by Phil Rickman
‘I’m not deaf, John.’
He was sitting upright under the high oak headboard, a pillow doubled at his back, his sword, sheathed, across his knees.
‘So you heard the hue and cry,’ I said.
‘A murder in the service of Satan?’
‘Robbie, this is a man who sees witches and sorcerers under every—’
‘And is he deluded?’
There were no plain answers to this. I sat at the foot of the bed, staring into the white gasses of a candle flame. Telling him about Cate Borrow, what had happened to her. Dudley leaned forward, his face narrow and blotched, his beard ragged. Looking far older than his years, a man stripped of all finery, pretention, status.
‘He thinks your doctor’s a witch, by heredity? Is there not good reason?’
‘He hanged her mother for, in truth, no good reason.’
‘And you’re saying… what was done to Martin Lythgoe, that’s no good reason? Does it look like a random attack, a robbery? What’s the matter with you? It has all the marks of ritual sacrifice. You’ve studied all this.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Blood sacrifice, John, is a trade… to summon a demon to do the bidding of the magician.’
‘In theory.’
Oh, I knew all the theory, having dissected in detail the rituals set down in The Key of Solomon and the grimoires of Pope Honorius. All the divers conjurations involving the sacrifice of cockerels and farm animals, the belief in the power of spilled blood to invoke… not the kind of angels with whom I would ever wish to commune.
Oh, Glastonbury… did I perceive that there were answers here to some of my deepest midnight questions? Maybe. I didn’t know. It was all too immense and complex. Too close to see.
But Dudley, coherent at last, would not let it go.
‘To bring about a death, could not the sacrifice of a good man to the devil or some demon of destruction, in a once sacred place… a once very sacred place… would that not be considered effective?’
I could hardly deny that a ritual sacrifice in the Abbey of Glastonbury might well be thought to invoke a demon of substance. I considered the sorcerer Gregory Wisdom – also a doctor of physic – hired by Lord Neville to commit murder from afar. And that was merely the most celebrated case of recent times. These things, the abuse of magic, occurred all around us. I considered the way the candle had burned down over Martin Lythgoe’s lips. Had that been in my own warped perception or had it been shaved into a likeness of the tor?
‘And the supposed victim is Fyche himself – in revenge for the hanging of her mother? I don’t see that it worked.’
Dudley snorted.
‘So it didn’t work. Or it hasn’t worked yet. Christ, I don’t want it to have been the woman who cured me of the fever. I just want this matter of Martin’s killing… I want it settled, whether by noose or sword, and us out of this stinking little town.’
‘And the bones of Arthur?’
He made no reply. Who could blame him, in his condition, and after all that had happened, for almost forgetting why we were here.
‘Give me your opinion of this,’ I said.
Pulling from my doublet Blanche Parry’s letter and taking it over to the candle in the window, just as there came a blinking of white light and then the first low shuddering of thunder from the east.
XXVI
Le Fay
THESE THINGS I purport to create, with all my astral charts and maps of the Zodiac, my pages of calculing and configuration… have I ever once been able to state, this will happen?
And those who do – which books have they read which are not available to me? Is there some holy grail of revelatory knowledge passed from hand to furtive hand? I don’t know. That’s the worst of it. I, who despise ignorance, do not know.
‘Who wrote this prophecy, John?’
Dudley’s face aglow with new sweat in the candlelight. I’d taken the letter to his bedside, and he’d bade me read it out again, but I repeated only those key lines.
Her nights are tormented and daytimes fraught. She will have no peace from Morgan le Fay until such time as her heroic forefather be entombed in glory.
‘All right then,’ Dudley said, ‘who might have written it?’
‘Could be one of ours, could be from abroad. There’s a seer on every corner in London. Europe’s thick with prophets. Especially after what happened with the King of France.’
Dudley leaned into the light.
‘You were there, weren’t you? In France, when that happened.’
‘No. But I had an account of it sent to me.’
By a student who’d attended one of my lectures in Paris. He’d sent it together with a faithful script of the horoscope said to have been sent from Rome – the one warning King Henri to avoid all single combat in an enclosed field, especially around his forty-first year. The one making reference to a head wound which would cause blindness.
‘Rome?’ Dudley said. ‘I thought it was all down to this fellow Nostradamus, at the French court.’
‘No, it was an Italian, Luca Gaurico. Not personally known to me any more than is Nostradamus – he was asked by the Queen of France to investigate Gaurico and his prophecy. This was after the King chose to laugh and ignore it. I find the whole thing doubtful in the extreme.’
‘Oh, well, of course. We all know, John, that you merely indicate the moods of the universe… and would never be so foolhardy as to forecast injury or death.’
‘And mistrust those who would.’ I let the sarcasm go, folded Blanche’s letter. ‘I’d understood that was what the Queen found useful in me – an ability to see through the fakery, offer informed advice. Apparently not. It seems she has a secret craving for the sensational.’
‘Of course. That’s why she’s so fond of me. But what would you have said about this fellow from Rome… had he heralded her demise? Not possible?’
I thought of the wax effigy in its coffin in the alley by the river. Had I been too dismissive of that and its power to do harm to the Queen? Did I continually dismiss what I, with all my scholarship, could not think to accomplish?
‘I think… that it is possible, but not likely. I believe there are some who see the same stars as I do, draw the same charts and then… either God himself intervenes or some faculty comes into play, some hidden organ of sensing which… doesn’t function in me.’
‘Your blind arrogance leaves me breathless,’ Dudley said.
‘Most times, however, it’s still trickery, for monetary gain.’
And yet…
I bit down on my lower lip, all too aware of the widespread fear and awe engendered by the prophecy apparently fulfilled at a jousting tournament held to celebrate the marriage of the French King’s daughter to Philip II of Spain.
Lest you forget… the King, though indeed in his forty-first year, had been far fitter than our own King Harry at that age and had elected to take a primary role in the jousting on that fateful day – the 30th day of June, 1556.
The reason we had a full account of what happened was the presence at the jousting of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the Queen’s envoy to Paris. Throckmorton had a good seat. He’d seen the lance hit Henri’s helm, watched it break, causing the splinters that would pierce the King’s eye and enter his brain. Had seen him helped from his horse and stripped of his armour. Reporting, at first, that the wound was not as severe as had been feared – unaware of the French surgeons frantically dissecting the heads of newly executed criminals to try to work out how the splinters might safely be removed.
All to no avail. By the second week of July the King of France lay dead in his darkened chamber, and soon the whole of Europe knew of the power of prophecy through astrology.
‘You don’t believe that prophecy was ever made, do you?’ Dudley said.
‘It’s too exact for my liking. But leaving that aside, is this –’ tapping Blanche’s letter – ‘the first you’ve heard of a prediction linking Arthur with Anne Boleyn?’
‘How sure are you that Morgan le Fay’s even supposed to represent Anne Boleyn?’
He would, of course, have read only Malory, who likes to play down the role of the enchantress Morgan in Arthur’s story.
‘I think this is Blanche’s own coded reference.’
Le Fay. Though sometimes portrayed as Arthur’s half-sister, in the earlier tellings she’s at least a partly supernatural being. And certainly a witch.
‘An evil influence?’ Dudley said. ‘I was never sure.’
‘Not wholly. It’s true she’s accused of trying to wreck the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere. She’s not trustworthy by human standards, causes mischief.’
‘Well, that’s Anne, certainly.’
‘However, in the story of Arthur – the earlier tales – Morgan’s role seems to be to test the faith and courage of the knights of the round table. And, in the end, all is reconciled, for she’s one of the ladies who accompanies the King on that last dolorous voyage to Avalon. Which brings us to the essence of this prophecy… that if what remains of Arthur is returned to Avalon…’
‘Then the Queen will have no more trouble from the witch.’
‘I thought at first that it might be nonsense, pamphlet trivia. Yet it’s being informed by a knowledge of the oldest accounts of Arthur… It could, when you think about it, be the reason we’re here. Or a big part of it.’
He was silent for just a moment too long.
Saying, at last, ‘How do you know Blanche didn’t make it up?’
‘Credit me at least with a knowledge of my cousin. Look, even if it were mischievously cobbled together to upset the Queen, it was done by someone who knew what he was about. And so…’ I tried to catch Dudley’s eye, but he was turned away. ‘As a man about court, have you heard of other prophecies of this nature?’
‘No.’
His head still turned to the wall as if he found the candle too bright. He knew something. He was not a duplicitous man – not with me, anyway – so I reasoned that his only cause for concealment would be the light it might throw upon his own relations with the Queen.
‘Or any other matter which might disturb the Queen’s rest?’ I said. ‘Because if anyone—’
‘You know what it’s like at court.’ Dudley flipped over a hand. ‘Rumours coming from all directions. Rumours of new plots to put the Queen of Scots on the English throne. Even the story going round that Mary’s reign was founded on a lie because Edward’s not dead.’
I nodded. I’d heard that one, too, but it was predictable – either a yearning for the return of a powerfully adult Edward or a hint that it was time Elizabeth found herself a man to rule the country. To the end of her reign she’d have the burden of proving that a woman on the throne of England was actually the will of God.
I kept up the pressure, quoting again from the letter.
‘Her nights tormented…’
Thunder rattled the panes. Dudley’s body pulsed under the sheet. He rolled over to face me.
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘What are you trying to avoid saying?’
‘I’m sick,’ he said, with a childish pathos. ‘What the hell’s got into you, John? You’re a mild man, a man of books. Why don’t you piss off and read one?’
I stood up and looked down on him, stripped of his finery and his waxed moustache, his hair all matted.
‘I have to know this, Robbie. We must needs fathom why we’re really here.’
He sat up, reached for the pitcher of water and the mug. The jug was too heavy for him and water spilled. I took the jug and poured him some, but he did no more than wet his lips. The thunder was like far-off war drums and, at the same time, Dudley spoke.
‘There was a night… three weeks ago… four, maybe. I was summoned to court at Richmond. A message brought to me, in private, by someone we both know.’
Maybe Blanche.
‘I was admitted to the Queen’s chamber, past midnight and all her ladies had been sent away, and I found her… distressed. In need of comfort.’
‘Comfort,’ I said.
‘And we talked. Long into the night. Talked.’
Hmm. I waited, guessing I’d be the first person ever to hear this and probably the last.
‘Bess was… much disturbed, you might say, by forecasts of her impending death.’
‘How? By whom?’
‘God knows. Omens and portents. Hardly the first. Hardly the thirty-first, but she demands to be told about all of them. Nothing must be hidden. All manner of letters and writings are put before her every day. This one was from a prophetic pamphlet found on the streets – treasonous drivel. She’d caught two of her ladies whispering about it.’
I felt an unease.
‘What did it say?’
‘That her death would occur… I know not when exactly… But that she need not worry, for she’d not be alone but would be guided through the veil. That she who’d brought her into the world would watch her out of it.’
‘Those words?’
‘Something like that. That Anne would watch her out of it. Watch her all the way to…’
‘Hell?’
A hush. A fluttering of lightning on the wall.
‘Widely known,’ Dudley said, ‘that the ghost of Anne Boleyn haunts the Tower.’
No thunder came to smash the silence. Dudley swallowed.
‘You can imagine what happened. The very next night, she has a dream. A vivid dream. The kind of dream where you dream of being asleep in your own bed and then you awaken and…’
‘Anne?’
‘Oh God, yes. Wearing that cute little smile from the portrait, and there’s a thin circle of dried blood around her neck. As if she’s decently popped her head back on, for the visit.’
I nodded. The images of myth full formed: Anne Boleyn smiling with a foxy serenity on the edge of the abyss. The mouth in the severed head, held up, still forming words. It took little imagination to envision the effects of the merest suggestion that the wilful Anne was there, in the shadows of the night, ready to beckon her daughter over death’s threshold.
‘Wouldn’t sleep alone in her chamber for several nights after that,’ Dudley said. ‘There’d be various ladies in attendance through till dawn, and extra candles alight.’
‘It continued?’
‘Happened twice more.’
‘And did this… did Anne speak?’
Dudley shook his head, drank more water.
‘Bess asked me if I thought she should summon John Dee to cast around her bed a protective circle which… which her mother couldn’t enter. I said, well, why not?’
‘Thank you for your confidence.’
‘However, it seems that someone else swiftly advised her against it. The Archbishop of Canterbury was privately summoned instead, to do what he could.’
‘Parker?’
‘Bless her bedchamber, anyway.’
Didn’t ask if that had worked. I leaned into the candlelight. ‘So this prophecy of the Queen’s death… were any attempts made to trace its origins?’
‘What’s the point? You know what these bastards are like. Some small printing shop in a cellar deep into Southwark. There was a name at the bottom, from the Bible. Some prophet – Elijah or Elisha or…’
At least it wasn’t Dee. But still this worried me. I’d already been brought within singeing distance of the stake as a result of one royal horoscope.
‘Look,’ Dudley said, ‘her mother… you need to understand this is not something new. When we were in the Tower, as children, she’d oft-times talk of… I mean, what would you expect in the place where your father had your mother’s head sliced off? She was growing up into a world heavy with omens and foreboding and the ever-presence of what you might call… sudden death.’
The keening of the axe in the air. Or in Anne’s case, thanks to Harry’s mercy, a sword wielded by a master.
‘All right, let’s examine this,’ I said. ‘Anne… Morgan. Two women said to b
e witches who’ve caused havoc. An undying king, whose aura of sacred magic was harnessed to the Tudor cause…’
‘Until this holy heritage was taken apart by Harry’s unholy desire for Anne.’
‘By whom he’d insist, when it suited him later, that he’d been bewitched. Just as Arthur and his knights were bedevilled by Morgan le Fay.’
I was chilled at how neatly it fitted together. ‘If the Queen fears the curse of her own immediate ancestry, as the child of a witch and a monster… and the suggestion is made that the only way it can be repaired…’
‘If we follow this road,’ Dudley said, ‘then the bones, when we find them, should stay here in Avalon. That is, not go to London, as Cecil prefers. And the Queen should come here, as did Edward I, to watch them re-entombed… in glory.’
‘In an abbey rebuilt at crippling expense?’
A barrel of worms. The window paled with lightning.
‘I tell you, John, I’m out of here tomorrow,’ Dudley said.
‘The town?’
‘Out of this bed. I want those fucking bones. And when we find them, we don’t immediately send word to Cecil, right?’
‘Robbie, he’s your friend, he’s been a friend of your family for—’
‘Be not naive. He has his own script; he wants the right marriage. And it won’t be an Englishman. Cecil believes that the only worthwhile royal marriage is a political marriage.’
‘Who?’
‘It varies. I know for a fact he’s been tossing around the idea of a union to unite us with Scotland – finally break France’s hold through Mary Stuart. And if… if, when he finds the right match, the chosen foreigner finds out that his virgin queen is not…’
Dudley fell back, coughing. The thunder rolled closer. The bedside candle went out.
…not a virgin. A shiver sped through me. ‘I think we’ve talked too much,’ I said. ‘Get some sleep, rest your throat.’
