Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘Thanks.’

Although the charges against me had been ridiculous and ill-founded, breaking them down, in public, into shards of malice had not been easy, and I’d been in a sweat at the end, awaiting a verdict.

And when it came at the end of August of the year 1555, it had not been good. I was to be bound over to keep the peace until Christmas of the following year, stripped of the rectorate of Upton-upon-Severn and – the most sinister aspect – to be sent for religious investigation to Bishop Bonner himself.

A burning matter.

He’d come in person to my cell, with a question. Signalling the guard to leave us alone.

‘Tell me, Dr Dee… do you believe that the soul is divine?’

Friendly, even then. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered he’d been interested in me and what I did for quite some while.

I’d given his question serious thought before replying. It was obviously a trap. If I agreed that the soul was divine I would put myself in God’s stead. If I said no, I was challenging His Majesty, so would needs be in league with the devil. Either answer could lead to the stake.

‘The soul is… not itself divine,’ I said after tense and endless seconds, ‘but it can acquire divinity.’

His eyes had connected with mine and in them, at this moment, I thought I could see the flicker of an unexpected delight.

And then it had vanished.

‘Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul acquire divinity?’

I held the gaze. Surmising by now that he had been briefed to look for any theological indications of a Protestant allegiance. That surely was what it had all been about. Mary’s people were looking for a plot, with Elizabeth at its centre.

‘By prayer,’ I said. ‘And suffering. And perchance… through learning.’

‘And what learning would you suggest?’

‘The Bible…’ I could see that he wanted more and I’d taken a chance. ‘And the sacred knowledge of the Jews.’

He’d been unable, then, to conceal his interest, drawing in a sharp breath.

‘And how could one become privy to such secrets?’

In the months that followed, many a long candle had been melted into a pool of wax over this question. I’d expected a butcher and found a man with a genuine sense of inquiry into the condition of the human soul.

Saved from the stake by Bonner’s interest in the hidden, and an unexpected friendship had developed. Even made me his chaplain, for a time, and many nights had been spent in discussion of alchemy and the Cabala.

I stood and walked over to the chest and picked up the looking glass. Saw a pale man with mid-length dark brown hair and, in the eyes, what some had seen as kindness, others as sorrow and I, now, as… lost.

‘Tell me, Ned… as a man who hears things…’

‘I’m growing increasingly and wilfully deaf, John.’

‘Have you become aware of any rumours of sorcery… against the Queen?’

‘What, like yours against Mary?’

Bonner’s laughter was like collapsing masonry.

‘In the shape of a wax effigy in a coffin. Done with some attention to detail. Do you know of anyone, or any group, which might seek to…?’

‘What are you getting at, sorcery or popery? The French don’t fear sorcery as we do. If they think it’ll get Bess out and Mary Stuart in, they’ll use it with abandon.’

‘Did I mention the French?’

‘It’s always the fucking French. They hate her with a passion. And with Scotch Mary wed to the boy king… Look, talk to a Frenchman, he’ll tell you the English Queen’s a witch. Like mother like daughter. Spawn of Satan. England, under Elizabeth, is therefore a cesspit of sorcery.’

‘Who believes that?’

‘You mean you don’t?’ Bonner half rose. ‘You’re telling me there hasn’t been an unimaginable increase in superstition – charms, talismans, fortune-telling, what-have-you, since we stopped burning people? Since little Bess decided to live and let live?’

‘Ned, that’s simply-’

‘No less than the unwaxed truth! Cannot believe a man of your peculiar talents goes around with his eyes shut. It’s everywhere, John. That’s not, of course, to say that the common folk in England don’t live in constant fear of it… but that’s part of the spell. And therefore anything which links the Queen into that world – little effigies, what you like – ain’t good. And that’s why she shouldn’t be meddling with the faerie myths of Arthur. You go and tell her that.’

‘I’m not being given the chance.’

‘Of course -’ Bonner beamed – ‘she shouldn’t be meddling with the likes of you, either. ’

‘Um…’ I’d had enough. ‘Doesn’t the French court have its own, um, interpreter of the hidden?’

‘Who? Nostradamus? Good Catholic, and a prophet in the Old Testament tradition. The French are in morbid thrall to his every word – and prophets in general, since their last king’s untimely death was forecast in detail.’

I’d never met Nostradamus, a physician by trade, whose sudden, spectacular fame as a prophet seemed largely founded upon his adoption by the French court and the pretentious use of poetry in his predictions. However, although his use of astrology was perfunctory and inaccurate, I’d felt obliged to keep notes on his career and had, in my library, several of his almanacs and a few actual manuscripts I’d bought quite cheaply in Louvain, where the man had been regarded with an academic disdain.

Bonner leaned back. He looked happy.

‘You know, John… I intend to enjoy prison. Time and a place to attone, through prayer, for all that I’ve done which has offended God. Prayer and silence. And self-denial.’

‘Self-denial?’ I lifted the jug from the board and sniffed. I was not an expert on fine wines.

‘Word of advice,’ Bonner said. ‘Let the bones of Arthur lie. They’ve ever been trouble.’

‘I don’t truly think I have a choice.’

‘As for Glastonbury, they say that, since the abbey went down, it’s like to the Bedlam… only without the walls.’

The mirror rattling on the chest as Bishop Bonner’s merriment came crackling back, a firing of dry kindling.

Called into Service

By the end of that day, another warning beacon had been lit. One which was to worry me no small amount.

Mid-afternoon, I’d gone again to Jack Simm, asking if he and Goodwife Faldo might keep an eye on my mother while I was away. Once again, with a finger to his lips and a thumb gestured towards his wife in the house, he led me from his door. Out to the edge of the woodland, tinted pale green now with the first hesitant catkins.

‘How long you gonna be away, Dr J?’

‘Three weeks? Four? Jack, are we losing our reason? My mother says people around the village give us strange looks, you tell me there are suspicions of necromancy. Am I-?’

‘Nah, you’re just too clever for your own good. We all suffer from the times we live in. Seen too much conspiracy.’

‘There are even those who’d profit from my notoriety,’ I said. Telling him of the pamphlet-seller with his ‘Prophecies of Dr Dee’. ‘You heard of this?’

‘Nah, but it’s bound to happen. There’s ever an appetite for prediction, even if it’s unlawful now. Even astrology’s unlawful, if it’s used to make predictions about the Queen, ain’t that right?’

‘When it may become treason, yes.’

‘Unless it’s you, of course.’

‘So it would seem.’

‘Fine line, Dr John.’

‘I know it.’

I leaned against an oak tree’s rugged bole. The pamphleteer in his peacock hat already merging in my mind with an image of George Ferrers, the Lord of Misrule, as some insane jester with a jingly horned hat and a stick with a dangling pine-cone. When I told Jack Simm there were people in that crowd who’d have bound me to a stake without a second thought, he seemed not at all surprised.