by Phil Rickman
‘What’s your plan?’
I’d thought of little else this past hour, and there was no light in my head.
‘Can only see who they produce as witnesses. See how they might be examined. Who, for example, will they have to testify about the bones found in the herb garden? Who, in the absence of Matthew Borrow, will be the doctor who’ll describe the injuries inflicted on Martin Lythgoe?’
‘If you’d officially been her lawyer you’d know all this,’ Dudley said. ‘What if she publicly refuses to have you represent her? Have you thought of that? Tells the court she doesn’t want you?’
‘Conducts her own defence? Not allowed. She can only call witnesses.’
‘And if no witnesses are come forward… I mean, even if she does accept you, how could you turn it around? ’
‘I may know enough now to discredit the lies of the witnesses they have.’
‘Discredit before whom? For that to work, you’d need a sympathetic judge. An unbiased judge. An unbiased jury.’
‘It would help.’
Dudley pulled down his hat.
‘I think it was Carew who said, this is not London.’
Half a dozen miles to Wells. So not like Glastonbury, they said, with its fine and functioning cathedral and its moated bishop’s house. It was full light when we at last came in sight of it.
Or as full as it would ever be this drab day. Dudley reined in his horse on the edge of watery ground, maybe half a mile from the city.
‘The assize court, according to Carew, is one half of a building overlooking the market place. The other half ’s apparently a wool store.’
‘At least they have their priorities right.’
‘Yes. Um… John… assuming we’ll have little time or opportunity to talk… I…’
‘You want to know about the bones of Arthur.’
‘It’s why we’re here.’
‘Yes.’
All flat land here, the colours of mould and enchannelled with dank water. We dismounted at the roadside and I laid upon Dudley the results of three, maybe four hours’ work.
‘It’s about the centre of the earthly Zodiac. You asked last night if it was the tor. I thought it wasn’t, and that’s true. And then realised the possible significance of finding the centre. Set myself the task of working it out, with the help of the existing charts.’
‘And?’
‘As far as I can judge, the centre is in or close to the village of Butleigh. Where you… seem to be a popular figure. A wood’s been marked on Leland’s chart. A skull drawn, looks like.’
‘Go on.’
‘The centre of the celestial Zodiac is the northern star. The axis on which the great wheel turns. A place of considerable cosmic significance. Lying in the star group of Ursa Minor.’
I look up at the sound of hooves. A couple of riders coming towards us, more of them behind. Outriders, it looked like, for a company of horsemen and a cart.
‘The Little Bear,’ Dudley said.
‘Exactly.’
‘And?’
The outriders slowing as they marked us. I saw that one of them was the grey-haired fellow with cracked teeth who’d supervised the arrest of Nel Borrow and the battery of her father before holding forth in the alehouse on the subject of hanging. He rode across to us, and I turned quickly back to Dudley.
‘What’s the Welsh for bear?’
‘How would I know that?
‘Arthur,’ I said. ‘The Welsh for bear is Arthur.’
‘Jesu.’
‘See?’
‘At the centre of his own round table?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Holy shit…’
‘Clear the way, you fellows,’ the cracked-teeth man said.
Dudley strode out.
‘I can’t see that we’re in the way. Fellow.’
Cracked-teeth leaned down from his horse as if he would slap Dudley across the face.
‘Well, don’t get in the way.’
I marked the tightening of Dudley’s gut, his right arm making that familiar diagonal across his body toward where the hilt of the sword might have been. But cracked-teeth turned his horse away, and we stood at the side of the road as the main body of men drew level. About a dozen of them before, behind and alongside the cart.
On the cart, a broken statue.
In my chest, a feeling like to a collapsing mountain.
The cart kept on moving, and I started towards it, and then a black energy possessed my legs and I was running alongside it, with a fury, through the slanting rain. Arms reaching for me, and I elbowed them away with the pulsing strength of desperation.
Some man demanding, ‘Who are you, fellow?’
‘A clerk from London.’ Cracked-teeth from his horse. ‘Thinks himself—’
I howled at the cart, ‘Where are you going?’
Panting now, as the company increased its pace.
Seeing that she was in chains, with a fat woman beside her. Grey-faced, still as stone. No cloak, hair in draggles. Bare arms. Freckles and goosebumps.
‘Stop!’
For whom?’
‘I’m her advocate.’
A rattle of laughter in the rain.
‘Bit late now, fellow. We’re taking her home.’
For one uncertain moment, I thought there might be hope of her release and then saw the weight of those chains and that the horseman looking down on me was Brother Stephen, son of Fyche. Clad not in monkish robes this day but a wine-coloured doublet, a short cape, a wide-brimmed black hat.
I clutched at the wooden side of the cart, meeting, just for an instant, the widening eyes of Nel Borrow, the only movement I’d seen in her, before my hands were dragged behind my back and a swordpoint was at my throat, just tickling, and Stephen Fyche was dismounting.
‘No, no.’ Waving the sword away. ‘He’s but a harmless clerk. You’ll frighten him to death.’
I was thrust back, panting, and the cart lurched away, leaving Stephen Fyche standing before me, his eyes without expression.
I said, ‘I don’t understand. The trial can’t be over.’
‘What trial?’
A thin face made more vulpine by a new beard, and his eyes and voice were lazy with power. He was all of eighteen years old.
‘Obviously, I’m aware, Dr John, that you have a certain interest in this woman, in relation to the ailment of your colleague. But I see he’s fully recovered now. For which I’m sure you’re grateful.’
I said nothing.
‘There’s no issue to be made of this,’ he said. ‘The woman decided yesterday to save us all the inconvenience of a trial and made a confession. Appeared before the judge for sentence at first light.’
Stephen Fyche cast a glance at the cart rumbling away behind him.
‘As you can imagine, it took not long.’
XLVIII
Black Hearts
MY LAUGHTER, IF laughter it was, must have sounded half crazed. Half in this world, half in purgatory, that same purgatory the Protestant reformers told us no longer existed. They could rearrange the structure of the universe on a whim, the reformers, demolish a cathedral at a stroke.
Back at the George, a letter had awaited me, evidently from Blanche Parry, and I’d torn it open at once, in front of Dudley and Cowdray, in the alehouse.
It began, Anwyl Sion…
The look on my face making Dudley sigh.
‘What’s wrong now?’
Pushed the letter in his face. My father, as you know, was Welsh to the bone; far more useful, he’d say, far more useful, boy, the Welsh tongue, than Latin or Greek, with all the living people speaking it, that wealth of oral, bardic tradition…
‘You mean you don’t speak this language?’ Dudley said.
‘Blanche evidently assumes I do.’
Anwyl Sion. My dear John. I knew that much.
‘God’s bollocks, John, there must be someone here who reads it.’
‘Like the bastard vicar at St Benignus
?’ I might have screamed it. ‘Not exactly a man who I’d have know the content. Which I’d guess to be of singular significance, else why send it in this… old British cipher?’ I turned on Cowdray – could we trust him? I hardly cared. ‘Is there anyone here who speaks Welsh and is not shackled to Fyche?’
‘I’ll think on it,’ Cowdray said.
‘Think not too long, Master Cowdray.’
Shutting my eyes, flinging back my head, squeezing my fists. When I straightened, Cowdray was staring bleakly at me, his eyes tired, his skin the colour of lead. God knows how I looked to him.
‘I should tell you,’ Cowdray said hesitantly, ‘what they were saying here last night. Fyche’s hirelings. About a… hanging.’
‘I’m assuming they don’t plan to delay it,’ Dudley said.
‘Next dawn.’
Choked on my own breath.
‘Not leaving much time for the royal pardon,’ Dudley said sourly.
Bent over, coughing, I struggled to think what time it was now, how much we had left, Dudley not looking at me as I struggled for some semblance of emotional restraint.
‘Town’s divided,’ Cowdray said. ‘Times of crisis, there’d always be leadership from the abbey. Taken as the word of God without a thought. But now the vicars…’
Looking worriedly at Dudley, doubtless the most confirmed Protestant in the room.
‘Go on, man,’ Dudley said.
‘All the people cured by Nel, her father, mother. Now they’re told she stands for all that needs purging. Two minds, Master Roberts, is the answer. The one thing that’s sure is they en’t gonner band together and raid the Meadwell. Word is there’s more weaponry in there than the royal armoury.’
‘I can’t believe,’ Dudley said, ‘that they intend an execution on the tor, rather than with… discretion.’
‘Jesu!’ I cried. ‘She’s to be an example. Just as Whiting’s killing was for the papists. An example to all who dare to think outside of the Bible, whichever version of it’s favoured these days, and we… we have the rest of a day and one night to get it stopped.’
‘Only Carew can get it stopped, John. Well, not stopped, but maybe he can have it delayed long enough for us to organise intervention… at a higher level. If he feels moved to it.’
‘But Carew—’
Cowdray was glancing beyond my shoulder; I turned and saw Monger was at the doorway, nodded, bidding him enter.
‘—Carew knows the trial was a travesty.’
‘Of course he does, but where witches are concerned he’ll accept rude justice. It’s the seaman in him. Hang them from the high mast, throw them in the sea. To sway him at all, we must needs challenge the very foundation of it. If… if… we can show who really killed Martin Lythgoe, then that…’
‘And tortured him,’ I said. ‘Forget not that.’
‘You think I fucking could? You think I’m ever going to forget that?’
Dudley’s eyes were inflamed, the humour in this place choleric and inside me lay the cold black bile of autumn.
‘In the first instance,’ I said, ‘if Carew can be shown, beyond doubt that the bones were planted in the herb garden…’
‘Beat the truth out of this bloody bone-man, you think?’
Monger cleared his throat. Dudley looked at him.
‘The bone-man’s sick,’ Monger said.
‘How sick?’
‘Maybe mortally.’
‘Spit it out.’
‘We think wool-sorters’.’
Cowdray drew breath. Monger shrugged.
‘Truly, there’s not much doubt. Matthew’s seen him. He has the lumps with the black hearts.’
‘God-damned fleeces, this is,’ Cowdray said. ‘Likely some farmer sold him some cheap skins from a flock rotten with it. You’d think he’d know better by now. Hell, we don’t want that in town again.’
‘Anyway, if you want to speak with him,’ Monger said, ‘I’d not delay. Just keep your distance.’
There was a silence. Benlow had looked unwell this morning, and I’d thought it was the drink.
‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘He wanted to talk to me earlier. Said he could point me to the location of the bones of Arthur. Which I thought was a try-on, not least because—’
I looked at Dudley, who opened out a hand to convey that it was a little late for circumspection. I turned to Monger.
‘We have reason to think Arthur’s bones could be reburied at Butleigh. A wood? Near a church?’
‘There is a wood near Butleigh church,’ Monger said. ‘But ’tis not an old wood.’
‘Wouldn’t need to be. We’re only talking twenty or so years ago, if the bones were removed before Whiting’s arrest. Maybe they planted the wood around the grave?’
‘Can you help with this, Farrier?’ Dudley asked.
‘No, but I know people in Butleigh who might, if they thought there was good reason. ’Tis not a big place.’
‘You could persuade them? Come with us?’
‘Us?’ I said.
‘If they’re there, we should find them quickly,’ Dudley said. ‘Deal with this now, I say. Waste no more time. For tomorrow…’
He looked at me and then looked away, as if far from certain that tomorrow I would not do something foolish enough to render our mission an abort.
‘Let’s have a dozen men,’ he said to Cowdray. ‘Don’t bother Carew with this. I’ll see him later.’
A dozen? I stared at him and then at Cowdray. Cowdray nodded.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, John…’ Dudley slumping down into a chair, looking pained. ‘You don’t think I’d bring us here without shielding our spines?’
‘What?’
‘Why do you think Carew displays such antagonism? Because he resents having to spare so many trained soldiers, working under cover to guard the arses of men he—’ Dudley blew out his cheeks. ‘Well, me he merely dislikes, it’s you he despises.’
‘How many?’
‘Men? I don’t know. Twenty at the most. I mean… not an army.’ Whatever had made me think this man and I inhabited the same world?
‘Let me get this right… You’re saying there’s been armed men watching our backs since we arrived?’ Whirling on Cowdray. ‘You knew of this?’
‘The guard… it got doubled after your man’s murder,’ Cowdray said. ‘Even Sir Peter was alarmed. Hadn’t expected that.’
‘But he was expecting trouble?’
‘He didn’t know,’ Dudley said. ‘None of us knew. A few men had come here ahead of us, orders of Cecil. It appears I am, after all… considered of some value to England. And maybe even you, in your peculiar way.’
‘Half a dozen sleeping in my cellars,’ Cowdray said. ‘Come out to watch the entrances at night. Nobody noticed the extra, with all the lowlife in town for the hue and cry.’
‘And, um, when Carew went to Exeter,’ Dudley said, ‘in fact he went no further than Wells. Now you know.’
‘Good of you.’
‘John, look… if ever a man spends his days looking over his shoulder, it’s you. You must know how you are.’
‘Unstable in my mind?’
‘It was simply considered unwise to… trouble you with this.’
‘Who considered it unwise? You? Carew? Cecil? You going to tell me Fyche knows?’
‘Fyche knows nothing of this,’ Dudley snapped. ‘You see? There you go again. That’s why you weren’t told. Would you have dug up a grave knowing you were being watched? Not that we—’ Dudley raising both hands. ‘No more than two of them, on that occasion. Instructed to come no closer than the bottom of the hill. They were not to see what we were doing.’
For me, the humiliation was as solid as an another person in this cider-stinking cell. I thought to leave. Then, at the door, recalled what Dudley had said that afternoon in his barge on the Thames, turned and threw it in his face.
‘A rare freedom to move around as a common man, unencumbered by the trappings of high office…?’
> ‘Figure of speech,’ Dudley said. ‘You’re right. You’re my friend, and I should’ve told you. Blame the fever.’
‘Go and look for your damned bones.’
Turning away, walking out of the alehouse, into the grey afternoon. Still hadn’t eaten, but there was no time. At least I’d fulfilled my purpose, decoding Leland’s notebook. If Arthur’s bones lay not at Butleigh then the monks of Glastonbury had not the wit I’d credited to them.
At least I was free now to apply what remained of my energies to that which was most important to me. The rain had stopped and, though the sky was cold, the day was unseasonably warm.
Wild lights were blazing in my head as I walked down the high street.
Half in purgatory, half in the Bedlam.
PART FIVE
‘Oh Glastonbury, Glastonbury… the Threasory of the carcasses of so famous and so many rare persons… how Lamentable is thy case now?’
John Dee.
XLIX
His Diversion
CANDLES EVERYWHERE.
A cathedral’s worth of candles albaze in Benlow’s ossuary. Cheap tallow candles, fine beeswax candles, many of them hot-waxed to the craniums of the anonymous dead who posed as kings and saints.
‘Burning them all,’ Benlow said. ‘Go out in light.’
The whole cellar was flickering white-gold. Somewhere, a forbidden incense burned, and the air was all sickly-sweet as if the bones themselves, as was sometimes said of saintly relics, were become fragrant.
‘I wanted you to take me to London,’ Benlow said. ‘I was going to ask you. Before you set that old bitch on me.’
Sitting on his bench in a fine gold-hued doublet and his soft velvet hat. Cradling what he said was the skull of King Edgar, the good Saxon. Light and shadows shivering all around him, and it was as if we were taken into the astral sphere where nothing was solid.
‘How could I trust you,’ I said. ‘Knowing that your trade was founded on lies.’
‘No lies no more, my lord. Silence, maybe, but no lies.’