commit murder from afar. And that was merely the most celebrated case of recent times. These things, the abuse of magic, occurred all around us. I considered the way the candle had burned down over Martin Lythgoe’s lips. Had that been in my own warped perception or had it been shaved into a likeness of the tor?
‘And the supposed victim is Fyche himself – in revenge for the hanging of her mother? I don’t see that it worked.’
Dudley snorted.
‘So it didn’t work. Or it hasn’t worked yet. Christ, I don’t want it to have been the woman who cured me of the fever. I just want this matter of Martin’s killing… I want it settled, whether by noose or sword, and us out of this stinking little town.’
‘And the bones of Arthur?’
He made no reply. Who could blame him, in his condition, and after all that had happened, for almost forgetting why we were here.
‘Give me your opinion of this,’ I said.
Pulling from my doublet Blanche Parry’s letter and taking it over to the candle in the window, just as there came a blinking of white light and then the first low shuddering of thunder from the east.
XXVI
Le Fay
These things I purport to create, with all my astral charts and maps of the Zodiac, my pages of calculing and configuration… have I ever once been able to state, this will happen?
And those who do – which books have they read which are not available to me? Is there some holy grail of revelatory knowledge passed from hand to furtive hand? I don’t know. That’s the worst of it. I, who despise ignorance, do not know.
‘Who wrote this prophecy, John?’
Dudley’s face aglow with new sweat in the candlelight. I’d taken the letter to his bedside, and he’d bade me read it out again, but I repeated only those key lines.
Her nights are tormented and daytimes fraught. She will have no peace from Morgan le Fay until such time as her heroic forefather be entombed in glory.
‘All right then,’ Dudley said, ‘who might have written it?’
‘Could be one of ours, could be from abroad. There’s a seer on every corner in London. Europe’s thick with prophets. Especially after what happened with the King of France.’
Dudley leaned into the light.
‘You were there, weren’t you? In France, when that happened.’
‘No. But I had an account of it sent to me.’
By a student who’d attended one of my lectures in Paris. He’d sent it together with a faithful script of the horoscope said to have been sent from Rome – the one warning King Henri to avoid all single combat in an enclosed field, especially around his forty-first year. The one making reference to a head wound which would cause blindness.
‘Rome?’ Dudley said. ‘I thought it was all down to this fellow Nostradamus, at the French court.’
‘No, it was an Italian, Luca Gaurico. Not personally known to me any more than is Nostradamus – he was asked by the Queen of France to investigate Gaurico and his prophecy. This was after the King chose to laugh and ignore it. I find the whole thing doubtful in the extreme.’
‘Oh, well, of course. We all know, John, that you merely indicate the moods of the universe… and would never be so foolhardy as to forecast injury or death.’
‘And mistrust those who would.’ I let the sarcasm go, folded Blanche’s letter. ‘I’d understood that was what the Queen found useful in me – an ability to see through the fakery, offer informed advice. Apparently not. It seems she has a secret craving for the sensational.’
‘Of course. That’s why she’s so fond of me. But what would you have said about this fellow from Rome… had he heralded her demise? Not possible?’
I thought of the wax effigy in its coffin in the alley by the river. Had I been too dismissive of that and its power to do harm to the Queen? Did I continually dismiss what I, with all my scholarship, could not think to accomplish?
‘I think… that it is possible, but not likely. I believe there are some who see the same stars as I do, draw the same charts and then… either God himself intervenes or some faculty comes into play, some hidden organ of sensing which… doesn’t function in me.’
‘Your blind arrogance leaves me breathless,’ Dudley said.
‘Most times, however, it’s still trickery, for monetary gain.’
And yet…
I bit down on my lower lip, all too aware of the widespread fear and awe engendered by the prophecy apparently fulfilled at a jousting tournament held to celebrate the marriage of the French King’s daughter to Philip II of Spain.
Lest you forget… the King, though indeed in his forty-first year, had been far fitter than our own King Harry at that age and had elected to take a primary role in the jousting on that fateful day – the 30th day of June, 1556.
The reason we had a full account of what happened was the presence at the jousting of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the Queen’s envoy to Paris. Throckmorton had a good seat. He’d seen the lance hit Henri’s helm, watched it break, causing the splinters that would pierce the King’s eye and enter his brain. Had seen him helped from his horse and stripped of his armour. Reporting, at first, that the wound was not as severe as had been feared – unaware of the French surgeons frantically dissecting the heads of newly executed criminals to try to work out how the splinters might safely be removed.
All to no avail. By the second week of July the King of France lay dead in his darkened chamber, and soon the whole of Europe knew of the power of prophecy through astrology.
‘You don’t believe that prophecy was ever made, do you?’ Dudley said.
‘It’s too exact for my liking. But leaving that aside, is this -’ tapping Blanche’s letter – ‘the first you’ve heard of a prediction linking Arthur with Anne Boleyn?’
‘How sure are you that Morgan le Fay’s even supposed to represent Anne Boleyn?’
He would, of course, have read only Malory, who likes to play down the role of the enchantress Morgan in Arthur’s story.
‘I think this is Blanche’s own coded reference.’
Le Fay. Though sometimes portrayed as Arthur’s half-sister, in the earlier tellings she’s at least a partly supernatural being. And certainly a witch.
‘An evil influence?’ Dudley said. ‘I was never sure.’
‘Not wholly. It’s true she’s accused of trying to wreck the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere. She’s not trustworthy by human standards, causes mischief.’
‘Well, that’s Anne, certainly.’
‘However, in the story of Arthur – the earlier tales – Morgan’s role seems to be to test the faith and courage of the knights of the round table. And, in the end, all is reconciled, for she’s one of the ladies who accompanies the King on that last dolorous voyage to Avalon. Which brings us to the essence of this prophecy… that if what remains of Arthur is returned to Avalon…’
‘Then the Queen will have no more trouble from the witch.’
‘I thought at first that it might be nonsense, pamphlet trivia. Yet it’s being informed by a knowledge of the oldest accounts of Arthur… It could, when you think about it, be the reason we’re here. Or a big part of it.’
He was silent for just a moment too long.
Saying, at last, ‘How do you know Blanche didn’t make it up?’
‘Credit me at least with a knowledge of my cousin. Look, even if it were mischievously cobbled together to upset the Queen, it was done by someone who knew what he was about. And so…’ I tried to catch Dudley’s eye,
