Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘No! I… I just… I just want to talk to you.’

‘Talk?’

‘Talk.’

Joan settled back into the sheepskins lining her bench. Light came through cracks in the shutters and the smoke-hole ’twixt the rafters.

‘You en’t easy with a woman, is you? I feels… a real moylin’ in you. You’ze shook up real bad. Real bad. En’t that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘’Tis a woman, no doubt ’bout that. A woman in there, sure as I be alive.’

‘Mistress Tyrre, I don’t know what you’ve heard…’

Joan pulled her shawl back around her bony shoulders, adjusted her eyepatch, peered at me through the smoke.

‘Joe Monger, he d’say you’ze a gonner plead for Nel.’

‘I’ll do anything that might…’

I swallowed.

‘You’ze a good man,’ Joan said. ‘I feels that. An honest man, if only enough folk knowed it, and a kind, zad face on you. But the zaddest thing…’ She looked up into the smoke, nodding slightly. ‘The zaddest thing of all… they en’t never gonner know, most of ’em. Now.’ She picked up the shilling, sat back in satisfaction, arms folded. ‘You ass me what you wants, boy.’

‘Tell me about the faerie,’ I said, of a sudden.

Not knowing where the question came from. Sometimes there’s an instinct of what will open a door.

Eye

The faerie were real. As real as the people in the street. As real as her own family. And closer. She’d heard them since… oh, a long time back, maybe since around her first monthly bleeding.

The voices of the faerie.

I said, ‘What kind of voices?’

Joan was hunched like a winter bird on a fence.

‘Man’s voices, woman’s voices. Tellin’ me to do things… things as got me in bother with my mam. ’Tis what they does, the faerie, tests you out, look, puts you on your mettle. And round about then it started. I knowed things…’

She leaned forward, a smell of mint around here.

‘Things as I shouldn’t know. Things what folks done.’

She was enjoying telling of it. It struck me – although I was wrong in this – that nobody had ever asked her these things before. She went and stirred the stew in the pot with a long wooden spoon and tasted some and came back and beamed at me in the meagre firelight, a brown dribble on her chin.

‘My mam, her throwed me out!’ she said proudly. ‘Her said I knowed too much, look.’

‘Because you told her things? Things the faerie had told to you?’

‘Things I knowed. ’ Joan put her face close to mine, the one eye boring into me until I flinched. ‘Only, I said it were the faerie. You gettin’ me? It was what I learned was best, look. Allus tell ’em ’twas the faerie, then you don’t get no blame.’

‘But you knew…’

‘ Pah. I was young. I tells meself it were the faerie. Made it easier. Only it don’t, Master Lunnonman. In the end it surely don’t. You put the blame on the faerie, the faerie an’t gonner like it… then you’re deep in the shitty.’

It had been bad when they took her to the church court in Taunton. All of it thrown at her. What the faerie could do to you if you fell into their thrall. How they could take away your sight. When she confessed all before God and they let her go, folk feared her. Pointing at her in the street. Piles of turds left outside her door. Dead rats.

And the only ones who came to her now were bad folk, who wanted the faerie to harm other folk, exact revenge for some slight. Once or twice, she was so hard up that she took their money. And then whenever folk died and it wasn’t obvious why, they were pointing at her.

And all this time, the voices were at her, chittering in her head, waking her up in the night… and, just like they’d warned her in the church court, her sight growing dim, and then one eye… the faerie took it.

Joan lifted away the eyepatch. There was only a pit of skwidged and puckered skin.

‘Wouldn’t give me no rest, look. Screechin’ do it! Do it! Sendin’ me out in the woods to the faerie tump, and there on the top… nice sharp stick, and I done it there and then! Aaaagh!’

Joan grasping a bony fist with her other hand, slamming it at the ruined eye.

‘Jesu!’

‘Hadda get away, Mr Lunnonman. Went in the night with all I could pack into an ole shawl.’

So this was what came before the flight to what Joe Monger had called the more openly mystical humours of Glastonbury. A town where friendship with the faerie might win you a welcome in some homes.

Of course, even in Glastonbury, she was still thought a little mad, this bird-boned woman building her rude shelter on the tor. The difference being that these people, who had grown up with divers kinds of madness, at least found her harmless. Notably Cate Borrow, who’d taken her in and then found her work with an old woman of some means, who’d died not long afterwards, leaving Joan a little money, enough to get by for a while without recourse to a misuse of her abilities.

But when it ran out, Joan, encouraged as ever by the voices in her head, had turned again to the faerie. And to the tor, where lived the king of the Faerie. And, having heard at the market about the dust of vision, she’d gone, as Joe Monger had told me, back to Cate Borrow.

‘Why else was I come here, look, if not summoned by the Lord Gwyn?’

Joan cackling, then springing up for another taste of her stew. When she sat down again, I made no attempt to hurry her. Oft-times, unusual talents are to be found among those cast out by society. When I was at Cambridge, one of my bolder tutors took me to a hovel in the fens, there to consult with a wild-eyed old man said to be possessed of the ability to summon the spirit of Hereward the Wake and speak with his voice in the old Saxon. The hovel stank to heaven, and the man was clearly deranged in his mind… yet I heard him speak in a younger man’s voice and knew enough of Anglo-Saxon to translate his words of glee at ever evading the Normans by becoming near invisible in the marshes.

And so to the tor at All Hallows.

‘What happened?’ I said softly. ‘Can you tell me?’

‘Dunno.’ Her eye glancing away at a strange angle. ‘Dunno.’

I said, ‘Joe Monger spoke of me, did he?’

You’ze a good man. I feels that.

‘Nothin’ happened, Master,’ Joan said. ‘You gettin’ it? Nothin’.’

I tried again.

‘The farmer… Moulder? He told the court at Cate’s trial that you’d been howling to the moon. Something like that. This was before Cate said she was alone, and Moulder told the court that the others must therefore have been spirits.’

‘’Twas me and her, was all,’ Joan said. ‘We never done no howlin’. We was quiet. Quiet as the dead. Her showed me how to sit, look.’

‘What about the potion?’

‘Potion, Master?’

‘The potion of the dust of vision.’

‘Never gived it me. You gettin’ this?’ Joan’s eye all over the place now. ‘Her never fuckin’ gived it me.’

‘Then what…?’

‘Us sat an’ talked, look. Sat an’ talked till dawn. Like I en’t never talked before and never since.’

‘What about?’

‘The faerie. The voices. Her says to me the voices wasn’t the faerie. Her says the voices was just voices. Her says the Lord Gwyn and his kind wasn’t for tellin’ nothin’ to the likes o’ me. Her says if I needed someone to talk to I oughter talk to the Lord Merlin, who dealed with the faerie all his life.’

‘What did you think to that?’

‘Din’t know whadda think. Up there by the ole tower, ’twas real quiet, it being All Hallows. Her showed me how to sit. Her said all the stars was out, but I couldn’t see none of ’em. My eye… real bad by then. Only made it to the top holdin’ on to Mistress Cate’s arm, couldn’t even see the path. But we’s sittin’ there, and her’s tellin’ me ’bout what the Lord Merlin seen – all the folks and the creatures in the stars.’