The Bones of Avalon (14 page)

‘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.

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 dreamed 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.

O
N 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.