The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘But underneath it all,’ Dudley said wearily, ‘he’s a sound enough man. A solid Protestant.’

  He was hunched hard over the fire now. His face looked narrow and starved – this emphasised by the selfless butchery of his moustache.

  ‘From what my father told me of Carew,’ I said, ‘I’d thought him little more than a mercenary. Perhaps you’re right, but it’ll still be easier for us to function without him. What’s the plan for the morrow?’

  ‘Kicking arses can sometimes cut a few corners. However… I think we’d best begin by surveying what’s left of the abbey. Then, if there’s a tame ex-monk…?’

  ‘The farrier.’

  ‘Yes. Talk to him.’ Dudley shivered. ‘I hope the bugger’s put bricks in our beds. He looked at me. ‘What are you thinking, John?’

  It was the first time since leaving London that we’d had a chance to talk, and I’d hoped to approach with him the problem of Elizabeth and her mother and the hares. Maybe tomorrow.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘I’m thinking, what if this is a wild goose chase? What if the bones are already in London? What if they were taken, on specific instruction, by Cromwell’s people, at the time of the Dissolution?’

  ‘We’d know. Or at least Cecil would know.’

  ‘Or if they were simply destroyed?’

  ‘That’s more of a possibility. To Fat Harry, they might just have represented some old Plantagenet scheme to demolish the myth of an immortal Welsh hero. Harry might even have seen it as symbolically grinding up any final hopes of a Plantagenet return to the throne. I…’ Dudley drew a hand across his forehead, then looked at the sweat on it. ‘I don’t know, John, I feel… I was seized by the romance of it – the Isle of Avalon, the Grail Quest. But when you see what a shithole the place is…’

  ‘It’ll look better in the morning.’

  ‘And now my throat’s gone dry and my head aches. All I need’s a cold. You were right. We should’ve stopped at an inn until the storm was over. That bloody Carew with his harder-than-thou blether.’

  ‘Get some sleep,’ I said.

  Because the inn had been empty, we were able to have separate chambers on the upstairs floor, while the attendants were accommodated below. Mine had a ruined four-post bed with one post hanging loose, all acreak, and the drapes so dense with dust that I dragged them down. Close drapery around a bed can be suffocating when you awake in the night from some smoky dream.

  I’d brought a few books with me, in my bag, and laid them out on the board before the window – some stained glass in it, I noticed, but it was only a murk in the light from my single candle.

  Kneeling before the window, I asked for God’s blessing for our mission, then prayed for mother’s welfare. Scarce remembered climbing into the bed, dragging the pulled-down drapes across it for more warmth. Hadn’t been given a hot brick.

  What I next remembered seemed more in the nature of a dream.

  Ever responsive to noises in the night, I must have slept no more than an hour when there came the creaking of a door.

  Lay for a moment listening, aware of slow footsteps on the stairs, but it was the sliding of bolts that brought me out of bed and across to the window, clutching the drapes around me, for the room had no fire and was shockingly cold now.

  The window was next to the inn sign, which bore the red cross of St George, drained to grey by the night. Below me I saw the outline of a man stepping down from the cobbles to the mud. In the thin moonlight, I saw him stand for a moment, leaning back, hands pushing against the bottom of his spine.

  Dudley?

  On the other side of the street was the abbey wall; beyond it, those great, lonely fingers of stone. After a while, he began to walk along the street, close to the wall until he vanished into shadow. The man of action who, sleeping alone, was restless.

  …a man who brings to his Queen such an irrefutable symbol of her royal heritage… something which bestows upon her monarchy’s most mystical aura. That man… he may expect his reward.

  My own reward would be the discovery of any ancient books quietly removed from the abbey and hidden away. Books that Leland had seen, leaving him in a condition of awe and stupor. But it was unlikely they’d be secreted within the precincts of the abbey itself.

  So I didn’t spend long wondering if I should go down and join Dudley. He didn’t need me, and I was cold and aching from the ride. John Dee, the conjurer, returned to his musty blankets.

  Ever the observer, separated from life by the screen of his own learning.

  It was probably fatigue and aching that turned the sudden dread I felt into something as real as another person in my bedchamber.

  XI

  Delirium

  It was light when I awoke to heavy footsteps and a banging on my door. Before I could speak, it had been thrown wide and Dudley’s attendant, Martin Lythgoe, stood there, his wide face creased with anxiety.

  ‘Doctor,’ he said. ‘Can tha come at once. Me master…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Took severely ill, sir.’

  Me rolling out of bed, forgetting how high it was and stumbling foolishly to my knees. Looking up at the straw-haired Martin Lythgoe from the floorboards.

  ‘Ill?’

  ‘A fever. Sweats and moans and rolls in his bed.’

  Should not have been shocked. Had it not been obvious last night that something was coming?

  ‘Have you sent for a doctor?’

  ‘But I thought thee…’

  He stood looking at me, hands on his hips, like if I was not a healer what was the use of me?

  ‘No.’ Groping for my old brown robe. ‘I’m not… that is, my doctorate’s…’

  It was in law, if you must know, another of the pools I’d paddled in. I sighed.

  ‘I’m coming now… ’

  The door of Dudley’s chamber was directly opposite mine across the narrow landing. A bigger room with a bigger window and more stained glass oozing reds and purples.

  He was not lying in his bed but sitting hunched on the edge of it, the curtains thrown back. Wrapped in blankets like a sweating horse, hair matted to his forehead.

  ‘John.’

  Hardly more than a sigh. The piss-pot was on the boards at his feet. A weighty shiver wracked his body, and the eyes turned to me were marbled with fear.

  ‘Lie down,’ I said.

  ‘John, get Lythgoe to prepare the horses. If I’m to die, I’m buggered if it’s going to happen here.’

  ‘You don’t need a horse. You’re not going anywhere, Robbie, least of all to the next-’

  I stepped back. Of a sudden, he’d bent over the empty piss-pot, hands either side of his head, retched. Looked up betwixt his fingers.

  ‘God’s bollocks, John… this task of ours – cursed, or what?’

  Rolling back on to his pillow, his back arched, face full-oiled with sweat. Martin Lythgoe throwing mute pleas at me from the doorway. Never, I would guess, having seen his famously elegant master so vulnerable.

  And God help me I knew not where to start.

  Born under Cancer, Dudley, like me – a water sign and thus ruled by the moon. If I’d had my charts and the necessary hours to spare, I’d no doubt be able to calcule how the planetary aspects might be affecting the organs of his body and the balance of its humours. And if I’d had Jack Simm here, we might, betwixt us, have come up with some remedy. Not for the first time I wished I was a doctor of physic.

  ‘When did this begin?’

  ‘Whuh…?’

  ‘I saw you go outside last night.’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep.’ Dudley was struggling up again, as if he might overcome this malady through strength of will. ‘Nose blocked, couldn’t breathe. Thought just a head cold. Hadda… gessome air.’

  Which would have made it worse, chilled his blood.

  ‘This a plague town, John? Might as well tell me. Has the air of it, no question.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t.’

  ‘Just m
e, then, is it?’

  ‘Lie down.’

  ‘John, that place is… wretched and…’

  ‘What place?’

  ‘…colder than the night. Colder than all the night.’

  A shiver coursing through him again, like a bolt of wild lightning, his head nodding, teeth clenched as he hugged himself under the blankets, moisture shining on his flushed cheeks.

  Cowdray, the innkeeper, came in with a wooden tray bearing a jug and a cup.

  ‘Cider. Ain’t much that good cider don’t help.’

  Me nodding thanks as Cowdray lowered the tray to a board, next to the ewer of water, backing swiftly away into the doorway – understandable enough: who knew what contagion a Londoner might have brought out of his filthy, overcrowded city?

  ‘Awful dreams, John.’ Dudley pulling his hands from the blankets to clutch at his head. ‘ Awful bloody dreams.’

  ‘Dreams mean nothing,’ I said.

  Knowing that to be untrue, although I believe that the meaning of dreams is oft-times obscured.

  ‘If dreams they were,’ Dudley said.

  ‘It’s the fever.’ I turned to Cowdray. ‘Is there a doctor here?’

  ‘Used to be,’ Cowdray said, ‘but he died.’

  Dudley laughed sourly into his hands.

  ‘There’s a couple of them in Wells, for the cathedral,’ Cowdray said. ‘Proper doctors. One trained in London. Long cloak, one of them pointy masks and all. I could get one of my boys to ride over. ’Twould… cost you a bit, mind.’

  ‘Cost isn’t important.’ I looked hard at him. ‘But time is. Who do you go to?’

  ‘I tries not to get ill, sir.’

  ‘You know what I’m asking.’

  His lips tightened. Men from London, he’d be thinking. Who from London could you trust not to have you arrested for the use of alternative healing by witchcraft?

  ‘Sir Peter Carew,’ I said. ‘Is he…?’

  ‘Gone. Left over an hour ago with his men. Before we knew about Master Roberts.’

  ‘Good. Help me. You wouldn’t send all the way to Wells, if someone in your family were sick.’

  He made no reply. I poured some of the cider into the cup and gave it a sniff.

  ‘Perhaps you could water this down a little. He’s delirious enough already. That’s if your water is drinkable.’

  Cowdray accepted the jug, stood for a moment looking into the clouded ferment.

  ‘There’s a feller we go to. Herbalist and surgeon.’

  ‘Good?’

  ‘We reckon so.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Up by St Benignus. Two minutes’ walk?’

  ‘What are we waiting for, then?’

  Well, of course, it would be the local cunning man.

  The kind of hedge-healer possessed of an ancestral knowledge of plants and herbs. The kind of practitioner of whom, in London, Jack Simm had been a touch afeared lest he became known as one. Afeared because of the persecution urged upon such people by the beak-nosed piss-sniffers with papers from the Royal College of Physicians.

  It would be a safer life, however, for a cunning man out here, where there’d be fewer registered doctors. And also fewer criminals and foreigners to degrade the healing crafts with so-called magical powders ground from stones and animal bones.

  I stayed with Dudley, having asked Martin Lythgoe to go with Cowdray to this healer, describe the symptoms and give him whatever money he demanded to come at once. At least I knew enough from my own studies, my astrology and my work with Jack to be able to assess, to some extent, the cunning man’s abilities.

  ‘Carew?’

  Dudley shifting in his bed, turning hunted eyes to me and trying to rise.

  ‘Gone.’ I pushed him gently back. ‘Gone to Exeter.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that. He’d think me weak as a woman.’

  He began to cough. He’d left most of the watered cider, saying it made him feel sick.

  ‘Women are not all weak, Robbie,’ I said. ‘I’d expect that you, of all people…’

  ‘I know it.’ He rolled onto his side, his face mottled as a cockerel’s in the light from the stained glass. ‘I do know it. Jesu, do I know it. But tell me… you tell me this… how’s it possible for someone to rule a country well and keep the ways of a woman?’

  ‘It might help if there’s a good man to share the burdens of power.’

  I meant Cecil, but Dudley almost cried out.

  ‘Should’ve been me…’ His eyes full of hot tears. ‘Would’ve been so right. Everything my father died for, John, and if I should die this hour…’

  ‘Jesu, you’re not-’

  He raised a limp hand to forestall me, then closed his eyes and took in a hollow breath. Shut his mouth and tried to swallow, but his throat must have been too dry, and when his eyes flickered open again they were empty, defeated.

  ‘Saw it coming.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Death coming for me. I’d not expected it so soon, but God knows I deserve no better.’

  ‘So,’ I said upon a sigh, ‘what does death look like?’

  ‘Old man. A sad old man.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Both feet above the ground, and looking down on me with a terrible pity. And the white moon shining through him. The whiteness aglow in his eyes. And cold, John. So very, very… cold.’

  Delirium.

  ‘And he knew, God help me, he knew what I am. ’

  Dudley’s hands clutching the blankets, knuckles white as bone. I heard children shouting in the street.

  ‘Fever dream, Robbie.’

  ‘Could see through him.’ Dudley gazing, blank-eyed at the beams. ‘And he… he knew.’ Teeth bared now, the breath sucked through them. ‘John, I’m no more than a piece of shit.’

  ‘Don’t-’

  ‘No! I need to tell you. Make my confession.’ His head turning towards me. ‘You’re an ordained man, are you not, John?’

  ‘No!’ I almost leapt back from the bed. ‘No, no… ’

  ‘Bonner’s chaplain? Rector of… somewhere.’

  ‘No…’ Wiping my hands across the air before me. ‘I swore what was necessary to obtain the income from the rectorate of Upton. I do not cure souls, so don’t you fucking tell me anything.’

  ‘God help me, but she’s not been well of late.’

  She?

  Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ‘Who?’ I whispered.

  For some moments he was silent, lying in the sun-reddened glow of the stained glass like an effigy upon a tomb.

  Time passed. And then the words were drifting out of him, as if they were not his words but those of some maleficent spirit that lived within him, poisoning his thoughts.

  ‘Found myself half wishing that she were… gone from my life.’

  Raising himself on an elbow, staring past me as though we were not alone in the room.

  ‘No such thing as a half-wish, is there?’ Dudley smiling a sick smile conveying private agony. ‘I was wishing… that she might be gone…’

  ‘Robbie.’

  ‘…in the night. Might quietly succumb, in the deep hours before dawn, to some swift sickness.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘With no pain. I could never wish her pain.’

  I looked away. Wishing not to be here. Wishing not to know what he meant. Tightening inside, for I knew that he’d wed Amy Robsart, a squire’s daughter, at the age of eighteen when he would have thought he had no chance of winning Elizabeth.

  But now he was closer than ever to Elizabeth, scandalously close, so close that she’d showered him with gifts and land, and Amy, meanwhile…

  Amy lived in the country.

  ‘He knew,’ Dudley whispered. ‘I could tell the old man knew.’

  ‘Your father? Your father’s shade came to you in a dream?’

  ‘Not my father,’ Dudley said. ‘And not a dream. I may be fevered, but I know what is… not a dream.’

&nb
sp; His head sinking to the pillow as if all loaded with lead. I felt that he’d gone to the abbey last night in search of some kind of absolution and found… no comfort. Maybe the reverse.

  ‘Instead, it’s me who’ll die,’ he said. ‘And not in the dark hours. Here in the full light, so that all may see.’ His breathing had become shallow. ‘That all may see.’

  ‘The doctor’s on his way,’ I said, numbed.

  XII

  Watchtower

  Moments later, with the strengthening sun now risen over the coloured glass and into the clear, leaded panes, Robert Dudley slipped into a merciful sleep.

  Merciful, at least, to me.

  I keep telling you, I’m no good with these matters. A quiet man, a scholar. A mathematician and an astronomer, who understands not the geometry of love, nor could think to chart the erratic trajectory of desire. And when that desire is further powered by worldly ambition, then God help us all.

  I moved away from the thickening sickbed miasma, walking towards the sun.

  Thinking how fever caused confusion and sickness skewed the senses. How a man who could face, with courage, an enemy he could see might become like to a frightened child when the enemy was within himself.

  And who had not, in times of anguish, found the foulest of ideas snaking into his thoughts?

  But now Dudley’s unguarded thoughts were locked into my thoughts. And his momentary showing of an inner guilt behind the usual arrogance and the banter would not quickly be erased from my memory. Nor would the implications of what he’d told me.

  It was well known that he aspired to the Privy Council, and the word from court was that he would soon be receiving a title well beyond Master of the Horse. Found myself recalling one particular day when I was first awakening in him what would become a real interest in astronomy. I want to go there, Dr Dee, he’d said, aged thirteen or so – me about twenty-one. I want to be among the stars.

  What if he had looked into the summoning eyes of death last night?

  What if he died?

  I gripped the window sill.

  And what if he did not die? When he was over this sickness, should I remind him of what he’d said this morning from the dark pool of his delirium?