The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  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.

  ‘Frere 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 place – 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.’

  ‘But you obviously put each one before your masters at court. There must needs be scrutiny of them prior to publication… surely?’

  He took a patient breath.

  ‘Dr Dee,’ he said. ‘I know not how you came to be here this evening, but I’m happy to greet you as a fellow man of science… and would positively relish a discussion with you on our common ground – astrology, alchemical texts, meditation, all matters scientific. The first rule, however, must be that… the matters of state, they are not for us.’

  I found this sentiment disingenuous in the extreme but said nothing.

  ‘Come.’ He extended an arm. ‘Rest awhile. We’ll not be disturbed, I promise. No-one comes down here at night but me.’

  There was a stone seat projecting from the wall to the side of the altar. I lowered myself into it. Just taking the weight off my feet brought on a quivering drowsiness which made me glad of the cold. Nostradamus fitted himself into a wooden chair with arms and pulled it up opposite me. He placed his hands in his lap.

  ‘It offends me, you know, that – from what I hear – your talents are regarded less well in your native country than are mine in France. As you suggested… a sad indictment of England’s values.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘that our talents are identical.’

  He shrugged, opened out his hands, and I reminded myself that his apparel was misleading, maybe deliberately so. This was not, nor had ever been, a man in holy office.

  ‘Why are you really here?’ I said.

  ‘A question most reasonable. Which you answered yourself. A fascination with these islands. The portals to the past, they are open here in ways which are not so apparent in most of Europe. This place in particular… has a sense of continuity denied to us. And, it appears, a relationship with the cosmos which elsewhere… is long-lost.’

  ‘Ah.’ Now I was no longer on the wing. ‘You mean the Zodiac.’

  ‘My God…’ He spread his arms wide. ‘When I heard of that…’

  ‘How long since you heard of it?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘And how came you by the knowledge?’

  ‘A ha!’ The smiling Nostradamus wagging an admonitory forefinger. ‘How came you by the knowledge of it, Dr Dee?’

  So he knew. I must have shown my discomfort, for he laughed.

  ‘But what’s to be done with the thing, that’s the biggest question. I am perfectly ready to accept that the celestial Zodiac is refashioned, by whatever means, on the ground, but what are we to make of it?’

  He didn’t know either, then. Or was he testing me?

  I said slowly, ‘If it were designed by God, it’s miraculous. If by man, then it shows that civilisations far more advanced than ours once lived – as you’ve suggested – in these islands.’

  ‘ Excellent thinking.’ Nostradamus leaned forward, alarmingly squeezing my arm, the way an uncle would. ‘You’re a man of perception, Dr Dee. Was this Merlin’s secret? What are your thoughts?’

  I sensed, at last, a curiosity. I must not lose this advantage. It was clear now that neither Cate Borrow nor John Leland had discovered the final secret – how the terrestrial Zodiac might be employed – which Abbot Whiting may well have died without passing on. If there was no-one alive who knew the key, it would tax all our skills for years to come.

  ‘My thoughts,’ I said carefully, ‘are, as yet, incomplete. Being more concerned, at this time, with the matter of Arthur.’

  ‘Oh. Does he not yet live, as the Britons believe?’ Nostradamus folded his arms, looking down at them for a moment, considering, then raising his head with a sly smile. ‘Does he not live as the spirit of the Tudor line? Tut!’ Lightly smacking his own hand. ‘I break my own rule about avoiding matters of state.’

  ‘I’d guess in your position they’d be near impossible to avoid.’

  No reply.

  ‘The matter of Arthur,’ I said, ‘and of Avalon. In seeking to… understand the Tudor line’s ancient right to the throne of England and Wales, certain elements within the French court must surely have realised that the role of Glastonbury must needs be considered.’

  ‘You flatter your country, Dr Dee.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Dr de Nostradame. Consider your own country. Until such time as the boy Francois is deemed fit to rule, France is protected by the Guise family, whose deepest desire is to see its daughter Mary, the Scot, become Queen of England.’

  ‘As is her right. As the Pope himself-’

  ‘Ah… the Pope. There lies the crux of the problem. England being once again free of Rome. Indeed… almost happily free.’

  ‘You delude yourself.’

  ‘You don’t live here. Consider the blood-letting which followed King Harry’s division from Rome. And consider the even worse bloodletting… the fire and blood of Mary Tudor’s reign, when the Pope was invited back. When Mary was gone, England was sick to its heart of religious persecution and the new Queen saw that. Had the vision to realise that Protestants and Catholics could live together, if not in harmony, at least in relative peace…’

  ‘In chaos, my friend! This sorrowful town, with all its witches and quackery, it is England in microcosm. London not much better. Do they not say Parker had virtually to be blackmailed into accepting Canterbury?’

  ‘The fact remains that in the year or so since Elizabeth became Queen, not one man or woman has been executed for religious belief.’ I opened my hand to the altar. ‘Look at us. Here we are, sitting in a Catholic chapel, with everything to hand for a Mass. There are chapels like it in houses throughout the country. Are they raided? Are they sacked and ruined?’

  ‘My good friend-’

  ‘And that’s the problem for the Pope, isn’t it? And for France… France is never sated. And with Elizabeth as Queen, its acquisition of England begins to look highy unlikely. The longed-for Catholic rebellion to remove Elizabeth and put Mary of Guise on the throne – where will that come from now? People enjoy the peace, even most Catholics. Why have most of the bishops sworn the Oath of Supremacy?’

  ‘Only the corrupt ones.’

  ‘And, of course, the Queen’s only twenty-six years old. She could be Queen for another half century. France… the Guises… the Pope… you’re all damned. Unless…’

  His face was without expression.

  Unless…

  Slowly, it was coming together.

  A Catholic chapel in the cellars of Meadwell gave the lie to Fyche’s assertion that every man here has put papacy well behind him and is ready to swear allegiance to the Queen.

  Quite the reverse. Fyche had been playing a double game from the beginning. Appearing to change sides at the Reformation, having betrayed his abbot to Cromwell in return for land and money, a knighthood and the status of Justice of the Peace. A betrayal viewed, maybe, as a necessary sacrifice, in the best long-term interests of the Roman Church.

  Not that Catholic
ism was likely to be closest to the heart of Fyche, from what I knew of him. He’d been a bursar, an administrator of accounts, had expected to become the next abbot… in effect, the supreme lord of Glastonbury and all points west, with limitless riches.

  Had he been led to believe that this, or something similar, could still happen? I thought of the long room full of books, furniture, minor treasures – the abbey in storage. Thought of how Cowdray, on our first night here, had told us of the severe penalties now imposed by Fyche on anyone caught stealing stone from the ruins.

  The abbey had not, as expected, been restored by Mary Tudor. But it might be under the sovereignty of Mary Queen of Scots, with all the wealth of France behind her.

  What had Fyche been promised in return for his assistance in the early removal of the Queen of England?

  How extensive was the part in this of Nostradamus?

  And why – in sudden discomfort, I glanced over my shoulder – was he still looking disturbingly at peace with himself?

  LIV

  A Cold Inversion

  Of course, he had no cause to explain anything to me. Unlike poor Benlow, he wasn’t even dying.

  I’d need to tempt him, and there was, as far as I could see, only one jewel I could offer him: the key to the mysteries of the round table, the Glastonbury Zodiac. And I didn’t have it.

  Not that he knew that.

  ‘Who comes here for the Mass?’ I asked him.

  ‘If you wish me to name anyone, I shall… decline.’

  ‘Not the rabble, I imagine. Only men of influence. Who might also attend… meetings. Maybe with guests from Europe? Leading theologians? Men of state? Not forgetting renowned prophets and forecasters of world affairs.’

  Nostradamus smiled

  ‘You journeyed to Glastonbury yourself,’ I said, ‘in the hope of deciphering the secret at the heart of Leland’s notes?’

  He toyed with the girdle of his robe, but I could feel the heat of his mind’s engine. There was only one way he could have got hold of Leland’s notes, so recently reburied.