The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  His eyes had connected with mine and in them, at this moment, I thought I could see the flicker of an unexpected delight.

  And then it had vanished.

  ‘Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul acquire divinity?’

  I held the gaze. Surmising by now that he had been briefed to look for any theological indications of a Protestant allegiance. That surely was what it had all been about. Mary’s people were looking for a plot, with Elizabeth at its centre.

  ‘By prayer,’ I said. ‘And suffering. And perchance… through learning.’

  ‘And what learning would you suggest?’

  ‘The Bible…’ I could see that he wanted more and I’d taken a chance. ‘And the sacred knowledge of the Jews.’

  He’d been unable, then, to conceal his interest, drawing in a sharp breath.

  ‘And how could one become privy to such secrets?’

  In the months that followed, many a long candle had been melted into a pool of wax over this question. I’d expected a butcher and found a man with a genuine sense of inquiry into the condition of the human soul.

  Saved from the stake by Bonner’s interest in the hidden, and an unexpected friendship had developed. Even made me his chaplain, for a time, and many nights had been spent in discussion of alchemy and the Cabala.

  I stood and walked over to the chest and picked up the looking glass. Saw a pale man with mid-length dark brown hair and, in the eyes, what some had seen as kindness, others as sorrow and I, now, as… lost.

  ‘Tell me, Ned… as a man who hears things…’

  ‘I’m growing increasingly and wilfully deaf, John.’

  ‘Have you become aware of any rumours of sorcery… against the Queen?’

  ‘What, like yours against Mary?’

  Bonner’s laughter was like collapsing masonry.

  ‘In the shape of a wax effigy in a coffin. Done with some attention to detail. Do you know of anyone, or any group, which might seek to…?’

  ‘What are you getting at, sorcery or popery? The French don’t fear sorcery as we do. If they think it’ll get Bess out and Mary Stuart in, they’ll use it with abandon.’

  ‘Did I mention the French?’

  ‘It’s always the fucking French. They hate her with a passion. And with Scotch Mary wed to the boy king… Look, talk to a Frenchman, he’ll tell you the English Queen’s a witch. Like mother like daughter. Spawn of Satan. England, under Elizabeth, is therefore a cesspit of sorcery.’

  ‘Who believes that?’

  ‘You mean you don’t?’ Bonner half rose. ‘You’re telling me there hasn’t been an unimaginable increase in superstition – charms, talismans, fortune-telling, what-have-you, since we stopped burning people? Since little Bess decided to live and let live?’

  ‘Ned, that’s simply-’

  ‘No less than the unwaxed truth! Cannot believe a man of your peculiar talents goes around with his eyes shut. It’s everywhere, John. That’s not, of course, to say that the common folk in England don’t live in constant fear of it… but that’s part of the spell. And therefore anything which links the Queen into that world – little effigies, what you like – ain’t good. And that’s why she shouldn’t be meddling with the faerie myths of Arthur. You go and tell her that.’

  ‘I’m not being given the chance.’

  ‘Of course -’ Bonner beamed – ‘she shouldn’t be meddling with the likes of you, either. ’

  ‘Um…’ I’d had enough. ‘Doesn’t the French court have its own, um, interpreter of the hidden?’

  ‘Who? Nostradamus? Good Catholic, and a prophet in the Old Testament tradition. The French are in morbid thrall to his every word – and prophets in general, since their last king’s untimely death was forecast in detail.’

  I’d never met Nostradamus, a physician by trade, whose sudden, spectacular fame as a prophet seemed largely founded upon his adoption by the French court and the pretentious use of poetry in his predictions. However, although his use of astrology was perfunctory and inaccurate, I’d felt obliged to keep notes on his career and had, in my library, several of his almanacs and a few actual manuscripts I’d bought quite cheaply in Louvain, where the man had been regarded with an academic disdain.

  Bonner leaned back. He looked happy.

  ‘You know, John… I intend to enjoy prison. Time and a place to attone, through prayer, for all that I’ve done which has offended God. Prayer and silence. And self-denial.’

  ‘Self-denial?’ I lifted the jug from the board and sniffed. I was not an expert on fine wines.

  ‘Word of advice,’ Bonner said. ‘Let the bones of Arthur lie. They’ve ever been trouble.’

  ‘I don’t truly think I have a choice.’

  ‘As for Glastonbury, they say that, since the abbey went down, it’s like to the Bedlam… only without the walls.’

  The mirror rattling on the chest as Bishop Bonner’s merriment came crackling back, a firing of dry kindling.

  IX

  Called into Service

  By the end of that day, another warning beacon had been lit. One which was to worry me no small amount.

  Mid-afternoon, I’d gone again to Jack Simm, asking if he and Goodwife Faldo might keep an eye on my mother while I was away. Once again, with a finger to his lips and a thumb gestured towards his wife in the house, he led me from his door. Out to the edge of the woodland, tinted pale green now with the first hesitant catkins.

  ‘How long you gonna be away, Dr J?’

  ‘Three weeks? Four? Jack, are we losing our reason? My mother says people around the village give us strange looks, you tell me there are suspicions of necromancy. Am I-?’

  ‘Nah, you’re just too clever for your own good. We all suffer from the times we live in. Seen too much conspiracy.’

  ‘There are even those who’d profit from my notoriety,’ I said. Telling him of the pamphlet-seller with his ‘Prophecies of Dr Dee’. ‘You heard of this?’

  ‘Nah, but it’s bound to happen. There’s ever an appetite for prediction, even if it’s unlawful now. Even astrology’s unlawful, if it’s used to make predictions about the Queen, ain’t that right?’

  ‘When it may become treason, yes.’

  ‘Unless it’s you, of course.’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘Fine line, Dr John.’

  ‘I know it.’

  I leaned against an oak tree’s rugged bole. The pamphleteer in his peacock hat already merging in my mind with an image of George Ferrers, the Lord of Misrule, as some insane jester with a jingly horned hat and a stick with a dangling pine-cone. When I told Jack Simm there were people in that crowd who’d have bound me to a stake without a second thought, he seemed not at all surprised.

  ‘Look – religion’s in disarray. For many ordinary folk the only certainty’s bleedin’ Satan. You got conjurers everywhere, and they operates a secret trade.’

  ‘But -’ was Bonner right about this? – ‘not so secret as it was?’

  Jack bent and picked up a blackened acorn.

  ‘I let my shop go, when they put it round I was dispensing love potions. Old men’d come in saying they’d heard as how the powdered horn of a ram could harden their cocks. “Then why’n’t you go and bleedin’ powder one?” I’d say, and they’d look at their boots and mumble about how it needed somefing else… You see? That’s the fine line I wasn’t gonna cross.’

  He looked around but, apart from rooks and ravens, we were well alone. Came and stood before me in a sodden heap of last year’s leaves.

  ‘When you was accused of attempting to murder Queen Mary by dark arts, that was horseshit. But it can be done, can’t it?’

  ‘Murder by magic? There’s precedent.’

  I walked a tight circle around a birch sapling, thinking of Henry, Lord Neville, the son of the Earl of Westmorland, who, twelve or so years earlier, had been accused of conspiring to murder his wife and his father by magical means, to obtain his inheritance and pay his gambling debts. Having
, it was said, hired an experienced sorcerer, a man well qualified in magic and medicine. And I was thinking, also, of the women who, it was said, could lay down a death-spell, inscribed in blood and sped on its way by days of dark meditation and self-denial – the black fast.

  ‘I think…’ I hesitated. ‘I believe the mind is a powerful tool which can unlock doors into the unknown. And thus awaken energies which can be directed, to cause both benefit and… and harm. But if you ask me can I do these things…?’

  Turning away, feeling, for all my years of study, my knowledge and my practical inventions, worthless and without substance.

  ‘Master.’

  I spun round. She was standing on the edge of the path, looking like some woodland sprite.

  ‘Catherine…’ She was wrapped in one of my mother’s shawls. ‘You’re back?’

  ‘My ma’s has been to talk to your… to Mistress Dee. All’s quite well now, Doctor.’

  Her face was dark, like a bruised apple. I wondered if there’d been a rift with her puritan father over this.

  ‘Please, the mistress says can you come home at once. You’ve a visitor.’

  ‘Who?’

  Becoming tense.

  ‘Someone from court.’ Catherine Meadows gave Jack a tentative smile. ‘Master Simm.’

  ‘There you go,’ Jack whispered to me, as she turned away onto the path. ‘You can leave on your mission with no anxiety.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Jack.’

  No anxiety. Of course not.

  Five horses were tethered in our yard, and I saw four armed men standing by the gate, and thought at once of the day my rooms had been searched and sealed and…

  Take him.

  Almost turning and walking away then, to buy time, before I recognised two of the men from the Queen’s company, and one gave me a respectful salute. Me nodding and breathing again.

  Only the four of them, so it could not be someone of particular eminence. Other than the Queen herself, there are few people at court I feel safe to trust.

  Hurrying inside, past the fire in the hall, I found them in the parlour overlooking the river: two women of similar age, seated by the window, sharing a platter of sweetmeats.

  ‘Cousin?’

  ‘Good afternoon, Dr Dee,’ Blanche Parry said. ‘I am come to collect the books.’

  Remaining seated. Her dark clothing almost nun-like.

  ‘But I thought… that I was to bring them. The books?’

  ‘More discreet, it is, for me to take them from you.’

  A small voice, yet oddly pitched, so that it carried like pipes.

  I call her cousin, yet am not sure precisely how we’re related.

  ‘You’ve ridden here from Richmond… just for the books?’

  ‘It were best,’ Blanche said, ‘that you were not seen too often at court.’

  ‘The Queen thinks that?’

  ‘It’s best.’

  I felt a chill. Looked into her small, shrewd eyes, fine lines around them. It was my tad who, with an uncommon prescience, had advised me years ago that our kinship with Mistress Blanche would one day prove an asset, and it was true that the Queen’s most senior gentlewoman had known Elizabeth since she was a babe. Had access, more than anyone, to the innermost sanctum.

  I said. ‘ You think I should keep a distance.’

  My mother frowned at such disrespect, but Blanche’s expression remained constant. Constant was Blanche’s watchword.

  ‘I merely suggest,’ she said, ‘that it were better for the Queen if your dealings were to remain discreet. You tend to question things too much, Dr Dee.’

  ‘One of my failings.’

  ‘You must excuse my son, Mistress Blanche,’ my mother said quickly. ‘I sometimes think that John is only ever half in this world and half in some dark place of his own complicated imaginings. Not at all healthy, to my thinking.’

  I pulled up a stool, my complicated imaginings telling me that this visit was about more than books.

  ‘As you, more than anyone, would be aware, Mistress Blanche,’ I said, ‘the Queen’s a most intelligent woman, who’s been reading manuscripts in Greek since she could barely-’

  ‘And I thought you an intelligent man, Dr Dee,’ Blanche snapped, ‘who would realise that it were best that the Queen should not be seen to be inquiring too deeply into certain areas of learning.’

  I fell silent. My mother arose.

  ‘Please excuse me, Mistress Blanche. I shall prepare a warm drink before your journey back to Richmond. Also for your men.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Blanche looking up, a distant smile like a mist upon her face. ‘It has been good to see you again, Jane.’

  My mother nodding and slipping away. Me sensing a prearrangement here, as Mistress Blanche gestured me to my mother’s chair next to the river window.

  ‘I’m informed, Dr Dee, that you’re to perform a service for Sir William Cecil.’

  ‘So it would appear.’

  ‘He’s a good man, for whom the Queen’s interests are always central.’

  ‘Indeed. His constant concern for the Queen is like to an older brother’s.’

  ‘And with you to Somersetshire… also goes Lord Dudley?’

  ‘A man whose support for the Queen -’ I watched her eyes – ‘is equally beyond question.’

  ‘But whose reputation is, if anything, even worse than yours,’ my cousin said. ‘If for different reasons.’

  ‘You don’t dice your words, do you, Mistress Blanche?’

  I pushed my chair back towards the window. A tired sun hung over the river in a cradle of stringy cloud. Obviously, Dudley’s relations with Elizabeth, on whatever level, would be a source of anxiety to Blanche, even though it was said she had oft-times passed intimate letters from one to the other.

  However, as the women with whom Dudley had been intimate must by now outnumber the wherries on the Thames, his reputation was no more the reason Blanche Parry was here than to collect the books on Arthur.

  One thing you should know about men and women of the border – any border – is that they ever use the small and narrow roads, and it can take an endless time before their reasons are manifest. Something embedded in their nature, relating to a need for caution with strangers. Along the border of England and Wales, even quite close relatives can be strangers through many generations, and I was resigned to a lengthy and, for the most part, aimless preamble.

  ‘Even apart from his adventures with women,’ Blanche Parry said, ‘Dudley is deemed by some to be ungodly.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For his study of the stars and similar interests. And… for his choice of friends.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘You mean me. Dear God, Blanche… are we not supposed to live now in enlightened times? My studies follow on directly from the work of Pythagoras and Plato, Hermes Trismegistus… Distinguished scholars, all of them.’

  ‘And heathens.’

  ‘Oh, for-’

  ‘Wait.’ Blanche holding up a palm, small fingers spread wide. ‘Are there not Catholics who say that the Protestant Church is itself a form of heathenism?’

  ‘Well, yes, there are, but that’s only to be-’

  ‘The Queen… the Queen, as you know, she seeks, if not a middle road, then at least a calmer situation, where each man may worship in his own way so long as he keeps the details of it betwixt himself and God. And within reason.’

  Grey cloud was turning the Thames into the Styx, and I felt my patience ebb.

  ‘Mistress Blanche, you’re evidently not just here to sample my mother’s famous pastries. What is it you wish to say to me that Cecil hasn’t already said?’

  ‘I…’ My cousin looking, for the first time, uncertain. ‘… I’m here to ask that when you report from the West Country to Sir William Cecil, you’ll bear in mind the Queen’s situation – and our kinship – and report also to me.’

  This I had not expected. I was wondering how to proceed without the use of the wo
rd why? when she came quickly back at me, all the Welshness in her pouring through now apace, words tumbling like mountain water over bedrocks.

  ‘…because Sir William, as you well know, is a pragmatist who will not permit whatever faith he has to interfere with his political judgement. You’re aware of that, we all are, but the Queen, she is ever troubled over what may be right or wrong in the eyes of God and feels a weight of responsibility, not only to her father’s legacy and what he would wish of her, but to her subjects, all of them, whom she loves, every man and woman, like her children.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was indeed a complexity of responsibilities here, to which no previous monarch would have felt the need to respond. Yes, we were moving, if more slowly than I would have wished, towards a new enlightenment, and yes the Queen was determined to be an essential part of that process, and yet…

  ‘Mistress Blanche.’ It was time to meet this good woman halfway. ‘Let me try to identify your dilemma. The question of the Arthurian succession is potentially a more complicated issue now than it was in the days of the Queen’s grandfather-’

  ‘When there was but one Church,’ she said.

  ‘The roots of the Arthurian history or legends go beyond all that. May well be pre-Christian. Is this what you’re approaching?’

  ‘Your family and mine,’ she said, ‘have deep roots in Wales, where the old bards sang of Arthur and his deeds in versions of the story which would indeed shock readers of Malory. Furthermore, in the days of the first Henry Tudor, the entrails of religious belief were not laid out and pulled apart for all to interpret, in the way that they are today.’

  None of which would matter much to Cecil, unless it should threaten to cause a collapse in the exchequer. This, evidently, was something private. Something unspoken of outside the Queen’s immediate chambers. I waited. We were, it seemed, getting there.

  ‘Rumours reach us from abroad,’ Blanche said.

  ‘As ever.’

  ‘The Queen has been spending much time with Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the envoy to Paris.’

  ‘In relation to what?’