Ormond House
The Bones of Avalon
Oh my God, how profound are these mysteries…
Monas Hieroglyphica.
JOHN DEE
A note on the background.
Born in 1527, John Dee grew up in the most volcanic years of the reign of Henry VIII, at whose court his father was employed as a ‘gentleman server.’ John was eight when the King split with Rome, declaring himself head of the Church of England and systematically plundering the wealth of the monasteries.
Recognised by his early twenties as one of Europe’s leading mathematicians and an expert in the science of astrology, John Dee was introduced at court during the short reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI.
But Edward died at only sixteen, and Dee was lucky to survive the brief but bloody reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor.
Mary died in 1558 and was succeeded by the Protestant Elizabeth, who would always encourage John’s lifelong interest in what he considered science but others often saw as sorcery.
Caught between Catholic plots and the rise of a new puritanism, he would feel no more secure than would Queen Elizabeth herself.
1560 was… a difficult year.
Matters of the Hidden
A foreboding.
I must have been the only man that morning to touch it. They’d gathered around me in the alley, but when I put a hand into the coffin they all drew back.
A drab day, not long after the year’s beginning. Sky like a soiled rag, sooted snow still clinging to the cobbles. I’d walked down, for maybe the last time, from my lodgings behind New Fish Street, through air already fugged with smoke from the morning fires. A stink of sour ale and vomit in the alley, and a hanging dread.
‘Dr Dee…’
The man pushing through the ring of onlookers wore a long black coat over a black doublet, expensive but unslashed. Mole-sleek hair was cut close to his skull.
‘You may not remember me, Doctor.’
His voice soft, making him younger than his appearance suggested.
‘Um…
’ ‘Arrived in Cambridge not long before you left.’
I was edging a cautious thumbnail over the yellowing face within the coffin. All the people you’re supposed to recognise these days. Why? They’re something then nothing, here then gone. Waste of study-time.
‘Quite a big college,’ I said.
‘I think you were a reader in Greek at the time?’
Which would have made it 1547 or ’48. I hadn’t been back to Cambridge since, having – to my mother’s fierce consternation – turned down a couple of proffered posts there. I looked up at him, shaking my head and begging mercy, for in truth I knew him not.
‘Walsingham,’ he said.
Heard of him. An MP now, about five years younger than me, so still in his twenties. Ambitious, they said, and courting Cecil for position. His messenger had been banging on my door before eight, when it was yet dark. I hadn’t liked this; it put me on edge. It always does, now.
‘Lucky to catch me, Master Walsingham. I was about to leave London for my mother’s house in Mortlake.’
‘Not permanently, I trust?’
I looked up, suspicious. A week earlier, the tight-arse who owned the house where I was lodging had finally raised the rent beyond my means – maybe under the impression, as many now seemed to be, that I was a man of wealth. It was as if this Walsingham knew the truth of my situation. How was that possible? There was also an assumed authority here which I doubted that he, as a mere MP, had any right to exercise.
Still, this matter intrigued me, so I was prepared to indulge him for a while.
‘Wax?’ he said.
Squatting down in the mud on the other side of the coffin, which was laid across a stone horse-trough. Putting out a forefinger to the face, but then drawing it back.
‘Let’s see,’ I said.
And then, impatient with all this superstition, placed both hands inside the coffin and lifted out the bundle, prompting a gasp from someone as I bent my head and sniffed.
‘Beeswax.’
‘Stolen from a church, then?’
‘I’d guess. Shaped over a flame. See the fingermark?’
What had lain in the box was naked upon a cloth of dark red, edged in gold. It was a foot in length, three inches in thickness. The eyes were jagged holes, the mouth a knife-slit smeared red. The smudged print was on one over-plump breast and another small glob of red made a dark berry in the cleft between the legs.
‘An altar candle?’ Walsingham said.
‘Could be. It was you who found it?’
‘My clerk. I live not far away, along the river. He thought at first it must be some nun’s still-born babe. When he-’
‘Don’t they usually just get dropped in the river wrapped in rags?’
‘-when he finally found the balls to take off the lid, he returned at once. Had me roused.’
I looked around: two constables, a man of the Watch, a couple of whores and a vagrant near the entrance to the alley. A dying pitch-torch smouldered by the door of a mean tavern on the corner, but the buildings either side were all tight-shuttered, no smoke from the chimneys. Warehouses, most likely.
‘Found exactly as…?’
‘No, no. The foul thing was in a most conspicuous position out on the quayside, where anyone might chance upon it. I had it moved here, then sent the Watch to knock on doors. A man walking the streets with a coffin in his arms can’t have gone entirely unseen.’
I nodded. Probably some drunkard out there still fearing for his sanity. I laid the waxen effigy back in the box and hefted the whole thing. It was quite light – pine maybe, ’neath the tarry black.
‘And then you summoned me,’ I said. ‘Can I, um, ask why?’
The question was left on the air; he tossed another at me.
‘Dr Dee, given that we both know who it represents, how is it supposed to work?’
I eased what I now saw to be a wooden crown from the hair of plaited straw. I picked it up. Not well carved, but from a distance…
‘And if it is fashioned from an altar candle,’ Walsingham said, ‘would that be considered to enhance its, ah, efficacy?’
‘Master Walsingham, before we take this further-’
Walsingham raised a hand, stood up, waved to the constables and retainers to move further away and then made motion toward a doorway opposite the trough. I scrambled up and followed him. He leaned back into a door frame which was flaking and starting to rot. A man drawn to damp and shadows.
Who evidently thought the same of me.
‘My understanding, Dr Dee, is that you’re our foremost authority on what we might call matters of the hidden.’
A sudden skreeting of seagulls over the river. Walsingham waited, bony face solemn, eyes sunk into hollows. I was wary now. How I’d served the new Queen was no secret, but it carried more risk than profit; anyone given leave to part dark curtains inevitably drew the suspicions of the vulgar.
But what could I say? I shrugged and acknowledged an academic interest. Reticent, though, because he still hadn’t given reason why a wax doll in a babe’s coffin should be an MP’s affair.
‘Seems to me, Dr Dee, that in seeking the provenance of this artefact we have two directions.’
We?
‘The first… some kind of papist pretence, to spread alarm. Hence its public display.’ He nodded toward the two constables. ‘See their faces. They fear for their very souls through being in its proximity.’
‘Which you do not?’
Fairly sure in my mind, now, that the Walsinghams were a strong reformist family, with a link to the Boleyns and, presumably, a hatred of idolatry in any form. Hence his disdainful use of nun for a street-woman.
‘And the second direction,’ he said, ‘would, of course, be toward Satan himself.’
These midnight questions, I approach them daily. Yet with care.
Know this: a few of us are endowed with abilities like to the angels. Some can see the dead or pluck thoughts from the minds of others. And to some are gifted the means to bring about change in the natural order of things.