worked in the abbot’s kitchen. Before she took the eye of the new physician and learned the arts of herbs and the growing of them… and then became the abbot’s friend.’
After the Dissolution of the abbey, she’d continued her work with curative plants, if less openly, occasionally helped by a woman who’d been a cook at the abbey. And then, in the boy Edward’s reign, the years of the protectorate, there was more tolerance, and this was when Cate had found the freedom to experiment in areas where doctors of physic seldom strayed.
‘Not all ailments,’ Monger said, ‘are physical.’
Telling me of a certain man – a wool-merchant, therefore not without money – who, after the death of his wife and daughter in a house fire, had lost his faith in God and was so cast down that he was near to taking his own life.
‘Also suffering from blinding pains in the head,’ Monger said, ‘ not a result of dousing his sorrow in wine, I should say – this was the kind of agony that comes out of nowhere with flashing lights, and no darkened chamber can bring ease.’
‘I’ve heard of it.’
I could hear a clanking of flagons from the alehouse, Cowdray’s hoarse laughter.
‘Cate had given him a certain kind of fungus dust,’ Monger said. ‘To be mixed with a large quantity of water, and the results were… frightening. Like an act of God. Powerfully mystical.’
One startling morn, Monger had met the wool-merchant on the fish-shaped hill to the east of the town, and here was a man raising his arms to heaven, extolling all the sublime beauty of creation. Talking of colours he’d never known. Confiding to Monger, later that day, in the George where we sat now, that his spirit had been awakened neither by prayer nor Bible… but by Cate Borrow and her fungus dust.
‘Not only eased the pain in his head, but opened his eyes to a brighter world.’ Monger’s tone was yet drab. ‘A vision of heaven on earth.’
I was intent, for this was said also of the mushrooms which Jack Simm had found for me and which I’d dried and brewed in private. Drinking the brew late at night in my library, amongst my books, surrounded by the wisdom of the ages.
Without any effects, in my case, beyond a mild headache. It was ever thus.
‘There could be considerable demand for such a potion,’ I said cautiously.
‘But, regrettably,’ Monger said, ‘there was – there always is – a hazard. The results were… not predictable. Indeed, rather than a sense of exaltation, there might, oft-times, be visions worse than the blackest nightmare. You see? Heaven or hell. A roll of the dice.’
The elixir of heaven and hell. I’d heard some talk of it in the low countries a year or two back, but it was like to the elixir of life – you never know how much to believe.
‘So random were its effects,’ Monger said, ‘that Cate Borrow would dispense it only in the most extreme circumstances – that is, for terrible head pains or when she had reason to think someone so deep sunk into misery than he might be about to take a length of rope into the woods.’
‘So, apart from this wool-merchant, who-?’
‘She tried it on herself. But with restraint, in the merest quantities. Matthew took it once – never again, he’ll tell you. When it was used they’d make sure whoever took it was never left alone, lest they might cause harm to themselves.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll come to that.’
‘So these…’ I recalled Cecil’s words. ‘These visions…’
‘I…’ Monger was hesitant. ‘I’ve heard it said that the place where the potion was ingested… might alter the response. And I imagine it would also be affected by the humour of the man ingesting it. Or the woman.’
I waited. So dim was it now that I could barely see his face, let alone read his expression.
‘Joan Tyrre,’ he said. ‘On hearing of the dust of vision, Joan Tyrre… was eager. And thus, in her foolish, innocent way, became the cause of Cate’s downfall.’
Joan Tyrre was herself a herbalist, if hardly in Cate’s company, and years earlier had been making another precarious living, in Taunton, out of her relations with the faerie. Joan apparently naming people the faerie had told her were bewitched and offering them help.
I’d heard of this unsavoury practice, preying upon the poor and desperate, and knew it couldn’t have lasted long before drawing the attention of the Church.
It hadn’t. Brought before the church court, Joan had admitted all and sworn herself to the service of God… while thinking to return, more discreetly, to her former trade in another part of the town when all the fuss had died down. But the faerie do not easily forgive such a betrayal and – or so she’d claim later – would no longer confide in her.
Having also left her near-blind. This was when she’d decided to leave Taunton for what she’d heard were the more openly mystical humours of Glastonbury.
‘She’d seen the tor,’ Monger said. ‘In the distance, magical in the evening light. And heard the tales of the King of the Faerie, Gwyn ap Nudd, still in residence in the heart of it.’
Thinking that the great Gwyn might be responsive to her urgent pleas, Joan had walked to Glastonbury, joining a band of travellers for protection. In a wood near the foot of the tor, she’d fashioned for herself a rude shelter out of bent saplings and thatch. It was summer, and she’d slept there for some weeks, praying that she might be taken into the hall of the faerie.
‘So Joan’s relations with the faerie,’ I said, ‘were not just…’
‘Of her own invention?’ Monger said. ‘Many people say she’s mad as a hare, and yet…’
Weeks had passed. Joan had been chilled to the bone by the winds of autumn, no illumination to warm her nights. Joe Monger himself had found her one day, collapsed in her shelter, half-starved. Bringing her into town and taking her to Matthew Borrow, who gave her a bed in the ante-chamber of his surgery, sometimes used as a hospital. When she was recovered, the Borrows had found her a position as housekeeper to an old woman who shared her fascination with the faerie.
But Joan was still cast down, and her sight was worse. Hearing of the experience of Monger’s friend, the wool-merchant, she’d returned, in despair, to Cate Borrow, begging her to disclose the herbal ingredients of the powder which offered entry to the very Garden of Eden, with its skies the colour of green apples and the forests all blue like some distant sea. Or, as she would see it…
‘The land of faerie?’ I said. ‘Cate Borrow, of course, refused, deeming Joan to be a woman of unsound temper who might be left sorely damaged. But Joan wouldn’t leave her alone. Her proposal was to go one last time to the top of the tor and dose herself with the dust of vision, there before the ruins of the church of St Michael.’
‘A bold woman.’
‘Moonstruck,’ Monger said. ‘She’d stopped eating by then. Starved herself for weeks. If you think she’s thin now… my God. Clothes hanging off her, hair falling out. Opening her arms to death. In the end… Cate relented. On condition that she and Matthew should accompany Joan to the tor and remain with her while she took the potion. Matthew having resisted it to the end, of course, repelled by thoughts of Joan Tyrre screeching to the sky in helpless ecstasy in possibly the most visible place in all Somerset. Then finally accepting that it should be done on All Hallows Eve.’
I shrank back.
‘Quite,’ Monger said. ‘Matthew, however – you should know that Matthew goes to church just enough to avoid penalty and only too glad to be called away to a case of sickness in the middle of it. His science is, I would say, a narrower science than yours.’
‘You mean he has no belief in God or the spiritual?’
‘No faith I’m aware of, no fear. Matthew fears only men – unlike most others here, as you can imagine. On All Hallows Eve, the town lights its lamps, bars its doors and firmly turns its back on the tor.’
‘The devil’s hill.’
‘This might be the one night they could be sure to be alone there. Or that anyone else up there’ – I sensed a rueful smile from Monger – ‘would be too far gone in madness to pay heed to Joan Tyrre.’
‘Or, presumably, that Joan would, on the eve itself, be too affeared to go on with the venture and…’
‘Exactly that,’ Monger said. ‘Matthew said that if Joan backed away now, at least that would be an end to it.’
