Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

He gestured me to the only chair, lowering himself to a corner of his bed. Clad this day like to a friar in humble brown habit, and yet the girdle of his robe had cloth-of-gold strands within it which drew the light betwixt the iron bars.

‘What’s this place, Ned?’

‘Purgatory!’ A great fart of laughter exploding out of him. ‘Preparation, my boy. Getting into practice.’

‘But you-’

‘Marshalsea, I gather. I’ve been before. Could be worse. Could be the Fleet.’

‘Why don’t you just swear the oath? You’re no enthusiast for Rome.’

‘No, indeed,’ Bonner said.

‘And the Queen… you don’t dislike her, do you?’

‘Admire her enormously, John.’

‘And she’s made her concession. She’s not head of the Church of England, merely its supreme governor. There’s no persecution, Catholics can still worship, there are private masses in country houses and nobody’s been executed for it since she’s been Qu-’

‘Get thee behind me Satan!’

Bonner bouncing to his feet, pudgy forefinger outstretched. Then he plopped down again, dissolving into giggles and looking around his simulation of a cell with something approximating to a perverse delight. I wondered, for a moment, if perchance he was dying of some malady and knew it, yet he appeared in his usual rude health.

‘So…’ He beamed. ‘Your message says you’re come to speak with me about Queen Mary and King Arthur.’

‘I am.’

Told him about my mission to Glastonbury. Told him nearly the whole of it, more than I’d told my own mother.

How could I confide in him thus, you ask? This man who, as the Catholic Bishop of London, had threatened and bullied and brow-beaten and choked the city’s air with the greasy smoke of religion gone bad, leaving what once had been men in small piles of twitching, blackened limbs. How could I trust this monster? God help me, I don’t know. Yet trust him I did.

When I’d finished, Bonner sat there nodding slowly, hands placidly enfolded across his not-inconsiderable gut.

‘Tell me,’ he said at last. ‘Young Dudley. Is it true he’s dicking the Queen?’

‘I’ve never asked,’ I said.

‘No.’ Bonner smiled, with affection. ‘You are the only man in the realm who, yet being close to the boy, would not ask.’

He observed me for a few moments, then threw up his hands.

‘All right, yes, there was a petition to Mary. Not calling for the restoration of Glastonbury Abbey, as such, merely asking for the site and what remained of the buildings to be handed over to a group of monks. Therefore it might have been done at almost no expense… and I believe it had the support of more than one bishop, as well as many of the gentle-folk of Somersetshire, if only because it would have planted the seeds of a recovery.’

‘So why didn’t Mary-?’

‘Hard to say, John. Maybe the Privy Council was against it. Or maybe if Mary had lived longer it might’ve happened. After all, the place was a treasure house of saintly remains, not all lifted by Cromwell, and that’s not something which someone as devout as Mary could easily overlook.’

‘Was mention made of the bones of Arthur?’

Bonner’s eyes widened.

‘If it was, then someone was not thinking.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The bones of even a Celtic saint would be holy relics. Was Arthur a saint?’

‘Better than that,’ I said, ‘in the eyes of some.’

‘No, no, no. ’ His head shaking. ‘What does Arthur represent but… magic… enchantment? The king who does not die but waits in some misty spiritual realm until he shall be summoned? Ferried in a barge to Avalon by beautiful black-clad totties? A fine legend for Henry Tudor, when he needed to involve the Welsh, but can you not see poor little Mary shuddering?’ Bonner leaning forward, hissing. ‘The S-word, John, the S-word.’

Sorcery. I thought about Mary – a kindly woman at heart, everyone said that, but her religious stronghold had been kept high and firm around her, patrolled by guard-dogs like Bonner. However, it had become clear quite early in our relationship that Bonner, who had publicly professed a hatred of all sorcery, in fact found wizards far less noxious than Lutherans. For did not magic lie at the heart of the Roman Church?

‘But what about the abbey’s place in the very foundation of Christianity in these islands. Joseph of Arimathea, the boy Jesu… the Holy Grail.’

‘God forbid, John! Nobody of any church cares for that one. Even the Lutherans will demand where it may be found in the Bible.’

‘You happen to know any significant names from the monks’ petition to Mary?’

‘I never saw it.’

‘Nobody you can think of in Somersetshire?’

‘There are men I can think of, but they may not be the main proponents. I’m sorry, John, this was never a big issue for Mary. It went quiet very quickly and was never raised again. I rather suspect this has been a wasted journey for you, though a great pleasure for me. I’m so glad I didn’t have you roasted.’

‘You just wanted to know about alchemy, you old bastard. You thought I had the secrets.’

My own position had still been fraught in the extreme that memorable day when Bishop Bonner had bustled into my cell.

Casting horoscopes for Mary and her husband, who would be King of Spain, had not, with hindsight, been the wisest of undertakings, but she’d not long been enthroned at the time, and none of us could have known how bad it would all become and how swiftly.

Nearly five years now, since I’d been arrested to appear on charges of the lewd and vain practices of calculing and conjuring. A fine May morning. My quarters sealed off and searched, my books taken away as evidence of a dangerous interest in the techniques of sorcery and witchcraft.

Don’t know why I’d thought that this would never happen to me. Many of my associates had already fled the country in fear of an indictment for heresy or treason. Anyone, at this time, might be seen as a threat to the reintroduction of the Roman Church to England and I, as a known conjuror, was an obvious target for all those at court who would win some favour with Mary.

Therefore, on the evidence of the horoscopes – which included one for Elizabeth, whose very existence was a threat to Mary’s rule – I’d been taken away and thrown into prison. It seemed like madness. Apart from anything, my forecast had been a good one for Mary and Philip of Spain, with Libra rising on the day of the marriage, promising well for their union. And no, before you ask, I don’t know what went wrong.

The practice of astrology, even then, was not the strongest of evidence for devilry. The charge was enough to hold me for a time, but they knew they’d need more to take me to the stake.

There had followed some loose accusations that I’d tried to kill the Queen by sorcery. But there had been no real evidence that I’d ever used spells, black or white.

Then came a down-at-heel lawyer called George Ferrers, whose finest moment had come during his period as the Lord of Misrule, planning London’s Christmas festivities, introducing his company of jesters and ‘magicians’, who specialised in illusion and festive fakery. Somehow, the merry custom had survived even into the drab and humourless years of Mary’s reign.

So Ferrers, of a sudden, steps up and accuses me of blinding one of his children and trying to kill another, some kind of magical assassin for hire. It might have been out of jealousy. He would have heard of my flying beetle, my owls. Either that or someone had paid him to have me stitched up.

The point of defence being that I didn’t know the man – or his children.

‘Even though you conducted your own defence with some aplomb,’ Bonner recalled, ‘the judges would not have wanted to be seen to extend leniency to someone who might well be in league with the devil.’