King Arthur's Bones

Also by The Medieval Murderers
The Tainted Relic
Sword of Shame
House of Shadows
The Lost Prophecies

A Historical Mystery
By
The Medieval Murderers
Susanna Gregory
Bernard Knight
Michael Jecks
Philip Gooden
Ian Morson

London • New York • Sydney • Toronto
A CBS COMPANY

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2009
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © The Medieval Murderers, 2009

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.

The right of The Medieval Murderers to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-84737-758-6

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.

Typeset in Baskerville by Ellipsis Books Limited, Glasgow

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

A small group of historical mystery writers, all members of the Crime Writers’ Association, who promote their work by giving informal talks and discussions at libraries, bookshops and literary festivals.

Bernard Knight
is a former Home Office pathologist and professor of forensic medicine who has been writing novels, non-fiction, radio and television drama and documentaries for more than forty years. He currently writes the highly regarded Crowner John series of historical mysteries, based on the first coroner for Devon in the twelfth century; the thirteenth of which,
Crowner Royal
, has recently been published by Simon & Schuster.

Ian Morson
is the author of an acclaimed series of historical mysteries featuring the thirteenth-century Oxford-based detective, William Falconer, and a brand-new series featuring Venetian crime solver, Nick Zuliani, the first of which,
City of the Dead
, has recently been published.

Michael Jecks
was a computer salesman before turning to writing full time. His immensely popular Templar series, set during the confusion and terror of the reign of Edward II, is translated into most continental languages and is published in America. His most recent novels are
The King of Thieves
and, the 27th in the series,
No Law in the Land
. Michael was chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association in 2004–5 but balances that by Morris Dancing enthusiastically – and badly.

Philip Gooden
is the author of the Nick Revill series, a sequence of historical mysteries set in Elizabethan and Jacobean London, during the time of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Among the titles are
Sleep of Death
and
Death of Kings
. He also writes 19th century mysteries, most recently
The Salisbury Manuscript
, as well as non-fiction books on language. Philip was chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association in 2007–8.

Susanna Gregory
is the author of the Matthew Bartholomew series of mystery novels, set in fourteenth-century Cambridge, the most recent of which are
A Vein of Deceit
and
To Kill or Cure
. In addition, she writes a series set in Restoration London, featuring Thomas Chaloner; the most recent book is
The Westminster Poisoner
. She also writes historical mysteries under the name of ‘Simon Beaufort’.

Prologue
– In which Philip Gooden describes how at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191 the remains of King Arthur are believed to have been discovered.

Act One
– In which Susanna Gregory describes how the bones are stolen during a violent skirmish between the Welsh and the invading Normans.

Act Two
– In which Bernard Knight relates how in 1282 a band of patriots retrieve the relics after the darkest day in Wales’s history.

Act Three
– In which Michael Jecks describes how a chance encounter with a pardoner and quack healer causes problems for Sir Baldwin de Furnshill, Simon Puttock and the church.

Act Four
– In which Philip Gooden’s player Nick Revill becomes involved with Arthur’s bones, William Shakespeare’s younger brother and a murder at the Tower of London.

Act Five
– In which Ian Morson recalls how rumours of Napoleon Bonaparte’s escape revives the old myth of King Arthur’s return.

Epilogue
– In which Bernard Knight returns to an archaeological dig near Tower Bridge, where the experts find something unexpected in the foundations of Bermondsey Abbey.

The first he knew of it was the noise, like the sound of leaves rustling across dry ground. The abbot looked up from the parchment he was studying. It was a list of estimates, the costs of rebuilding. Listening more carefully, he heard not the sound of leaves but of voices. He wasn’t sorry to be distracted from his task. He got up and opened the window of the parlour. It was an overcast afternoon in mid-autumn. The air was still.

Monks and lay brothers as well as ordinary workers were converging on an area of grass a few dozen yards from the abbot’s first-floor window. They were crowding around a tent-like structure of drapery curtains, crowding with such force that the whole construction quivered as if about to topple down. What surprised the abbot was not the fact that the workers or even the lay brothers should be running to reach the spot – obviously something had been discovered behind the dirty white curtains, and word had spread fast – but that his fellow Benedictines in their black garb were also moving at such an undignified rate. Whatever the
something
was, it must be significant. Almost despite himself, the abbot felt a tremor of excitement.

Henry de Sully fastened the window. He moved towards his chamber door at a deliberate pace. There was no one to see, but it would not do to betray any sign of agitation, even to himself. Before he could reach it, there was a clatter and the door banged open. In the entrance stood Brother Geoffrey, his chaplain and secretary.

The man was out of breath. He was not so old that a few stairs should have exhausted him. He clung to the door frame, with an expression on his face that was close to confusion. Henry de Sully smiled and made a calming gesture. He waited while Geoffrey regained control of himself, but the other was too impatient. His secretary-chaplain got as far as ‘They have found . . . have found . . .’ before being overcome by a bout of gulping and swallowing.

‘It’s all right, Geoffrey. Calm yourself. Whatever they have found I will discover for myself,’ said de Sully.

The chaplain shifted to let his superior through the doorway and followed him down the stone steps to the lobby. The abbot moved without hurry although it cost him an effort to do so. Over his shoulder he heard the monk stuttering, ‘It’s . . . it . . . it is . . .’

‘Yes?’ said de Sully, halting at the foot of the stairs. ‘It is . . . what?’

‘Extraordinary,’ Geoffrey managed to get out.

‘We’ll see.’

The abbot and his chaplain emerged into the open. The crowd around the tent was growing all the time, with monks and labourers still arriving from every quarter. They moved at a run or a brisk walk. There could not have been such a stir in the place, thought Henry de Sully, since the great fire of a few years ago, the fire which destroyed the old church and much of the abbey before his own arrival in Glastonbury. At the thought, he glanced towards the Lady Chapel, which stood, fresh and fine, near the site of the original church. He’d never seen the church but had been told frequently of that simple wattle-and-daub edifice, many centuries old and transformed to ash in minutes.

Abbot de Sully and Brother Geoffrey drew nearer to the tent-like construction. Located halfway between a pair of stone pillars, it consisted of discoloured white drapes slung over crosspieces supported on wooden uprights. It enclosed an area of a few square yards. The tent might have been primitive, but it was sufficient to give some protection from the weather and a measure of privacy to whatever was going on inside.

No one noticed the approach of the abbot or his chaplain. Instead, the monks and lay brothers jostled each other to get closer to where the drapes had been pulled back to allow the workers to come and go past piles of earth and rubble. The buzz of questions and exclamations was like the sound of bees.

Henry de Sully halted. Geoffrey clapped his hands several times and silence slowly fell as the crowd realized the abbot had arrived. They moved aside and left a passage to the entrance of the ‘tent’. At first sight it was hard to imagine what the exitement was about. Four men were kneeling or crouching by the entrance. On the ground between them lay a couple of stone fragments. Two of the men were labourers, identifiable by their caps and coarse clothing. Their faces were streaked with mud and sweat. The other two men were monks, Brother Frederick, who was the sacristan of the abbey, and Brother Owen, the cellarer.

Brother Frederick looked up at de Sully and clambered creakily to his feet. There was the same mixture of confusion and excitement on his face which the abbot had seen on his chaplain’s. The sacristan brushed away the dirt from the knees of his cassock and came towards Henry.

‘I knew this must be the place!’ he said.

‘You have made a discovery?’

‘About six or seven feet down, we found . . . well, they found . . . come and see.’