God’s name was this about?’

He began to cough. The woman with Joan Tyrre turned to me.

‘They was outside at dawn, sir, banging on the door, demanding to search the premises.’

‘Bazzards,’ Joan said.

‘Take him inside, Joan,’ the woman said. ‘Do what you can, I’ll be with you now, Matthew.’ Her accent was of Wales, the south. She turned to me. ‘I live across, by there. Vicar’s wife. I saw them go in. Had him up against the wall they did, before the door was full open.’

‘But they know him. He probably healed their-’

‘No,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘They don’t know him. These are not men of Glaston. The people here don’t know any of them.’

No surprise. Some men would travel miles to join a hue and cry, just for the chase and the violence of it and what they might steal, who they might rape.

‘The town’s overrun with them, it is,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘They was in the taverns last night through the storm. Dozens of them.’

‘Bazzards,’ Joan said.

‘Dozens?’ I followed the vicar’s wife down into the street. ‘What did they want here?’

She looked at me, with uncertainty. A stout woman, fawn-coloured hair under the coif.

‘It weren’t no normal night, Master. My husband, the vicar, he’s been at the altar since first light, praying for forgiveness. The weight of sin lies heavy on us all.’

‘Joe Monger,’ I said, ‘will vouch for me. What did they want here, Mistress?’

‘They got what they wanted,’ she said. ‘But ’twasn’t enough. Well, they knowed he wouldn’t take it quietly, and when he come running out after her, they laid about him. ’Twasn’t his fault she was bred from his loins.’

‘Beg-’

‘Why she came back I’ll never know.’

‘Who?’ It was as if cracks were forming in the sky; I almost seized her by the shoulders. ‘Tell me.’

‘They must’ve been watching the house, all night, all I can think.’

The sky began to fall.

She said, ‘You didn’t see them take her?’

‘Christ…’

She stared at me, appalled at my profanity and I wanted to shake her, shake out all the false piety which had replaced thought and reason.

‘Tell me!’

My whole head felt to be alight, and I think she saw the madness in my eyes and backed away. I saw the young man again, watching us, and realised it was Brother Stephen, the younger of the two monks who’d been with Fyche when first I’d met him, on the tor.

The vicar’s wife pushed straying hair back under her coif.

‘Said she- Well, we heard her, we all did. Shouting down the stairs as how she’d go quietly if they left her father alone. ’Course, soon as they had her out of sight…’

I turned to look up the street, the gathering of people dispersing now. Felt my mouth moving but it could shape no words.

‘En’t fair for a man to get beaten for the sins of his daughter,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘Is it?’

I stared at her.

‘Sins?’

‘She never said they was wrong when they read out the charge to her face. When they said she was a witch and a murderer, she never said they was wrong. Folks here, they’ve seen this coming – a young woman who thinks she can walk a man’s path when she should be married and keeping a man’s home.’

‘Mistress,’ I said, ‘for God’s sake, if a woman has skills…’

But her face had fallen into an expression of blankness, a self-preserving forced indifference I’d seen too many times in this divided land.

From the heart of the town, I heard whoops and jeering.

Venus Glove

‘You could be a dead man.’

Thickbuilt, uncompromising, beard like strings of peat. Sir Peter Carew, senior knight, seeking to wither me with his contempt.

‘You could be lying like offal in the mud. You realise that?’

I made no reply.

‘And all for an old cunning man and a witch,’ Carew said. ‘Tales of your learning would appear to be exaggerated. Your brains are soft as shit.’

He and his company had ridden in, mid-morning, from Taunton where they’d passed the night. He and Dudley and I were alone in the dimness of the panelled room at the George, flagons of rough cider before us. I hadn’t touched mine. Carew spat out a mouthful of his onto the stone flags.

‘You think this shithole’s like London. Do you?’

‘Observing its present condition,’ Dudley murmured, ‘I doubt that’s a mistake anyone would make.’

‘The law here comes with rough edges, Lord Dudley, that’s all I’m saying. Rough edges.’

The sweat was cooling on me. Clothed in what remained of the fraying fabric of delusionary vision, I’d run blindly through the streets, from the foot of the town to its summit, past the Church of the Baptist, until the tor was swelling up ahead of me. Half convinced that if only I could catch them I could stop them. Bring her back.

But they were gone. She was gone, and now I wanted to throw myself at Carew, rip out his beard, strand by strand.

Felt Dudley’s warning gaze upon me. Dudley thinking, no doubt with some reason, that Carew would welcome any opportunity to batter me into the flags.

I effected a calmness.

‘Before the dissolution of the abbey, Sir Peter, I understand justice was administered by the abbot. How many witches did he arrest?’

Dudley frowned at me.

‘This is not the answer,’ I said. ‘Fyche sees himself as appointed by God to control the practice of religion in this town, and that’s a dangerous-’

‘Control the spread of sorcery,’ Carew said. ‘Surely?’

I could not this day face another futile argument on what constituted sorcery.

‘Look, Doctor, ’ Carew said. ‘In my experience, nobody tried for witchcraft is ever entirely innocent.’

‘That’s-’

‘Hear me out. They ask for it. Can’t keep their fingers out of God’s pot.’ He eased back, hands on his thighs. ‘From where I sit, Doctor, life and religion, since we ditched the Bishop of Rome, are simple and equitable. You go to church on the Sabbath, spend an hour or so on your knees thinking about your next night’s jelly-jousting and – unless you’re a vicar or a bishop – that’s it. I’ve no time for any man or woman for whom this world, so long as they’re yet in it, is not enough. And in the case of this bitch…’