Matthew Borrow was a cunning man.
‘When were you at Montpellier?’ I said. ‘May I ask?’
Nostradamus shrugged.
‘Around 1529. I was twenty-six.’
‘Would’ve taken him under your wing then. The young Matthew Borrow.’
‘He was quite capable of looking after himself, Dr Dee. A Jesuit education does that for one.’
I gripped the stone seat hard.
Hell.
A Jesuit. The steel in the blade of the Catholic Church.
Tried not even to blink, only nodded, as if I’d known of this already.
It at once rang true. The town thought him an unbeliever, a man who went to church only to avoid the fines. Well, safer to be assumed an atheist than a cutting-edge Catholic. The target of Matthew Borrow’s quiet venom would, in his own mind, be the Protestant Church. When the expulsion from this country of the papacy itself comes through a rising not of the spirit… but a man’s cock…
It also explained his cruelty. The callousness of the zealot with a Jesuit’s cold intelligence and almost mystical intuition.
I don’t think I smiled.
‘Was it you who suggested at the French court that he’d make a perfect secret agent in the town of his birth?’
No reaction. But I could see the reason for it. Fyche had established Meadwell, as a possible hub of Catholic rebellion. But how far could the French trust him? Francois of Guise, and Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, would have wanted their own man in Avalon.
‘I wondered what he receives for his services to France – maybe an income and the promise of land and a title when the Queen of Scots and Queen of France is also Queen of England.’
‘Dr Dee…’ Nostradamus scowled. ‘I’ve been tolerant of your unceasing-’
‘One more question… before I offer you, in the interests of science, my theory of at least one use for the Glastonbury Zodiac. What do you know of wool-sorters’ disease?’
It could have been Borrow himself who’d thought of using wool-sorters’, the disease on which he was now an expert. Or maybe some spy-master close to the French court or the Guise family, some ambitious young Walsingham, had seen that notebook and thought how it might be used.
But had Nostradamus really known nothing of this?
‘As a doctor, you tended plague victims?’
I was thinking of Aix-en-Provence, fifteen or so years ago. So ravaged by the plague that scores of houses were abandoned, churches closed, graveyards overflowing. Into this hell, Nostradamus, according to an account I’d received, had entered as a physician. A brave thing.
‘An experience most harrowing,’ he said. ‘There was, in truth, little I or anyone could do, except to aid the healthy in their efforts to remain free of contagion. Still… good for one’s immortal soul, is it not, to risk death in such a cause? Forgive me, but whether the disease of the wool-sorters can be compared…’
‘There’s a man dying of it in the town. Maybe dead by now.’
‘It happens. Especially in areas such as this.’
‘Do you know how it’s spread?’
‘I believe through the meat and skins of animals dead of it.’
‘Oft-times long after their deaths?’
‘It is as well to bury them deep.’
‘Yes.’
‘What is your interest, Dr Dee?’
I took a breath and repeated to him the third and now most chilling line in his Elizabeth quatrain.
‘Jusqu’ele beisera les os du roi des Isles Britanniques.’
Sat back against the stone. He appeared unmoved.
I said, ‘Does that mean physically to kiss the bones?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘You composed it.’
‘No, my friend, God composed it.’
‘’God composes in rhyme and metre?’
One of the altar candles went out. A draught from somewhere.
‘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.’
LV
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.