Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘Who?’

I said nothing. Jack let go a thin whistle. Might’ve been admiration but pity seemed more likely.

‘Again? It was me, I tell you, I’d be spending the rest of the night shivering in me privy. But I suppose when you’ve known her since she was young…’

‘Young still, Jack.’

‘Nah, they grows up fast under a crown. All fresh and dewy on the outside; underneath, skin like a lizard. What’s the occasion?’

It was over a month now since the incident of the effigy and not a word, so it seemed unlikely to be that.

‘I don’t truly know,’ I said. ‘She has an interest in my work…’

‘The navigation, this would be?’ He may have winked. ‘Well, best be going in. Can’t seem to feel me toes no more. Good luck to you, Dr John.’

For some reason, Jack Simm found me amusing.

Walking away, my left boot slid across a frozen wheel-rut, and I stumbled. An old man had broken his leg not far from here just a fortnight ago and was not found until morning. Dead by then of the cold.

No use hurrying, anyway; there’d be time for no more work this night. I’d need to help my mother prepare our house for the visit of the Queen… even though I knew the Queen would not enter it.

Hobbled into Mortlake High Street, past the school run by nuns for poor children – well intentioned, but a poor child with a little education would often simply be sold by its parents at the first opportunity. Candles still aglow far back in the school chapel, but the nearby Church of St Mary was black. A big modern church only slightly more interesting amid night shadow than it was by daylight. I should have liked to see a proper steeple – some symbol of a soaring spiritual ambition.

Not that anyone in recent years has dared soar. Not since I was a child. Nowadays, only a fool kneels before God without first glancing over his shoulder, or prays too long with eyes closed. All is confusion. Vision and spirit are fled. How quickly can rational thought progress now in England, with zealots like Abel Meadows on the march, warning of a fast-approaching apocalypse? For which, of course, there’s no scientific evidence whatsoever.

Candlemas tomorrow. Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, when the candles were blessed. And no-one knows what to do about it any more. In some churches the blessing of candles is a secret ritual.

Pausing now, by the coffin gate. In the icy night, the stars – the energy of stars – felt real and close. Bright orbs, each one familiar, dancing in a formal complexity as satisfying to me as a well-wrought knot garden in the heavens. My garden.

A familiar wild excitement arose in me, like to a moon-drawn tide. Closing my eyes, holding out my hands into the palpitating air, open to the nudging, flittering interplay of invisible vibrations, sensing sacred splinters of ice-white light in flow through my body – rendered, in my imagination, transparent in the cold blue night.

Thus, failing to see my mother until she was upon me.

‘Head in the stars, as ever, when it’s not in a book. Well? Did you find her?’

Jane, the widow Dee. A tallish woman, still straight, although nearing sixty years. She held up her lantern to my face as if to be full sure that it actually was me.

‘No.’ I relieved her of the lamp as we walked. Not the time to tell her about the madness of Abel Meadows. ‘But I did find out that she has troubles at home. Illness in the family.’

‘Plague?’

My mother taking a rapid step back. The rushing of breath into her throat.

‘ No, Mother… no suggestion of that. She went to get help for her grandmother – to the bone-twister. Probably didn’t get back home before it was too dark to return here safely.’

‘Well then, she ought to have sent word.’

How? I was about to ask her, but the night was too advanced for argument.

‘Yes,’ I conceded. ‘It’s not like her not to send word.’

‘Now I shall have no sleep.’ My mother expelled a martyr’s sigh. ‘We should have two servants. Always used to.’

I said nothing. There was nothing to be said. I was a scholar, and the monetary rewards for learning were yet meagre.

‘Someone older.’ My mother was winding her winter cloak tight around her. ‘With such a young woman on the throne, lesser young women seem to think they have some new freedom to behave as they like.’

I had to smile. By young woman she meant flighty, irresponsible. A queen who was laughing openly in the teeming streets on her coronation day and waving in glee to the crowd. Acknowledging the common horde – what was our society coming to?

My own heart, I should assure you, had been alight that coronation day, relishing the rush of such spontaneous goodwill as I’d never known in a public place, even at Christmas. Sunday, the fifteenth of January, Fifteen Hundred and Fifty Nine. Just over a year ago. The choice of this auspicious date having been made by the heavens and interpreted through my charts, and I’d been weak with relief, for if the day had gone badly…

‘What’s more -’ Jane Dee refusing to let it go – ‘it was market day today. Now we have no fresh fare. On this, of all days.’

‘We’ll get by.’

‘ Get by?’ My mother, horrorstruck, let the hem of her heavy cloak fall to the road. ‘Oh yes – as if the body can be sustained by lofty intellect and little else. Your poor, blessed father, if he could hear you now-’

Exasperated, she stalked across the frost-furred street to enter through our open gate. In truth, my poor blessed tad would have understood too well – all the stories he’d told us of the titanic quantities of waste scraped from the late King Harry’s boards. Like stoking a particularly temperamental furnace, he’d remarked once, memorably, after too much wine.

I stood for a moment in the middle of the lane. No movement in the shining night, not even a slinking fox. Few candles still burning behind our neighbours’ frozen windows. The richer houses here are set back further from the river. Our own, not the most graceful of dwellings, is built partly on stilts because of the threat of flooding. I called out, across the roadway.

‘Mother, you know she won’t come in. She never comes in. ’

When I was last here, in the autumn, Elizabeth had arrived at this gate with her company, and I’d gone out to her, and that was where we’d remained. When I’d wanted her to see my books, she wouldn’t. Didn’t have time. Had to be off. Queenly things to do.

Still, given the size of her train, if we’d had to feed them all we’d’ve been on stale bread and small beer for a month.

‘John… are you part of this world?’ My mother spinning at the gateway, her cloak a billowing of shadow. ‘Just because she hasn’t passed our threshold thus far, who’s to say that on such a cold winter’s morn she won’t find herself in sore need of sustenance and a hot drink? Who’s to say?’ She sniffed. ‘Probably not you, who sees only the need to feed his learning.’

Always in two minds about my career, Mistress Jane Dee.

And who truly could blame her?

For an hour or more beyond midnight, I lay open-eyed in my bedchamber, one of the house cats curled up at my feet, and thought about the nature of time, how we might make more of it. One lifetime was never going to be enough. A flimsy thing, a stuttering from a candle, then gone. If not extinguished prematurely by some… miscalculation.

In Paris, in the week I was preparing to leave, all the talk had been of an elixir of life. I didn’t believe it. If there’s a method of prolonging existence, it will never come in a stoppered flask but will be part of some inner process. When I was sent up to Cambridge, at fifteen, I decided one simple step towards an extension of time was to minimise the hours of sleep.