The Bones of Avalon

XIX

Beyond Normal

Cowdray came back with me to the abbey.

I’d battered every door in the George Inn until I’d found the chamber where he lay – with one of the kitchen maids, I believe. Now he stood on the edge of the chancel and shivered and looked again at what was there and shivered again. Crossing himself, I noticed, before turning away, almost in anger.

‘I’ll send a boy for Sir Edmund Fyche. And constables. There should be a hue and cry.’

‘No… wait.’

A little light. A single lantern, burning in the vastness.

Dear God, dear God, dear God…

‘Doctor, this is…’ Moonlight deepening the furrows in Cowdray’s face, turning them black. ‘’Tis beyond normal, man.’

‘What’s normal?’ I was barely in control. ‘How are men usually killed here?’

‘In hot blood. And strong drink.’ His voice flat. ‘Never like this.’

The man who lay dead had arms spread wide, like to Our Saviour on his cross. Shadows flucting like the wings of angels on the walls above and to the sides.

‘I must needs consult my colleague,’ I said. ‘Master Roberts.’

‘He’s ill.’

‘Yes, and needs sleep, however-’

‘He doesn’t need this, ’ Cowdray said. ‘God’s word…’

‘No.’

I’ve lived through violent times, seen men executed in divers gruesome ways but nothing, since the burning of Barthlet Green, so heartsick close. I turned again to face it, swallowing bile and self-loathing, the lantern held high.

Like something sanctified, the dead man lay pointing east, towards where the high altar would have stood and the tomb of black marble.

The remains of a candle were wedged in his mouth, his tallowed lips obscenely around its stem. Throwing a hand to my mouth and nose, for now I could smell it: cold fat and shit. The candle must have been lit, its melting making a ruined deathmask of the face. And, on the rim of its fading rays, was also displayed what had been done, dear God, to the chest.

The body raided, organs laid out glistening in a sludge of black blood like a breakfast of sweetmeats among the stones. I bent over and vomited again, and saw, for the first time, what lay in the left hand.

‘Oh Christ, Cowdray…’

Dudley used to say that Martin Lythgoe had been a part of his household since his boyhood. I did not know him well but thought him a fine man. A good man.

‘This town’s starting to stink to hell,’ Cowdray said with venom. ‘Come away, Doctor.’

But I was making myself look again, to confirm that in poor Martin’s left hand lay what even I – no anatomist, a doctor only by title – knew to be his unbeating heart.

Then following Cowdray back to the gatehouse, the abbey rearing around us, like nothing so much, in this sour dawn, as the open-ribbed skeleton of a great ox.

‘You’re right.’ I said. ‘You’d better send for him.’

Lanterns aplenty now. The last of the night alight and the abbey looking, perversely, as if it were made active again. I felt confused and dislocated, the weariness of a sleepless night descending damply around me as I watched Fyche marking the scene from his horse and then dismounting and strolling over, unhurried.

‘This is the corpse of your servant, Dr John?’

He’d ridden in with three constables and the first lines of dawn in the sky. Leather jerkin and riding boots. He picked up a lantern to light my face, as if he might see guilt written upon it. And maybe he would.

‘Interesting that you should be the one to find him, Dr John. Why exactly were you in the abbey, on the wrong side of midnight?’

‘I…’ Christ, I hadn’t even thought to invent a reason. ‘I couldn’t sleep. Seemed like a good, quiet time to inspect the ruins. When there was noone about.’

‘Except the dead. You’re not yourself afeared of the walking dead, then, Doctor?’

‘I have a job to do.’

How unlikely all of this was now sounding.

‘For were you not a servant of the Crown,’ Fyche said, ‘I might have assumed you’d gone there to steal.’

‘Steal what?’

‘Or even to kill,’ Fyche said. ‘ If you were not supposed to be in the Queen’s employ.’

I said nothing. Two constables patrolled the extent of the nave with their swinging lanterns.

‘I regret this, Dr John, but I think it’s time for me to inspect your documents of authority. Don’t you?’

‘I’ll fetch them.’

My letter of authority was not from Cecil himself, which might have caused unnecessary alert, but it carried the necessary seal. I made to walk away, but Fyche put out an arm.

‘Not now – I’ve more questions. When did you last see this man alive?’

‘I… last afternoon. Not long before you and I met upon the tor.’

‘You and the witch? He was with you and the witch?’ ‘ I’d sent him back to attend to his master.’

‘I thought you told me you were his master.’

‘I spoke loosely. In strictest truth, he’s in the employ of my… of Master Roberts.’

‘The man who lies sick. But, despite his doctor – not yet dead.’

‘Improving,’ I said.

‘Unlike this wretched man.’ Fyche turned to look down at Martin Lythgoe. ‘The manner of whose death- how would you describe it?’

‘Foul and unjust.’

The rising stench was worse, but Fyche made no attempt to move away. He removed his hat, bent to Martin’s plundered body.

‘Yet efficiently accomplished. Split from throat to groin. A butcher’s tools, would you say?’

‘I’m a clerk, not a coroner.’

‘Or an axe to split the ribs. Look…’

Didn’t want to look. Looked up instead, to where one of the nave’s own ribs had collapsed in upon itself, another smashed corpse.

‘Both lungs most carefully detached,’ Fyche said. ‘And the long entrails of the guts – do you see? – wound tightly around one arm, like to a coiled serpent.’

Through the hole in the roof, the cold sky was lit by bright Venus, the daybreak planet.

‘And the heart placed, like a sceptre, in the left hand. Reasonable, therefore, to assume that the killer would be plentifully daubed with gore. So, what did happen to this man?’

‘Sir Edmund, we can fully see what happened to him, I just can’t tell you why. He was a groom. He talked more to horses than men. A gentle man, a harmless man…’

‘But the manner of his killing…?’

‘It has… an element of ritual.’

Fyche nodded, pricks of white in his half-grown beard. He’d wanted me to say it.

‘And an element of sacrilege, also,’ I said. ‘If you accept that the abbey remains sacred.’

‘Oh, it’s still sacred,’ Fyche said. ‘The question is, to whom?’

‘You see the hand of Satan everywhere, don’t you, Fyche?’ I maybe should not have spoken thus, but I was tired. ‘Yes, yes,’ I mumbled wearily, ‘cry mercy. If this isn’t satanic evil, I know not what is.’

Feeling the heat of his lantern, now, as he leaned close.

‘Hands,’ he said. ‘Show me your hands.’

‘I…’ Looked into his grizzled face. ‘What?’

‘Hands. Both of them.’

Two of his constables had appeared either side of him. I held out my hands, humiliated, while he examined them at leisure under a lantern.

‘Thank you. A necessary formality.’

I could only nod.

‘For what it’s worth,’ Fyche said, ‘the last time I was summoned here it was a cockerel on a makeshift altar of fallen stones. The element of sacrilege noted… but not pursued.’

‘A blood sacrifice?’

‘Wasn’t the remains of a chicken supper, Dr John.’

‘Who are the people who commit such crimes against God?’

‘The same as those who dig up graves and remove bones.’

Given our surroundings I thought he must mean Arthur and couldn’t make the link. But I was wrong.

‘No more than a week ago,’ Fyche said, ‘the grave of a man laid to rest some years ago was dug up from the graveyard of St Benignus across the street. Necromancy, Dr John. I told you, there’s filth in this town. Ask the Borrow woman.’

‘She’s a doctor… ’

‘You’re naive, Dr John. And I’ll give you another thought. Was this poor man, perchance, asking questions, on your behalf, about what treasures might be acquired by the Crown? Thus awakening bitter memories of another list gathered more than twenty years ago?’

‘Leland?’

‘Was this man’s visit to the abbey tonight made for the same reason as your own? To look for relics? Had you sent him?

‘No, I… I don’t know why he was here.’

‘It’s an odd coincidence, is it not?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Well,’ Fyche said. ‘I have no choice but to send a messenger to Sir Peter Carew in Exeter. With the abbey in his charge, he’d thank neither of us for concealing from him a killing of this nature. And, ah… was he not your travelling companion?’

I nodded, hardly relishing the thought of Carew rampaging through the town like some beached pirate.

‘He’ll be here within a day or so,’ Fyche said. ‘Even less likely than I to allow the scum who did this to remain free for long.’

I looked for Cowdray’s reaction to this, but he’d wandered away. I wondered how extreme had been Fyche’s latent conversion to the reformed church. There was ever a certain kind of man who would find personal fulfilment, even a bloody pleasure, in the persecution of a particular species, be it Catholics or Protestants, Jews or Saracens. They said Bonner was one such, but Bonner had never changed sides, even to stay out of prison.

‘I’ll have more constables brought in from Wells,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll be obliged to set to and take this town apart. The innocent will be inconvenienced, doubtless. But the murder of a servant of the Queen – no matter how menial – is no occasion for a soft tread.’

An excuse to flatten the maggots. The air was full of the stench of tallow, blood and shit. I swallowed my nausea.

Fyche took a long, slow inbreath against the stink and turned to bend over the corpse, and I…

What I saw next… you must understand that I was tired. I’d had no sleep this night and insufficient the night before. My head ached and my vision was blurred and imagination, left to its own devices, can, as I may have said, cause havoc in the mind, and who was to say what were visions and what were signs of an oncoming madness?

The candle wedged into Martin Lythgoe’s mouth had formed itself into a cone of yellow wax spread beyond his lips across his chin and cheeks. My first impression – of a piss-sniffer’s mask – was swiftly replaced as I took in blackened wick standing erect from the steep, yellow cone, slicked with rivulets of melted fat.

‘John… what the hell…’

No!

‘…goes on?’

I twisted around, to find Robert Dudley, half dressed, steadying himself against a collapsed wall, his face sweat-oiled and eyes dark smudges. I wanted to scream at him to get back, but could not speak, for inside my head was bobbing the image of the melted candle which, I swear, had resembled nothing so much as a grotesque waxen likeness of the Glastonbury Tor.

And that… that was when I became aware – one of the strangest, most creepingly invasive feelings of my life thus far – that this place, in some unholy way, was beginning to live inside me.