The Bones of Avalon

XLII

Twin Souls

In my questioning of mortality, I’ve watched the sexton who digs the graves at Mortlake; this was not the same. Churchyard earth is oft-times dry, tired soil, gritty with fragments of brown bone: burial upon burial, death upon death, the ground cleared, start again… But this was rich growing land, ripe with humus, warm down there and hungry.

Unused to this kind of work, a couple of feet down we stopped to rest. My throat was dry as tinder, but we hadn’t thought to bring ale or cider, neither of us being exactly a labouring man.

Dudley said, ‘If Martin Lythgoe were here…’

‘Then we would not be.’

‘True.’

A movement, and both of us were looking down the herb garden, where a rabbit bobbed. No… a night hare. It hopped away, disappeared under the hedgerow and into the mist of its own mythology.

This night of all nights, I would not look for omens.

‘How should his heart be taken to London?’ Dudley said. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’

‘You need a wooden casket. Something like a reliquary. I’d suggest going to Benlow the bone-man, but whatever he provided…well, you wouldn’t know what had been in it before. Best to talk to the vicar at St John’s or St Benignus. They’ll charge you dear, but that’s the way of it.’

‘Normal life, I’d just give an instruction, a wave of the hand and it would be done.’ Dudley pushed both fists into his spine, rocking back. ‘Jesu, look at me… out at midnight with grave dirt all over my hands. The great quest. Tell me where in Malory are Arthur’s knights reduced to unearthing the dead.’

He pulled down his hat as a white owl passed overhead in graceful silence.

‘You know she gave me an abbey? A monastery, anyway.’

‘Another one?’

‘ I’m giving you a monastery, she says. William will see to the paperwork.’

‘When was this?’

‘Ten days ago, a fortnight? Worst of it is, I can’t even remember the name of the damned place. It’s just a monastery, a few hundred acres. It’s only when I come here and walk for a couple of hours amongst people for whom an extra loaf of gritty, grey bread…’

‘You’re talking of the village of Butleigh?’

‘They had no fear of me. An old woman watered my horse, gave me cider and a piece of pie. An old woman who’d be hiding behind her shutters if she’d known who…’ He looked at me across the hole. ‘It was strange… I didn’t think they had lives. I thought they only lived to serve. Of a sudden, I was envying them. All my life ruled by circumstance and the need for position. A monastery or a piece of pie – which is the most-?’

‘Shush.’

Dudley spinning round. No-one there, but even mumblings would be carried away on this still night.

‘Mercy,’ he said softly.

‘ It won’t last, of course.’

‘Oh, no. It won’t last. A couple of days in that village, I’d be off my head with the workaday boredom of it. But for just a few hours… maybe it was through the release from the fever…’ Dudley’s teeth flashed in the lamplight. ‘I did used to envy you… for the freedom to travel abroad and study and kick at God’s own boundaries.’

‘Now a lodger at my mother’s house by the river. And all I can aspire to is one day to inherit it and fill it full of books.’

‘More than that, John, and you know it. You certainly taught me… well, nothing useful… ’

‘Taught you mathematics. Arithmetic to enable you to calcule how many thousand acres your family had managed to appropriate over the years, and… we’re wasting time, aren’t we? We’re delaying the moment.’

‘Of course we are.’ He grinned, tossed the spade at me. ‘Your turn.’

He held the lamp against the tump of earth, which we’d at least had the wit to raise on the town side, to shield our light.

And I dug down with a fury, my bookman’s hands already raw. The deeper we went, the easier the soil and stones were to move, or so it seemed. As if we were beckoned deeper into the sin of what we did. Digging ourselves into hell.

Dudley said, from above, ‘ Do they come back? The dead?’

‘I think it can happen.’

‘But you haven’t yet seen… I mean, with your own eyes…’

‘And you… in the abbey?’

‘Fever. We make our own ghosts.’

‘And maybe also, through magic, make the ghosts that others see.’ I stepped back as dank water splashed up. ‘Who else saw the shade of Anne Boleyn at the Queen’s bedside? Anyone?’

‘She needs a man at her side,’ Dudley said. ‘And not just Cecil.’

No, no, no. Not now.

I kept on shovelling, hard and steady. I’d stripped off my doublet and my shirt was already soaked with sweat and there was slippery mud down my boots. Yet, knowing there was more dangerous ground than this, I threw myself at it until I was panting and there was a roaring in my ears. And I could swear we were being watched, that the night movements in the trees and hedgerows were not the movements of rabbits but the scufflings of men.

Take him.

‘Say it, John. Just say whatever you think should be said.’

I raised the spade out of the pit.

‘You know there can be no future in it.’ Plunged the spade in again. ‘You’re wed.’

‘For now.’

‘No… whatever you’re thinking to say- Oh Christ.’

The spade had skidded on something hard.

‘She’s not well,’ Dudley said.

I pulled the spade out of the hole. Wanting to throw it in the bushes and run. Didn’t move. On the edge of the herb garden a shadow bulged and I jerked upright.

‘People think I hide her away in the country,’ Dudley said. ‘The truth is, there’s something amiss with her… She’s ill.’

Amy. His wife.

‘In what way?’

‘Varies. Pains. Weakness.’

‘In her head, maybe?’

‘I think not. We’ve talked about it. She said to me, she actually said… I think I may die soon. As if she’d had notice of it, from God.’

‘What about from a doctor?’

‘She’s seen them. Several. They’re clowns, John. They don’t know where to start.’

Nor I. With the lamp lowered, I couldn’t see his face, but in my mind’s eyes it was smirched again with sweat and fever.

Found myself half wishing that she were… gone from my life… No such thing as a half-wish, is there?

‘You love her,’ I said desperately. ‘You love Amy.’

‘Always. It was a marriage for love. How often does that happen to a man in my position?’

Dudley sat down on the tump of grave dirt, his legs overhanging the hole and me.

‘Broke me up, the way she looked at me, saying that. Almost as if she thought it was ordained. For the greater good of the country.’

‘She’s been talking to… who?’

‘I know not. Daren’t think on it. I kneel in my own chapel, all twisted up with hatred of myself, and I’m crying aloud to God to-’ He leaned down in the shuddery lamplight. ‘John, I don’t know what I’m praying for. I can’t say it’s not self-serving ambition, but I feel it’s more…’

A tawny owl answered another’s call across the valley. Owls. Spirits of the dead.

Please God, no omens.

Dudley said, ‘I ask God that I might… know his will. Know what’s right… or what’s meant. ’

‘Help me,’ I said.

I was standing on a flat stone.

‘Bess and me… we’re twin souls. Born in the same hour of the same day.’

This was a legend much put about by Dudley himself. I knew not if it were true. He’d once asked me to do a joint horoscope for the Queen and himself but I’d avoided it.

‘We lie and talk and laugh all night, and put the world to rights. Talking of all we might do, and it’s more… Oh, for Christ’s sake, it’s more than love. ’

‘Just help me.’ Putting my hands down and finding water. The stone lay in water. ‘Give me more light.’

‘This is wrong,’ Dudley said. ‘This is sacrilege.’

‘Yes.’

Not knowing if he meant what we were doing or what he’d been saying. All was wrong.

He was lying on his stomach now on the rim of the hole, holding the lamp low, and I saw something under the stone and thought it was a bony hand. Looked quickly away began to dig all around, making a channel for the water.

‘All right, come out,’ Dudley said. ‘I’ll do this. My soul’s a lost cause.’

There were three flat stones covering the body, either to protect it against digging animals or to show where it lay so that another might one day lie on top. Dudley managed to lift each in turn, handing them up to me.

Underneath, a thin layer of earth amongst which ragged flaps of fabric were visible.

The remains of her winding sheet.

Dudley was hacking with the spade at the side of the trench, bringing down shards of clay to widen the hole inside. A narrow space for him to stand there now, next to the body, as if it were on an earthen catafalque. A moat of dark water around it. Stagnant grave water.

It was worse doing nothing, no longer finding refuge in the oblivion of toil. With no doublet on, my arms and chest were chilled, my hands numbed, and the feeling that we were watched grew near-impossible to bear. I sensed figures creeping across the field of bones behind me, rising up as they reached A pulse ran through me. The lamplight wavered behind its milky glass. ‘Uuuuh!’

Dudley rearing back as if two arms reached out for him. Then the smell came to me, too.

‘Oh God…’

‘It’s all right. I’ve smelled worse, John. It was just… sudden.’

‘Listen… please… better it were me, who… It’s probably going to be ruined, anyway. Rotted away long ago. We’re likely wasting our time.’

After a few moments, Dudley clambered out.

‘Yes.’ The relief in his voice all too evident. ‘Better it were you.’

I saw her face just once.

The smell… musty rather than putrid after all this time. Still, I tried to breathe through my mouth. The lantern glass was fogged with vapour, its glow like to a small and clouded moon. Or a nightlight, by a bedside.

She lay there before me in her rotted winding sheet: small, bent.

What now?

Hadn’t asked Borrow, how could I? Where is it? Is it clasped to her breast?

This was the most likely place, and I hoped for that, bringing the lamp close to what I judged to be the middle of her, but the hands were fallen away, rotted skin and dull bone, nothing between them but sodden linen, and a glistening slime like the pulp of some putrefying windfall fruit.

What did I expect? Guinevere? All slender bones and a twist of golden hair, which would go to dust at first touch?

The eyes, which might once have been green, were gone and the jaw had fallen and the teeth were full of black gaps, and then all was black, Dudley calling out.

‘Did you see it?’

‘Lamp’s out. Lamp’s drowned.’

‘ I saw something. I think it’s under her… I think her head lies on it, like a pillow.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘No, but… you’re going to have to lift her head to find out.’

‘I can’t even see it.’

‘Better, maybe… that way. I’ll do it if you-’

‘No… no…’

I took steadying breaths. Recalling the gasps when I’d lifted a waxen effigy from its small coffin near the bank of the Thames.

Dr Dee, the authority on matters of the hidden. Jesu…

Shutting my eyes, as if that might make it easier. But what it brought up, in an instant of glorious anguish, was an image of the unremembered. Moments lost to me since the night of the storm, moments following the river of blinding white light. The moments of the sunrise in the heart, Nel Borrow in my arms, the conjurer and the witch, twin souls.

More than love. I felt that my heart bled.

‘John, are you-?’

‘Yes,’ I cried out. ‘Yes, I’m doing it.’

Letting both hands fall into hair which went not to dust but only curled greasily around them, the wet and rotted skin from which it had grown coming away in slimed flakes, and then my fingers were sunk into the holes where her eyes had been. Eyes which had last seen daylight bulging against the constriction of a rope.

If her’s scrawny, her can hold out a good while.

With a sickening little bonecrack, I was raising her head. Heavier than you’d think. All the weight of mortality.

For this spoke not of afterlife.