Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘Call yourself a magician,’ Dudley said.

‘I don’t.’ Bending my head into the blizzard. ‘As you know. Can we not find an inn?’

‘There isn’t an inn. Can you see an inn?’

‘I can see very little.’

‘Is there an inn near here, Carew?’ Dudley shouted.

‘There is. ’ Sir Peter Carew riding up alongside him. ‘But spend the night there and by morning you’d have scratched off your balls. As for this poor fellow…’

Carew glancing back at me, as if unsure whether I possessed balls. He was a stocky and muscular man, older than Dudley by a good twenty years, but his long beard was still as dark and thick as tarred rope.

‘Well, perchance we could rest there at least until the sky shows some mercy,’ Dudley said. ‘Is the food fit to eat?’

‘Press on, my advice, you want to reach Glaston tonight. You and I, we’ve known a fucking site worse than this – and with a battle on the morrow.’ Carew turned briefly to me, eyes slitted against the sleet. ‘I gather you’ve not served your country as a fighting man, Doctor?’

Behind me, Carew’s two men were, I suspected, sniggering. I made no response. Could not, in truth, speak, for the cold. As Carew pulled ahead, Martin Lythgoe, the groom, was alongside me, low-voiced.

‘Yon bugger’s fought for too many countries, you ask me, Dr John.’

Smiled and turned away, urging his horse back on to the whitening road.

My tad had talked of Carew, who’d found favour at Harry’s court when little more than a boy. A far-travelled boy, however, who had already seen much action in Europe.

Sent by his father, Sir William, as a page to France after years of truancy and rebellion at his grammar school in Exeter, he’d ended up with the French army and then, after his master was killed, changed sides to join the Prince of Orange. Still only sixteen when he’d returned to England, with letters of introduction from the royalty of Orange to the King. Impressing the Great Furnace with his horsemanship and finding a place, two years later, as a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. A great individual, my father had said. Sir Peter goes his own way.

Certainly knew his way through the west of England, having risen to become MP for his native Devon and Sheriff of that county. Now he was its senior knight and, as such, wielded power in Somerset, too.

And also – the reason he was with us – Carew was the present owner of Glastonbury Abbey. Safe pair of hands, Dudley had assured me. He wasn’t sure precisely how the Queen had come to place the holy ruins in Carew’s hands, and wasn’t sure the Queen knew either. But no one better to keep the papists out.

It was very near dark when we rode at last into the hills above Glastonbury but, by then, the sleet had turned to rain and then ceased, and a fragment of moon was visible, and we soon could see why those pleas for restoration had fallen upon muffled ears.

Carew had told us that, because of its history, a strong Protestant presence at the abbey had been deemed essential. In Seymour’s time as Duke of Somerset, it had been given over to a community of Flemish weavers – followers of the insane Protestant John Calvin – who’d set up a flourishing industry within its precincts. Thus had the town’s economy been sustained through the years of the boy Edward. But when Mary came to power and the Bishop of Rome was reinstated, through fire and blood, as our spiritual leader, the weavers had fled back to the low countries.

As we rode down the last hillside, the moon’s sickle cut through the cloud. In its cold light the abbey was a grey ghost with stony arms raised as if to clutch us to its cracked ribs.

The George Inn, in the well of the town, had been strong-built of stone to accommodate pilgrims of status and must once have blazed with welcoming candlelight. Tonight… well, there must be light in there somewhere, but the ground-floor windows facing the road were as black as hell’s privy.

Carew had sent one of his men ahead and, by the time we arrived in the yard at the rear, two boys were on hand to look after the horses we’d ridden from Bristol.

‘Cowdray!’ Carew bawled out. ‘Where the fuck’s Cowdray?’

‘I’m here, Sir Peter, I’m here.’ A man stumbling down from some wooden steps, leaving pale flame hissing from a pitch-torch on a wall-bracket. ‘Having fires built for you, sir, the big ovens lit.’

‘Why were the bastards not already lit?’

‘Sir Peter, we’ve had no travellers here for a fortnight or more. ’Tis February, man.’

‘Told you, didn’t I?’ Carew turning to Dudley, coughing out a laugh like a pellet of phlegm. ‘Arsehole of the west, this town.’

Town? Even though its main street was on the road to Exeter, I’d noticed no more than a dozen buildings of any substance, including a tall-towered church. And the abbey in all its smashed splendour.

‘Bring in plenty logs, Cowdray,’ Carew said. ‘First light tomorrow, I ride to Exeter, but these gentlemen will be staying for several days. This is Master Roberts and Dr John, of the Queen’s Commission on Antiquities.’

It had been Cecil’s insistence that we should conceal our identities. I was not sorry to obscure mine, but I guessed that Dudley already was feeling naked without his panoply of privilege. At the Bristol inn where we’d spent last night, his mild advances to our chambermaid had been quite scornfully rebuffed. A mere civil servant… small beer.

Carew, however… even in Bristol, Carew had oft-times been recognised. A famous man of the west, it seemed, his legend widely circulated. A favourite tale dated back to his Exeter youth when, escaping school, he’d scaled a turret of the city wall and threatened to jump off if pursued further… his father eventually leading him home, it was said, on a dog-leash.

After we’d dined passably well on broth and mutton, in a small, oak-walled room, Carew summoned the innkeeper.

‘Shut the door, Cowdray. Sit the fuck down. We have need of your local knowledge.’

The innkeeper was a bulky man with sparse ginger hair, a good week’s uneven growth of beard and the air of one resigned to disappointment. Wiping his hands on his apron, he lowered himself to the end of a settle near the door. Four candles spread a creamy glow over the oak board, and a fragrant wood was burning in the grate – apple logs, I guessed. No shortage of these in the one-time Isle of Avalon.

Carew stood with his arse to the fire, his eyes, under wide black brows, aglitter in the candlelight.

‘These good men, Cowdray, are appointed by the Queen to inquire into the disappearance of certain documents and artefacts from the abbey.’

‘Bit late now, sir,’ Cowdray said, ‘if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘Say what you like to me, but if a word of it gets beyond these walls I’ll have this fucking hovel closed down by midweek. We understand each other?’

‘We do,’ Cowdray said mildly, not appearing too oppressed. ‘We always have.’

‘Full twenty years since the abbey was removed from the greasy fingers of corrupted monks,’ Carew said. ‘Now we’re in fairly settled days, the Privy Council feels it’s time for a reassessment of what remains.’

‘Monks are long gone.’

‘Good fucking riddance. All of them?’

‘Well… mostly gone from the town. They had good pensions, about five pounds a year.’

‘What are they now then?’

‘One’s a farrier. We use him here.’

‘A more useful life, certainly,’ Carew said.

‘And you gets to marry.’

‘Everything has its downside.’

Carew glanced at Dudley, who made no response. I’d thought Dudley’s marriage was for love, but of course my friend was renowned for having love to spare.