The Bones of Avalon (50 page)

And I dug down with a fury, my bookman’s hands already raw. The deeper we went, the easier the soil and stones were to move, or so it seemed. As if we were beckoned deeper into the sin of what we did. Digging ourselves into hell.

Dudley said, from above, ‘
Do
they come back? The dead?’

‘I think it can happen.’

‘But you haven’t yet seen… I mean, with your own eyes…’

‘And you… in the abbey?’

‘Fever. We make our own ghosts.’

‘And maybe also, through magic, make the ghosts that others see.’ I stepped back as dank water splashed up. ‘Who else saw the shade of Anne Boleyn at the Queen’s bedside? Anyone?’

‘She needs a man at her side,’ Dudley said. ‘And not just Cecil.’

No, no,
no.
Not now.

I kept on shovelling, hard and steady. I’d stripped off my doublet and my shirt was already soaked with sweat and there was slippery mud down my boots. Yet, knowing there was more dangerous ground than this, I threw myself at it until I was panting and there was a roaring in my ears. And I could swear we were being watched, that the night movements in the trees and hedgerows were not the movements of rabbits but the scufflings of men.

Take him.

‘Say it, John. Just say whatever you think should be said.’

I raised the spade out of the pit.

‘You know there can be no future in it.’ Plunged the spade in again. ‘You’re wed.’

‘For now.’

‘No… whatever you’re thinking to say—
Oh Christ.’

The spade had skidded on something hard.

‘She’s not well,’ Dudley said.

I pulled the spade out of the hole. Wanting to throw it in the bushes and run. Didn’t move. On the edge of the herb garden a shadow bulged and I jerked upright.

‘People think I hide her away in the country,’ Dudley said. ‘The truth is, there’s something amiss with her… She’s ill.’

Amy. His wife.

‘In what way?’

‘Varies. Pains. Weakness.’

‘In her head, maybe?’

‘I think not. We’ve talked about it. She said to me, she actually said…
I think I may die soon.
As if she’d had notice of it, from God.’

‘What about from a doctor?’

‘She’s seen them. Several. They’re clowns, John. They don’t know where to start.’

Nor I. With the lamp lowered, I couldn’t see his face, but in my mind’s eyes it was smirched again with sweat and fever.

Found myself half wishing that she were… gone from my life… No such thing as a half-wish, is there?

‘You love her,’ I said desperately. ‘You love Amy.’

‘Always. It was a marriage for love. How often does that happen to a man in my position?’

Dudley sat down on the tump of grave dirt, his legs overhanging the hole and me.

‘Broke me up, the way she looked at me, saying that. Almost as if she thought it was ordained. For the greater good of the country.’

‘She’s been talking to… who?’

‘I know not. Daren’t think on it. I kneel in my own chapel, all twisted up with hatred of myself, and I’m crying aloud to God to—’ He leaned down in the shuddery lamplight. ‘John, I don’t know what I’m praying for. I can’t say it’s not self-serving ambition, but I feel it’s
more
…’

A tawny owl answered another’s call across the valley. Owls. Spirits of the dead.

Please God, no omens.

Dudley said, ‘I ask God that I might… know his will. Know what’s right… or what’s
meant.
’

‘Help me,’ I said.

I was standing on a flat stone.

‘Bess and me… we’re twin souls. Born in the same hour of the same day.’

This was a legend much put about by Dudley himself. I knew not if it were true. He’d once asked me to do a joint horoscope for the Queen and himself but I’d avoided it.

‘We lie and talk and laugh all night, and put the world to rights. Talking of all we might do, and it’s more… Oh, for Christ’s sake,
it’s more than love.
’

‘Just
help
me.’ Putting my hands down and finding water. The stone lay in water. ‘Give me more light.’

‘This is wrong,’ Dudley said. ‘This is sacrilege.’

‘Yes.’

Not knowing if he meant what we were doing or what he’d been saying.
All
was wrong.

He was lying on his stomach now on the rim of the hole, holding the lamp low, and I saw something under the stone and thought it was a bony hand. Looked quickly away began to dig all around, making a channel for the water.

‘All right, come out,’ Dudley said. ‘I’ll do this. My soul’s a lost cause.’

There were three flat stones covering the body, either to protect it against digging animals or to show where it lay so that another might one day lie on top. Dudley managed to lift each in turn, handing them up to me.

Underneath, a thin layer of earth amongst which ragged flaps of fabric were visible.

The remains of her winding sheet.

Dudley was hacking with the spade at the side of the trench, bringing down shards of clay to widen the hole inside. A narrow space for him to stand there now, next to the body, as if it were on an earthen catafalque. A moat of dark water around it. Stagnant grave water.

It was worse doing nothing, no longer finding refuge in the oblivion of toil. With no doublet on, my arms and chest were chilled, my hands
numbed, and the feeling that we were watched grew near-impossible to bear. I sensed figures creeping across the field of bones behind me, rising up as they reached—

A pulse ran through me. The lamplight wavered behind its milky glass. ‘Uuuuh!’

Dudley rearing back as if two arms reached out for him. Then the smell came to me, too.

‘Oh God…’

‘It’s all right. I’ve smelled worse, John. It was just… sudden.’

‘Listen… please… better it were me, who… It’s probably going to be ruined, anyway. Rotted away long ago. We’re likely wasting our time.’

After a few moments, Dudley clambered out.

‘Yes.’ The relief in his voice all too evident. ‘Better it were you.’

I saw her face just once.

The smell.… musty rather than putrid after all this time. Still, I tried to breathe through my mouth. The lantern glass was fogged with vapour, its glow like to a small and clouded moon. Or a nightlight, by a bedside.

She lay there before me in her rotted winding sheet: small, bent.

What now?

Hadn’t asked Borrow, how could I?
Where is it? Is it clasped to her breast?

This was the most likely place, and I hoped for that, bringing the lamp close to what I judged to be the middle of her, but the hands were fallen away, rotted skin and dull bone, nothing between them but sodden linen, and a glistening slime like the pulp of some putrefying windfall fruit.

What did I expect? Guinevere? All slender bones and a twist of golden hair, which would go to dust at first touch?

The eyes, which might once have been green, were gone and the jaw had fallen and the teeth were full of black gaps, and then all was black, Dudley calling out.

‘Did you see it?’

‘Lamp’s out. Lamp’s drowned.’

‘
I
saw something. I think it’s under her… I think her head lies on it, like a pillow.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘No, but… you’re going to have to lift her head to find out.’

‘I can’t even see it.’

‘Better, maybe… that way.
I’ll
do it if you—’

‘No… no…’

I took steadying breaths. Recalling the gasps when I’d lifted a waxen effigy from its small coffin near the bank of the Thames.

Dr Dee, the authority on matters of the hidden.
Jesu…

Shutting my eyes, as if that might make it easier. But what it brought up, in an instant of glorious anguish, was an image of the unremembered. Moments lost to me since the night of the storm, moments following the river of blinding white light. The moments of the sunrise in the heart, Nel Borrow in my arms, the conjurer and the witch, twin souls.

More than love.
I felt that my heart bled.

‘John, are you—?’

‘Yes,’ I cried out. ‘Yes, I’m doing it.’

Letting both hands fall into hair which went not to dust but only curled greasily around them, the wet and rotted skin from which it had grown coming away in slimed flakes, and then my fingers were sunk into the holes where her eyes had been. Eyes which had last seen daylight bulging against the constriction of a rope.

If her’s scrawny, her can hold out a good while.

With a sickening little bonecrack, I was raising her head. Heavier than you’d think. All the weight of mortality.

For this spoke not of afterlife.

I
N THE SMALL
, panelled room at the George, we closed the shutters over the fogged and dripping glass, urgently refreshed the old red fire with applewood, piling on log after log, then finding more candles and lighting them all, until we sat within a nest of light and heat.

Yet still shivered. I tell you, this is what it means to be cold to the soul.

‘If it’s all destroyed…’ Dudley eased off his sodden boots in the ingle. ‘I may find it hard to laugh.’

My hands were reddened and chapped and scored all over with cuts and scratches. I was trying to flex them over the fire when we heard footsteps on the stairs, and then Cowdray was with us. He stood in the doorway, hands linked over his ale-belly, blue bags under his eyes.

‘We’re not thieves, innkeeper,’ Dudley said. ‘Unless you count an armful of logs.’

Cowdray glanced at the board and then looked away, for the gravedirt was yet all over it. And us. We stank of the grave.

‘I seen you go out. Wondered if there was anything I could do for you.’

‘Do you never sleep?’

‘Not unless I’m sure I’m gonner wake up, Master Roberts.’

‘Who can ever be sure of that?’ Dudley said. ‘What hour is it, Master Cowdray?’

‘Gone three. I’d be up and about in a couple of hours, anyway. I get you anything?’

‘Small… small beer would be… most acceptable.’ No way to keep the tremor from my voice. ‘And some peace. If you please.’

‘I think he means that if you see anything of Carew, you should keep the bastard away from us,’ Dudley said.

‘I’ll leave the beer out for you. And Sir Peter lies at Meadwell.’

‘
Does
he?’

‘Word is, he and Sir Edmund’ll leave here after church, for Wells.’

‘For the assizes.’

‘On the morrow,’ Cowdray said. ‘Monday.’

‘Cowdray…’

He turned to me. Flakes of drying soil crumbled from my sleeve.

I said, ‘If you saw us leave, did you see if we were followed?’

Dudley frowned at me. I cared not a toss. The state of us, what was Cowdray supposed to think?