The Bones of Avalon (61 page)

Euclidis Elementa Geometrica

My God.

Within a few minutes, I’d happened upon
Alberti Magni Minerarium
and then Aquinas’s
Quaestionum Disputartarum
and divers other scientific and philosophical volumes, copies of which were in my own humble collection at Mortlake.

All of these leaving me in little doubt that I’d found a large part of the library which had aroused such awe and stupor in Leland at Glastonbury Abbey in the days of Abbot Richard Whiting.

Yet unshelved, uncatalogued. Haphazardly stored, mainly uncared for, some thick with dust and eroded with damp. A veritable charnel house of knowledge.

With all the books, I’d failed to notice that the room also contained divers items of furniture: chairs and screens and chests, all of an ecclesiastical appearance. I opened the nearest chest and found there, wrapped in cloths, two silver platters and a cup with handles.

Books and furniture and altar goods.

This was not goods being stolen and accommodated into the fabric and furnishings of someone’s house. This was the abbey in storage.

Did Carew know of this?

His abbey, his property.

Unlikely. While I myself might have spent the next five years here, books of any kind would have little appeal for a notorious truant who legend said had threatened to jump from Exeter city wall rather than be hauled back to school.

I neither knew nor cared which way I went after that. Stumbled through walkways and doorways, under arches where the mortar seemed barely dry. If this place would ever be a college, it was unlike any I’d known.

Came at last to a dead-end. A door to either side of it. The one on the left had a window with bars. The cells? The armoury, more like.

The door on the right opened into a short passage, with almost no light. I edged my way slowly along the left-hand wall.

Steps. Narrow steps leading down. From the stairwell, the faintest of glows.

Was this the way to the dungeons? Was my phantasy to be realised? I held down the brief flaring of excitement. It could never be so easy.

And then, as I descended slowly, there was a voice, yet some distance away. A single voice, a low and rhythmic mumble. One voice, no exchange, just one man addressing not another man but… his God?

In Latin, I thought then, which is my own second language and the language in which God was habitually addressed.

Sometimes, we find ourselves in situations which seem to have been fore-planned by some greater agency. I may have written earlier of the feeling of becoming a chess piece upon a board, moved by a player in some bigger game whose rules I could not yet comprehend, and I had
the sense of it again – that sense of the predestined – as I walked softly towards the sound of the voice.

And also the only light. Reaching an archway of stone, beyond which candles glimmed piercingly upon what looked to be an altar.

In a niche above the altar was a statue of Mary, the Virgin. The kind of statue which, all too recently, was torn from the walls of churches throughout the land. A man was kneeling before it, arms at his sides, head bent, and the litany he was chanting came not from our Book of Common Prayer but from something older that lived in his head.

Its language proving not to be Latin after all, but French. My third language, or possibly fourth.

I stood and watched and listened for what must have been over a minute. And then, for some reason, I felt obliged to cough.

At which the man arose, quite slowly, and turned in the stone space, the prayer continuing to issue from his lips.

Not a prayer, nor a voice I’d heard before.

Nor expected to, from a deaf mute.

I
MADE NO MOVE
.

‘Frêre Michel,’
I said softly.

‘Qu’est-ce qui se passe?’

Peering at me. After staring into the altar candles, he’d see me only as a shadow, while I saw his full face: eyes bulging slightly under heavy lids, a jutting lower lip, that grey beard like a pointed shovel.

Seizing this momentary advantage, I told him, in French, how delighted I was at the miraculous restoration of his speech, trusting this would not affect his renowned visionary powers.

Fyche in my head from that first afternoon on the tor.

…
with no men’s talk to distract him, he hears only the voices of angels. Thus, as you may imagine, his moral and spiritual judgement is… much valued.

Brother Michael blinked and, without ceremony, snatched up one of the candlesticks from the altar and held it aloft, to the right of me.

Then nodded solemnly.

‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘When we met upon the tor, your host seemed to think he had no duty to introduce us.’

He made no reply.

His age? Yes, that would be about right. Around my mother’s age, nearing sixty. The way his felt hat was pulled down suggestive of baldness.

‘I should have realised,’ I said, ‘that you’d be here. Obviously, much to interest you. Not least in the remains of the finest library outside London. Or even Paris.’

Continuing to speak in French, for I wasn’t aware that he knew English. As good a reason as any for someone in his position to be introduced as deaf and dumb.

‘And more than this,’ I said. ‘Far more. I’ve read of your interest in old monuments and Druidical remains. Which here are, I’d guess, more numerous and more impressive than in France. One of the advantages of being an island.’

He still held his candlestick… and his peace.

‘One of the disadvantages, of course,’ I said, ‘is that more people here are superstitious and less open to progressive learning. One good reason for your presence to be concealed – although some of us would welcome it. All the hours we might spend in discussion of astrology, alchemical texts, the Cabala…’

It occurred to me then that he thought my questions speculative, posed to draw him out, establish final proof of his identity, and he was holding out. In truth, I was burning up. Time to lay down my cards.

‘I didn’t, at first, think that you’d have been at Montpellier College at the same time at Matthew Borrow – you being most of a decade older than him. And then I remembered, from my documents, that you were there as a
mature
student of medicine – in your thirtieth year?’

I’d watched his eyes move for the first time at the mention of Matthew Borrow.

‘I’ve been reading some of the letters you’d sent him. Not easy. How the hell did the apothecaries decipher your instructions? You could’ve poisoned someone.’

Neither of the two letters I’d stolen from Borrow’s surgery had been signed, but handwriting’s been one of my more recreational studies. I’ve ever enjoyed the analysis of styles and the development of divers approaches to lettering.

‘Your writing’s even worse now than in the early manuscripts on my shelves,’ I said.

He might have smiled. I don’t know, for that was the moment when he chose at last to lower the candlestick.

‘I heard you were building a library,’ he said.

‘Early days.’

Absurdly flattered that he’d heard of my library. Or even of me. Gratified that he’d spoken at last.

‘The day we were on the tor,’ I said. ‘Were you aware then… of who I was?’

I watched him pondering the question, as if it might contain some hidden snare. As indeed it might.

‘Not then,’ he said, ‘no.’

‘Maybe later, though?’ What was to be lost? ‘Maybe after Fyche’s crazed son had extracted the information from my colleague’s groom? Before finding it necessary to kill him?’

No reply, and I could no longer see his eyes, but I kept on, the wild lights back inside me, and now they were dancing.

‘Whose idea was it to have the dead man taken to the abbey and then dress up this murder of expediency as a ritual killing? I only ask because – as the assize court would have been told, had the trial of Eleanor Borrow ever taken place – the mutilation of the body seemed to call for a certain surgical skill. The kind of skill for which a younger Michel de Nostradame was, I believe, quite well known.’

With that first use of his full name, a mystifying lightness was grown within me. As if I were thrown back into the night of the storm when the dust of vision had me and I floated like an angel in the night garden. I gripped a stone ledge behind me, as if it would hold me down.

At length, there came a reply.

‘I was – and am – a physician. A physician, he does not kill. Well…’ He shrugged. ‘Not with intent.’

‘Not invariably true,’ I said.

He replaced the candlestick upon the stone altar.

I looked around. On the wall nearest the entrance where I stood, there was a crucifix and, in niches where stones had been removed either side of it, small statues, presumably of saints.

There was a tabernacle on the altar. In the air a vagueness of incense.

‘You look cold, my friend.’

Still wearing his monk’s robe. A quite practical form of apparel in this house. I was yet angry with myself that I’d made no link betwixt Nostradamus and the deaf mute Brother Michael until I’d heard him
speak. One of the letters in Borrow’s surgery had confirmed that he was to arrive in February and would be lodging with
our mutual friend of the judiciary
. The rest of the letter had made little sense and I’d guessed it to be coded.

‘I left my lodgings in rather a hurry,’ I said. ‘Having not long before read your latest prophetic quatrain. Relating to the Queen of England and the bones of King Arthur? I was wondering how it had found its way to Throckmorton.’

I’d gone too far. His tolerant smile said that this time he knew I was on the wing.

‘Dr Dee, there are questions I cannot answer.’ He touched an ear. ‘Questions I cannot even hear.’

‘Do you get many… messages… about the Queen of England?’

‘I receive what I receive.’

‘But you obviously put each one before your masters at court. There must needs be scrutiny of them prior to publication… surely?’

He took a patient breath.

‘Dr Dee,’ he said. ‘I know not how you came to be here this evening, but I’m happy to greet you as a fellow man of science… and would positively
relish
a discussion with you on our common ground – astrology, alchemical texts, meditation, all matters scientific. The first rule, however, must be that… the matters of state, they are not for us.’

I found this sentiment disingenuous in the extreme but said nothing.

‘Come.’ He extended an arm. ‘Rest awhile. We’ll not be disturbed, I promise. No-one comes down here at night but me.’

There was a stone seat projecting from the wall to the side of the altar. I lowered myself into it. Just taking the weight off my feet brought on a quivering drowsiness which made me glad of the cold. Nostradamus fitted himself into a wooden chair with arms and pulled it up opposite me. He placed his hands in his lap.

‘It offends me, you know, that – from what I hear – your talents are regarded less well in your native country than are mine in France. As you suggested… a sad indictment of England’s values.’