by Phil Rickman
Dark bearded, dark clad and instantly admitted to the house. Unmistakably Francis Walsingham, the Oxfordshire MP known to serve the Privy Council on a confidential level. A coolly ambitious man whom I was more than inclined to mistrust. The very sight of him made me wonder if I were followed and I pulled down my hat, threw myself into the crowd and then slipped into an alley, where I stood with my back to the rain-slick brickwork and found myself panting.
Fear? Very likely. I’d persistently refused the offer of Cecil’s barge, recalling the man who’d been beaten, robbed and drowned. If it could happen once this year, then it could happen again, and who’d question it?
You think me suffering from some persecution sickness? All I can say is that you weren’t with the secretary this day. A man who’d felt himself slipping into the pit and now was scrambling back up its steep and greasy sides.
And was, therefore, less balanced and more dangerous than ever he’d been.
I thought of Dudley, once his friend, fellow supporter of Elizabeth from the start. And then Dudley, drunk on his status at court, unable to do wrong in the Queen’s eyes, had seen himself as her first advisor, damaging Cecil. Now Dudley was sorely damaged and Cecil would seize his chance to…
…what?
Thrusting myself from the wall, a sweat on my brow, I followed the alleyway into another, this one ripe with the stench of rotting meat. I waited, listening for running footsteps above the distant bustling and chattering, the barking of dogs, the cries of street traders, the grinding of cartwheels and the clacking of builders’ hammers on brick and stone.
No one coming. I walked on, through the mud and stinking puddles, across an inn yard and along a mews, with its more friendly stench of horseshit, until I saw the glitter of the river.
I stood beneath an iron lamp on its bracket, Cecil’s voice in my head.
Do you have a matter of, ah, science, requiring your specific and immediate attention?
There was a man I would have visited on the morrow.
On the morrow, I was now commanded to be out of London.
I walked, with no great enthusiasm, out of the mews, to hail a wherry to take me not to Mortlake but across the river into Southwark’s seething maw. Not a place I’ve oft-times visited, having little taste for gambling, whoring, bear baiting or street-theatre. But, then, I didn’t have to go far after leaving the wherry.
A solid building close to the riverbank, like to a castle or my old college in Cambridge, but still a place I feared, like all gaols, as a result of having myself been held in one. At the mercy, as it happened, of the man I now thought to visit.
But… there are gaols and gaols, and it might have been Jack Simm who once had described the Marshalsea as the finest inn south of the Thames.
Now the official residence of the former Bishop of London, known in his day as Bloody Bonner.
XII
Blood and Ash
SHUTTING THE DOOR behind us with his heel, he set down his jug of wine on the board and then rushed to clasp my right hand.
‘John, my boy…’ Letting go the hand, stepping back and inspecting me, beaming. ‘And, my God, you’re still looking like a boy. Some alchemical, eternal youth thing you’ve contrived?’
In truth, I must look as worn and weary as I felt. I removed my hat. He was just being kind.
Yes, yes, I know. Kind? Bishop Bonner? I still could barely look at him for long without recalling some poor bastard’s crispen feet, black to the bones in the ashes of the kindling… or the savage flaring of hell’s halo as the hair of another Protestant took fire. I’d oft-times wondered how many nights Bonner might lie awake in cold sweat, accounting to God for all the public burnings he’d ordered during the years of blazing terror after Mary had restored the Roman faith.
How many nights? Probably not one. Even now, in a bright new reign, when stakes were used more for the support of saplings, he seemed to believe that there’d been a moral substance to what he’d done. How could I possibly have grown to like this monster?
‘And what think you of my dungeon, John?’
His grin displaying more teeth than he deserved.
‘It’s not the Fleet, is it?’ I said.
Bonner sniffed.
‘You might think it looks not unpleasant, my boy, but you aren’t here when the brutal guards come at nightfall and hoist us in chains from iron rings on the walls.’
Inevitably, I looked up at the conspicuously unbloodied walls until his laughter seemed to crash from them like thunder. Haw, haw, haw. Then I heard a key turned in the lock on the door and spun around.
‘Don’t worry,’ Bonner said. ‘They lock me in for my safety. I’ll see you get out. Before the week’s end, anyway.’
I smiled cautiously. We had history, Bishop Bonner and I. When first we’d met it had been in my own cell, back when I was falsely accused of working magic against Queen Mary and also of heresy. The good man I’d shared it with was already become cinders and even though I’d overturned the primary case against me in court I’d no cause to believe I’d escape the same end.
But Edmund Bonner had been curious about my reputation as a scholar of the Hidden. Wanted to know what mystical secrets I might have uncovered at the Catholic university of Louvain.
And so, against all odds, I’d been allowed to live, even serving for a time as his chaplain – the inevitable guilt that haunted me tempered by the discovery that, just as Bloody Mary was said to have been surprisingly soft-hearted, Bloody Bonner had a learned and questing mind and was – God help me – good company.
‘Wild tales abound,’ he said, ‘of what you and Lord Dudley found in Glastonbury.’
‘Can’t tell you about it, Ned. You know that.’
‘Pah.’ He waved a hand. ‘It can be of no consequence now, anyway. As long as dear Bess was happy with you.’
She was far from happy with Bonner. Yet, even now, all he had to do to regain his freedom was to recognise her as supreme governor of the Church. While admiring his steadfast refusal, I guessed that, in his own mind, he already was free. Only the bars outside the window glass were evidence of a prison. Almost everything else was recognisable from the cramped chamber he’d occupied while under house arrest at his bishop’s palace: the chair and board, the looking glass and the books on the shelf, with Thomas Aquinas prominent.
Yes, it was fair to say the Marshalsea had not the squalor of the Fleet – none that could be seen, anyway. Established to confine maritime offenders, it now also housed debtors and those convicted of political crimes… and thrived upon a strong foundation of corruption. Prisoners with money could buy good meals and wine, and others without money were allowed out by day to earn some to hand over to their gaolers.
For Edmund Bonner, it was a life of no conspicuous discomfort. He’d expressed joy at my visit, offering to entertain me in the cellar where wine was served. But there were too many of his fellow prisoners in there, some with their wives who came and went unchallenged, especially if they brought money. Impossible for us to talk with confidence here so, taking with us a jug of wine, we’d gone upstairs to his cell.
There was a stool for me to sit on, while Bonner, clad in the robe of a humble Franciscan monk, poured wine for us.
‘I was told’ – eyes aglint with mischief as he stoppered the jug – ‘that after the demise of Dudley’s poor, wretched little wife had become known, the Queen would be seen around the court all in black attire—’
‘As was everyone at court.’
‘—with a dance in her step and a lovely, joyful smile upon her face that remained immovable for days. Is it still there?’
His own face – which, with his history, you might imagine moulded into a permanent rictus of hate – was, as ever, plump and benign as he handed me a cup and lowered his bulk to the edge of his pallet.
‘I understand that the smile,’ I said, ‘is now a little strained.’
He nodded, looking me steadily in the eyes.
‘I also heard
that, some days before your friend Dudley was widowed, the Queen confided to the esteemed Spanish ambassador, Bishop La Quadra, that Lady Dudley would very soon be departing this life. Have you heard that, too?’
Yes, and wished I hadn’t.
‘When it first came to my notice,’ Bonner said, ‘I couldn’t help but wonder if it was you who’d happened to see this impending tragedy in the stars.’
I considered this unworthy of reply, but it didn’t stop him.
‘Because, as you must see, John, the only other possible explanation of the Queen’s foreknowledge of the death of Amy Dudley is that she was, herself, party to the disposal of the woman preventing marriage to her childhood sweetheart.’
‘There are many explanations,’ I said firmly, ‘and one is that the Spanish Ambassador is lying.’
‘A bishop of the Roman Church?’
‘As part of his campaign to win the English queen for the Spanish king – again.’
‘Well yes.’ Bonner nodded. ‘Indeed, it was my hope too that she’d see what God wanted of her and choose Philip of Spain for herself.’
‘Her sister’s widower? Was that ever truly on the cards?’
‘Was for him. And think of the benefits – we’d be back with Rome before the year’s end, and I’d be brought out of here in glory and made Archbishop of Canterbury.’
For a moment he looked almost serious and then a belch of laughter made his body rock.
‘In truth, I suppose I’ll die within these walls. Never mind.’ He took a slow sip of wine. ‘But methinks you didn’t come here to discuss the arrangements for my funeral.’
‘Or the marriage prospects of the Queen.’
‘Then what?’
I sipped some prison wine, which proved better than ours at home.
‘Wigmore Abbey,’ I said.
‘Where’s that?’
‘In the Welsh Marches. Not far from where my father was born.’
‘Ah yes. Of course it is. Or was. Is it was?’
‘So I believe.’
‘Never went there, John. Horrible journey, I hear. Best thing your father did, getting out of that wilderness, or you’d’ve been born into a life of penury and ignorance.’
He sat for some moments peering into his cup, then looked up and beamed.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘It’s come to me, now. John Smart.’
I waited, guessing it had not come to him at all. It had ever been there, in the catacombs of his impressive mind.
‘Last Abbot of Wigmore. Got himself reported to Tom Cromwell, on a list of charges as long as my cock.’
‘What charges?’
‘As I recall… simony on a grand scale. Smart was littering the place with new-made priests. While also growing rich on the sale of abbey treasure. What a rogue the man was. Hunting and hawking with his canons. Poking maids and goodwives over quite a wide area. Ah… I see your ears are already awaggle.’
‘Abbey treasure? Gold? Plate?’
‘Doubtless.’
‘What else? Precious stones?’
Bonner frowned.
‘Methinks, before we travel further down this road, it would be as well for you to enlighten me as to our destination.’
I was hesitant. Bonner drained his cup and placed it on the board at his bedside.
‘John, I may have blood and ashes on my hands but I’m not known for breaking confidence.’
I nodded. What was there to lose? I took my wine over to the window, with its view, between bars, of the river, and told him what I knew about the shewstone of Wigmore Abbey.
* * *
I admit to being captivated by what I’d been told about this wondrous crystal with its history of miracles and healing. But talking to a cynic like Bonner could sometimes bring you sharply to your senses.
And the more I heard about the last Abbot of Wigmore, the more I wondered if he and the scryer, Brother Elias, were not, as Jack Simm had suspected, working together. Abbot Smart, an Oxford graduate, had been appointed Abbot of Wigmore by Cardinal Wolsey. Although there were rumours, Bonner said, that he’d paid for it. His rise had been rapid. In the years before the Reform he was also become suffragen Bishop of Hereford and accumulating endless money, most of it directly into his purse, by appointing over fifty candidates to Holy Orders.
‘Ho, ho,’ Bonner said. ‘What a holy knave the man was. Many attempts were made to unseat him, of course, but he always wriggled away, with the help of a small coterie of thoroughly reprehensible followers. While the abbey, both physically and morally, was rotting around him.’
‘But he escaped the dissolution with his life,’ I said.
‘And with a pension, for heaven’s sake! But then… who knows what favours he did for Lord Cromwell? A man who’d bend the law to have you hanged for stealing a spoon and sprung from a murderer’s death-cell if you were a friend he could use.’
If the shewstone was amongst his treasures, it seemed more than likely that he knew Elias and that both were well connected.
And well informed. In the right atmosphere, and with a good foundation, the power of insinuation is near limitless and may take on a life of its own. What had happened during our time in Glastonbury was surely talked about over a wide area of the west and beyond. It was not unlikely that Elias’s path had crossed with that of some fellow priest – even the garrulous Welsh vicar of Glastonbury – who had known of my passing association with Benlow the boneman. Unlikely, but not impossible.
‘You truly believe,’ Bonner said, ‘as a philosopher and a man of science, that it’s possible to achieve communion with the angelic hosts by means of a reflective stone?’
‘By means of celestial rays and the human spirit. There’s a long tradition of it.’
‘There’s a tradition of reading the future in the entrails of a chicken, John, but it still sounds like balls to me.’
‘Comes from a stimulation of the senses,’ I said. ‘Like to prayer and meditation in a church under windows of coloured glass, while the air is laden with incense. Sometimes a cloth is pulled over the head to shut out the world, so that, for the scryer, the crystal becomes luminous.’
Like to a small cathedral of light. I tried to find words to explain how attention to the light-play within the crystal might alter the workings of the mind, rendering it receptive to messages from higher spheres, and Bonner didn’t dismiss it.
‘But would you also accept,’ he said, ‘that a true mystic has no need of a scrying stone or any such tool?’
‘Of course.’ I looked over to where his rosary hung by the window. ‘But while a mystic accepts what he receives and dwells upon it—’
‘—you, as a man of science, must needs explain the process?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s how it is.’
Bonner smiled.
‘With which archangel do you seek to commune?’
‘Michael,’ I said at once.
His ancient sigil appearing in my mind, where I must have drawn it more than a hundred times in the past year, to summon courage and the powers of reason.
Which told me now to say nothing to Bonner about the Queen’s interest in communion with the supercelestial and the pressure upon me which would almost certainly resume when those deceitful mourning clothes were put away.
‘Methinks,’ he said, ‘that you imagine this stone might… awaken something in you?’
This would be the lesser of two admissions but I said nothing.
‘The great sorrow of your life,’ Bonner said, ‘is that you yourself, with all your studies and experiments, your extensive book-knowledge of ancient wisdom and cabalistic progression through the spheres are… how shall I put this…?’
‘Dead,’ I said. ‘Dead to the soul.’
Exaggerating, in hope that he’d contradict me.
‘Poor boy,’ he said.
* * *
I’d hoped he’d be able to tell me more, but all he could recall were this man Smart’s alleged crimes against both Church and
Crown. Crimes for which, in earlier times, he would have roasted. The fact that he seemed to have survived suggested he knew men of influence.
So where was he now? Still at Wigmore? Bonner thought he might be able to find out if I could come back, say, in a week?
I supposed I could find accommodation in some part of London well away from the court and Cecil, but I’d forever be watching my back, and anyone, from a street-seller to a beggar, might be one of Walsingham’s agents.
And why would I take the risk of discovery for something I’d never afford?
I shook my head, Bonner regarding me from his pallet, a pensive forefinger extended along a cheek.
‘What else are you not telling me, John?’
Kept on shaking my head. I’d been drawn into circumstances I’d had no role in shaping. However the matter of Amy’s death and her own marriage was resolved, the Queen would remember that I’d not been here when she had need of my services. And Dudley… Dudley would also remember. If he survived.
… if a messenger was to come knocking on my door now with news that Dudley had been cut down… or shot… or skewered in a crowd…
I saw Cecil’s narrow, long-nosed face and dark, intelligent eyes, flecked, for the first time in my experience of him, with what seemed a most urgent need.
And then he’d said,
Were you to be gone, even for a matter of weeks, that might be sufficient.
For what? Sufficient for circumstances to alter so that Dudley’s marriage to the Queen was no longer a possibility…
… due to his death?
Was I mad to think thus?
‘Dudley, eh?’ Bonner said.
As if he’d tapped into my thoughts. I stared at him, startled.
‘Poor Dudley,’ he said. ‘Exiled from court, compelled to keep his burrowing tool out of the royal garden. Do you see him these days?’