LVII
The Void
The Fish Hill was where Joseph of Arimathea had disembarked, stabbing his staff into the good soil of Avalon.
Soil so good, in fact, that the staff sprouted buds and grew into a thorn bush which yet survived, or descendants of it, and came into flower each Christmas Day.
Joe Monger had told me that. A pretty tale with many echoes, this hill being one of the fishes in the starsign of Pisces, whose age began with the coming of Christianity. I’d sat by this thorn bush before, not knowing of the legend, and sat there again in the chill breeze as the year approached the day when St David died, aged one hundred, a thousand or so years ago.
St David? Oh, yes, he was here too, how could he not have been?
Sitting here, you could see both the abbey and the tor. Maybe this was the medium between the two worlds, Christian and pagan, natural and celestial. He’d known what he did, the abbot, in giving this land to Cate Borrow, for the purpose of healing.
‘The abbot’s thought,’ Nel said, ‘was that if the medical herbs traditionally related to certain starsigns in the sky were to be grown inside the corresponding formations upon the ground… then the healing properties of them would be quite marvellously increased.’
‘She told you this?’
‘Of course not. It came to me when I awoke this morning. I remembered that when a particular herb did well here – yarrow or camomile, I forget which – then she’d say, Aha, this plant is responsive to the sign of the fishes. And I remembered how she’d go off with the abbot to plant herbs in other fields belonging to the abbey and… that’s my guess.’
The logic of it was beyond assail. Cate taken into the confidence of the monks at the abbey who held the secret of the Zodiac. Working with them on a new kind of astrological healing. The implications were fascinating.
‘I suppose ’tis not the only secret of the Zodiac, and far from the most important, but…’
She smiled and squeezed my hand, and I looked at her with longing but no real hope. Though we’d lain together four nights now, I was sensing, in the sweetness of it, a parting rather than a beginning.
It had been nearly a week before she was able to speak without pain. She said this was only because of the burns and the weals yet apparent on her throat despite all the balms and ointments applied to it by Joan Tyrre. But I thought there was more. My feeling was that she’d foresworn all speech until she had an understanding.
She wore the blue overdress and a worn muslin scarf to keep the breeze from her throat. Below us, we could see the tip of the cross marking Cate’s grave, beyond it the abbey laid out like some broken golden coronet.
‘You’re sure you didn’t see him?’ she said. ‘He was standing next to you for several moments.’
I shook my head. I think she meant the abbot. Cowdray had said there were more people seen on the top of the tor that night than had come down from it.
‘I saw only the phoenix made by the torches,’ I said. ‘I’m just a dull and bookish man who has not the sight.’
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.
