Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘See?’ Nostradamus said. ‘See how He responds to your impudence?’

He picked up the smoking candle and relit it from its neighbour.

However…’ Placing his hands on his knees and levering his back straight. ‘I repeat to you… a physician only heals.’

‘Yet you know which road I’m on.’

‘No, Dr Dee, I confess to bewilderment.’

‘And I admit to fury, because someone seeks to make me part of a plot to destroy my Queen.’

I tried to tell him. He made the hand-behind-the-ear motions, shook his head violently.

‘You leave me far behind again, Dr Dee.’

I leaned toward him.

‘The bones which it’s intended should be kissed… are laid upon the fleece of a ewe dead of wool-sorters’ disease. The man charged with laying the bones on the fleece is become its first victim. A plot, of cold complexity, to kill the Queen.’

It was the first time I’d spoken aloud of this: a journey to enlightenment contrived as a difficult and perilous quest, involving even a journey to the underworld – grave dirt and distress.

But why had the arcane knowledge of the Zodiac been made attainable… Been given away? Maybe the answer was supplied by Nostradamus himself when he’d demanded, But what’s to be done with the thing? Nobody knew. It was a wonder, but an enigma and maybe always would remain so.

And, as such, had been found expendable in what was considered to be a greater cause: the death of Queen Elizabeth just over a year after her coronation.

Would the Queen have kissed the bones?

Oh, indeed.

Without a doubt.

Before a breathless crowd of onlookers, smiling with a gracious pride as she bent her noble head to the recently shattered brainbox of Big Jamey Hawkes.

‘You truly think,’ Michel de Nostradame said, ‘that I journeyed here to supervise the murder of your Queen?’

‘You think that it wouldn’t cause considerable rejoicing amongst your patrons at the French court? In France, is not Queen Elizabeth seen as satanic? How many of your forecasts have named Elizabeth as the worst of women? Flawed parentage.’

‘I lose count. It comes from God. I spend long hours alone, in vigils deep and silent, opening my heart to the divine spirit and, at some point… am granted entry into what you would call the mist of perceiving.’

I snatched a candlestick from the altar and held the light close to his face and stared into his deep-lidded eyes. He was calmness itself, as if he might drift at any moment into his prophetic mist. I leaned into his face. I was beyond fatigue, my body felt weightless and my hand shook, and the candle went out.

‘Where is he?’ I said. ‘Where’s Borrow?’

His eyes remained benign, untroubled.

‘Matthew? Not here.’

I looked around me. The quietness of Meadwell had seemed an advantage when I was first here. Now the wrongness of it hit me like a blow to the heart.

‘Why is it nobody’s here but you?’

‘Because they’re all out on the hill,’ Nostradamus said. ‘Me – I’ve seen too much death.’

‘Hill?’

‘But not Matthew, of course,’ he said. ‘Surely no-one, even in England, would compel a man to attend the hanging of his daughter.’

Tainted

I’ve seen hangings, we all have. Hangings and beheadings and burnings, mostly undeserved. The one which had most affected me was the burning of Barthlet Green. Just a man with whom I’d shared a prison cell. A mild good-natured man.

Who’d burned.

A harder death than hanging. Or so it was said.

But who knew? Who’d ever come back from the flames or the noose?

An unearthly last glare in the west. Amber and white streaks, a dawn sky at night.

Half in this sick world, half in hell, the bookman went scrambling up the flank of the conical hill, legs numbed, hands torn on barbs and briars, print-weakened eyes straining at the glow which fanned around the summit as if the whole hill were opened into the golden court of the King of Faerie.

When, close to the top, I was sinking to my knees in exhaustion, heaving my guts into the mud, her voice came to me, soft and light.

Be not alarmed, Dr John, you’re hardly the first to lose his balance up here.

Tears blinded me.

Why was it not to be done with discretion? Robert Dudley had asked, and now it was. Dawn was become dusk. Misinformation to forestall any outcry from the town, deal with it in darkness then leave the body hanging until it were ripped clean of all womanly beauty and the place where it was done tainted again.

A place which was tainted and tainted and tainted again. A hill persecuted for being different. I scrambled up into a ground mist which seemed to come from within, as if the tor sought to hide itself from man and what he did.

‘May God have mercy on this sinful town! May the light of God shine upon this poisoned place.’

The twisted indignity of it.

The fat vicar of St Benignus with his unwashed robe and his Book of Common Prayer.

I dragged myself to the top, bleeding from both hands, as muted male voices were descending in lumpen amen.

Stood trembling.

A ground mist was rising on the summit, where two blazing torches were lofted on poles bringing the ruined tower of St Michael to an unreal life. There were men with staffs and pikes, but not more than a dozen. One of them the man with grey hair and cracked teeth and a knowledge of death by hanging and why women made not much of a show of it.

The gibbet, maybe ten feet tall, was firmly staked before the tower, like a open doorway, its feet swathed in mist but the top of its frame hard against the lingering light, pink now, like bloodied milk.

Grunts and mutters. The bottom of an orchard ladder could be seen propped against the stock of the gibbet, rising from the brown mist.

Carew stood a few yards away, in leather hat and jerkin, hands linked behind him, rocking back and forth, impatient, and when I ran to him he didn’t look at me, his voice a murmur.

‘God’s spleen, Dee, will I never get you from under my fucking boots?’

‘Sir Peter, I need you to listen to me.’

Was what I meant to say, but the smoke from the torches caught at my throat.

‘Damn mist,’ Carew said. ‘Would’ve had three of ’em brought up if I’d thought.’

‘I must needs tell you-’

‘Never been up for learning, Doctor. Not your kind anyway.’ He turned, a firelit flash of teeth in the beard. ‘If you have any magic to spare to give the poor bitch a swift death, she’d doubtless appreciate it.’ Sniffed the air. ‘Quite a beauty. Hadn’t realised.’

Nodding at the gibbet, a small group of men round it now, the vicar of St Benignus telling us we should not suffer a witch to live, as they brought her out, in her blue overdress, smirched and muddied, though her hair looked combed and drifted behind her shoulders.

‘Stop them… please… for Christ’s sake!’

I think she looked towards me as if she recognised a voice and then turned away as I threw at Carew the only words that might wake him from his mental slumber.

‘It’s part of a papist plot.’

He laughed.

‘You see any papists here?’

‘Yes!’

He looked at me, his curiosity at last alive, but it was too late then.

You forgot how quick it could be.

The torchlight had gone pale with vapour, and of a sudden she was there on the ladder, hands bound behind her, the vicar’s voice floating over her in the dusk.

‘May the death of this sinner bring atonement and cleanse this town forever of all filth and wickedness, idolatry and the worship of all false gods.’

‘That arsehole annoys me nearly as much as you,’ Carew said.

A movement on the ladder, a crisp slap.