I broke off. Without thinking, I’d found myself giving voice to another matter which was denying me sleep. Too late, now.
‘Robbie, when you walked out to the abbey, last night, you said you’d seen-’
‘Don’t recall going to any abbey.’
‘I saw you from my window. You walked across the street.’
‘You were dreaming.’
‘You said you’d seen an old man. You said the old man was looking down on you, as if he was in the air, and you could see the moon-’
‘I was full of fever!’ Dudley pulled the blankets tighter around him. ‘Don’t you go throwing my sickbed fancies back at me!’
‘What about the Queen?’
He stared at me.
‘Does the Queen have delusions?’
‘How dangerously do you want to live, John?’
‘It’s said the Queen… sees her mother.’
‘Who says that?’ He tried to rise, slid back down. ‘What shit are they spreading around court now?’
‘I wouldn’t say that it’s being spread around. My source is… a discreet source.’
Dudley closed his eyes.
‘Anne Boleyn. God…’
‘Is it true?’
‘Crazed bitch.’
‘Anne Boleyn?’
‘Could’ve stopped all the talk. My father always said that. But maybe she liked it.’
‘The talk of witchcraft?’
‘Also, probably thought Harry liked it. Added to her allure. Her having a extra finger and all. And moles. They say she had a furry mole shaped like a…’ He closed his eyes. ‘And maybe he did like it. Maybe it oiled his lance. For a while. Until she was his wife – would all have to stop then. But, by God, if anyone thinks that Bess…’ Dudley’s eyes came open and he looked hard at me across the shadows. ‘You know, unless you really think you can help, you’d do best to forget this, John.’
‘Help?’
‘But then you don’t go in for the cure of souls, do you? Didn’t you once tell me that?’
I said, ‘Queen Mary-’
‘I always thought you’d prefer to forget Queen Mary, too.’
‘Do you remember telling me, some years ago, how Mary had oft-times warned the Princess Elizabeth to be seen to reject her mother and the Boleyn nest of Lutherans. Pleading with her to embrace the old faith while she yet could?’
‘I need to sleep,’ Dudley said. ‘Did you not tell me that?’
Back in my bedchamber, I stood by the window and gazed down into Glastonbury’s moonlit high street. Beyond it, the abbey’s arches, a company of the mournful dead.
I was remembering the townsfolk yesterday and my sense that they went about their business as if in a play. As if all of them knew that the town possessed a life beneath, which must needs be concealed for its own protection… except when reference to it might be used to secure the future, the way the monks of the twelfth century had used the bones of Arthur.
The monks. Guardians of this sacred ground for more than a thousand years.
What did that mean? What did it mean now? All abbeys and monasteries were repositories of ancient and esoteric knowledge, and if this had been the oldest of them all – the very foundation stone of Christianity in England – then, yes, it would have been heavy with sacred secrets.
As for the conservation of physical items of value, the gold and the bones… well, plans would have been made well in advance, individuals selected for the task of secreting them away when the abbey fell into the Great Furnace.
It could be that some of these items had been smuggled across to France or hidden in the wildest parts of Wales.
Yet…
…a hallowed place. Even with the abbey going to ruin. There are some things you can’t destroy. Some things about a place that are in that place.
I thought of Brother Michael, the mute who’d been with Fyche, and what jewels might be enclosed in his silent world. And I thought of Abbot Whiting, the benign old man who’d held on to his secrets, held out under torture, before a slow and savage death on the devil’s hill.
It seemed to me that I’d done the right thing in not asking Fyche about the bones. The man to ask would have been the abbot himself.
A shuddering breath came into me. Across the street, under a bloating moon, the corpse of the abbey lay restless and violated.
It was past three in the morning. I felt a pang of anxiety about my mother and Catherine Meadows at the house in Mortlake and knelt and prayed for their safety.
And then, knowing that if I went back to bed, my thoughts and dreams would once more go searching for the witch’s daughter, I shed my old brown robe and reached for my day apparel.
XVIII
The First Age of Light
Three Spheres.
The natural world, the celestial or astral world, and the supercelestial, wherein are angels.
Though she’s never spoken of it to me, I’ve reason to believe that my mother once went with our neighbour, Goodwife Faldo, to visit a woman who kept a skrying crystal through which she professed to see the faces of the dead.
This would have been not long after my father’s death, so I could understand why my mother had done it. But I knew, even then, that my ambition must needs be loftier, aiming for communion with the supercelestial, wherein lies truth and light and not deception.
Therefore not ghosts. A ghost in the natural world is un natural. To call down a spirit of the departed into this world is necromancy. Even if it be the spirit of my poor tad.
Or the shade of what once was a man of God?
I heard again the voice of Bishop Bonner, the day he came into my prison cell, asking the question which would determine whether I lived or burned.
Tell me, Dr Dee… do you believe that the soul is divine?
Me telling him what I believed to be the truth:
The soul is… not itself divine, but it can acquire divinity.
And Bonner going, Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul acquire divinity?
Extending my string, his little eyes tindered like the glowing tips of tapers.
By prayer, I’d said. And learning. The Bible… and the sacred knowledge of the Jews.
Getting it right, guessing what Bonner was after.
But I’d omitted martyrdom.
As in tortured, hanged, drawn and quartered.
The night was cold and still but not quite freezing. Cloaked and shadowy, I entered the abbey grounds through the open gateway, finding the gates closed but unlocked. Never thinking it would be quite so easy to gain admission. But then, what was to steal now but the stones themselves?
I’d read what I could find about the history and layout of the abbey. Enough to recognise the plundered remains of the abbot’s grand house and his distinctive kitchen, with its ornate pinnacle, pale as ice in the moonlight, and the Lady Chapel above where the bones of Arthur had been found.
But I was shocked at the condition of the place. What once must have been well-scythed lawn was now a wilderness of bushes and black brambles whipping and ripping at my boots. Broken walls were rearing around me like an old carcass left to the weather and the crows, and I could even smell its decay, all moist and foetid.
I stopped and looked around in the silvered pool of moonlight. An apartment had been built near here for the one and only visit of the Queen’s grandfather, Henry VII. When, of course, he would have seen the black marble tomb. What had he been told about it, this man who’d ridden into England through Wales, trailing the legend of the undying British king? Would he have seen this evidence of the great Arthur’s death as a threat to the credibility of the next Arthur, his son?
But there’d been no indication of a future religious division then, and King Henry would never have thought to lay a finger on this or any other tomb. And, anyway, the new King Arthur… this was not to be. The prince had died before his father who had himself departed soon afterwards. Heavy with melancholy, it was said, and sick with the fear that his Tudor line might, through hubris, have brought down upon itself not dynastic glory but some old curse.