The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  Yet…

  …a hallowed place. Even with the abbey going to ruin. There are some things you can’t destroy. Some things about a place that are in that place.

  I thought of Brother Michael, the mute who’d been with Fyche, and what jewels might be enclosed in his silent world. And I thought of Abbot Whiting, the benign old man who’d held on to his secrets, held out under torture, before a slow and savage death on the devil’s hill.

  It seemed to me that I’d done the right thing in not asking Fyche about the bones. The man to ask would have been the abbot himself.

  A shuddering breath came into me. Across the street, under a bloating moon, the corpse of the abbey lay restless and violated.

  It was past three in the morning. I felt a pang of anxiety about my mother and Catherine Meadows at the house in Mortlake and knelt and prayed for their safety.

  And then, knowing that if I went back to bed, my thoughts and dreams would once more go searching for the witch’s daughter, I shed my old brown robe and reached for my day apparel.

  XVIII

  The First Age of Light

  Three Spheres.

  The natural world, the celestial or astral world, and the supercelestial, wherein are angels.

  Though she’s never spoken of it to me, I’ve reason to believe that my mother once went with our neighbour, Goodwife Faldo, to visit a woman who kept a skrying crystal through which she professed to see the faces of the dead.

  This would have been not long after my father’s death, so I could understand why my mother had done it. But I knew, even then, that my ambition must needs be loftier, aiming for communion with the supercelestial, wherein lies truth and light and not deception.

  Therefore not ghosts. A ghost in the natural world is un natural. To call down a spirit of the departed into this world is necromancy. Even if it be the spirit of my poor tad.

  Or the shade of what once was a man of God?

  I heard again the voice of Bishop Bonner, the day he came into my prison cell, asking the question which would determine whether I lived or burned.

  Tell me, Dr Dee… do you believe that the soul is divine?

  Me telling him what I believed to be the truth:

  The soul is… not itself divine, but it can acquire divinity.

  And Bonner going, Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul acquire divinity?

  Extending my string, his little eyes tindered like the glowing tips of tapers.

  By prayer, I’d said. And learning. The Bible… and the sacred knowledge of the Jews.

  Getting it right, guessing what Bonner was after.

  But I’d omitted martyrdom.

  As in tortured, hanged, drawn and quartered.

  The night was cold and still but not quite freezing. Cloaked and shadowy, I entered the abbey grounds through the open gateway, finding the gates closed but unlocked. Never thinking it would be quite so easy to gain admission. But then, what was to steal now but the stones themselves?

  I’d read what I could find about the history and layout of the abbey. Enough to recognise the plundered remains of the abbot’s grand house and his distinctive kitchen, with its ornate pinnacle, pale as ice in the moonlight, and the Lady Chapel above where the bones of Arthur had been found.

  But I was shocked at the condition of the place. What once must have been well-scythed lawn was now a wilderness of bushes and black brambles whipping and ripping at my boots. Broken walls were rearing around me like an old carcass left to the weather and the crows, and I could even smell its decay, all moist and foetid.

  I stopped and looked around in the silvered pool of moonlight. An apartment had been built near here for the one and only visit of the Queen’s grandfather, Henry VII. When, of course, he would have seen the black marble tomb. What had he been told about it, this man who’d ridden into England through Wales, trailing the legend of the undying British king? Would he have seen this evidence of the great Arthur’s death as a threat to the credibility of the next Arthur, his son?

  But there’d been no indication of a future religious division then, and King Henry would never have thought to lay a finger on this or any other tomb. And, anyway, the new King Arthur… this was not to be. The prince had died before his father who had himself departed soon afterwards. Heavy with melancholy, it was said, and sick with the fear that his Tudor line might, through hubris, have brought down upon itself not dynastic glory but some old curse.

  As if he should have worried about hubris. If this comparatively frugal, cautious man had reason to think his line accursed, what could be said about the son who’d succeeded him in Arthur’s stead? Starting wars, building palace after palace – temples to himself – and then, to help pay for it all, directing the wreck and plunder of religious houses. Little wonder that the Queen feared the worst and thought herself haunted by evil.

  Haunted.

  I looked up in search of my far-off friends, the stars, finding Orion’s belt and then, prominent tonight, the seven-starred body of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, my hands instinctively reaching out to cup it like a cluster of jewels. While I was embraced by the skeletal frame of the abbey whose walls, honeyed by daylight, now came in weathered-bone shades of white and grey.

  It was not a welcoming embrace. I heard a movement and turned and saw small, moonlit orbs.

  Jesu…

  Ewes. Sheep grazed in here, now.

  I sat down on a low wall until my breath was regular again, imagining these walls aglow in the light of a thousand candles which would flicker in rhythm with the ethereal rise and fall of the Roman chant. It was this incandescence which I held in my head as I stood and, with right arm extended, inscribed, in the air and then on the ground before me, the sign of the pentagram.

  The old protection, but it needed more. Kneeling in the centre of the imagined pentagram, amongst broken stones at the entrance to the nave, I began to pray in a whisper, invoking the ancient shield of St Patrick’s Breastplate, which would almost certainly have been known to Arthur.

  ‘Christ be with me, Christ within me

  Christ behind me, Christ before me

  Christ beside me…’

  Breaking off, aghast, remembering how I’d held a bone purported to be part of Patrick’s actual breastplate.

  What was I doing?

  But the words went on inside my head, as if creating their own momentum.

  Natural magic.

  ‘I bind unto myself the Name

  The Strong Name of the Trinity

  By invocation of the same

  The Three in One and One in Three…’

  When I’d finished, keeping my eyes tight closed, I called back the words of those who’d known the abbot in life, in good times and then the worst of times.

  Cowdray: saw him lashed to a hurdle, dragged through the high street. Bumping along like a deer carcass. An old man, beaten, bruised and cut about like a low-born thief…

  Mistress Borrow: remember his wrinkly smile, and his eyes had a kindness. For a long time, I thought I’d seen the face of God.

  Better, yes. But more important…

  The poor man has little cause for rest.

  If he was still here and rested not, then this surely would not be the crime against God and State which was called necromancy.

  Which, I swear to you, I had never attempted. Not my direction. Smelled too much of grave-dirt and divination by the examination of entrails. Necromancy: the very word whispered death. As if the dead had no purpose but to serve the desires of the living.

  Afraid, then?

  I came to my feet. After all my years of study, I hadn’t expected to be afraid. Our grandparents crouched over their fires, the slits in their walls shuttered against the storms. Even in Tad’s day there were still those who believed a ghost was a walking corpse, an earthen being rising putrid from the grave.

  But now we live in the first age of light. Now we stand behind walls of glass like great lanterns and watch the bending of the trees and
the bursting of the skies. We stand, protected, and study, in warmth, the force and the violence of nature. And thus old shadows fall away, and the spirits of the dead are become flitting, half-seen moonbeams.

  I gripped cold stone, slick with slugtrails.

  Perchance I can help.

  Listen to me.

  Perchance we might help one another, you and I, Abbot, two men of learning divided only by the thin skein of mortality.

  Here, within my protective pentagram, upon the cold hearth of our faith, intoning words and phrases borrowed from the grimoires, rendered safe and wholesome, or so I must needs believe, by Christian prayer.

  Not conjuring. I won’t command, in the manner of the old sorcerers. I only request…

  ‘…humbly, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, if the Trinity doth so consent. Dear God, if it be your will that I might help your servant Abbot Whiting find peace… that I may bear a portion of his burden, in return for some small enlightenment, then let him appear to me now in… in a not unpleasant form.’

  A not unpleasant form. Essential, that. Always important in the grimoires to imagine how you would wish to view the spirit.

  State it firmly. A not unpleasant form. Say it strongly, then let it go. Imagination, when bound to our human will, can be a powerful tool for altering the course of events but, when left to its own devices, can cause havoc in the mind.

  So, do I feel, or do I imagine, the air growing cold around me? Should I, as a scientist, try to still such feelings, separating myself from them to stand aside, become an observer? Or allow these fancies to form around me, creating a numinous cloud into which a spirit, some watery essence of a man, might gradually become manifest?

  The conjurer at work.

  Dear God.

  You think me reckless?

  You who watch from behind your window glass. You who were not there that night, cold in the belly of the abbey.

  Slowly lifting my face, I placed him there, imprinting him upon my closed eyelids, marking that look of helpless sorrow on his face and his hands raised in formal, weary benediction.

  Who’s to say what are visions and what are signs of an oncoming madness?

  I must have been close to the edge of a kind of madness when, in a instant of heart-lurch, I knew that I was not alone.

  Knew? How did I know? How? Did I hear then movement, a footfall among the riffling of last winter’s crispen leaves, the slow beat of owl wings?

  It was none of that. None of anything. Only an absence, a flatness, a deadness, a not-hearing. A void which spoke of the dreadful.

  I’m trying, God help me, to explain this. Without diagrams or arcane symbols. To evoke the crawling fear it awoke in me as, with a last, slack-lipped prayer, wildly slashing another pentagram in the air before me, I began moving, open-eyed now, along the moon-washed, rubbled nave towards the chancel.

  Towards what was there.

  XIX

  Beyond Normal

  Cowdray came back with me to the abbey.

  I’d battered every door in the George Inn until I’d found the chamber where he lay – with one of the kitchen maids, I believe. Now he stood on the edge of the chancel and shivered and looked again at what was there and shivered again. Crossing himself, I noticed, before turning away, almost in anger.

  ‘I’ll send a boy for Sir Edmund Fyche. And constables. There should be a hue and cry.’

  ‘No… wait.’

  A little light. A single lantern, burning in the vastness.

  Dear God, dear God, dear God…

  ‘Doctor, this is…’ Moonlight deepening the furrows in Cowdray’s face, turning them black. ‘’Tis beyond normal, man.’

  ‘What’s normal?’ I was barely in control. ‘How are men usually killed here?’

  ‘In hot blood. And strong drink.’ His voice flat. ‘Never like this.’

  The man who lay dead had arms spread wide, like to Our Saviour on his cross. Shadows flucting like the wings of angels on the walls above and to the sides.

  ‘I must needs consult my colleague,’ I said. ‘Master Roberts.’

  ‘He’s ill.’

  ‘Yes, and needs sleep, however-’

  ‘He doesn’t need this, ’ Cowdray said. ‘God’s word…’

  ‘No.’

  I’ve lived through violent times, seen men executed in divers gruesome ways but nothing, since the burning of Barthlet Green, so heartsick close. I turned again to face it, swallowing bile and self-loathing, the lantern held high.

  Like something sanctified, the dead man lay pointing east, towards where the high altar would have stood and the tomb of black marble.

  The remains of a candle were wedged in his mouth, his tallowed lips obscenely around its stem. Throwing a hand to my mouth and nose, for now I could smell it: cold fat and shit. The candle must have been lit, its melting making a ruined deathmask of the face. And, on the rim of its fading rays, was also displayed what had been done, dear God, to the chest.

  The body raided, organs laid out glistening in a sludge of black blood like a breakfast of sweetmeats among the stones. I bent over and vomited again, and saw, for the first time, what lay in the left hand.

  ‘Oh Christ, Cowdray…’

  Dudley used to say that Martin Lythgoe had been a part of his household since his boyhood. I did not know him well but thought him a fine man. A good man.

  ‘This town’s starting to stink to hell,’ Cowdray said with venom. ‘Come away, Doctor.’

  But I was making myself look again, to confirm that in poor Martin’s left hand lay what even I – no anatomist, a doctor only by title – knew to be his unbeating heart.

  Then following Cowdray back to the gatehouse, the abbey rearing around us, like nothing so much, in this sour dawn, as the open-ribbed skeleton of a great ox.

  ‘You’re right.’ I said. ‘You’d better send for him.’

  Lanterns aplenty now. The last of the night alight and the abbey looking, perversely, as if it were made active again. I felt confused and dislocated, the weariness of a sleepless night descending damply around me as I watched Fyche marking the scene from his horse and then dismounting and strolling over, unhurried.

  ‘This is the corpse of your servant, Dr John?’

  He’d ridden in with three constables and the first lines of dawn in the sky. Leather jerkin and riding boots. He picked up a lantern to light my face, as if he might see guilt written upon it. And maybe he would.

  ‘Interesting that you should be the one to find him, Dr John. Why exactly were you in the abbey, on the wrong side of midnight?’

  ‘I…’ Christ, I hadn’t even thought to invent a reason. ‘I couldn’t sleep. Seemed like a good, quiet time to inspect the ruins. When there was noone about.’

  ‘Except the dead. You’re not yourself afeared of the walking dead, then, Doctor?’

  ‘I have a job to do.’

  How unlikely all of this was now sounding.

  ‘For were you not a servant of the Crown,’ Fyche said, ‘I might have assumed you’d gone there to steal.’

  ‘Steal what?’

  ‘Or even to kill,’ Fyche said. ‘ If you were not supposed to be in the Queen’s employ.’

  I said nothing. Two constables patrolled the extent of the nave with their swinging lanterns.

  ‘I regret this, Dr John, but I think it’s time for me to inspect your documents of authority. Don’t you?’

  ‘I’ll fetch them.’

  My letter of authority was not from Cecil himself, which might have caused unnecessary alert, but it carried the necessary seal. I made to walk away, but Fyche put out an arm.

  ‘Not now – I’ve more questions. When did you last see this man alive?’

  ‘I… last afternoon. Not long before you and I met upon the tor.’

  ‘You and the witch? He was with you and the witch?’ ‘ I’d sent him back to attend to his master.’

  ‘I thought you told me you were his master.’

  ‘I
spoke loosely. In strictest truth, he’s in the employ of my… of Master Roberts.’

  ‘The man who lies sick. But, despite his doctor – not yet dead.’

  ‘Improving,’ I said.

  ‘Unlike this wretched man.’ Fyche turned to look down at Martin Lythgoe. ‘The manner of whose death- how would you describe it?’

  ‘Foul and unjust.’

  The rising stench was worse, but Fyche made no attempt to move away. He removed his hat, bent to Martin’s plundered body.

  ‘Yet efficiently accomplished. Split from throat to groin. A butcher’s tools, would you say?’

  ‘I’m a clerk, not a coroner.’

  ‘Or an axe to split the ribs. Look…’

  Didn’t want to look. Looked up instead, to where one of the nave’s own ribs had collapsed in upon itself, another smashed corpse.

  ‘Both lungs most carefully detached,’ Fyche said. ‘And the long entrails of the guts – do you see? – wound tightly around one arm, like to a coiled serpent.’

  Through the hole in the roof, the cold sky was lit by bright Venus, the daybreak planet.

  ‘And the heart placed, like a sceptre, in the left hand. Reasonable, therefore, to assume that the killer would be plentifully daubed with gore. So, what did happen to this man?’

  ‘Sir Edmund, we can fully see what happened to him, I just can’t tell you why. He was a groom. He talked more to horses than men. A gentle man, a harmless man…’

  ‘But the manner of his killing…?’

  ‘It has… an element of ritual.’

  Fyche nodded, pricks of white in his half-grown beard. He’d wanted me to say it.

  ‘And an element of sacrilege, also,’ I said. ‘If you accept that the abbey remains sacred.’

  ‘Oh, it’s still sacred,’ Fyche said. ‘The question is, to whom?’

  ‘You see the hand of Satan everywhere, don’t you, Fyche?’ I maybe should not have spoken thus, but I was tired. ‘Yes, yes,’ I mumbled wearily, ‘cry mercy. If this isn’t satanic evil, I know not what is.’

  Feeling the heat of his lantern, now, as he leaned close.