The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  ‘And with you to Somersetshire… also goes Lord Dudley?’

  ‘A man whose support for the Queen –’ I watched her eyes – ‘is equally beyond question.’

  ‘But whose reputation is, if anything, even worse than yours,’ my cousin said. ‘If for different reasons.’

  ‘You don’t dice your words, do you, Mistress Blanche?’

  I pushed my chair back towards the window. A tired sun hung over the river in a cradle of stringy cloud. Obviously, Dudley’s relations with Elizabeth, on whatever level, would be a source of anxiety to Blanche, even though it was said she had oft-times passed intimate letters from one to the other.

  However, as the women with whom Dudley had been intimate must by now outnumber the wherries on the Thames, his reputation was no more the reason Blanche Parry was here than to collect the books on Arthur.

  One thing you should know about men and women of the border – any border – is that they ever use the small and narrow roads, and it can take an endless time before their reasons are manifest. Something embedded in their nature, relating to a need for caution with strangers. Along the border of England and Wales, even quite close relatives can be strangers through many generations, and I was resigned to a lengthy and, for the most part, aimless preamble.

  ‘Even apart from his adventures with women,’ Blanche Parry said, ‘Dudley is deemed by some to be ungodly.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For his study of the stars and similar interests. And… for his choice of friends.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘You mean me. Dear God, Blanche… are we not supposed to live now in enlightened times? My studies follow on directly from the work of Pythagoras and Plato, Hermes Trismegistus… Distinguished scholars, all of them.’

  ‘And heathens.’

  ‘Oh, for—’

  ‘Wait.’ Blanche holding up a palm, small fingers spread wide. ‘Are there not Catholics who say that the Protestant Church is itself a form of heathenism?’

  ‘Well, yes, there are, but that’s only to be—’

  ‘The Queen… the Queen, as you know, she seeks, if not a middle road, then at least a calmer situation, where each man may worship in his own way so long as he keeps the details of it betwixt himself and God. And within reason.’

  Grey cloud was turning the Thames into the Styx, and I felt my patience ebb.

  ‘Mistress Blanche, you’re evidently not just here to sample my mother’s famous pastries. What is it you wish to say to me that Cecil hasn’t already said?’

  ‘I…’ My cousin looking, for the first time, uncertain. ‘… I’m here to ask that when you report from the West Country to Sir William Cecil, you’ll bear in mind the Queen’s situation – and our kinship – and report also to me.’

  This I had not expected. I was wondering how to proceed without the use of the word why? when she came quickly back at me, all the Welshness in her pouring through now apace, words tumbling like mountain water over bedrocks.

  ‘…because Sir William, as you well know, is a pragmatist who will not permit whatever faith he has to interfere with his political judgement. You’re aware of that, we all are, but the Queen, she is ever troubled over what may be right or wrong in the eyes of God and feels a weight of responsibility, not only to her father’s legacy and what he would wish of her, but to her subjects, all of them, whom she loves, every man and woman, like her children.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was indeed a complexity of responsibilities here, to which no previous monarch would have felt the need to respond. Yes, we were moving, if more slowly than I would have wished, towards a new enlightenment, and yes the Queen was determined to be an essential part of that process, and yet…

  ‘Mistress Blanche.’ It was time to meet this good woman halfway. ‘Let me try to identify your dilemma. The question of the Arthurian succession is potentially a more complicated issue now than it was in the days of the Queen’s grandfather—’

  ‘When there was but one Church,’ she said.

  ‘The roots of the Arthurian history or legends go beyond all that. May well be pre-Christian. Is this what you’re approaching?’

  ‘Your family and mine,’ she said, ‘have deep roots in Wales, where the old bards sang of Arthur and his deeds in versions of the story which would indeed shock readers of Malory. Furthermore, in the days of the first Henry Tudor, the entrails of religious belief were not laid out and pulled apart for all to interpret, in the way that they are today.’

  None of which would matter much to Cecil, unless it should threaten to cause a collapse in the exchequer. This, evidently, was something private. Something unspoken of outside the Queen’s immediate chambers. I waited. We were, it seemed, getting there.

  ‘Rumours reach us from abroad,’ Blanche said.

  ‘As ever.’

  ‘The Queen has been spending much time with Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the envoy to Paris.’

  ‘In relation to what?’

  Blanche made no reply. I had the suspicion she didn’t know. And there wasn’t much happening around the Queen that Blanche didn’t know.

  ‘In France and Spain,’ she said at last, ‘the Queen is regarded with suspicion. And also with superstition.’

  ‘I know.’

  When you spend time in Europe, you have to listen to it. All the support in Catholic-heavy France is for the Queen of Scots, newly wed to the boy king François.

  ‘Relating, principally,’ Blanche said, ‘to her mother.’

  Who’d gone smiling, it was widely said, to her own execution, in anticipation of being soon united with her infernal master. The lips of Anne Boleyn still forming satanic prayers as her head was held up by the swordsman.

  The talk of London and a gift to the pamphleteers of Europe, who wondered how long before the result of the unhallowed union ’twixt the Great Furnace and the witch would be called into the service of that same master.

  Blanche said, ‘In your garden… your orchard… what did the Queen see?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I think you do. Before I came to you.’ Leaning toward me. ‘John, I’ve seen it before, the way she stiffens, the way her eyes… What did she say to you?’

  I was remembering how quickly she’d appeared on the orchard path, wrinkling her nose against the pervading smell of hops as if it were the sulphurs of hell.

  ‘What did she say to you, John?’

  ‘She asked if there were…’

  Hares in our orchard. I said nothing.

  Blanche waited.

  I said, ‘I’ll take this no further.’

  Could almost see my world curling at its corners, like parchment touched with flame. Blanche Parry sat quite still, as if her spirit temporarily had left her body. How long we remained in this awful silence I do not know.

  Finally, I said, ‘What did you mean you’d seen it before? What happens to her eyes?’

  ‘They see more than they should,’ she said. ‘Sometimes.’

  Blanche’s hands seized one another in her lap, as if in a spasm, and I turned away.

  ‘And what, at such times –’ so breathless it didn’t sound to me like my voice – ‘do they see?’

  Outside, night’s tapestry was already unrolling ’twixt the trees above the river. There was a crocus-bloom of light on the water, the lamp on a wherry.

  ‘I’ve stayed too long,’ Blanche said. ‘Send messengers to me, and I’ll send them to you, if there’s anything…’

  ‘What does she see, Blanche?’

  Holding on to the arms of my chair, the darkness at my back, as Blanche whispered it to the wall: how the Queen had said she saw the sanguinous shade of Anne Boleyn at her bedside, that small smile all twisted with spoiled ambition.

  PART TWO

  It is hardly credible what a harvest, or rather what a wilderness of superstition had sprung up in the darkness of the Marian times. We found in all places votive relics of saints, nails with which the infatuated people drea
med that Christ had been pierced… small fragments of the sacred cross. The number of witches and sorceresses had everywhere become enormous.

  John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, after a journey

  through the west of England, 1559.

  X

  Relics

  ON THE RIM of nightfall, sudden sleet had tossed us, with a stinging contempt, back into the worst of winter. Still some miles to go, and my cloak was a sodden rag.

  Dudley, riding ahead, looked out toward middle-distant trees as bare as fishbones and hills still ermine-furred with snow. Then up at the spattering sky and back at me, over his shoulder.

  ‘Can’t you do anything about this, John? Change the weather? Shift the skies to France?’

  He was rearing up from his saddle, and my horse took fright and I leaned forward to calm her. I was better with horses than with women, just about, but Dudley, as usual, made me feel a feeble creature.

  Still, I was glad he’d spoken so – a hint of the old Dudley in a man who, since we’d left London, had been uncharacteristically silent, almost reserved. Something on his mind.

  There were six of us, including the big northerner Martin Lythgoe. Lythgoe was Dudley’s chief groom, a man he’d known all his life, whom he’d taken with him to court.

  ‘Call yourself a magician,’ Dudley said.

  ‘I don’t.’ Bending my head into the blizzard. ‘As you know. Can we not find an inn?’

  ‘There isn’t an inn. Can you see an inn?’

  ‘I can see very little.’

  ‘Is there an inn near here, Carew?’ Dudley shouted.

  ‘There is.’ Sir Peter Carew riding up alongside him. ‘But spend the night there and by morning you’d have scratched off your balls. As for this poor fellow…’

  Carew glancing back at me, as if unsure whether I possessed balls. He was a stocky and muscular man, older than Dudley by a good twenty years, but his long beard was still as dark and thick as tarred rope.

  ‘Well, perchance we could rest there at least until the sky shows some mercy,’ Dudley said. ‘Is the food fit to eat?’

  ‘Press on, my advice, you want to reach Glaston tonight. You and I, we’ve known a fucking site worse than this – and with a battle on the morrow.’ Carew turned briefly to me, eyes slitted against the sleet. ‘I gather you’ve not served your country as a fighting man, Doctor?’

  Behind me, Carew’s two men were, I suspected, sniggering. I made no response. Could not, in truth, speak, for the cold. As Carew pulled ahead, Martin Lythgoe, the groom, was alongside me, low-voiced.

  ‘Yon bugger’s fought for too many countries, you ask me, Dr John.’

  Smiled and turned away, urging his horse back on to the whitening road.

  My tad had talked of Carew, who’d found favour at Harry’s court when little more than a boy. A far-travelled boy, however, who had already seen much action in Europe.

  Sent by his father, Sir William, as a page to France after years of truancy and rebellion at his grammar school in Exeter, he’d ended up with the French army and then, after his master was killed, changed sides to join the Prince of Orange. Still only sixteen when he’d returned to England, with letters of introduction from the royalty of Orange to the King. Impressing the Great Furnace with his horsemanship and finding a place, two years later, as a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. A great individual, my father had said. Sir Peter goes his own way.

  Certainly knew his way through the west of England, having risen to become MP for his native Devon and Sheriff of that county. Now he was its senior knight and, as such, wielded power in Somerset, too.

  And also – the reason he was with us – Carew was the present owner of Glastonbury Abbey. Safe pair of hands, Dudley had assured me. He wasn’t sure precisely how the Queen had come to place the holy ruins in Carew’s hands, and wasn’t sure the Queen knew either. But no one better to keep the papists out.

  It was very near dark when we rode at last into the hills above Glastonbury but, by then, the sleet had turned to rain and then ceased, and a fragment of moon was visible, and we soon could see why those pleas for restoration had fallen upon muffled ears.

  Carew had told us that, because of its history, a strong Protestant presence at the abbey had been deemed essential. In Seymour’s time as Duke of Somerset, it had been given over to a community of Flemish weavers – followers of the insane Protestant John Calvin – who’d set up a flourishing industry within its precincts. Thus had the town’s economy been sustained through the years of the boy Edward. But when Mary came to power and the Bishop of Rome was reinstated, through fire and blood, as our spiritual leader, the weavers had fled back to the low countries.

  As we rode down the last hillside, the moon’s sickle cut through the cloud. In its cold light the abbey was a grey ghost with stony arms raised as if to clutch us to its cracked ribs.

  The George Inn, in the well of the town, had been strong-built of stone to accommodate pilgrims of status and must once have blazed with welcoming candlelight. Tonight… well, there must be light in there somewhere, but the ground-floor windows facing the road were as black as hell’s privy.

  Carew had sent one of his men ahead and, by the time we arrived in the yard at the rear, two boys were on hand to look after the horses we’d ridden from Bristol.

  ‘Cowdray!’ Carew bawled out. ‘Where the fuck’s Cowdray?’

  ‘I’m here, Sir Peter, I’m here.’ A man stumbling down from some wooden steps, leaving pale flame hissing from a pitch-torch on a wall-bracket. ‘Having fires built for you, sir, the big ovens lit.’

  ‘Why were the bastards not already lit?’

  ‘Sir Peter, we’ve had no travellers here for a fortnight or more. ’Tis February, man.’

  ‘Told you, didn’t I?’ Carew turning to Dudley, coughing out a laugh like a pellet of phlegm. ‘Arsehole of the west, this town.’

  Town? Even though its main street was on the road to Exeter, I’d noticed no more than a dozen buildings of any substance, including a tall-towered church. And the abbey in all its smashed splendour.

  ‘Bring in plenty logs, Cowdray,’ Carew said. ‘First light tomorrow, I ride to Exeter, but these gentlemen will be staying for several days. This is Master Roberts and Dr John, of the Queen’s Commission on Antiquities.’

  It had been Cecil’s insistence that we should conceal our identities. I was not sorry to obscure mine, but I guessed that Dudley already was feeling naked without his panoply of privilege. At the Bristol inn where we’d spent last night, his mild advances to our chambermaid had been quite scornfully rebuffed. A mere civil servant… small beer.

  Carew, however… even in Bristol, Carew had oft-times been recognised. A famous man of the west, it seemed, his legend widely circulated. A favourite tale dated back to his Exeter youth when, escaping school, he’d scaled a turret of the city wall and threatened to jump off if pursued further… his father eventually leading him home, it was said, on a dog-leash.

  After we’d dined passably well on broth and mutton, in a small, oak-walled room, Carew summoned the innkeeper.

  ‘Shut the door, Cowdray. Sit the fuck down. We have need of your local knowledge.’

  The innkeeper was a bulky man with sparse ginger hair, a good week’s uneven growth of beard and the air of one resigned to disappointment. Wiping his hands on his apron, he lowered himself to the end of a settle near the door. Four candles spread a creamy glow over the oak board, and a fragrant wood was burning in the grate – apple logs, I guessed. No shortage of these in the one-time Isle of Avalon.

  Carew stood with his arse to the fire, his eyes, under wide black brows, aglitter in the candlelight.

  ‘These good men, Cowdray, are appointed by the Queen to inquire into the disappearance of certain documents and artefacts from the abbey.’

  ‘Bit late now, sir,’ Cowdray said, ‘if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘Say what you like to me, but if a word of it gets beyond these walls I’ll have this fucking hove
l closed down by midweek. We understand each other?’

  ‘We do,’ Cowdray said mildly, not appearing too oppressed. ‘We always have.’

  ‘Full twenty years since the abbey was removed from the greasy fingers of corrupted monks,’ Carew said. ‘Now we’re in fairly settled days, the Privy Council feels it’s time for a reassessment of what remains.’

  ‘Monks are long gone.’

  ‘Good fucking riddance. All of them?’

  ‘Well… mostly gone from the town. They had good pensions, about five pounds a year.’

  ‘What are they now then?’

  ‘One’s a farrier. We use him here.’

  ‘A more useful life, certainly,’ Carew said.

  ‘And you gets to marry.’

  ‘Everything has its downside.’

  Carew glanced at Dudley, who made no response. I’d thought Dudley’s marriage was for love, but of course my friend was renowned for having love to spare.

  ‘Might it be worth you speaking with this farrier, Master Roberts?’ Carew said.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Dudley shook himself. ‘Doubtless we should.’

  The points had been lopped from his moustache and his doublet was the colour of a stagnant ditch. As Master Roberts, his clothing must needs be more humble and muted, and it seemed to be constraining his manner. Even at the inn last night his moves toward the chambermaid had been cursory, as if he’d felt no more than obliged to keep topping up the levels of his lust. He sighed, raised himself up and drank some ale.

  ‘This is… not bad.’

  ‘Brewed to a recipe the Flemish weavers brought to us,’ Cowdray said. ‘Good people, on the whole. Some folk accused ’em of bringing the wool-sorters’ disease but, hell, ’twas here before they come.’

  ‘Much of that about now?’ Carew asked.

  ‘A few deaths. Likely we just notices it more, now all the money’s from sheep again. Folk’s in fear of the black scabs, but more of starvation.’