Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

A rustling now in the chamber. Rats, most likely. There were always rats. I thought, inevitably, of Queen Elizabeth, her bedchamber red-hued from the fire. Afraid to sleep alone lest she awake under the dark glower of Anne Boleyn, the talking head with its blood-rimed neck.

Jesu… stop this.

Sliding off the bed, scrabbling on the board for a candle to light from the sconce on the landing. I would bring out my few books and study until the dawn came or sleep overcame me, or…

There was a shadow before the window.

I twisted urgently away from the board, my hand going to my mouth.

‘Who’s there?’

Could see it seated by the window in the greyness.

A Sister of Venus

‘I’d thought,’ she said, ‘to bare my breast.’

A candle fell on to its side.

The storm prowled closer, the beast at the door. All fumble-fingered, I caught the candle before it could roll from the board and hurriedly relit it from the flame of another. Three were alight now, including the one from the sconce on the landing, all in a bunch so that their flames mingled in a spiral of fire.

‘It having occurred to me,’ she said delicately from the chair by the window, ‘that you might wish to be sure I was not in possession of such a thing as a third nipple.’

She wore the blue overdress, and her hair was down over her shoulders. In the candleflare, the panes of stained glass in the lower window were the colour of dried mud.

‘With which to suckle my familiar?’ she said. ‘As some say.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard that… I mean… how such an appendage is said to be employed.’

Stepping back from the light, in pursuit of my breath.

And – if you were thinking to ask – only one woman since my infancy had ever bared a breast for me.

Mistress Borrow was smiling distantly, as if across a long room, say a lecture hall, some lofty-ceilinged forum for civilised, cultural debate.

‘Oh, of course – from the books.’ Musing very softly, as if to herself. ‘He’d know it from his books.’

Holding my old brown robe together, my right hand shook. We’d not spoken since she’d walked away from the tower on the tor, after Fyche’s naming of her as a witch. It was as if she’d picked up from there: a line drawn, with geometrical precision, betwixt that point in time and this present moment, and…

…all right… a Sister of Venus, if you must know. It was in Cambridge, on a rare night I’d drunk too much in an effort to be one with my fellow students, all of them older than me who, proving too young in worldly experience, too overawed and fumbling, had not… Oh God, how she’d laughed, that woman, a cold and brittle laugh, like a chisel chipping stonework from the buildings which enclosed the alley where we’d stood, tight ’twixt walls.

A very sour memory which must surely have retarded my progress into manhood.

I said, ‘You know they’re looking for you…’

Hoarse words, meagre as the scrapings of a rat. Within an instant, cruel lightning had exposed what I guessed to be my raging blush.

‘I try not to let these diversions interfere with my work,’ she said, almost briskly. ‘Which oft-times, as you know, is also a matter of life and death. I beg mercy if this visit disturbs you, Dr John, but a man’s bed-chamber, for me… well, I’ve been in so many.’

The thunder shook the panes.

‘As a doctor,’ she said. ‘Dear Lord, what a night this is become.’

And placed a calming hand above her breast and, in my head, I was spinning again down the green flank of the tor, sky and hills falling around me like a cascade of playing-cards, crying Eleanor…

…Nel…

Oh my God, she seemed so small now, with her narrow shoulders, her eyes half-lidded, demure, hair over her cheeks.

‘Well,’ she was saying. ‘I came really to inquire after your friend. Thinking it best to knock on your door first, but it was hanging open, so…’ Looking up at me, skin white-gold in the haze of light. ‘How is he?’

‘Not yet well.’

‘Then he has need of me?’

Reaching for the black cloth bag at her feet on top of her folded black cloak.

Need… Dear God…

‘He’s sleeping,’ I said quickly. ‘And… and better in body, most certainly, than yesterday, thank you. Though much damaged by the murder of his servant.’

‘Yes, that was-’

She broke off. Only seconds after the thunderblast, lightning had flared again, like full day, in the glass. And then, on the sudden, as she flinched at the exploding sky, I saw in her eyes what had been so well hidden by her voice.

Her doctor’s voice, which would be well practised at smoothing fears in herself and others. But the green eyes… to me, in this moment, they were the wild eyes of a bewildered animal in a forest of predators. And I felt calmer for seeing them, for they surely were not a witch’s eyes.

The chamber had fallen dark again. Could it be that she had nowhere else to go but here that was safe from Fyche’s hue and cry?

But, truly, how safe was this place?

I said, ‘You’ve seen Joe Monger this night?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nor this day at all.’

I nodded, feeling this to be the truth. Time, then, to hasten to the chase. Not that this was any kind of chase, for if I were a predator then she’d walked into my den.

Holding my robe together with my left hand, I stood and held out the right.

‘John Dee,’ I said.

Thus began the hours of change. The night of a wild transformation.

How can I begin to tell this?

Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul…?

Alchemy.

We talk of it. We talk of transmutation, we, the men of science, the men of books. We say, there is a formula, there has to be a formula to turn low metal into solid gold, to make man into something close to God. Some ancient secret, maybe known to Pythagoras and addressed by Plato. A matter of the occult.

Most times, we say glibly, it will involve a painful passage through darkness towards a distant planet of light. But the truth is that almost none of us of us will ever attain that light, seeing only momentary glimpses like flashes from the beaten sky in the black belly of a storm. And then, having watched the flashes and searched deep within ourselves for something more lasting, will only – God help us – dwell forever in a deeper darkness.

Worldly matters must needs be dealt with first, some small mysteries opened out. It seemed she’d left early this morning to see a sick child at a poor farm in the marshes, towards Wells, when a rider carrying letters to that city had spied her and stopped to tell her of the murder. Returning later to Glastonbury she’d had the wit to exercise caution, knowing how some men, under cover of hue and cry, can behave towards women alone.

Slipping back into the town, not by the road but along sheep paths, she’d encountered Joan Tyrre, who’d told to her the worst of news – that she was sought – and she’d hastened away, back into the woods, only returning, well cloaked, after dark.

And had gone, not home, but to Cowdray who, having seen off Fyche and his constables, had given her food and drink and an attic room. Sending word, discreetly, to her father that she was safe. Cowdray, she said, was a good man, if you didn’t mind waiting a full half-year for settlement of your bill. Her father had cared for Cowdray’s wife before she died, easing her pain a good deal, and he’d not forget that.

I assured her that my friend, Master Roberts, would be swifter to settle. Anxious, naturally, to know if Dudley, as well as giving away my name, had betrayed his own identity. He hadn’t, but it seemed he’d come perilously close to it.