by Phil Rickman
‘Not yet. I… went, on Cowdray’s advice—’
‘You told Cowdray why—? ‘No. Not exactly.’
‘Jesu, John!’
‘I went to see a dealer in relics. He had a load of old bones… any old bones…’
‘From where?’
‘I don’t know. Stolen from church crypts, dug out of graves. People bring them to him, I’d guess, for pennies. He sells them to gullible pilgrims as saintly relics.’
‘He’d be a source, I suppose,’ Dudley mused, ‘if we don’t find the real bones. Though we’d probably need to get him killed afterwards.’
I stared at him. It might be the fever speaking or he might be serious. Either way, no time to tell him of my suspicion that Benlow might indeed know where the actual remains were to be found. What had been very clear to me was that something pertaining to the matter of Arthur had left that man sorely afraid.
‘I’d find them,’ Dudley said, ‘if I could get out of this pit.’
‘Give it another day. Get up too soon and it’ll come back, only worse. Robbie…’
‘Get me a new nightshirt, would you, tomorrow? This one stinks to heaven.’
I pulled the stool away from the wall and sat down just outside the circle of candlelight.
‘He offered me an obvious fake.’
‘Who did?’
‘The relic man. He had a lump of wood which he said was from Arthur’s round table.’
‘Have you heard of the round table still preserved?’
‘Not here. Only the one in Winchester Cathedral. And we all know the truth of that.’
Everyone accepted that this huge artefact was Plantaganet fakery, maybe from the time of Edward III, who was crazy for Camelot, or even Edward I who had travelled to see the bones entombed at Glastonbury Abbey. The Winchester board had been further tampered with by the Great Furnace who, at a time of his own enthusiasm for all things Arthurian, had caused his own features to be imposed upon it.
‘This Benlow… he would’ve told me it was a piece of the true cross if he’d thought that was what I was looking for. Glastonbury seems to be a place where it’s ever difficult to make out the real from the false. If you’re an outsider, anyway. Look, your own vis—’
I broke off. Without thinking, I’d found myself giving voice to another matter which was denying me sleep. Too late, now.
‘Robbie, when you walked out to the abbey, last night, you said you’d seen—’
‘Don’t recall going to any abbey.’
‘I saw you from my window. You walked across the street.’
‘You were dreaming.’
‘You said you’d seen an old man. You said the old man was looking down on you, as if he was in the air, and you could see the moon—’
‘I was full of fever!’ Dudley pulled the blankets tighter around him. ‘Don’t you go throwing my sickbed fancies back at me!’
‘What about the Queen?’
He stared at me.
‘Does the Queen have delusions?’
‘How dangerously do you want to live, John?’
‘It’s said the Queen… sees her mother.’
‘Who says that?’ He tried to rise, slid back down. ‘What shit are they spreading around court now?’
‘I wouldn’t say that it’s being spread around. My source is… a discreet source.’
Dudley closed his eyes.
‘Anne Boleyn. God…’
‘Is it true?’
‘Crazed bitch.’
‘Anne Boleyn?’
‘Could’ve stopped all the talk. My father always said that. But maybe she liked it.’
‘The talk of witchcraft?’
‘Also, probably thought Harry liked it. Added to her allure. Her having a extra finger and all. And moles. They say she had a furry mole shaped like a…’ He closed his eyes. ‘And maybe he did like it. Maybe it oiled his lance. For a while. Until she was his wife – would all have to stop then. But, by God, if anyone thinks that Bess…’ Dudley’s eyes came open and he looked hard at me across the shadows. ‘You know, unless you really think you can help, you’d do best to forget this, John.’
‘Help?’
‘But then you don’t go in for the cure of souls, do you? Didn’t you once tell me that?’
I said, ‘Queen Mary—’
‘I always thought you’d prefer to forget Queen Mary, too.’
‘Do you remember telling me, some years ago, how Mary had oft-times warned the Princess Elizabeth to be seen to reject her mother and the Boleyn nest of Lutherans. Pleading with her to embrace the old faith while she yet could?’
‘I need to sleep,’ Dudley said. ‘Did you not tell me that?’
Back in my bedchamber, I stood by the window and gazed down into Glastonbury’s moonlit high street. Beyond it, the abbey’s arches, a company of the mournful dead.
I was remembering the townsfolk yesterday and my sense that they went about their business as if in a play. As if all of them knew that the town possessed a life beneath, which must needs be concealed for its own protection… except when reference to it might be used to secure the future, the way the monks of the twelfth century had used the bones of Arthur.
The monks. Guardians of this sacred ground for more than a thousand years.
What did that mean? What did it mean now? All abbeys and monasteries were repositories of ancient and esoteric knowledge, and if this had been the oldest of them all – the very foundation stone of Christianity in England – then, yes, it would have been heavy with sacred secrets.
As for the conservation of physical items of value, the gold and the bones… well, plans would have been made well in advance, individuals selected for the task of secreting them away when the abbey fell into the Great Furnace.
It could be that some of these items had been smuggled across to France or hidden in the wildest parts of Wales.
Yet…
…a hallowed place. Even with the abbey going to ruin. There are some things you can’t destroy. Some things about a place that are in that place.
I thought of Brother Michael, the mute who’d been with Fyche, and what jewels might be enclosed in his silent world. And I thought of Abbot Whiting, the benign old man who’d held on to his secrets, held out under torture, before a slow and savage death on the devil’s hill.
It seemed to me that I’d done the right thing in not asking Fyche about the bones. The man to ask would have been the abbot himself.
A shuddering breath came into me. Across the street, under a bloating moon, the corpse of the abbey lay restless and violated.
It was past three in the morning. I felt a pang of anxiety about my mother and Catherine Meadows at the house in Mortlake and knelt and prayed for their safety.
And then, knowing that if I went back to bed, my thoughts and dreams would once more go searching for the witch’s daughter, I shed my old brown robe and reached for my day apparel.
XVIII
The First Age of Light
THREE SPHERES.
The natural world, the celestial or astral world, and the supercelestial, wherein are angels.
Though she’s never spoken of it to me, I’ve reason to believe that my mother once went with our neighbour, Goodwife Faldo, to visit a woman who kept a skrying crystal through which she professed to see the faces of the dead.
This would have been not long after my father’s death, so I could understand why my mother had done it. But I knew, even then, that my ambition must needs be loftier, aiming for communion with the supercelestial, wherein lies truth and light and not deception.
Therefore not ghosts. A ghost in the natural world is unnatural. To call down a spirit of the departed into this world is necromancy. Even if it be the spirit of my poor tad.
Or the shade of what once was a man of God?
I heard again the voice of Bishop Bonner, the day he came into my prison cell, asking the question which would determine whether I lived or burned.
Tell me, Dr Dee… do you beli
eve that the soul is divine?
Me telling him what I believed to be the truth:
The soul is… not itself divine, but it can acquire divinity.
And Bonner going, Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul acquire divinity?
Extending my string, his little eyes tindered like the glowing tips of tapers.
By prayer, I’d said. And learning. The Bible… and the sacred knowledge of the Jews.
Getting it right, guessing what Bonner was after.
But I’d omitted martyrdom.
As in tortured, hanged, drawn and quartered.
The night was cold and still but not quite freezing. Cloaked and shadowy, I entered the abbey grounds through the open gateway, finding the gates closed but unlocked. Never thinking it would be quite so easy to gain admission. But then, what was to steal now but the stones themselves?
I’d read what I could find about the history and layout of the abbey. Enough to recognise the plundered remains of the abbot’s grand house and his distinctive kitchen, with its ornate pinnacle, pale as ice in the moonlight, and the Lady Chapel above where the bones of Arthur had been found.
But I was shocked at the condition of the place. What once must have been well-scythed lawn was now a wilderness of bushes and black brambles whipping and ripping at my boots. Broken walls were rearing around me like an old carcass left to the weather and the crows, and I could even smell its decay, all moist and foetid.
I stopped and looked around in the silvered pool of moonlight. An apartment had been built near here for the one and only visit of the Queen’s grandfather, Henry VII. When, of course, he would have seen the black marble tomb. What had he been told about it, this man who’d ridden into England through Wales, trailing the legend of the undying British king? Would he have seen this evidence of the great Arthur’s death as a threat to the credibility of the next Arthur, his son?
But there’d been no indication of a future religious division then, and King Henry would never have thought to lay a finger on this or any other tomb. And, anyway, the new King Arthur… this was not to be. The prince had died before his father who had himself departed soon afterwards. Heavy with melancholy, it was said, and sick with the fear that his Tudor line might, through hubris, have brought down upon itself not dynastic glory but some old curse.
As if he should have worried about hubris. If this comparatively frugal, cautious man had reason to think his line accursed, what could be said about the son who’d succeeded him in Arthur’s stead? Starting wars, building palace after palace – temples to himself – and then, to help pay for it all, directing the wreck and plunder of religious houses. Little wonder that the Queen feared the worst and thought herself haunted by evil.
Haunted.
I looked up in search of my far-off friends, the stars, finding Orion’s belt and then, prominent tonight, the seven-starred body of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, my hands instinctively reaching out to cup it like a cluster of jewels. While I was embraced by the skeletal frame of the abbey whose walls, honeyed by daylight, now came in weathered-bone shades of white and grey.
It was not a welcoming embrace. I heard a movement and turned and saw small, moonlit orbs.
Jesu…
Ewes. Sheep grazed in here, now.
I sat down on a low wall until my breath was regular again, imagining these walls aglow in the light of a thousand candles which would flicker in rhythm with the ethereal rise and fall of the Roman chant. It was this incandescence which I held in my head as I stood and, with right arm extended, inscribed, in the air and then on the ground before me, the sign of the pentagram.
The old protection, but it needed more. Kneeling in the centre of the imagined pentagram, amongst broken stones at the entrance to the nave, I began to pray in a whisper, invoking the ancient shield of St Patrick’s Breastplate, which would almost certainly have been known to Arthur.
‘Christ be with me, Christ within me
Christ behind me, Christ before me
Christ beside me…’
Breaking off, aghast, remembering how I’d held a bone purported to be part of Patrick’s actual breastplate.
What was I doing?
But the words went on inside my head, as if creating their own momentum.
Natural magic.
‘I bind unto myself the Name
The Strong Name of the Trinity
By invocation of the same
The Three in One and One in Three…’
When I’d finished, keeping my eyes tight closed, I called back the words of those who’d known the abbot in life, in good times and then the worst of times.
Cowdray: saw him lashed to a hurdle, dragged through the high street. Bumping along like a deer carcass. An old man, beaten, bruised and cut about like a low-born thief…
Mistress Borrow: remember his wrinkly smile, and his eyes had a kindness. For a long time, I thought I’d seen the face of God.
Better, yes. But more important…
The poor man has little cause for rest.
If he was still here and rested not, then this surely would not be the crime against God and State which was called necromancy.
Which, I swear to you, I had never attempted. Not my direction. Smelled too much of grave-dirt and divination by the examination of entrails. Necromancy: the very word whispered death. As if the dead had no purpose but to serve the desires of the living.
Afraid, then?
I came to my feet. After all my years of study, I hadn’t expected to be afraid. Our grandparents crouched over their fires, the slits in their walls shuttered against the storms. Even in Tad’s day there were still those who believed a ghost was a walking corpse, an earthen being rising putrid from the grave.
But now we live in the first age of light. Now we stand behind walls of glass like great lanterns and watch the bending of the trees and the bursting of the skies. We stand, protected, and study, in warmth, the force and the violence of nature. And thus old shadows fall away, and the spirits of the dead are become flitting, half-seen moonbeams.
I gripped cold stone, slick with slugtrails.
Perchance I can help.
Listen to me.
Perchance we might help one another, you and I, Abbot, two men of learning divided only by the thin skein of mortality.
Here, within my protective pentagram, upon the cold hearth of our faith, intoning words and phrases borrowed from the grimoires, rendered safe and wholesome, or so I must needs believe, by Christian prayer.
Not conjuring. I won’t command, in the manner of the old sorcerers. I only request.…
‘…humbly, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, if the Trinity doth so consent. Dear God, if it be your will that I might help your servant Abbot Whiting find peace… that I may bear a portion of his burden, in return for some small enlightenment, then let him appear to me now in… in a not unpleasant form.’
A not unpleasant form. Essential, that. Always important in the grimoires to imagine how you would wish to view the spirit.
State it firmly. A not unpleasant form. Say it strongly, then let it go. Imagination, when bound to our human will, can be a powerful tool for altering the course of events but, when left to its own devices, can cause havoc in the mind.
So, do I feel, or do I imagine, the air growing cold around me? Should I, as a scientist, try to still such feelings, separating myself from them to stand aside, become an observer? Or allow these fancies to form around me, creating a numinous cloud into which a spirit, some watery essence of a man, might gradually become manifest?
The conjurer at work.
Dear God.
You think me reckless?
You who watch from behind your window glass. You who were not there that night, cold in the belly of the abbey.
Slowly lifting my face, I placed him there, imprinting him upon my closed eyelids, marking that look of helpless sorrow on his face and his hands raised in formal, weary benediction.
Who’s to
say what are visions and what are signs of an oncoming madness?
I must have been close to the edge of a kind of madness when, in a instant of heart-lurch, I knew that I was not alone.
Knew? How did I know? How? Did I hear then movement, a footfall among the riffling of last winter’s crispen leaves, the slow beat of owl wings?
It was none of that. None of anything. Only an absence, a flatness, a deadness, a not-hearing. A void which spoke of the dreadful.
I’m trying, God help me, to explain this. Without diagrams or arcane symbols. To evoke the crawling fear it awoke in me as, with a last, slack-lipped prayer, wildly slashing another pentagram in the air before me, I began moving, open-eyed now, along the moon-washed, rubbled nave towards the chancel.
Towards what was there.
XIX
Beyond Normal
COWDRAY CAME BACK with me to the abbey.
I’d battered every door in the George Inn until I’d found the chamber where he lay – with one of the kitchen maids, I believe. Now he stood on the edge of the chancel and shivered and looked again at what was there and shivered again. Crossing himself, I noticed, before turning away, almost in anger.
‘I’ll send a boy for Sir Edmund Fyche. And constables. There should be a hue and cry.’
‘No… wait.’
A little light. A single lantern, burning in the vastness.
Dear God, dear God, dear God…
‘Doctor, this is…’ Moonlight deepening the furrows in Cowdray’s face, turning them black. ‘’Tis beyond normal, man.’
‘What’s normal?’ I was barely in control. ‘How are men usually killed here?’
‘In hot blood. And strong drink.’ His voice flat. ‘Never like this.’
The man who lay dead had arms spread wide, like to Our Saviour on his cross. Shadows flucting like the wings of angels on the walls above and to the sides.
‘I must needs consult my colleague,’ I said. ‘Master Roberts.’
‘He’s ill.’
‘Yes, and needs sleep, however—’
