Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

I knew I was lucky to be at the college, for Tad was not as rich as he liked everyone to think. Also knew, too well, that we lived in dangerous times and that the King he served, like to a huge bellows, blew hot and then deathly cold. I was certainly under no illusion that I’d be allowed to remain long at Cambridge, and so I’d hurled myself into study, reducing sleep to little more than three hours a night, all fatigue flattened under the urgency of learning.

Thus, I can still work long hours without sleep, when it’s called for. But now I’ll accept that this is partly because… well, because I’m a little afraid of it. Afraid of sleep, which is death’s bedfellow. And of dreams, which give form to the deepest of fears.

BANG…

And did, by means of sorcery, attempt to kill or grievously harm Her Majesty…

BANG…

Take him.

Lurching up in bed, breathing hard.

For God’s sake, it’s a different queen.

No such accusations against my tad, but his Protestant’s fall, under Queen Mary’s purge, had been total. They took everything he owned, except for this house. By that time, I was almost famous in Europe, for my learning. In Paris, they’d stood on boards and crowded outside open windows to hear me lecture on Euclid. Famous men had come to consult me at Louvain. Whilst in England…

In England, even living once again in my mother’s house, I couldn’t afford to build an observatory, nor pay more than a single servant fulltime.

This is yet a backward country.

Next summer, in July, I would be thirty-three years old. My God, the journey perchance more than half over, and so much left to do, so much yet to know.

The cold moon lit my wall betwixt the timbers. The cat purred. The scent of pastry still lay upon the air – my mother having laboured until close to midnight in the kitchen, baking and making what preparations she could in case the only surviving child of the late Harry should deign to cross our threshold with half an army in attendance. Me trying to help her but being sent away, in the end… for how could I welcome the Queen to Mortlake all wrinkle-eyed and slow from lack of rest?

So, I slept and fell into the worst of my recurring dreams.

My hands are tied behind me, my back is hard against the wood, my eyes are closed and I’m wondering when they’ll do it.

Listening for the crackle, waiting for the heat.

There’s a silence. I’m thinking, they’ve gone. They’re not going to do it after all. I’ve been pardoned. I’m to be freed.

And open my eyes to a fine blue sky over London, with all its spires. Thinking to float away into it. Thinking of some way to free my hands and looking down…

…to find my thighs turned black and crisp, incinerated into flaking husks which, like Jack Simm and his frosted toes, I can no longer feel. My legs gone to blackened bone. The remains of my feet lying some distance away in the smouldering ash.

This is when I awake, down on the floorboards, having rolled away in a blind terror from the sudden roaring, guzzling heat and a ghastly sense of hell’s halo around my head.

Hares

Well, she came.

Not long after eleven, the gilded company appeared on the river in a fleet of bright barges and wherries. Banners aloft, sunlight flashing on helms and blades, the air aquiver with frost.

Frost… and anticipation, a vibration never far removed, in my experience, from anxiety. Certainly not this day. By the time she was being assisted from her barge, up the steps to the bank, all the neighbours were at their windows and I, in a fresh doublet, was waiting by the gate.

My stomach grown taut for, unless engaged in intellectual exchange, the dissection of ideas, I was never good with people of any station.

My mother, unless summoned, would remain inside the house amidst her pastries and mulled wine. Neither of us had slept, although that was nothing to do with she who now peeled off a glove.

A wafting of rose-petal perfume, as I bent to kiss her hand.

Those long fingers, pale as pearl, pale as ice. An unnecessary number of pikemen behind her, gazing down, unmoving.

‘Well met, John. And how’s your health now?’

A voice still light and girlish. And yet almost, you might think, still a little unsure. Something I recognised in myself. Too much time spent with books, my tad would say – himself all Welsh and voluble.

‘I’m very well, Your Highness,’ I said. ‘And, um, I trust you also-?’

Looking up in time to perceive movement in her face, a small twist of a small, strawberry mouth. Nothing that could be construed as a smile.

‘So,’ she said, ‘your cold is better then?’

The high nose, the wide-spaced eyes. The hand had fallen away. Above her, the weak sun was trembling like the yolk of a fresh-cracked egg.

‘Um… cold?’

‘The ailment’ – her voice firmer now, the mouth suddenly resembling her father’s fleshy bud, but all I could think of was a knife-slash in wax – ‘which prevented you joining us last weekend.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Better, yes, thank you, madam. Yes… much better.’

‘So worrying, a cold.’ The Queen wore a fur cloak over riding apparel, and a fur hat. ‘Especially when we perceive the long winter grinding to its end.’

‘Certainly best kept within one’s own walls,’ I said carefully. ‘That is… rather than taken out and, um, given to other people.’

‘Or bears,’ said the Queen.

Her dark grey eyes half-lidded. Shuttered rooms, and I thought, Oh dear God.

My friend, Robert Dudley, mocks me for it.

Merely what happens in the wild, John. Bears, dogs, they’re all killers, and so are we. Part of us. What we are. We’re a fighting race, everything we have we’ve fought for and killed for. Sometimes we’re the bear and sometimes the dogs, depending upon whether we’re fighting to keep what we have or to grab more.

I point out to him that successful warfare is, and always has been, about cunning, intelligence and invention rather than blind savagery. Reminding him of the machinery I’ve fashioned to this end, the navigational aids to speed our supremacy on the seas. I insist, with a passion, that we have nothing to gain from observing the conflict of bears and dogs and only our humanity to lose. In war, I say, we fight to get it over, not to prolong agony in the cause of amusement.

Dudley shrugs.

Admit the truth, John. You’re a man of books, you simply have no stomach for it.

Well, yes: the anguished roaring and the frenzied yelps, those pitiful echoes from the ante-chambers of Hades… such barbarity I can live without.

But then, with a benign, faintly sorrowful smile, my friend and former student chooses his spot and inserts his blade.

You should see the Queen, John. Clapping her little hands and bobbing in her chair at each snap of the bloodied jaws. Oh my, the Queen has ever loved a bear-baiting…

Let no-one forget, in other words, whose daughter this was. The feelings of pity and distaste, I can cope with those, suppress them when necessary. But some involuntary disclosure of contempt… who dares risk that?

Thus, when invited to a banquet, to be attended by Her Majesty and followed by bear-baiting, I’d swiftly developed a cold.

Her perfume coloured the air. Always roses, as if the wave of a royal hand could alter the seasons. I saw my older cousin, Blanche Parry, the Queen’s First Gentlewoman, staying well back amongst the company of guards and courtiers and smirking hangers-on. Watching us, like to a white owl in a tree. Blanche had ever mistrusted me.

‘I’m afraid that, with a cold, I wasn’t a pretty sight,’ I said lamely. ‘My nose-’

‘-was in a book, as usual, I expect,’ the Queen said.