Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

The laughter came from deep in her throat, which must have hurt.

And I was still wondering what was real, what was dream or the runaway imagination of a man starved of food for a day, and sleep for longer. I’d mentioned to no-one my meeting with Nostradamus, who was gone by the time Carew’s men went into Meadwell. As were all the statues and the tabernacle in the chapel.

Little firm evidence against Fyche himself, Carew claimed, though it was Dudley’s suspicion that Fyche knew too much about Carew for him to be brought before an assize. But his status as Justice of the Peace seemed likely to be short-lived.

His son would be buried without ceremony. Raising a dagger to the Queen’s Master of the Horse? Carew had said mildly. What choice did I have?

I couldn’t help dwelling on the possible reasons for Fyche trying to pass off the malignant Stephen as a monk. Had he actually thought that when Mary was Queen of England, the Pope back as head of the Church and the abbey rebuilt, it might be placed under Stephen’s control?

Madness. But then, many abbots and many bishops had been closer to the devil…

Had Brother Michael returned to France in the company of his old friend, Matthew Borrow? If I were looking for cause to believe that Michel de Nostradame was guilty of epic deceit, I could think of no better evidence than his friendship with Borrow.

What was this man?

Why had neither his wife nor his daughter, even in the shadow of the noose, been prepared to raise voice against him?

In the week since Dudley’s departure, I’d attended Benlow’s burial, along with the re-burial, in the goose field behind the Church of the Baptist, of all the bones in his cellar, and also revisited Mistress Cadwaladr. Now that Borrow was gone from the town and Fyche’s status was in question, many more truths were emerging.

Monger had recalled how, in the early ’30s, not long after the King had proclaimed himself head of the Church, s omeone had suggested to the abbot that the abbey’s treasures should be sent to France, where they might remain in the care of the Catholic Church. Fyche, the bursar? Almost certainly. But Richard Whiting, an Englishman to his soul, had been unconvinced – still, apparently, believing that the dark hand of Cromwell would never descend upon the fount of English Christianity. And, indeed, it would be five years or more before it did.

From Mistress Cadwaladr, I’d learned of Cate’s first meeting with the man who was to become her husband, when he’d come to the abbey to spear a boil on the abbot’s neck. An unlikely match for the doctor, this recently illiterate kitchenmaid.

For while she was undoubtedly beautiful, Cate was also with child.

Was ever a woman more grateful to a man? Mistress Cadwaladr said. I swear she would have died for him.

And had.

The way I saw it, Borrow had known his mission might take years. He needed a wife to keep the other women and their ambitious fathers from his door. If he turned down too many he’d arouse suspicions. Or be thought a Bessie. He’d be looking for a woman of…

‘Little education,’ Mistress Cadwaladr had said. ‘Knowing her place. No inclination to question his movements. A housemaid with a ring.’

And that, for a number of years, was what he had. I suppose it was learning to read which had begun the change in her, but it was a slow change and a long time before she became a threat to him and his clandestine work for the French. Maybe Cate, working ever closer to her husband, had begun to suspect that he was not all he seemed. Perchance when he’d gone out to see some sick person whom she’d met in the market next day, perfectly fit, not having seen the doctor in months. She was no longer the woman he thought he’d married. One way or another she’d have found him out. And from then on she’d be marked for death.

The inhumanity of the religious zealot. What were two women’s lives against the delivery of a country back to Rome and the one true Church?

Fyche’s hatred of witches and the dust of vision must have seemed opportune. And I’d bet my library that the theft from the surgery, leading to the death of the boy in Somerton, had somehow been contrived by Borrow.

The wind rattled the thorn tree born of Joseph’s staff. It was grown colder now, in keeping with Benlow’s warning that winter was not yet gone.

Nel said, ‘I was brought up to revere him for his skills and saintly generosity. And not to bother him with childish matters.’

Staring out across the town, her voice even, without heat or bitterness. The voice of a woman who was back from the dead but not entirely. A Persephone who’d left some part of herself in the underworld. I knew then that there were elements of her which would also be beyond the understanding even of a man of science and a student of the hidden.

‘She never told you you were not his child?’

‘She told no-one.’

‘When did you learn?’

‘Not from my mother. Not till after her death.’

‘When Mistress Cadwaladr returned to Glastonbury?’

‘She was only one who knew. The only one who cared to know.’

Nel said nothing for a few moments, then she turned to look at me, hot pain in her eyes.

‘John, it only made me want to be closer to him. I’ve been proud to be the daughter of Matthew Borrow, the finest physician in all Somerset.’

She looked across to the abbey ruins. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘I’ll find him. So many questions.’

It was my hope she’d never find him.

‘Your mother…Could she not see the void in him where the heart should be?’

‘She owed him her life. Don’t you see? Whatever the reason for it, all the good that had ever come of her life… she owed to him.’

‘She wouldn’t look at him in the court. She turned her eyes away.’

‘Maybe she had no wish to see the…’ She looked down the field to where stood the wooden cross. ‘’twas not something to take to your grave.’

She began to weep and I held her to me, and time passed, and I tried to understand and could not. Both of us knowing the question I must needs ask or be forever tormented.

At last, she said, ‘She must have felt the wind of it. I was home from medical school, and my mother said – not a week before her arrest – that when I was qualified I should go far from here. London… anywhere. As soon as I left the college. I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing her again. But she made me promise.’

‘And you promised?’

She stiffened.

‘I would not. I laughed. And it haunts me. It haunts me that she thought her own death might make me realise. Maybe she thought me cleverer than I turned out to be. Something always drew me to him. This… this saintly man who…’ She seized my hand hard enough to stop the blood. ‘When I was held at Wells… they told me he’d confessed to save me.’

‘Who? Who told you?’

‘The gaoler. The woman gaoler. She said he’d told them- Said they were his knives with all the blood over them.’

‘They were… God damn it, they were his knives.’

‘I’d watched him fighting them when they came to take me. They knocked him down. He lay in the street, they dragged him up…’

I saw some of that too, as I and everybody in that street was meant to. A play. A masquerade. He was good at that. The next time I’d seen him, in his surgery, he’d been working through the pain, and I – and doubtless the whole town – had thought him brave and selfless, like the women who’d thought they’d loved him… if not for himself, then for what he was.

Thought they should love him.

A man so cold and remorseless that he’d betray his country and then, to conceal his treachery, dispose of his wife of convenience. And then, a year later, seize an opportunity to do away with the young woman who was not his daughter.