Blanche said, ‘In your garden… your orchard… what did the Queen see?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I think you do. Before I came to you.’ Leaning toward me. ‘John, I’ve seen it before, the way she stiffens, the way her eyes… What did she say to you?’
I was remembering how quickly she’d appeared on the orchard path, wrinkling her nose against the pervading smell of hops as if it were the sulphurs of hell.
‘What did she say to you, John?’
‘She asked if there were…’
Hares in our orchard. I said nothing.
Blanche waited.
I said, ‘I’ll take this no further.’
Could almost see my world curling at its corners, like parchment touched with flame. Blanche Parry sat quite still, as if her spirit temporarily had left her body. How long we remained in this awful silence I do not know.
Finally, I said, ‘What did you mean you’d seen it before? What happens to her eyes?’
‘They see more than they should,’ she said. ‘Sometimes.’
Blanche’s hands seized one another in her lap, as if in a spasm, and I turned away.
‘And what, at such times -’ so breathless it didn’t sound to me like my voice – ‘do they see?’
Outside, night’s tapestry was already unrolling ’twixt the trees above the river. There was a crocus-bloom of light on the water, the lamp on a wherry.
‘I’ve stayed too long,’ Blanche said. ‘Send messengers to me, and I’ll send them to you, if there’s anything…’
‘What does she see, Blanche?’
Holding on to the arms of my chair, the darkness at my back, as Blanche whispered it to the walclass="underline" how the Queen had said she saw the sanguinous shade of Anne Boleyn at her bedside, that small smile all twisted with spoiled ambition.
PART TWO
It is hardly credible what a harvest, or rather what a wilderness of superstition had sprung up in the darkness of the Marian times. We found in all places votive relics of saints, nails with which the infatuated people dreamed that Christ had been pierced… small fragments of the sacred cross. The number of witches and sorceresses had everywhere become enormous.
X
Relics
On the rim of nightfall, sudden sleet had tossed us, with a stinging contempt, back into the worst of winter. Still some miles to go, and my cloak was a sodden rag.
Dudley, riding ahead, looked out toward middle-distant trees as bare as fishbones and hills still ermine-furred with snow. Then up at the spattering sky and back at me, over his shoulder.
‘Can’t you do anything about this, John? Change the weather? Shift the skies to France?’
He was rearing up from his saddle, and my horse took fright and I leaned forward to calm her. I was better with horses than with women, just about, but Dudley, as usual, made me feel a feeble creature.
Still, I was glad he’d spoken so – a hint of the old Dudley in a man who, since we’d left London, had been uncharacteristically silent, almost reserved. Something on his mind.
There were six of us, including the big northerner Martin Lythgoe. Lythgoe was Dudley’s chief groom, a man he’d known all his life, whom he’d taken with him to court.
‘Call yourself a magician,’ Dudley said.
‘I don’t.’ Bending my head into the blizzard. ‘As you know. Can we not find an inn?’
‘There isn’t an inn. Can you see an inn?’
‘I can see very little.’
‘Is there an inn near here, Carew?’ Dudley shouted.
‘There is. ’ Sir Peter Carew riding up alongside him. ‘But spend the night there and by morning you’d have scratched off your balls. As for this poor fellow…’
Carew glancing back at me, as if unsure whether I possessed balls. He was a stocky and muscular man, older than Dudley by a good twenty years, but his long beard was still as dark and thick as tarred rope.
‘Well, perchance we could rest there at least until the sky shows some mercy,’ Dudley said. ‘Is the food fit to eat?’
‘Press on, my advice, you want to reach Glaston tonight. You and I, we’ve known a fucking site worse than this – and with a battle on the morrow.’ Carew turned briefly to me, eyes slitted against the sleet. ‘I gather you’ve not served your country as a fighting man, Doctor?’
Behind me, Carew’s two men were, I suspected, sniggering. I made no response. Could not, in truth, speak, for the cold. As Carew pulled ahead, Martin Lythgoe, the groom, was alongside me, low-voiced.
‘Yon bugger’s fought for too many countries, you ask me, Dr John.’
Smiled and turned away, urging his horse back on to the whitening road.
My tad had talked of Carew, who’d found favour at Harry’s court when little more than a boy. A far-travelled boy, however, who had already seen much action in Europe.
Sent by his father, Sir William, as a page to France after years of truancy and rebellion at his grammar school in Exeter, he’d ended up with the French army and then, after his master was killed, changed sides to join the Prince of Orange. Still only sixteen when he’d returned to England, with letters of introduction from the royalty of Orange to the King. Impressing the Great Furnace with his horsemanship and finding a place, two years later, as a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. A great individual, my father had said. Sir Peter goes his own way.
Certainly knew his way through the west of England, having risen to become MP for his native Devon and Sheriff of that county. Now he was its senior knight and, as such, wielded power in Somerset, too.
And also – the reason he was with us – Carew was the present owner of Glastonbury Abbey. Safe pair of hands, Dudley had assured me. He wasn’t sure precisely how the Queen had come to place the holy ruins in Carew’s hands, and wasn’t sure the Queen knew either. But no one better to keep the papists out.
It was very near dark when we rode at last into the hills above Glastonbury but, by then, the sleet had turned to rain and then ceased, and a fragment of moon was visible, and we soon could see why those pleas for restoration had fallen upon muffled ears.
Carew had told us that, because of its history, a strong Protestant presence at the abbey had been deemed essential. In Seymour’s time as Duke of Somerset, it had been given over to a community of Flemish weavers – followers of the insane Protestant John Calvin – who’d set up a flourishing industry within its precincts. Thus had the town’s economy been sustained through the years of the boy Edward. But when Mary came to power and the Bishop of Rome was reinstated, through fire and blood, as our spiritual leader, the weavers had fled back to the low countries.
As we rode down the last hillside, the moon’s sickle cut through the cloud. In its cold light the abbey was a grey ghost with stony arms raised as if to clutch us to its cracked ribs.
The George Inn, in the well of the town, had been strong-built of stone to accommodate pilgrims of status and must once have blazed with welcoming candlelight. Tonight… well, there must be light in there somewhere, but the ground-floor windows facing the road were as black as hell’s privy.
Carew had sent one of his men ahead and, by the time we arrived in the yard at the rear, two boys were on hand to look after the horses we’d ridden from Bristol.
‘Cowdray!’ Carew bawled out. ‘Where the fuck’s Cowdray?’
‘I’m here, Sir Peter, I’m here.’ A man stumbling down from some wooden steps, leaving pale flame hissing from a pitch-torch on a wall-bracket. ‘Having fires built for you, sir, the big ovens lit.’
‘Why were the bastards not already lit?’
‘Sir Peter, we’ve had no travellers here for a fortnight or more. ’Tis February, man.’