Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

Please… come with us to Wells. Tell the assize how you provided the bones to be scattered on Eleanor Borrow’s herb garden.

In court? In front of Sir Edmund? I may be a sick man, my lord, but I’m not a madman. What’s the matter with you?

He’d shaken his head and I’d said, We can protect you.

My lord, I wouldn’t even get out of Wells alive.

Then… you can’t help me.

I can tell you where to find more relics of Arthur. I can tell you where to find his bones.

I doubt that, Master Benlow.

I swear to you.

You can swear all you like.

Me turning away, frustrated, and Benlow fading back into his own darkness.

When the other travellers were ahead of us and we were able to ride side by side, Dudley slowed his horse.

‘What’s your plan?’

I’d thought of little else this past hour, and there was no light in my head.

‘Can only see who they produce as witnesses. See how they might be examined. Who, for example, will they have to testify about the bones found in the herb garden? Who, in the absence of Matthew Borrow, will be the doctor who’ll describe the injuries inflicted on Martin Lythgoe?’

‘If you’d officially been her lawyer you’d know all this,’ Dudley said. ‘What if she publicly refuses to have you represent her? Have you thought of that? Tells the court she doesn’t want you?’

‘Conducts her own defence? Not allowed. She can only call witnesses.’

‘And if no witnesses are come forward… I mean, even if she does accept you, how could you turn it around? ’

‘I may know enough now to discredit the lies of the witnesses they have.’

‘Discredit before whom? For that to work, you’d need a sympathetic judge. An unbiased judge. An unbiased jury.’

‘It would help.’

Dudley pulled down his hat.

‘I think it was Carew who said, this is not London.’

Half a dozen miles to Wells. So not like Glastonbury, they said, with its fine and functioning cathedral and its moated bishop’s house. It was full light when we at last came in sight of it.

Or as full as it would ever be this drab day. Dudley reined in his horse on the edge of watery ground, maybe half a mile from the city.

‘The assize court, according to Carew, is one half of a building overlooking the market place. The other half ’s apparently a wool store.’

‘At least they have their priorities right.’

‘Yes. Um… John… assuming we’ll have little time or opportunity to talk… I…’

‘You want to know about the bones of Arthur.’

‘It’s why we’re here.’

‘Yes.’

All flat land here, the colours of mould and enchannelled with dank water. We dismounted at the roadside and I laid upon Dudley the results of three, maybe four hours’ work.

‘It’s about the centre of the earthly Zodiac. You asked last night if it was the tor. I thought it wasn’t, and that’s true. And then realised the possible significance of finding the centre. Set myself the task of working it out, with the help of the existing charts.’

‘And?’

‘As far as I can judge, the centre is in or close to the village of Butleigh. Where you… seem to be a popular figure. A wood’s been marked on Leland’s chart. A skull drawn, looks like.’

‘Go on.’

‘The centre of the celestial Zodiac is the northern star. The axis on which the great wheel turns. A place of considerable cosmic significance. Lying in the star group of Ursa Minor.’

I look up at the sound of hooves. A couple of riders coming towards us, more of them behind. Outriders, it looked like, for a company of horsemen and a cart.

‘The Little Bear,’ Dudley said.

‘Exactly.’

‘And?’

The outriders slowing as they marked us. I saw that one of them was the grey-haired fellow with cracked teeth who’d supervised the arrest of Nel Borrow and the battery of her father before holding forth in the alehouse on the subject of hanging. He rode across to us, and I turned quickly back to Dudley.

‘What’s the Welsh for bear?’

‘How would I know that?

‘ Arthur, ’ I said. ‘The Welsh for bear is Arthur.’

‘ Jesu.’

‘See?’

‘At the centre of his own round table?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Holy shit…’

‘Clear the way, you fellows,’ the cracked-teeth man said.

Dudley strode out.

‘I can’t see that we’re in the way. Fellow.’

Cracked-teeth leaned down from his horse as if he would slap Dudley across the face.

‘Well, don’t get in the way.’

I marked the tightening of Dudley’s gut, his right arm making that familiar diagonal across his body toward where the hilt of the sword might have been. But cracked-teeth turned his horse away, and we stood at the side of the road as the main body of men drew level. About a dozen of them before, behind and alongside the cart.

On the cart, a broken statue.

In my chest, a feeling like to a collapsing mountain.

The cart kept on moving, and I started towards it, and then a black energy possessed my legs and I was running alongside it, with a fury, through the slanting rain. Arms reaching for me, and I elbowed them away with the pulsing strength of desperation.

Some man demanding, ‘Who are you, fellow?’

‘A clerk from London.’ Cracked-teeth from his horse. ‘Thinks himself-’

I howled at the cart, ‘Where are you going?’

Panting now, as the company increased its pace.

Seeing that she was in chains, with a fat woman beside her. Grey-faced, still as stone. No cloak, hair in draggles. Bare arms. Freckles and goosebumps.

‘Stop!’

For whom?’

‘I’m her advocate.’

A rattle of laughter in the rain.

‘Bit late now, fellow. We’re taking her home.’

For one uncertain moment, I thought there might be hope of her release and then saw the weight of those chains and that the horseman looking down on me was Brother Stephen, son of Fyche. Clad not in monkish robes this day but a wine-coloured doublet, a short cape, a wide-brimmed black hat.

I clutched at the wooden side of the cart, meeting, just for an instant, the widening eyes of Nel Borrow, the only movement I’d seen in her, before my hands were dragged behind my back and a swordpoint was at my throat, just tickling, and Stephen Fyche was dismounting.

‘No, no.’ Waving the sword away. ‘He’s but a harmless clerk. You’ll frighten him to death.’

I was thrust back, panting, and the cart lurched away, leaving Stephen Fyche standing before me, his eyes without expression.

I said, ‘I don’t understand. The trial can’t be over.’

‘What trial?’

A thin face made more vulpine by a new beard, and his eyes and voice were lazy with power. He was all of eighteen years old.

‘Obviously, I’m aware, Dr John, that you have a certain interest in this woman, in relation to the ailment of your colleague. But I see he’s fully recovered now. For which I’m sure you’re grateful.’

I said nothing.

‘There’s no issue to be made of this,’ he said. ‘The woman decided yesterday to save us all the inconvenience of a trial and made a confession. Appeared before the judge for sentence at first light.’

Stephen Fyche cast a glance at the cart rumbling away behind him.

‘As you can imagine, it took not long.’

Black Hearts

My laughter, if laughter it was, must have sounded half crazed. Half in this world, half in purgatory, that same purgatory the Protestant reformers told us no longer existed. They could rearrange the structure of the universe on a whim, the reformers, demolish a cathedral at a stroke.

Back at the George, a letter had awaited me, evidently from Blanche Parry, and I’d torn it open at once, in front of Dudley and Cowdray, in the alehouse.