The Bones of Avalon (4 page)

‘
No
, Mother… no suggestion of that. She went to get help for her grandmother – to the bone-twister. Probably didn’t get back home before it was too dark to return here safely.’

‘Well then, she ought to have sent word.’

How
? I was about to ask her, but the night was too advanced for argument.

‘Yes,’ I conceded. ‘It’s not like her not to send word.’

‘Now I shall have no sleep.’ My mother expelled a martyr’s sigh. ‘We should have two servants. Always used to.’

I said nothing. There was nothing to be said. I was a scholar, and the monetary rewards for learning were yet meagre.

‘Someone older.’ My mother was winding her winter cloak tight around her. ‘With such a young woman on the throne, lesser young women seem to think they have some new freedom to behave as they like.’

I had to smile. By
young woman
she meant
flighty, irresponsible.
A queen who was laughing openly in the teeming streets on her coronation day and waving in glee to the crowd. Acknowledging the common horde – what
was
our society coming to?

My own heart, I should assure you, had been alight that coronation day, relishing the rush of such spontaneous goodwill as I’d never known in a public place, even at Christmas. Sunday, the fifteenth of January, Fifteen Hundred and Fifty Nine. Just over a year ago. The choice of this auspicious date having been made by the heavens and interpreted through my charts, and I’d been weak with relief, for if the day had gone badly…

‘What’s more –’ Jane Dee refusing to let it go – ‘it was market day today. Now we have no fresh fare. On this, of all days.’

‘We’ll get by.’

‘
Get by?’
My mother, horrorstruck, let the hem of her heavy cloak fall to the road. ‘Oh yes – as if the body can be sustained by lofty intellect and little else. Your poor, blessed father, if he could hear you now—’

Exasperated, she stalked across the frost-furred street to enter through our open gate. In truth, my poor blessed tad would have understood too well – all the stories he’d told us of the titanic quantities of waste scraped from the late King Harry’s boards. Like stoking a particularly temperamental furnace, he’d remarked once, memorably, after too much wine.

I stood for a moment in the middle of the lane. No movement in the shining night, not even a slinking fox. Few candles still burning behind our neighbours’ frozen windows. The richer houses here are set back further from the river. Our own, not the most graceful of dwellings, is built partly on stilts because of the threat of flooding. I called out, across the roadway.

‘Mother, you know she won’t come in.
She never comes in.
’

When I was last here, in the autumn, Elizabeth had arrived at this gate with her company, and I’d gone out to her, and that was where we’d remained. When I’d wanted her to see my books, she wouldn’t. Didn’t have time. Had to be off. Queenly things to do.

Still, given the size of her train, if we’d had to feed them all we’d’ve been on stale bread and small beer for a month.

‘John… are you
part
of this world?’ My mother spinning at the gateway, her cloak a billowing of shadow. ‘Just because she hasn’t passed our threshold
thus far,
who’s to say that on such a cold winter’s morn she won’t find herself in sore need of sustenance and a hot drink? Who’s to
say?’
She sniffed. ‘Probably not you, who sees only the need to feed his learning.’

Always in two minds about my career, Mistress Jane Dee.

And who truly could blame her?

For an hour or more beyond midnight, I lay open-eyed in my bedchamber, one of the house cats curled up at my feet, and thought about the nature of time, how we might make more of it. One lifetime was never going to be enough. A flimsy thing, a stuttering from a candle, then gone. If not extinguished prematurely by some… miscalculation.

In Paris, in the week I was preparing to leave, all the talk had been of an elixir of life. I didn’t believe it. If there’s a method of prolonging existence, it will never come in a stoppered flask but will be part of some inner process. When I was sent up to Cambridge, at fifteen, I decided one simple step towards an extension of time was to minimise the hours of sleep.

I knew I was lucky to be at the college, for Tad was not as rich as he liked everyone to think. Also knew, too well, that we lived in dangerous times and that the King he served, like to a huge bellows, blew hot and then deathly cold. I was certainly under no illusion that I’d be allowed to remain long at Cambridge, and so I’d hurled myself into study, reducing sleep to little more than three hours a night, all fatigue flattened under the urgency of learning.

Thus, I can still work long hours without sleep, when it’s called for. But now I’ll accept that this is partly because… well, because I’m a little afraid of it. Afraid of sleep, which is death’s bedfellow. And of dreams, which give form to the deepest of fears.

BANG…

And did, by means of sorcery, attempt to kill or grievously harm Her Majesty…

BANG…

Take him.

Lurching up in bed, breathing hard.

For God’s sake, it’s
a different queen
.

No such accusations against my tad, but his Protestant’s fall, under Queen Mary’s purge, had been total. They took everything he owned, except for this house. By that time, I was almost famous in Europe, for my learning. In Paris, they’d stood on boards and crowded outside open windows to hear me lecture on Euclid. Famous men had come to consult me at Louvain. Whilst in England…

In England, even living once again in my mother’s house, I couldn’t afford to build an observatory, nor pay more than a single servant fulltime.

This is yet a backward country.

Next summer, in July, I would be thirty-three years old. My God, the journey perchance more than half over, and so much left to do, so much yet to
know.

The cold moon lit my wall betwixt the timbers. The cat purred. The scent of pastry still lay upon the air – my mother having laboured until close to midnight in the kitchen, baking and making what preparations she could in case the only surviving child of the late Harry should deign to cross our threshold with half an army in attendance. Me trying to help her but being sent away, in the end… for how could I welcome the Queen to Mortlake all wrinkle-eyed and slow from lack of rest?

So, I slept and fell into the worst of my recurring dreams.

My hands are tied behind me, my back is hard against the wood, my eyes are closed and I’m wondering when they’ll do it.

Listening for the crackle, waiting for the heat.

There’s a silence. I’m thinking,
they’ve gone. They’re not going to do it after all. I’ve been pardoned. I’m to be freed.

And open my eyes to a fine blue sky over London, with all its spires.
Thinking to float away into it. Thinking of some way to free my hands and looking down…

…to find my thighs turned black and crisp, incinerated into flaking husks which, like Jack Simm and his frosted toes, I can no longer feel. My legs gone to blackened bone. The remains of my feet lying some distance away in the smouldering ash.

This is when I awake, down on the floorboards, having rolled away in a blind terror from the sudden roaring, guzzling heat and a ghastly sense of hell’s halo around my head.

W
ELL, SHE CAME
.

Not long after eleven, the gilded company appeared on the river in a fleet of bright barges and wherries. Banners aloft, sunlight flashing on helms and blades, the air aquiver with frost.

Frost… and anticipation, a vibration never far removed, in my experience, from anxiety. Certainly not this day. By the time she was being assisted from her barge, up the steps to the bank, all the neighbours were at their windows and I, in a fresh doublet, was waiting by the gate.

My stomach grown taut for, unless engaged in intellectual exchange, the dissection of ideas, I was never good with people of
any
station.

My mother, unless summoned, would remain inside the house amidst her pastries and mulled wine. Neither of us had slept, although that was nothing to do with she who now peeled off a glove.

A wafting of rose-petal perfume, as I bent to kiss her hand.

Those long fingers, pale as pearl, pale as ice. An unnecessary number of pikemen behind her, gazing down, unmoving.

‘Well met, John. And how’s your health now?’

A voice still light and girlish. And yet almost, you might think, still a little unsure. Something I recognised in myself. Too much time spent with books, my tad would say – himself all Welsh and voluble.

‘I’m very well, Your Highness,’ I said. ‘And, um, I trust you also—?’

Looking up in time to perceive movement in her face, a small twist of a small, strawberry mouth. Nothing that could be construed as a smile.

‘So,’ she said, ‘your cold is
better
then?’

The high nose, the wide-spaced eyes. The hand had fallen away. Above her, the weak sun was trembling like the yolk of a fresh-cracked egg.

‘Um… cold?’

‘The ailment’ – her voice firmer now, the mouth suddenly resembling her father’s fleshy bud, but all I could think of was a knife-slash in wax – ‘which prevented you joining us last weekend.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Better, yes, thank you, madam. Yes… much better.’

‘So worrying, a cold.’ The Queen wore a fur cloak over riding apparel, and a fur hat. ‘Especially when we perceive the long winter grinding to its end.’

‘Certainly best kept within one’s own walls,’ I said carefully. ‘That is… rather than taken out and, um, given to other people.’

‘Or bears,’ said the Queen.

Her dark grey eyes half-lidded. Shuttered rooms, and I thought,
Oh dear God.

My friend, Robert Dudley, mocks me for it.

Merely what happens in the wild, John. Bears, dogs, they’re all killers, and so are we. Part of us. What we are. We’re a fighting race, everything we have we’ve fought for and killed for. Sometimes we’re the bear and sometimes the dogs, depending upon whether we’re fighting to keep what we have or to grab more.

I point out to him that successful warfare is, and always has been, about cunning, intelligence and invention rather than blind savagery. Reminding him of the machinery I’ve fashioned to this end, the navigational aids to speed our supremacy on the seas. I insist, with a passion, that we have nothing to gain from observing the conflict of bears and dogs and only our humanity to lose. In war, I say, we fight to get it over, not to prolong agony in the cause of amusement.