The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Being protective of the Queen’s interests and welfare,’ my mother said, ‘is how she would see it.’

  ‘Also more than a little apprehensive of the advance of the sciences.’

  My mother, Jane Dee, looked as if she’d bitten into a onion.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Would Mistress Blanche call it science, do you think?’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  Avoiding my mother’s eyes, I noticed that the panelling on the walls was flaking for want of varnish, while the red-brocaded fabric of my mother’s chair looked all tired and worn. I noticed also that a sleeve of her dark brown dress had been patched in two places.

  She had asked nothing about what the Queen had said or the reason for the visit. I could have told her that Elizabeth, already renowned as a demanding and expensive guest at the finest homes, would be unlikely to enter one that was conspicuously more lowly. In this case, I was sure, mindful and considerate of our poverty.

  And thus I felt ashamed. Inadequate. I should have done better; I was my mother’s only child. My father had determined that I should receive the best education their money could buy. I might have become a bishop or even a lawyer, for which I had qualification, instead of… whatever I am become.

  The river shone dully, full of animal and doubtless many human carcasses embedded in a city’s shit. The sun was pale and hard-looking, like marble.

  Conjurer, I was called by some, when my back was turned, and by others even when it was not.

  III

  His Second Coming

  RATHER THAN A crude summoner of spirits, a conjurer may, as you know, be seen in these more enlightened times as one who deals in illusion. And I’ve done that and found much delight there. Once, at college, for a piece of theatre, I fabricated a gigantic beetle which, through a system of pulleys and the employment of light and shadow, was seen to fly through the air. Spent many days in the making of it and many hours basking in the awe and mystification it inspired.

  Nothing wrong with that. I was only a boy, and the beetle did not fly. Not as a bird flies, or an angel.

  But now I am a man and more exercised by the true nature of angels. Fully accepting, however, that men like Sir William Cecil feel happier with what they know to be illusion, even if they know not how it’s done.

  No frost today, only a sour sporadic rain as I boarded a wherry by Mortlake pier for my appointment. Low cloud stained with smoke and pricked by a hundred spires, the highest of them St Paul’s in the west.

  We entered the city past the steaming midden of Southwark with its low-life amusements: bear-pits, cock-pits, whorehouses, gambling and theatre. I no longer noticed the impaled heads of criminals and traitors on London bridge; now that executions of the higher orders had become less commonplace, these crow-picked noddles were more of a grotesque attraction for visitors than a dread warning for the inhabitants.

  As for Cecil’s new town house… all I understood was that it was on the Strand, where high-powered clergy once lived. But a wherrymen is a floating gazetteer, and mine knew precisely when to steer us to the bank, pulling in his oars by the footings of a new-built stone stairway.

  ‘Ain’t the biggest house inner row,’ he said. ‘But he got plans.’

  ‘The Secretary’s a personal friend of yours that you know of his plans?’

  Hating at once, the way this must have sounded. Although I’d travelled with this same man seven times or more, I ever find difficulty in the exchange of common pleasantries.

  The wherryman only grinned. At least I thought it was a grin, all his top teeth being gone – a fight, perchance, or he’d sold them to a maker of false sets, and I should have liked to ask, but…

  ‘One of his builder’s men’s marrying my youngest girl,’ the wherryman said. ‘They gets detailed orders, how he wants it done. Inspects every sodding brick.’

  Cecil’s pastime, fashioning houses. I knew that. The tide had been with us, and when I found the house, three storeys high, behind a cage of builders’ wooden scaffolding, I was more than an hour early. Going in now would convey either over-eagerness or anxiety.

  So I walked away from the Strand, arriving some minutes later in a street of brightly painted new shops selling fine furniture, tapestries and good lamps. You could tell how fashionable this quarter had now become by the apparel of the shoppers and the scarcity of children and beggars. Even the street stench here was less putrid, women carrying pomanders more as a declaration of status than to sweeten the air.

  It had started to rain. I stepped into a covered shop doorway, from where the street-sellers’ cries were muted. Not that there were many of those around – with men as prominent as Sir William Cecil residing hereby, the security services would have seen to all that. If it hadn’t been for the rain, I might have wandered away into some other street and never heard—

  ‘—the future! Learn what is to come! Learn how the world will end with darkness and disease before… His Second Coming!’

  Purple proclamations of apocalypse. Some pamphleteer. Ever cheaper now, the pamphlets. More ubiquitous and more lurid, spewing out their grossly illustrated accounts of murder, executions and devil worship. And end-of-time warnings now, from the puritans.

  ‘—for yourselves the terrifying new predictions of Her Majesty’s stargazer! Read the forecasts of Dr Dee!’

  Jesu! Now I was out of the doorway and backing clumsily around an unattended cart, finding myself in a cramped alley, the man’s bellow seeming to pursue me into the piss-stinking shadows.

  ‘Know the future now… what’s left of it.’

  Beginning to sweat as I peered out to observe quite a crowd gathering around the pamphlet man. Respectable-looking people, women in furtrim, men in the new-fashion Venetian breeches. All hot for revelations of turmoil in the heavens, discovery of unknown lands full of strange winged creatures, some new war in Europe.

  All invention, of course, but too many people were ready to believe anything committed to print and…

  …did they not know I did not do this?

  Second coming? My role was to scribe charts indicating planetary influences on world affairs, the balance of the humours. Possible directions, opportunities, auspices. But never a claim to full-fledged prophecy. That way, until we know more, lies madness.

  But why had no-one told me about this shit?

  Rumour and gossip, Dr John, rumour and gossip.

  Jack Simm’s voice in my head, as I moved out towards the crowd. Had Jack known of this? Were there more such publications, about spells and divination and the conjuring of spirits in a house at Mortlake? Did everybody know about it, except for me?

  Head in the stars, as ever, when it’s not in a book. My mother. Too much time with books, boy, isn’t it? Even my tad, once, in exasperation – the man who’d been so determined I should have the best education his money could secure.

  ‘Know the time of the End and the evil which comes before it!’ the pamphlet-seller bawled, lips plump and wet. ‘Prepare yourselves!’

  Turning, as if he knew I was there, cowering in the shadows. A lumpen fellow in a leather hat with two peacock feathers, his wares in a crate at his feet.

  The rain had ceased. I hung back, not knowing what to do. I could take the rogue to law, but a court case would only invite more of the kind of notoriety I could live without. For I would be questioned in public about the nature of my work and be compelled to answer, and I’d been there – oh God, yes – once before.

  Face it: more likely, the man would simply disappear, leaving his pamphlets to blow in the gutters.

  Steadied myself on the side of the cart. It was as if part of me had been snatched away to fulfil some presumed role on the public stage. As if, while the mind of John Dee was absorbed in the contents of his library, the conjurer strode the streets, dispensing darkness.

  ‘How do we know these are Dr Dee’s predictions?’ A woman, sounding scared. ‘How came you by them?’

  ‘How do we know,
mistress?’ the pamphlet man screamed. ‘How do we know?’

  Evidently playing for time.

  ‘Indeed,’ another said, a man in a long gaberdine. ‘What proof have you that the renowned Dee is the author of these prophecies?’

  A moment’s silence as the pamphlet-seller clawed the air for inspiration, and then he sniffed loudly, puffed up his chest like a cock bird on a bough.

  ‘Dr Dee, sir, is a man who must needs guard his privacy. Myself, however, as his secretary and publisher, am given leave to make public those of his words what he considers might help men and women prepare for their fate. These being not his words, you understand, for he is a humble man, but the very utterings of messengers of God who communicate with him through his intelligent devices.’

  ‘I’ll take two,’ a man said.

  ‘That’ll be four pence.’

  I could stand it no more and stepped out of the alleyway.

  ‘So you’re –’ a sickness in my gut, for I’ve ever hated confrontation – ‘you’re Dr Dee’s publisher.’

  No reaction. My words lost in the chittering. I called out louder.

  ‘You work for Dr Dee?’

  ‘For many years, friend.’

  Speaking from out of the side of his mouth. He wasn’t looking at me, handing over a pamplet with one hand, taking the money with the other. The pamphlet was displaying a smudged engraving of a dark-robed man with a beard to his chest, his hands raised to the planets aswirl about his wide-brimmed hat. I ask you!

  ‘What sort of man is he?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This Dr Dee.’

  ‘A man of deepest learning and erudition.’

  ‘Does he resemble this picture?’

  ‘It’s a fair likeness. I’d—’

  The pamphlet-seller broke off, turning to observe me. His skin was oily-sallow and he had a stubbly black mole on one unbarbered cheek. He clearly did not know me and seemed quickly to lose interest in a man in plain clothing and no hat.

  ‘So,’ I ran a hand across my fresh-shaven jaw, ‘he’d be an old man, would he, with that long beard?’

  ‘If you don’t have the money to buy, my friend, then pray clear the way for those who do. Life – as you may read within – is too short for wasters of time.’

  ‘You haven’t yet answered the question. How do we know that these… stories are come from Dee?’

  ‘And how do you know that they are not?’

  ‘Because I didn’t—’

  It just happened that no-one else spoke, a random hush.

  ‘—write them,’ I said.

  Speaking quietly, but in that moment I might as well have bawled it from the rooftops.

  ‘Who are you, cocker?’ the pamphlet-seller said.

  I would have walked away but was tight-pressed now, on all sides. I’d seen this before. Warnings of the end of time could produce a near-riot in the street, fear filling the air like a choking smoke.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Says he is Dr Dee,’ someone said.

  It had begun to rain again, and the high buildings echoed the clitter-clatter of horses’ hooves. The only space was in front of me, and the pamphlet-seller was leaning into it, a fat forefinger levelled at my chest.

  ‘Harken to the scoundrel! “I am John Dee!”’

  Some laughter, but it was flittery and uncertain. I said nothing, looking quickly among the circle of faces. There seemed to be nobody here I knew. I brought out a handful of small coins.

  ‘I’ll take a pamphlet, then.’

  The seller leaned towards me, holding out a pamphlet but then, as I reached for it, pulled it sharply back, his eyes alight with an energy of malice and glee.

  ‘If you’re Dr Dee,’ he said, ‘you’ll already know what’s in here.’

  Someone laughed. I held fast to the sneery gaze.

  ‘Dee’s a common conjurer, anyway,’ a man said to my left.

  ‘Give us a prophecy.’ The pamphlet man smiling crookedly. ‘Go on then. Make us a prediction.’

  I saw then that he was not alone. Two boys of fourteen or fifteen were each carrying a stack of his publication. They’d been moving among the audience and now stopped, a hand of one moving to his belt.

  ‘Beware the criminal element!’ The pamphlet man whirling himself in triumph to the crowd. ‘A beardless youth what dares posture as the Queen’s seer. Go on! Tell us the future, boy!’

  The mood of the crowd had begun to turn like a great mill-wheel. Someone began slowly to clap, the pamphlet man joining in with his flabby butter-pat hands. And then came another man’s loud voice, cold as cracking stonework.

  ‘Prophecy is blasphemy!’

  Something wet hit me on the cheek and I flinched. Saw that both of the boy assistants had put down their pamphlets and were glancing towards me and then at their master, as if awaiting instructions to stab me and run.

  ‘Dr Dee trades with demons!’ a woman shrilled.

  ‘I’ve heard that.’ Another woman, older. ‘He spits upon the Holy Bible.’

  Someone pressed against me and, as ever in a tangle, my body tensed, anticipating the fleet fingers of pickpockets, a glint of daggers. Some gentlemen, I noticed, were guiding their ladies away. I glanced behind me, looking for a way out of here.

  Staring into a bearded face all too close. The beard splitting into a gap-toothed grin. Now the press of hard bodies, the stench of ale-breath. Before me, the pamphlet man was bloating into a near-frenzy, and the eyes of his peacock feathers were vibrating either side of his head.

  ‘Go on!’ he screamed. ‘Prophesy! Tell us of the coming of your dark master!’

  I froze, watching the feathers wave.

  A wild fury shook me. ‘All right…’ Barely aware of my words coming out. ‘I prophesy that before the week’s out you’ll be banged up in the lowest dungeon in the Fleet, you—’

  A forearm was wrapped across my throat. My head jerked back, both arms seized, wrenched stiff behind me. Hard rain slashing my face.

  Then a leathered hand across my mouth, and I was spun around to behold a man with a black velvet hat pulled down over his eyes. His dark cape failing to conceal the golden glow of a doublet that was like to a treasure chest split open.

  ‘Take this fucking impostor away,’ he said.

  IV

  Stability of the Realm

  EVEN ON SUCH a day as this, the light was everywhere in the room. Windows you could ride a horse through.

  He had his back to them. He was sitting behind a trestle of wide oaken boards, which faced a modest coal fire.

  ‘This is merely a humble cottage, I tell everyone that. Plea for privacy.’ He poured wine for me, a little less of it for himself. ‘And, of course, they all fail to understand. Especially the Queen.’

  There was a hanging smell of linseed and beeswax around the empty shelves. It seemed the house, at present, had room only for himself, his wife, two daughters and a mere fourteen servants. But he was already acquiring substantial properties on either side and, by the spring, it would be more than twice its size. In the meantime, I could see it would have its limitations for a man of the eminence of Sir William Cecil.

  Who now turned limpid, mournful eyes upon me.

  ‘I do greatly love that young woman, Dee. And shall serve her, God willing, for the rest of my working days. But she does, dear Lord, require constant diversion. Oh, I shall come to sup with you, William. Soon! Everything must be soon.’

  ‘It’s only the newness of it,’ I said. ‘The limitless power of monarchy is an intoxication. And she, more than most, knows how short life is. That is, um… some lives.’

  ‘She came through.’ Cecil’s eyes hardening fractionally, but he didn’t move. ‘And now she’s protected. For ever.’

  He wore a black robe over a cloud-grey doublet. Hard to believe he was not yet forty; it was as if a certain tiredness had become part of his nature. Illusion, I knew. The weariness and the drabness of his attire was theatre. He loved what he did
and was unfailingly good at it. So good, so efficient and so blessed by fortune that he was now serving his third monarch. How many could say that?

  ‘And you had a good meeting with Her Majesty yesterday?’

  ‘For as long as it lasted, Sir William.’

  I sank back, still aquiver from the incident in the street. I’d been given a comfortably padded chair facing the great windows. The glass in them was very fine, with large panes. We were on the first upper floor, with a view of river and spires in the blue-grey haze.

  ‘We were interrupted,’ I said. ‘By my cousin.’

  Which he’d know, of course, having – I was sure – personally instructed her to ensure that my discourse with the Queen should not get below surface pleasantries. I was guessing there was something Cecil wanted me to hear from him rather than the Queen. Presumably because their respective versions would differ a good deal.

  ‘You have a cousin’ – raising of a Cecil eyebrow – ‘who would interrupt the Queen?’

  ‘Blanche Parry,’ I said with patience. ‘Her family and mine are related. As are most families from the borderland of Wales.’

  Including, for heaven’s sake, his own, the Cecils of Allt-yr-ynys – all of us down from those same hills.

  ‘So I’ve heard.’ He nodded. ‘Yes, of course. A formidable woman, Mistress Blanche.’

  His eyes were half closed. He’d been Secretary of State in the time of the plot to make poor Jane Grey Queen of England in Mary’s stead, and yet somehow avoided entanglement. Thus surviving to serve under Mary, to enter Parliament, become knighted. Protestant to Catholic and back to Protestant – how many could say that?

  He picked up his wineglass and appeared to do no more than moisten his lips before putting it down again and leaning back into fingers interlacing behind his head.

  ‘You’re busy, John?’

  ‘Day and night,’ I said. ‘When permitted.’

  ‘A man ever driven by an endless flow of illumination.’ Cecil peered down at his board on which several letters had been spread, then looked up. ‘Glastonbury.’