The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘Think not too long, Master Cowdray.’

  Shutting my eyes, flinging back my head, squeezing my fists. When I straightened, Cowdray was staring bleakly at me, his eyes tired, his skin the colour of lead. God knows how I looked to him.

  ‘I should tell you,’ Cowdray said hesitantly, ‘what they were saying here last night. Fyche’s hirelings. About a… hanging.’

  ‘I’m assuming they don’t plan to delay it,’ Dudley said.

  ‘Next dawn.’

  Choked on my own breath.

  ‘Not leaving much time for the royal pardon,’ Dudley said sourly.

  Bent over, coughing, I struggled to think what time it was now, how much we had left, Dudley not looking at me as I struggled for some semblance of emotional restraint.

  ‘Town’s divided,’ Cowdray said. ‘Times of crisis, there’d always be leadership from the abbey. Taken as the word of God without a thought. But now the vicars…’

  Looking worriedly at Dudley, doubtless the most confirmed Protestant in the room.

  ‘Go on, man,’ Dudley said.

  ‘All the people cured by Nel, her father, mother. Now they’re told she stands for all that needs purging. Two minds, Master Roberts, is the answer. The one thing that’s sure is they en’t gonner band together and raid the Meadwell. Word is there’s more weaponry in there than the royal armoury.’

  ‘I can’t believe,’ Dudley said, ‘that they intend an execution on the tor, rather than with… discretion.’

  ‘Jesu!’ I cried. ‘She’s to be an example. Just as Whiting’s killing was for the papists. An example to all who dare to think outside of the Bible, whichever version of it’s favoured these days, and we… we have the rest of a day and one night to get it stopped.’

  ‘Only Carew can get it stopped, John. Well, not stopped, but maybe he can have it delayed long enough for us to organise intervention… at a higher level. If he feels moved to it.’

  ‘But Carew-’

  Cowdray was glancing beyond my shoulder; I turned and saw Monger was at the doorway, nodded, bidding him enter.

  ‘-Carew knows the trial was a travesty.’

  ‘Of course he does, but where witches are concerned he’ll accept rude justice. It’s the seaman in him. Hang them from the high mast, throw them in the sea. To sway him at all, we must needs challenge the very foundation of it. If… if… we can show who really killed Martin Lythgoe, then that…’

  ‘And tortured him,’ I said. ‘Forget not that.’

  ‘You think I fucking could? You think I’m ever going to forget that?’

  Dudley’s eyes were inflamed, the humour in this place choleric and inside me lay the cold black bile of autumn.

  ‘In the first instance,’ I said, ‘if Carew can be shown, beyond doubt that the bones were planted in the herb garden…’

  ‘Beat the truth out of this bloody bone-man, you think?’

  Monger cleared his throat. Dudley looked at him.

  ‘The bone-man’s sick,’ Monger said.

  ‘How sick?’

  ‘Maybe mortally.’

  ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘We think wool-sorters’.’

  Cowdray drew breath. Monger shrugged.

  ‘Truly, there’s not much doubt. Matthew’s seen him. He has the lumps with the black hearts.’

  ‘God-damned fleeces, this is,’ Cowdray said. ‘Likely some farmer sold him some cheap skins from a flock rotten with it. You’d think he’d know better by now. Hell, we don’t want that in town again.’

  ‘Anyway, if you want to speak with him,’ Monger said, ‘I’d not delay. Just keep your distance.’

  There was a silence. Benlow had looked unwell this morning, and I’d thought it was the drink.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘He wanted to talk to me earlier. Said he could point me to the location of the bones of Arthur. Which I thought was a try-on, not least because-’

  I looked at Dudley, who opened out a hand to convey that it was a little late for circumspection. I turned to Monger.

  ‘We have reason to think Arthur’s bones could be reburied at Butleigh. A wood? Near a church?’

  ‘There is a wood near Butleigh church,’ Monger said. ‘But ’tis not an old wood.’

  ‘Wouldn’t need to be. We’re only talking twenty or so years ago, if the bones were removed before Whiting’s arrest. Maybe they planted the wood around the grave?’

  ‘Can you help with this, Farrier?’ Dudley asked.

  ‘No, but I know people in Butleigh who might, if they thought there was good reason. ’Tis not a big place.’

  ‘You could persuade them? Come with us?’

  ‘Us?’ I said.

  ‘If they’re there, we should find them quickly,’ Dudley said. ‘Deal with this now, I say. Waste no more time. For tomorrow…’

  He looked at me and then looked away, as if far from certain that tomorrow I would not do something foolish enough to render our mission an abort.

  ‘Let’s have a dozen men,’ he said to Cowdray. ‘Don’t bother Carew with this. I’ll see him later.’

  A dozen? I stared at him and then at Cowdray. Cowdray nodded.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, John…’ Dudley slumping down into a chair, looking pained. ‘You don’t think I’d bring us here without shielding our spines?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why do you think Carew displays such antagonism? Because he resents having to spare so many trained soldiers, working under cover to guard the arses of men he-’ Dudley blew out his cheeks. ‘Well, me he merely dislikes, it’s you he despises.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Men? I don’t know. Twenty at the most. I mean… not an army.’ Whatever had made me think this man and I inhabited the same world?

  ‘Let me get this right… You’re saying there’s been armed men watching our backs since we arrived?’ Whirling on Cowdray. ‘ You knew of this?’

  ‘The guard… it got doubled after your man’s murder,’ Cowdray said. ‘Even Sir Peter was alarmed. Hadn’t expected that.’

  ‘But he was expecting trouble?’

  ‘He didn’t know,’ Dudley said. ‘None of us knew. A few men had come here ahead of us, orders of Cecil. It appears I am, after all… considered of some value to England. And maybe even you, in your peculiar way.’

  ‘Half a dozen sleeping in my cellars,’ Cowdray said. ‘Come out to watch the entrances at night. Nobody noticed the extra, with all the lowlife in town for the hue and cry.’

  ‘And, um, when Carew went to Exeter,’ Dudley said, ‘in fact he went no further than Wells. Now you know.’

  ‘Good of you.’

  ‘John, look… if ever a man spends his days looking over his shoulder, it’s you. You must know how you are.’

  ‘Unstable in my mind?’

  ‘It was simply considered unwise to… trouble you with this.’

  ‘ Who considered it unwise? You? Carew? Cecil? You going to tell me Fyche knows?’

  ‘Fyche knows nothing of this,’ Dudley snapped. ‘You see? There you go again. That ’s why you weren’t told. Would you have dug up a grave knowing you were being watched? Not that we-’ Dudley raising both hands. ‘No more than two of them, on that occasion. Instructed to come no closer than the bottom of the hill. They were not to see what we were doing.’

  For me, the humiliation was as solid as an another person in this cider-stinking cell. I thought to leave. Then, at the door, recalled what Dudley had said that afternoon in his barge on the Thames, turned and threw it in his face.

  ‘A rare freedom to move around as a common man, unencumbered by the trappings of high office…?’

  ‘Figure of speech,’ Dudley said. ‘You’re right. You’re my friend, and I should’ve told you. Blame the fever.’

  ‘Go and look for your damned bones.’

  Turning away, walking out of the alehouse, into the grey afternoon. Still hadn’t eaten, but there was no time. At least I’d fulfilled my purpose, decoding Leland’s not
ebook. If Arthur’s bones lay not at Butleigh then the monks of Glastonbury had not the wit I’d credited to them.

  At least I was free now to apply what remained of my energies to that which was most important to me. The rain had stopped and, though the sky was cold, the day was unseasonably warm.

  Wild lights were blazing in my head as I walked down the high street.

  Half in purgatory, half in the Bedlam.

  PART FIVE

  ‘Oh Glastonbury, Glastonbury… the Threasory of the carcasses of so famous and so many rare persons… how Lamentable is thy case now?’

  John Dee.

  XLIX

  His Diversion

  Candles everywhere.

  A cathedral’s worth of candles albaze in Benlow’s ossuary. Cheap tallow candles, fine beeswax candles, many of them hot-waxed to the craniums of the anonymous dead who posed as kings and saints.

  ‘Burning them all,’ Benlow said. ‘Go out in light.’

  The whole cellar was flickering white-gold. Somewhere, a forbidden incense burned, and the air was all sickly-sweet as if the bones themselves, as was sometimes said of saintly relics, were become fragrant.

  ‘I wanted you to take me to London,’ Benlow said. ‘I was going to ask you. Before you set that old bitch on me.’

  Sitting on his bench in a fine gold-hued doublet and his soft velvet hat. Cradling what he said was the skull of King Edgar, the good Saxon. Light and shadows shivering all around him, and it was as if we were taken into the astral sphere where nothing was solid.

  ‘How could I trust you,’ I said. ‘Knowing that your trade was founded on lies.’

  ‘No lies no more, my lord. Silence, maybe, but no lies.’

  ‘Silence helps no-one.’

  ‘No-one helps me.’

  ‘Do some good.’

  ‘What is good?’ He leaned out from the bench. ‘You tell me what is good. You can’t! No-one knows no more! To which God do I commend my soul? Do I cry to His mother? Am I allowed? Is He allowed a mother?’

  Benlow began to laugh, and it turned to coughing. He covered his mouth and then looked down at his hand.

  ‘How soon before the blood comes?’ He moved to the end of the bench. ‘Sit with me. Are you afraid? Afraid I’ll give you the black lumps?’

  Tentatively, I crossed the cellar, a brittle bone ground to fragments under my boot. Sat down at the opposite end of the bench. Even so, straining to hear what Benlow said next, for it was said in not much above a whisper, borne on poor breath.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m John Dee.’

  He sighed.

  ‘The royal conjurer.’

  ‘The royal astrologer and consultant.’

  ‘Conjurer. Admit it.’

  ‘No. It would be a lie.’

  ‘It’s all lies. All life’s a lie. Tell me – which God’s a lie? Or are they all lies? Even no God’s a lie. Everybody lies in this town. You’re a wise man. Tell me that. Tell me that and I’ll tell you something. Bargain. Folks bargains with me all the time.’

  ‘Oh, there is a truth,’ I said. ‘At the core of it, Master Benlow, there’s a truth.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I’m a mathematician and I can see the geometry of it. I can chart the geometry of heaven and earth.’

  ‘Good, good… good so far. You’re a clever man. No more clever man in the whole of Europe, I’ve heard.’

  ‘That’s a lie also. But… clever enough.’ I felt a sweat in my hands. ‘Your turn, Master Benlow.’

  ‘I do resurrect the dead,’ he said. ‘To order.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘I know you provided the bones to be buried in the herb garden. I know that you dug up certain graves at the Church of St Benignus. As you say, to order.’

  ‘Good so far.’

  ‘I know that you perform these tasks for Sir Edmund Fyche and, in return, he’s permitted you to continue your business. Undisturbed.’

  Benlow leaned back, his breath a thin wheezing. He brought out a small bottle, resting it on King Edgar’s cranium.

  ‘Dr Borrow give me this.’

  ‘For your… illness?’

  ‘Can’t be cured. He says this will give me sleep when I need sleep.’

  ‘You’ll rest easier,’ I said, ‘with a clear conscience.’

  ‘So they say. What’s all this to you, Dr Dee?’

  ‘Dr Borrow’s daughter’s to be hanged. For no good reason.’

  He turned his face to me. It was creamed with sweat.

  ‘Like her, do you, my lord?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She never judged me. I’ll say that for her.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Tell me something else.’

  ‘You’ve told me nothing yet. Not much of a bargain.’

  ‘Your servant… he was a fine, big man.’

  ‘And a good man.’

  ‘I followed him.’ Benlow said. ‘I follow people a lot. Especially men. I had nothing better to do, and following a fine big man…’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘He was following you at the time. When you walked off with the fair Eleanor, up to the tor and the Blood Well, he followed you, and I followed him.’

  ‘Thinking you might learn something. Something you could pass on to Fyche.’

  ‘The business of relics is not what it was.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘What a funny voice he had. Could hardly understand a word.’

  ‘You heard him talking? Where was that?’

  ‘By the Blood Well. Are you testing me, Dr Dee? You sent him away, to find Joe Monger. Only he never went where he was bid. He kept on following you, keeping back a good way behind when you went up the tor, the two of you. I stayed even further back, for all’s visible from the tor. But I saw you talking to Fyche, and the old monk was there and Fyche’s cruel son, and when you left, your man followed them. ’

  ‘He followed Fyche?’

  ‘All the way back to Meadwell. He went over the wall to have a look and came back through the gate, two of them twisting his arm behind his back.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Two of the retainers. One of them had a hammer, I think they’d been putting a fence up. I kept my distance. I don’t go there. Then Stephen Fyche comes back – and he… Tell me’ – Benlow slapped his hands on the sides of the skull – ‘ secrets. ’

  I started to tell him how I’d made the owls which seemed to fly, but that seemed not to satisfy him, probably because it could be explained by mechanics, so I talked about the spheres, the earthly, the celestial and the supercelestial, and he looked at me, his eyes filling up.

  ‘Where will I go when I die?’

  ‘Where would you wish to go?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘I’d wish to live on here. Free of the body and all its sickness.’ He lifted the skull. ‘An empty vessel, see? Is the skull not like a cup, from which the liquid of life has been poured out?’

  ‘Maybe. Liquid… evaporates. Goes to air.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A silence, then he told me.

  ‘Stephen Fyche… is a cruel boy. Likes to cause hurt. He had three men with him. They took your big fellow into the wood. Couldn’t hear too well, but they knew who he was and how he’d come here with you. They were demanding he should tell them who you were and what your business was here. He refused, of course. Not knowing whom he refused. For a long time, he refused. Too long. I’d’ve told them what they wanted without a thought. But then I know what Stephen Fyche is like. What he did to animals in the fields as a boy. Horses. For his diversion.’

  Benlow said that once they’d starting trying to make Lythgoe talk, they wouldn’t stop till he did. It went too far. Too far, too quick.

  ‘Stephen was in a frenzy. Do this to him, let’s try this… move away, I’ll do it. By the time he’d given them your name, he was so cut about, real cut about – I couldn’t sta
nd to watch no more. And Master Stephen said it was best to finish him. I didn’t stay for that, but his screams, before they were stifled, were pitiful.’

  ‘How close were you?’

  ‘Hidden in some brambles, which was torture enough for me. Yet I can be still for long periods. Still as the dead.’ He smiled. ‘I’m real tidy, my lord. I can dig up a grave and put it all back and no-one knows I’ve been. Except when they want me to, like Big Jamey Hawkes.’

  I remembered Big Jamey Hawkes. ‘By the church of St Benignus? Benlow… How can I persuade you to tell all of this to Sir Peter Carew? What they did to Lythgoe. What happened to the bones of Jamey Hawkes.’

  He tried to laugh. It would not come, He clutched at his throat, distressed.

  ‘You’re ill,’ I said.

  ‘So quick… In full health, not a week ago I was in full health. God help me…’

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘That man’s a pig.’

  ‘Do you want to see Nel Borrow hang?’

  ‘I won’t see it.’

  He leaned forward, and some small breath came into him, strained through the wheezing.

  He put a hand on my knee. I tried not to cringe away.

  ‘Never thought I’d meet a man as famous as you, my lord. I would’ve asked you to take me to London. That’s what I planned. A bargain. Would’ve told you anything if you’d take me to London.’

  ‘You could have gone to London anytime.’

  ‘But not with… with introductions. You don’t just go to London. You go as someone. Or you go with someone. Too late now.’ He peered at me, closer, as if I were going faint in his sight. ‘Will I see King Edgar when I die? If I die holding him, will he be waiting for me?’

  He’d seem to have forgotten this was not King Edgar, that none of the bones were likely to be the remains of anyone of note.

  ‘In the celestial sphere,’ I told him, ‘all is… possible.’

  ‘Do you truly believe that? Do you know these things, with all your science and your magic?’

  ‘Some believe,’ I said, ‘that living here helps. I didn’t quite see how that were possible, but… today I’ve seen evidence that this place is blessed by the heavens like no other. But you know this. When I was here before, you said death came easier here.’