‘The East?’
‘Some.’
‘You mean holy men? Magi?’
‘On – what is it – camels? All in silk robes?’ She laughed. ‘Rags, more like, and on foot. Not wealthy, except in spirit. We feed them and we give them shelter, and they take our air. Visit our high places, drink from our wells. And share with us their… ways of being.’
‘Does Fyche-?’
‘Good God, no. Although some of them came to the abbey, in the old days. To meet with the abbot and senior monks.’
‘And your mother?’
‘It’s possible.’
I moistened my dry lips. ‘What was she growing, Nel?’
‘Collecting, mainly. She collected from the fields and hedgerows more than she grew. In search of cures – smallpox, wool-sorters’ disease. Her ambition was quietly boundless.’
‘And the dust of vision?’
The first splotter of slow rain came on the window glass.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘ that.’
‘Maybe I’ve also been sent here to learn.’
She made no reply.
‘If I’d been here in your mother’s day I suppose I might’ve gone pleading to her, like Joan Tyrre, for a little flask of…’
Nel unlaced her cloak with a small pull and it slid from her shoulders. My hands shook.
She bent to dip a hand into her cloth bag. When it emerged it was holding a small, stoppered earthenware pot.
‘This?’
Now the storm was all around us.
You think me mad to trust this woman with the sovereignty of my senses?
Maybe you’re right. Maybe there was a madness in me that night, born of years of unsatisfied longing. All I can say is that, as soon as I’d heard of it, I knew that if it were still to be found in Glastonbury, this dust of vision, then I could not leave the town without having tested it upon myself.
Never thinking for one minute, though, that Nel Borrow would carry it around in her bag.
‘It’s been found to help pregnant women,’ she said, ‘when the child won’t come. And for the relief of those who bleed too much afterwards.’
‘Is this the common use?’
‘And also for the severe head-pains with bright lights and no cause.’
‘Your mother discovered it?’
‘Of course not. It’s been around, in one form or another, since the most ancient of days. I’m surprised you haven’t come across it in your studies.’
‘In truth,’ I said, ‘I think I have.’
It all came back to me now, watching Nel Borrow laying out an array of items from her bag on the candlelit board. I hadn’t read of it, merely been told, and what was not put down in a book was always suspect to me, but what else could it be?
Ignis sacer.
A small but severe plague of it had been spoken of when I was in France last year. Many people had died, but from the disease itself rather than its effects on their minds, the survivors speaking of visions both dreadful and exultant.
The holy fire.
The disease was a burning from within: terrible agonies, convulsions, loss of all control over movement. A dance, Monger had called it, and this would certainly have described what happened in France, where the talk had been of the wrath of God visited upon a faithless community. I hadn’t read of it, so I’d dismissed it as exaggeration to frighten people into some religious conformity.
Nel had spread out a clean white cloth over the board. Brought out a small knife and a wooden spoon. There was also a flask of water which reddened when shaken, leading me to suppose it from the Blood Well.
Then a crystal goblet, a scrap of paper. An apple and a small wooden cup.
She unstoppered the earthenware pot.
I said, ‘Tell me what this is.’
‘The powder? ’Tis ground from a fungus. It grows on grain. In this case, barley. Hangs from it like a black ear. My mother would pound it in a pestle with… other herbs.’
‘She showed you how to make it?’
‘No. Never. It took me over a year to get it right – driven, at the time, by the need to relieve the suffering of our neighbour, Alice – aching head. Keeping the whole street awake, with moans all through the night. Some strange cries, indeed, the night Alice took-’ She looked up at me. ‘Are you sure about this?’
I nodded decisively. There’d be no chance of trying it when Dudley was up and about again.
‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘It will probably have no effect.’
Telling her of the night I’d brewed some powder of the mushrooms gathered in our orchard by Jack Simm. The little mushrooms that come in the autumn.
‘This was in London?’
‘In my library in Mortlake. Thinking that if I were surrounded by all the wisdom of the ancients, its effects might be… why are you smiling?’
‘No reason, Dr John. No reason at all.’
I was able to smile, too. But had not Monger, speaking of the dust of vision, told me: I’ve heard it said that the place where the potion was ingested might condition the response?
‘Where’s it best to drink this?’ I asked her, for I was anxious now for it to be done before I could change my mind. ‘Should I take it outside?’
‘In the storm? I think not. I heard of a man once for whom the falling rain turned to a hail of arrows.’ She looked at me. ‘You’ll have no control.’
‘Is that not the point of it?’
‘It’s just that you strike me as a man for whom a degree of self-control-’
‘May be the cause,’ I said, almost breathless, ‘of all my deficiences. As you’ve implied.’
Yet had not the man of science in me already dwelt on the possibilities for further research if I could obtain some of the potion to take back to London? Was I not already wondering how its effects might be conditioned by the movement of seasons or the positioning of stars at the time it was ingested?
Nel Borrow was bent over the board, spooning something from the earthenware pot onto the paper.
‘The quantity must be so small as to be almost invisible to the untutored eye, else the consequences… God only knows how much that boy in Somerton swallowed.’ She looked up. ‘Have you ever heard the affliction called by the name St Anthony’s Fire?’
‘Have you?’
‘Though I don’t know why. Did St Anthony have visions?’
‘All saints seem to have had visions.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but are visions that come as a result of taking a potion… are they still what you would call sacred?’
‘I know not,’ I said. ‘And there may lie more heresy.’
There was a silence, even the rain holding back. Or so it seemed from this golden sanctum.
‘Would it not be possible’ – Nel Borrow held the flask before the candles, and the liquid turned to amber – ‘that the senses, through the action of the herbs, might be awakened to the spiritual?’
The liquid was lit red-gold. Her eyes were amber green. The admonishing rain was coming hard now at the window as she lifted the paper betwixt her fingers and funnelled powder into the little wooden cup. Adding a little water and pouring more into the crystal goblet.
Could the pathway to divinity be glimpsed through the bottom of a goblet? Or the road to hellfire…
