The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Saw it coming.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Death coming for me. I’d not expected it so soon, but God knows I deserve no better.’

  ‘So,’ I said upon a sigh, ‘what does death look like?’

  ‘Old man. A sad old man.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Both feet above the ground, and looking down on me with a terrible pity. And the white moon shining through him. The whiteness aglow in his eyes. And cold, John. So very, very… cold.’

  Delirium.

  ‘And he knew, God help me, he knew what I am.’

  Dudley’s hands clutching the blankets, knuckles white as bone. I heard children shouting in the street.

  ‘Fever dream, Robbie.’

  ‘Could see through him.’ Dudley gazing, blank-eyed at the beams. ‘And he… he knew.’ Teeth bared now, the breath sucked through them. ‘John, I’m no more than a piece of shit.’

  ‘Don’t—’

  ‘No! I need to tell you. Make my confession.’ His head turning towards me. ‘You’re an ordained man, are you not, John?’

  ‘No!’ I almost leapt back from the bed. ‘No, no…’

  ‘Bonner’s chaplain? Rector of… somewhere.’

  ‘No…’ Wiping my hands across the air before me. ‘I swore what was necessary to obtain the income from the rectorate of Upton. I do not cure souls, so don’t you fucking tell me anything.’

  ‘God help me, but she’s not been well of late.’

  She?

  Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t—

  ‘Who?’ I whispered.

  For some moments he was silent, lying in the sun-reddened glow of the stained glass like an effigy upon a tomb.

  Time passed. And then the words were drifting out of him, as if they were not his words but those of some maleficent spirit that lived within him, poisoning his thoughts.

  ‘Found myself half wishing that she were… gone from my life.’

  Raising himself on an elbow, staring past me as though we were not alone in the room.

  ‘No such thing as a half-wish, is there?’ Dudley smiling a sick smile conveying private agony. ‘I was wishing… that she might be gone…’

  ‘Robbie.’

  ‘…in the night. Might quietly succumb, in the deep hours before dawn, to some swift sickness.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘With no pain. I could never wish her pain.’

  I looked away. Wishing not to be here. Wishing not to know what he meant. Tightening inside, for I knew that he’d wed Amy Robsart, a squire’s daughter, at the age of eighteen when he would have thought he had no chance of winning Elizabeth.

  But now he was closer than ever to Elizabeth, scandalously close, so close that she’d showered him with gifts and land, and Amy, meanwhile…

  Amy lived in the country.

  ‘He knew,’ Dudley whispered. ‘I could tell the old man knew.’

  ‘Your father? Your father’s shade came to you in a dream?’

  ‘Not my father,’ Dudley said. ‘And not a dream. I may be fevered, but I know what is… not a dream.’

  His head sinking to the pillow as if all loaded with lead. I felt that he’d gone to the abbey last night in search of some kind of absolution and found… no comfort. Maybe the reverse.

  ‘Instead, it’s me who’ll die,’ he said. ‘And not in the dark hours. Here in the full light, so that all may see.’ His breathing had become shallow. ‘That all may see.’

  ‘The doctor’s on his way,’ I said, numbed.

  XII

  Watchtower

  MOMENTS LATER, WITH the strengthening sun now risen over the coloured glass and into the clear, leaded panes, Robert Dudley slipped into a merciful sleep.

  Merciful, at least, to me.

  I keep telling you, I’m no good with these matters. A quiet man, a scholar. A mathematician and an astronomer, who understands not the geometry of love, nor could think to chart the erratic trajectory of desire. And when that desire is further powered by worldly ambition, then God help us all.

  I moved away from the thickening sickbed miasma, walking towards the sun.

  Thinking how fever caused confusion and sickness skewed the senses. How a man who could face, with courage, an enemy he could see might become like to a frightened child when the enemy was within himself.

  And who had not, in times of anguish, found the foulest of ideas snaking into his thoughts?

  But now Dudley’s unguarded thoughts were locked into my thoughts. And his momentary showing of an inner guilt behind the usual arrogance and the banter would not quickly be erased from my memory. Nor would the implications of what he’d told me.

  It was well known that he aspired to the Privy Council, and the word from court was that he would soon be receiving a title well beyond Master of the Horse. Found myself recalling one particular day when I was first awakening in him what would become a real interest in astronomy. I want to go there, Dr Dee, he’d said, aged thirteen or so – me about twenty-one. I want to be among the stars.

  What if he had looked into the summoning eyes of death last night?

  What if he died?

  I gripped the window sill.

  And what if he did not die? When he was over this sickness, should I remind him of what he’d said this morning from the dark pool of his delirium?

  And, you see, the worst of it, the worst was this: with all those grasping, foreign would-be suitors knocking shoulders with each other for prime position in the queue, there could indeed have been no safer and more capable consort for Queen Elizabeth… than my friend Robert Dudley.

  I knew it. William Cecil would, at the heart of him, know it, too.

  And of course poor Amy would know it.

  Standing, morose, at the upstairs window of this one-time pilgrim inn, I realised I’d been looking down, for the first time, into the daylit town of Glastonbury. Watching it going about its morning business, the familiar circle-dance of laden carts, goodwives with their baskets, children, horses and dogs, the flutter of voices in the air.

  Unaware, at first, because of the graveness of my pervading thoughts, of what was so wrong here. Just as they seemed unaware, the goodfolk of Glastonbury, of what still was raised above them, in all its empty splendour.

  This was not Bristol, nor Bath. Glastonbury itself was hardly bigger than a village, an untidy huddle with few buildings of any age and none at all on the other side of the street. Only the abbey wall and, beyond it, the golden shell of what had been the finest, wealthiest ecclesiastical building in the west of England.

  Two decades, now, since its forty monks had been displaced, their abbot tortured, killed and quartered.

  What can I say of this? I would not deny the case for reform, or at least throwing off the papal yoke. But the destruction of so many noble buildings with the consequent dispersal of treasures and books – and the pointless slaughter of men who understood them – was as distressing to me as the sacking of Rome by barbarians. The abbey had been the reason for this town, and now all reason had fled.

  Yet the abbey glowed, still. Even with its roofs ripped away, its nave reduced to naked ribs and unrestrained greenery sprouting from its damaged central tower. Even in wan February, the soft glow remained in the golden stone, and you could understand why some people had refused to believe that all here was lost.

  Only, where were they today? The spirit had left and the people in the street appeared oblivious of the continued presence of the body. Did one of them know the fate of Arthur’s bones? With Dudley so sick, it was my task now to find out. Which would be easier were I better at discourse with common people.

  Stood there at the window, helplessly shaking my head. A book-man, incapable of preparatory small talk. Where Dudley would have impressed the men and charmed the women, I would arouse only suspicion.

  Footsteps on the stairs, then.

  I turned quickly away from the window and crept across the boards, for it
would be best to appraise the doctor of Dudley’s condition outside of his hearing. But no sooner was I through the doorway than this doctor had walked past me into the bedchamber.

  And I felt a damp disappointment.

  For it seemed this might actually be a doctor, not the local cunning man I’d expected. The long black cloak, its hood drawn full over the face to protect against contagion. The bulky Cowdray following, carrying a black cloth bag.

  Piss-sniffers. The last men I’d consult if I were sick. They might have papers professing their authority but they know nothing, most of them. Worse, they have no instinct for healing.

  Before I could speak, Cowdray had put down the case and withdrawn from the bedchamber, and the door was shut against us. Bolts sliding, and me feeling foolish, knowing that, in my old frayed robe, I’d probably been mistaken for a servant.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to break your fast, Dr John,’ Cowdray said. ‘Worry not, eh? Your colleague’s in the best of hands.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said.

  When the serving girl had brought my cheese and bread and a jug of ale, I asked both Cowdray and Martin Lythgoe to stay and share it. Not wanting Cowdray to think I considered my status above his. Not wanting anyone to be afraid to speak to me.

  Dr John, the ordinary man.

  Something, anyway, encouraged Cowdray to approach the question that must have been troubling him since our arrival with Carew. He pulled off his apron of sackcloth, sat down at the board amid the dusty sunbeams, broke bread.

  ‘Something particular, is it, you’re looking for?’ he said.

  ‘My field of knowledge is documents,’ I said truthfully. ‘Manuscripts and books.’

  Cowdray stared down at the broken bread on his platter.

  ‘Like Leland?’

  Did not look at me. Of course, he would have encountered John Leland, as King Harry’s antiquary toured the west, doing much as we now purported to do. Because, for us, the listing of antiquities was merely a cover story, I hadn’t considered how we might be perceived… in the wake of Leland.

  Oh, dear God.

  ‘Friendly enough feller,’ Cowdray said. ‘Scholar and a gentleman. Didn’t look like anybody’s idea of the Angel of Death.’

  What could I say? I doubted that Leland, compiling his lists of monastic treasure, could, at the time of his itinerary, have foreseen how the information would be used by Thomas Cromwell after the Reform of the Church. As Harry’s wish-list.

  ‘I wouldn’t’ve said this in front of Sir Peter Carew,’ Cowdray said, ‘but there’s folks here who won’t forget Leland.’

  I sighed.

  ‘Man comes here with his script from the King,’ Cowdray said. ‘Telling everybody how much the King wants to know about all the great writings held in the furthest reaches of his realm. Ten or more years later, he’s back again, and now it’s all in ruins, and he hardly seems to notice. Blethering about making charts. All I’m saying… You’d be well advised not to make a show of your mission. Might be misunderstood.’

  ‘I can assure you that the Queen’s intentions—’

  ‘Not as there’s anything left she could do to this town. Nothing left but wool and apples.’

  I knew not what to say. When Leland had returned to Glastonbury, some fifteen years ago, it would have been as part of his aim to list the topography of every county in the realm. A task which had proved too massive for him to deal with and may have driven him into his final madness.

  That and his scholar’s guilt at the dreadful outcome of his earlier mission. All those books, the first sight of which had raised him into awe and stupor.

  ‘What did happen to the books in the abbey library?’ I said.

  Cowdray massaged his red stubble.

  ‘A few got took away by the King’s men – the ones with gold bindings, I’d guess. The old black ones… thrown out in a heap. With the monks gone, not many folk left with an interest in books. Well, not in reading them.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘You can get a good fire going with a book.’ Cowdray smiling sadly at my reaction. ‘That distresses you, Doctor?’

  I did not say that books had value beyond gold, only nodded wearily.

  ‘All right, maybe some were saved,’ Cowdray said. ‘Maybe the monks took some. Maybe some were taken to Wells, or further. For safekeeping. Nobody could believe it was all over for ever. Hard for strangers to understand the power the abbey gave out, owning land for miles all around – down in Cornwall, up in Wales. ’Twas like to a great beacon, man, always alight.’

  ‘You’d’ve supported the appeal to Queen Mary,’ I said, ‘to restore the abbey?’

  ‘Everybody did. Not for any big religious reasons, most of us. ’Tis just our only hope of returning to any kind of prosperity. Aye, we’re still on the Exeter road, we gets regular traffic through here, travellers stay the night, nobody starves to death. But for those of us who remember the foreign pilgrims throwing their money around, drinking all the wine and cider we could provide.’ Cowdray smiled. ‘Happy times, Doctor. But then… I was a young man then.’

  ‘The pilgrims,’ I said, ‘came to venerate the bones of the saints. What remains of them?’

  ‘Pilgrims?’

  ‘Bones.’

  He eyed me with the kind of suspicion that made me glad we had Carew here to vouch for our status.

  ‘Bones,’ he said. ‘That’s why you’re here?’

  ‘In part.’

  ‘I know not where the bones are,’ Cowdray said. ‘Gone. From the earth, anyway.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Maybe. There’s people could tell you better than me.’

  ‘Were they taken by the King’s men or were some… removed to places of safety?’

  He was blinking, wary now, and I guessed I could not expect an honest answer.

  ‘Listen, I’m a lowly civil servant,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to persecute anybody. I won’t be reporting any names. Myself and Master Roberts, our report will simply be a list of what remains and what does not. So tell me… who’d know better than you about bones?’

  Cowdray thought for a moment and then shrugged.

  ‘The bone-man?’

  I waited. This might be mockery.

  ‘Benlow the bone-man,’ Cowdray said. ‘He collects bones. People take him bones and he pays for them and then sells them to the pilgrims. At least, he used to. Obviously, his trade’s not so good nowadays.’

  ‘He’s known to conduct this trade? Without getting—’

  ‘Bothered by the law? What crime does he commit? No doubt they could find one if anyone wanted to, but they don’t seem to.’ Cowdray got up to add a log to the fire in the ingle. ‘The more bones, the holier the place looks to pilgrims, and this was the holiest of all.’

  I tore off a piece of bread, spread it with white cheese.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Christ himself walked these hills. We gotter believe that.’

  I watched the new flames licking at the apple logs in the hearth, the sun lighting the flags.

  ‘The people here must have been sick at heart when the monks were driven away.’ I caught the flicker of alarm in his eyes. ‘It’s all right. You have my word…’

  ‘Aye.’ Cowdray looked up at the window. ‘The day they took Abbot Whiting to the tor, ’twas like the end of the world. A good man. Not all abbots are good men, I’d be the first to agree that, but he was a mild old feller, and kind. Never turned his back on the town.’

  ‘You… saw what they did to him?’

  ‘Saw him lashed to a hurdle, dragged through the high street.’ Cowdray’s grizzled head in a sunbeam, his words coming out of darkness. ‘Bumping along like a deer carcass. An old man, beaten, bruised and cut about like a low-born thief? Where’s the reason in that?’

  I said nothing. I was thinking of an amiable man called Barthlet Green who’d shared my chamber in Bonner’s lock-up, before being burned.

  ‘Don’t thin
k he knew what was happening,’ Cowdray said, ‘or else he’d given up caring. His eyes were closed. ’Course, there were cheers and trumpets all around – like to a holiday. That’s how stupid some folk are. All following him up the tor, half-pissed. I couldn’t take it. Came in and served drinks and kept quiet.’

  ‘The tor…?’

  ‘Yon little pointy hill, doctor,’ Martin Lythgoe said. ‘Wi’ a church on top as were brought down by an earth tremble. Too dark for thee to see last night.’

  ‘Of course.’ I nodded. ‘That’s where the abbot was executed?’

  ‘Some say ’tis the devil’s own hill,’ Cowdray said. ‘Why they built a church on it, and why the church fell down. They say that next to every holy place there’s a high ground as the devil takes for his watchtower. And, aye, that’s where they hanged the abbot and two good monks. And then they cut him down and hacked his body into four, and the pieces they took…’

  ‘I know what’s involved.’

  ‘Is it any wonder he don’t rest?’

  ‘Mercy…?’

  I looked up at a movement and saw that a woman had come in and sat herself down at the smaller board just inside the door. Evidently not a servant; she wore no apron and had entered uninvited.

  ‘’Tis why folk don’t go in the abbey after dark,’ Cowdray said. ‘Why they ain’t helping theirselves to stone much n’more. They reckon as first you sees the abbot’s candle in the nave. And then, if you got the sense you was born with, you drops your sack of stone and runs like buggery. Or there’s the abbot himself in front of you, in his full robes.’

  I saw Martin Lythgoe shudder. The woman in the corner by the door sat motionless, and I wondered if this was Cowdray’s wife. She had long dark hair pushed back over her shoulders, wore a washed-out blue over-dress with a loose girdle around her waist.

  ‘If you takes a stone from the abbey and puts it into your wall,’ Cowdray said, ‘you should kneel and do penance every morning for seven weeks. Or ’tis likely your house will not be at peace.’

  ‘As good a means as any,’ the woman murmured, ‘to deter people from stealing the abbey. Especially if they have stiff knees.’