The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

‘Your mother…Could she not see the void in him where the heart should be?’

  ‘She owed him her life. Don’t you see? Whatever the reason for it, all the good that had ever come of her life… she owed to him.’

  ‘She wouldn’t look at him in the court. She turned her eyes away.’

  ‘Maybe she had no wish to see the…’ She looked down the field to where stood the wooden cross. ‘’twas not something to take to your grave.’

  She began to weep and I held her to me, and time passed, and I tried to understand and could not. Both of us knowing the question I must needs ask or be forever tormented.

  At last, she said, ‘She must have felt the wind of it. I was home from medical school, and my mother said – not a week before her arrest – that when I was qualified I should go far from here. London… anywhere. As soon as I left the college. I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing her again. But she made me promise.’

  ‘And you promised?’

  She stiffened.

  ‘I would not. I laughed. And it haunts me. It haunts me that she thought her own death might make me realise. Maybe she thought me cleverer than I turned out to be. Something always drew me to him. This… this saintly man who…’ She seized my hand hard enough to stop the blood. ‘When I was held at Wells… they told me he’d confessed to save me.’

  ‘Who? Who told you?’

  ‘The gaoler. The woman gaoler. She said he’d told them— Said they were his knives with all the blood over them.’

  ‘They were.… God damn it, they were his knives.’

  ‘I’d watched him fighting them when they came to take me. They knocked him down. He lay in the street, they dragged him up…’

  I saw some of that too, as I and everybody in that street was meant to. A play. A masquerade. He was good at that. The next time I’d seen him, in his surgery, he’d been working through the pain, and I – and doubtless the whole town – had thought him brave and selfless, like the women who’d thought they’d loved him… if not for himself, then for what he was.

  Thought they should love him.

  A man so cold and remorseless that he’d betray his country and then, to conceal his treachery, dispose of his wife of convenience. And then, a year later, seize an opportunity to do away with the young woman who was not his daughter.

  ‘It was made clear to me in the prison in Wells,’ Nel said. ‘Made clear that it would be either me… or him.’ She was staring right through me. ‘What had I done that he wanted me dead?’

  I said nothing. He’d seen his chance, that was all. He’d been called in to get Stephen Fyche out of trouble, to make a disposal after torture look like a ritual killing, and the cold bastard had seen his chance.

  ‘At least,’ I said, ‘you now know who your father was.’

  She plucked grass from her dress. ‘He dined at the abbey, with the abbot. The abbot had fine meals prepared. Salmon and trout. He was, it seems, charmed by the maid who’d served it.’

  ‘And he didn’t know… about you? I mean, when he returned after the sacking of the abbey…?’

  ‘My mother was a respectable married woman by then, with a child and an education. Their relations were good… but of a different kind.’

  I looked into her green eyes. She tossed back her hair against the wind. She’d lived nearly all her life under a lie and very nearly died under one.

  ‘Poor Leland,’ she said.

  ENDWORD

  September 1560

  I do not understand the efforts of certain people who rise up against me.

  John Dee

  Monas Hieroglyphica.

  ANOTHER DAWN. I sit at my mother’s board in the window of our parlour with the letter from my stricken friend.

  God help me, John, but I had no part in it. I say this to you, who have least cause to believe me. I place my hand upon my Bible and I swear it over her poor dead body, through my tears…

  Could sleep hardly at all last night after reading this five times, six times… more… The wind was up and the river was high and I’m lying open-eyed and cursing fate.

  If fate it was. All London talks of black sorcery. The steeple of St Paul’s is gone to ashes these past two months, struck by summer lightning. An earth trembling was recently felt in London, causing panic in the streets.

  Two days ago, I was summoned to Cecil’s house in the Strand where he received me in a private garden with high hedges. An afternoon of sultry heat but little sunshine.

  ‘The end of days,’ he said. ‘There’s been much talk of it.’

  ‘Except in the night sky,’ I assured him. ‘The stars have nothing to say about the end of days.’

  ‘And the Second Coming. The Queen makes light of it but is nonetheless perturbed.’

  ‘Nor do the stars herald another Christ.’

  ‘Who speaks of Christ?’ The Queen’s chief minister handed me a pamphlet. ‘This comes to us from Paris.’

  It was in French. I was permitted to sit down at the garden table to read it. At first, I was inclined to laugh, but a sight of Cecil’s face warned against.

  ENGLAND AWAITS THE CHILD OF SATAN

  The pamphlet said that the magicians in England were now claiming London, the fastest-growing city in the world, to be the New Jerusalem.

  In fact, London’s growth was as a centre of evil, its cold and smoky streets filled with murder, robbery, whoring and all the disfiguring diseases known to man. All this having begun with the rejection of the Church of Rome, the plunder of God’s holy houses throughout the kingdom, the slaying of priests and the occupation of the throne by the repellant daughter of the union of a wife-murderer and a witch.

  No wonder, the pamphlet went on, that the stars foretold that London expected soon to welcome a dark messiah, whose birth was to be kept secret until such time as the child was grown.

  The coming of Satan incarnate. And if London was the satanic Jerusalem then the black Bethlehem, where the child would be born, was the town of Glastonbury, celebrated as the birthplace of Christianity in England until its abbey, founded by St Joseph, uncle of Christ, was torn down and its streets filled not with pilgrims but witches and sorcerers.

  Just as the first Tudor to usurp the throne had ensured that his first son was born in Winchester, claimed for the court of the great King Arthur, so this child would be born in the town of Arthur’s death.

  Born to Elizabeth, the witch queen.

  The pamphlet reported that England’s most notorious black sorcerer, ‘Dr’ John Dee was himself just returned from a visit to Glastonbury to meet the circle of witches there and make preparation for the birth of the child. The sorcerer having journeyed to Glastonbury with the child’s…

  ‘Father?’

  I let the paper fall.

  Cecil said, ‘It’s not been the only pamphlet to suggest that the Queen’s already pregnant by Dudley.’

  Described here as a known wizard, trained in the black arts from boyhood by the evil Dee.

  ‘We found signs of a similar campaign being planned for London,’ Cecil said. ‘While you were away, Walsingham raided the premises of a disreputable lawyer called Ferrers. Took away a printing press. Copies of pamphlets purporting to contain your astrological forecasts. Usual end-of-the-world drivel. Ferrers, naturally, denies any connection with France. Even Walsingham sees him as just another lunatic.’

  ‘I’ve… had dealings with this man,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Probably quite annoyed that he failed to get me burned.’

  But there was surely more than an old hatred behind this.

  Cecil took the French pamphlet out of my hands and crumpled it.

  ‘We’re not too worried as yet, but a word or two from you to the Queen about the absence of sinister signs in the sky would do no harm. I’ll make you an appointment.’

  I said, ‘How is she now?’ ‘Well,’ Cecil said. ‘Quite well.’

  Despite my full written report, he hadn’t once mentioned the bones
of Arthur or the attempt to afflict the Queen with wool-sorters’ disease. She would have had the full story at length from Dudley, but I wanted to discuss it with Cecil. I wanted to know exactly how the Queen had received those Nostradamus predictions and who had suggested she might act on them. But he wasn’t giving me an opening.

  Cowdray’s boys had caught up with Dudley in the Mendip Hills, turned him round, and thank God for that. Twice I’d awoken in a sweat after dreaming that he was putting the poisoned bones before the Queen. And once I’d dreamed Nel Borrow had not been cut down, and my arms had given way through exhaustion and I’d looked up to see the whites of her eyes and her lolling tongue.

  Big Jamey Hawkes had gone back to his old grave at the church of St Benignus, with a weight of rocks piled on top of his box so that his toxic remains might never be disturbed.

  Cecil smiled. ‘You see, we kept your mother and her housekeeper quite safe in your absence.’

  ‘Did you?’

  With Catherine Meadows back and no evident threat from her puritan father, I’d not asked for protection.

  ‘More safe than when you were in the house,’ Cecil said. ‘Turning out to be a good man, Walsingham.’ He paused. ‘Makes one think, John… are they more secure when you’re away?’

  ‘You have more work for me, don’t you, Sir William?’

  ‘For the Queen,’ Cecil said.

  I’d left angry, swearing that on the morrow I’d make plans to go back to Glastonbury to undertake full and detailed research into the Zodiac formed on the ground. A garden of stars upon the earth. What could be more important than finding the key to that?

  And also finding Nel. Not an hour passed when I didn’t think of her.

  A month ago, I had a letter from Monger, telling me she’d successfully taken over the medical practice opposite the church of St Benignus while continuing her work in the herb garden with the help of himself and Joan Tyrre.

  She seems happy. I tried to find some small solace in Joan’s prediction of my future marriages. Until shortly before dusk yesterday, when Blanche Parry arrived in Mortlake with the letter from Dudley and word of what it contained and the hellish and piteous scandal with my friend at its heart.

  I think I’ve said that his ailing wife, Amy, lived in the country.

  This was true, but not in any great style. Even after ten years, Dudley had kept postponing plans to set his wife up in a grand house, and she seemed to spend her time at the homes of friends or relatives, journeying from one to another.

  With Dudley at Windsor with the Queen, Amy has been found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs in Oxfordshire. Her neck is broken.

  Dudley maintains she’d been unwell for some time. What he’s never spoken of are the rumours that she was being poisoned, with at least one doctor refusing to attend her because he feared for his own life whether she was cured or dead.

  The staircase down which Amy is said to have fallen apparently is quite short. Dudley tells me in his letter that her bones were made thin and fragile by some malady in her breast.

  God help me, John, but I had no part in it. I swear she was ill. I swear I loved her and always will…

  The Queen, meanwhile, is said to be recovered from her nightmares.

  ‘What happens now?’ I said to Blanche, when we were alone.

  ‘She’s ordered full mourning at court while in a constant state of barely concealed merriment. She thinks they’ll marry. I have my doubts.’

  There’s to be an inquest. No danger that Dudley will be implicated… except in the minds of everyone in Europe.

  The inquest is also unlikely to hear of a story I heard not from Blanche but from my mother, who had it from a relative of Goodwife Faldo whose sister is maid to a minor lady-in-waiting.

  The crux of it is that, only days ago, the Queen told the Spanish ambassador that Dudley would soon be free to marry her as his wife was close to death.

  Nostradamus again?

  Given the alternative explanations of the Queen’s foresight, just for once I’d dearly like to think this was something from Michel’s mist of perceiving.

  Strange to think that under different circumstances, we might even have worked together to uncover the secrets of Arthur’s round table. Such matters are beyond religion and matters of state. I’ll make a point, now, of acquiring all the manuscripts of Leland I can afford.

  One day, if the boundaries of science are pushed that far, I may even be equipped to talk to Abbot Whiting.

  He was standing next to you for several moments.

  Not much use to a dull and bookish man who has not the sight.

  I fold Dudley’s letter and walk out of my mother’s house and into the orchard, where a hare lopes across my path.

  Notes and Credits

  Many elements in this story are part of recorded history – Dee’s background, his relations with Bonner and Dudley. Carew, Cowdray and Joan Tyrre all existed.

  And the Queen did visit Dee at Mortlake, several times, although she didn’t go into the house. Dee would often bring out items to demonstrate to her what he was working on.

  Three major biographies should be mentioned: John Dee, The World of an Elizabethan Magus, by Peter J. French, John Dee, Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I by Richard Deacon and, most recent and best, The Queen’s Conjurer by Benjamin Woolley.

  The surviving diaries of John Dee don’t really begin until many years after the events recorded in this book, but do offer many clues about his character, particularly his paranoia, often turning to anger, at other people’s attitudes to his work. Dee’s distaste for spectator bloodsport is more than hinted at (along with his fondness for cats) when he doesn’t exactly shed tears over the collapse of a stand at Paris Gardens, causing the death of a number of bear-baiting fans on a Sunday. ‘The godly expowned it as a due plage of God for the wickedness there usid and the Sabath day so profanely spent.’

  Some of Dee’s eccentric spelling has been modernised, as has some of his terminology.

  The incident of the wax doll, with Dee called in, is mentioned by some biographers, although they suggest it happened some years later than Dee’s account here. Given Walsingham’s talent for the clandestine, either it was covered up for years or there was an earlier case.

  The story of Joan Tyrre and the faerie folk is recorded in several volumes on the history of witchcraft, including Christina Hole’s authoritative Witchcraft in England and Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic. Joan lived in Taunton but Dee’s experience of her later activities in Glastonbury is hardly surprising.

  The full story of Lord Neville and the hiring of a psychic contract killer is wonderfully told in Alec Ryrie’s The Sorcerer’s Tale, perhaps the best book yet about magic and criminality in Tudor times.

  There’s little evidence that the concept of the Glastonbury Zodiac was floated by anybody before Kathryn Maltwood in the 1930s. However, the Dee connection is widely mentioned and given as fact in the late Richard Deacon’s 1968 biography, which quotes Dee’s observation that ‘the starres which agree with their reproductions on the ground do lye onlie on the celestial path of the Sonne, moon and planets, with notable exception of Orion and Hercules.… this is astrologie and astronomie carefullie and exactly married and measured in a scientific reconstruction of the heavens which shews that the ancients understoode all which today the lerned know to be factes.’

  It has to be said that this is seriously questioned by other biographers, including Benjamin Woolley, author of the excellent The Queen’s Conjuror , some even suggesting that Deacon made it up. But why would he? The great Glastonbury historian, Geoffrey Ashe, who remains unconvinced about the existence of the Zodiac, seems nevertheless to have been the first – in his book Avalonian Quest – to link the line in a Nostradamus quatrain:

  ‘In the land of the great heavenly temple’

  to the idea of a terrestrial Zodiac. The Nostradamian scholar John Hogue’s suggestion t
hat this refers to a temple of Apollo which once stood on the site of Westminster Abbey is a bit lame, especially as the phrasing suggests a location away from London. And, as Geoffrey Ashe notes, even Stonehenge was not known at the time as an astronomical temple or observatory.

  The best book I found on Nostradamus himself was Ian Wilson’s Nostradamus: the Evidence.

  John Leland: the facts, as given by Dee, are largely provable. Leland did provide information for Thomas Cromwell. He did return to Glastonbury after the Dissolution, with an over-ambitious project in mind. And he did go mad, almost certainly regretting the way his information had been used. It’s suggested he might have been overwhelmed by the enormity of the topographical task he’d taken on.

  Leland was also well into the hidden.

  Wool-sorters’ disease would later be called anthrax.

  Ignis sacer, the holy fire, is a recorded phenomenon, caused by the grain fungus later known as ergot, a natural hallucinogen used in the twentieth century during the development of LSD. It was known as St Anthony’s Fire after an eleventh-century religious order was founded, in the name of St Anthony, to help the large number of people in the south of France afflicted by convulsions, madness and that awful burning sensation.

  You can find much about this in Andy Roberts’s history of LSD, Albion Dreaming.

  Nicholas Culpeper, born in 1616, was the first in ‘modern’ England to write of the links between astrology and herbalism, though such beliefs were obviously common in Dee’s time. Culpeper’s Herbal is still available.

  For help with Elizabethan speech, my thanks to the master linguists, David Crystal and Ben Crystal, author of the fascinating Shakespeare on Toast. Also Jo Fletcher and Kathy McMullen. Sadly, I had to ignore much of the advice to help Dee meet the new level of clarity to which he aspired in telling this story. Because we’re unable to hear Elizabethan speech – which was unlikely to follow Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter – a strict adherence to Elizabethan written structures and terminology would only have made it sound stilted in ways it never would have been at the time.