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.’
I sat and waited for Monger to tell me what had happened in the end, but he became reticent, saying only that Joan did not back away, with the result that they went, the three of them, on All Hallows Eve, to the tor.
To my own mind, having myself been aware of the strange air upon the tor, Joan Tyrre was either very brave, very mad or very sure of the nearness of another sphere of existence. And of its charity towards her.
‘All I know,’ Monger said, ‘is that Joan claimed that from the following morning her sight – in her best eye at least – had begun to improve by degrees.’ He shrugged. ‘But we have only her word for that.’
‘You didn’t talk to the Borrows about it?’
‘The Borrows spoke of it to no-one, until much later. Matthew, needless to say, remains convinced that whatever Joan had seen was within her own head. The worst of it, you see, John… the very worst of it is not what they saw, but that they were seen. The three of them. Ascending the tor, on the night when the dead are abroad.’
‘Who saw them?’
‘A tenant farmer, Dick Moulder, looking for some runaway ewes, stated that he watched them ascending the tor with lighted candles in the dusk and later saw them clustered near to the church ruins. Dancing and chanting to the moon, he said.’
I’d caught his emphasis. ‘You think he didn’t see them at all?’
‘I think someone saw them, or heard of it. But I know Moulder as a Bible man who wouldn’t go within a mile of the tor after dark. The truth, more likely, is that they were seen from the Meadwell land. But, this being too close to Fyche, Moulder was ordered – or paid – to say he’d seen them. Put it this way: this came some weeks later, when more evidence was being sought, to support a… a graver charge.’
And so it emerged. The whole bitter tragedy of it.
Whether Joan Tyrre had been loose-tongued in the town about Cate’s potion improving her eyes through some inner vision, Monger didn’t know. All he knew for certain was that, within the week, a travelling dealer had called on Dr Borrow offering him a substantial sum of money for a quantity of the dust of vision which could offer glimpses of heaven. He’d sent the dealer away but it seemed the man returned when Matthew was with a patient and Cate was out in her herb garden. Two days later, the potion would sold in the market in Somerton, a town some miles away.
Which made no sense to me, for if the thief knew not which was the magic potion…
‘He took everything he could cram into his bag and sold it all – people’ll buy anything if it’s cheap enough and said to be from abroad. And if just one person achieved a vision of heaven, as a result, that would be sufficient to set up a clamour.’
The clamour that resulted, however, was not the kind the thief expected.
‘As Cate herself told me more than once, what was most important was the quantity in which the potion – the fungus dust and whatever was mixed with it – was administered. The quantity is-’ Monger held a forefinger and thumb barely apart ‘-very, very small.’
According to Monger, a small flask of the potion had been bought by the sixteen-year-old son of a prominent landowner. The boy had gone out that night, on the roister with some of his fellows. Never came back.
‘His companions had left him, in fear at his behaviour,’ Monger said. ‘They spoke of the dreadful convulsions of his body… in a kind of dance. He was screaming that devils were pinching him and his arms and legs were afire.’
I must’ve shuddered; Monger glanced at me.
‘They found his body about a week later, entangled in branches under the river bridge. Thrown himself in the river to put out the fire in his limbs.’
Monger said the dealer had fled from Somerton but was caught in the hue and cry. In return, Monger guessed, for his life, he confessed to the theft of herbs mixed by Cate Borrow.
‘And was this established to be caused by swallowing some of the… the dust of vision?’
Thinking that I’d heard of something similar in France. ‘Although no-one else died in this way, the boy was the first of several to complain of burning limbs, visions of angels and monsters made manifest under unearthly skies. All had been sold quantities of Cate Borrow’s potion. And then, as she was awaiting trial, word came in of the deaths of infants.’