The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  Stood up, moving slowly at first and then in a frenzy, pulling on my old brown robe.

  Going at once to Dudley’s chamber.

  Not even thinking, in my haste, that he might have his sword at the ready again.

  Not this time, though. This time he slept.

  ‘Robbie…’

  If not deeply.

  ‘Well, well.’ No movement in him. ‘John Dee. What took you so long?’

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘The surgical knives. They didn’t bring the knives with them.’

  ‘Knives?’

  ‘Fyche. He didn’t bring them. The knives were Nel’s knives, and the blood… the blood might even have been Martin Lythgoe’s, but they—’

  ‘Where’s the point of this?’

  ‘They didn’t bring the knives… they brought the blood. They brought the blood that it might be spread on something… anything… during their search. Clothing – who can say? A bottle of blood. And the discovery of the knives… that must’ve seemed like a Godsend.’

  ‘John—’

  It’s what he does. Stitches people up – the abbot and the chalice, Cate Borrow and the false witness and the grave dirt… Fyche contrives evidence.’

  ‘When did this come to you?’

  ‘Just now. I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘So you thought to share the burden of it. So generous.’

  ‘In case I… should forget.’

  ‘Oh, go to,’ Dudley said wearily. ‘You know you’ll never prove it, and we both know why you’re here.’

  Heaving himself up in the bed, the cover falling away, and I saw by the thin moonlight that he was full-dressed in his day apparel.

  ‘Get your coat, you mad bastard,’ he said. ‘If it must be done, best t’were finished before sunrise.’

  Not asking you to go out with a spade and a muffled lantern, Cecil had said.

  It took us a while to find a spade. Cowdray must have locked up all the best tools. The only one we could lay hand on was old and rusted, with a split in the shaft. Short of breaking into one of the outbuildings, it was the best we were going to get, and it made a certain poetic sense that this should not, in any way, be easy.

  But there could be no more poetry in this.

  ‘You could at least have made preparation,’ Dudley said.

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Yes you bloody did. We both did. We just dared not speak of the unspeakable.’

  And spoke not again until the houses were behind us, the sweet scent of apple-smoke gone from the air. I’d found an oil-lantern and lit it from the alehouse fire before we left. Kept it muffled until we’d left the town for higher ground, with the waxing moon all wrapped in mist and the air alive with moisture.

  We found the stile without difficulty.

  Dudley set foot on it and then came down again. Laughter on his breath.

  ‘Know you what hour this is?’

  ‘It’s a long way from dawn, that’s all that matters, but if you press me…’ I looked up at where the moon stood. Few stars were visible, but I made out Jupiter in the south. ‘I’d say approaching midnight.’

  Thinking that if this was London the Watch would be out, with his staff and his dog.

  Twelve of the clock, look well to your locks

  Your fire and your light and God give you goodnight.

  Goodnight. A comfort. In Glastonbury, there was only the owls and us, and I drew no comfort from anywhere. I was a city man, particularly after dark, when even Mortlake…

  ’Tis said that no man who fears for his immortal soul oughta go past your place beyond sunset, nor walk in Mortlake churchyard lest graves be open.

  My God, if Jack Simm could but see me now, all ready to embrace the taint of necromancy.

  ‘We’re upon the cusp of Sunday, is what I meant,’ Dudley said. ‘We’re doing this on the sabbath.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d ask for God’s blessing, but I rather fear that would be a blasphemy in itself.’

  The wooden cross was not quite where I’d remembered it, but the eyes cannot be trusted at night. I looked down upon it and wondered how often Nel had knelt here and the horror and revulsion she might feel if she knew what we were about to do.

  The high-born gentleman and the low conjurer. God forgive me.

  Knowing that I should be the one to begin this, I set the lantern upon the grass, reached down the bars of the cross and pulled. It was not deeply embedded and came away easily, with a small squelch.

  ‘Water down there?’ Dudley said.

  ‘Water everywhere, here.’

  I laid the cross beside the grave. Looked around. The woods round the herb garden were like the shadow of an army in the hushed moments before a battle. I could hear stirrings. Animals hunting, or the restless spirits of the people whose bones had recently been scattered over this land like horseshit? I lifted the spade and stood looking down at the grass in the greasy lamplight.

  ‘What if he’s lying?’ I said. ‘He’s lied before.’

  ‘Oh, he lies well,’ Dudley said. ‘One of the skills of his profession. Of course I’ll make you better… The important question is, what kind of man buries his dead wife’s most private documents without even finding out what they contain?’

  ‘A man who knows what’s inside. Or thinks he does. An embittered non-believer. A man who’s both stricken with loss and cold with anger. A man blaming his dead wife for her own misfortune.’

  ‘And what do we think we might find in them?’

  ‘We might find nothing of consequence,’ I said. ‘Or we just might find the true reason for Fyche’s persecution of Cate Borrow and Eleanor Borrow.’

  From a neighbouring field came the barking cough of an old ewe. Might be interpeted as encouragement or outrage.

  ‘Do it,’ Dudley said.

  I stabbed the spade into Cate’s grave.

  XLII

  Twin Souls

  IN MY QUESTIONING of mortality, I’ve watched the sexton who digs the graves at Mortlake; this was not the same. Churchyard earth is oft-times dry, tired soil, gritty with fragments of brown bone: burial upon burial, death upon death, the ground cleared, start again… But this was rich growing land, ripe with humus, warm down there and hungry.

  Unused to this kind of work, a couple of feet down we stopped to rest. My throat was dry as tinder, but we hadn’t thought to bring ale or cider, neither of us being exactly a labouring man.

  Dudley said, ‘If Martin Lythgoe were here…’

  ‘Then we would not be.’

  ‘True.’

  A movement, and both of us were looking down the herb garden, where a rabbit bobbed. No… a night hare. It hopped away, disappeared under the hedgerow and into the mist of its own mythology.

  This night of all nights, I would not look for omens.

  ‘How should his heart be taken to London?’ Dudley said. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’

  ‘You need a wooden casket. Something like a reliquary. I’d suggest going to Benlow the bone-man, but whatever he provided…well, you wouldn’t know what had been in it before. Best to talk to the vicar at St John’s or St Benignus. They’ll charge you dear, but that’s the way of it.’

  ‘Normal life, I’d just give an instruction, a wave of the hand and it would be done.’ Dudley pushed both fists into his spine, rocking back. ‘Jesu, look at me… out at midnight with grave dirt all over my hands. The great quest. Tell me where in Malory are Arthur’s knights reduced to unearthing the dead.’

  He pulled down his hat as a white owl passed overhead in graceful silence.

  ‘You know she gave me an abbey? A monastery, anyway.’

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘I’m giving you a monastery, she says. William will see to the paperwork.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Ten days ago, a fortnight? Worst of it is, I can’t even remember the name of the damned place. It’s just a monastery, a few hundred acres. It’s only when I
come here and walk for a couple of hours amongst people for whom an extra loaf of gritty, grey bread…’

  ‘You’re talking of the village of Butleigh?’

  ‘They had no fear of me. An old woman watered my horse, gave me cider and a piece of pie. An old woman who’d be hiding behind her shutters if she’d known who…’ He looked at me across the hole. ‘It was strange… I didn’t think they had lives. I thought they only lived to serve. Of a sudden, I was envying them. All my life ruled by circumstance and the need for position. A monastery or a piece of pie – which is the most—?’

  ‘Shush.’

  Dudley spinning round. No-one there, but even mumblings would be carried away on this still night.

  ‘Mercy,’ he said softly.

  ‘It won’t last, of course.’

  ‘Oh, no. It won’t last. A couple of days in that village, I’d be off my head with the workaday boredom of it. But for just a few hours… maybe it was through the release from the fever…’ Dudley’s teeth flashed in the lamplight. ‘I did used to envy you… for the freedom to travel abroad and study and kick at God’s own boundaries.’

  ‘Now a lodger at my mother’s house by the river. And all I can aspire to is one day to inherit it and fill it full of books.’

  ‘More than that, John, and you know it. You certainly taught me… well, nothing useful…’

  ‘Taught you mathematics. Arithmetic to enable you to calcule how many thousand acres your family had managed to appropriate over the years, and… we’re wasting time, aren’t we? We’re delaying the moment.’

  ‘Of course we are.’ He grinned, tossed the spade at me. ‘Your turn.’

  He held the lamp against the tump of earth, which we’d at least had the wit to raise on the town side, to shield our light.

  And I dug down with a fury, my bookman’s hands already raw. The deeper we went, the easier the soil and stones were to move, or so it seemed. As if we were beckoned deeper into the sin of what we did. Digging ourselves into hell.

  Dudley said, from above, ‘Do they come back? The dead?’

  ‘I think it can happen.’

  ‘But you haven’t yet seen… I mean, with your own eyes…’

  ‘And you… in the abbey?’

  ‘Fever. We make our own ghosts.’

  ‘And maybe also, through magic, make the ghosts that others see.’ I stepped back as dank water splashed up. ‘Who else saw the shade of Anne Boleyn at the Queen’s bedside? Anyone?’

  ‘She needs a man at her side,’ Dudley said. ‘And not just Cecil.’

  No, no, no. Not now.

  I kept on shovelling, hard and steady. I’d stripped off my doublet and my shirt was already soaked with sweat and there was slippery mud down my boots. Yet, knowing there was more dangerous ground than this, I threw myself at it until I was panting and there was a roaring in my ears. And I could swear we were being watched, that the night movements in the trees and hedgerows were not the movements of rabbits but the scufflings of men.

  Take him.

  ‘Say it, John. Just say whatever you think should be said.’

  I raised the spade out of the pit.

  ‘You know there can be no future in it.’ Plunged the spade in again. ‘You’re wed.’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘No… whatever you’re thinking to say— Oh Christ.’

  The spade had skidded on something hard.

  ‘She’s not well,’ Dudley said.

  I pulled the spade out of the hole. Wanting to throw it in the bushes and run. Didn’t move. On the edge of the herb garden a shadow bulged and I jerked upright.

  ‘People think I hide her away in the country,’ Dudley said. ‘The truth is, there’s something amiss with her… She’s ill.’

  Amy. His wife.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Varies. Pains. Weakness.’

  ‘In her head, maybe?’

  ‘I think not. We’ve talked about it. She said to me, she actually said… I think I may die soon. As if she’d had notice of it, from God.’

  ‘What about from a doctor?’

  ‘She’s seen them. Several. They’re clowns, John. They don’t know where to start.’

  Nor I. With the lamp lowered, I couldn’t see his face, but in my mind’s eyes it was smirched again with sweat and fever.

  Found myself half wishing that she were… gone from my life… No such thing as a half-wish, is there?

  ‘You love her,’ I said desperately. ‘You love Amy.’

  ‘Always. It was a marriage for love. How often does that happen to a man in my position?’

  Dudley sat down on the tump of grave dirt, his legs overhanging the hole and me.

  ‘Broke me up, the way she looked at me, saying that. Almost as if she thought it was ordained. For the greater good of the country.’

  ‘She’s been talking to… who?’

  ‘I know not. Daren’t think on it. I kneel in my own chapel, all twisted up with hatred of myself, and I’m crying aloud to God to—’ He leaned down in the shuddery lamplight. ‘John, I don’t know what I’m praying for. I can’t say it’s not self-serving ambition, but I feel it’s more…’

  A tawny owl answered another’s call across the valley. Owls. Spirits of the dead.

  Please God, no omens.

  Dudley said, ‘I ask God that I might… know his will. Know what’s right… or what’s meant.’

  ‘Help me,’ I said.

  I was standing on a flat stone.

  ‘Bess and me… we’re twin souls. Born in the same hour of the same day.’

  This was a legend much put about by Dudley himself. I knew not if it were true. He’d once asked me to do a joint horoscope for the Queen and himself but I’d avoided it.

  ‘We lie and talk and laugh all night, and put the world to rights. Talking of all we might do, and it’s more… Oh, for Christ’s sake, it’s more than love.’

  ‘Just help me.’ Putting my hands down and finding water. The stone lay in water. ‘Give me more light.’

  ‘This is wrong,’ Dudley said. ‘This is sacrilege.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Not knowing if he meant what we were doing or what he’d been saying. All was wrong.

  He was lying on his stomach now on the rim of the hole, holding the lamp low, and I saw something under the stone and thought it was a bony hand. Looked quickly away began to dig all around, making a channel for the water.

  ‘All right, come out,’ Dudley said. ‘I’ll do this. My soul’s a lost cause.’

  There were three flat stones covering the body, either to protect it against digging animals or to show where it lay so that another might one day lie on top. Dudley managed to lift each in turn, handing them up to me.

  Underneath, a thin layer of earth amongst which ragged flaps of fabric were visible.

  The remains of her winding sheet.

  Dudley was hacking with the spade at the side of the trench, bringing down shards of clay to widen the hole inside. A narrow space for him to stand there now, next to the body, as if it were on an earthen catafalque. A moat of dark water around it. Stagnant grave water.

  It was worse doing nothing, no longer finding refuge in the oblivion of toil. With no doublet on, my arms and chest were chilled, my hands numbed, and the feeling that we were watched grew near-impossible to bear. I sensed figures creeping across the field of bones behind me, rising up as they reached—

  A pulse ran through me. The lamplight wavered behind its milky glass. ‘Uuuuh!’

  Dudley rearing back as if two arms reached out for him. Then the smell came to me, too.

  ‘Oh God…’

  ‘It’s all right. I’ve smelled worse, John. It was just… sudden.’

  ‘Listen… please… better it were me, who… It’s probably going to be ruined, anyway. Rotted away long ago. We’re likely wasting our time.’

  After a few moments, Dudley clambered out.

  ‘Yes.’ The relief in his voice all too evident. ‘Bett
er it were you.’

  I saw her face just once.

  The smell.… musty rather than putrid after all this time. Still, I tried to breathe through my mouth. The lantern glass was fogged with vapour, its glow like to a small and clouded moon. Or a nightlight, by a bedside.

  She lay there before me in her rotted winding sheet: small, bent.

  What now?

  Hadn’t asked Borrow, how could I? Where is it? Is it clasped to her breast?

  This was the most likely place, and I hoped for that, bringing the lamp close to what I judged to be the middle of her, but the hands were fallen away, rotted skin and dull bone, nothing between them but sodden linen, and a glistening slime like the pulp of some putrefying windfall fruit.

  What did I expect? Guinevere? All slender bones and a twist of golden hair, which would go to dust at first touch?

  The eyes, which might once have been green, were gone and the jaw had fallen and the teeth were full of black gaps, and then all was black, Dudley calling out.

  ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘Lamp’s out. Lamp’s drowned.’

  ‘I saw something. I think it’s under her… I think her head lies on it, like a pillow.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘No, but… you’re going to have to lift her head to find out.’

  ‘I can’t even see it.’

  ‘Better, maybe… that way. I’ll do it if you—’

  ‘No… no…’

  I took steadying breaths. Recalling the gasps when I’d lifted a waxen effigy from its small coffin near the bank of the Thames.

  Dr Dee, the authority on matters of the hidden. Jesu…

  Shutting my eyes, as if that might make it easier. But what it brought up, in an instant of glorious anguish, was an image of the unremembered. Moments lost to me since the night of the storm, moments following the river of blinding white light. The moments of the sunrise in the heart, Nel Borrow in my arms, the conjurer and the witch, twin souls.

  More than love. I felt that my heart bled.

  ‘John, are you—?’

  ‘Yes,’ I cried out. ‘Yes, I’m doing it.’