‘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…
And what, oh my God, was to be be glimpsed behind those lustrous green eyes?
What followed had a certain sense of the Mass, in which I still strongly, if quietly, believe, for it surely is an ancient, alchemical formula for the highest transformation.
She handed me the goblet.
‘This is from the Blood Well. And this… is for you to hold.’
A stone. A pale brown pebble, as if from a riverbed, near the size of a hen’s egg. It felt cool in my hand.
‘What is it?’
‘I found it inside the tower on the tor.’ With the knife, she was cutting the apple in half. ‘It will ground you.’
I nodded, kept the stone in my hand as I raised the goblet to my lips.
She said, ‘Wait…’
When I put the vessel down, some of the fluid was spilled across the boardtop.
‘You’re afraid,’ she said. ‘Your hand’s trembling.’
‘It’s the cold.’
‘’Tis not good to do this when you’re afraid.’ She took my hand; I shuddered at the warmth and energy in her fingers. ‘John… I think… I feel that you don’t need to do this. You, of all people, must know that there are other ways. Think about it.’
‘Am I not the man who thinks too much?’
She said, ‘What have you not told me?’
I wanted so much to turn over my hand to grip hers, but her face was so solemn. Instead, I drew a hard, slow breath, bad memories hauled in on a long, frayed rope.
‘I have dreams,’ I whispered. ‘Recurring dreams.’
Didn’t go on. Didn’t tell her about the dreams of fire, my arms and legs as blackened twigs. I felt apart from myself now, but maybe not in the way she’d spoken of. Recalling how, watching the parade of townsfolk before the Baptist’s Church the other day, I’d imagined them in a play, their bodies feigning ordinary life, while their real lives were happening on some other level. Now I felt I was to become part of that play. Was given the means to enter that other reality.
‘Listen…’ She leaned forward. ‘There are other ways. We’ll work together on the other ways.’
She reached out for the goblet, but I snatched it up and turned away and drank down the liquid, all of it.
The thunder was dying, now, but maybe the storm had only just begun.
XXX
Like to the Sun
I went to sit on the edge of the bed, and we talked. Or she did. I only sat and listened to the soft, sad music of her voice as she spoke of her father and how, after her mother’s execution, he’d thrown himself into his work, riding out each night to care for the sick, spending no more waking minutes than he needed in the bed where his wife would lie no more.
The tragedy of it was so extreme and there was such physical pain in my heart that I began to weep into my hands.
‘Damn,’ Nel Borrow murmured. ‘What do you do to lose the cares of the day, Dr John?’
‘Cares?’ Wiped my eyes on my sleeve, dragging out a smile. ‘There are no cares if I’m working. Did your mother have cares when she was tending her garden?’
‘She had -’ a wistful smile – ‘two hundred kinds of herbs. They took a lot of care. If life were only work and we were allowed to do it unmolested…’