The Bones of Avalon (24 page)

‘Look…’

On a bed of fleece lay a fragment, not of bone, but of splintered wood.

‘There,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘Touch it.’

I placed a finger inside the box. The wood was hard, probably oak, blackened with age.

‘Picture it, my lord,’ Benlow said, but his voice was strained now and desperately wheedling. ‘See a great hall hung with banners and lit by a thousand torches. Hear the walls echoing tales of valour.’

‘Don’t piss with me, Benlow.’

He slammed the lid down on the box and thrust it at me. ‘Take it.’ His jaw trembling. ‘Take it back to London with you. Please. Don’t come back! How many other men alive today can say they’ve laid hand on the round table?’

I
T WOULD HAVE
been about half an hour past midnight when I dragged on my old brown robe and went to sit with Dudley in his room.

A small candle was burning on the water stand. He lay asleep and unmoving, his breathing even. Earlier, I’d watched him swallow half the jugful of holy water, enough returned to his everyday mind to wince at its metallic taste.

Discreetly, I’d unstoppered the bottle of his potion and sniffed it. As if that would tell me anything, for who could identify the scent of deadly nightshade? Nonsense, anyway. I’d had little hesitation in giving him more, and he’d slept.

I sat upon a stumpy wooden stool by the night-muddied window, staring into the candle flame, wide awake. A mathematician and an astronomer, who understood not the geometry of love, nor could hope to chart the trajectory of desire.

Least of all his own.

I’d awoken thrice before midnight in the hollow, stony silence of the George Inn, rolling in my bed and thinking at first that I’d caught Dudley’s fever.

Becoming all too aware there was more than one kind of fever. It was as if all the suppressed bodily demands of my bookish youth had broken their chains at once. In the minutes when I was not awake, I was dreaming of the emeralds in the eyes, the abandon of the dark hair and the foxy crossing of those front teeth. The witch’s daughter.

And I will travel to Avalon, to the fairest of all maidens…

…
and she shall make all my wounds sound and make me whole with healing medicines…

Witchcraft… sorcery… conjuring. Despite its air of abandonment,
apathy and decay, I could well believe now that some element beyond our known science lived in this watery place, and the bones of Arthur were the least of its secrets.

‘Meant to tell you…’

I spun round. Dudley was turned upon his side, his eyes open, bulbous in the candlelight.

‘How are you now, Robbie?’

‘Throat feels like I’ve swallowed a dagger.’

‘It’ll pass.’

‘That’s what your doctor says?’

A warm pulse inside me. I sat up.

‘She came to me again,’ Dudley murmured.

‘When?’

‘Dunno.’ Raising his head on an arm. ‘God’s bollocks, John, she’s a beauty. If I’d the strength to lift the sheets, I’d have had her in here with me before you could say…’ Unable to come up with a suitably distasteful word, he let his head fall back. ‘At least I’m beginning to feel I might not have to bargain with the evil one… in the short-term.’

‘Pity,’ I said. ‘Dying was good for you. You spoke more truth than I’ve heard from you in years.’

‘What did I say?’

‘It’ll save. What was it you meant to tell me?’

‘What?’

‘You said you meant to tell me something.’

‘God knows.’ Dudley rolled onto his back, making the candle flame bend. ‘Oh… bears? Was it bears?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’ll tell you ’bout that anyway. The Queen’s fondness for the bear-baiting, the way it distresses you so. This is from when we were children – eleven or twelve. There was to be a bear-baiting one day—’

‘We?’

‘Bess and me. We’d overheard my father discussing it with my uncle – the evening’s sport. We were in the gardens, behind some holly bushes and my father’s going, “How shall the women be entertained, meanwhile, and the maids?” Making it clear that the bear-baiting was strictly
for the men and women and maids might faint at the… flying blood and flesh. Thus spoiling the enjoyment of the men.’

I got up and poured out more water for him. He glanced at me and scowled.

‘Though some men –
half
men – remain oblivious of its… Anyway, I remember watching Bess, as we’re crouching behind that bush. She’s but eleven years old, don’t forget. Never seen a mouth set so tight. Stamping her little foot till they let her in. So they did. She came to the bear-baiting… and though at times her eyes strained with tears she never once looked away and, at the end, she’s clapping longer and harder than any man round the pit.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘I thought you’d be interested to know that,’ Dudley said.

‘Would explain a lot.’

Dudley said softly, ‘I think that what I saw in her eyes that day was a sensing of her destiny in a world of men. For a little maid, you had to admire her balls.’

I wondered why he’d never told me this before. Maybe he thought he owed me something for his avoidance, once more, of an early death. Although, in truth, all thanks were due to Eleanor Borrow. The witch.

‘God, why do I feel so weak, John. Barely drag my arse to the damn piss-pot.’

‘Well, don’t think I’m going to hold it up for you.’

An image of Benlow came into my head, and I shuddered.

‘No, fair enough.’ Dudley summoned the shade of a smile. ‘So who is she really?’

‘The doctor?’

‘Doctors don’t come with good tits. Doctors are white-faced, humourless bastards, who… is she still in the inn?’

‘I don’t know where she is. I… tried to find her earlier.’

I’d asked Cowdray where she lived, and he’d sent one of his boys for her, but the boy came back saying the house was empty. I’d looked also for Martin Lythgoe, to find out if he’d spoken to the farrier, but he wasn’t around either, and I’d eaten alone and sparsely in the ale-house, surrounded by cider-swilling farmers.

Dudley said, ‘What the hell are we doing in this shithole, John? Remind me.’

‘We’ve come to search for the bones of Arthur.’

‘Have we found them?’

‘Not yet. I… went, on Cowdray’s advice—’

‘You told Cowdray why—? ‘No. Not exactly.’

‘
Jesu,
John!’

‘I went to see a dealer in relics. He had a load of old bones… any old bones…’

‘From where?’

‘I don’t know. Stolen from church crypts, dug out of graves. People bring them to him, I’d guess, for pennies. He sells them to gullible pilgrims as saintly relics.’

‘He’d be a source, I suppose,’ Dudley mused, ‘if we don’t find the real bones. Though we’d probably need to get him killed afterwards.’

I stared at him. It might be the fever speaking or he might be serious. Either way, no time to tell him of my suspicion that Benlow might indeed know where the actual remains were to be found. What had been very clear to me was that something pertaining to the matter of Arthur had left that man sorely afraid.

‘
I’d
find them,’ Dudley said, ‘if I could get out of this pit.’

‘Give it another day. Get up too soon and it’ll come back, only worse. Robbie…’

‘Get me a new nightshirt, would you, tomorrow? This one stinks to heaven.’

I pulled the stool away from the wall and sat down just outside the circle of candlelight.

‘He offered me an obvious fake.’

‘Who did?’

‘The relic man. He had a lump of wood which he said was from Arthur’s round table.’

‘Have you heard of the round table still preserved?’

‘Not here. Only the one in Winchester Cathedral. And we all know the truth of that.’

Everyone accepted that this huge artefact was Plantaganet fakery, maybe from the time of Edward III, who was crazy for Camelot, or even Edward I who had travelled to see the bones entombed at Glastonbury Abbey. The Winchester board had been further tampered with by the Great Furnace who, at a time of his own enthusiasm for all things Arthurian, had caused his own features to be imposed upon it.

‘This Benlow… he would’ve told me it was a piece of the true cross if he’d thought that was what I was looking for. Glastonbury seems to be a place where it’s ever difficult to make out the real from the false. If you’re an outsider, anyway. Look, your own vis—’

I broke off. Without thinking, I’d found myself giving voice to another matter which was denying me sleep. Too late, now.

‘Robbie, when you walked out to the abbey, last night, you said you’d seen—’

‘Don’t recall going to any abbey.’

‘I saw you from my window. You walked across the street.’

‘You were dreaming.’

‘You said you’d seen an old man. You said the old man was looking down on you, as if he was in the air, and you could see the moon—’

‘I was full of
fever
!’ Dudley pulled the blankets tighter around him. ‘Don’t you go throwing my sickbed fancies back at me!’

‘What about the Queen?’

He stared at me.

‘Does the Queen have delusions?’

‘How dangerously do you want to live, John?’

‘It’s said the Queen… sees her mother.’

‘Who says that?’ He tried to rise, slid back down. ‘What shit are they spreading around court now?’

‘I wouldn’t say that it’s being spread around. My source is… a discreet source.’

Dudley closed his eyes.

‘Anne Boleyn. God…’

‘Is it true?’

‘Crazed bitch.’

‘Anne Boleyn?’

‘Could’ve stopped all the talk. My father always said that. But maybe she liked it.’

‘The talk of witchcraft?’

‘Also, probably thought Harry liked it. Added to her allure. Her having a extra finger and all. And moles. They say she had a furry mole shaped like a…’ He closed his eyes. ‘And maybe he
did
like it. Maybe it oiled his lance. For a while. Until she was his wife – would all have to stop then. But, by God, if anyone thinks that Bess…’ Dudley’s eyes came open and he looked hard at me across the shadows. ‘You know, unless you really think you can help, you’d do best to forget this, John.’

‘Help?’

‘But then you don’t go in for the cure of souls, do you? Didn’t you once tell me that?’

I said, ‘Queen Mary—’

‘I always thought you’d prefer to forget Queen Mary, too.’

‘Do you remember telling me, some years ago, how Mary had oft-times warned the Princess Elizabeth to be seen to reject her mother and the Boleyn nest of Lutherans. Pleading with her to embrace the old faith while she yet could?’

‘I need to sleep,’ Dudley said. ‘Did you not tell me that?’

Back in my bedchamber, I stood by the window and gazed down into Glastonbury’s moonlit high street. Beyond it, the abbey’s arches, a company of the mournful dead.

I was remembering the townsfolk yesterday and my sense that they went about their business as if in a play. As if all of them knew that the town possessed a life
beneath
, which must needs be concealed for its own protection… except when reference to it might be used to secure the future, the way the monks of the twelfth century had used the bones of Arthur.

The monks. Guardians of this sacred ground for more than a thousand years.

What did that mean? What did it mean
now?
All abbeys and monasteries were repositories of ancient and esoteric knowledge, and if this had
been the oldest of them all – the very foundation stone of Christianity in England – then, yes, it would have been heavy with sacred secrets.

As for the conservation of physical items of value, the gold and the bones… well, plans would have been made well in advance, individuals selected for the task of secreting them away when the abbey fell into the Great Furnace.