The Bones of Avalon (65 page)

From Mistress Cadwaladr, I’d learned of Cate’s first meeting with the man who was to become her husband, when he’d come to the abbey to spear a boil on the abbot’s neck. An unlikely match for the doctor, this recently illiterate kitchenmaid.

For while she was undoubtedly beautiful, Cate was also with child.

Was ever a woman more grateful to a man?
Mistress Cadwaladr said.
I swear she would have died for him.

And had.

The way I saw it, Borrow had known his mission might take years. He needed a wife to keep the other women and their ambitious fathers from his door. If he turned down too many he’d arouse suspicions. Or be thought a Bessie. He’d be looking for a woman of…

‘Little education,’ Mistress Cadwaladr had said. ‘Knowing her place. No inclination to question his movements. A housemaid with a ring.’

And that, for a number of years, was what he had. I suppose it was learning to read which had begun the change in her, but it was a slow change and a long time before she became a threat to him and his clandestine work for the French. Maybe Cate, working ever closer to her husband, had begun to suspect that he was not all he seemed. Perchance when he’d gone out to see some sick person whom she’d met in the market next day, perfectly fit, not having seen the doctor in months. She was no longer the woman he thought he’d married. One way or another she’d have found him out. And from then on she’d be marked for death.

The inhumanity of the religious zealot. What were two women’s lives against the delivery of a country back to Rome and the one true Church?

Fyche’s hatred of witches and the dust of vision must have seemed opportune. And I’d bet my library that the theft from the surgery, leading to the death of the boy in Somerton, had somehow been contrived by Borrow.

The wind rattled the thorn tree born of Joseph’s staff. It was grown colder now, in keeping with Benlow’s warning that winter was not yet gone.

Nel said, ‘I was brought up to revere him for his skills and saintly generosity. And not to bother him with childish matters.’

Staring out across the town, her voice even, without heat or bitterness. The voice of a woman who was back from the dead but not entirely. A Persephone who’d left some part of herself in the underworld. I knew
then that there were elements of her which would also be beyond the understanding even of a man of science and a student of the hidden.

‘She never told you you were not his child?’

‘She told no-one.’

‘When did you learn?’

‘Not from my mother. Not till after her death.’

‘When Mistress Cadwaladr returned to Glastonbury?’

‘She was only one who knew. The only one who
cared
to know.’

Nel said nothing for a few moments, then she turned to look at me, hot pain in her eyes.

‘John, it only made me want to be closer to him. I’ve been
proud
to be the daughter of Matthew Borrow, the finest physician in all Somerset.’

She looked across to the abbey ruins. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘I’ll find him. So many questions.’

It was my hope she’d never find him.

‘Your mother…Could she not see the void in him where the heart should be?’

‘She owed him her life. Don’t you see? Whatever the reason for it, all the good that had ever come of her life… she owed to
him.’

‘She wouldn’t look at him in the court. She turned her eyes away.’

‘Maybe she had no wish to see the…’ She looked down the field to where stood the wooden cross. ‘’twas not something to take to your grave.’

She began to weep and I held her to me, and time passed, and I tried to understand and could not. Both of us knowing the question I must needs ask or be forever tormented.

At last, she said, ‘She must have felt the wind of it. I was home from medical school, and my mother said – not a week before her arrest – that when I was qualified I should go far from here. London… anywhere. As soon as I left the college. I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing her again. But she made me promise.’

‘And you promised?’

She stiffened.

‘I would not. I laughed. And it haunts me. It haunts me that she thought her own death might make me realise. Maybe she thought me cleverer
than I turned out to be. Something always drew me to him. This… this
saintly man
who…’ She seized my hand hard enough to stop the blood. ‘When I was held at Wells… they told me he’d confessed to save me.’

‘Who?
Who told you?’

‘The gaoler. The woman gaoler. She said he’d told them— Said they were
his
knives with all the blood over them.’

‘They were.… God damn it, they
were
his knives.’

‘I’d watched him fighting them when they came to take me. They knocked him down. He lay in the street, they dragged him up…’

I saw some of that too, as I and everybody in that street was meant to. A play. A masquerade. He was good at that. The next time I’d seen him, in his surgery, he’d been working through the pain, and I – and doubtless the whole town – had thought him brave and selfless, like the women who’d thought they’d loved him… if not for himself, then for what he was.

Thought they
should
love him.

A man so cold and remorseless that he’d betray his country and then, to conceal his treachery, dispose of his wife of convenience. And then, a year later, seize an opportunity to do away with the young woman who was not his daughter.

‘It was made clear to me in the prison in Wells,’ Nel said. ‘Made clear that it would be either me… or him.’ She was staring right through me. ‘What had I done that he wanted me dead?’

I said nothing. He’d seen his chance, that was all. He’d been called in to get Stephen Fyche out of trouble, to make a disposal after torture look like a ritual killing, and the cold bastard had seen his chance.

‘At least,’ I said, ‘you now know who your father was.’

She plucked grass from her dress. ‘He dined at the abbey, with the abbot. The abbot had fine meals prepared. Salmon and trout. He was, it seems, charmed by the maid who’d served it.’

‘And he didn’t know… about you? I mean, when he returned after the sacking of the abbey…?’

‘My mother was a respectable married woman by then, with a child and an education. Their relations were good… but of a different kind.’

I looked into her green eyes. She tossed back her hair against the wind. She’d lived nearly all her life under a lie and very nearly died under one.

‘Poor Leland,’ she said.

September 1560

I do not understand the efforts of certain people who rise up against me.

John Dee

Monas Hieroglyphica.

A
NOTHER DAWN
. I sit at my mother’s board in the window of our parlour with the letter from my stricken friend.

God help me, John, but I had no part in it. I say this to you, who have least cause to believe me. I place my hand upon my Bible and I swear it over her poor dead body, through my tears…

Could sleep hardly at all last night after reading this five times, six times… more… The wind was up and the river was high and I’m lying open-eyed and cursing fate.

If fate it was. All London talks of black sorcery. The steeple of St Paul’s is gone to ashes these past two months, struck by summer lightning. An earth trembling was recently felt in London, causing panic in the streets.

Two days ago, I was summoned to Cecil’s house in the Strand where he received me in a private garden with high hedges. An afternoon of sultry heat but little sunshine.

‘The end of days,’ he said. ‘There’s been much talk of it.’

‘Except in the night sky,’ I assured him. ‘The stars have
nothing
to say about the end of days.’

‘And the Second Coming. The Queen makes light of it but is nonetheless perturbed.’

‘Nor do the stars herald another Christ.’

‘Who speaks of Christ?’ The Queen’s chief minister handed me a pamphlet. ‘This comes to us from Paris.’

It was in French. I was permitted to sit down at the garden table to read it. At first, I was inclined to laugh, but a sight of Cecil’s face warned against.

ENGLAND AWAITS THE CHILD OF SATAN

The pamphlet said that the magicians in England were now claiming London, the fastest-growing city in the world, to be the New Jerusalem.

In fact, London’s growth was as a centre of evil, its cold and smoky streets filled with murder, robbery, whoring and all the disfiguring diseases known to man. All this having begun with the rejection of the Church of Rome, the plunder of God’s holy houses throughout the kingdom, the slaying of priests and the occupation of the throne by the repellant daughter of the union of a wife-murderer and a witch.

No wonder, the pamphlet went on, that the stars foretold that London expected soon to welcome a
dark messiah,
whose birth was to be kept secret until such time as the child was grown.

The coming of Satan incarnate. And if London was the satanic Jerusalem then the black Bethlehem, where the child would be born, was the town of Glastonbury, celebrated as the birthplace of Christianity in England until its abbey, founded by St Joseph, uncle of Christ, was torn down and its streets filled not with pilgrims but witches and sorcerers.

Just as the first Tudor to usurp the throne had ensured that his first son was born in Winchester, claimed for the court of the great King Arthur, so this child would be born in the town of Arthur’s death.

Born to Elizabeth, the witch queen.

The pamphlet reported that England’s most notorious black sorcerer, ‘Dr’ John Dee was himself just returned from a visit to Glastonbury to meet the circle of witches there and make preparation for the birth of the child. The sorcerer having journeyed to Glastonbury with the child’s…

‘
Father?’

I let the paper fall.

Cecil said, ‘It’s not been the only pamphlet to suggest that the Queen’s already pregnant by Dudley.’

Described here as
a known wizard, trained in the black arts from boyhood by the evil Dee.

‘We found signs of a similar campaign being planned for London,’ Cecil said. ‘While you were away, Walsingham raided the premises of a disreputable lawyer called Ferrers. Took away a printing press. Copies of pamphlets purporting to contain your astrological forecasts. Usual end-of-the-world
drivel. Ferrers, naturally, denies any connection with France. Even Walsingham sees him as just another lunatic.’

‘I’ve… had dealings with this man,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Probably quite annoyed that he failed to get me burned.’

But there was surely more than an old hatred behind this.

Cecil took the French pamphlet out of my hands and crumpled it.

‘We’re not too worried as yet, but a word or two from you to the Queen about the absence of sinister signs in the sky would do no harm. I’ll make you an appointment.’

I said, ‘How is she now?’ ‘Well,’ Cecil said. ‘Quite well.’

Despite my full written report, he hadn’t once mentioned the bones of Arthur or the attempt to afflict the Queen with wool-sorters’ disease. She would have had the full story at length from Dudley, but I wanted to discuss it with Cecil. I wanted to know exactly how the Queen had received those Nostradamus predictions and who had suggested she might act on them. But he wasn’t giving me an opening.

Cowdray’s boys had caught up with Dudley in the Mendip Hills, turned him round, and thank God for that. Twice I’d awoken in a sweat after dreaming that he was putting the poisoned bones before the Queen. And once I’d dreamed Nel Borrow had not been cut down, and my arms had given way through exhaustion and I’d looked up to see the whites of her eyes and her lolling tongue.

Big Jamey Hawkes had gone back to his old grave at the church of St Benignus, with a weight of rocks piled on top of his box so that his toxic remains might never be disturbed.