The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Meadwell, I reckon. Used to be an old gaol up town, but they wouldn’t rely on that now. There are cells at Meadwell. ’Tis almost fortified, that house. Well… so they say. I’ve never been.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Not since it was rebuilt.’

  ‘Will Carew be there?’

  ‘Most likely, aye.’ He cast eyes on me and winced. ‘Dr John, man… you’re in sorest need of sleep. You’re like the walking bloody dead. You en’t eaten… In truth I don’t know how you’re still on your feet.’

  ‘I’m well. And must needs talk to Carew, without delay.’

  Better it were Dudley, but who could say when, or if, we’d see Dudley again this night. I told Cowdray what Benlow had said about Stephen Fyche and the murder of Martin Lythgoe.

  ‘Let this come out, Master Cowdray. Let it be spread far and wide. Too late now to rebound on poor Benlow.’

  A weary disbelief on Cowdray’s face.

  ‘You think it en’t known? What that boy is. Folks might’ve chose to forget the tales about Fyche, in view of his charity, but they’ve seen what his boy’s like, loose in the town of a summer night, well into his cups.’

  ‘Where’s the mother?’

  ‘Long gone. Fyche and the boy, ’tis said they goes whoring together in Wells.’

  ‘Carew knows of this?’

  ‘It would alarm Carew?’

  ‘No. I suppose not. Look, what’s the quickest way to Meadwell? I only know it’s the other side of the tor.’

  ‘No, Doctor.’ Cowdray sighed. ‘’Tis only the other side of the tor when you’re on the tor. The Meadwell’s a mile or so out of town. If you follows the track after the one to the tor, keep heading east, you’ll come to the gates.’

  I nodded. I was thinking of Borrow, where he might be. Where he’d been educated thirty years ago or more.

  ‘You’re thinking to go there on your own?’

  ‘No-one else. No, no…’ I held up a hand. ‘Thank you. Look to your inn.’

  Cowdray shook his head. I wanted to say, Cowdray, they want to kill the Queen. They’ve poisoned her heritage. Yet, if he’d asked who, I could not have told him with any degree of certainty.

  ‘I assume… there’s no-one left to watch for me, is there?’ I said. ‘Carew’s guard?’

  ‘You never was the one they was guarding, you must know that.’ Cowdray laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘You just watch out for yourself, hear me?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  So much now to watch out for. The sky was all the colours of mould, but wild lights were blazing in my head as I walked into the street. I’d go to Meadwell, but not yet.

  The darkening town was silent, streets deserted, the air laden with comforting smoke as I walked down towards the church of St Benignus. The doctor’s surgery was sinking into the gloom of early dusk, and I was just another shadow at the top of the steps as I took out my dagger.

  I’m no expert at this, but it was an old lock and the wood splintered around the blade.

  Inside, the fire in the grate was near dead, but I managed to light a couple of candles from it, setting them on the trestle board. Not yet sure what I was looking for but I’d know when I found it.

  LII

  Abominations

  WHAT HAD I expected? Maybe not the severity of it.

  For those of a certain wealth, as I’ve said, this is the first age of light. Big houses have big windows.

  Not like the mean mullions at Meadwell. I stood in the gateway. Noone in attendance, the house rearing before me, like a cliff face in the dusk.

  The gates were open. I’d not expected that either, imagining myself accosted by some surly jobsworth and having a message sent to Carew who, in his own good time, would emerge before me, angry or sneering. But he’d be forced to listen. By Christ, I’d make him listen. And an execution would, by God’s good offices, be halted pending an inquiry which might take many weeks and end with different necks in nooses elsewhere.

  I wanted Carew, not Fyche. Out here.

  But only the owls were out. Fluting across the valley behind me, in a sky which, perversely after such a day, was clearing.

  No stars yet, though. I was on my own. Kept on walking.

  It had not entered my mind that Carew himself might be party to any of this. He was not, in essence, that complicated. True, he’d served different kings in Europe, fought at different times with opposing armies. But since returning to England he seemed solely committed to England’s interests, Protestant to his spine, an adventurer, not a conspirator.

  Not that I could ever like the oaf. But he’d been given the abbey by the Queen or Cecil, and the owner of the abbey was yet the owner of this sorry town.

  I thought to call out for Carew but, in the end, simply walked up to the house, until I came to a door of green oak, set into the stone wall without porch or overhang. Hardly the main entrance, but it would do. I banged upon it with a fist, twice.

  No response. No echo within.

  Standing there, unsure, for some moments before twisting the iron ring above the keyhole, somehow knowing that it would not be locked.

  I’d gone back to Cowdray. Nobody knew more about a town than its principal innkeeper, observing who came and who went, listening to all the careless words which fell nightly from lips loosened by drink.

  First, I’d taken the letters I’d found in Borrow’s surgery and hid them under a beam high in the ass’s stable. Asses could keep secrets.

  Then I’d beckoned Cowdray from the alehouse – filling up now, much talk of the execution on the morrow.

  You couldn’t find Meadwell, Dr John?

  Not even tried yet. We don’t have much time. Dr Borrow – when did he leave the town, as a boy?

  Which was how I’d learned about Borrow’s father, a wealthy wool-merchant and prominent Catholic, who’d done much of his trade in France and found the humours there more to his liking.

  In the ’20s, this was, when there was no inkling of Reformation and King Harry was safely wed to his brother Arthur’s widow, Catherine.

  The only one who came back was Matthew, as a qualified doctor. A fine doctor, as he soon proved. Glastonbury had been grateful to have him. And many of the wealthier merchants and landowners in the area, Cowdray said, would have been grateful to have him wed their daughters.

  But, to the dismay of the merchants and their daughters, Borrow took up with an orphan who’d become a kitchen maid at the abbey.

  She was beautiful, mind, Cowdray said. But, obviously, she had no money. Nobody could understand it.

  Some houses, whatever the season, are colder inside than the open air. Without coat or cloak and or even food that day, I stiffened at the chill of Meadwell.

  No candles or lamps, no flicker of fire or scent of woodsmoke.

  Only a passage. I stood, quiet and without obvious direction, while the foolish lower mind was conjuring its own steps down to the dungeons, which would, of course, be unguarded, a bunch of keys hanging, in full view, from a nail.

  And then what? Run away from here with Nel Borrow, hand in hand? Flee the country together?

  Life would never be that simple any more, not for anyone. I turned to the left, there being more light that way, from high slit windows. I surely could not be alone in here and thought to call out. But what if it were Fyche? What I needed was a servant whom I could bid fetch me Carew.

  The passage ended in a T and a door was facing me, so I simply opened it. As far as it would go, which was not far. I thought at first that the resistance was someone pushing from the other side and sprang back, and there was a toppling sound which I recognised at once.

  Books. A long room full of books. A smell of old leather and damp.

  Not a library, though. All the books, none of the shelves. Books in squalid piles on the floor. Good books, well bound, in incredible quantity. At the far end, a window gave into a high-walled yard, and almost the first title I was able to discern through its meagre light was at on
ce familiar.

  Euclidis Elementa Geometrica

  My God.

  Within a few minutes, I’d happened upon Alberti Magni Minerarium and then Aquinas’s Quaestionum Disputartarum and divers other scientific and philosophical volumes, copies of which were in my own humble collection at Mortlake.

  All of these leaving me in little doubt that I’d found a large part of the library which had aroused such awe and stupor in Leland at Glastonbury Abbey in the days of Abbot Richard Whiting.

  Yet unshelved, uncatalogued. Haphazardly stored, mainly uncared for, some thick with dust and eroded with damp. A veritable charnel house of knowledge.

  With all the books, I’d failed to notice that the room also contained divers items of furniture: chairs and screens and chests, all of an ecclesiastical appearance. I opened the nearest chest and found there, wrapped in cloths, two silver platters and a cup with handles.

  Books and furniture and altar goods.

  This was not goods being stolen and accommodated into the fabric and furnishings of someone’s house. This was the abbey in storage.

  Did Carew know of this?

  His abbey, his property.

  Unlikely. While I myself might have spent the next five years here, books of any kind would have little appeal for a notorious truant who legend said had threatened to jump from Exeter city wall rather than be hauled back to school.

  I neither knew nor cared which way I went after that. Stumbled through walkways and doorways, under arches where the mortar seemed barely dry. If this place would ever be a college, it was unlike any I’d known.

  Came at last to a dead-end. A door to either side of it. The one on the left had a window with bars. The cells? The armoury, more like.

  The door on the right opened into a short passage, with almost no light. I edged my way slowly along the left-hand wall.

  Steps. Narrow steps leading down. From the stairwell, the faintest of glows.

  Was this the way to the dungeons? Was my phantasy to be realised? I held down the brief flaring of excitement. It could never be so easy.

  And then, as I descended slowly, there was a voice, yet some distance away. A single voice, a low and rhythmic mumble. One voice, no exchange, just one man addressing not another man but… his God?

  In Latin, I thought then, which is my own second language and the language in which God was habitually addressed.

  Sometimes, we find ourselves in situations which seem to have been fore-planned by some greater agency. I may have written earlier of the feeling of becoming a chess piece upon a board, moved by a player in some bigger game whose rules I could not yet comprehend, and I had the sense of it again – that sense of the predestined – as I walked softly towards the sound of the voice.

  And also the only light. Reaching an archway of stone, beyond which candles glimmed piercingly upon what looked to be an altar.

  In a niche above the altar was a statue of Mary, the Virgin. The kind of statue which, all too recently, was torn from the walls of churches throughout the land. A man was kneeling before it, arms at his sides, head bent, and the litany he was chanting came not from our Book of Common Prayer but from something older that lived in his head.

  Its language proving not to be Latin after all, but French. My third language, or possibly fourth.

  I stood and watched and listened for what must have been over a minute. And then, for some reason, I felt obliged to cough.

  At which the man arose, quite slowly, and turned in the stone space, the prayer continuing to issue from his lips.

  Not a prayer, nor a voice I’d heard before.

  Nor expected to, from a deaf mute.

  LIII

  In the Night Garden

  I MADE NO MOVE.

  ‘Frêre Michel,’ I said softly.

  ‘Qu’est-ce qui se passe?’

  Peering at me. After staring into the altar candles, he’d see me only as a shadow, while I saw his full face: eyes bulging slightly under heavy lids, a jutting lower lip, that grey beard like a pointed shovel.

  Seizing this momentary advantage, I told him, in French, how delighted I was at the miraculous restoration of his speech, trusting this would not affect his renowned visionary powers.

  Fyche in my head from that first afternoon on the tor.

  …with no men’s talk to distract him, he hears only the voices of angels. Thus, as you may imagine, his moral and spiritual judgement is… much valued.

  Brother Michael blinked and, without ceremony, snatched up one of the candlesticks from the altar and held it aloft, to the right of me.

  Then nodded solemnly.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘When we met upon the tor, your host seemed to think he had no duty to introduce us.’

  He made no reply.

  His age? Yes, that would be about right. Around my mother’s age, nearing sixty. The way his felt hat was pulled down suggestive of baldness.

  ‘I should have realised,’ I said, ‘that you’d be here. Obviously, much to interest you. Not least in the remains of the finest library outside London. Or even Paris.’

  Continuing to speak in French, for I wasn’t aware that he knew English. As good a reason as any for someone in his position to be introduced as deaf and dumb.

  ‘And more than this,’ I said. ‘Far more. I’ve read of your interest in old monuments and Druidical remains. Which here are, I’d guess, more numerous and more impressive than in France. One of the advantages of being an island.’

  He still held his candlestick… and his peace.

  ‘One of the disadvantages, of course,’ I said, ‘is that more people here are superstitious and less open to progressive learning. One good reason for your presence to be concealed – although some of us would welcome it. All the hours we might spend in discussion of astrology, alchemical texts, the Cabala…’

  It occurred to me then that he thought my questions speculative, posed to draw him out, establish final proof of his identity, and he was holding out. In truth, I was burning up. Time to lay down my cards.

  ‘I didn’t, at first, think that you’d have been at Montpellier College at the same time at Matthew Borrow – you being most of a decade older than him. And then I remembered, from my documents, that you were there as a mature student of medicine – in your thirtieth year?’

  I’d watched his eyes move for the first time at the mention of Matthew Borrow.

  ‘I’ve been reading some of the letters you’d sent him. Not easy. How the hell did the apothecaries decipher your instructions? You could’ve poisoned someone.’

  Neither of the two letters I’d stolen from Borrow’s surgery had been signed, but handwriting’s been one of my more recreational studies. I’ve ever enjoyed the analysis of styles and the development of divers approaches to lettering.

  ‘Your writing’s even worse now than in the early manuscripts on my shelves,’ I said.

  He might have smiled. I don’t know, for that was the moment when he chose at last to lower the candlestick.

  ‘I heard you were building a library,’ he said.

  ‘Early days.’

  Absurdly flattered that he’d heard of my library. Or even of me. Gratified that he’d spoken at last.

  ‘The day we were on the tor,’ I said. ‘Were you aware then… of who I was?’

  I watched him pondering the question, as if it might contain some hidden snare. As indeed it might.

  ‘Not then,’ he said, ‘no.’

  ‘Maybe later, though?’ What was to be lost? ‘Maybe after Fyche’s crazed son had extracted the information from my colleague’s groom? Before finding it necessary to kill him?’

  No reply, and I could no longer see his eyes, but I kept on, the wild lights back inside me, and now they were dancing.

  ‘Whose idea was it to have the dead man taken to the abbey and then dress up this murder of expediency as a ritual killing? I only ask because – as the assize court would have been told, had the trial of Eleanor Borrow ever taken p
lace – the mutilation of the body seemed to call for a certain surgical skill. The kind of skill for which a younger Michel de Nostradame was, I believe, quite well known.’

  With that first use of his full name, a mystifying lightness was grown within me. As if I were thrown back into the night of the storm when the dust of vision had me and I floated like an angel in the night garden. I gripped a stone ledge behind me, as if it would hold me down.

  At length, there came a reply.

  ‘I was – and am – a physician. A physician, he does not kill. Well…’ He shrugged. ‘Not with intent.’

  ‘Not invariably true,’ I said.

  He replaced the candlestick upon the stone altar.

  I looked around. On the wall nearest the entrance where I stood, there was a crucifix and, in niches where stones had been removed either side of it, small statues, presumably of saints.

  There was a tabernacle on the altar. In the air a vagueness of incense.

  ‘You look cold, my friend.’

  Still wearing his monk’s robe. A quite practical form of apparel in this house. I was yet angry with myself that I’d made no link betwixt Nostradamus and the deaf mute Brother Michael until I’d heard him speak. One of the letters in Borrow’s surgery had confirmed that he was to arrive in February and would be lodging with our mutual friend of the judiciary. The rest of the letter had made little sense and I’d guessed it to be coded.

  ‘I left my lodgings in rather a hurry,’ I said. ‘Having not long before read your latest prophetic quatrain. Relating to the Queen of England and the bones of King Arthur? I was wondering how it had found its way to Throckmorton.’

  I’d gone too far. His tolerant smile said that this time he knew I was on the wing.

  ‘Dr Dee, there are questions I cannot answer.’ He touched an ear. ‘Questions I cannot even hear.’

  ‘Do you get many… messages… about the Queen of England?’

  ‘I receive what I receive.’