Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘Dr Borrow, tomorrow is Sunday. The day after that, your daughter goes on trial for her life, accused of witchcraft and the murder of my groom. Did she kill him?’

‘I’m her father.’

Borrow opened out his hands, two rings of dull metal on one, the kind employed to dispel cramp.

Dudley said, ‘Will you plead for her in court?’

‘If I’m allowed, I’ll give evidence as to her good character and appeal for her to be cleared of all accusations.’

‘And tell the judge and jury the truth about the bloodied surgical tools?’

Silence.

‘What is the truth, Dr Borrow?’

No reply.

‘For God’s sake, Dr Borrow,’ I said. ‘We’re on your side. Your daughter’s side.’

The look Dudley gave me implied this was not necessarily the case, but my own feelings could never be so easily discarded.

‘I swear to you,’ I said with a passion I could not quell, ‘that I’ll move all heaven to have her released.’

Borrow raised an eyebrow. I breathed in hard against a blush.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Looked at with dispassion, it seems hardly credible that such a big man was killed and butchered by a woman. Nor can credible motive be shown. But the fact remains that, with no Caesarean birth in Butleigh – no birth at all – your explanation for the blood on the knives-’

‘Is shown to be a lie.’ Borrow’s hands falling to his sides. ‘Yes. Had I been given notice, I’d’ve come up with a better one.’

Oh Christ.

Some of it was true, apparently.

What he’d said about coming home late, very tired, throwing his tools under the stairs, where both his and his daughter’s were stored.

His tools which, that night, seemed to have been unused. Borrow threw open a door to show us where they were kept. It was a cramped space, with narrow wooden stairs.

I said, ‘You had no cause to bring them out next day until-?’

‘Why would I? They needed no cleaning. No-one came to my door in need of surgery.’

‘So the bloodstained tools…?’

‘One of Fyche’s men pulled out the bag and passed it to him and he said, “What are these? Whose is this blood?” And held them up, and I could see that there was blood, and I told him… the first likely explanation that came into my head. But Fyche wasn’t listening anyway. As I told you, he had his evidence. He was satisfied.’

‘How do you know the bloodied tools were Nel’s?’

‘Mine are still here. Unbloodied.’

‘Did you see Nel’s tools there before Fyche took them?’

‘No. They were quickly passed hand to hand and out of the door.’

‘Then how do you know they were hers? And not some others brought here by Fyche as… as ready-made evidence?’

Knowing, even before the words were out, that I was grasping at dustmotes in the air.

‘In which case… where are Eleanor’s tools?’ Borrow said. ‘Dr John, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I fear your friend is right. I lied… not well enough.’

Dudley said, ‘Did she kill my servant?’

Borrow met his eyes at once.

‘Of course not. A woman?’

‘Then what?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘Could she have lent her tools to someone who brought them back in this condition?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘To whom might she lend her tools, Dr Borrow?’

‘Master Roberts, if I knew that, I would not hesitate to name them. It must needs be someone she trusted. And maybe that’s why… why she won’t talk to me. Or to anyone.’

‘She’s protecting someone?’

Borrow shrugged. This was my last hope for her innocence, but I could see that it was not much better. She was supposed to have lent out her tools and then taken them home, still smirched with a dead man’s blood?

‘Who, having done this, would not clean them afterwards to remove the evidence?’ Dudley said. ‘Taken them to the river… or any one of these local springs.’

The Blood Well, I thought bitterly. Borrow looked at Dudley, shook his head.

‘Who would she wish to protect?’ Dudley said. ‘Who would she die to protect? Does she have a lover?’

Not looking at me.

‘A father,’ Borrow said, ‘is ever the last to know. Especially a father who seldom has time for chit-chat.’

Dudley glanced at me. His eyes said that we’d learned all we could and should be away, but I could not.

‘Have you told us everything?’ I said. ‘Everything that might help?’

‘Dr John…’ A first sign of impatience in Borrow. ‘How would I know what might help?

I thought back to the stormy night in my chamber, enclosed in what seemed to me now like a golden orb.

‘All right… think on this. Nel remains convinced that her mother’s death was engineered because she was believed to possess evidence against Sir Edmund Fyche… maybe evidence that he was responsible for the betrayal of Abbot Whiting.’

‘You must have come to know my daughter very well indeed, in a very short time, Dr John.’

‘Do you believe that?’

He was silent for a moment.

‘No… I don’t. Whiting’s death, and the manner of it, would have been ordered by Thomas Cromwell. Fyche was irrelevant. Nor do I think Cate was in possession of any so-called evidence. In the papers she left behind, there was nothing… worthwhile. And she certainly never spoke to me of anything of that-’

‘But you are, as you say, a man who works day and night. A man with little time for chit-’

‘Don’t insult me,’ he said mildly. ‘She would have told me. I might not have shared much with Whiting in the way of religious belief, but I respected the abbey as a centre of learning.’

‘Your wife and the abbey…’

‘She owed a debt to them, Dr John, and it was a simple one. She had no education as a child. The monks… taught her to read and write.’

‘When was this?’

‘When she was a young woman. She sought to repay them by growing herbs for them. Whiting had an interest in healing, Cate had a rare ability… for making things grow. I’m talking about herbs and fruits which had never been grown here before. Seeds would be brought to the abbey, oft-times from abroad, and she’d sow them and nurture the plants. She seemed to know, by instinct, what conditions would suit them.’

‘So the ground.. the herb garden.’

‘Given to her by the abbot. The abbot was impressed by her abilities. Thought them -’ Borrow’s lips turned down – ‘ God -given.’

Dudley said, ‘You say she left some papers behind?’

‘They’re gone.’

‘What was in them?’

‘If she’d wanted me to see them, she’d have shown them to me.’

‘You weren’t curious?’

‘There are matters,’ Borrow said, ‘about which I have no curiosity whatsoever. For I know it to be a mess of myth to keep the vulgar people in their place. There was a middle ground on which we’d talk all night, Cate and I – the curative properties of plants, the quantities in which they…’ He slapped a hand at the air. ‘ Tchah! The idea that these curative properties were instilled into each plant by some god… as part of some divine plan for the great cathedral universe…’

I saw Dudley blink. Saw what Monger had meant when he’d said that Dr Borrow’s science was of a different canon to mine.

‘Yours is a lonely voice,’ I said, ‘in this town.’

‘Which is why I stay silent much of the time. I seek no conversions. I wouldn’t wish, Dr John, to start a religion.’

‘But you must know… that the legends here have a power. And if it were felt that your wife was party to some secret knowledge-’

Like the rope tethering a boat to a storm-battered harbour, his restraint snapped at last.

‘Knowledge? You call this superstition knowledge? The belief that there’s a great secret here, preserved by the monks… that while the abbey might be left in ruins, the secret yet remains…? As if Cromwell and King Harry were not the winners because they never learned the secret? You truly think that’s any more than balm for the dispossessed? It’s like the foolish resentment of Wells because Wells has its cathedral and all the wealth that brings, and Glastonbury has only ruins.’