Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

It was my turn to hold the calm. One way or another, I’d pursue this matter to an end.

‘What do you know of this so-called secret?’

He took a steadying breath and then let it out.

‘Dr John, how can I best convey my contempt for such talk? Except to say that if she hadn’t been drawn into this nonsense, Cate would be alive today.’

‘Drawn into it how?’

‘The abbot… all these people. They led her into areas of madness and then abandoned her.’

‘Which people?’

‘ All of them. Everyone who ever trod these hills in a robe. She was an expert grower of herbs, like no-one else, but she had to let herself be led down blindingly foolish pathways. And then people died.’

‘The dust of vision? That’s what you’re-’

‘You think she wasn’t encouraged in that venture? As if every damned, deluded monk who ever lived didn’t aspire to some visionary experience… whether it’s from whipping his own flesh raw or fasting to the point of starvation. All the years she spent trying to gratify their impractical urges… it sickened me.’

He half rose, both hands on his board, his breathing harsh. Dudley was silent, intent.

After she was hanged,’ Borrow said, ‘Fyche came with his men – as I knew he would – to turn over the house, take possession of all her potions.’

‘In search of the dust?’ I said.

‘So that all the ingredients of the mixture that caused the burning might be destroyed, was how he put it.’

‘And what do you think he was most scared of – the burning or the vision?’

‘He didn’t see it as vision. He saw it as opening people to possession by demons. So he took everything away, everything he could find in her workshop, the flasks, the weights, potions, papers, recipes – once she’d learned to write, Cate took great pleasure in committing everything she could think of to paper. I like to think of Fyche and his scholars spending many fruitless weeks poring over them in search of… secrets.’

‘Secrets…’ I looked hard at Borrow. ‘The secrets she’d learned from the monks?’

‘This is what you’re here for, is it?’ he said. ‘These antiquities. The Queen, or someone close to her, has heard of secrets here and must, therefore, possess them.’

I said nothing.

‘My own belief, for what it’s worth, is that any secret ever supposed to have been held by the monks of Glastonbury was a secret invented for the creation of wealth.’

I was in no mood to dispute it.

‘So Fyche took everything?’

‘Everything he could find. Some documents I removed from the house. I had no interest in them, but they were close to her heart and head. All that, in my opinion, reduced her. I had no wish to see any of it again, but I wasn’t about to hand them to Fyche.’

‘And what was this?’

‘Something I neither understood nor would wish to. Too many lives wasted.’

I stared at the shelf of apothecary’s jars. The sun gone now, the jars did not shine. I listened to Nel’s voice in my head.

All the treasure was long gone.

But treasure did not simply go, transformed to vapour like the dew. It merely changed hands.

I said, ‘Whatever it was… did you not think to give it to Nel?’

‘Why would I…?’ He looked at me as if I were mad. ‘Put the source of my wife’s downfall into the hands of my daughter?’

‘Someone did.’

‘The dust?’ he said. ‘Are we talking of the dust?’

‘She knows how to make it. I’d guess not many people do. The various outbreaks of St Anthony’s Fire seem to have been caused by accidental ingestion of the mould. Someone who knows what amounts may be used and mixed with whatever other ingredients, to produce the visions without the bodily harm… that would be valuable knowledge, would it not?’

‘She worked it out for herself,’ Dr Borrow said. ‘But it’s dangerous knowledge.’

‘Then, is this one of the secrets? Is this something which may have been known here for many years, passed down? But perchance the factoring of it… the practical details… had been forgotten. Did she help the monks rediscover what had been lost?’

‘Proving that the legendary magic of the place is no more than a form of intoxication? An appealing idea, Dr John.’

It wasn’t at all what I’d meant to imply; I would never have wished to see the spirit of this place so diminished. But I’d give him no argument, being afraid that we’d lose him… that he would see us as no more than vulgar treasure-seekers.

‘So this was not the formula for the dust?’

No reply.

‘Dr Borrow,’ I said, ‘I’m looking for something – anything – to give me leverage on Fyche.’

‘Fyche has ambition. Understand that about him and you have the measure of the man.’

I said nothing.

‘I’ve tried to hate him,’ Borrow said, ‘but I’m not sure I have the right. Fyche looks around and sees the same madness that I see. The difference in us being that I see all religions conspiring to destroy any hope of mankind’s progress in this world… while Fyche believes that if all men were bent to a single religion and all knowledge guarded by men of his own class-’

‘His own class?’

‘That is, not the-’

‘Maggots?’

‘He’s an intelligent man, in his way, the abbey bursar once, who would probably have become abbot had Reform not come.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘He sought it. As I say, he’s ever had ambition.’

I tried again.

‘So if not for the dust of vision…?’

‘Nothing so useful,’ Borrow said. ‘She was a friend of John Leland’s, you know, the…’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘When he died, he left some of his papers to her. Of course, he died insane, leaving a mess behind him, and it was years before someone thought to send them.’

‘And what… what were they?’

‘Shit. Worthless. Occultism. The man was a slave to all that drivel. Astrology, alchemy… I’m afraid she seemed to set great store by them. Poring over them for hours in her last… few weeks.’

A tingling in me.

‘You know what they’re about.’

‘I’m afraid I have better things…’

‘Could I see them?’

‘Hardly.’

Borrow laughed bleakly. Dudley leaned forward.

‘Dr Borrow… this is what’s thought to be the treasure… is it?’

‘It’s shit.’

‘If neither Fyche nor your daughter possesses this… treasure… then who does?’

Borrow shook his head sadly, then sat down again, clasping his long hands together as if in parody of prayer.

‘Cate,’ he said, ‘Cate has it yet.’

Who Fears For His Immortal Soul…

The third time I awoke, I lay staring at the ceiling until its oaken beams were full manifest in the moonlight, like the bars of a prison.

The prison of this world.

I lay thinking for long minutes, until the weight of it was all so intense upon my chest that I thought a seizure were come upon me and almost cried out, throwing myself from the bed into the merciless cold.

Wide awake, now. Standing at the window, looking out over the empty street and the night-grey ghost of the abbey just barely outlined under a misted moon. Then I was sinking to my knees and praying that, if only this once, I might know the mind of God. Asking, in essence, if I should take it that this third awakening was a dark summons into a deeper dark.

The idea of it filling me with such dread that it could only be countered by thoughts of Nel Borrow lying sleepless in some stinking, half-flooded dungeon, with the damp and the cold, the scurrying and the despair.

Having been, just once, consigned to such a place, I could not bear this and felt that I’d do anything. Wept over my praying hands before the abbey’s shell, the tears pouring out of me like lifeblood.