The Bones of Avalon (49 page)

Having been, just once, consigned to such a place, I could not bear this and felt that I’d do anything. Wept over my praying hands before the abbey’s shell, the tears pouring out of me like lifeblood.

Blood.

What are these? Whose is this blood?

Fyche, gleefully, to Borrow, holding aloft his bag of clanking evidence.

All bloodied. Could be pig’s blood, chicken’s blood.
Dear God.

Stood up, moving slowly at first and then in a frenzy, pulling on my old brown robe.

Going at once to Dudley’s chamber.

Not even thinking, in my haste, that he might have his sword at the ready again.

Not this time, though. This time he slept.

‘Robbie…’

If not deeply.

‘Well, well.’ No movement in him. ‘John Dee. What took you so long?’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘The surgical knives. They didn’t bring the knives with them.’

‘Knives?’

‘Fyche. He didn’t bring them. The knives
were
Nel’s knives, and the blood… the blood might even have been Martin Lythgoe’s, but they—’

‘Where’s the point of this?’

‘They didn’t bring the knives… they brought the
blood
. They brought the blood that it might be spread on something… anything… during their search. Clothing – who can say? A bottle of blood. And the discovery of the knives… that must’ve seemed like a Godsend.’

‘John—’

It’s what he
does
. Stitches people up – the abbot and the chalice, Cate Borrow and the false witness and the grave dirt…
Fyche contrives evidence.
’

‘When did this come to you?’

‘Just now. I couldn’t sleep.’

‘So you thought to share the burden of it. So generous.’

‘In case I… should forget.’

‘Oh, go to,’ Dudley said wearily. ‘You know you’ll never prove it, and we both know why you’re here.’

Heaving himself up in the bed, the cover falling away, and I saw by the thin moonlight that he was full-dressed in his day apparel.

‘Get your coat, you mad bastard,’ he said. ‘If it must be done, best t’were finished before sunrise.’

Not asking you to go out with a spade and a muffled lantern,
Cecil had said.

It took us a while to find a spade. Cowdray must have locked up all the best tools. The only one we could lay hand on was old and rusted, with a split in the shaft. Short of breaking into one of the outbuildings,
it was the best we were going to get, and it made a certain poetic sense that this should not, in any way, be easy.

But there could be no more poetry in this.

‘You could at least have made preparation,’ Dudley said.

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Yes you bloody did. We both did. We just dared not speak of the unspeakable.’

And spoke not again until the houses were behind us, the sweet scent of apple-smoke gone from the air. I’d found an oil-lantern and lit it from the alehouse fire before we left. Kept it muffled until we’d left the town for higher ground, with the waxing moon all wrapped in mist and the air alive with moisture.

We found the stile without difficulty.

Dudley set foot on it and then came down again. Laughter on his breath.

‘Know you what hour this is?’

‘It’s a long way from dawn, that’s all that matters, but if you press me…’ I looked up at where the moon stood. Few stars were visible, but I made out Jupiter in the south. ‘I’d say approaching midnight.’

Thinking that if this was London the Watch would be out, with his staff and his dog.

Twelve of the clock, look well to your locks

Your fire and your light and God give you goodnight.

Goodnight. A comfort. In Glastonbury, there was only the owls and us, and I drew no comfort from anywhere. I was a city man, particularly after dark, when even Mortlake…

’Tis said that no man who fears for his immortal soul oughta go past your place beyond sunset, nor walk in Mortlake churchyard lest graves be open.

My God, if Jack Simm could but see me now, all ready to embrace the taint of necromancy.

‘We’re upon the cusp of Sunday, is what I meant,’ Dudley said. ‘We’re doing this on the sabbath.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d ask for God’s blessing, but I rather fear that would be a blasphemy in itself.’

The wooden cross was not quite where I’d remembered it, but the eyes cannot be trusted at night. I looked down upon it and wondered how often Nel had knelt here and the horror and revulsion she might feel if she knew what we were about to do.

The high-born gentleman and the low conjurer.
God forgive me.

Knowing that I should be the one to begin this, I set the lantern upon the grass, reached down the bars of the cross and pulled. It was not deeply embedded and came away easily, with a small squelch.

‘Water down there?’ Dudley said.

‘Water everywhere, here.’

I laid the cross beside the grave. Looked around. The woods round the herb garden were like the shadow of an army in the hushed moments before a battle. I could hear stirrings. Animals hunting, or the restless spirits of the people whose bones had recently been scattered over this land like horseshit? I lifted the spade and stood looking down at the grass in the greasy lamplight.

‘What if he’s lying?’ I said. ‘He’s lied before.’

‘Oh, he lies well,’ Dudley said. ‘One of the skills of his profession.
Of course I’ll make you better…
The important question is, what kind of man buries his dead wife’s most private documents without even finding out what they contain?’

‘A man who knows what’s inside. Or thinks he does. An embittered non-believer. A man who’s both stricken with loss and cold with anger. A man blaming his dead wife for her own misfortune.’

‘And what do
we
think we might find in them?’

‘We might find nothing of consequence,’ I said. ‘Or we just might find the true reason for Fyche’s persecution of Cate Borrow and Eleanor Borrow.’

From a neighbouring field came the barking cough of an old ewe. Might be interpeted as encouragement or outrage.

‘Do it,’ Dudley said.

I stabbed the spade into Cate’s grave.

I
N MY QUESTIONING
of mortality, I’ve watched the sexton who digs the graves at Mortlake; this was not the same. Churchyard earth is oft-times dry, tired soil, gritty with fragments of brown bone: burial upon burial, death upon death, the ground cleared, start again… But this was rich growing land, ripe with humus, warm down there and hungry.

Unused to this kind of work, a couple of feet down we stopped to rest. My throat was dry as tinder, but we hadn’t thought to bring ale or cider, neither of us being exactly a labouring man.

Dudley said, ‘If Martin Lythgoe were here…’

‘Then we would not be.’

‘True.’

A movement, and both of us were looking down the herb garden, where a rabbit bobbed. No… a night hare. It hopped away, disappeared under the hedgerow and into the mist of its own mythology.

This night of all nights, I would not look for omens.

‘How should his heart be taken to London?’ Dudley said. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’

‘You need a wooden casket. Something like a reliquary. I’d suggest going to Benlow the bone-man, but whatever
he
provided…well, you wouldn’t know what had been in it before. Best to talk to the vicar at St John’s or St Benignus. They’ll charge you dear, but that’s the way of it.’

‘Normal life, I’d just give an instruction, a wave of the hand and it would be done.’ Dudley pushed both fists into his spine, rocking back. ‘Jesu, look at me… out at midnight with grave dirt all over my hands. The great quest. Tell me where in Malory are Arthur’s knights reduced to unearthing the dead.’

He pulled down his hat as a white owl passed overhead in graceful silence.

‘You know she gave me an abbey? A monastery, anyway.’

‘Another one?’

‘
I’m giving you a monastery
, she says.
William will see to the paperwork.’

‘When was this?’

‘Ten days ago, a fortnight? Worst of it is, I can’t even remember the name of the damned place. It’s just a monastery, a few hundred acres. It’s only when I come here and walk for a couple of hours amongst people for whom an extra loaf of gritty, grey bread…’

‘You’re talking of the village of Butleigh?’

‘They had no fear of me. An old woman watered my horse, gave me cider and a piece of pie. An old woman who’d be hiding behind her shutters if she’d known who…’ He looked at me across the hole. ‘It was strange… I didn’t think they had
lives.
I thought they only lived to serve. Of a sudden, I was envying them. All my life ruled by circumstance and the need for position. A monastery or a piece of pie – which is the most—?’

‘Shush.’

Dudley spinning round. No-one there, but even mumblings would be carried away on this still night.

‘Mercy,’ he said softly.

‘
It won’t last, of course.’

‘Oh, no. It won’t last. A couple of days in that village, I’d be off my head with the workaday boredom of it. But for just a few hours… maybe it was through the release from the fever…’ Dudley’s teeth flashed in the lamplight. ‘I did used to envy
you…
for the freedom to travel abroad and study and kick at God’s own boundaries.’

‘Now a lodger at my mother’s house by the river. And all I can aspire to is one day to inherit it and fill it full of books.’

‘More than that, John, and you know it. You certainly taught me… well, nothing
useful…
’

‘Taught you mathematics. Arithmetic to enable you to calcule how many thousand acres your family had managed to appropriate over
the years, and… we’re wasting time, aren’t we? We’re delaying the moment.’

‘Of course we are.’ He grinned, tossed the spade at me. ‘Your turn.’

He held the lamp against the tump of earth, which we’d at least had the wit to raise on the town side, to shield our light.