Monger looked pained.
‘You don’t understand, do you? The poison’s spreading as we speak. A man precisely disbowelled and laid out like a decorated altar? The older townsfolk will already be quaking behind their doors. Who’ll be next? And who’ll be accused? So Fyche puts out a name… and those will emerge who’ll state before a judge that when they couldn’t afford to pay Nel’s doctor’s bill, their cattle died. I tell you in sorrow… it doesn’t take much.’
‘She’s a doctor.’
‘She’s a doctor who’s become too much associated with the worship-pers of the stars and the old stones.’
I shut my eyes, remembering how swiftly all the apocryphal tales had arisen of Anne Boleyn’s dark ways after her husband had first denounced her as a witch.
‘What you must needs understand, Dr John, is that these people – the seekers – there’s still only a few of them compared with the old families of Glastonbury. The old families who hold tight to a Godly fear of the power of this place… who’ll turn their backs upon the tor at certain seasons. Who are afraid of what meddlers like poor mad old Joan might cause, through their meddling, to happen.’
‘Another earthquake?’
‘You may laugh, in your learned, London way…’
‘If you think I laugh at such things-’
‘Mercy.’ Holding up his hands. ‘Yes, I know, of course, where your interests lie. What I’m trying to explain is that most folk here are not men of science and inquiry, all they want is a quiet life and bread on the board. They don’t meddle. For all the talk of treasure, you won’t find hill-diggers on the tor, for ’tis said that when a man once took a hammer to the tower, thinking to obtain stone, the heavens were suddenly aflame with lightning. Out of a cloudless sky. One bolt strikes the hammer, man falls down dead.’
‘This is fact, or legend?’
‘In Glaston… no division. They say that if you put your hands on a certain buttress on a corner of the tower you’ll feel the shock of the thunderbolt.’
‘There’ll be an explanation.’ Recalling my own fall on the tor. ‘Through science. If I had the time here-’
‘Then you, too, would very swiftly fall foul of the old families. They don’t welcome pokers into the unknowable. What you call science.’
‘I know.’
‘Nel was tempted onto a path which is… unstable.’
‘Like her mother?’
Monger smiled his unhappy, priestly smile.
‘Cate Borrow dug her own pit. Through kindness, perhaps, but she dug it none the less.’
It was growing dark. From behind the oaken panels, Cowdray and his maids could be heard serving cider to the farmers and maybe a constable or two. But the room was reserved for overnight guests, and we were yet alone.
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me about her.’
XXIV
Fungus Dust
She was a gardener.
Two acres of land reclaimed from the sea, down towards Wells – this was where she was most at peace, passing the lengthening days among its fragrances, harvesting herbs to eat: carrots and onions and leeks, cabbages and beans, to be sold at Glastonbury market.
And also herbs for healing. Behind her husband’s surgery, near the Church of St Benignus, she had a little workroom where they were hung and dried and ground into powder. A quiet woman, who preferred her husband to take the credit for balms and ointments, the cure of infected wounds and upset guts.
‘I knew her first more than a score of years ago,’ Monger said, ‘when I was at the abbey. This was when she 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.