In London it would be considered unseemly for a man to walk in such isolation with a young woman he’d barely met, but it seemed to worry this one not at all. Being a doctor, I supposed.
The bag must have had pouches inside for the potions and the leeches or whatever she carried around, for it didn’t rattle when I slung the strap over my shoulder.
‘I’ve nothing in there to hide,’ she said. ‘if that’s what you were thinking.’
‘No, no, I didn’t…’ Even my attempts at crude chivalry were ever misinterpreted. ‘Where did you train, mistress?’
‘Oh…’ She was walking swiftly across the yard towards the rear gate. ‘I’ve studied for many years.’
‘You don’t look old enough’ – catching up with her – ‘to have studied for many years.’
She stopped at the gate, a hand on the bolt, and looked up at me, her eyes widening.
‘I don’t look sixty years old?’ Her head on one side. ‘What a marvellous thing is my father’s elixir of youth.’
‘Little short of miraculous. How old’s your father?’
‘Oh… he must be near to ninety years, now. Though looks barely fifty.’
Turning quickly away, Mistress Borrow drew back the bolt with a clank which almost, but not quite, obscured what I thought might be laughter.
‘You’re following your father’s trade?’ I said.
‘And my mother’s,’ she said. ‘Though my poor mother’s been dead for…a while.’
The gate had opened on to a patch of greensward, grazed by half a dozen geese, behind the high street. I followed Mistress Borrow onto an earthen path alongside it.
‘Both your parents were doctors?’
‘My father still is – he’s the finest doctor in the west. Would have come with Master Cowdray to your friend but had been summoned to the bedside of an old woman about to quit this world. No, my mother grew herbs. My father uses them.’
‘And you grow them still?’
‘I borrow them – from the land.’
Oh, these clearly were not physicians as I was used to them in London. This sounded to me like a cunning man married to a wise woman. Which was like a breath of air to me, but Mistress Borrow could not know that.
Ahead of us, pale as ash, rose a high and elegant tower. The church of St John the Baptist, I imagined, having read of it in my research. Leland calls it fair and lightsome.
‘A proud tower,’ I observed.
‘Built by Abbot Selwood a century ago.’
‘And who cares for it now?’
‘Who cares for anything?’
She walked on, head down, dark brown hair flowing behind her, unrestrained by cap or coif. We passed through the churchyard, emerging at last on to the high street, where I saw a baker’s shop doing good business and a man having less success selling sheep fleeces from a cart. I followed Mistress Borrow along the street, which wound uphill past a building site backing onto the abbey wall – doubtless the plan was to use this as a supporting wall for new homes, but nobody was working on the site, and I recalled Cowdray:
If you takes a stone from the abbey and puts it into your wall, you should kneel and do penance every morning for seven weeks. Or ’tis likely your house will not be at peace.
But back at the inn Mistress Borrow had sounded sceptical. I caught up with her again.
‘The ghost of Abbot Whiting… do you not believe he’s seen?’
‘I didn’t say that. I said that such rumours might be employed to deter people from stealing stone.’
‘Then do you believe that he’s seen?’
‘It doesn’t surprise me. The poor man has little cause for rest. But as I don’t go in there it isn’t my business.’
‘You don’t sound afraid.’
‘Because I remember the abbot. From… when I was a small child. I remember him walking through the town, not far from here. He stopped to talk to us, my mother and me. His face… I remember his wrinkly smile, and his eyes had a kindness, like…’ She looked up at me. ‘For a long time, I thought I’d seen the face of God.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Three or four years.’
People passed us, entering the pale Church of the Baptist. Outside, on the edge of the street, a young man was plucking discordantly upon a patched lute, another slapping at a goatskin drum, chickens pecking in the mud around them. It seemed to me, for a curious moment, as if the people were behaving as though in a play and feigning ordinary life. That the real life here happened on some other level.
‘At least, unlike the abbey, the church is in full daily use,’ I said. ‘Does it have a library?’
‘I don’t know. Should it?’
‘Everywhere should have a library.’
‘Why?’
Walking faster, now she was away from the town centre.
‘Because -’ feeling the pull of my breathing as I kept up with her pace – ‘only through learning can we hope to attain…’
The words unaccountably dying on me. I felt suddenly foolish. And inadequate, somehow, as Mistress Borrow stopped at the entrance to a narrow track, tall, bare trees on either side, and turned to look down at me.
‘And is learning acquired only from books?’
She turned away again and began ascending the track.
‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘but the process of learning is surely much hastened. Is it not remarkable that, by means of a book, one man’s whole lifetime of learning can be passed to another in a matter of hours?’
‘All learning can be passed this way?’
‘Most of it. In my experience.’
She stopped at a low wall with a stile. Stepping away from it and waiting while I climbed up and jumped down on the other side. Giving her my hand, to help her down. Her own hand was bare, not like the Queen’s rose- petal glove. I experienced a most disturbing reaction and let go of it quickly when she was down from the stile, and turned away, feeling the warm blood suffuse my cheeks.
‘The well is that way,’ she said
Pointing towards a wood, a well-trodden path leading through it, and I had the sense of a mocking laughter rising within her. A laughter that seemed to be translated into a sudden, raucous cawking of crows, which caused me to look up in a hot displeasure mixed with apprehension and thus, through a gap in the trees, to espy, almost directly above us, a green mound like to a gigantic mole’s tump.
A stone tower projecting from its summit, like a stalk from an apple and black against the cloud.
XIV
A Mortifying of the Flesh
The clouds behind the jutting tower were a strange and blinding white, the hill itself a more vivid green than was common in February. A shock to the senses, and I felt a momentary separation that I liked not.
Division: part of me longing to go rushing to its summit, another part hissing, turn away.
‘So close to the town,’ I said, ‘and yet…’
‘Not of it,’ Mistress Borrow said. ‘It is its own place.’
We stood on the edge of the wood in full silence. No birdsong. The hill, I saw, was ridged, had terraces approaching the summit, like the mounds of the castles in my family’s country burned down in the Glyndwr wars. But no castle mound I’d seen was so imposing, so steep or quite so startlingly conical. It was utterly strange, as if it were planted here, constructed by men – or angels – for some purpose.
And I felt, oddly, as if some inner part of me was already familiar with it.
Most likely from an engraving in a book.
