Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

After a few moments, Dudley clambered out.

‘Yes.’ The relief in his voice all too evident. ‘Better it were you.’

I saw her face just once.

The smell… musty rather than putrid after all this time. Still, I tried to breathe through my mouth. The lantern glass was fogged with vapour, its glow like to a small and clouded moon. Or a nightlight, by a bedside.

She lay there before me in her rotted winding sheet: small, bent.

What now?

Hadn’t asked Borrow, how could I? Where is it? Is it clasped to her breast?

This was the most likely place, and I hoped for that, bringing the lamp close to what I judged to be the middle of her, but the hands were fallen away, rotted skin and dull bone, nothing between them but sodden linen, and a glistening slime like the pulp of some putrefying windfall fruit.

What did I expect? Guinevere? All slender bones and a twist of golden hair, which would go to dust at first touch?

The eyes, which might once have been green, were gone and the jaw had fallen and the teeth were full of black gaps, and then all was black, Dudley calling out.

‘Did you see it?’

‘Lamp’s out. Lamp’s drowned.’

‘ I saw something. I think it’s under her… I think her head lies on it, like a pillow.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘No, but… you’re going to have to lift her head to find out.’

‘I can’t even see it.’

‘Better, maybe… that way. I’ll do it if you-’

‘No… no…’

I took steadying breaths. Recalling the gasps when I’d lifted a waxen effigy from its small coffin near the bank of the Thames.

Dr Dee, the authority on matters of the hidden. Jesu…

Shutting my eyes, as if that might make it easier. But what it brought up, in an instant of glorious anguish, was an image of the unremembered. Moments lost to me since the night of the storm, moments following the river of blinding white light. The moments of the sunrise in the heart, Nel Borrow in my arms, the conjurer and the witch, twin souls.

More than love. I felt that my heart bled.

‘John, are you-?’

‘Yes,’ I cried out. ‘Yes, I’m doing it.’

Letting both hands fall into hair which went not to dust but only curled greasily around them, the wet and rotted skin from which it had grown coming away in slimed flakes, and then my fingers were sunk into the holes where her eyes had been. Eyes which had last seen daylight bulging against the constriction of a rope.

If her’s scrawny, her can hold out a good while.

With a sickening little bonecrack, I was raising her head. Heavier than you’d think. All the weight of mortality.

For this spoke not of afterlife.

Drawings for Children

In the small, panelled room at the George, we closed the shutters over the fogged and dripping glass, urgently refreshed the old red fire with applewood, piling on log after log, then finding more candles and lighting them all, until we sat within a nest of light and heat.

Yet still shivered. I tell you, this is what it means to be cold to the soul.

‘If it’s all destroyed…’ Dudley eased off his sodden boots in the ingle. ‘I may find it hard to laugh.’

My hands were reddened and chapped and scored all over with cuts and scratches. I was trying to flex them over the fire when we heard footsteps on the stairs, and then Cowdray was with us. He stood in the doorway, hands linked over his ale-belly, blue bags under his eyes.

‘We’re not thieves, innkeeper,’ Dudley said. ‘Unless you count an armful of logs.’

Cowdray glanced at the board and then looked away, for the gravedirt was yet all over it. And us. We stank of the grave.

‘I seen you go out. Wondered if there was anything I could do for you.’

‘Do you never sleep?’

‘Not unless I’m sure I’m gonner wake up, Master Roberts.’

‘Who can ever be sure of that?’ Dudley said. ‘What hour is it, Master Cowdray?’

‘Gone three. I’d be up and about in a couple of hours, anyway. I get you anything?’

‘Small… small beer would be… most acceptable.’ No way to keep the tremor from my voice. ‘And some peace. If you please.’

‘I think he means that if you see anything of Carew, you should keep the bastard away from us,’ Dudley said.

‘I’ll leave the beer out for you. And Sir Peter lies at Meadwell.’

‘ Does he?’

‘Word is, he and Sir Edmund’ll leave here after church, for Wells.’

‘For the assizes.’

‘On the morrow,’ Cowdray said. ‘Monday.’

‘Cowdray…’

He turned to me. Flakes of drying soil crumbled from my sleeve.

I said, ‘If you saw us leave, did you see if we were followed?’

Dudley frowned at me. I cared not a toss. The state of us, what was Cowdray supposed to think?

‘No, Doctor,’ he said. ‘Nobody.’

Tipping just one glance at what lay on the board before he left.

It was about a foot long, maybe nine inches wide, but no thicker than my wrist, and stinking, still smirched with the unspeakable.

‘He knows who we are,’ I said. ‘He bloody knows -’

‘No,’ Dudley said. ‘He only knows who we are not. Now open it.’

We pulled the board closer to the fire, and I turned over the pouch. It was made of leather and appeared to have been sealed all around with wax.

Dudley kept his distance.

‘This is what you expected?’

‘I know not what I was expecting.’

Bringing out my dagger and prising up the edging of wax. We’d replaced the stones one by one, filling in the grave, stamping down the earth to make it as level as we could, banging the cross back in place with the handle of the spade. After which, despite the cold, the fear that we were watched, the aching need to run, I’d bent for long minutes in the stream that bordered the herb garden, scrubbing my hands in the freezing water, washing my face of all mud-spatter.

Dudley said. ‘If it turns out to be a damned Bible…’

Lifting the flaps now, one by one, until it was all opened out.

‘It’s a notebook,’ I said. ‘Bound in hide.’

Sat and looked at it, not touching. Nothing was scribed on the front.

Its pages were browned and damp, some stuck together.

‘Undamaged, John? Readable?’

I slid the blade between two pages. Saw inked diagrams, scribbled notes.

‘Readable… is it?’

‘Give me a chance…’

Peering closer, I saw that some of it had been slashed out and scarred and ink-spattered, as if in rage. Turned over more pages – there were no more than twenty of them, a few blank.

‘Over half of it seems to be filled with fragments of charts. There are some across two pages. And some -’ I upended the book – ‘to a different scale.’

‘But what does it all show?’

‘I have…’ Looked up. ‘Absolutely no idea.’

‘So the cleverest man in the world…’

‘Sometimes it takes months… years.’

‘Which, of course, you have.’

‘Wait…’

The unmistakable word Tor had appeared.

Not in the middle of the page, but in its top right-hand corner. And then, further in, Abbey.

I gathered more candles, arranging them around the notebook, as if their very symmetry could translate to what was writ in these pages.

‘It’s a plan of the land around here… some of it, anyway.’

‘A treasure chart?’

I shrugged. Gradually, I made out place names: Glastonbury, of course. Also Meare and an arrow pointing to Wells. Hills were marked, and roads and the river and wavy lines to suggest wetland. Across the centre pages a circle was scribed in ink and inside the circle were shapes, some crudely drawn, others more complete. Symbols – a cross, a bell, a small skull. An arrow signifying north.