Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

Dudley was gazing out, in noble profile, across the broad water, then up at the sky where a buttermilk moon bided its time.

Awe and Stupor

Although I don’t consider myself sensitive to such intrusions, that night it was as if I were not alone in my library.

It happens. Oft-times I’ll hear a scraping of paper, as if the books are conversing amongst themselves. The sound of knowledge being shared and expanding in the air. Or a faint clarion of bells – distant, yet somehow within the room itself, as if proclaiming the nativity of an idea. Oh, I’m fanciful, you might think. But what I think is that science must never become dull and roped to rigid formulae, but must always be alive to the omnipresent otherness of things.

This night, sitting at my work board under two candles, a cup of small beer at my elbow, I’d thought to work on my creation theory, an attempt to explain precisely, concisely and mathematically the origins and composition of our universe… and how we might have commerce with the hidden influences which govern it.

But then caught myself thinking of our lost housekeeper, Catherine Meadows, and the times I’d wished I lay with her, that we might find warmth and consolation in one another, for Catherine looked a gentle girl who would not…

Oh dear God, what am I become?

Dr Dee trades with demons!

‘John.’

I almost cried out, in my shame. My mother was standing in the doorway, holding a candle in a tin tray, her face turned to vellum in its light. She wore an old grey robe over her nightgown.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I like not the way our neighbours look at us.’

Candlelight shadows bounded over the walls of books and manuscripts and the globe made for me by my friend and tutor, Gerard Mercator. Logs shifted on the fire. I sat up.

‘Which neighbours? Not Goodwife Faldo?’

‘No, they’re… not people I know by name. Do you not notice the looks we get?’

I thought of the men who’d stared at me in the tavern where I’d been in search of Jack Simm. And of what he’d said. I wanted to say something reassuring and could only think of Cecil’s offer to have my mother guarded – knowing what her reaction would be.

‘I don’t want it. I have to live here. I don’t want us to be seen as… strange.’ My mother came into the room and shut the door behind her. ‘I thought it would all be different, when you were given the rectorate of Upton-upon-Severn.’

‘That was a long time ago.’

‘Not so very long.’

‘Mother, it was another era. The boy Edward was king, Seymour was protector, the Act against witchery was withdrawn, I was-’

‘Untainted,’ my mother said, ‘by rumour.’

‘Unknown,’ I said. ‘I was unknown then, there’s the difference.’

There’s ever been a thin line ’twixt fame and notoriety.

Couldn’t deny that the eighty pounds a year for Upton had been useful, but I was never going to be a minister of the church. The cure of souls – the very idea of such responsibility was terrifying to me.

‘I don’t know what you do,’ my mother said, in a kind of desperation. ‘I no longer understand what you do.’

‘I study. Collect knowledge. Calcule.’

Couldn’t see her expression, but I could feel it. Must needs do better.

‘Studying mathematics’ – I closed my book – ‘I’ve become aware of universal patterns. Ordered patterns, which I feel could enjoin with something within us. Allowing us to… change things. I hope eventually to understand something of why we are here. To know, in some small way, God’s purpose-’

‘How does that change my life? Who pays you to know of these things?’

I closed my eyes. She was right. The Queen had oft-times spoken of making my situation more formal, but nothing ever happened. No income, no title, not even the offer of a new rectorate. Men had been awarded knighthoods or peerages and estates for smaller services than my work on navigation, while I was yet a commoner.

But, then, who honours a conjurer?

I should not feel bitter. What was a title worth? It made you known to the world in ways I care nought for, only wanting to be left alone to get on with my work. Although, yes, I agree that it would have been pleasant not to have to worry about money.

‘Please thank the Secretary for his concern for me,’ my mother said, ‘but assure him that I shall be quite secure here.’

‘You don’t think that. You said-’

‘I’ve never lived entirely without servants. Indeed, I’d thought you’d be married by now, and there’d be another woman here to-’

‘Mother-’

‘Still… perchance the very fact that you are not here… will make the difference.’

‘Yes,’ I said softly. ‘Maybe it will.’

The candlelight flickered like soft lightning on my coloured charts of the planets, glimmed in my hourglass, brought the eyes of the owl to life. I felt like a man hanging onto a stunted tree bent over an abyss. No firm situation, no wife, no siblings. No family but my poor mother, who only wished for me to be a normal man, and respected as such.

‘Don’t stay up too late,’ my mother said. ‘You’re not so young any more.’

The cats. Maybe the rustling in the shelves had been the cats, who liked to prowl the library when I was working here.

Or maybe it was the matter of Arthur, calling to me. I sighed, put away my cosmology and reopened the collected manuscripts of Giraldus Cambrensis.

Gerald of Wales, a respectable chronicler who had travelled widely in these islands and attempted accurate descriptions of what he found there. You might almost have thought that Gerald was present himself when the discovery was made of the bones of Arthur at Glastonbury in 1191, such was the detail.

The thigh bone, when put next to the tallest man present, as the abbot shewed us, and placed on the ground by his foot, reached three inches above his knee. And the skull was of a great, indeed prodigious capacity, to the extent that the space betwixt the brows and betwixt the eyes was a palm’s breadth. But in the skull there were ten or more wounds which had all healed into scars, with the exception of one which had made a great cleft and seemed to have been the sole cause of death.

Gerald probably was not there when the bones were uncovered, but it seemed unlikely that he could have invented any of this. It was a report. The bones had been shown to him. The bones were real. But whose?

If, perchance, I was able to bring some of them back here, to examine them closely, it would be possible to determine something of their antiquity.

I read of the inscription upon the cross which had been found above the remains.

Hic iacet sepultus inclitus Rex Arturius in Insula Avalonia.

Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon.

Succinct enough, but a little too perfect. I had seen it suggested that the description ‘King’ Arthur had not been in use at the time of the burial. It was also in Latin, when it would surely have been more convincing in old Welsh.

The cross might, however, have been put into the earth long after the burial, to mark the place rather than as a memorial. It was possible. Anything was possible.

For, truly, I did not want this to have been a deception. Knowing, all the same, that I could not turn away from any evidence of fabrication.

Unless commanded to?

Dear God, what a wasps’ nest this was. I turned to The History of Kings of Britain by the less-reliable Geoffrey of Monmouth and the account of Arthur’s final battle with his treacherous nephew, Mordred. Geoffrey claims this happened in Cornwall, with much mortality on both sides.

After which, Arthur is conveyed to the Isle of Avalon, for his wounds to be cured.