Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘I’ll have more constables brought in from Wells,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll be obliged to set to and take this town apart. The innocent will be inconvenienced, doubtless. But the murder of a servant of the Queen – no matter how menial – is no occasion for a soft tread.’

An excuse to flatten the maggots. The air was full of the stench of tallow, blood and shit. I swallowed my nausea.

Fyche took a long, slow inbreath against the stink and turned to bend over the corpse, and I…

What I saw next… you must understand that I was tired. I’d had no sleep this night and insufficient the night before. My head ached and my vision was blurred and imagination, left to its own devices, can, as I may have said, cause havoc in the mind, and who was to say what were visions and what were signs of an oncoming madness?

The candle wedged into Martin Lythgoe’s mouth had formed itself into a cone of yellow wax spread beyond his lips across his chin and cheeks. My first impression – of a piss-sniffer’s mask – was swiftly replaced as I took in blackened wick standing erect from the steep, yellow cone, slicked with rivulets of melted fat.

‘John… what the hell…’

No!

‘…goes on?’

I twisted around, to find Robert Dudley, half dressed, steadying himself against a collapsed wall, his face sweat-oiled and eyes dark smudges. I wanted to scream at him to get back, but could not speak, for inside my head was bobbing the image of the melted candle which, I swear, had resembled nothing so much as a grotesque waxen likeness of the Glastonbury Tor.

And that… that was when I became aware – one of the strangest, most creepingly invasive feelings of my life thus far – that this place, in some unholy way, was beginning to live inside me.

Monas Hieroglyphica.

Our Sister

‘Wife,’ Dudley said. ‘Seven children.’

The window glass was full of pinky light, the unwintry dawn creaming the sky like some sickly syllabub.

‘Five boys,’ Dudley said. ‘Two girls.’

This was a side of him I’d rarely seen. He sat, shivering in the cold and his anguish, on the side of his bed, still too weak to be out of it.

‘My father’s stable boy when I was young. Would, I swear, have died for my father – gone to the block in his stead. Loyalty, John. An immovable loyalty.’ He sucked in a hissing breath which must have pained his swollen throat. ‘The hell with Carew, if I find these bastards first, I’ll cut them down where they stand, piece by fucking-’

Then began to weep, knowing that, in truth, he couldn’t cut down a bed of reeds. His sword lay on the floorboards, half unsheathed as if he’d not the strength to draw it.

I stood up at the window, looking down into the high street, where the goodwives huddled watching men dismounting by the abbey gates: Fyche’s constables from Wells. They’d put Martin’s body, his insides on his lap, in an outbuilding at the abbey for Carew to inspect as soon as he arrived from Exeter.

I turned back to the pink-washed chamber.

Confession.

‘I sent him away,’ I said. ‘Yesterday. He’d followed me.’

‘Aye. Like a good hound.’

Dudley was sobbing, his shoulders aquake, and I sensed the murder of Martin Lythgoe all bound up, in the dark of his sickness, with the execution of his father and all the other dread memories of unjust killings he’d known in his score and six years.

At last, he looked up at me, without shame, through his tears.

‘With Lythgoe, there always had to be someone to watch over. After my father was gone, it was me. With me sick in bed, the poor bugger was looking out for you.’

‘And I sent him away.’

Fingernails piercing my palms.

‘Chrissake, John, how could you have known?’

Well, I couldn’t, but it didn’t matter. It was the circumstance. The fact that I’d dispatched this man to the most sickening and degrading of deaths because…

…because of some half-formed fascination with Eleanor Borrow. And you know the worst of it? The worst of it was that Dudley, being Dudley, would have understood.

‘Where did you send him, John?’

‘Back here. To… make sure you were drinking enough water.’

I know. I know. But if I’d told him about bidding Martin Lythgoe to find the farrier, he’d go dragging himself through the streets like a leper until he’d located the man himself.

‘I don’t remember.’ Squeezing his head. ‘Don’t remember him coming back. It was the last time I saw him and I don’t remember.’

‘You’d be sleeping. As you should be now.’

‘Can’t even…’ Head sinking into his hands. ‘Can’t even think. What… I mean, for God’s sake, what was Lythgoe doing there in the middle of the night? In the abbey?’

‘May not have happened in the middle of the night. He may have lain there some hours.’

How long for a candle to burn out? How long had the candle been? Or had someone else come along afterwards and stuffed it in his mouth? But only a madman would do that… and not possible, anyway, if the rigor had set in, jaws and teeth clenched tight.

‘And what were you doing there, John? What in God’s name took you to the abbey?’

‘Couldn’t sleep.’

‘You went out there alone… because you couldn’t sleep?’

As if he hadn’t done the same the previous night. Yet I was growing tired of lies and half-truths. I’d tell him, spell it out, the whole folly of it.

‘The abbot,’ I said. ‘They say the abbot doesn’t rest.’

‘Who says that?’

‘Cowdray. And if such a thing was there to be seen… I wanted to see it.’

Dudley stared at me. Reluctantly, I met his gaze.

‘For Christ’s sake, suddenly, everyone sees them. The Queen, you… everyone but me. There. A sorrowful admission from a half-man.’

From the street came the merry honk of a hunting horn, then a billowing of laughter. The blood was up, the chase was on.

‘Let me get this fully clear,’ Dudley said. ‘You went into the ruins intending to conjure the spirit of the last abbot?’

‘No! I don’t conjure. Don’t do that. I just wanted…’

Courage dying on me. Dudley slid back on to his pillow, staring up at the ceiling beams.

‘Do you know something? I think if I were a ghost, the very last man on earth I’d want to appear before would be John Dee. Walking all around me, peering and prodding and unrolling his measuring device and exhausting me with his endless questions about the condition of the afterlife and have I seen God yet and what does-’

‘All right.’

‘Or perchance you thought the spirit might conveniently point you in the direction of the bones of Arthur?’

Too close. I sat down on the stool under the window, said that I could only wish I’d gone there earlier, when Martin Lythgoe was yet alive.

‘What? So they could slay you, too? Where would that leave us?’

‘I might -’ wiped a hand across my unshaved jaw – ‘might’ve been able to-’

‘Display your mastery of the fighting arts? Throw a couple of heavy books at them?’