Free The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman

a man who brings to his Queen such an irrefutable symbol of her royal heritage… something which bestows upon her monarchy’s most mystical aura. That man… he may expect his reward.’
    He was not smiling.
    ‘It isn’t a quest for the Holy Grail,’ I said.
    ‘Maybe not for you. But for me… possibly.’
    Dudley was gazing out, in noble profile, across the broad water, then up at the sky where a buttermilk moon bided its time.

Awe and Stupor
     
    A LTHOUGH I DON ’ T consider myself sensitive to such intrusions, that night it was as if I were not alone in my library.
    It happens. Oft-times I’ll hear a scraping of paper, as if the books are conversing amongst themselves. The sound of knowledge being shared and expanding in the air. Or a faint clarion of bells – distant, yet somehow within the room itself, as if proclaiming the nativity of an idea. Oh, I’m fanciful, you might think. But what
I
think is that science must never become dull and roped to rigid formulae, but must always be alive to the omnipresent
otherness
of things.
    This night, sitting at my work board under two candles, a cup of small beer at my elbow, I’d thought to work on my creation theory, an attempt to explain precisely, concisely and
mathematically
the origins and composition of our universe… and how we might have commerce with the hidden influences which govern it.
    But then caught myself thinking of our lost housekeeper, Catherine Meadows, and the times I’d wished I lay with her, that we might find warmth and consolation in one another, for Catherine looked a gentle girl who would not…
    Oh dear God, what am I become?
    Dr Dee trades with demons!
    ‘John.’
    I almost cried out, in my shame. My mother was standing in the doorway, holding a candle in a tin tray, her face turned to vellum in its light. She wore an old grey robe over her nightgown.
    ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I like not the way our neighbours look at us.’
    Candlelight shadows bounded over the walls of books and manuscriptsand the globe made for me by my friend and tutor, Gerard Mercator. Logs shifted on the fire. I sat up.
    ‘Which neighbours? Not Goodwife Faldo?’
    ‘No, they’re… not people I know by name. Do you not notice the looks we get?’
    I thought of the men who’d stared at me in the tavern where I’d been in search of Jack Simm. And of what he’d said. I wanted to say something reassuring and could only think of Cecil’s offer to have my mother guarded – knowing what her reaction would be.
    ‘I don’t want it. I have to live here. I don’t want us to be seen as… strange.’ My mother came into the room and shut the door behind her. ‘I thought it would all be different, when you were given the rectorate of Upton-upon-Severn.’
    ‘That was a long time ago.’
    ‘Not so very long.’
    ‘Mother, it was another era. The boy Edward was king, Seymour was protector, the Act against witchery was withdrawn, I was—’
    ‘Untainted,’ my mother said, ‘by rumour.’
    ‘Unknown,’ I said. ‘I was unknown then, there’s the difference.’
    There’s ever been a thin line ’twixt fame and notoriety.
    Couldn’t deny that the eighty pounds a year for Upton had been useful, but I was never going to be a minister of the church. The cure of souls – the very idea of such responsibility was terrifying to me.
    ‘I don’t know what you do,’ my mother said, in a kind of desperation. ‘I no longer understand what you do.’
    ‘I study. Collect knowledge. Calcule.’
    Couldn’t see her expression, but I could feel it. Must needs do better.
    ‘Studying mathematics’ – I closed my book – ‘I’ve become aware of universal patterns. Ordered patterns, which I feel could enjoin with something within us. Allowing us to… change things. I hope eventually to understand something of why we are here. To know, in some small way, God’s purpose—’
    ‘How does that change
my
life? Who
pays
you to know of these things?’
    I closed my