The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘Hands,’ he said. ‘Show me your hands.’

  ‘I…’ Looked into his grizzled face. ‘What?’

  ‘Hands. Both of them.’

  Two of his constables had appeared either side of him. I held out my hands, humiliated, while he examined them at leisure under a lantern.

  ‘Thank you. A necessary formality.’

  I could only nod.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ Fyche said, ‘the last time I was summoned here it was a cockerel on a makeshift altar of fallen stones. The element of sacrilege noted… but not pursued.’

  ‘A blood sacrifice?’

  ‘Wasn’t the remains of a chicken supper, Dr John.’

  ‘Who are the people who commit such crimes against God?’

  ‘The same as those who dig up graves and remove bones.’

  Given our surroundings I thought he must mean Arthur and couldn’t make the link. But I was wrong.

  ‘No more than a week ago,’ Fyche said, ‘the grave of a man laid to rest some years ago was dug up from the graveyard of St Benignus across the street. Necromancy, Dr John. I told you, there’s filth in this town. Ask the Borrow woman.’

  ‘She’s a doctor… ’

  ‘You’re naive, Dr John. And I’ll give you another thought. Was this poor man, perchance, asking questions, on your behalf, about what treasures might be acquired by the Crown? Thus awakening bitter memories of another list gathered more than twenty years ago?’

  ‘Leland?’

  ‘Was this man’s visit to the abbey tonight made for the same reason as your own? To look for relics? Had you sent him?

  ‘No, I… I don’t know why he was here.’

  ‘It’s an odd coincidence, is it not?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Well,’ Fyche said. ‘I have no choice but to send a messenger to Sir Peter Carew in Exeter. With the abbey in his charge, he’d thank neither of us for concealing from him a killing of this nature. And, ah… was he not your travelling companion?’

  I nodded, hardly relishing the thought of Carew rampaging through the town like some beached pirate.

  ‘He’ll be here within a day or so,’ Fyche said. ‘Even less likely than I to allow the scum who did this to remain free for long.’

  I looked for Cowdray’s reaction to this, but he’d wandered away. I wondered how extreme had been Fyche’s latent conversion to the reformed church. There was ever a certain kind of man who would find personal fulfilment, even a bloody pleasure, in the persecution of a particular species, be it Catholics or Protestants, Jews or Saracens. They said Bonner was one such, but Bonner had never changed sides, even to stay out of prison.

  ‘I’ll have more constables brought in from Wells,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll be obliged to set to and take this town apart. The innocent will be inconvenienced, doubtless. But the murder of a servant of the Queen – no matter how menial – is no occasion for a soft tread.’

  An excuse to flatten the maggots. The air was full of the stench of tallow, blood and shit. I swallowed my nausea.

  Fyche took a long, slow inbreath against the stink and turned to bend over the corpse, and I…

  What I saw next… you must understand that I was tired. I’d had no sleep this night and insufficient the night before. My head ached and my vision was blurred and imagination, left to its own devices, can, as I may have said, cause havoc in the mind, and who was to say what were visions and what were signs of an oncoming madness?

  The candle wedged into Martin Lythgoe’s mouth had formed itself into a cone of yellow wax spread beyond his lips across his chin and cheeks. My first impression – of a piss-sniffer’s mask – was swiftly replaced as I took in blackened wick standing erect from the steep, yellow cone, slicked with rivulets of melted fat.

  ‘John… what the hell…’

  No!

  ‘…goes on?’

  I twisted around, to find Robert Dudley, half dressed, steadying himself against a collapsed wall, his face sweat-oiled and eyes dark smudges. I wanted to scream at him to get back, but could not speak, for inside my head was bobbing the image of the melted candle which, I swear, had resembled nothing so much as a grotesque waxen likeness of the Glastonbury Tor.

  And that… that was when I became aware – one of the strangest, most creepingly invasive feelings of my life thus far – that this place, in some unholy way, was beginning to live inside me.

  PART THREE

  Although the semicircle of the Moon is placed above the circle of the Sun and would appear to be superior, nevertheless we know that the Sun is ruler and King. We see that the Moon in her shape and her proximity rivals the Sun with her grandeur, which is apparent to ordinary men, yet the face, or a semi-sphere of the Moon, always reflects the light of the Sun. It desires so much to be impregnated with solar rays and to be transformed into Sun that at times it disappears completely from the skies and some days after reappears, and we have represented her by the figure of the Horns.

  John Dee,

  Monas Hieroglyphica.

  XX

  Our Sister

  ‘Wife,’ Dudley said. ‘Seven children.’

  The window glass was full of pinky light, the unwintry dawn creaming the sky like some sickly syllabub.

  ‘Five boys,’ Dudley said. ‘Two girls.’

  This was a side of him I’d rarely seen. He sat, shivering in the cold and his anguish, on the side of his bed, still too weak to be out of it.

  ‘My father’s stable boy when I was young. Would, I swear, have died for my father – gone to the block in his stead. Loyalty, John. An immovable loyalty.’ He sucked in a hissing breath which must have pained his swollen throat. ‘The hell with Carew, if I find these bastards first, I’ll cut them down where they stand, piece by fucking-’

  Then began to weep, knowing that, in truth, he couldn’t cut down a bed of reeds. His sword lay on the floorboards, half unsheathed as if he’d not the strength to draw it.

  I stood up at the window, looking down into the high street, where the goodwives huddled watching men dismounting by the abbey gates: Fyche’s constables from Wells. They’d put Martin’s body, his insides on his lap, in an outbuilding at the abbey for Carew to inspect as soon as he arrived from Exeter.

  I turned back to the pink-washed chamber.

  Confession.

  ‘I sent him away,’ I said. ‘Yesterday. He’d followed me.’

  ‘Aye. Like a good hound.’

  Dudley was sobbing, his shoulders aquake, and I sensed the murder of Martin Lythgoe all bound up, in the dark of his sickness, with the execution of his father and all the other dread memories of unjust killings he’d known in his score and six years.

  At last, he looked up at me, without shame, through his tears.

  ‘With Lythgoe, there always had to be someone to watch over. After my father was gone, it was me. With me sick in bed, the poor bugger was looking out for you.’

  ‘And I sent him away.’

  Fingernails piercing my palms.

  ‘Chrissake, John, how could you have known?’

  Well, I couldn’t, but it didn’t matter. It was the circumstance. The fact that I’d dispatched this man to the most sickening and degrading of deaths because…

  …because of some half-formed fascination with Eleanor Borrow. And you know the worst of it? The worst of it was that Dudley, being Dudley, would have understood.

  ‘Where did you send him, John?’

  ‘Back here. To… make sure you were drinking enough water.’

  I know. I know. But if I’d told him about bidding Martin Lythgoe to find the farrier, he’d go dragging himself through the streets like a leper until he’d located the man himself.

  ‘I don’t remember.’ Squeezing his head. ‘Don’t remember him coming back. It was the last time I saw him and I don’t remember.’

  ‘You’d be sleeping. As you should be now.’

  ‘Can’t even…’ Head sinking into his hands. ‘Can’t even think. What…
I mean, for God’s sake, what was Lythgoe doing there in the middle of the night? In the abbey?’

  ‘May not have happened in the middle of the night. He may have lain there some hours.’

  How long for a candle to burn out? How long had the candle been? Or had someone else come along afterwards and stuffed it in his mouth? But only a madman would do that… and not possible, anyway, if the rigor had set in, jaws and teeth clenched tight.

  ‘And what were you doing there, John? What in God’s name took you to the abbey?’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘You went out there alone… because you couldn’t sleep?’

  As if he hadn’t done the same the previous night. Yet I was growing tired of lies and half-truths. I’d tell him, spell it out, the whole folly of it.

  ‘The abbot,’ I said. ‘They say the abbot doesn’t rest.’

  ‘Who says that?’

  ‘Cowdray. And if such a thing was there to be seen… I wanted to see it.’

  Dudley stared at me. Reluctantly, I met his gaze.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, suddenly, everyone sees them. The Queen, you… everyone but me. There. A sorrowful admission from a half-man.’

  From the street came the merry honk of a hunting horn, then a billowing of laughter. The blood was up, the chase was on.

  ‘Let me get this fully clear,’ Dudley said. ‘You went into the ruins intending to conjure the spirit of the last abbot?’

  ‘No! I don’t conjure. Don’t do that. I just wanted…’

  Courage dying on me. Dudley slid back on to his pillow, staring up at the ceiling beams.

  ‘Do you know something? I think if I were a ghost, the very last man on earth I’d want to appear before would be John Dee. Walking all around me, peering and prodding and unrolling his measuring device and exhausting me with his endless questions about the condition of the afterlife and have I seen God yet and what does-’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Or perchance you thought the spirit might conveniently point you in the direction of the bones of Arthur?’

  Too close. I sat down on the stool under the window, said that I could only wish I’d gone there earlier, when Martin Lythgoe was yet alive.

  ‘What? So they could slay you, too? Where would that leave us?’

  ‘I might -’ wiped a hand across my unshaved jaw – ‘might’ve been able to-’

  ‘Display your mastery of the fighting arts? Throw a couple of heavy books at them?’

  I said nothing. Dudley weakly raised his hands.

  ‘Forgive me, John, who am I to talk, weak as an infant born before time? God help me if I didn’t awake this morn with the sure knowledge that this whole adventure was no more than a scheme of Cecil’s to keep me out of Bess’s bedchamber long enough for him to talk sense into her.’

  ‘He’s alarmed by the gossip from France,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘And who are the fucking French to lecture us on morals?’ Dudley’s head rolled back. ‘What’s this JP fellow say?’

  ‘Talks of devil-worship. But then, he’s a man who sees witchcraft and sorcery everywhere. He’s also thinking there are those with bitter memories of Leland’s list and its consequences for Glastonbury. Lives and livings brought to ruin by the destruction of the abbey. Maybe fears of another crackdown.’

  ‘And disembowel a man for that?’

  ‘I don’t-’

  ‘And are we next? Should we get out while we can? Am I the kind of man who’d run from some small-town malcontent with a butcher’s knife?’

  He fell back, coughing like a sheep. I went to the bedside. ‘Things have changed. Death changes everything. Maybe it’s time for you to remember who you are. You only need lift a finger, send out a letter, and you’ll have two hundred men here by-’

  ‘No. We finish this.’

  ‘God damn it, Robbie, you’re Lord Dudley, the heir to-’

  ‘A pile of hatred. All England hates me for an arrogant cock.’ He turned his face to me, all smirched with dirt and sweat. ‘They should see me now, eh, John?’

  I recalled him on the river, his talk of humility, of fasting for three days, vigils until dawn, riding out silently and stopping at each church to pray. I’d thought this jesting – only now remembering at how many churches we had stopped on the way here, how often he’d wandered off alone.

  That a man who brings to his Queen such an irrefutable symbol of her royal heritage… something which bestows upon her monarchy’s most mystical aura. That man… he may expect his reward.

  A quest for some manner of redemption? Could not think on this. Not now.

  ‘You’re a sick man,’ I said. ‘Get some sleep.’

  ‘It’s day.’

  He ripped a hand irritably across his forehead, as if wiping off the dust of some battle he was being denied. I stood up.

  ‘Even you can’t fight sickness. Let it run its course. I’ll pull the curtains.’

  ‘Leave them.’

  I was at the door when he called me back.

  ‘John.’ He rolled onto his side to face me. ‘Martin’s body…’

  ‘Yes, I… Should I find a carpenter to make a coffin? Will we take him back to London?’

  Dudley’s eyes had closed. ‘His heart,’ he said. ‘We’ll take his heart home.’

  At the foot of the stairs, I found Cowdray with a young man of about eighteen years who, he said, had ridden from Bristol, with a letter.

  ‘From London, sir,’ the young man said.

  I recognised the seal at once, told Cowdray to give him a good breakfast and ale and charge it to Master Roberts.

  ‘I’ve also found Joe Monger for you,’ Cowdray said.

  ‘Forgive me… who?’

  ‘The farrier. You asked me last night?’

  Last night: another age. ‘He’s out back now, Dr John. Summoned to trim the hooves of my old ass.’

  ‘Thank you. I should pay for that, too, then. Please… add it to our bill.’ I nodded to the messenger. ‘Thank you, also.’

  ‘No letter for return, Master?’

  ‘It’s possible. Go and eat. Take your time.’

  My head was aching. Found my way through the ale-smelling passage to the rear door, a small cobwebbed window above it. Leaned my back against the door and broke the seal on the letter.

  Blanche Parry. She must’ve written this not long after we’d left London, to get it here so soon. I unfolded the paper, held it up to the glass.

  Odd. Written not with Blanche’s customary distant formality. Had an immediacy not of her usual character, and it addressed me in a familiar way I’d not known before from this severe and cautious woman.

  Cousin,

  All is not well with our good sister.

  Her nights are tormented, and daytimes fraught.

  This is what I have learned: our sister hath been informed of dire prophecies and is told she will have no peace from

  Morgan le Fay until such time as her heroic forefather be entombed in glory. I therefore pray you speed to a resolution in this matter and send early word to me of your progress.

  For obvious reasons of security, it was unsigned, but the references were clear.

  …she will have no peace…

  Mistress Blanche. Born not far from my own family in countryside ravaged by the Glyndwr wars, Wales against England, castles burning. And then the great war Lancaster against York, local families changing their allegiance one to the other, neighbour against neighbour.

  Cautious like no others, these Border people, and would never show their hand until the direst peril loomed. But Blanche’s devotion to Elizabeth would smash all barriers before it.

  I therefore pray you speed…

  I read it twice more. The use of the word prophecies put me at once in mind of a man with peacock feathers in his hat shrieking, Know how the world will end.

  Prophecy. Most of it is based upon empty air. It preys on the night-terrors of the subject and the desires of the prophet himsel
f. Never, never confuse it with the ancient discipline of astrology, which charts the movements of the cosmos, from which estimates of probability may be drawn.

  How wrong my neighbour, Jack Simm, had been when he suggested that all monarchs would grow skin like to a lizard’s. Royal skin, in truth, was pale and petal-thin and bruised if you blew on it, and the wind of a prophecy blew colder than blizzard snow.

  Fear not prophecy, I would say, fear only prophets. Not least the ones who speak in such specifics as: until such time as her heroic forefather be entombed in glory.

  The forefather: Arthur.

  And Morgan le Fay?

  The witch queen of Arthurian lore, leader of that dolorous sisterhood which, in legend, had conveyed Arthur by barge to the Isle of Avalon. There seemed little doubt that Blanche was here making reference to the Queen’s own mother. And my feeling was that this was not Blanche’s own coded reference – she had little imagination – but came from the orginal wording of the prophecy.

  Anne Boleyn. Poor bloody Anne Boleyn, no more a witch than Mistress Borrow. Whose mother…

  Oh God, what did I know? What did any of us know? Witchcraft – white witchcraft, at least – oft-times would be no more than a condition of belief, an approach to more or less the same spiritual ends we sought as Christians. And, to a Catholic, Anne Boleyn’s notorious Lutherism had been the worst kind of witchery. And not considered white.

  So was this how it had begun, our quest for what remained of Arthur? Some ‘prophecy’ the Queen had read? She has a rare appetite for learning, but also a thirst for trivia and gossip and, as I’ve said, is ever prey to night fears and uncertainties, moving this way and that way and watching always for signs.

  And under the new freedom, London teems as never before with false prophets and tricksters, men and women intent on weaving whole mystical tapestries to achieve ends far removed from the expansion of human knowledge.

  Why had she not consulted me?

  I stood with my back to the yard door, shadowed by a sense of isolation like the onset of night. Was there something I was missing, something so blindingly clear that everyone else had been laughing over it for years? Was I, in truth, trusted by no-one, respected by no-one? A man lauded abroad but in his own land either feared as a conjurer or scorned as a mere book-learner in this age of adventurers in golden doublets which shone like the sun. A poor clerk who charted starry patterns and made cautious estimates of probability. Not good enough. Little wonder that this man had been rewarded with neither land nor title.