Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘It was made clear to me in the prison in Wells,’ Nel said. ‘Made clear that it would be either me… or him.’ She was staring right through me. ‘What had I done that he wanted me dead?’

I said nothing. He’d seen his chance, that was all. He’d been called in to get Stephen Fyche out of trouble, to make a disposal after torture look like a ritual killing, and the cold bastard had seen his chance.

‘At least,’ I said, ‘you now know who your father was.’

She plucked grass from her dress. ‘He dined at the abbey, with the abbot. The abbot had fine meals prepared. Salmon and trout. He was, it seems, charmed by the maid who’d served it.’

‘And he didn’t know… about you? I mean, when he returned after the sacking of the abbey…?’

‘My mother was a respectable married woman by then, with a child and an education. Their relations were good… but of a different kind.’

I looked into her green eyes. She tossed back her hair against the wind. She’d lived nearly all her life under a lie and very nearly died under one.

‘Poor Leland,’ she said.

September 1560

Monas Hieroglyphica.

Another dawn. I sit at my mother’s board in the window of our parlour with the letter from my stricken friend.

God help me, John, but I had no part in it. I say this to you, who have least cause to believe me. I place my hand upon my Bible and I swear it over her poor dead body, through my tears…

Could sleep hardly at all last night after reading this five times, six times… more… The wind was up and the river was high and I’m lying open-eyed and cursing fate.

If fate it was. All London talks of black sorcery. The steeple of St Paul’s is gone to ashes these past two months, struck by summer lightning. An earth trembling was recently felt in London, causing panic in the streets.

Two days ago, I was summoned to Cecil’s house in the Strand where he received me in a private garden with high hedges. An afternoon of sultry heat but little sunshine.

‘The end of days,’ he said. ‘There’s been much talk of it.’

‘Except in the night sky,’ I assured him. ‘The stars have nothing to say about the end of days.’

‘And the Second Coming. The Queen makes light of it but is nonetheless perturbed.’

‘Nor do the stars herald another Christ.’

‘Who speaks of Christ?’ The Queen’s chief minister handed me a pamphlet. ‘This comes to us from Paris.’

It was in French. I was permitted to sit down at the garden table to read it. At first, I was inclined to laugh, but a sight of Cecil’s face warned against.

ENGLAND AWAITS THE CHILD OF SATAN

The pamphlet said that the magicians in England were now claiming London, the fastest-growing city in the world, to be the New Jerusalem.

In fact, London’s growth was as a centre of evil, its cold and smoky streets filled with murder, robbery, whoring and all the disfiguring diseases known to man. All this having begun with the rejection of the Church of Rome, the plunder of God’s holy houses throughout the kingdom, the slaying of priests and the occupation of the throne by the repellant daughter of the union of a wife-murderer and a witch.

No wonder, the pamphlet went on, that the stars foretold that London expected soon to welcome a dark messiah, whose birth was to be kept secret until such time as the child was grown.

The coming of Satan incarnate. And if London was the satanic Jerusalem then the black Bethlehem, where the child would be born, was the town of Glastonbury, celebrated as the birthplace of Christianity in England until its abbey, founded by St Joseph, uncle of Christ, was torn down and its streets filled not with pilgrims but witches and sorcerers.

Just as the first Tudor to usurp the throne had ensured that his first son was born in Winchester, claimed for the court of the great King Arthur, so this child would be born in the town of Arthur’s death.

Born to Elizabeth, the witch queen.

The pamphlet reported that England’s most notorious black sorcerer, ‘Dr’ John Dee was himself just returned from a visit to Glastonbury to meet the circle of witches there and make preparation for the birth of the child. The sorcerer having journeyed to Glastonbury with the child’s…

‘ Father?’

I let the paper fall.

Cecil said, ‘It’s not been the only pamphlet to suggest that the Queen’s already pregnant by Dudley.’

Described here as a known wizard, trained in the black arts from boyhood by the evil Dee.

‘We found signs of a similar campaign being planned for London,’ Cecil said. ‘While you were away, Walsingham raided the premises of a disreputable lawyer called Ferrers. Took away a printing press. Copies of pamphlets purporting to contain your astrological forecasts. Usual end-of-the-world drivel. Ferrers, naturally, denies any connection with France. Even Walsingham sees him as just another lunatic.’

‘I’ve… had dealings with this man,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Probably quite annoyed that he failed to get me burned.’

But there was surely more than an old hatred behind this.

Cecil took the French pamphlet out of my hands and crumpled it.

‘We’re not too worried as yet, but a word or two from you to the Queen about the absence of sinister signs in the sky would do no harm. I’ll make you an appointment.’

I said, ‘How is she now?’ ‘Well,’ Cecil said. ‘Quite well.’

Despite my full written report, he hadn’t once mentioned the bones of Arthur or the attempt to afflict the Queen with wool-sorters’ disease. She would have had the full story at length from Dudley, but I wanted to discuss it with Cecil. I wanted to know exactly how the Queen had received those Nostradamus predictions and who had suggested she might act on them. But he wasn’t giving me an opening.

Cowdray’s boys had caught up with Dudley in the Mendip Hills, turned him round, and thank God for that. Twice I’d awoken in a sweat after dreaming that he was putting the poisoned bones before the Queen. And once I’d dreamed Nel Borrow had not been cut down, and my arms had given way through exhaustion and I’d looked up to see the whites of her eyes and her lolling tongue.

Big Jamey Hawkes had gone back to his old grave at the church of St Benignus, with a weight of rocks piled on top of his box so that his toxic remains might never be disturbed.

Cecil smiled. ‘You see, we kept your mother and her housekeeper quite safe in your absence.’

‘Did you?’

With Catherine Meadows back and no evident threat from her puritan father, I’d not asked for protection.

‘More safe than when you were in the house,’ Cecil said. ‘Turning out to be a good man, Walsingham.’ He paused. ‘Makes one think, John… are they more secure when you’re away?’

‘You have more work for me, don’t you, Sir William?’

‘For the Queen,’ Cecil said.

I’d left angry, swearing that on the morrow I’d make plans to go back to Glastonbury to undertake full and detailed research into the Zodiac formed on the ground. A garden of stars upon the earth. What could be more important than finding the key to that?

And also finding Nel. Not an hour passed when I didn’t think of her.

A month ago, I had a letter from Monger, telling me she’d successfully taken over the medical practice opposite the church of St Benignus while continuing her work in the herb garden with the help of himself and Joan Tyrre.

She seems happy. I tried to find some small solace in Joan’s prediction of my future marriages. Until shortly before dusk yesterday, when Blanche Parry arrived in Mortlake with the letter from Dudley and word of what it contained and the hellish and piteous scandal with my friend at its heart.