The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘Presumably, Matthew Borrow sent you the notebook. Having, despite his many skills, been unable to extract any sense from it.’

  ‘No more than could Leland,’ Nostradamus said.

  Probably true. He’d left his notes to Cate in the hope that she might one day make something meaningful of them.

  How had Leland himself found out about it originally? Maybe from one of the monks – just a whisper of it, on one of his first visits to Somersetshire, in the ’30s, in search of antiquities and Arthur. When at last he’d found time to investigate it, he’d returned. Most of the monks having gone by then, but Cate Borrow had still been around and he’d gone to her. I’m my own man now.

  Had Cate found out more? Had she ever got close to the real meaning and intentions of the Zodiac? We would probably never know. She hadn’t had much time, anyway, between receiving the notebook long after Leland’s death and her own arrest for witchcraft and murder.

  After which the book had fallen, inevitably, into Borrow’s hands. Borrow would have seen the possible significance and alerted either his masters or Nostradamus himself. How long had it taken Michel de Nostradame, with the help of a translator, to decipher Leland’s notes? Had he discovered the whereabouts of the bones of Arthur buried by the last faithful monks of Glastonbury? Had the bones of Arthur been buried in Ursa Minor? If so, where were they now? On their way to France?

  It was clear that Nostradamus, with his fascination for ancient remains, had come to Glastonbury to investigate the Zodiac. Returning the notebook to Borrow? Worthless, Borrow had said to Dudley and me. Occultism. Knowing how rapidly the last of these words might persuade me to approach the unspeakable – taking the bait, waking into the snare. If the journey to Arthur’s grave had been less of a perilous and harrowing quest we’d be far more likely to question what we’d found.

  Matthew Borrow was a cunning man.

  ‘When were you at Montpellier?’ I said. ‘May I ask?’

  Nostradamus shrugged.

  ‘Around 1529. I was twenty-six.’

  ‘Would’ve taken him under your wing then. The young Matthew Borrow.’

  ‘He was quite capable of looking after himself, Dr Dee. A Jesuit education does that for one.’

  I gripped the stone seat hard.

  Hell.

  A Jesuit. The steel in the blade of the Catholic Church.

  Tried not even to blink, only nodded, as if I’d known of this already.

  It at once rang true. The town thought him an unbeliever, a man who went to church only to avoid the fines. Well, safer to be assumed an atheist than a cutting-edge Catholic. The target of Matthew Borrow’s quiet venom would, in his own mind, be the Protestant Church. When the expulsion from this country of the papacy itself comes through a rising not of the spirit… but a man’s cock…

  It also explained his cruelty. The callousness of the zealot with a Jesuit’s cold intelligence and almost mystical intuition.

  I don’t think I smiled.

  ‘Was it you who suggested at the French court that he’d make a perfect secret agent in the town of his birth?’

  No reaction. But I could see the reason for it. Fyche had established Meadwell, as a possible hub of Catholic rebellion. But how far could the French trust him? Francois of Guise, and Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, would have wanted their own man in Avalon.

  ‘I wondered what he receives for his services to France – maybe an income and the promise of land and a title when the Queen of Scots and Queen of France is also Queen of England.’

  ‘Dr Dee…’ Nostradamus scowled. ‘I’ve been tolerant of your unceasing-’

  ‘One more question… before I offer you, in the interests of science, my theory of at least one use for the Glastonbury Zodiac. What do you know of wool-sorters’ disease?’

  It could have been Borrow himself who’d thought of using wool-sorters’, the disease on which he was now an expert. Or maybe some spy-master close to the French court or the Guise family, some ambitious young Walsingham, had seen that notebook and thought how it might be used.

  But had Nostradamus really known nothing of this?

  ‘As a doctor, you tended plague victims?’

  I was thinking of Aix-en-Provence, fifteen or so years ago. So ravaged by the plague that scores of houses were abandoned, churches closed, graveyards overflowing. Into this hell, Nostradamus, according to an account I’d received, had entered as a physician. A brave thing.

  ‘An experience most harrowing,’ he said. ‘There was, in truth, little I or anyone could do, except to aid the healthy in their efforts to remain free of contagion. Still… good for one’s immortal soul, is it not, to risk death in such a cause? Forgive me, but whether the disease of the wool-sorters can be compared…’

  ‘There’s a man dying of it in the town. Maybe dead by now.’

  ‘It happens. Especially in areas such as this.’

  ‘Do you know how it’s spread?’

  ‘I believe through the meat and skins of animals dead of it.’

  ‘Oft-times long after their deaths?’

  ‘It is as well to bury them deep.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is your interest, Dr Dee?’

  I took a breath and repeated to him the third and now most chilling line in his Elizabeth quatrain.

  ‘Jusqu’ele beisera les os du roi des Isles Britanniques.’

  Sat back against the stone. He appeared unmoved.

  I said, ‘Does that mean physically to kiss the bones?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘You composed it.’

  ‘No, my friend, God composed it.’

  ‘’God composes in rhyme and metre?’

  One of the altar candles went out. A draught from somewhere.

  ‘See?’ Nostradamus said. ‘See how He responds to your impudence?’

  He picked up the smoking candle and relit it from its neighbour.

  However…’ Placing his hands on his knees and levering his back straight. ‘I repeat to you… a physician only heals.’

  ‘Yet you know which road I’m on.’

  ‘No, Dr Dee, I confess to bewilderment.’

  ‘And I admit to fury, because someone seeks to make me part of a plot to destroy my Queen.’

  I tried to tell him. He made the hand-behind-the-ear motions, shook his head violently.

  ‘You leave me far behind again, Dr Dee.’

  I leaned toward him.

  ‘The bones which it’s intended should be kissed… are laid upon the fleece of a ewe dead of wool-sorters’ disease. The man charged with laying the bones on the fleece is become its first victim. A plot, of cold complexity, to kill the Queen.’

  It was the first time I’d spoken aloud of this: a journey to enlightenment contrived as a difficult and perilous quest, involving even a journey to the underworld – grave dirt and distress.

  But why had the arcane knowledge of the Zodiac been made attainable… Been given away? Maybe the answer was supplied by Nostradamus himself when he’d demanded, But what’s to be done with the thing? Nobody knew. It was a wonder, but an enigma and maybe always would remain so.

  And, as such, had been found expendable in what was considered to be a greater cause: the death of Queen Elizabeth just over a year after her coronation.

  Would the Queen have kissed the bones?

  Oh, indeed.

  Without a doubt.

  Before a breathless crowd of onlookers, smiling with a gracious pride as she bent her noble head to the recently shattered brainbox of Big Jamey Hawkes.

  ‘You truly think,’ Michel de Nostradame said, ‘that I journeyed here to supervise the murder of your Queen?’

  ‘You think that it wouldn’t cause considerable rejoicing amongst your patrons at the French court? In France, is not Queen Elizabeth seen as satanic? How many of your forecasts have named Elizabeth as the worst of women? Flawed parentage.’

  ‘I lose count. It comes from God. I spend long hours alone, in vi
gils deep and silent, opening my heart to the divine spirit and, at some point… am granted entry into what you would call the mist of perceiving.’

  I snatched a candlestick from the altar and held the light close to his face and stared into his deep-lidded eyes. He was calmness itself, as if he might drift at any moment into his prophetic mist. I leaned into his face. I was beyond fatigue, my body felt weightless and my hand shook, and the candle went out.

  ‘Where is he?’ I said. ‘Where’s Borrow?’

  His eyes remained benign, untroubled.

  ‘Matthew? Not here.’

  I looked around me. The quietness of Meadwell had seemed an advantage when I was first here. Now the wrongness of it hit me like a blow to the heart.

  ‘Why is it nobody’s here but you?’

  ‘Because they’re all out on the hill,’ Nostradamus said. ‘Me – I’ve seen too much death.’

  ‘Hill?’

  ‘But not Matthew, of course,’ he said. ‘Surely no-one, even in England, would compel a man to attend the hanging of his daughter.’

  LV

  Tainted

  I’ve seen hangings, we all have. Hangings and beheadings and burnings, mostly undeserved. The one which had most affected me was the burning of Barthlet Green. Just a man with whom I’d shared a prison cell. A mild good-natured man.

  Who’d burned.

  A harder death than hanging. Or so it was said.

  But who knew? Who’d ever come back from the flames or the noose?

  An unearthly last glare in the west. Amber and white streaks, a dawn sky at night.

  Half in this sick world, half in hell, the bookman went scrambling up the flank of the conical hill, legs numbed, hands torn on barbs and briars, print-weakened eyes straining at the glow which fanned around the summit as if the whole hill were opened into the golden court of the King of Faerie.

  When, close to the top, I was sinking to my knees in exhaustion, heaving my guts into the mud, her voice came to me, soft and light.

  Be not alarmed, Dr John, you’re hardly the first to lose his balance up here.

  Tears blinded me.

  Why was it not to be done with discretion? Robert Dudley had asked, and now it was. Dawn was become dusk. Misinformation to forestall any outcry from the town, deal with it in darkness then leave the body hanging until it were ripped clean of all womanly beauty and the place where it was done tainted again.

  A place which was tainted and tainted and tainted again. A hill persecuted for being different. I scrambled up into a ground mist which seemed to come from within, as if the tor sought to hide itself from man and what he did.

  ‘May God have mercy on this sinful town! May the light of God shine upon this poisoned place.’

  The twisted indignity of it.

  The fat vicar of St Benignus with his unwashed robe and his Book of Common Prayer.

  I dragged myself to the top, bleeding from both hands, as muted male voices were descending in lumpen amen.

  Stood trembling.

  A ground mist was rising on the summit, where two blazing torches were lofted on poles bringing the ruined tower of St Michael to an unreal life. There were men with staffs and pikes, but not more than a dozen. One of them the man with grey hair and cracked teeth and a knowledge of death by hanging and why women made not much of a show of it.

  The gibbet, maybe ten feet tall, was firmly staked before the tower, like a open doorway, its feet swathed in mist but the top of its frame hard against the lingering light, pink now, like bloodied milk.

  Grunts and mutters. The bottom of an orchard ladder could be seen propped against the stock of the gibbet, rising from the brown mist.

  Carew stood a few yards away, in leather hat and jerkin, hands linked behind him, rocking back and forth, impatient, and when I ran to him he didn’t look at me, his voice a murmur.

  ‘God’s spleen, Dee, will I never get you from under my fucking boots?’

  ‘Sir Peter, I need you to listen to me.’

  Was what I meant to say, but the smoke from the torches caught at my throat.

  ‘Damn mist,’ Carew said. ‘Would’ve had three of ’em brought up if I’d thought.’

  ‘I must needs tell you-’

  ‘Never been up for learning, Doctor. Not your kind anyway.’ He turned, a firelit flash of teeth in the beard. ‘If you have any magic to spare to give the poor bitch a swift death, she’d doubtless appreciate it.’ Sniffed the air. ‘Quite a beauty. Hadn’t realised.’

  Nodding at the gibbet, a small group of men round it now, the vicar of St Benignus telling us we should not suffer a witch to live, as they brought her out, in her blue overdress, smirched and muddied, though her hair looked combed and drifted behind her shoulders.

  ‘Stop them… please… for Christ’s sake!’

  I think she looked towards me as if she recognised a voice and then turned away as I threw at Carew the only words that might wake him from his mental slumber.

  ‘It’s part of a papist plot.’

  He laughed.

  ‘You see any papists here?’

  ‘Yes!’

  He looked at me, his curiosity at last alive, but it was too late then.

  You forgot how quick it could be.

  The torchlight had gone pale with vapour, and of a sudden she was there on the ladder, hands bound behind her, the vicar’s voice floating over her in the dusk.

  ‘May the death of this sinner bring atonement and cleanse this town forever of all filth and wickedness, idolatry and the worship of all false gods.’

  ‘That arsehole annoys me nearly as much as you,’ Carew said.

  A movement on the ladder, a crisp slap.

  ‘I swear to God if you touch me there again, I’ll die cursing you to perdition.’

  Laughter and coughing in the mist, and someone asked her if she had anything to say before sentence was carried out, and I heard her say with contempt, ‘To you?’

  The bookman throwing his gasping, sorry self through flickering air as the short ladder was tipped to the ground and the group of men parted before him to reveal the body of Nel Borrow swaying slowly against the flesh-coloured sky.

  The vicar, with his Bible and his back to the hanging woman, singing out.

  ‘The witch is gone to Satan. May the light of God come to us all.’

  LVI

  Brown Blanket

  A half circle of men were around us, the two torch-carriers standing either side of the gibbet frame, and in the fuzzy light I saw Fyche and his son, Stephen, and Sir Peter Carew, pale-eyed in the thick air. A jabbering amongst them, and then Carew’s voice was lifted above it.

  ‘Hellfire, let him alone. If he wishes to pull her neck like a chicken, so be it, the end’s the same.’

  Still I held her up, arms wrapped about her covered legs, my cheek against a thigh. Could feel the rope that bound her hands. Gripped one of the hands, and it was cold. Prayed, as I’d never prayed before, to God and all the angels, the noise in my head like the bells crashing in the tower from which all the bells were long gone.

  ‘In fact, give a hand, Simmons,’ Carew said.

  The man with cracked teeth moving forward, pushing aside the vicar, who was still bent and retching from my blow to his throat…

  …and then stopping.

  ‘Well, go on, man!’ Carew roared. ‘Before his feeble fucking spine snaps.’

  I looked up and saw what the man with cracked teeth saw.

  ‘Angels!’ he screamed.

  But what I saw was a white-gold bird rising from the fire of two torches meeting in the mist with a burst of gases.

  Then the rope gave, and she felt into my arms, her body slumped against my head and shoulders. Dead weight but I would not let go, would never let go.

  The mist gathering around us, wrapping us in its brown blanket.

  ‘Say it!’ Dudley snarled. ‘Say what you did.’

  Stephen Fyche was backed up against a leg of the gibbet. He stumbled, swore. I ha
d the impression he’d been drinking. His father turned and walked away.

  ‘You had a nail hammered under his fingernails,’ Dudley said. ‘Then, when he yielded nothing, you started to slit his gut.’

  The pikemen’s hands were tensed around their weapons for they knew not this man who’d strode through the mist, his sword out to cut through the hangman’s rope.

  ‘No…’ Stephen glancing around, maybe looking for his father. He wore his monk’s robe and his new beard looked to have been cut fine and sharp for the occasion. ‘That’s horseshit. Who is this fucking bladder?’

  I kept quiet, sitting in the mud under the still-swinging rope, my arms around Nel, listening to her breath coming in harsh snorts. Celestial music.

  Fyche was back. Somebody must have told him who Dudley was, most likely Carew.

  ‘My Lord, before you accuse my son-’

  ‘Who took out his guts?’ Dudley said to Stephen Fyche. ‘Who took out his heart with the doctor’s tools?’

  ‘The fucking witch!’

  ‘Why not the doctor himself?’

  A small sound came out of Nel’s half-strangled throat. Dudley edged closer to Stephen Fyche.

  ‘Tell us, boy.’

  ‘Aye,’ Carew said. ‘Maybe you better had.’

  ‘How…’ Stephen Fyche rose to his full height, swaying. Even I could smell the wine on his breath. ‘How dare you accuse a man of God, sirrah?’

  And turned slightly, and I saw that he held a dagger close to his side and that Dudley saw it, too, and his hand was making a familiar short journey to his belt.

  ‘No trial needed here, then,’ Dudley said.

  ‘Uh… no.’ Carew gripping his wrist, twisting his sword out of his grasp. ‘Not your place.’

  I’d seen something akin to this before.

  Carew half turning this time, holding Dudley’s side-sword in both hands, and then the sword was a tongue of flame in the light of the torches and there was a look of faint puzzlement on the youthful face of Stephen Fyche as his body sagged below it.

  Carew moved twice more, short hacks, and Stephen’s head seemed, for an instant, to be quite still in the air before it dropped to earth and rolled once into the grass where the body already lay, spouting its blood into the soil.