The Bones of Avalon

XXXV

Black Energy

It must have taken more than an hour to enlighten him, as the sky shifted into a grey afternoon and dulled the chamber.

I doubt I left out much, from that first meeting with Fyche atop the tor and all that I’d learned from Monger about Nel’s mother, to what had been spoken of between us last night. He interrupted not once. It was like when he was a boy and I a very young man: when the subject was of interest, like astronomy, he would sit calmly, all the facts digested slowly, savoured like a platter of sweetmeats.

Not much here that was sweet. Least of all the tale of a monk who was said to have stood by while his abbot, a man most fondly remembered in and out of the abbey, was tortured and killed and dismembered. Because of what he would not disclose? I posed the question and Dudley posed another.

‘Who knows of this, John?’

‘Nobody knows of it. Nobody left alive anyway. Quite a few suspect . But who dares speak of it?’

‘The death of Mistress Borrow’s mother was contrived because she had evidence against Fyche?’

‘Monger the farrier thinks it was to do with the dust of vision, but that’s what Nel believes, yes.’

‘But it was twenty years ago. Bad things happened then. And anyway, what would Whiting not disclose to Cromwell’s heavies?’

‘He was said to have hidden a chalice. That’s all I know.’

‘Not the Grail?’

‘Hardly likely. The chalice is supposed to have been found anyway. Had it been the Grail, I think King Harry would’ve made something of that, don’t you? To be known as the custodian of the most sacred of all vessels… the field of the cloth of gold doesn’t begin to compete. But it could be there was something… something Cate Borrow knew, from her friendship with the abbot, that he determined to conceal. Perhaps something Fyche wanted, rather than Cromwell.’

‘Was there mention of Arthur’s bones?’

‘No, but…’

‘We know for a fact that the bones disappeared during the Dissolution,’ Dudley said. ‘Possibly removed on instruction of the abbot to a place of safety. If he suspected the King himself wanted them either removed or destroyed, to improve their mythic status… support the legend that Arthur lives on in the Tudors…’

‘Then he would certainly have hidden them. The presence of the bones of Arthur being central to the status of Glastonbury Abbey since the twelfth century.’

‘And if Whiting knew where they were, he didn’t reveal the hiding place, even under… torture.’

Torture. As soon as that word was out, I knew what he was thinking. I saw in my head that rusting point under Martin Lythgoe’s blackened fingernail.

‘Even facing the worst of deaths, Whiting kept quiet.’ Dudley looked hard at me. ‘Are you listening, John?’

‘Of course.’

‘You seem… not here.’

I shook my head to try and clear it. It must needs be recorded in any future notes on this experience that the effects of the dust of vision do not depart from the body and mind as swiftly as the imbiber might assume. Several times I’d returned to an otherworldly condition, losing my hold on circumstance.

This scared me – would it go on happening for the rest of my life? Maybe Fyche was right in wanting to suppress its use.

And now I must needs tell Dudley of this experience. What would his reaction be? I recalled him on the barge: is not John Dee the greatest adventurer of them all? A man prepared… to venture beyond this world.

‘There’s an air here,’ I said. ‘Unlike anywhere I’ve ever been. An air of both a dark trepidation and… an expectancy of wonders. It’s what some people here cling to and what Fyche fears may ultimately undermine his control.’

‘Could say that of the whole country, John. Hopes and fears.’

‘It’s stronger here.’

‘But then you’re a mystic.’

‘And not the only one. Magi travel here from distant places. Here. Not to England, to Glastonbury. Avalon. There’s something. I know it. I’ve… felt it.’

‘Felt it how?’

I sighed.

The final act… I said nothing of that. Some things are too intense and personal to be shared even with a trusted friend.

But the circumstances leading to it, even though they whispered hoarsely of witchcraft, needed to be related, and in doing this I began to see the pattern of a rite which would have made sense to thrice-great Hermes himself: an initiatory journey from darkness into light.

The palms of my hands grew damp.

Daring to think that something here had cast out the demon of all my midnights – that fear of an ashy death, the final explosion of gases in the head. The memory of something which had never happened to me yet had tormented my nights for years. Gone. Burned out of me, and then…

A heat sped up my spine.

…out of fire into water. The sun finding the moon, with all its female qualities. I was aware now of all the cabalistic parallels here, as well as those less esoteric, like the journey out of books and into life.

And earthly love. No avoiding that.

By the time I finished, I was pacing circles. Dudley had barely moved.

‘This is the dust that causes St Anthony’s Fire?’

‘I believe it is, yes.’

‘God’s bollocks, John, What the hell were you about?’

‘I believed it might also open passageways to the soul. And that… may well have been right.’

Or had I been possessed by the black energy of the storm in unholy union with my own base urges? Were the places I’d been, in truth, closer to the devil than to God? Was I, in fact, bewitched? The borderline was so close and so fine.

Shutting my eyes in uncertainty and anguish, until Dudley spoke. Something in his voice that was close to compassion.

‘First time, John?’

Little point in throwing up a curtain.

‘As good as.’

He nodded.

‘And I’m guessing that now you believe yourself… in love?’

A poet’s phrase.

‘I…’ Shifting uncomfortably. ‘From the moment we first spoke. I… didn’t know at the time… how certain sensations might translate.’

Dudley laughed.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘a woman who’ll cook your meat and yet take it upon herself to see you won’t have to lay a third place at the board… is a rare find indeed. How do you prefer to play this?’

‘Play?’

‘A bad word. Still…’

‘I didn’t think,’ I said, ‘that you’d want to play at all.’

‘After what happened to Martin Lythgoe? After what we saw this morning?’

‘You think Fyche is behind it?’

‘If he is, he’s a dead man.’

‘After due process of the law,’ I said carefully.

‘Or not.’

‘You’re Lord Dudley.’

‘And might soon be an earl. Indeed, Cecil gave strong intimation that on my return from this…mission… the possibility of appointment to the Privy Council might become… more than a possibility.’

‘On your return…’

I think that neither of us wanted to approach the possibility that Dudley’s return to London – and the Queen’s bedchamber – might be seen, in certain quarters, as less than desirable, let alone the thought that…

That he was not meant to return from here.

‘Some matters can’t easily be resolved here,’ Dudley said. ‘But others can. And, as things stand, Dudley was never here and can’t be held accountable for whatever… act of primitive justice… is carried out by Master Roberts.’

For a moment, all before my eyes was drained of colour, and I’d swear that I could see around Dudley a living blackness.

‘Your witch, your… enchantress…’ Dudley said. ‘She’ll be in some ratinfested dungeon now.’

‘Yes.’

‘Awaiting an assize judge.’

‘Who’ll be corrupt.’

‘Inevitably,’ Dudley said. ‘So, I ask again: what will you do?’

The idea that I might simply turn away from this… did not arise. When I first thought that something of this place had begun to live inside me, I knew not the depth of it, the ways in which the structure of my being was altered.

‘My mother and father,’ I said tonelessly, ‘were overjoyed when I came home with a doctorate in law. Thinking I’d left other matters behind. Come to my senses at last. Found a solid trade.’

‘Solid enough,’ Dudley said, ‘when you were accused of trying to damage Mary. Displaying, it’s said, a rare eloquence before the hardest judges in the land.’

‘And Bonner. Himself a lawyer, once.’

‘What a cunt that man is,’ Dudley said.

‘Sometimes.’

‘Yet, by some means, you outfoxed the bastard.’ He sat back against the wonky bedpost. ‘You’re saying you want to be her advocate?’

‘If she’ll have me in that… capacity.’

‘I take it she knows who you are.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Fyche?’

‘Unlikely.’

‘You’re still on a blade’s edge, John.’

‘Maybe always will be.’

The chamber was grown dim, even though it was not long past three. Neither of us had eaten this day, and I recalled what Dudley had said that Candlemas afternoon in the barge about every great quest beginning with prayer and fasting.

He arose and stood with his back to the window, and I was aware that something had caused change in him, also. He’d combed his hair and beard, but the old arrogance was gone. His arms, in drab dark green, hung limply by his sides.

‘When you’d left to find the doctor,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t stay with Martin, knowing what had been done to him while I lay there, useless. I went out to the abbey gates to wait for you. That was when I heard a commotion and had to stand and watch it. Saw them bringing her up, through the town.’

‘Nel?’

My fists clenching of their own volition.

‘Must’ve been nine of them,’ Dudley said. ‘They had her in chains. It was like a… festive occasion. A mob arisen from nowhere. Men jeering. Rotten apples thrown at her by women. Screams. Murderer, witch. Well… if you say to a crowd of uneducated peasants, if you say, this is a murderer, this is a witch… Even if it’s their own sister, nobody challenges it. I’ve seen it before.’

I shut my eyes and saw it. Made myself watch the procession he described.

‘Her head was bare. Her dress was torn at one shoulder, pulled down toward her breast. She moved with… with dignity, I suppose – as dignified as you can, in chains. Her head held up, not looking to either side. Yet they… behaved as though she might be ready to escape at any moment, and they’d keep touching her-’

‘No…’

‘Men are men,’ Dudley said. ‘Particularly out of London.’

It felt like all the muscles in my body were contracting, making me cramped and knotted inside. When I opened my eyes, Dudley was looking down at the boards.

‘Tell me, John… did I talk about Amy?’

‘You oft-times talk of Amy.’

Not true.

‘I mean in my fever.’ Dudley looked up, no sign of fever in his eyes now. ‘I think I may have spoken of Amy, and I know not if it was a sick man’s dream… or if I spoke some things to you.’

There was a silence, even in the street, but it was a silence that howled like a hound at the moon.

‘Must have been a dream,’ I said. ‘I’ve no memory of it.’

Enough had been said. Dudley and I went down to the alehouse to be served bread and Mendip cheese by the kitchen wench. There was no sign of Cowdray, and the farmers were not yet in from the fields.

All the same, we ate without conversation, and then walked out into the dusk to find that a man was newly dead.