Cowdray was serving the drink himself, no women around, and the usual farmers and wool-merchants were pushed to the periphery by the constables – must have been twenty of them, some I was beginning to recognise.
They were a rabble, thrusting others aside like pigs at a trough when their drinking vessels were empty, and anyone who dared challenge them would wish he’d stayed by his own fireside. I saw one man leaving on hands and knees, bleeding from an ear, after a kicking. Later, a vicious fight broke out between two rival constables from Wells and Taunton. By nine of the clock, the benches were agleam with blood and cider.
It was then that the man with ragged grey hair and cracked teeth, who’d led the assault on Matthew Borrow, sought to calm the situation, raising a king-size flagon and holding forth to his fellows.
Calming me, however, not at all.
‘Longest I ever seen, look, was near to two hours.’
‘Go to!’
‘I’m fuckin’ tellin’ you! Little short, stubby feller, neck like a pig’s. Hardly moved the whole time, just saggin’ like a sack o’ flour.’
‘How’d they know he en’t gone, then?’
‘Ah, well, they’s all thinkin’ he’s gone… goes over to cut ’im down, look, and then, of a sudden, he gives ’em a big grin. Like this… bleaaaaargh! Scares the livin’ shit of ’em, and, oh, he d’ love that, he do. He just grins and grins, and when he don’t stop grinnin, they d’ swing on his legs, three of ’em.’
‘Then what?’
‘Well, he went. Obviously, he went then.’
‘Still grinnin’?’
‘Musc’lar neck, look. They can hold out. Women, though, a poor show, most of ’em…’
‘Time to leave, I think, ’ Dudley murmured.
But some self-wounding impulse in me made me say and have it inflicted upon me. I stood by the door to the stairs, looking down at my boots.
‘Women, it’s too quick,’ some man yelped. ‘No fight in ’em.’
‘Ah now,’ cracked-teeth said. ‘Not always, look. If her’s scrawny, bones like a sparrer, her can hold out a good while. Not the weight there, see, to tighten the ole rope.’
‘John-’
Dudley gripping my shoulder. I marked Benlow, the bone-man, slumped over his mug. He was drunk.
‘They dances real pretty, mind, some of ’em does,’ a small man said wistfully. ‘Legs goin’ this way an’ that.’
‘All you wants, Simeon, is a peek up their fuckin’ skirts!’
‘Surprisin’ what you sees up the skirts of a woman when her’s hangin’,’ Simeon said in the trail of the laughter.
We left then, but I slept not well that night.
XXXVII
The Heresy
Though I’d drunk only small beer, I stumbled down next morning with a head bidding to equal my aching heart. Last night’s dreams had been lit with a dark vision, reminding me of some madman’s paintings I’d seen in the low countries in which tiny men and women roiled and squittered like demonic insects.
Or the maggots Fyche claimed to see on the side of the tor, writhing around my feet and ankles as I walked endlessly amid the dream hills around Glastonbury, lured by the distant chinging of church bells.
Always unreachable; when I reached the first dream-church, all that would remain would be an echo, mixed with the cawking of crows, and the insect people would still be squirming and chittering around my boots, some hacking at them with tiny axes, my feet all pricked and sore, and I’d hear the bells picked up from another far-off tower or steeple and set off in that direction only for the same to happen.
And so till dawn, and the discovery of Sir Peter Carew hefting a flagon of cider in the alehouse, still foul with last night’s sweat and vomit. When I took the opportunity to tell him what I wanted, he said he hoped he’d live to see me crawling up the walls of the Bedlam from the inside.
‘This would be your way of saying no, Sir Peter?’
Carew stroked the back of one roughened hand with the palm of another, fingers curling into a fist, indicating he could think of a more emphatic way. We were never likely to be friends. Maybe he’d glimpsed the writing on the wall which suggested that all those centuries of supremacy by the fighting man were at last yielding to the wiles of the thinking man. But not in his lifetime. Oh no. To Carew, a man without relish for violence was a Bessie.
I’d not walk away this time.
‘You need do nothing,’ I said, ‘except arrange for me to ride to Wells and speak with the accused.’
‘ Jesu, you’re a fucking-’ Carew had turned to the doorway where Dudley now stood, rubbing his eyes. ‘ You tell him. Tell him of the madness of taking on Fyche on behalf of a witch. ’
‘He serves the Queen, Carew,’ Dudley said. ‘Not Fyche. Nor even you.’
‘He’s a fucking conjurer!’
‘But, even if that were true, he’d be the Queen’s fucking conjurer. So if I were you – God forbid – I’d be tempted to go along with his proposal.’
‘Tell Fyche my friend from the Commission on Antiquities deems it his role to represent the woman accused of murdering his colleague’s servant?’
Dudley smiled tiredly.
‘Fix it. Why not?’
Carew stood shaking his head.
‘All right. I’ll help you. I’ll help you see the weakness of your judgement. Show you and the conjurer the truth of what you think to defend.’
In his efforts to sell me a new cloak, Benlow the bone-man had suggested the deepest of winter might be yet to come, but this morning appeared to dispute his forecast. The sun shone stronger than on any day this year, and the Poet’s Narcissus was budding at the roadsides. It was as if the thunderstorm, far from being an expression of God’s ire, had been the herald of an early spring, the gay ghost of some long-dead Mayday dancing in the wasteland of February.
Did I feel Eleanor Borrow with me as we approached her herb garden? Did I sense her presence on this hillside? In truth, I sensed it everywhere, now, as if she were become the spirit of this curious town and all that it had brought to me.
It had taken us no more than ten minutes to walk here from the George. Across the street, to the edge of the town, then over a stile to follow a muddied path on the flank of the long hill which sheltered the town like an arm. Now I stood by a wooden gate, looking up at the strip of land hedged all around, with a fast-flowing stream down one side. Its mainly empty furrows were neat and drawn as if aligned to the tor, the battlements of whose tower crested the highest horizon. The air was shimmering with bright alchemical dew. And I felt…
What I felt was naked. Naked in my emotions. Close to breaking down and had to turn away from Carew and Dudley. Standing there facing the lower skyline, where the sun lit up the channels of water and pale pools all the way to the sea, until I found composure.
‘What does she grow here?’ Dudley asked.
‘Her mother had two hundred kinds of herbs,’ I mumbled, and Carew’s head swivelled.
‘Who told you that?’
‘I… forget. Could’ve been Fyche.’
‘There aren’t two hundred kinds of herbs in the world,’ Carew said.
‘There are far more than that.’
And they’d grow well here… a well-sheltered place, in its way, with good soil and an abundance of water. It moved me to think of what I’d read of the herb garden of the visionary Hildegard of Bingen, a woman well ahead of her time in the relating of science to creation and the use of plants to treat the melancholic condition.
‘You really want to know what she grew here?’ Carew wore a slanting smile. ‘I’ll show you what she fucking grew. Stay there. ’
He moved off across the land, but I ignored him, walking up the slow slope. Sensing her walking beside me, the swish of her dress in the wet grass, following the winter-brown hedge toward the top of the field, where I’d seen a wooden cross.