Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘Let me understand this,’ I said. ‘You would’ve stood up in that courtroom and told them there could be no witchcraft because there is no God, therefore no Satan, and so…?’

‘I prefer a quiet life, but -’ he shrugged – ‘I’d’ve done it.’

‘Did your wife know this?’

‘She knew of my principles.’

‘But you go to church…’

‘It’s the law.’

‘How can you… I mean, this town…’

‘How can I live and work in a town like Glaston? Easily. I was born here. A community where few people appear to share a creed only underlines the folly of it all.’

‘But your wife…’

‘Was, I’m afraid, a perfect example of one who rarely held the same beliefs two days together. I’d tease her, I’m afraid. Always going to find a new cure for this and that – and oft-times did, mind, let’s not forget that. Yet would have made more of her undoubted skills had she not been so easily diverted by dreams of… of a golden age we’ll never have again because it’s an age that never was.’ He stopped, looked at me, sorrow in his eyes. ‘But you’d surely not expect me to speak ill of her.’

There was a silence, during which Borrow took down a couple of jars from the shelf and held them to the light, and I thought of Nel and wondered what it had been like growing up amid such extremes of opinion.

‘To answer your unspoken question,’ he said at last, ‘harmony would always, in the end, prevail, thanks to a shared belief in healing.’

‘And how do you feel now?’

He took in a slow breath, let it out. Was there an element of the shudder in its expulsion? Was there something inside Borrow which roiled and spat? I couldn’t say. I’d met countless men and women, not least Dudley and the Queen, whose spouses or parents had died by execution, and several had exhibited this same calm, but whether it was a sign of acceptance…

He’d retired again behind his healer’s screen, taking the top off one of the small jars and stirring the contents with a taper of wood. There was something about him… something I’d seen in Monger, only more so. The quality of a priest. In an atheist. As if his atheism had brought him an inner certainty he could draw on, as men drew on their trust in God and the Church.

‘You know she’s innocent of this.’ I stood up. ‘And if you don’t believe she can be saved by prayer or faith in a just God… then what’s to be done?’

He put down the jar and pushed it toward me.

‘Contains yarrow and camomile. Make a solution of it with cold water, soak a cloth and hold it where it hurts.’

‘I-?’

‘Your face,’ he said. ‘Take it. Pay me if it works.’

‘Thank you.’

He waved it away.

‘And, in the future,’ he said, almost kindly, ‘take care where you tread.’

But there was no balm for my spirit. Walking down the five steps to the surgery door, I felt more troubled than when I’d gone in

There was nothing to be read from Matthew Borrow’s face – not yet an old man’s face but possessed of a mature self-knowing. I’d never encountered his like. Here was a man who would never strip back the layers of his dreams in search of meaning nor aspire to measure the dimensions of the universe. A man for whom matters of the hidden were of no consequence, for there was nothing to hide.

If he had no fear of God, then he feared nothing. His inner calm was remarkable.

Of course, his anger must have overflowed when Fyche’s mercenaries had taken his daughter. He’d fought them with no regard for himself and been badly beaten for it. Yet had he given up trying to see Nel? I thought not. But whatever he had in mind he didn’t want me involved.

Did he perchance know who I was? What I was?

A man who sought to know the mind of God… no-one more worthy of an atheist’s contempt. I was sunk into confusion and despair as I walked down past the Church of St Benignus – how ironic that Matthew Borrow should be living almost directly opposite a church. A man who loved not God and feared not Satan. In this bubbling cauldron of creeds was there a kind of purity to that?

The thought was so shocking that I broke into a run and, rounding the corner, almost collided with a lean man striding down the slope from the George.

‘John… where the hell’ve you been? What’s -?’

‘Dudley, God…You found her?’

I fell back, panting against the church wall, two ragged children springing up on the other side and running away, laughing, a smell of fresh shit upon the air.

‘What happened to your face?’ Dudley said.

‘It’s of no import.’ I held up the jar of balm. ‘From the doctor.’

‘Her father?’

‘She won’t talk with me,’ I said. ‘She won’t even see me. Or anyone. The woman in Butleigh – have you talked to her? Will she go to the assize?’

‘John…’

‘You did find her?’

‘Let’s go back,’ Dudley said.

‘What?’

‘To the doctor’s. I have questions for him.’

‘For Christ’s sake -’ throwing back my head to the sky, greenish clouds sailing in from the coast with a skreeting of gulls, my voice hurled against them – ‘did you find her?’

A goodwife with a basket of eggs crossed the road, scuttling away from us. Dudley continued down the hill, and I caught up with him.

‘ Tell me.’

‘I spoke there to several people… Notably the smith, to whom I gave money in return for his honesty. And from whom I learned that there’s been no twins born in Butleigh this past year. No twins. Nor, come to that, these past ten years.’

I moved ahead of him, halting his progress, a flood of bad bile entering my gut.

‘You took one man’s word for that?’

‘ Listen to me. No births at all in more than a month. Including bastards. Confirmed by the minister of the church, who also maintains that no child in recent memory has been delivered there from the belly.’

Dudley’s eyes were lit with fury.

‘ Now will you go back and talk to the bloody doctor?’

A Different Canon

Don’t misunderstand me. Robert Dudley was not like Carew. Behind the arrogance, my friend was an educated man with a questing mind. But he was yet a young man, with a young man’s impulse and a soldier’s spine, and there were times when all thought and reason would be kicked aside. And then you’d feel his hand quivering over the hilt of his sword, the air grown thin around him.

‘These knives…’

Standing now in Borrow’s doorway, shouldering out the sunlight, crisp winter in his voice.

‘See me later, please.’ Borrow buckling his leather bag, throwing it over a shoulder. ‘I have sick people to minister to.’

‘I’ll see you in hell, Dr Borrow. Where goeth all fucking liars.’

The space betwixt them throbbing like the hush before a beheading.

‘ Who are you, again?’ Matthew Borrow said.

‘You know who I am.’

‘I know who you claim to be.’ Borrow’s voice was but one notch above disinterest. ‘However, a mere clerk of antiquities would be unlikely, in my experience, to employ a groom. My instinct tells me you’re clad below your status, so if we’re speaking of liars…’

No movement in his grey eyes; he’d marked Dudley’s mood, yet had no fear of it. Found it, if anything, a sign of weakness.

And, in some way, this gave me small hope, for the very last thing I wanted was for Borrow to have lied about the bloodied knives. I wanted there to be some reason for them that we’d all missed. Some reason not involving Nel.

There was a tacit suspension of hostility. Borrow unslung his medical bag, and the tension went out of Dudley, who came into the surgery and closed the door behind him.