‘Dr John,’ she said, ‘don’t make me say these things.’
I said nothing. She would hardly be the first to suggest that the anglicised services of the reformed church were a poor substitute for the older rituals it had discarded.
‘You haven’t been here long enough to know this town,’ she said.
‘Then tell me.’
‘Feelings…’ She sighed. ‘Feelings here run to extreme. When you try to describe it, it sounds like nothing much – bitter quarrels which are not healed…feuds, street fights. Thieving and wife-beating and men killed over very little. Very little. But put them all together and sometimes it seems that this place is become like to a wound left open, where there’s gangrene and rot. A mortifying of the flesh.’
My eyes must have widened at her eloquence and the force of her argument. I was thinking of what Cowdray had said about the power the abbey had given out. Like to a great beacon, always alight. A calming light. And the abbey had been here before the town, which had grown up to serve it. And now the light had gone out, leaving the town bereft and prey to…
Next to every holy place there’s a high ground as the devil takes for his watchtower.
I’d thought myself well qualified in theology, but this was unfamiliar territory and made me feel as if all my years of learning were of little consequence. I looked down at the holy well, the blood well, the iron well, and felt the weight of the strange hill, like the burden of a hunchback.
There are places – I know this – where the earth itself speaks to us. In olden times, men were closer to it. All men, not only priests. When I think on this, I sometimes feel that even the Bible men might be closer to regaining this lost faculty, yet the rigidity of their beliefs prevent them from the experience of it. I turned to Mistress Borrow.
‘And the visions?’
She drew her cloak over her knees.
‘Who’s to say what are visions and what are signs of an oncoming madness?’
‘Or possession?’
‘Oh yes, there’s much possession in Glastonbury. The demons have a rare freedom here.’
‘Could you -’ my throat was as dry as parched earth – ‘explain this to me?’
‘And this is important, Doctor?’ Looking up at me, of a sudden suspicious. ‘This has an importance for your work in the listing of the Queen’s antiquities?’
As if she were awakening from some daydream… as if we both were held in a spell which she must needs break.
‘I’m interested,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
‘We should go.’ She was looking away, to somewhere beyond the circle of thorn trees, scrambling coltishly to her feet. ‘I have visits to make. To the sick.’
Snatching up her bag before I could reach it, she moved away betwixt the apple trees and was almost in collision with the panting bulk of Dudley’s groom, Martin Lythgoe.
‘Beg mercy, Doctor…’
Red in the face, his thatch of yellow hair standing up in spikes, a ragged scratch scoring one cheek.
‘I’m reet glad to’ve found thee. Me master-’
I leapt up.
‘Is he worse?’
‘No, he’s… much the same. He were asleep when I left him. It’s just he said – before he become ill, like – as how we should watch out for thee.’
‘Me?’
‘And what do I do, wi’ the master all laid up, but go buggering off checking on th’horses and let yer go wandering off on yer own. Well…’ He looked at Mistress Borrow. ‘Pardon me, I din’t known tha were wi’ him, Doctor.’
If he’d been following me, he must have known, but I let it pass.
‘Martin, I’m a grown man.’
‘Aye, well, I can see that, but me master, he reckons…’
However you survived in the cesspits of Paris and Antwerp without me around to save your sorry arse I shall never know.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I know what he reckons. Martin… ’ Looking into his eyes and speaking with deliberation in the hope he would get the underlying message that I was engaged in picking up useful intelligence. ‘Doctor Borrow… has shown me the holy well… to get some iron water. To aid Master Roberts’s recovery?’
‘Aye, aye.’ He nodded. ‘Not a problem, sir.’ Straightening his leather jerkin, casting a sideways glance at Mistress Borrow. ‘Anyroad, I think, under t’circumstances, Master Roberts would understand.’
‘Circumstances?’
Martin Lythgoe gave me a discreet… what looked to be a wink.
What?
I felt my cheeks suffused with blood.
‘I’ll leave thee to it, then, sir.’
He beamed.
‘No… Martin…’
‘Aye?’
‘If you want to help me -’ groping wildly for something sounding halfway authoritative – ‘there’s someone you might talk to. Cowdray spoke last night of a former monk from the abbey who’d become a farrier. I thought that, with your own work with horses, you might find a plausible reason to approach him?’
‘I could do that.’
‘You know what we’re looking for. What information we seek, and to what purpose?’
‘Oh, aye.’
‘And could inquire with discretion?’
‘I reckon yer mare could do wi’ some new shoes for t’journey back to Bristol.’
‘That would be a very good reason to make an approach.’
‘Awreet then, I’ll seek out this feller, and I’ll sithee back at th’ inn, Dr John.’
He patted down his haystack hair, nodded to Mistress Borrow and blundered away amongst the guardian apple trees, leaving me struggling to assemble an apologetic smile.
‘My… usual work being with manuscripts and books, my colleagues think me unused to the outside world.’
‘’Tis a real mystery to me how they could think that.’
Lips unsmiling, but her eyes were dancing, and the discomfort in me burst its dam.
‘I’d like to see the church.’
‘Church?’
‘ That church. Upon the tor. The devil’s hill. Whoever the devil may be, in this instance – the wizard Merlin, the King of the Faerie, the… to a Catholic, the Protestants are devils.’
Flinging out too many words, as usual, when I’m in a turmoil.
‘But there’s nothing up there,’ she said. ‘Even the tower’s all but hollow now.’
‘You call the remains of a church nothing? And what’s that terracing around the hill? Like to old fortifications.’
She shrugged.
‘Antiquities are my business,’ I said stiffly. ‘I can’t very well neglect this one.’
Knowing not, in truth, why I had to go up there, to a place that seemed so forbidding. Maybe because it was forbidding. To demonstrate that I was a man unafraid to challenge the devil.
Or even just a man.
‘Very well.’ The doctor gathered up her cloak. ‘This way…’
The path curved, making the ascent less steep than the appearance of the tor suggested. But it still was not a pleasant climb, and all the way I carried a damp and dolorous feeling of what it must have been like for the elderly, aching Abbot Whiting, hauled up on a hurdle to a certain death.
Like to the labouring of Christ, with his cross, up the hill of Calvary, the place of skulls.
