The Bones of Avalon

XXV

Trade

When Monger had left through the back door, I stood for a while on the edge of the yard, watching the dregs of day soaking into a sad tapestry of cloud around the tower of the Baptist’s church. The sky was darker than it should be at this time: a storm coming. I went back inside and stood in the gloom of the rear passageway and my own lightless thoughts.

Of the cold ruthlessness of Fyche and the victims of it. Of the doctor, Matthew Borrow and what he had to live with: awakening each day to the memory of his wife’s face in that courtroom, fixed and white. And turned away.

Would not look at him. Never looked at him again.

The agony of a non-believer. No consoling dreams of their eyes meeting some day in heaven. Yet Borrow worked on, staying out half the night to save others’ lives, regardless of his own health. Probably not caring if he worked himself into the grave or how soon.

I could still see him in my head, how he’d stood in that backstreet by the church. A stringy, ashen man in the shadow of the final injustice: his daughter meeting the same fate as his wife, at the same man’s hands.

The George Inn was silent now around me, the farmers having fled for their homes before the storm, Cowdray likely in his quarters with his kitchenmaid. And she was out there. Nel Borrow, somewhere under the massing sky.

I ran up the shadowed stairs, paused for only a moment outside the door of Dudley’s bedchamber where, hearing nothing, I went in.

As the door closed behind me, the air moved. An arm drawn back against the green light in the square panes, a silvery skimming on a long, tapering blade. Its point finishing a foot, at most, from my throat.

Time suspended in a moment of glittering terror, smelling the diseased sweat. Watching the blade of the soldier’s side-sword quiver once, almost touching my softest skin like a crooked finger under a babe’s chin.

And then seeing it fall away, clattering to the boards. The tumble of a body on a bed in a room which was as dark as the floor of a pine-forest.

‘Christ, John, you could’ve knocked.’

I took a breath.

‘Thought you were asleep.’

Guessing that he’d been more affeared wafting his blade than I’d been at the point of it. Physical weakness was a condition new to Robert Dudley.

‘Can’t take any more sleep. Filthy dreams sucking me in soon as I close my damned eyes. Head feels like a cannon ball.’

‘You eaten anything?’

‘A little broth. Tasted like piss.’

‘The throat?’

‘Better. A bit. Maybe. I don’t know. Hate this cell, reminds me of the Tower. You haven’t brought your doctor back with you?’

‘No, she…’

‘What?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

But it did, of course. It mattered more than anything.

‘We need light,’ I said.

My innards felt cramped through lack of food, but too much time had been wasted, through concealment. I stumbled to the window, where I found two candles of good beeswax on their trays and took them down the stairs to the panelled room and lit them with a taper from the fire in the ingle. Back in Dudley’s bedchamber, I placed one candle in the window and one on the bedside board.

‘I’m not deaf, John.’

He was sitting upright under the high oak headboard, a pillow doubled at his back, his sword, sheathed, across his knees.

‘So you heard the hue and cry,’ I said.

‘A murder in the service of Satan?’

‘Robbie, this is a man who sees witches and sorcerers under every-’

‘And is he deluded?’

There were no plain answers to this. I sat at the foot of the bed, staring into the white gasses of a candle flame. Telling him about Cate Borrow, what had happened to her. Dudley leaned forward, his face narrow and blotched, his beard ragged. Looking far older than his years, a man stripped of all finery, pretention, status.

‘He thinks your doctor’s a witch, by heredity? Is there not good reason?’

‘He hanged her mother for, in truth, no good reason.’

‘And you’re saying… what was done to Martin Lythgoe, that’s no good reason? Does it look like a random attack, a robbery? What’s the matter with you? It has all the marks of ritual sacrifice. You’ve studied all this.’

‘Yes, but-’

‘Blood sacrifice, John, is a trade… to summon a demon to do the bidding of the magician.’

‘In theory.’

Oh, I knew all the theory, having dissected in detail the rituals set down in The Key of Solomon and the grimoires of Pope Honorius. All the divers conjurations involving the sacrifice of cockerels and farm animals, the belief in the power of spilled blood to invoke… not the kind of angels with whom I would ever wish to commune.

Oh, Glastonbury… did I perceive that there were answers here to some of my deepest midnight questions? Maybe. I didn’t know. It was all too immense and complex. Too close to see.

But Dudley, coherent at last, would not let it go.

‘To bring about a death, could not the sacrifice of a good man to the devil or some demon of destruction, in a once sacred place… a once very sacred place… would that not be considered effective?’

I could hardly deny that a ritual sacrifice in the Abbey of Glastonbury might well be thought to invoke a demon of substance. I considered the sorcerer Gregory Wisdom – also a doctor of physic – hired by Lord Neville to commit murder from afar. And that was merely the most celebrated case of recent times. These things, the abuse of magic, occurred all around us. I considered the way the candle had burned down over Martin Lythgoe’s lips. Had that been in my own warped perception or had it been shaved into a likeness of the tor?

‘And the supposed victim is Fyche himself – in revenge for the hanging of her mother? I don’t see that it worked.’

Dudley snorted.

‘So it didn’t work. Or it hasn’t worked yet. Christ, I don’t want it to have been the woman who cured me of the fever. I just want this matter of Martin’s killing… I want it settled, whether by noose or sword, and us out of this stinking little town.’

‘And the bones of Arthur?’

He made no reply. Who could blame him, in his condition, and after all that had happened, for almost forgetting why we were here.

‘Give me your opinion of this,’ I said.

Pulling from my doublet Blanche Parry’s letter and taking it over to the candle in the window, just as there came a blinking of white light and then the first low shuddering of thunder from the east.