The Bones of Avalon Read Online Free PDF Page B

me.’ My mother turned away from the grey-brown water, arose and patted her skirts. ‘Not any more, apparently.’
    ‘Blanche is jealous of her position at court. It’s not your fault. It’s me she doesn’t trust.’
    ‘Being protective of the Queen’s interests and welfare,’ my mother said, ‘is how she would see it.’
    ‘Also more than a little apprehensive of the advance of the sciences.’
    My mother, Jane Dee, looked as if she’d bitten into a onion.
    ‘What?’ I said.
    ‘Would Mistress Blanche call it
science
, do you think?’
    ‘Maybe not.’
    Avoiding my mother’s eyes, I noticed that the panelling on the walls was flaking for want of varnish, while the red-brocaded fabric of my mother’s chair looked all tired and worn. I noticed also that a sleeve of her dark brown dress had been patched in two places.
    She had asked nothing about what the Queen had said or the reason for the visit. I could have told her that Elizabeth, already renowned as a demanding and expensive guest at the finest homes, would be unlikely to enter one that was conspicuously more lowly. In this case, I was sure, mindful and considerate of our poverty.
    And thus I felt ashamed. Inadequate. I should have done better; I was my mother’s only child. My father had determined that I should receive the best education their money could buy. I might have become a bishop or even a lawyer, for which I had qualification, instead of… whatever I am become.
    The river shone dully, full of animal and doubtless many human carcasses embedded in a city’s shit. The sun was pale and hard-looking, like marble.
    Conjurer
, I was called by some, when my back was turned, and by others even when it was not.

His Second Coming
     
    R ATHER THAN A crude summoner of spirits, a conjurer may, as you know, be seen in these more enlightened times as one who deals in illusion. And I’ve done that and found much delight there. Once, at college, for a piece of theatre, I fabricated a gigantic beetle which, through a system of pulleys and the employment of light and shadow, was seen to fly through the air. Spent many days in the making of it and many hours basking in the awe and mystification it inspired.
    Nothing wrong with that. I was only a boy, and the beetle did
not
fly. Not as a bird flies, or an angel.
    But now I am a man and more exercised by the true nature of angels. Fully accepting, however, that men like Sir William Cecil feel happier with what they know to be illusion, even if they know not how it’s done.

     
    No frost today, only a sour sporadic rain as I boarded a wherry by Mortlake pier for my appointment. Low cloud stained with smoke and pricked by a hundred spires, the highest of them St Paul’s in the west.
    We entered the city past the steaming midden of Southwark with its low-life amusements: bear-pits, cock-pits, whorehouses, gambling and theatre. I no longer noticed the impaled heads of criminals and traitors on London bridge; now that executions of the higher orders had become less commonplace, these crow-picked noddles were more of a grotesque attraction for visitors than a dread warning for the inhabitants.
    As for Cecil’s new town house… all I understood was that it was on the Strand, where high-powered clergy once lived. But a wherrymen is a floating gazetteer, and mine knew precisely when to steer us to the bank, pulling in his oars by the footings of a new-built stone stairway.
    ‘Ain’t the biggest house inner row,’ he said. ‘But he got plans.’
    ‘The Secretary’s a personal friend of yours that you know of his plans?’
    Hating at once, the way this must have sounded. Although I’d travelled with this same man seven times or more, I ever find difficulty in the exchange of common pleasantries.
    The wherryman only grinned. At least I thought it was a grin, all his top teeth being gone – a fight, perchance, or he’d sold them to a maker of false sets, and I should have liked to ask, but…
    ‘One of his