Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

I sat back and thought about it. Dudley was staring at me, as if waiting for the exposition to begin, the unravelling.

My hands hurt. My brain was cold.

‘Drawn by Leland?’ Dudley said.

‘Looks like his writing. I’ve several of his manuscripts in my library. And seen many more. Copied them, even, when I was younger and studying the arts of geography and chorography. And we know he was working with Cate Borrow.’

‘On a plan of the area? Something to do with his itinerary?’

‘It’s what he did.’

I turned the pages slowly, twice more. Words were few and all of them place names or topographical features – hedge, stream, stone, boundary. And the shapes of things.

‘It’s incomplete. Something in its early stages. The bones of a chart.’

‘Then why would she keep studying it?’

‘Maybe she was also still working on it. Maybe she thought he’d return some day.’

‘And then he went mad?’

‘Overwork. So it’s said. The magnitude of the task he’d set himself in charting all England and writing down its topography. He’d vowed to chronicle details of every hill and vale and river in the country… everything that could be marked. Not having realised the size of the task. And the limitations of one lifetime.’

I could sympathise. All the times I’d awoken in the night, panicked by realisation of the brevity of life and the impossibility of learning all that was to be learned. No wonder that Leland, like me, had been drawn toward alchemy and astrology, the hope that we might call down celestial influences to guide us toward some elixir.

‘Maybe he was on his way into madness when he did this,’ Dudley said. ‘Defacing his own charts with drawings for children.’

‘What?’

‘Animals.’

I looked up at him.

‘Are you pissing up my leg?’

‘Well, what do you see them as? Look.’ He leaned over, tracing the shape with a finger. ‘There’s a hound… and a bird, with tail fanned?’

‘Robbie,’ I said. ‘Just fetch the beer.’

Leland. A driven man. Who knew the magic of charts. Vast areas of land and sea reduced to small shapes upon a page, so that our eyes can see it as if from on high. As above, so below, Leland, like me, having studied Plato, Pythagoras and, beyond them, thrice-great Hermes of ancient Egypt.

A driven man. Driven into insanity.

Dudley went out of the room and padded across the passage to the alehouse, leaving me turning over pages, time and time again, in a quiet frenzy. Tilting the notebook on end, almost scorching the thin paper in the candle flames.

Found a second drawing on which the tor was marked. This time, one flank of it, as if seen from above, was picked out in heavy ink and became part of a far bigger shape which resembled what Dudley had thought to be a bird with tail fanned. Within its shape, the outlines of fields were thinly scribed.

Maybe if I was at home in my library, with all that I possessed of Leland’s works, I might make something of this.

Or maybe I’d understand it enough to know that it was of no relevance. The meaningless scribblings of a broken man, blaming himself for all that Cromwell had stolen from Glastonbury.

Dudley set down an ale jug and two mugs – good pewter mugs, I noticed, the first time we’d been given them.

‘Might it be clearer, if you tore out all the pages,’ Dudley said, ‘and put them together? I’m clutching at straws.’

‘If he’d wanted that, he’d’ve done it.’ In truth, I hated to destroy a book. ‘I need time, Robbie.’

‘You don’t have time.’ Dudley drained his mug, then stretched out his arms, yawning. ‘Defeats me. I don’t think myself an idiot, but it defeats me how a man can stand on the ground and chart the land as if he were a bird flying over it.’

‘It’s a long and complicated process involving much walking. Robbie… You’ve been ill. You need rest. Why not go to your bed till dawn?’

He looked down at me, his smile askew.

‘That means you want to be on your own with this, doesn’t it?’

‘Who said I taught you nothing of use?’

I laughed, I suppose a little sadly.

The disappointment over what we’d found must have been etched on my face.

When I awoke, two hours later, head on an arm on the boardtop, three tallow candles had burned to a foul mush, and I was sickened at myself. The logs were all red and ashy in the hearth and I thought of Nel in the dungeon in Wells, another day of it before being hauled before a hanging judge and a jury of self-satisfied, pious minnows.

My apparel was stiff with dried mud. With the first light palely aflare in the northeast, I stood up and went out back for a piss. Listening to the chittering of the early birds and Cowdray calling orders to the maids. In the yard, the ass was watching me benignly from the entrance to his stable.

The moon was yet visible and there was a scatter of stars, the remains of my night garden.

My garden.

John Dee… the greatest adventurer of them all… a man of deepest learning and erudition… her Merlin.

What a deluded fool I was. Nothing, going nowhere. Just a failed bone-collector.

Harlot

Cleaned up as best I could, clad in the spare doublet over an old, tattered shirt, I dragged myself to church. Dudley had not emerged from his chamber, and so I went alone: Dr Dee, specialist in matters of the hidden, throwing himself at the mercy of the God whose mind, with unspeakable arrogance, he’d determined to know. Dr Dee, lovesick, bent with sorrow, smirched with sin, in vain hope of absolution.

The morning sky had become very quickly ominous: a fine line of salmon putting a sandy cast upon the long hill before the sun rose but briefly into a mantle of dense cloud which smothered Glastonbury from horizon to horizon.

The beginning of the end of the world, the vicar said. Dear God, what had I expected: calm, fortitude and the sure hope of redemption?

St Benignus, this was, the lesser church. Fyche and Carew, I’d guessed, would be at the more impressive St John’s, and I’d no wish to encounter either of them.

The farmers and their families had come down from the hills and the modern church was packed to the doors, me standing at the very back, where it was darkest.

Hell, in truth, all of it was dark. No candles on the altar, and there’d be no communion, nothing approaching the Mass, no enfolding element of the mystic. And, in this plump Welsh vicar, I heard the voice of an Abel Meadows.

‘At the end of days, it is foretold that the angels of light and the angels of darkness will engage in a great battle, and the field of that battle is the soul of mankind – your souls, my soul. Within every one of us… every one of us – that final battle will be fought. Will you give yourself, body and soul, to God?’

The vicar panting, as he leaned over his pulpit, passing his eyes across all the congregation. I watched men go pale, a woman wring her hands, felt the air go cold with menace.

‘Or will you give your soul away? As some already have done, though they knew it not, by putting their faith in charms and talismans. By opening their mouths to receive potions from a witch’s cauldron. By… sucking the syrup of Satan…’

I pressed myself against the wall in anger, felt that the cultured Abbot Bere, who built this place, would abhor this man.

‘Isaiah saeth, Now is the faithful city become a harlot! It was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers!’

The vicar bulging from his pulpit, wagging a flaccid forefinger.

‘We have not long, I tell you, to purge ourselves and this once-holy town of all sin, unbelief and wrong belief… before that which is foretold at the Bible’s end shalt indeed come to pass. And then shalt them – them as repents not – be embraced by a final darkness!’