Of a sudden, this made sense to me: Leland seeking to assure Cate that he was no longer working for the Crown, that whatever she told him would go no further.
‘When you say possessed…’
‘Only that he was in thrall to this town and its peculiarities.’
I remembered what Nel had told me her father had thought: that Leland’s first visit was to collect treasure, and his second was to collect the place itself. This might simply refer to the notation of its features. Yet knowing of Leland’s interest in the hidden…
‘This secret that Leland believed the monks kept, do you think Cate knew what it was?’
‘I can’t say. She was certainly closer to the abbot than anyone outside the abbey – and closer than most of us in side.’ He wiped rain and maybe sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his dark brown robe. ‘I must needs go back, Dr John. I go to my old mother’s on a Sunday.’
‘Joe… what are you’re not telling me?’
‘Nothing that can help you. Nothing I know. ’
He began to walk away, and although I’d known him only a short time I knew this was not like him. I didn’t move. After about ten paces, he turned back to me. Hesitated for a moment and then cried out quickly, ‘Talk to Joan. Last hovel on the left, top of town, past the alehouse.’
Then turned, stumbling, dragging his cowl over his head and almost running back to the town through the rain, all his old composure gone.
Why?
Joan Tyrre’s house might once – and not too long ago – have been a stable or a winter sheepshed, built of mismatched timbers and rubblestone, with two open doorways and chickens pecking around in the straw. Inside, another door was patched with wads of grey wool, probably plucked from hedgerows and brambles. It opened into the place where Joan lived.
‘Shillin’?’ she said. ‘Seein’ it be Sunday and I don’t work, normal way of it. Howzat zound, Master Lunnonman?’
Bringing down from a niche in the wall above the fire, with some reverance, her skrying crystal. I knew not how a woman of her limited means might have come by it. It was small but of good quality, near as clear as my own. I tried to convey to her that I would not be troubling her for a reading today.
‘Sixpence, then?’
‘Mistress Tyrre…’
I took from my pocket a new shilling, placing it on the boards which made an old manger into a table. The place was cleaner than I might have expected and the strongest smell was from the iron stewpot hanging over a grizzling fire which fugged the air with smoke.
‘Ahaaaah.’ Joan broke out a toothless smile. Then she was putting down the crystal to unwrap her shawl and loosen the faded garment that covered her bosom. ‘ This be what you-’
‘No! I… I just… I just want to talk to you.’
‘Talk?’
‘Talk.’
Joan settled back into the sheepskins lining her bench. Light came through cracks in the shutters and the smoke-hole ’twixt the rafters.
‘You en’t easy with a woman, is you? I feels… a real moylin’ in you. You’ze shook up real bad. Real bad. En’t that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘’Tis a woman, no doubt ’bout that. A woman in there, sure as I be alive.’
‘Mistress Tyrre, I don’t know what you’ve heard…’
Joan pulled her shawl back around her bony shoulders, adjusted her eyepatch, peered at me through the smoke.
‘Joe Monger, he d’say you’ze a gonner plead for Nel.’
‘I’ll do anything that might…’
I swallowed.
‘You’ze a good man,’ Joan said. ‘I feels that. An honest man, if only enough folk knowed it, and a kind, zad face on you. But the zaddest thing…’ She looked up into the smoke, nodding slightly. ‘The zaddest thing of all… they en’t never gonner know, most of ’em. Now.’ She picked up the shilling, sat back in satisfaction, arms folded. ‘You ass me what you wants, boy.’
‘Tell me about the faerie,’ I said, of a sudden.
Not knowing where the question came from. Sometimes there’s an instinct of what will open a door.
XLV
Eye
The faerie were real. As real as the people in the street. As real as her own family. And closer. She’d heard them since… oh, a long time back, maybe since around her first monthly bleeding.
The voices of the faerie.
I said, ‘What kind of voices?’
Joan was hunched like a winter bird on a fence.
‘Man’s voices, woman’s voices. Tellin’ me to do things… things as got me in bother with my mam. ’Tis what they does, the faerie, tests you out, look, puts you on your mettle. And round about then it started. I knowed things…’
She leaned forward, a smell of mint around here.
‘Things as I shouldn’t know. Things what folks done.’
She was enjoying telling of it. It struck me – although I was wrong in this – that nobody had ever asked her these things before. She went and stirred the stew in the pot with a long wooden spoon and tasted some and came back and beamed at me in the meagre firelight, a brown dribble on her chin.
‘My mam, her throwed me out!’ she said proudly. ‘Her said I knowed too much, look.’
‘Because you told her things? Things the faerie had told to you?’
‘Things I knowed. ’ Joan put her face close to mine, the one eye boring into me until I flinched. ‘Only, I said it were the faerie. You gettin’ me? It was what I learned was best, look. Allus tell ’em ’twas the faerie, then you don’t get no blame.’
‘But you knew…’
‘ Pah. I was young. I tells meself it were the faerie. Made it easier. Only it don’t, Master Lunnonman. In the end it surely don’t. You put the blame on the faerie, the faerie an’t gonner like it… then you’re deep in the shitty.’
It had been bad when they took her to the church court in Taunton. All of it thrown at her. What the faerie could do to you if you fell into their thrall. How they could take away your sight. When she confessed all before God and they let her go, folk feared her. Pointing at her in the street. Piles of turds left outside her door. Dead rats.
And the only ones who came to her now were bad folk, who wanted the faerie to harm other folk, exact revenge for some slight. Once or twice, she was so hard up that she took their money. And then whenever folk died and it wasn’t obvious why, they were pointing at her.
And all this time, the voices were at her, chittering in her head, waking her up in the night… and, just like they’d warned her in the church court, her sight growing dim, and then one eye… the faerie took it.
Joan lifted away the eyepatch. There was only a pit of skwidged and puckered skin.
‘Wouldn’t give me no rest, look. Screechin’ do it! Do it! Sendin’ me out in the woods to the faerie tump, and there on the top… nice sharp stick, and I done it there and then! Aaaagh!’
Joan grasping a bony fist with her other hand, slamming it at the ruined eye.
‘Jesu!’
‘Hadda get away, Mr Lunnonman. Went in the night with all I could pack into an ole shawl.’
So this was what came before the flight to what Joe Monger had called the more openly mystical humours of
