Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

I felt an unease.

‘What did it say?’

‘That her death would occur… I know not when exactly… But that she need not worry, for she’d not be alone but would be guided through the veil. That she who’d brought her into the world would watch her out of it.’

‘Those words?’

‘Something like that. That Anne would watch her out of it. Watch her all the way to…’

‘Hell?’

A hush. A fluttering of lightning on the wall.

‘Widely known,’ Dudley said, ‘that the ghost of Anne Boleyn haunts the Tower.’

No thunder came to smash the silence. Dudley swallowed.

‘You can imagine what happened. The very next night, she has a dream. A vivid dream. The kind of dream where you dream of being asleep in your own bed and then you awaken and…’

‘Anne?’

‘Oh God, yes. Wearing that cute little smile from the portrait, and there’s a thin circle of dried blood around her neck. As if she’s decently popped her head back on, for the visit.’

I nodded. The images of myth full formed: Anne Boleyn smiling with a foxy serenity on the edge of the abyss. The mouth in the severed head, held up, still forming words. It took little imagination to envision the effects of the merest suggestion that the wilful Anne was there, in the shadows of the night, ready to beckon her daughter over death’s threshold.

‘Wouldn’t sleep alone in her chamber for several nights after that,’ Dudley said. ‘There’d be various ladies in attendance through till dawn, and extra candles alight.’

‘It continued?’

‘Happened twice more.’

‘And did this… did Anne speak?’

Dudley shook his head, drank more water.

‘Bess asked me if I thought she should summon John Dee to cast around her bed a protective circle which… which her mother couldn’t enter. I said, well, why not?’

‘Thank you for your confidence.’

‘However, it seems that someone else swiftly advised her against it. The Archbishop of Canterbury was privately summoned instead, to do what he could.’

‘Parker?’

‘Bless her bedchamber, anyway.’

Didn’t ask if that had worked. I leaned into the candlelight. ‘So this prophecy of the Queen’s death… were any attempts made to trace its origins?’

‘What’s the point? You know what these bastards are like. Some small printing shop in a cellar deep into Southwark. There was a name at the bottom, from the Bible. Some prophet – Elijah or Elisha or…’

At least it wasn’t Dee. But still this worried me. I’d already been brought within singeing distance of the stake as a result of one royal horoscope.

‘Look,’ Dudley said, ‘her mother… you need to understand this is not something new. When we were in the Tower, as children, she’d oft-times talk of… I mean, what would you expect in the place where your father had your mother’s head sliced off? She was growing up into a world heavy with omens and foreboding and the ever-presence of what you might call… sudden death.’

The keening of the axe in the air. Or in Anne’s case, thanks to Harry’s mercy, a sword wielded by a master.

‘All right, let’s examine this,’ I said. ‘Anne… Morgan. Two women said to be witches who’ve caused havoc. An undying king, whose aura of sacred magic was harnessed to the Tudor cause…’

‘Until this holy heritage was taken apart by Harry’s un holy desire for Anne.’

‘By whom he’d insist, when it suited him later, that he’d been bewitched. Just as Arthur and his knights were bedevilled by Morgan le Fay.’

I was chilled at how neatly it fitted together. ‘If the Queen fears the curse of her own immediate ancestry, as the child of a witch and a monster… and the suggestion is made that the only way it can be repaired…’

‘If we follow this road,’ Dudley said, ‘then the bones, when we find them, should stay here in Avalon. That is, not go to London, as Cecil prefers. And the Queen should come here, as did Edward I, to watch them re-entombed… in glory.’

‘In an abbey rebuilt at crippling expense?’

A barrel of worms. The window paled with lightning.

‘I tell you, John, I’m out of here tomorrow,’ Dudley said.

‘The town?’

‘Out of this bed. I want those fucking bones. And when we find them, we don’t immediately send word to Cecil, right?’

‘Robbie, he’s your friend, he’s been a friend of your family for-’

‘Be not naive. He has his own script; he wants the right marriage . And it won’t be an Englishman. Cecil believes that the only worthwhile royal marriage is a political marriage.’

‘Who?’

‘It varies. I know for a fact he’s been tossing around the idea of a union to unite us with Scotland – finally break France’s hold through Mary Stuart. And if… if, when he finds the right match, the chosen foreigner finds out that his virgin queen is not…’

Dudley fell back, coughing. The thunder rolled closer. The bedside candle went out.

…not a virgin. A shiver sped through me. ‘I think we’ve talked too much,’ I said. ‘Get some sleep, rest your throat.’

I blew out the other candle and closed the door on Dudley, shaken. Pacing the landing, lighting a tallow candle in the sconce there.

So much I hadn’t told him. How, for example, would he have reacted to the knowledge that at least two people in this town knew exactly who I was, and that one of them was the woman now sought by Fyche in connection with the murder of Martin Lythgoe?

Who, in this situation, could we trust? How would Dudley feel about the farrier, who seemed to me an honest, well-intentioned man?

But then what did I know? What did I know about the life outside of books?

I went into my chamber and sat at the foot of the dusty bed in the darkness and wondered whether I hadn’t made a terrible mistake in giving an answer to Monger’s simple question.

Madness. Night thoughts.

Why, truly, are you here, Dr Dee?

A smitter of rain on the window, and then it stopped and I thought of what Monger had said when I’d told him what we sought.

The lead went first from the roof and then the glass from the windows. The marble tomb? It just disappeared.

All of it? At once?

I’ve heard the old cross has been seen – the one from the original grave – but I know not where it is now. I don’t think any of us cared one way or the other. They’d cut out our heart. Lesser abbeys were kept on as cathedrals, but we were too close to Wells. Would be better the abbey had never been here than we’re left with an open wound.

I’d asked him if it was true that Abbot Whiting had been tortured because it was thought he was concealing the famous eucharistic vessel of the Last Supper, the Holy Grail. I’d asked Monger if he believed it yet existed.

That depends on how you define existence. It may well have existed as a vessel, of metal or pottery or wood. May well have existed here. But it might also have a spiritual life, a holy symbol, experienced only in visions.

Those visions again. Monger had shaken his head in a weary bewilderment.

Some say this is the holiest place in these islands, while to others it’s just a tawdry town with a history of fraud and deception and the monks at the rotten core of it.

In the old days, Monger said, there had been whisperings, even amongst the monks, of things hidden, certain wonders pre-dating Christianity. Rumours still passed around by the town’s ragbag of half-pagan mystics… although they were in thrall to an essentially different Arthur, representing the magical legacy of the old Celtic tribes and Druids.

What had we stumbled into?

I undressed swiftly, because of the cold, threw on my robe over my night shirt, sat on the edge of the bed. Outside, the thunder crawled like a black beast on the hills, and I could not but think of Joan Tyrre and her dreams of Gwyn ap Nudd under his spiked hill.