The Bones of Avalon (16 page)

‘Get some sleep,’ I said.

Because the inn had been empty, we were able to have separate chambers on the upstairs floor, while the attendants were accommodated below. Mine had a ruined four-post bed with one post hanging loose, all acreak, and the drapes so dense with dust that I dragged them down. Close drapery around a bed can be suffocating when you awake in the night from some smoky dream.

I’d brought a few books with me, in my bag, and laid them out on the board before the window – some stained glass in it, I noticed, but it was only a murk in the light from my single candle.

Kneeling before the window, I asked for God’s blessing for our mission, then prayed for mother’s welfare. Scarce remembered climbing into the bed, dragging the pulled-down drapes across it for more warmth. Hadn’t been given a hot brick.

What I next remembered seemed more in the nature of a dream.

Ever responsive to noises in the night, I must have slept no more than an hour when there came the creaking of a door.

Lay for a moment listening, aware of slow footsteps on the stairs, but it was the sliding of bolts that brought me out of bed and across to the window, clutching the drapes around me, for the room had no fire and was shockingly cold now.

The window was next to the inn sign, which bore the red cross of St George, drained to grey by the night. Below me I saw the outline of a man stepping down from the cobbles to the mud. In the thin moonlight, I saw him stand for a moment, leaning back, hands pushing against the bottom of his spine.

Dudley?

On the other side of the street was the abbey wall; beyond it, those great, lonely fingers of stone. After a while, he began to walk along the street, close to the wall until he vanished into shadow. The man of action who, sleeping alone, was restless.

.…a man who brings to his Queen such an irrefutable symbol of her royal heritage… something which bestows upon her monarchy’s most mystical aura. That man… he may expect his reward.

My own reward would be the discovery of any ancient books quietly removed from the abbey and hidden away. Books that Leland had seen, leaving him in a condition of
awe and stupor.
But it was unlikely they’d be secreted within the precincts of the abbey itself.

So I didn’t spend long wondering if I should go down and join Dudley. He didn’t need me, and I was cold and aching from the ride. John Dee, the conjurer, returned to his musty blankets.

Ever the observer, separated from life by the screen of his own learning.

It was probably fatigue and aching that turned the sudden dread I felt into something as real as another person in my bedchamber.

I
T WAS LIGHT
when I awoke to heavy footsteps and a banging on my door. Before I could speak, it had been thrown wide and Dudley’s attendant, Martin Lythgoe, stood there, his wide face creased with anxiety.

‘Doctor,’ he said. ‘Can tha come at once. Me master…’

‘What?’

‘Took severely ill, sir.’

Me rolling out of bed, forgetting how high it was and stumbling foolishly to my knees. Looking up at the straw-haired Martin Lythgoe from the floorboards.

‘Ill?’

‘A fever. Sweats and moans and rolls in his bed.’

Should not have been shocked. Had it not been obvious last night that something was coming?

‘Have you sent for a doctor?’

‘But I thought
thee
…’

He stood looking at me, hands on his hips, like if I was not a healer what was the use of me?

‘No.’ Groping for my old brown robe. ‘I’m not… that is, my doctorate’s…’

It was in law, if you must know, another of the pools I’d paddled in. I sighed.

‘I’m coming now…
’

The door of Dudley’s chamber was directly opposite mine across the narrow landing. A bigger room with a bigger window and more stained glass oozing reds and purples.

He was not lying in his bed but sitting hunched on the edge of it, the curtains thrown back. Wrapped in blankets like a sweating horse, hair matted to his forehead.

‘John.’

Hardly more than a sigh. The piss-pot was on the boards at his feet. A weighty shiver wracked his body, and the eyes turned to me were marbled with fear.

‘Lie down,’ I said.

‘John, get Lythgoe to prepare the horses. If I’m to die, I’m buggered if it’s going to happen here.’

‘You don’t need a horse. You’re not going anywhere, Robbie, least of all to the next—’

I stepped back. Of a sudden, he’d bent over the empty piss-pot, hands either side of his head, retched. Looked up betwixt his fingers.

‘God’s bollocks, John… this task of ours – cursed, or what?’

Rolling back on to his pillow, his back arched, face full-oiled with sweat. Martin Lythgoe throwing mute pleas at me from the doorway. Never, I would guess, having seen his famously elegant master so vulnerable.

And God help me I knew not where to start.

Born under Cancer, Dudley, like me – a water sign and thus ruled by the moon. If I’d had my charts and the necessary hours to spare, I’d no doubt be able to calcule how the planetary aspects might be affecting the organs of his body and the balance of its humours. And if I’d had Jack Simm here, we might, betwixt us, have come up with some remedy. Not for the first time I wished I
was
a doctor of physic.

‘When did this begin?’

‘Whuh…?’

‘I saw you go outside last night.’

‘Couldn’t sleep.’ Dudley was struggling up again, as if he might overcome this malady through strength of will. ‘Nose blocked, couldn’t breathe. Thought just a head cold. Hadda… gessome air.’

Which would have made it worse, chilled his blood.

‘This a plague town, John? Might as well tell me. Has the air of it, no question.’

‘Of course it isn’t.’

‘Just me, then, is it?’

‘Lie down.’

‘John, that place is… wretched and…’

‘What place?’

‘…colder than the night. Colder than all the night.’

A shiver coursing through him again, like a bolt of wild lightning, his head nodding, teeth clenched as he hugged himself under the blankets, moisture shining on his flushed cheeks.

Cowdray, the innkeeper, came in with a wooden tray bearing a jug and a cup.

‘Cider. Ain’t much that good cider don’t help.’

Me nodding thanks as Cowdray lowered the tray to a board, next to the ewer of water, backing swiftly away into the doorway – understandable enough: who knew what contagion a Londoner might have brought out of his filthy, overcrowded city?

‘Awful dreams, John.’ Dudley pulling his hands from the blankets to clutch at his head. ‘
Awful
bloody dreams.’

‘Dreams mean nothing,’ I said.

Knowing that to be untrue, although I believe that the meaning of dreams is oft-times obscured.

‘If dreams they were,’ Dudley said.

‘It’s the fever.’ I turned to Cowdray. ‘Is there a doctor here?’

‘Used to be,’ Cowdray said, ‘but he died.’

Dudley laughed sourly into his hands.

‘There’s a couple of them in Wells, for the cathedral,’ Cowdray said. ‘Proper doctors. One trained in London. Long cloak, one of them pointy masks and all. I could get one of my boys to ride over. ’Twould… cost you a bit, mind.’

‘Cost isn’t important.’ I looked hard at him. ‘But time is. Who do
you
go to?’

‘I tries not to get ill, sir.’

‘You know what I’m asking.’

His lips tightened. Men from London, he’d be thinking. Who from London could you trust not to have you arrested for the use of alternative healing by witchcraft?

‘Sir Peter Carew,’ I said. ‘Is he…?’

‘Gone. Left over an hour ago with his men. Before we knew about Master Roberts.’

‘Good. Help me. You wouldn’t send all the way to Wells, if someone in your family were sick.’

He made no reply. I poured some of the cider into the cup and gave it a sniff.

‘Perhaps you could water this down a little. He’s delirious enough already. That’s if your water is drinkable.’

Cowdray accepted the jug, stood for a moment looking into the clouded ferment.

‘There’s a feller we go to. Herbalist and surgeon.’

‘Good?’

‘We reckon so.’

‘How far?’

‘Up by St Benignus. Two minutes’ walk?’

‘What are we waiting for, then?’

Well, of course, it would be the local cunning man.

The kind of hedge-healer possessed of an ancestral knowledge of plants and herbs. The kind of practitioner of whom, in London, Jack Simm had been a touch afeared lest he became known as one. Afeared because of the persecution urged upon such people by the beak-nosed piss-sniffers with papers from the Royal College of Physicians.

It would be a safer life, however, for a cunning man out here, where there’d be fewer registered doctors. And also fewer criminals and foreigners to degrade the healing crafts with so-called magical powders ground from stones and animal bones.

I stayed with Dudley, having asked Martin Lythgoe to go with Cowdray to this healer, describe the symptoms and give him whatever money he demanded to come at once. At least I knew enough from my own studies, my astrology and my work with Jack to be able to assess, to some extent, the cunning man’s abilities.

‘Carew?’

Dudley shifting in his bed, turning hunted eyes to me and trying to rise.

‘Gone.’ I pushed him gently back. ‘Gone to Exeter.’

‘Thank Christ for that. He’d think me weak as a woman.’

He began to cough. He’d left most of the watered cider, saying it made him feel sick.

‘Women are not all weak, Robbie,’ I said. ‘I’d expect that you, of all people…’

‘I know it.’ He rolled onto his side, his face mottled as a cockerel’s in the light from the stained glass. ‘I
do
know it. Jesu, do I know it. But tell me… you tell me this… how’s it possible for someone to rule a country well and keep the ways of a woman?’

‘It might help if there’s a good man to share the burdens of power.’

I meant Cecil, but Dudley almost cried out.

‘Should’ve been
me
…’ His eyes full of hot tears. ‘Would’ve been so
right
. Everything my father died for, John, and if
I
should die this hour…’

‘Jesu, you’re not—’

He raised a limp hand to forestall me, then closed his eyes and took in a hollow breath. Shut his mouth and tried to swallow, but his throat must have been too dry, and when his eyes flickered open again they were empty, defeated.

‘Saw it coming.’

‘What?’

‘Death coming for me. I’d not expected it so soon, but God knows I deserve no better.’

‘So,’ I said upon a sigh, ‘what does death look like?’

‘Old man. A sad old man.’

I said nothing.

‘Both feet above the ground, and looking down on me with a terrible pity. And the white moon shining through him. The whiteness aglow in his eyes. And cold, John. So very, very… cold.’