The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  I blew out the other candle and closed the door on Dudley, shaken. Pacing the landing, lighting a tallow candle in the sconce there.

  So much I hadn’t told him. How, for example, would he have reacted to the knowledge that at least two people in this town knew exactly who I was, and that one of them was the woman now sought by Fyche in connection with the murder of Martin Lythgoe?

  Who, in this situation, could we trust? How would Dudley feel about the farrier, who seemed to me an honest, well-intentioned man?

  But then what did I know? What did I know about the life outside of books?

  I went into my chamber and sat at the foot of the dusty bed in the darkness and wondered whether I hadn’t made a terrible mistake in giving an answer to Monger’s simple question.

  Madness. Night thoughts.

  Why, truly, are you here, Dr Dee?

  A smitter of rain on the window, and then it stopped and I thought of what Monger had said when I’d told him what we sought.

  The lead went first from the roof and then the glass from the windows. The marble tomb? It just disappeared.

  All of it? At once?

  I’ve heard the old cross has been seen – the one from the original grave – but I know not where it is now. I don’t think any of us cared one way or the other. They’d cut out our heart. Lesser abbeys were kept on as cathedrals, but we were too close to Wells. Would be better the abbey had never been here than we’re left with an open wound.

  I’d asked him if it was true that Abbot Whiting had been tortured because it was thought he was concealing the famous eucharistic vessel of the Last Supper, the Holy Grail. I’d asked Monger if he believed it yet existed.

  That depends on how you define existence. It may well have existed as a vessel, of metal or pottery or wood. May well have existed here. But it might also have a spiritual life, a holy symbol, experienced only in visions.

  Those visions again. Monger had shaken his head in a weary bewilderment.

  Some say this is the holiest place in these islands, while to others it’s just a tawdry town with a history of fraud and deception and the monks at the rotten core of it.

  In the old days, Monger said, there had been whisperings, even amongst the monks, of things hidden, certain wonders pre-dating Christianity. Rumours still passed around by the town’s ragbag of half-pagan mystics… although they were in thrall to an essentially different Arthur, representing the magical legacy of the old Celtic tribes and Druids.

  What had we stumbled into?

  I undressed swiftly, because of the cold, threw on my robe over my night shirt, sat on the edge of the bed. Outside, the thunder crawled like a black beast on the hills, and I could not but think of Joan Tyrre and her dreams of Gwyn ap Nudd under his spiked hill.

  A rustling now in the chamber. Rats, most likely. There were always rats. I thought, inevitably, of Queen Elizabeth, her bedchamber red-hued from the fire. Afraid to sleep alone lest she awake under the dark glower of Anne Boleyn, the talking head with its blood-rimed neck.

  Jesu… stop this.

  Sliding off the bed, scrabbling on the board for a candle to light from the sconce on the landing. I would bring out my few books and study until the dawn came or sleep overcame me, or…

  There was a shadow before the window.

  I twisted urgently away from the board, my hand going to my mouth.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  Could see it seated by the window in the greyness.

  XXVII

  A Sister of Venus

  ‘I’d thought,’ she said, ‘to bare my breast.’

  A candle fell on to its side.

  The storm prowled closer, the beast at the door. All fumble-fingered, I caught the candle before it could roll from the board and hurriedly relit it from the flame of another. Three were alight now, including the one from the sconce on the landing, all in a bunch so that their flames mingled in a spiral of fire.

  ‘It having occurred to me,’ she said delicately from the chair by the window, ‘that you might wish to be sure I was not in possession of such a thing as a third nipple.’

  She wore the blue overdress, and her hair was down over her shoulders. In the candleflare, the panes of stained glass in the lower window were the colour of dried mud.

  ‘With which to suckle my familiar?’ she said. ‘As some say.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard that… I mean… how such an appendage is said to be employed.’

  Stepping back from the light, in pursuit of my breath.

  And – if you were thinking to ask – only one woman since my infancy had ever bared a breast for me.

  Mistress Borrow was smiling distantly, as if across a long room, say a lecture hall, some lofty-ceilinged forum for civilised, cultural debate.

  ‘Oh, of course – from the books.’ Musing very softly, as if to herself. ‘He’d know it from his books.’

  Holding my old brown robe together, my right hand shook. We’d not spoken since she’d walked away from the tower on the tor, after Fyche’s naming of her as a witch. It was as if she’d picked up from there: a line drawn, with geometrical precision, betwixt that point in time and this present moment, and…

  …all right… a Sister of Venus, if you must know. It was in Cambridge, on a rare night I’d drunk too much in an effort to be one with my fellow students, all of them older than me who, proving too young in worldly experience, too overawed and fumbling, had not… Oh God, how she’d laughed, that woman, a cold and brittle laugh, like a chisel chipping stonework from the buildings which enclosed the alley where we’d stood, tight ’twixt walls.

  A very sour memory which must surely have retarded my progress into manhood.

  I said, ‘You know they’re looking for you…’

  Hoarse words, meagre as the scrapings of a rat. Within an instant, cruel lightning had exposed what I guessed to be my raging blush.

  ‘I try not to let these diversions interfere with my work,’ she said, almost briskly. ‘Which oft-times, as you know, is also a matter of life and death. I beg mercy if this visit disturbs you, Dr John, but a man’s bed-chamber, for me… well, I’ve been in so many.’

  The thunder shook the panes.

  ‘As a doctor,’ she said. ‘Dear Lord, what a night this is become.’

  And placed a calming hand above her breast and, in my head, I was spinning again down the green flank of the tor, sky and hills falling around me like a cascade of playing-cards, crying Eleanor.…

  …Nel…

  Oh my God, she seemed so small now, with her narrow shoulders, her eyes half-lidded, demure, hair over her cheeks.

  ‘Well,’ she was saying. ‘I came really to inquire after your friend. Thinking it best to knock on your door first, but it was hanging open, so…’ Looking up at me, skin white-gold in the haze of light. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Not yet well.’

  ‘Then he has need of me?’

  Reaching for the black cloth bag at her feet on top of her folded black cloak.

  Need… Dear God…

  ‘He’s sleeping,’ I said quickly. ‘And… and better in body, most certainly, than yesterday, thank you. Though much damaged by the murder of his servant.’

  ‘Yes, that was—’

  She broke off. Only seconds after the thunderblast, lightning had flared again, like full day, in the glass. And then, on the sudden, as she flinched at the exploding sky, I saw in her eyes what had been so well hidden by her voice.

  Her doctor’s voice, which would be well practised at smoothing fears in herself and others. But the green eyes… to me, in this moment, they were the wild eyes of a bewildered animal in a forest of predators. And I felt calmer for seeing them, for they surely were not a witch’s eyes.

  The chamber had fallen dark again. Could it be that she had nowhere else to go but here that was safe from Fyche’s hue and cry?

  But, truly, how safe was this place?

  I said, ‘You’ve seen Joe Monger this night?’
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  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nor this day at all.’

  I nodded, feeling this to be the truth. Time, then, to hasten to the chase. Not that this was any kind of chase, for if I were a predator then she’d walked into my den.

  Holding my robe together with my left hand, I stood and held out the right.

  ‘John Dee,’ I said.

  Thus began the hours of change. The night of a wild transformation.

  How can I begin to tell this?

  Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul…?

  Alchemy.

  We talk of it. We talk of transmutation, we, the men of science, the men of books. We say, there is a formula, there has to be a formula to turn low metal into solid gold, to make man into something close to God. Some ancient secret, maybe known to Pythagoras and addressed by Plato. A matter of the occult.

  Most times, we say glibly, it will involve a painful passage through darkness towards a distant planet of light. But the truth is that almost none of us of us will ever attain that light, seeing only momentary glimpses like flashes from the beaten sky in the black belly of a storm. And then, having watched the flashes and searched deep within ourselves for something more lasting, will only – God help us – dwell forever in a deeper darkness.

  Worldly matters must needs be dealt with first, some small mysteries opened out. It seemed she’d left early this morning to see a sick child at a poor farm in the marshes, towards Wells, when a rider carrying letters to that city had spied her and stopped to tell her of the murder. Returning later to Glastonbury she’d had the wit to exercise caution, knowing how some men, under cover of hue and cry, can behave towards women alone.

  Slipping back into the town, not by the road but along sheep paths, she’d encountered Joan Tyrre, who’d told to her the worst of news – that she was sought – and she’d hastened away, back into the woods, only returning, well cloaked, after dark.

  And had gone, not home, but to Cowdray who, having seen off Fyche and his constables, had given her food and drink and an attic room. Sending word, discreetly, to her father that she was safe. Cowdray, she said, was a good man, if you didn’t mind waiting a full half-year for settlement of your bill. Her father had cared for Cowdray’s wife before she died, easing her pain a good deal, and he’d not forget that.

  I assured her that my friend, Master Roberts, would be swifter to settle. Anxious, naturally, to know if Dudley, as well as giving away my name, had betrayed his own identity. He hadn’t, but it seemed he’d come perilously close to it.

  ‘Your friend awoke that morning,’ Mistress Borrow said, ‘and knew not where he was. Nor who I was. Once, he called me Amy.’

  ‘Good,’ I whispered.

  Meaning, good that he hadn’t called her Bess.

  ‘And then, in his delirium, he called out for you twice by name. Where’s John Dee? Send John Dee to me.’

  ‘Um… there must be others,’ I said, ‘of that name.’

  ‘Not in my knowledge. And anyway, there was something about your friend’s manner. A man used to giving orders and being obeyed, in a snapping of the fingers. But now I was less interested in him than in you. I had to find out. Obviously.’

  At last I found a smile, recalling all her educated talk of astrological herbalism as we walked through the town and sat by the holy well. And all the time, she would have been charting the rising excitement in me, as we discussed the inherent power of places.

  All that blithe skipping on the rim of heresy.

  Heresy! Of a sudden, I wanted to cry it to the beams. Embrace it.

  Or her. ‘I’ve tried to follow your work, of course,’ she said. ‘As best I could, from pamphlets left around the town by travellers. Some of them insist that you’re the cleverest man in Europe, while others…’

  ‘I know well what the others say. Anyway, both are distortions of the truth.’

  ‘Ah, but all say the Queen thinks very highly of you. That’s distortion, too?’

  She sat, all serious, prim and decorous, looking down at her small hands in her lap. Why would my hands not be still? I sat on them. On the bed. Should not be sitting on the bed with a woman here, but she had the only chair.

  The candles, still in a cluster on the board I’d took care to keep betwixt us, made a bright ball of light and shot golden arrows to the beams. Mistress Borrow bent and pushed aside her cloak to delve into her black cloth bag.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that you’ve seen this one.’

  I rose and accepted the crumpled pamphlet, holding it close to the candles.

  IMPORTANT FOR ALL THE SECOND COMING

  Know that the Queen hath been served with clear warning of the ending of the world. That which was foretold in the Book of the Revelation of St John will soon come to pass. Dr Dee, the royal stargazer, hath been commanded to foretell the date when England, wherein lies the New Jerusalem, will see the Second Coming of Our Saviour…

  I read no further.

  ‘It’s bollocks,’ I said. Then blushed. ‘Beg mercy, mistress—’

  ‘Jesu, I’m a doctor.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Men cry out far worse when having a foot cut off.’

  This casual mention of surgery tensed me. But I would not think on it now. Handing the pamphlet back, I wondered if this could be the peacock man’s paper, or were there more? Was this one mere twig from a huge oak tree of fakery? Or – more disturbing – was there something in the stars I’d missed?

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘Some wool-merchants passing through.’

  ‘Well, you should know that no-one in this world has ever asked me to name the date of the apocalypse or the time of the Second Coming of Christ.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You sound disappointed.’

  ‘Tush, Dr John, you’re the Queen’s astrologer.’

  ‘So they tell me.’

  She fell silent. At some point she would be asking what the Queen’s astrologer was doing here in Glastonbury. And in the light of what had happened since we arrived, this no longer seemed like a secret worth preserving.

  So I waited for the next thunder to fade, and then told her. Told her, without identifying Robert Dudley, about our hitherto discreet mission to recover the bones which, whoever’s flesh had once been upon them, had lain in the tomb of King Arthur.

  Something like relief was at once apparent in her eyes, a tightness departing her body. Evidently, she’d feared worse.

  ‘But the bones are gone,’ she said. ‘Gone from the abbey, yes.’

  ‘Gone from the town.’

  I settled back on the side of the bed.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I…’ She hesitated for a moment and then shrugged. ‘My mother told me once.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And now you’re about to ask how my mother knew.’

  I said nothing. Mistress Borrow took breath.

  ‘She was close to the abbey. Always. That is, to the abbot. When I told you I remembered the abbot, that was because he was oft-times at our house. Which my father, though he’d little time for men of God, would tolerate because the abbot had an interest in healing.’

  ‘But it was only your mother who had the abbot’s confidence?’

  ‘And whatever he told her always remained in the most sacred confidence. She told neither my father nor me, and we learned not to ask. It was just that, one night my father was reading to us from Malory, while scorning his version of the tales…’

  ‘With good reason.’

  ‘It was read for amusement only. And we talked of Arthur in Avalon and his burial, and my father remarked on the tomb being plundered for the marble and my mother said to me later that it was of no import because it was empty by then. The tomb was empty.’

  ‘You think the abbot had the bones removed, knowing what was to come?’

  ‘Someone must have.’

  ‘But your mother said they were not in the town.’

  ‘I think her words were, it’s no use anyo
ne looking for them in Glastonbury.’

  ‘Thus suggesting that she knew where the bones were hidden.’

  ‘I don’t know. I truly don’t know. She never spoke of it again, though sometimes, when we were alone, I thought she came close.’

  Which didn’t take us much further but was a start. But Mistress Borrow hadn’t finished – hesitating a moment, as if considering how sacred a confidence might be when both parties were dead.

  ‘My mother… knew, I think, where many secret things were to be found. Other remains of Arthur.’

  I sat up, recalling what Monger had said about hidden wonders. But her smile was regretful.

  ‘I don’t mean the Holy Grail. Anyway, most people say the Grail’s not real. That it’s only a vision.’

  ‘Only—’

  ‘But there was once mention of King Arthur’s round table.’

  ‘Your mother believed King Arthur’s round table remains? Here? In this town?’

  ‘It was just a passing— What’s the matter?’

  I told her about Benlow, the bone-man and his piece of oak in a wooden box which I might have taken away but, in the end, had bade him keep. She laughed.

  ‘Did he suggest you stow it away inside your codpiece, and then offer to help you?’

  ‘Um…’ I sighed. ‘I gather that Benlow is not regarded as one of the seekers of Avalon.’

  ‘You gather right.’

  ‘So he’d not be trusted with secrets…’

  ‘Dr John, that man would sell his own mother’s bones to flavour a Christmas stew.’ Her face sobered. ‘When my mother spoke of the round table, I felt it was in a more spiritual sense, in the way that mystics speak of the Grail. She was a rare woman. I think she knew much of what happened under the surface.’

  ‘You mean underground?’

  ‘I truly can’t say, Dr John,’ Mistress Borrow said. ‘But I do believe that’s why—’

  She broke off at the white spatter of lightning, and we waited for what followed. Very soon afterwards, this time, and the whole frame of the window was atremble.