The Bones of Avalon (35 page)

‘Who?’

‘It varies. I know for a fact he’s been tossing around the idea of a union to unite us with Scotland – finally break France’s hold through Mary Stuart. And if…
if
, when he finds the right match, the chosen foreigner finds out that his virgin queen is not…’

Dudley fell back, coughing. The thunder rolled closer. The bedside candle went out.

…not a virgin.
A shiver sped through me. ‘I think we’ve talked too much,’ I said. ‘Get some sleep, rest your throat.’

I blew out the other candle and closed the door on Dudley, shaken. Pacing the landing, lighting a tallow candle in the sconce there.

So much I hadn’t told him. How, for example, would he have reacted to the knowledge that at least two people in this town knew exactly who I was, and that one of them was the woman now sought by Fyche in connection with the murder of Martin Lythgoe?

Who, in this situation, could we trust? How would Dudley feel about the farrier, who seemed to me an honest, well-intentioned man?

But then what did
I
know? What did I know about the life outside of books?

I went into my chamber and sat at the foot of the dusty bed in the darkness and wondered whether I hadn’t made a terrible mistake in giving an answer to Monger’s simple question.

Madness. Night thoughts.

Why, truly, are you here, Dr Dee?

A smitter of rain on the window, and then it stopped and I thought of what Monger had said when I’d told him what we sought.

The lead went first from the roof and then the glass from the windows. The marble tomb? It just disappeared.

All of it? At once?

I’ve heard the old cross has been seen – the one from the original grave – but I know not where it is now. I don’t think any of us cared one way or the other. They’d cut out our heart. Lesser abbeys were kept on as cathedrals, but we were too close to Wells. Would be better the abbey had never been here than we’re left with an open wound.

I’d asked him if it was true that Abbot Whiting had been tortured because it was thought he was concealing the famous eucharistic vessel of the Last Supper, the Holy Grail. I’d asked Monger if he believed it yet existed.

That depends on how you define existence. It may well have existed as a vessel, of metal or pottery or wood. May well have existed here. But it might also have a spiritual life, a holy symbol, experienced only in visions.

Those visions again. Monger had shaken his head in a weary bewilderment.

Some say this is the holiest place in these islands, while to others it’s just a tawdry town with a history of fraud and deception and the monks at the rotten core of it.

In the old days, Monger said, there had been whisperings, even amongst the monks, of things hidden, certain wonders pre-dating Christianity. Rumours still passed around by the town’s ragbag of half-pagan mystics… although
they
were in thrall to an essentially different Arthur, representing the magical legacy of the old Celtic tribes and Druids.

What had we stumbled into?

I undressed swiftly, because of the cold, threw on my robe over my night shirt, sat on the edge of the bed. Outside, the thunder crawled like a black beast on the hills, and I could not but think of Joan Tyrre and her dreams of Gwyn ap Nudd under his spiked hill.

A rustling now in the chamber. Rats, most likely. There were always rats. I thought, inevitably, of Queen Elizabeth, her bedchamber red-hued
from the fire. Afraid to sleep alone lest she awake under the dark glower of Anne Boleyn, the talking head with its blood-rimed neck.

Jesu…
stop this.

Sliding off the bed, scrabbling on the board for a candle to light from the sconce on the landing. I would bring out my few books and study until the dawn came or sleep overcame me, or…

There was a shadow before the window.

I twisted urgently away from the board, my hand going to my mouth.

‘Who’s there?’

Could see it seated by the window in the greyness.

‘I’d thought,’ she said, ‘to bare my breast.’

A candle fell on to its side.

The storm prowled closer, the beast at the door. All fumble-fingered, I caught the candle before it could roll from the board and hurriedly relit it from the flame of another. Three were alight now, including the one from the sconce on the landing, all in a bunch so that their flames mingled in a spiral of fire.

‘It having occurred to me,’ she said delicately from the chair by the window, ‘that you might wish to be sure I was not in possession of such a thing as a third nipple.’

She wore the blue overdress, and her hair was down over her shoulders. In the candleflare, the panes of stained glass in the lower window were the colour of dried mud.

‘With which to suckle my familiar?’ she said. ‘As some say.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard that… I mean… how such an appendage is said to be employed.’

Stepping back from the light, in pursuit of my breath.

And – if you were thinking to ask – only one woman since my infancy had ever bared a breast for me.

Mistress Borrow was smiling distantly, as if across a long room, say a lecture hall, some lofty-ceilinged forum for civilised, cultural debate.

‘Oh, of course – from the books.’ Musing very softly, as if to herself. ‘He’d know it from his books.’

Holding my old brown robe together, my right hand shook. We’d not spoken since she’d walked away from the tower on the tor, after Fyche’s naming of her as a witch. It was as if she’d picked up from there: a line
drawn, with geometrical precision, betwixt that point in time and this present moment, and…

…all right
… a Sister of Venus, if you must know. It was in Cambridge, on a rare night I’d drunk too much in an effort to be one with my fellow students, all of them older than me who, proving too young in worldly experience, too overawed and fumbling, had not… Oh God, how she’d laughed, that woman, a cold and brittle laugh, like a chisel chipping stonework from the buildings which enclosed the alley where we’d stood, tight ’twixt walls.

A very sour memory which must surely have retarded my progress into manhood.

I said, ‘You know they’re looking for you…’

Hoarse words, meagre as the scrapings of a rat. Within an instant, cruel lightning had exposed what I guessed to be my raging blush.

‘I try not to let these diversions interfere with my work,’ she said, almost briskly. ‘Which oft-times, as you know, is also a matter of life and death. I beg mercy if this visit disturbs you, Dr John, but a man’s bed-chamber, for me… well, I’ve been in so many.’

The thunder shook the panes.

‘As a doctor,’ she said. ‘Dear Lord, what a night this is become.’

And placed a calming hand above her breast and, in my head, I was spinning again down the green flank of the tor, sky and hills falling around me like a cascade of playing-cards, crying
Eleanor.…

…Nel…

Oh my God, she seemed so small now, with her narrow shoulders, her eyes half-lidded, demure, hair over her cheeks.

‘Well,’ she was saying. ‘I came really to inquire after your friend. Thinking it best to knock on your door first, but it was hanging open, so…’ Looking up at me, skin white-gold in the haze of light. ‘How
is
he?’

‘Not yet well.’

‘Then he has need of me?’

Reaching for the black cloth bag at her feet on top of her folded black cloak.

Need… Dear God…

‘He’s sleeping,’ I said quickly. ‘And… and better in body, most
certainly, than yesterday, thank you. Though much damaged by the murder of his servant.’

‘Yes, that was—’

She broke off. Only seconds after the thunderblast, lightning had flared again, like full day, in the glass. And then, on the sudden, as she flinched at the exploding sky, I saw in her eyes what had been so well hidden by her voice.

Her doctor’s voice, which would be well practised at smoothing fears in herself and others. But the green eyes… to me, in this moment, they were the wild eyes of a bewildered animal in a forest of predators. And I felt calmer for seeing them, for they surely were not a witch’s eyes.

The chamber had fallen dark again. Could it be that she had nowhere else to go but here that was safe from Fyche’s hue and cry?

But, truly, how safe
was
this place?

I said, ‘You’ve seen Joe Monger this night?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nor this day at all.’

I nodded, feeling this to be the truth. Time, then, to hasten to the chase. Not that this was any kind of chase, for if I were a predator then she’d walked into my den.

Holding my robe together with my left hand, I stood and held out the right.

‘John Dee,’ I said.

Thus began the hours of change. The night of a wild transformation.

How can I begin to tell this?

Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul…?

Alchemy.

We
talk
of it. We talk of
transmutation
, we, the men of science, the men of books. We say,
there is a formula, there has to be a formula
to turn low metal into solid gold
,
to make man into something close to God. Some ancient secret, maybe known to Pythagoras and addressed by Plato. A matter of the occult.

Most times, we say glibly, it will involve a painful passage through darkness towards a distant planet of light. But the truth is that almost none of
us of us will ever attain that light, seeing only momentary glimpses like flashes from the beaten sky in the black belly of a storm. And then, having watched the flashes and searched deep within ourselves for something more lasting, will only – God help us – dwell forever in a deeper darkness.