The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘Your blind arrogance leaves me breathless,’ Dudley said.

  ‘Most times, however, it’s still trickery, for monetary gain.’

  And yet…

  I bit down on my lower lip, all too aware of the widespread fear and awe engendered by the prophecy apparently fulfilled at a jousting tournament held to celebrate the marriage of the French King’s daughter to Philip II of Spain.

  Lest you forget… the King, though indeed in his forty-first year, had been far fitter than our own King Harry at that age and had elected to take a primary role in the jousting on that fateful day – the 30th day of June, 1556.

  The reason we had a full account of what happened was the presence at the jousting of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the Queen’s envoy to Paris. Throckmorton had a good seat. He’d seen the lance hit Henri’s helm, watched it break, causing the splinters that would pierce the King’s eye and enter his brain. Had seen him helped from his horse and stripped of his armour. Reporting, at first, that the wound was not as severe as had been feared – unaware of the French surgeons frantically dissecting the heads of newly executed criminals to try to work out how the splinters might safely be removed.

  All to no avail. By the second week of July the King of France lay dead in his darkened chamber, and soon the whole of Europe knew of the power of prophecy through astrology.

  ‘You don’t believe that prophecy was ever made, do you?’ Dudley said.

  ‘It’s too exact for my liking. But leaving that aside, is this -’ tapping Blanche’s letter – ‘the first you’ve heard of a prediction linking Arthur with Anne Boleyn?’

  ‘How sure are you that Morgan le Fay’s even supposed to represent Anne Boleyn?’

  He would, of course, have read only Malory, who likes to play down the role of the enchantress Morgan in Arthur’s story.

  ‘I think this is Blanche’s own coded reference.’

  Le Fay. Though sometimes portrayed as Arthur’s half-sister, in the earlier tellings she’s at least a partly supernatural being. And certainly a witch.

  ‘An evil influence?’ Dudley said. ‘I was never sure.’

  ‘Not wholly. It’s true she’s accused of trying to wreck the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere. She’s not trustworthy by human standards, causes mischief.’

  ‘Well, that’s Anne, certainly.’

  ‘However, in the story of Arthur – the earlier tales – Morgan’s role seems to be to test the faith and courage of the knights of the round table. And, in the end, all is reconciled, for she’s one of the ladies who accompanies the King on that last dolorous voyage to Avalon. Which brings us to the essence of this prophecy… that if what remains of Arthur is returned to Avalon…’

  ‘Then the Queen will have no more trouble from the witch.’

  ‘I thought at first that it might be nonsense, pamphlet trivia. Yet it’s being informed by a knowledge of the oldest accounts of Arthur… It could, when you think about it, be the reason we’re here. Or a big part of it.’

  He was silent for just a moment too long.

  Saying, at last, ‘How do you know Blanche didn’t make it up?’

  ‘Credit me at least with a knowledge of my cousin. Look, even if it were mischievously cobbled together to upset the Queen, it was done by someone who knew what he was about. And so…’ I tried to catch Dudley’s eye, but he was turned away. ‘As a man about court, have you heard of other prophecies of this nature?’

  ‘No.’

  His head still turned to the wall as if he found the candle too bright. He knew something. He was not a duplicitous man – not with me, anyway – so I reasoned that his only cause for concealment would be the light it might throw upon his own relations with the Queen.

  ‘Or any other matter which might disturb the Queen’s rest?’ I said. ‘Because if anyone-’

  ‘You know what it’s like at court.’ Dudley flipped over a hand. ‘Rumours coming from all directions. Rumours of new plots to put the Queen of Scots on the English throne. Even the story going round that Mary’s reign was founded on a lie because Edward’s not dead.’

  I nodded. I’d heard that one, too, but it was predictable – either a yearning for the return of a powerfully adult Edward or a hint that it was time Elizabeth found herself a man to rule the country. To the end of her reign she’d have the burden of proving that a woman on the throne of England was actually the will of God.

  I kept up the pressure, quoting again from the letter.

  ‘ Her nights tormented…’

  Thunder rattled the panes. Dudley’s body pulsed under the sheet. He rolled over to face me.

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘What are you trying to avoid saying?’

  ‘I’m sick,’ he said, with a childish pathos. ‘What the hell’s got into you, John? You’re a mild man, a man of books. Why don’t you piss off and read one?’

  I stood up and looked down on him, stripped of his finery and his waxed moustache, his hair all matted.

  ‘I have to know this, Robbie. We must needs fathom why we’re really here.’

  He sat up, reached for the pitcher of water and the mug. The jug was too heavy for him and water spilled. I took the jug and poured him some, but he did no more than wet his lips. The thunder was like far-off war drums and, at the same time, Dudley spoke.

  ‘There was a night… three weeks ago… four, maybe. I was summoned to court at Richmond. A message brought to me, in private, by someone we both know.’

  Maybe Blanche.

  ‘I was admitted to the Queen’s chamber, past midnight and all her ladies had been sent away, and I found her… distressed. In need of comfort.’

  ‘Comfort,’ I said.

  ‘And we talked. Long into the night. Talked. ’

  Hmm. I waited, guessing I’d be the first person ever to hear this and probably the last.

  ‘Bess was… much disturbed, you might say, by forecasts of her impending death.’

  ‘How? By whom?’

  ‘God knows. Omens and portents. Hardly the first. Hardly the thirty- first, but she demands to be told about all of them. Nothing must be hidden. All manner of letters and writings are put before her every day. This one was from a prophetic pamphlet found on the streets – treasonous drivel. She’d caught two of her ladies whispering about it.’

  I felt an unease.

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘That her death would occur… I know not when exactly… But that she need not worry, for she’d not be alone but would be guided through the veil. That she who’d brought her into the world would watch her out of it.’

  ‘Those words?’

  ‘Something like that. That Anne would watch her out of it. Watch her all the way to…’

  ‘Hell?’

  A hush. A fluttering of lightning on the wall.

  ‘Widely known,’ Dudley said, ‘that the ghost of Anne Boleyn haunts the Tower.’

  No thunder came to smash the silence. Dudley swallowed.

  ‘You can imagine what happened. The very next night, she has a dream. A vivid dream. The kind of dream where you dream of being asleep in your own bed and then you awaken and…’

  ‘Anne?’

  ‘Oh God, yes. Wearing that cute little smile from the portrait, and there’s a thin circle of dried blood around her neck. As if she’s decently popped her head back on, for the visit.’

  I nodded. The images of myth full formed: Anne Boleyn smiling with a foxy serenity on the edge of the abyss. The mouth in the severed head, held up, still forming words. It took little imagination to envision the effects of the merest suggestion that the wilful Anne was there, in the shadows of the night, ready to beckon her daughter over death’s threshold.

  ‘Wouldn’t sleep alone in her chamber for several nights after that,’ Dudley said. ‘There’d be various ladies in attendance through till dawn, and extra candles alight.’

  ‘It continued?’

  ‘Happened twice more.’

  ‘And
did this… did Anne speak?’

  Dudley shook his head, drank more water.

  ‘Bess asked me if I thought she should summon John Dee to cast around her bed a protective circle which… which her mother couldn’t enter. I said, well, why not?’

  ‘Thank you for your confidence.’

  ‘However, it seems that someone else swiftly advised her against it. The Archbishop of Canterbury was privately summoned instead, to do what he could.’

  ‘Parker?’

  ‘Bless her bedchamber, anyway.’

  Didn’t ask if that had worked. I leaned into the candlelight. ‘So this prophecy of the Queen’s death… were any attempts made to trace its origins?’

  ‘What’s the point? You know what these bastards are like. Some small printing shop in a cellar deep into Southwark. There was a name at the bottom, from the Bible. Some prophet – Elijah or Elisha or…’

  At least it wasn’t Dee. But still this worried me. I’d already been brought within singeing distance of the stake as a result of one royal horoscope.

  ‘Look,’ Dudley said, ‘her mother… you need to understand this is not something new. When we were in the Tower, as children, she’d oft-times talk of… I mean, what would you expect in the place where your father had your mother’s head sliced off? She was growing up into a world heavy with omens and foreboding and the ever-presence of what you might call… sudden death.’

  The keening of the axe in the air. Or in Anne’s case, thanks to Harry’s mercy, a sword wielded by a master.

  ‘All right, let’s examine this,’ I said. ‘Anne… Morgan. Two women said to be witches who’ve caused havoc. An undying king, whose aura of sacred magic was harnessed to the Tudor cause…’

  ‘Until this holy heritage was taken apart by Harry’s un holy desire for Anne.’

  ‘By whom he’d insist, when it suited him later, that he’d been bewitched. Just as Arthur and his knights were bedevilled by Morgan le Fay.’

  I was chilled at how neatly it fitted together. ‘If the Queen fears the curse of her own immediate ancestry, as the child of a witch and a monster… and the suggestion is made that the only way it can be repaired…’

  ‘If we follow this road,’ Dudley said, ‘then the bones, when we find them, should stay here in Avalon. That is, not go to London, as Cecil prefers. And the Queen should come here, as did Edward I, to watch them re-entombed… in glory.’

  ‘In an abbey rebuilt at crippling expense?’

  A barrel of worms. The window paled with lightning.

  ‘I tell you, John, I’m out of here tomorrow,’ Dudley said.

  ‘The town?’

  ‘Out of this bed. I want those fucking bones. And when we find them, we don’t immediately send word to Cecil, right?’

  ‘Robbie, he’s your friend, he’s been a friend of your family for-’

  ‘Be not naive. He has his own script; he wants the right marriage . And it won’t be an Englishman. Cecil believes that the only worthwhile royal marriage is a political marriage.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It varies. I know for a fact he’s been tossing around the idea of a union to unite us with Scotland – finally break France’s hold through Mary Stuart. And if… if, when he finds the right match, the chosen foreigner finds out that his virgin queen is not…’

  Dudley fell back, coughing. The thunder rolled closer. The bedside candle went out.

  …not a virgin. A shiver sped through me. ‘I think we’ve talked too much,’ I said. ‘Get some sleep, rest your throat.’

  I blew out the other candle and closed the door on Dudley, shaken. Pacing the landing, lighting a tallow candle in the sconce there.

  So much I hadn’t told him. How, for example, would he have reacted to the knowledge that at least two people in this town knew exactly who I was, and that one of them was the woman now sought by Fyche in connection with the murder of Martin Lythgoe?

  Who, in this situation, could we trust? How would Dudley feel about the farrier, who seemed to me an honest, well-intentioned man?

  But then what did I know? What did I know about the life outside of books?

  I went into my chamber and sat at the foot of the dusty bed in the darkness and wondered whether I hadn’t made a terrible mistake in giving an answer to Monger’s simple question.

  Madness. Night thoughts.

  Why, truly, are you here, Dr Dee?

  A smitter of rain on the window, and then it stopped and I thought of what Monger had said when I’d told him what we sought.

  The lead went first from the roof and then the glass from the windows. The marble tomb? It just disappeared.

  All of it? At once?

  I’ve heard the old cross has been seen – the one from the original grave – but I know not where it is now. I don’t think any of us cared one way or the other. They’d cut out our heart. Lesser abbeys were kept on as cathedrals, but we were too close to Wells. Would be better the abbey had never been here than we’re left with an open wound.

  I’d asked him if it was true that Abbot Whiting had been tortured because it was thought he was concealing the famous eucharistic vessel of the Last Supper, the Holy Grail. I’d asked Monger if he believed it yet existed.

  That depends on how you define existence. It may well have existed as a vessel, of metal or pottery or wood. May well have existed here. But it might also have a spiritual life, a holy symbol, experienced only in visions.

  Those visions again. Monger had shaken his head in a weary bewilderment.

  Some say this is the holiest place in these islands, while to others it’s just a tawdry town with a history of fraud and deception and the monks at the rotten core of it.

  In the old days, Monger said, there had been whisperings, even amongst the monks, of things hidden, certain wonders pre-dating Christianity. Rumours still passed around by the town’s ragbag of half-pagan mystics… although they were in thrall to an essentially different Arthur, representing the magical legacy of the old Celtic tribes and Druids.

  What had we stumbled into?

  I undressed swiftly, because of the cold, threw on my robe over my night shirt, sat on the edge of the bed. Outside, the thunder crawled like a black beast on the hills, and I could not but think of Joan Tyrre and her dreams of Gwyn ap Nudd under his spiked hill.

  A rustling now in the chamber. Rats, most likely. There were always rats. I thought, inevitably, of Queen Elizabeth, her bedchamber red-hued from the fire. Afraid to sleep alone lest she awake under the dark glower of Anne Boleyn, the talking head with its blood-rimed neck.

  Jesu… stop this.

  Sliding off the bed, scrabbling on the board for a candle to light from the sconce on the landing. I would bring out my few books and study until the dawn came or sleep overcame me, or…

  There was a shadow before the window.

  I twisted urgently away from the board, my hand going to my mouth.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  Could see it seated by the window in the greyness.

  XXVII

  A Sister of Venus

  ‘I’d thought,’ she said, ‘to bare my breast.’

  A candle fell on to its side.

  The storm prowled closer, the beast at the door. All fumble-fingered, I caught the candle before it could roll from the board and hurriedly relit it from the flame of another. Three were alight now, including the one from the sconce on the landing, all in a bunch so that their flames mingled in a spiral of fire.

  ‘It having occurred to me,’ she said delicately from the chair by the window, ‘that you might wish to be sure I was not in possession of such a thing as a third nipple.’

  She wore the blue overdress, and her hair was down over her shoulders. In the candleflare, the panes of stained glass in the lower window were the colour of dried mud.

  ‘With which to suckle my familiar?’ she said. ‘As some say.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard that… I mean… how such an appendage is said to be emplo
yed.’

  Stepping back from the light, in pursuit of my breath.

  And – if you were thinking to ask – only one woman since my infancy had ever bared a breast for me.

  Mistress Borrow was smiling distantly, as if across a long room, say a lecture hall, some lofty-ceilinged forum for civilised, cultural debate.

  ‘Oh, of course – from the books.’ Musing very softly, as if to herself. ‘He’d know it from his books.’

  Holding my old brown robe together, my right hand shook. We’d not spoken since she’d walked away from the tower on the tor, after Fyche’s naming of her as a witch. It was as if she’d picked up from there: a line drawn, with geometrical precision, betwixt that point in time and this present moment, and…

  …all right… a Sister of Venus, if you must know. It was in Cambridge, on a rare night I’d drunk too much in an effort to be one with my fellow students, all of them older than me who, proving too young in worldly experience, too overawed and fumbling, had not… Oh God, how she’d laughed, that woman, a cold and brittle laugh, like a chisel chipping stonework from the buildings which enclosed the alley where we’d stood, tight ’twixt walls.

  A very sour memory which must surely have retarded my progress into manhood.

  I said, ‘You know they’re looking for you…’

  Hoarse words, meagre as the scrapings of a rat. Within an instant, cruel lightning had exposed what I guessed to be my raging blush.

  ‘I try not to let these diversions interfere with my work,’ she said, almost briskly. ‘Which oft-times, as you know, is also a matter of life and death. I beg mercy if this visit disturbs you, Dr John, but a man’s bed-chamber, for me… well, I’ve been in so many.’

  The thunder shook the panes.

  ‘As a doctor,’ she said. ‘Dear Lord, what a night this is become.’

  And placed a calming hand above her breast and, in my head, I was spinning again down the green flank of the tor, sky and hills falling around me like a cascade of playing-cards, crying Eleanor…

  …Nel…

  Oh my God, she seemed so small now, with her narrow shoulders, her eyes half-lidded, demure, hair over her cheeks.