The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

…out of fire into water. The sun finding the moon, with all its female qualities. I was aware now of all the cabalistic parallels here, as well as those less esoteric, like the journey out of books and into life.

  And earthly love. No avoiding that.

  By the time I finished, I was pacing circles. Dudley had barely moved.

  ‘This is the dust that causes St Anthony’s Fire?’

  ‘I believe it is, yes.’

  ‘God’s bollocks, John, What the hell were you about?’

  ‘I believed it might also open passageways to the soul. And that… may well have been right.’

  Or had I been possessed by the black energy of the storm in unholy union with my own base urges? Were the places I’d been, in truth, closer to the devil than to God? Was I, in fact, bewitched? The borderline was so close and so fine.

  Shutting my eyes in uncertainty and anguish, until Dudley spoke. Something in his voice that was close to compassion.

  ‘First time, John?’

  Little point in throwing up a curtain.

  ‘As good as.’

  He nodded.

  ‘And I’m guessing that now you believe yourself… in love?’

  A poet’s phrase.

  ‘I…’ Shifting uncomfortably. ‘From the moment we first spoke. I… didn’t know at the time… how certain sensations might translate.’

  Dudley laughed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘a woman who’ll cook your meat and yet take it upon herself to see you won’t have to lay a third place at the board… is a rare find indeed. How do you prefer to play this?’

  ‘Play?’

  ‘A bad word. Still…’

  ‘I didn’t think,’ I said, ‘that you’d want to play at all.’

  ‘After what happened to Martin Lythgoe? After what we saw this morning?’

  ‘You think Fyche is behind it?’

  ‘If he is, he’s a dead man.’

  ‘After due process of the law,’ I said carefully.

  ‘Or not.’

  ‘You’re Lord Dudley.’

  ‘And might soon be an earl. Indeed, Cecil gave strong intimation that on my return from this…mission… the possibility of appointment to the Privy Council might become… more than a possibility.’

  ‘On your return…’

  I think that neither of us wanted to approach the possibility that Dudley’s return to London – and the Queen’s bedchamber – might be seen, in certain quarters, as less than desirable, let alone the thought that…

  That he was not meant to return from here.

  ‘Some matters can’t easily be resolved here,’ Dudley said. ‘But others can. And, as things stand, Dudley was never here and can’t be held accountable for whatever… act of primitive justice… is carried out by Master Roberts.’

  For a moment, all before my eyes was drained of colour, and I’d swear that I could see around Dudley a living blackness.

  ‘Your witch, your… enchantress…’ Dudley said. ‘She’ll be in some ratinfested dungeon now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Awaiting an assize judge.’

  ‘Who’ll be corrupt.’

  ‘Inevitably,’ Dudley said. ‘So, I ask again: what will you do?’

  The idea that I might simply turn away from this… did not arise. When I first thought that something of this place had begun to live inside me, I knew not the depth of it, the ways in which the structure of my being was altered.

  ‘My mother and father,’ I said tonelessly, ‘were overjoyed when I came home with a doctorate in law. Thinking I’d left other matters behind. Come to my senses at last. Found a solid trade.’

  ‘Solid enough,’ Dudley said, ‘when you were accused of trying to damage Mary. Displaying, it’s said, a rare eloquence before the hardest judges in the land.’

  ‘And Bonner. Himself a lawyer, once.’

  ‘What a cunt that man is,’ Dudley said.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Yet, by some means, you outfoxed the bastard.’ He sat back against the wonky bedpost. ‘You’re saying you want to be her advocate?’

  ‘If she’ll have me in that… capacity.’

  ‘I take it she knows who you are.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Fyche?’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘You’re still on a blade’s edge, John.’

  ‘Maybe always will be.’

  The chamber was grown dim, even though it was not long past three. Neither of us had eaten this day, and I recalled what Dudley had said that Candlemas afternoon in the barge about every great quest beginning with prayer and fasting.

  He arose and stood with his back to the window, and I was aware that something had caused change in him, also. He’d combed his hair and beard, but the old arrogance was gone. His arms, in drab dark green, hung limply by his sides.

  ‘When you’d left to find the doctor,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t stay with Martin, knowing what had been done to him while I lay there, useless. I went out to the abbey gates to wait for you. That was when I heard a commotion and had to stand and watch it. Saw them bringing her up, through the town.’

  ‘Nel?’

  My fists clenching of their own volition.

  ‘Must’ve been nine of them,’ Dudley said. ‘They had her in chains. It was like a… festive occasion. A mob arisen from nowhere. Men jeering. Rotten apples thrown at her by women. Screams. Murderer, witch. Well… if you say to a crowd of uneducated peasants, if you say, this is a murderer, this is a witch… Even if it’s their own sister, nobody challenges it. I’ve seen it before.’

  I shut my eyes and saw it. Made myself watch the procession he described.

  ‘Her head was bare. Her dress was torn at one shoulder, pulled down toward her breast. She moved with… with dignity, I suppose – as dignified as you can, in chains. Her head held up, not looking to either side. Yet they… behaved as though she might be ready to escape at any moment, and they’d keep touching her-’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Men are men,’ Dudley said. ‘Particularly out of London.’

  It felt like all the muscles in my body were contracting, making me cramped and knotted inside. When I opened my eyes, Dudley was looking down at the boards.

  ‘Tell me, John… did I talk about Amy?’

  ‘You oft-times talk of Amy.’

  Not true.

  ‘I mean in my fever.’ Dudley looked up, no sign of fever in his eyes now. ‘I think I may have spoken of Amy, and I know not if it was a sick man’s dream… or if I spoke some things to you.’

  There was a silence, even in the street, but it was a silence that howled like a hound at the moon.

  ‘Must have been a dream,’ I said. ‘I’ve no memory of it.’

  Enough had been said. Dudley and I went down to the alehouse to be served bread and Mendip cheese by the kitchen wench. There was no sign of Cowdray, and the farmers were not yet in from the fields.

  All the same, we ate without conversation, and then walked out into the dusk to find that a man was newly dead.

  XXXVI

  What’s Coming

  The high street was gloomed in its own shadows. No shops were open; two, I noticed, had been boarded and probably not against the elements.

  Three people remained outside the baker’s shop under the dusken sky. I made out Joan Tyrre and Woolly, the little dowser, but at first failed to recognise Monger, for his body movements, once languid and gliding, were now taut and rigid like some engine worked by ropes and pulleys.

  It soon becoming apparent that this was a stricture caused by inner rage. The first time I’d seen it in him and this, together with the absence of both light and laughter, made the whole evening tense as drumskin.

  Monger held a book I recognised at once: the Steganographia of Trithemius. Or what remained or it – little more, in truth, than the hide in which it had been bound. Monger’s hands shook. He rammed the book under an arm and led us into a small yard behind the shop.

  ‘T
ell them,’ he said to Woolly. ‘Tell them everything.’

  Woolly’s wild, white beard was shining like the moon in the blue-grey dusk.

  ‘They come for bread,’ he said. ‘Bangin’ on the door, demandin’ bread. Hungry men ridden from Taunton to swell the ranks.’

  ‘I would never have thought Taunton had so many constables and bailiffs to spare,’ Monger said. ‘But what do I know of the recruitment of a mob? I’m but a farrier.’

  ‘Baker had to let the bastards in, look. While they was waitin’ for bread, pokin’ all around the shop, in comes Master Stephen Fyche.’

  ‘Fyche’s son,’ Monger said.

  ‘Beg mercy,’ I said. ‘ Brother Stephen?’

  ‘An occasional conceit. Monastic apparel’s favoured at Meadwell to convey the impression that all men there are men of prayer and learning in the great tradition of the abbey. The boy’s brutish violence makes mockery of the robe. I think you saw him kicking Joan Tyrre.’

  ‘Damn – thought I knew the face, but it was dark in there.’

  ‘Typical JP’s son. Drink inside him, he’s prowling the streets like a rabid mastiff,’ Woolly said. One of his eyes was half-closed, the skin around it turning black. ‘I’d followed the buggers in, not liking the looks of this, then they had the door shut, and one’s going, Hoo! What we got here? En’t no Holy Bible. Another’s fingerin’ the pictures and all the symbols, and Fyche goes, ’Tis a grimoire, boys! ’Twas all they needed.’

  ‘All they’d come for,’ Monger said.

  ‘They’ve got the baker up against a wall, screamin’ at him as he’s a fuckin’ wizard, and Fyche is rippin’ pages out the book, one by one, wavin’ ’em in his face and then casting ’em into his oven. Two of ’em holding him back, and he’s a sobbin’ and a howlin’ like they’re slaughterin’ his babes.’

  ‘They were his babes, those books,’ Monger said. ‘It was even his hope one day to learn to read them.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘Too late now,’ he said.

  ‘He couldn’t read?’

  ‘His old feller had the books off the abbey,’ Woolly said. ‘Worthy, he was brought up to think there was some’ing mirac’lous about ’em. If he kept ’em warm in his bakery, kind o’ thing, their secrets’d be yielded to him… and he’d one day find gold, I s’pose.’

  ‘Had them nigh on twenty years,’ Monger said, ‘and all he knew was that the title was an extremely long word and therefore extremely magical and…’ His jaw wrenched away. ‘ God’s bones, Dr John, what are we come to?’

  Woolly tapped his eye.

  ‘When they starts knockin’ him around him, look, I couldn’t hold back no longer. Makes a rush for the book, thinkin’ I’d snatch it and run like soft shit – wouldn’t’ve took me long to lose ’em. But Fyche grabs me, bangs my face, side of the oven, and likely they’d’ve done more, if… if Worthy…’

  ‘If he hadn’t thrown a fit,’ Monger said to me. ‘As if his heart were held in seizure.’

  ‘Poor ole boy collapses on ’em, all droolin’ from the mouth, eyes up in his head, and one of em’s goin’, A demon face, a demon face! Divil’s into him, look, and I reckon they got scared then, and they was off. Worthy breathin’ like an ole sheep, well out of it. I figured best thing be to get Dr Borrow. But he weren’t there.’

  ‘Bazzards.’

  Joan Tyrre standing there like a ragged blackbird, shifting from one foot to the other. The first frail candlelight flickering in a stone house across the yard.

  ‘Time I got back, he was stone dead, poor ole bugger,’ Woolly said. ‘Could be he was already sick, but you’d never know it, would you? Picture of health, all that fat on him, and in truth he weren’t n’more’n… what would you reckon, thirty-nine?’

  Monger, calmer now, nodded at Dudley.

  ‘This is your companion, Dr John, from the… ah… Queen’s Commission on Antiquities?’

  ‘Much recovered now. Master Roberts… knows all that I know.’

  ‘Then you both should also know this is only the start of it. As JP, Fyche has the power to deal with all civil disturbance and affray and will use it to the full.’

  ‘Is there affray?’

  ‘Anything can be an affray, even a gathering to bemoan the baker’s death. I keep telling people to stay off the streets, they don’t listen to me. They don’t see what’s coming.’

  ‘Forgive my London innocence,’ Dudley said, ‘but what is coming?’

  Monger went to the yard gate, peered into the high street, then returned. It had grown cold.

  ‘The storm’s been proclaimed as an omen. The word planted that God’s sorely annoyed with Glastonbury, a town ready to throw away its sanctity as Jesu’s own domain in England. If homes are raided, people beaten, then it’s clearly the will of God that all false belief be driven out.’

  ‘Only through scourging,’ I suggested, ‘will the town find redemption?’

  ‘For a clerk of antiquities, your grasp of provincial theology is admirably acute, Dr John. Anything that looks like an assembly, they’ll pounce. Anyone named as a witch or a wizard, whether named freely or under duress… Neighbour will betray neighbour.’

  ‘Does no-one cry out against this? The vicar – where’s he stand?’

  ‘Stands were he’s told. There are two vicars, and one at least is an ignorant placeman who needs his fingers to read the lessons.’

  Like so many. If ever a town needed a clergyman of wisdom and intellect, it was Glastonbury in this time of disarray.

  ‘Mistress Borrow,’ I said. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Wells. Special assize on Monday.’

  ‘What’s the charge?’

  ‘Unspoken, as yet, but nothing that doesn’t carry the death penalty or t’would be dealt with by Fyche himself.’

  ‘And the judge?’

  ‘Does it matter? They’re all tight together on this circuit.’

  It was near to night now, the last lucent clouds retreating beyond the tower of the Baptist’s Church. Woolly looked up at the bakery wall.

  ‘We needs get Worthy’s poor ole body out of there. Been in the oven heat the whole day.’

  ‘Wait until full dark then we’ll move him.’ Monger put a hand on Woolly’s shoulder. ‘Not the best time for Glastonbury to be permeated by the sweet stench of decay.’

  I thought of what Nel Borrow had said about the town becoming like to a wound left open… gangrene and rot, mortifying of the flesh. Turned to Monger but could not tell his expression in the gloom.

  Later, Dudley and I went down to the alehouse of the George to learn what we could, but it was not a good place to be. The air was greasy with tallow and rendered fraught by a trailing taper of violence which, periodically, would flare like last night’s lightning.

  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 ove
r 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.