The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  ‘But what about the abbey’s place in the very foundation of Christianity in these islands. Joseph of Arimathea, the boy Jesu… the Holy Grail.’

  ‘God forbid, John! Nobody of any church cares for that one. Even the Lutherans will demand where it may be found in the Bible.’

  ‘You happen to know any significant names from the monks’ petition to Mary?’

  ‘I never saw it.’

  ‘Nobody you can think of in Somersetshire?’

  ‘There are men I can think of, but they may not be the main proponents. I’m sorry, John, this was never a big issue for Mary. It went quiet very quickly and was never raised again. I rather suspect this has been a wasted journey for you, though a great pleasure for me. I’m so glad I didn’t have you roasted.’

  ‘You just wanted to know about alchemy, you old bastard. You thought I had the secrets.’

  My own position had still been fraught in the extreme that memorable day when Bishop Bonner had bustled into my cell.

  Casting horoscopes for Mary and her husband, who would be King of Spain, had not, with hindsight, been the wisest of undertakings, but she’d not long been enthroned at the time, and none of us could have known how bad it would all become and how swiftly.

  Nearly five years now, since I’d been arrested to appear on charges of the lewd and vain practices of calculing and conjuring. A fine May morning. My quarters sealed off and searched, my books taken away as evidence of a dangerous interest in the techniques of sorcery and witchcraft.

  Don’t know why I’d thought that this would never happen to me. Many of my associates had already fled the country in fear of an indictment for heresy or treason. Anyone, at this time, might be seen as a threat to the reintroduction of the Roman Church to England and I, as a known conjuror, was an obvious target for all those at court who would win some favour with Mary.

  Therefore, on the evidence of the horoscopes – which included one for Elizabeth, whose very existence was a threat to Mary’s rule – I’d been taken away and thrown into prison. It seemed like madness. Apart from anything, my forecast had been a good one for Mary and Philip of Spain, with Libra rising on the day of the marriage, promising well for their union. And no, before you ask, I don’t know what went wrong.

  The practice of astrology, even then, was not the strongest of evidence for devilry. The charge was enough to hold me for a time, but they knew they’d need more to take me to the stake.

  There had followed some loose accusations that I’d tried to kill the Queen by sorcery. But there had been no real evidence that I’d ever used spells, black or white.

  Then came a down-at-heel lawyer called George Ferrers, whose finest moment had come during his period as the Lord of Misrule, planning London’s Christmas festivities, introducing his company of jesters and ‘magicians’, who specialised in illusion and festive fakery. Somehow, the merry custom had survived even into the drab and humourless years of Mary’s reign.

  So Ferrers, of a sudden, steps up and accuses me of blinding one of his children and trying to kill another, some kind of magical assassin for hire. It might have been out of jealousy. He would have heard of my flying beetle, my owls. Either that or someone had paid him to have me stitched up.

  The point of defence being that I didn’t know the man – or his children.

  ‘Even though you conducted your own defence with some aplomb,’ Bonner recalled, ‘the judges would not have wanted to be seen to extend leniency to someone who might well be in league with the devil.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Although the charges against me had been ridiculous and ill-founded, breaking them down, in public, into shards of malice had not been easy, and I’d been in a sweat at the end, awaiting a verdict.

  And when it came at the end of August of the year 1555, it had not been good. I was to be bound over to keep the peace until Christmas of the following year, stripped of the rectorate of Upton-upon-Severn and – the most sinister aspect – to be sent for religious investigation to Bishop Bonner himself.

  A burning matter.

  He’d come in person to my cell, with a question. Signalling the guard to leave us alone.

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

  Friendly, even then. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered he’d been interested in me and what I did for quite some while.

  I’d given his question serious thought before replying. It was obviously a trap. If I agreed that the soul was divine I would put myself in God’s stead. If I said no, I was challenging His Majesty, so would needs be in league with the devil. Either answer could lead to the stake.

  ‘The soul is… not itself divine,’ I said after tense and endless seconds, ‘but it can acquire divinity.’

  His eyes had connected with mine and in them, at this moment, I thought I could see the flicker of an unexpected delight.

  And then it had vanished.

  ‘Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul acquire divinity?’

  I held the gaze. Surmising by now that he had been briefed to look for any theological indications of a Protestant allegiance. That surely was what it had all been about. Mary’s people were looking for a plot, with Elizabeth at its centre.

  ‘By prayer,’ I said. ‘And suffering. And perchance… through learning.’

  ‘And what learning would you suggest?’

  ‘The Bible…’ I could see that he wanted more and I’d taken a chance. ‘And the sacred knowledge of the Jews.’

  He’d been unable, then, to conceal his interest, drawing in a sharp breath.

  ‘And how could one become privy to such secrets?’

  In the months that followed, many a long candle had been melted into a pool of wax over this question. I’d expected a butcher and found a man with a genuine sense of inquiry into the condition of the human soul.

  Saved from the stake by Bonner’s interest in the hidden, and an unexpected friendship had developed. Even made me his chaplain, for a time, and many nights had been spent in discussion of alchemy and the Cabala.

  I stood and walked over to the chest and picked up the looking glass. Saw a pale man with mid-length dark brown hair and, in the eyes, what some had seen as kindness, others as sorrow and I, now, as… lost.

  ‘Tell me, Ned… as a man who hears things…’

  ‘I’m growing increasingly and wilfully deaf, John.’

  ‘Have you become aware of any rumours of sorcery… against the Queen?’

  ‘What, like yours against Mary?’

  Bonner’s laughter was like collapsing masonry.

  ‘In the shape of a wax effigy in a coffin. Done with some attention to detail. Do you know of anyone, or any group, which might seek to…?’

  ‘What are you getting at, sorcery or popery? The French don’t fear sorcery as we do. If they think it’ll get Bess out and Mary Stuart in, they’ll use it with abandon.’

  ‘Did I mention the French?’

  ‘It’s always the fucking French. They hate her with a passion. And with Scotch Mary wed to the boy king… Look, talk to a Frenchman, he’ll tell you the English Queen’s a witch. Like mother like daughter. Spawn of Satan. England, under Elizabeth, is therefore a cesspit of sorcery.’

  ‘Who believes that?’

  ‘You mean you don’t?’ Bonner half rose. ‘You’re telling me there hasn’t been an unimaginable increase in superstition – charms, talismans, fortune-telling, what-have-you, since we stopped burning people? Since little Bess decided to live and let live?’

  ‘Ned, that’s simply—’

  ‘No less than the unwaxed truth! Cannot believe a man of your peculiar talents goes around with his eyes shut. It’s everywhere, John. That’s not, of course, to say that the common folk in England don’t live in constant fear of it… but that’s part of the spell. And therefore anything which links the Queen into that world – little effigies, what you like – ain’t good. And that’s why she shouldn’t be meddling with the faerie myt
hs of Arthur. You go and tell her that.’

  ‘I’m not being given the chance.’

  ‘Of course –’ Bonner beamed – ‘she shouldn’t be meddling with the likes of you, either.’

  ‘Um…’ I’d had enough. ‘Doesn’t the French court have its own, um, interpreter of the hidden?’

  ‘Who? Nostradamus? Good Catholic, and a prophet in the Old Testament tradition. The French are in morbid thrall to his every word – and prophets in general, since their last king’s untimely death was forecast in detail.’

  I’d never met Nostradamus, a physician by trade, whose sudden, spectacular fame as a prophet seemed largely founded upon his adoption by the French court and the pretentious use of poetry in his predictions. However, although his use of astrology was perfunctory and inaccurate, I’d felt obliged to keep notes on his career and had, in my library, several of his almanacs and a few actual manuscripts I’d bought quite cheaply in Louvain, where the man had been regarded with an academic disdain.

  Bonner leaned back. He looked happy.

  ‘You know, John… I intend to enjoy prison. Time and a place to attone, through prayer, for all that I’ve done which has offended God. Prayer and silence. And self-denial.’

  ‘Self-denial?’ I lifted the jug from the board and sniffed. I was not an expert on fine wines.

  ‘Word of advice,’ Bonner said. ‘Let the bones of Arthur lie. They’ve ever been trouble.’

  ‘I don’t truly think I have a choice.’

  ‘As for Glastonbury, they say that, since the abbey went down, it’s like to the Bedlam… only without the walls.’

  The mirror rattling on the chest as Bishop Bonner’s merriment came crackling back, a firing of dry kindling.

  IX

  Called into Service

  BY THE END of that day, another warning beacon had been lit. One which was to worry me no small amount.

  Mid-afternoon, I’d gone again to Jack Simm, asking if he and Goodwife Faldo might keep an eye on my mother while I was away. Once again, with a finger to his lips and a thumb gestured towards his wife in the house, he led me from his door. Out to the edge of the woodland, tinted pale green now with the first hesitant catkins.

  ‘How long you gonna be away, Dr J?’

  ‘Three weeks? Four? Jack, are we losing our reason? My mother says people around the village give us strange looks, you tell me there are suspicions of necromancy. Am I—?’

  ‘Nah, you’re just too clever for your own good. We all suffer from the times we live in. Seen too much conspiracy.’

  ‘There are even those who’d profit from my notoriety,’ I said. Telling him of the pamphlet-seller with his ‘Prophecies of Dr Dee’. ‘You heard of this?’

  ‘Nah, but it’s bound to happen. There’s ever an appetite for prediction, even if it’s unlawful now. Even astrology’s unlawful, if it’s used to make predictions about the Queen, ain’t that right?’

  ‘When it may become treason, yes.’

  ‘Unless it’s you, of course.’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘Fine line, Dr John.’

  ‘I know it.’

  I leaned against an oak tree’s rugged bole. The pamphleteer in his peacock hat already merging in my mind with an image of George Ferrers, the Lord of Misrule, as some insane jester with a jingly horned hat and a stick with a dangling pine-cone. When I told Jack Simm there were people in that crowd who’d have bound me to a stake without a second thought, he seemed not at all surprised.

  ‘Look – religion’s in disarray. For many ordinary folk the only certainty’s bleedin’ Satan. You got conjurers everywhere, and they operates a secret trade.’

  ‘But –’ was Bonner right about this? – ‘not so secret as it was?’

  Jack bent and picked up a blackened acorn.

  ‘I let my shop go, when they put it round I was dispensing love potions. Old men’d come in saying they’d heard as how the powdered horn of a ram could harden their cocks. “Then why’n’t you go and bleedin’ powder one?” I’d say, and they’d look at their boots and mumble about how it needed somefing else… You see? That’s the fine line I wasn’t gonna cross.’

  He looked around but, apart from rooks and ravens, we were well alone. Came and stood before me in a sodden heap of last year’s leaves.

  ‘When you was accused of attempting to murder Queen Mary by dark arts, that was horseshit. But it can be done, can’t it?’

  ‘Murder by magic? There’s precedent.’

  I walked a tight circle around a birch sapling, thinking of Henry, Lord Neville, the son of the Earl of Westmorland, who, twelve or so years earlier, had been accused of conspiring to murder his wife and his father by magical means, to obtain his inheritance and pay his gambling debts. Having, it was said, hired an experienced sorcerer, a man well qualified in magic and medicine. And I was thinking, also, of the women who, it was said, could lay down a death-spell, inscribed in blood and sped on its way by days of dark meditation and self-denial – the black fast.

  ‘I think…’ I hesitated. ‘I believe the mind is a powerful tool which can unlock doors into the unknown. And thus awaken energies which can be directed, to cause both benefit and… and harm. But if you ask me can I do these things…?’

  Turning away, feeling, for all my years of study, my knowledge and my practical inventions, worthless and without substance.

  ‘Master.’

  I spun round. She was standing on the edge of the path, looking like some woodland sprite.

  ‘Catherine…’ She was wrapped in one of my mother’s shawls. ‘You’re back?’

  ‘My ma’s has been to talk to your… to Mistress Dee. All’s quite well now, Doctor.’

  Her face was dark, like a bruised apple. I wondered if there’d been a rift with her puritan father over this.

  ‘Please, the mistress says can you come home at once. You’ve a visitor.’

  ‘Who?’

  Becoming tense.

  ‘Someone from court.’ Catherine Meadows gave Jack a tentative smile. ‘Master Simm.’

  ‘There you go,’ Jack whispered to me, as she turned away onto the path. ‘You can leave on your mission with no anxiety.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Jack.’

  No anxiety. Of course not.

  Five horses were tethered in our yard, and I saw four armed men standing by the gate, and thought at once of the day my rooms had been searched and sealed and…

  Take him.

  Almost turning and walking away then, to buy time, before I recognised two of the men from the Queen’s company, and one gave me a respectful salute. Me nodding and breathing again.

  Only the four of them, so it could not be someone of particular eminence. Other than the Queen herself, there are few people at court I feel safe to trust.

  Hurrying inside, past the fire in the hall, I found them in the parlour overlooking the river: two women of similar age, seated by the window, sharing a platter of sweetmeats.

  ‘Cousin?’

  ‘Good afternoon, Dr Dee,’ Blanche Parry said. ‘I am come to collect the books.’

  Remaining seated. Her dark clothing almost nun-like.

  ‘But I thought… that I was to bring them. The books?’

  ‘More discreet, it is, for me to take them from you.’

  A small voice, yet oddly pitched, so that it carried like pipes.

  I call her cousin, yet am not sure precisely how we’re related.

  ‘You’ve ridden here from Richmond… just for the books?’

  ‘It were best,’ Blanche said, ‘that you were not seen too often at court.’

  ‘The Queen thinks that?’

  ‘It’s best.’

  I felt a chill. Looked into her small, shrewd eyes, fine lines around them. It was my tad who, with an uncommon prescience, had advised me years ago that our kinship with Mistress Blanche would one day prove an asset, and it was true that the Queen’s most senior gentlewoman had known Elizabeth since she was
a babe. Had access, more than anyone, to the innermost sanctum.

  I said. ‘You think I should keep a distance.’

  My mother frowned at such disrespect, but Blanche’s expression remained constant. Constant was Blanche’s watchword.

  ‘I merely suggest,’ she said, ‘that it were better for the Queen if your dealings were to remain discreet. You tend to question things too much, Dr Dee.’

  ‘One of my failings.’

  ‘You must excuse my son, Mistress Blanche,’ my mother said quickly. ‘I sometimes think that John is only ever half in this world and half in some dark place of his own complicated imaginings. Not at all healthy, to my thinking.’

  I pulled up a stool, my complicated imaginings telling me that this visit was about more than books.

  ‘As you, more than anyone, would be aware, Mistress Blanche,’ I said, ‘the Queen’s a most intelligent woman, who’s been reading manuscripts in Greek since she could barely—’

  ‘And I thought you an intelligent man, Dr Dee,’ Blanche snapped, ‘who would realise that it were best that the Queen should not be seen to be inquiring too deeply into certain areas of learning.’

  I fell silent. My mother arose.

  ‘Please excuse me, Mistress Blanche. I shall prepare a warm drink before your journey back to Richmond. Also for your men.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Blanche looking up, a distant smile like a mist upon her face. ‘It has been good to see you again, Jane.’

  My mother nodding and slipping away. Me sensing a prearrangement here, as Mistress Blanche gestured me to my mother’s chair next to the river window.

  ‘I’m informed, Dr Dee, that you’re to perform a service for Sir William Cecil.’

  ‘So it would appear.’

  ‘He’s a good man, for whom the Queen’s interests are always central.’

  ‘Indeed. His constant concern for the Queen is like to an older brother’s.’