The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Silence helps no-one.’

  ‘No-one helps me.’

  ‘Do some good.’

  ‘What is good?’ He leaned out from the bench. ‘You tell me what is good. You can’t! No-one knows no more! To which God do I commend my soul? Do I cry to His mother? Am I allowed? Is He allowed a mother?’

  Benlow began to laugh, and it turned to coughing. He covered his mouth and then looked down at his hand.

  ‘How soon before the blood comes?’ He moved to the end of the bench. ‘Sit with me. Are you afraid? Afraid I’ll give you the black lumps?’

  Tentatively, I crossed the cellar, a brittle bone ground to fragments under my boot. Sat down at the opposite end of the bench. Even so, straining to hear what Benlow said next, for it was said in not much above a whisper, borne on poor breath.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m John Dee.’

  He sighed.

  ‘The royal conjurer.’

  ‘The royal astrologer and consultant.’

  ‘Conjurer. Admit it.’

  ‘No. It would be a lie.’

  ‘It’s all lies. All life’s a lie. Tell me – which God’s a lie? Or are they all lies? Even no God’s a lie. Everybody lies in this town. You’re a wise man. Tell me that. Tell me that and I’ll tell you something. Bargain. Folks bargains with me all the time.’

  ‘Oh, there is a truth,’ I said. ‘At the core of it, Master Benlow, there’s a truth.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I’m a mathematician and I can see the geometry of it. I can chart the geometry of heaven and earth.’

  ‘Good, good… good so far. You’re a clever man. No more clever man in the whole of Europe, I’ve heard.’

  ‘That’s a lie also. But… clever enough.’ I felt a sweat in my hands. ‘Your turn, Master Benlow.’

  ‘I do resurrect the dead,’ he said. ‘To order.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘I know you provided the bones to be buried in the herb garden. I know that you dug up certain graves at the Church of St Benignus. As you say, to order.’

  ‘Good so far.’

  ‘I know that you perform these tasks for Sir Edmund Fyche and, in return, he’s permitted you to continue your business. Undisturbed.’

  Benlow leaned back, his breath a thin wheezing. He brought out a small bottle, resting it on King Edgar’s cranium.

  ‘Dr Borrow give me this.’

  ‘For your… illness?’

  ‘Can’t be cured. He says this will give me sleep when I need sleep.’

  ‘You’ll rest easier,’ I said, ‘with a clear conscience.’

  ‘So they say. What’s all this to you, Dr Dee?’

  ‘Dr Borrow’s daughter’s to be hanged. For no good reason.’

  He turned his face to me. It was creamed with sweat.

  ‘Like her, do you, my lord?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She never judged me. I’ll say that for her.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Tell me something else.’

  ‘You’ve told me nothing yet. Not much of a bargain.’

  ‘Your servant… he was a fine, big man.’

  ‘And a good man.’

  ‘I followed him.’ Benlow said. ‘I follow people a lot. Especially men. I had nothing better to do, and following a fine big man…’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘He was following you at the time. When you walked off with the fair Eleanor, up to the tor and the Blood Well, he followed you, and I followed him.’

  ‘Thinking you might learn something. Something you could pass on to Fyche.’

  ‘The business of relics is not what it was.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘What a funny voice he had. Could hardly understand a word.’

  ‘You heard him talking? Where was that?’

  ‘By the Blood Well. Are you testing me, Dr Dee? You sent him away, to find Joe Monger. Only he never went where he was bid. He kept on following you, keeping back a good way behind when you went up the tor, the two of you. I stayed even further back, for all’s visible from the tor. But I saw you talking to Fyche, and the old monk was there and Fyche’s cruel son, and when you left, your man followed them.’

  ‘He followed Fyche?’

  ‘All the way back to Meadwell. He went over the wall to have a look and came back through the gate, two of them twisting his arm behind his back.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Two of the retainers. One of them had a hammer, I think they’d been putting a fence up. I kept my distance. I don’t go there. Then Stephen Fyche comes back – and he… Tell me’ – Benlow slapped his hands on the sides of the skull – ‘secrets.’

  I started to tell him how I’d made the owls which seemed to fly, but that seemed not to satisfy him, probably because it could be explained by mechanics, so I talked about the spheres, the earthly, the celestial and the supercelestial, and he looked at me, his eyes filling up.

  ‘Where will I go when I die?’

  ‘Where would you wish to go?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘I’d wish to live on here. Free of the body and all its sickness.’ He lifted the skull. ‘An empty vessel, see? Is the skull not like a cup, from which the liquid of life has been poured out?’

  ‘Maybe. Liquid… evaporates. Goes to air.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A silence, then he told me.

  ‘Stephen Fyche… is a cruel boy. Likes to cause hurt. He had three men with him. They took your big fellow into the wood. Couldn’t hear too well, but they knew who he was and how he’d come here with you. They were demanding he should tell them who you were and what your business was here. He refused, of course. Not knowing whom he refused. For a long time, he refused. Too long. I’d’ve told them what they wanted without a thought. But then I know what Stephen Fyche is like. What he did to animals in the fields as a boy. Horses. For his diversion.’

  Benlow said that once they’d starting trying to make Lythgoe talk, they wouldn’t stop till he did. It went too far. Too far, too quick.

  ‘Stephen was in a frenzy. Do this to him, let’s try this… move away, I’ll do it. By the time he’d given them your name, he was so cut about, real cut about – I couldn’t stand to watch no more. And Master Stephen said it was best to finish him. I didn’t stay for that, but his screams, before they were stifled, were pitiful.’

  ‘How close were you?’

  ‘Hidden in some brambles, which was torture enough for me. Yet I can be still for long periods. Still as the dead.’ He smiled. ‘I’m real tidy, my lord. I can dig up a grave and put it all back and no-one knows I’ve been. Except when they want me to, like Big Jamey Hawkes.’

  I remembered Big Jamey Hawkes. ‘By the church of St Benignus? Benlow… How can I persuade you to tell all of this to Sir Peter Carew? What they did to Lythgoe. What happened to the bones of Jamey Hawkes.’

  He tried to laugh. It would not come, He clutched at his throat, distressed.

  ‘You’re ill,’ I said.

  ‘So quick… In full health, not a week ago I was in full health. God help me…’

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘That man’s a pig.’

  ‘Do you want to see Nel Borrow hang?’

  ‘I won’t see it.’

  He leaned forward, and some small breath came into him, strained through the wheezing.

  He put a hand on my knee. I tried not to cringe away.

  ‘Never thought I’d meet a man as famous as you, my lord. I would’ve asked you to take me to London. That’s what I planned. A bargain. Would’ve told you anything if you’d take me to London.’

  ‘You could have gone to London anytime.’

  ‘But not with… with introductions. You don’t just go to London. You go as someone. Or you go with someone. Too late now.’ He peered at me, closer, as if I were going faint in his sight. ‘Will I see King Edgar when I die? If I die holding him, will
he be waiting for me?’

  He’d seem to have forgotten this was not King Edgar, that none of the bones were likely to be the remains of anyone of note.

  ‘In the celestial sphere,’ I told him, ‘all is… possible.’

  ‘Do you truly believe that? Do you know these things, with all your science and your magic?’

  ‘Some believe,’ I said, ‘that living here helps. I didn’t quite see how that were possible, but… today I’ve seen evidence that this place is blessed by the heavens like no other. But you know this. When I was here before, you said death came easier here.’

  Where the fabric between the spheres is finer than muslin. The most memorable thing he’d said.

  ‘Do you know why this is?’ I said. ‘I can tell you.’

  And told him – why not? Time was running away from me – the secret which the monks had guarded and John Leland had tried to chart. Bringing the notebook from out of my doublet. Showing him the drawings. Explaining about the Zodiac. The mirror of heaven.

  ‘Ah.’ Benlow smiled at me. ‘So that’s what it is. Where did you find this, my lord?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Where did you unearth it?’

  His fingernails clawing my hose as I sprang up, my head bumping painfully against the boarded ceiling, and I could see the lumps now, on his neck. The lumps all black at the centre of them.

  ‘Someone had to bury it,’ Benlow said. ‘Pity they wouldn’t let me take the bones. I could’ve cleaned her up real nice. Made her look pretty again.’

  Within minutes, I was out of that temple of death and running back to the George as though pursued by all the demons of hell.

  L

  Emanation

  FOUND COWDRAY in the dimness of the panelled room, replacing burned-out stubs with new candles.

  ‘Where’s Monger?’

  ‘Gone with Master Roberts. To Butleigh. I thought you knew.’

  ‘Of course I did.’ Sinking into a chair, head in my hands. ‘Shit.’

  Cowdray put down the candles.

  ‘Let me get you some meat, Dr John.’

  ‘No.… no time. But some small beer…?’

  ‘Look, I should say…’ Cowdray brushed at his apron. ‘I didn’t realise there were things you hadn’t been told… by Carew and your friend. I’m not a man who… That is, I must needs keep these walls from falling down, you know?’

  ‘Cowdray, I’m not blaming you for my friend’s deceit. The money you’d make for accommodating Carew’s men, that was hardly to be turned down. It’s just… there’s something wrong here. Something very wrong.’

  Wanting to tell him what Stephen Fyche had done to Lythgoe. Wanting to cry it in the streets.

  ‘Dr John…’

  Cowdray’s gaze was in the gloom behind me. I turned quickly.

  The woman sitting in the most shadowed corner, to the left of the window, had long, silver hair, uncoifed, unbound. I’d never seen her before. In front of her on the board were pen and ink and paper.

  ‘Mistress Cadwaladr,’ Cowdray said. ‘A speaker of Welsh.’

  I inclined my head to her. Yet cautious.

  ‘My brother was a monk at the abbey of Strata Florida,’ Mistress Cadwaladr said. ‘I came here with him some years ago, and stayed. I was a cook at the abbey.’

  ‘After which,’ Cowdray said, ‘she worked with Cate Borrow in her herb garden. If that helps.’

  If ever a man spends his days looking over his shoulder, it’s you. You must know how you are.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered. ‘Thank you, Cowdray.’

  My dear John

  I am writing in our own tongue in case this letter should be intercepted, which I fear it might. I am aware that you do not speak the Cymraeg, but I think you might be able to read it.

  I believe the prophecies to have been conveyed to our sister through the good offices of her correspondent in France. The source would seem to be the French family’s own consultant. I know not the circumstances of this, except that they appear to have been secretly obtained.

  Here is the latest prophecy in full. The translation from French to English to Welsh will not, I hope, present too much fuddle in the meaning of it.

  Our sister is no better.

  I looked up.

  ‘I’m sorry all’s not well with your family,’ Mistress Cadwaladr said. ‘But what I’ve read, I shall forget.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I stared at the translation.

  Two names had at once presented themselves.

  Her correspondent in France: Sir Nicholas Thockmorton, the Queen’s ambassador. I’d met him once, only briefly, but knew he’d been close to the Dudley family. That he came from an old Catholic family, yet was now unquestionably Protestant. Knew also that he was considered a trusted adviser to the Queen and would keep her well informed about plans by the power-hungry Guise family to ensure that the daughter of Mary of Guise, the Queen of Scots, now Queen of France, would also one day be Queen of England.

  As for the French family’s own consultant, this could only be Nostradamus. Christ above, I could scarce believe it.

  Michele de Nostradame. This man had thrown a long and faintly sinister shadow over my career from the start. Some twenty-five years older than I, beloved by the French court and held in reverence over half Europe… for doing what I would not do. I’d never met him, nor sought to. If pressed, I’d say I was suspicious of his prophecies, so pretentiously laid out in four lines of verse… whilst wondering privately if the bastard possessed some faculty with which I’d not been endowed.

  He was known to be an astrologer but, if these prophecies were drawn from the heavens, then oft-times he and I saw different stars.

  I read the verse, as neatly transcribed by Mistress Cadwaladr.

  In the land of the great religious divide

  The dead witch shall haunt her daughter

  Till she shall kiss the bones of the King of all Britons

  And have them entombed again in glory

  Explicit. The dead witch, not Morgan le Fay.

  What was the sequence here? When had the forecast been received? Had the Queen believed herself haunted before or after its receipt? Either way, Nostradamus, if it was he, would know precisely what he was doing, the alleged bond of witchcraft between the Queen and her late mother having long been common gossip in France.

  Was it, then, an invented prophecy designed to unbalance the Queen in her mind? How much of this was going on? Think… the waxen effigy, all talk of which Walsingham had suppressed before it could reach court… the pamphlet prediction of the Queen’s death which had somehow found its way through the security. How organised was it, this mixture of sorcery and Machiavellian mind-play?

  And why had the Queen not been advised of what appeared to be a subtle, many-pronged assault on her senses, the higher mind and the lower mind, in wakefulness and sleep?

  Unless she was given false advice, whether knowingly or in ignorance.

  Did the answer to this lie in the line, they appear to have been secretly obtained?

  Obviously, we had spies in France at all levels of society. Had one of them got his hands on unpublished Nostradamus quatrains relating to the Queen of England? If this verse, for example, had been received as intelligence, then its credibility would obviously be enhanced.

  The Queen was superstitious, and there was no denying the eminence of Nostradamus, the respect afforded to him in France. I’d heard him credited many times with that terrifying prophecy of the killing of King Henri in the jousting, even though it came out of Italy. If Nostradamus said there was a bad air, people in France stayed indoors, farmers delayed the harvest. Our own archbishop, Parker, was once said – though he’d denied it – to have been deterred from accepting the Canterbury post by a prophecy of Nostradamus.

  And the man’s published predictions relating to the Queen had been so full of spleen as to be considered French Catholic filth. Never in the kingdom has arrived one so
bad, he’d written when her path to the throne had been clear. Making reference also to her poor parentage. Anne.

  Intelligence from France would be passed to the Queen in person by Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. Did Cecil know of this?

  ‘You look perturbed, Dr John,’ Mistress Cadwaladr said. ‘And, if I may say so, very tired.’

  Cowdray had left us alone, with a jug of small beer.

  ‘I’m well,’ I said.

  No use in further conjecture. This should be discussed with Dudley, who knew Throckmorton far better than I did.

  ‘Master Cowdray,’ Mistress Cadwaladr said, ‘in asking for my help… told me you’d become quite intimate with Eleanor.’

  I looked up, startled. This was, it must be said, a woman of mature beauty, and the level of translation had said much for her intellect.

  ‘We’d known one another only days,’ I said. ‘But there was… much we had in common. I was intent on becoming her advocate at the assize. Distressed when she wouldn’t see me.’

  ‘I also find that hard to accept. Do you think you were lied to?’

  ‘It occurred to me. But… no. I think she was in some way persuaded to…’

  ‘Confess? How could she be persuaded to confess away her life?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Mistress Cadwaladr placed her hands together, palm to palm, touching her fingers to her lips.

  ‘Anything relating to witchery seems yet to be outside all normal rules. Her mother’s confession was the same. I worked with Cate in her garden. I’d grown herbs for the abbey kitchens, and later we’d both studied the works of St Hildegard of Bingen, regarding the curative properties of plants.’

  ‘Does that mean you were her first link with the abbey?’

  ‘In a way. Before her marriage, she worked alongside me there, as a kitchen maid. But when, much later, she became the abbot’s friend, I was never party to their discussions.’

  ‘I wish I’d known of you earlier,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.…’ She looked not comfortable. ‘It’s some years since I left the garden. Not everyone would remember.’