Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘Sir Peter Carew,’ I said. ‘Is he…?’

‘Gone. Left over an hour ago with his men. Before we knew about Master Roberts.’

‘Good. Help me. You wouldn’t send all the way to Wells, if someone in your family were sick.’

He made no reply. I poured some of the cider into the cup and gave it a sniff.

‘Perhaps you could water this down a little. He’s delirious enough already. That’s if your water is drinkable.’

Cowdray accepted the jug, stood for a moment looking into the clouded ferment.

‘There’s a feller we go to. Herbalist and surgeon.’

‘Good?’

‘We reckon so.’

‘How far?’

‘Up by St Benignus. Two minutes’ walk?’

‘What are we waiting for, then?’

Well, of course, it would be the local cunning man.

The kind of hedge-healer possessed of an ancestral knowledge of plants and herbs. The kind of practitioner of whom, in London, Jack Simm had been a touch afeared lest he became known as one. Afeared because of the persecution urged upon such people by the beak-nosed piss-sniffers with papers from the Royal College of Physicians.

It would be a safer life, however, for a cunning man out here, where there’d be fewer registered doctors. And also fewer criminals and foreigners to degrade the healing crafts with so-called magical powders ground from stones and animal bones.

I stayed with Dudley, having asked Martin Lythgoe to go with Cowdray to this healer, describe the symptoms and give him whatever money he demanded to come at once. At least I knew enough from my own studies, my astrology and my work with Jack to be able to assess, to some extent, the cunning man’s abilities.

‘Carew?’

Dudley shifting in his bed, turning hunted eyes to me and trying to rise.

‘Gone.’ I pushed him gently back. ‘Gone to Exeter.’

‘Thank Christ for that. He’d think me weak as a woman.’

He began to cough. He’d left most of the watered cider, saying it made him feel sick.

‘Women are not all weak, Robbie,’ I said. ‘I’d expect that you, of all people…’

‘I know it.’ He rolled onto his side, his face mottled as a cockerel’s in the light from the stained glass. ‘I do know it. Jesu, do I know it. But tell me… you tell me this… how’s it possible for someone to rule a country well and keep the ways of a woman?’

‘It might help if there’s a good man to share the burdens of power.’

I meant Cecil, but Dudley almost cried out.

‘Should’ve been me…’ His eyes full of hot tears. ‘Would’ve been so right. Everything my father died for, John, and if I should die this hour…’

‘Jesu, you’re not-’

He raised a limp hand to forestall me, then closed his eyes and took in a hollow breath. Shut his mouth and tried to swallow, but his throat must have been too dry, and when his eyes flickered open again they were empty, defeated.

‘Saw it coming.’

‘What?’

‘Death coming for me. I’d not expected it so soon, but God knows I deserve no better.’

‘So,’ I said upon a sigh, ‘what does death look like?’

‘Old man. A sad old man.’

I said nothing.

‘Both feet above the ground, and looking down on me with a terrible pity. And the white moon shining through him. The whiteness aglow in his eyes. And cold, John. So very, very… cold.’

Delirium.

‘And he knew, God help me, he knew what I am. ’

Dudley’s hands clutching the blankets, knuckles white as bone. I heard children shouting in the street.

‘Fever dream, Robbie.’

‘Could see through him.’ Dudley gazing, blank-eyed at the beams. ‘And he… he knew.’ Teeth bared now, the breath sucked through them. ‘John, I’m no more than a piece of shit.’

‘Don’t-’

‘No! I need to tell you. Make my confession.’ His head turning towards me. ‘You’re an ordained man, are you not, John?’

‘No!’ I almost leapt back from the bed. ‘No, no… ’

‘Bonner’s chaplain? Rector of… somewhere.’

‘No…’ Wiping my hands across the air before me. ‘I swore what was necessary to obtain the income from the rectorate of Upton. I do not cure souls, so don’t you fucking tell me anything.’

‘God help me, but she’s not been well of late.’

She?

Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ‘Who?’ I whispered.

For some moments he was silent, lying in the sun-reddened glow of the stained glass like an effigy upon a tomb.

Time passed. And then the words were drifting out of him, as if they were not his words but those of some maleficent spirit that lived within him, poisoning his thoughts.

‘Found myself half wishing that she were… gone from my life.’

Raising himself on an elbow, staring past me as though we were not alone in the room.

‘No such thing as a half-wish, is there?’ Dudley smiling a sick smile conveying private agony. ‘I was wishing… that she might be gone…’

‘Robbie.’

‘…in the night. Might quietly succumb, in the deep hours before dawn, to some swift sickness.’

‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘With no pain. I could never wish her pain.’

I looked away. Wishing not to be here. Wishing not to know what he meant. Tightening inside, for I knew that he’d wed Amy Robsart, a squire’s daughter, at the age of eighteen when he would have thought he had no chance of winning Elizabeth.

But now he was closer than ever to Elizabeth, scandalously close, so close that she’d showered him with gifts and land, and Amy, meanwhile…

Amy lived in the country.

‘He knew,’ Dudley whispered. ‘I could tell the old man knew.’

‘Your father? Your father’s shade came to you in a dream?’

‘Not my father,’ Dudley said. ‘And not a dream. I may be fevered, but I know what is… not a dream.’

His head sinking to the pillow as if all loaded with lead. I felt that he’d gone to the abbey last night in search of some kind of absolution and found… no comfort. Maybe the reverse.

‘Instead, it’s me who’ll die,’ he said. ‘And not in the dark hours. Here in the full light, so that all may see.’ His breathing had become shallow. ‘That all may see.’

‘The doctor’s on his way,’ I said, numbed.

Watchtower

Moments later, with the strengthening sun now risen over the coloured glass and into the clear, leaded panes, Robert Dudley slipped into a merciful sleep.

Merciful, at least, to me.

I keep telling you, I’m no good with these matters. A quiet man, a scholar. A mathematician and an astronomer, who understands not the geometry of love, nor could think to chart the erratic trajectory of desire. And when that desire is further powered by worldly ambition, then God help us all.

I moved away from the thickening sickbed miasma, walking towards the sun.

Thinking how fever caused confusion and sickness skewed the senses. How a man who could face, with courage, an enemy he could see might become like to a frightened child when the enemy was within himself.

And who had not, in times of anguish, found the foulest of ideas snaking into his thoughts?

But now Dudley’s unguarded thoughts were locked into my thoughts. And his momentary showing of an inner guilt behind the usual arrogance and the banter would not quickly be erased from my memory. Nor would the implications of what he’d told me.

It was well known that he aspired to the Privy Council, and the word from court was that he would soon be receiving a title well beyond Master of the Horse. Found myself recalling one particular day when I was first awakening in him what would become a real interest in astronomy. I want to go there, Dr Dee, he’d said, aged thirteen or so – me about twenty-one. I want to be among the stars.