The Bones of Avalon (9 page)

‘She seems to have been made aware, maybe through her reading, of the mystical qualities of the place. Talk of visions – your area of
expertise, not mine, but
something
’s put it into her mind. And she talks of Arthur, increasingly. As if she’s suddenly discovered his importance.’

The coal fire had burned low. Cecil might have summoned a servant by now to stoke it, but he only stared into the whitening embers.

‘And what was the Queen’s second question?’ I said.

His face was dark. He wiped a hand across his jaw.

‘She asked me what it might cost to restore the Abbey of Glastonbury to its former golden glory.’

‘Costly,’ I said.

‘Costly?’
Cecil smacked his board. ‘Jesu
Christ,
this was the most extensive, gorgeous, religious fucking edifice in the entire country!’

‘Ah.’

I stood up, still not fully understanding. If the Queen’s father had been happy enough to destroy the evidence, however discredited, of Arthur’s mortality, why was Elizabeth now interested in getting it back?

‘All right,’ Cecil said. ‘Let’s hasten to the chase. If these bones exist, we need to have them. Even though they’ve caused nothing but trouble for more than four centuries.’

My doublet was cheap and I was cold.

‘Sir William, I don’t know this place. I don’t know anyone there.’

‘Sit down, John. Not asking you to go out with a spade and a muffled lantern.’

I sat down. Cecil made a steeple of his fingers.

‘We’ve known each other for a good many years. Have our differences, I accept this, but I think we’re at least united in our desire to preserve this queen. In body and in… spirit. And it seems her spirit, at present, is troubled.’

‘She’s talked to you of this?’

‘Doesn’t talk to
me
of such things. She’ll doubtless, in due course, talk of them to you, as her adviser on matters less earthly. Her… Merlin, shall we say?’

I didn’t like the direction this was going. Cecil looked down at his board.

‘We both of us know her strengths and her… weaknesses.’

Meaning her indecisiveness. Agonising over some issue, going one way then another. An example of this being the inability to reconcile her conflicting attitudes to religion – unable, as was I, to renounce the mysticism of the Mass.

‘Restoration’s out of the question,’ Cecil said, ‘even if the money were there. Glastonbury Abbey’s too big and already hardly more than a ruin. Its stonework apparently supports new houses for miles around. Hopeless. However… if we had the bones, then we might satisfy the Queen by fashioning a suitably elaborate shrine for Arthur…’

‘Where?’

‘Here in London.’

‘You want me to go to Glastonbury… locate the bones of Arthur… and fetch them back here?’

His nod was almost imperceptible. He
was
asking me to go out with a spade and muffled lantern.

‘Alone?’

‘You’ll be accompanied by someone both of us can trust.’

‘Who?’

Sounding as if this had already been organised. I had a dismaying thought.

‘Not Walsingham?’

Cecil’s gaze hardened.

‘I met him when—’

‘I
know
when you met him.’

‘Does he work for you, Sir William?’

‘Francis?’ He leaned back. ‘Not officially. Let’s say I’m trying him out. As he’s not the man who’ll go with you to Glastonbury, he needn’t worry you.’

Could not quite explain my relief. There’d been a close-hung darkness around Walsingham, and not only in his dress. Whatever he’d done after we’d parted that morning in the alley near the river, not a word about the effigy seemed to have leaked out. No pamphlet had published even a hint of it.

But within the relief, there was still trepidation.

‘What if they’re not to be found? The bones.’

‘Oh, they’ll be
found
,’ Cecil said. ‘Not necessarily the full set. A leg bone may suffice, and a ribcage. And of course a skull, suitably shattered.’

‘And you think the Queen will be convinced that these are indeed the remains of her… ancestor?’

‘That would depend.… on who assures her of their authenticity.’ The thin, grey light of Cecil’s gaze settling upon me.

Here would be the bones of Arthur, formally presented to Her Majesty the Queen by her Merlin. And oh, dear God, as you can imagine, I liked this not at all.

T
HE OARSMEN HAD
been bidden to take it slowly, and our progress downriver was smooth. Fireshined by the unexpected afternoon sun, the Thames looked near-serene. Legend has this as a holy river, and I’ve seen it written that the Romans considered it sacred to their solar deity, Apollo.

River of the Sun. I liked that and could believe it, even though today’s sun, being yet a winter sun, was shamed by my companion’s gold and burgundy slashed doublet. The kind of doublet which, on a summer’s day, must needs be viewed through smoked glass.

‘Where are your thoughts gone now, John?’

Sprawled in the stern of his low barge, regarding me with that old amusement.

‘I was seeing the river as a lake,’ I said bitterly. ‘Imagining a woman’s hand emerging holding a magical sword. The sun’s rays spraying from its blade.’

The eyes of Robert Dudley were theatrically wide.

‘God’s bollocks, John… any woman’s arm protruding from the Thames would, for a start, be brown to the elbow with shite!’

My former student’s reputation as a great romantic figure is, in my view, ill-founded. Doubtless the Queen sees a different side of her Master of the Horse. But then, how much of Dudley the Queen sees is something I try not to think too hard about.

‘Perchance we might
all
go to Glastonbury.’ He sank into the cushions, lifting a soft-booted foot to the seat opposite. ‘Good idea, do you think?’

‘All?’

‘You… me… the Queen?’

When he’d told me he’d be lying with her at Richmond this night, I’d
taken him to mean simply that he would be accommodated, as Master of the Horse, in his apartment at the palace. They’d been friends since children. But who knew? Who really
knew
?

‘You really don’t understand, do you, Robbie?’

‘Of course I understand. I’m merely thinking how best to loosen Cecil’s bowels.’ Dudley smoothed his moustache over a malicious smile. ‘Apart from the rest of it, the very last thing Uncle Willie wants is for Bess to descend upon some God-forsaken Somerset ruin and set up a round table with a… what did they call that fucking chair at the round table where you planted your arse if it was your lot to pursue the holy cup?’

‘The Siege Perilous?’

‘That’s the one. And the thing is – ’ he sat up – ‘she’d do it, you know. She’d have a board made and assemble her knights all about her, in splendour.
So
loves her heroes – men of adventure, soldiers, seamen. And you, of course, John, you above all.’

‘Go to!’

‘I’ll admit it foxed me for quite a while, why the Queen should go so often out of her way to visit a pale scholar in a hovel on stilts in dreary Mortlake. And then it came to me – is not John Dee the greatest adventurer of them all? A man prepared… to venture beyond this world.
Woohee!’

Dudley’s laughter ringing like cathedral bells across the water.

With his trusted chief groom, Martin Lythgoe, he’d been awaiting me downstairs in Cecil’s yet unfurnished entrance hall, jesting there with the guards. His own appointment with the Secretary had been two hours earlier than mine, which explained why he and his attendants had been on hand to witness the incident of the pamphlet-seller. And make their move.

His barge had been ready at the riverbank, with a hamper of midday meat.
I shall see you home, John, lest the pamphlet-man and his uglies are awaiting you in some back alley.
Shaking his head, incredulous.
However you survived in the cesspits of Paris and Antwerp without me around to save your sorry arse, I shall never know.

Insisting on taking me all the way back to Mortlake. After which he
was to return to the Queen at Richmond. His wife, meanwhile, being sequestered in the country.

‘When do we leave?’ he said now.

‘I’ve not yet decided… whether to do it.’

‘Oh, you’ll do it, John, you know you will.’

‘And deceive the Queen?’

The word
deceive
hissing like a new-forged blade slid into cold water. Me thinking I was out of that world at last. And to deceive the Queen, who’d saved my reputation, and who was, after all… the Queen.

‘That may not be necessary,’ Dudley said. ‘We may find the bones. That’s certainly
my
intention. I should love to see the relics of Ar—’

Me glaring at him, glancing at the oarsmen and his attendants at the front of the barge. He lowered his voice.

‘Has anybody ever
really
attempted to find them? I think not. We should easily get to the truth within a few days. Beat the shit out of some duplicitous ex-monk.’

‘This is just another small diversion for you, isn’t it, Robbie?’

Someone both of us can trust
, Cecil had said. Well, this was true, to a degree. I’d known Dudley since, as a very young man, I’d been employed as tutor to him and his siblings, by his late father, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. Robbie had fast developed an interest in maths and astronomy, but other subjects that interested him had been beyond me at the time and were, I suppose, beyond me still.

‘I was in thrall, as a boy, to Malory’s histories,’ he mused. ‘The sword in the stone… the gathering of the knights – Gawaine, Galahad, Bedivere, Bors. And of course Lancelot, who made off with Arthur’s wife… I could well admire
his
nerve.’

Dudley grinned. His beard was close-trimmed, his hair styled like he was ready to pose for a new portrait. He, too, had been close to a public death, feeling the wind of the axe that dispatched his father after the Jane Grey affair. But what had made me wary seemed, in some way, to have liberated his spirit.

‘As I tried to explain to you more than ten years ago,’ I said, ‘Thomas Malory… never trust the bastard and his ridiculous modernisation. Arthur was some tribal warlord.’

‘Matters not. Within those tales lies the very essence of knightly chivalry.’ Dudley leaned forward. ‘Whatever you say about the origins of Arthur, I revere what I
perceive
of him, and I’ll be honoured to bring back his bones. To London – the new Camelot.’

‘Streets full of thieves and whores and beggars, and a river full of shit?’

‘John, he
belongs
here – at Westminster, or St Paul’s. The Queen will be delighted beyond words.’

‘How will she? The Tudor line is he’s not dead.’

‘Ah, the body may be dead, but the spirit lives. His tomb shall once again be a monument to the golden age to which we aspire. For Bess, in particular.
She’
ll be the one to bring Arthur home in glory. John, we have to
give
her this.’

Downriver, I could already see the tower of Mortlake Church. I didn’t have much time.

‘This big boys’ adventure,’ I said. ‘Neither of us has the time for that. And there has to be something more to it.’

‘Like what?’

‘Cecil said he thought the Queen was spiritually troubled.’

‘Did he say how?’

Dudley’s eyes narrowing; I saw caution there.

‘He said she didn’t often speak to him of such matters.’

‘But you think,’ Dudley said, ‘that she might’ve spoken of them… to me?’

‘Has she?’

Dudley caught the eye of the thatch-haired Martin Lythgoe and moved a hand up and down to convey that he wished the oarsman to further slow our progress towards Mortlake.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Look into history. Beginning, if you like, with the death of Arthur – not the king, the Queen’s uncle, Prince Arthur, who would’ve been King Arthur the Second. Born in Winchester, which Malory had identified as Camelot. His early death meant some salvage was required, lest it be thought a sign that God did not, after all, wish Arthur to be reborn as a Tudor. And then comes Harry…’