The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘My place, I think,’ Carew said.

  The silence on the tor seemed eternal. It was as if it were done by the hill itself. As if, deprived of one life, it had taken another.

  LVII

  The Void

  The Fish Hill was where Joseph of Arimathea had disembarked, stabbing his staff into the good soil of Avalon.

  Soil so good, in fact, that the staff sprouted buds and grew into a thorn bush which yet survived, or descendants of it, and came into flower each Christmas Day.

  Joe Monger had told me that. A pretty tale with many echoes, this hill being one of the fishes in the starsign of Pisces, whose age began with the coming of Christianity. I’d sat by this thorn bush before, not knowing of the legend, and sat there again in the chill breeze as the year approached the day when St David died, aged one hundred, a thousand or so years ago.

  St David? Oh, yes, he was here too, how could he not have been?

  Sitting here, you could see both the abbey and the tor. Maybe this was the medium between the two worlds, Christian and pagan, natural and celestial. He’d known what he did, the abbot, in giving this land to Cate Borrow, for the purpose of healing.

  ‘The abbot’s thought,’ Nel said, ‘was that if the medical herbs traditionally related to certain starsigns in the sky were to be grown inside the corresponding formations upon the ground… then the healing properties of them would be quite marvellously increased.’

  ‘She told you this?’

  ‘Of course not. It came to me when I awoke this morning. I remembered that when a particular herb did well here – yarrow or camomile, I forget which – then she’d say, Aha, this plant is responsive to the sign of the fishes. And I remembered how she’d go off with the abbot to plant herbs in other fields belonging to the abbey and… that’s my guess.’

  The logic of it was beyond assail. Cate taken into the confidence of the monks at the abbey who held the secret of the Zodiac. Working with them on a new kind of astrological healing. The implications were fascinating.

  ‘I suppose ’tis not the only secret of the Zodiac, and far from the most important, but…’

  She smiled and squeezed my hand, and I looked at her with longing but no real hope. Though we’d lain together four nights now, I was sensing, in the sweetness of it, a parting rather than a beginning.

  It had been nearly a week before she was able to speak without pain. She said this was only because of the burns and the weals yet apparent on her throat despite all the balms and ointments applied to it by Joan Tyrre. But I thought there was more. My feeling was that she’d foresworn all speech until she had an understanding.

  She wore the blue overdress and a worn muslin scarf to keep the breeze from her throat. Below us, we could see the tip of the cross marking Cate’s grave, beyond it the abbey laid out like some broken golden coronet.

  ‘You’re sure you didn’t see him?’ she said. ‘He was standing next to you for several moments.’

  I shook my head. I think she meant the abbot. Cowdray had said there were more people seen on the top of the tor that night than had come down from it.

  ‘I saw only the phoenix made by the torches,’ I said. ‘I’m just a dull and bookish man who has not the sight.’

  The laughter came from deep in her throat, which must have hurt.

  And I was still wondering what was real, what was dream or the runaway imagination of a man starved of food for a day, and sleep for longer. I’d mentioned to no-one my meeting with Nostradamus, who was gone by the time Carew’s men went into Meadwell. As were all the statues and the tabernacle in the chapel.

  Little firm evidence against Fyche himself, Carew claimed, though it was Dudley’s suspicion that Fyche knew too much about Carew for him to be brought before an assize. But his status as Justice of the Peace seemed likely to be short-lived.

  His son would be buried without ceremony. Raising a dagger to the Queen’s Master of the Horse? Carew had said mildly. What choice did I have?

  I couldn’t help dwelling on the possible reasons for Fyche trying to pass off the malignant Stephen as a monk. Had he actually thought that when Mary was Queen of England, the Pope back as head of the Church and the abbey rebuilt, it might be placed under Stephen’s control?

  Madness. But then, many abbots and many bishops had been closer to the devil…

  Had Brother Michael returned to France in the company of his old friend, Matthew Borrow? If I were looking for cause to believe that Michel de Nostradame was guilty of epic deceit, I could think of no better evidence than his friendship with Borrow.

  What was this man?

  Why had neither his wife nor his daughter, even in the shadow of the noose, been prepared to raise voice against him?

  In the week since Dudley’s departure, I’d attended Benlow’s burial, along with the re-burial, in the goose field behind the Church of the Baptist, of all the bones in his cellar, and also revisited Mistress Cadwaladr. Now that Borrow was gone from the town and Fyche’s status was in question, many more truths were emerging.

  Monger had recalled how, in the early ’30s, not long after the King had proclaimed himself head of the Church, s omeone had suggested to the abbot that the abbey’s treasures should be sent to France, where they might remain in the care of the Catholic Church. Fyche, the bursar? Almost certainly. But Richard Whiting, an Englishman to his soul, had been unconvinced – still, apparently, believing that the dark hand of Cromwell would never descend upon the fount of English Christianity. And, indeed, it would be five years or more before it did.

  From Mistress Cadwaladr, I’d learned of Cate’s first meeting with the man who was to become her husband, when he’d come to the abbey to spear a boil on the abbot’s neck. An unlikely match for the doctor, this recently illiterate kitchenmaid.

  For while she was undoubtedly beautiful, Cate was also with child.

  Was ever a woman more grateful to a man? Mistress Cadwaladr said. I swear she would have died for him.

  And had.

  The way I saw it, Borrow had known his mission might take years. He needed a wife to keep the other women and their ambitious fathers from his door. If he turned down too many he’d arouse suspicions. Or be thought a Bessie. He’d be looking for a woman of…

  ‘Little education,’ Mistress Cadwaladr had said. ‘Knowing her place. No inclination to question his movements. A housemaid with a ring.’

  And that, for a number of years, was what he had. I suppose it was learning to read which had begun the change in her, but it was a slow change and a long time before she became a threat to him and his clandestine work for the French. Maybe Cate, working ever closer to her husband, had begun to suspect that he was not all he seemed. Perchance when he’d gone out to see some sick person whom she’d met in the market next day, perfectly fit, not having seen the doctor in months. She was no longer the woman he thought he’d married. One way or another she’d have found him out. And from then on she’d be marked for death.

  The inhumanity of the religious zealot. What were two women’s lives against the delivery of a country back to Rome and the one true Church?

  Fyche’s hatred of witches and the dust of vision must have seemed opportune. And I’d bet my library that the theft from the surgery, leading to the death of the boy in Somerton, had somehow been contrived by Borrow.

  The wind rattled the thorn tree born of Joseph’s staff. It was grown colder now, in keeping with Benlow’s warning that winter was not yet gone.

  Nel said, ‘I was brought up to revere him for his skills and saintly generosity. And not to bother him with childish matters.’

  Staring out across the town, her voice even, without heat or bitterness. The voice of a woman who was back from the dead but not entirely. A Persephone who’d left some part of herself in the underworld. I knew then that there were elements of her which would also be beyond the understanding even of a man of science and a student of the hidden.

  ‘She never told you you were not his child?’


  ‘She told no-one.’

  ‘When did you learn?’

  ‘Not from my mother. Not till after her death.’

  ‘When Mistress Cadwaladr returned to Glastonbury?’

  ‘She was only one who knew. The only one who cared to know.’

  Nel said nothing for a few moments, then she turned to look at me, hot pain in her eyes.

  ‘John, it only made me want to be closer to him. I’ve been proud to be the daughter of Matthew Borrow, the finest physician in all Somerset.’

  She looked across to the abbey ruins. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘I’ll find him. So many questions.’

  It was my hope she’d never find him.

  ‘Your mother…Could she not see the void in him where the heart should be?’

  ‘She owed him her life. Don’t you see? Whatever the reason for it, all the good that had ever come of her life… she owed to him.’

  ‘She wouldn’t look at him in the court. She turned her eyes away.’

  ‘Maybe she had no wish to see the…’ She looked down the field to where stood the wooden cross. ‘’twas not something to take to your grave.’

  She began to weep and I held her to me, and time passed, and I tried to understand and could not. Both of us knowing the question I must needs ask or be forever tormented.

  At last, she said, ‘She must have felt the wind of it. I was home from medical school, and my mother said – not a week before her arrest – that when I was qualified I should go far from here. London… anywhere. As soon as I left the college. I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing her again. But she made me promise.’

  ‘And you promised?’

  She stiffened.

  ‘I would not. I laughed. And it haunts me. It haunts me that she thought her own death might make me realise. Maybe she thought me cleverer than I turned out to be. Something always drew me to him. This… this saintly man who…’ She seized my hand hard enough to stop the blood. ‘When I was held at Wells… they told me he’d confessed to save me.’

  ‘Who? Who told you?’

  ‘The gaoler. The woman gaoler. She said he’d told them- Said they were his knives with all the blood over them.’

  ‘They were… God damn it, they were his knives.’

  ‘I’d watched him fighting them when they came to take me. They knocked him down. He lay in the street, they dragged him up…’

  I saw some of that too, as I and everybody in that street was meant to. A play. A masquerade. He was good at that. The next time I’d seen him, in his surgery, he’d been working through the pain, and I – and doubtless the whole town – had thought him brave and selfless, like the women who’d thought they’d loved him… if not for himself, then for what he was.

  Thought they should love him.

  A man so cold and remorseless that he’d betray his country and then, to conceal his treachery, dispose of his wife of convenience. And then, a year later, seize an opportunity to do away with the young woman who was not his daughter.

  ‘It was made clear to me in the prison in Wells,’ Nel said. ‘Made clear that it would be either me… or him.’ She was staring right through me. ‘What had I done that he wanted me dead?’

  I said nothing. He’d seen his chance, that was all. He’d been called in to get Stephen Fyche out of trouble, to make a disposal after torture look like a ritual killing, and the cold bastard had seen his chance.

  ‘At least,’ I said, ‘you now know who your father was.’

  She plucked grass from her dress. ‘He dined at the abbey, with the abbot. The abbot had fine meals prepared. Salmon and trout. He was, it seems, charmed by the maid who’d served it.’

  ‘And he didn’t know… about you? I mean, when he returned after the sacking of the abbey…?’

  ‘My mother was a respectable married woman by then, with a child and an education. Their relations were good… but of a different kind.’

  I looked into her green eyes. She tossed back her hair against the wind. She’d lived nearly all her life under a lie and very nearly died under one.

  ‘Poor Leland,’ she said.

  ENDWORD

  September 1560

  I do not understand the efforts of certain people who rise up against me.

  John Dee

  Monas Hieroglyphica.

  Another dawn. I sit at my mother’s board in the window of our parlour with the letter from my stricken friend.

  God help me, John, but I had no part in it. I say this to you, who have least cause to believe me. I place my hand upon my Bible and I swear it over her poor dead body, through my tears…

  Could sleep hardly at all last night after reading this five times, six times… more… The wind was up and the river was high and I’m lying open-eyed and cursing fate.

  If fate it was. All London talks of black sorcery. The steeple of St Paul’s is gone to ashes these past two months, struck by summer lightning. An earth trembling was recently felt in London, causing panic in the streets.

  Two days ago, I was summoned to Cecil’s house in the Strand where he received me in a private garden with high hedges. An afternoon of sultry heat but little sunshine.

  ‘The end of days,’ he said. ‘There’s been much talk of it.’

  ‘Except in the night sky,’ I assured him. ‘The stars have nothing to say about the end of days.’

  ‘And the Second Coming. The Queen makes light of it but is nonetheless perturbed.’

  ‘Nor do the stars herald another Christ.’

  ‘Who speaks of Christ?’ The Queen’s chief minister handed me a pamphlet. ‘This comes to us from Paris.’

  It was in French. I was permitted to sit down at the garden table to read it. At first, I was inclined to laugh, but a sight of Cecil’s face warned against.

  ENGLAND AWAITS THE CHILD OF SATAN

  The pamphlet said that the magicians in England were now claiming London, the fastest-growing city in the world, to be the New Jerusalem.

  In fact, London’s growth was as a centre of evil, its cold and smoky streets filled with murder, robbery, whoring and all the disfiguring diseases known to man. All this having begun with the rejection of the Church of Rome, the plunder of God’s holy houses throughout the kingdom, the slaying of priests and the occupation of the throne by the repellant daughter of the union of a wife-murderer and a witch.

  No wonder, the pamphlet went on, that the stars foretold that London expected soon to welcome a dark messiah, whose birth was to be kept secret until such time as the child was grown.

  The coming of Satan incarnate. And if London was the satanic Jerusalem then the black Bethlehem, where the child would be born, was the town of Glastonbury, celebrated as the birthplace of Christianity in England until its abbey, founded by St Joseph, uncle of Christ, was torn down and its streets filled not with pilgrims but witches and sorcerers.

  Just as the first Tudor to usurp the throne had ensured that his first son was born in Winchester, claimed for the court of the great King Arthur, so this child would be born in the town of Arthur’s death.

  Born to Elizabeth, the witch queen.

  The pamphlet reported that England’s most notorious black sorcerer, ‘Dr’ John Dee was himself just returned from a visit to Glastonbury to meet the circle of witches there and make preparation for the birth of the child. The sorcerer having journeyed to Glastonbury with the child’s…

  ‘ Father?’

  I let the paper fall.

  Cecil said, ‘It’s not been the only pamphlet to suggest that the Queen’s already pregnant by Dudley.’

  Described here as a known wizard, trained in the black arts from boyhood by the evil Dee.

  ‘We found signs of a similar campaign being planned for London,’ Cecil said. ‘While you were away, Walsingham raided the premises of a disreputable lawyer called Ferrers. Took away a printing press. Copies of pamphlets purporting to contain your astrological forecasts. Usual end-of-the-world drivel. Ferrers, naturally, denies any c
onnection with France. Even Walsingham sees him as just another lunatic.’

  ‘I’ve… had dealings with this man,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Probably quite annoyed that he failed to get me burned.’

  But there was surely more than an old hatred behind this.

  Cecil took the French pamphlet out of my hands and crumpled it.

  ‘We’re not too worried as yet, but a word or two from you to the Queen about the absence of sinister signs in the sky would do no harm. I’ll make you an appointment.’

  I said, ‘How is she now?’ ‘Well,’ Cecil said. ‘Quite well.’

  Despite my full written report, he hadn’t once mentioned the bones of Arthur or the attempt to afflict the Queen with wool-sorters’ disease. She would have had the full story at length from Dudley, but I wanted to discuss it with Cecil. I wanted to know exactly how the Queen had received those Nostradamus predictions and who had suggested she might act on them. But he wasn’t giving me an opening.

  Cowdray’s boys had caught up with Dudley in the Mendip Hills, turned him round, and thank God for that. Twice I’d awoken in a sweat after dreaming that he was putting the poisoned bones before the Queen. And once I’d dreamed Nel Borrow had not been cut down, and my arms had given way through exhaustion and I’d looked up to see the whites of her eyes and her lolling tongue.

  Big Jamey Hawkes had gone back to his old grave at the church of St Benignus, with a weight of rocks piled on top of his box so that his toxic remains might never be disturbed.

  Cecil smiled. ‘You see, we kept your mother and her housekeeper quite safe in your absence.’

  ‘Did you?’

  With Catherine Meadows back and no evident threat from her puritan father, I’d not asked for protection.

  ‘More safe than when you were in the house,’ Cecil said. ‘Turning out to be a good man, Walsingham.’ He paused. ‘Makes one think, John… are they more secure when you’re away?’