The Heresy of Dr Dee

XV The Hill of Bones and Ghosts

October, 1560. Brynglas at Pilleth on the Welsh Border.

A SINGLE EYE looks up at Anna Ceddol through a veil of shivering ground-mist, and all the rest is blood.

She’s saying, ‘Who is he?’

As if anyone could be sure. You must imagine Anna Ceddol clutching her woollen shawl tight across her breast but refusing to look away. Down the valley, the early sun hangs amid rusted coils of mist.

At first she could not understand what all the fear was about – Pedr Morgan’s wife drumming with both fists on her door as the sky grew pink. A dead man found on Brynglas? Wouldn’t be the first this year, nor the twelfth. All those forlorn heaps of browning bones turned up by the plough, all ragged with the remnants of leather jerkins and makeshift armour. Too many.

The dead are removed upon an old cart kept in a tumbledown sheep shelter halfway up the lower slope. Taken for reburial with small ceremony in the field beside the church where, even after a century and a half, their descendants come to pray and visit the holy well.

But anyone can see what’s different about this one.

‘Likely been yere all night,’ Pedr Morgan, the shepherd says.

‘But no longer than that. That’s the point, isn’t it?’

The stink of blood and shit will be wafting up at Anna, and still, I imagine, she does not turn away.

His face has been split open with a spade or an axe. One eye hanging out, laid upon the remains of a cheek, while the other has been taken, most likely by a crow. The naked chest and stomach have also been ripped and plucked by scavenging birds or foxes. Bands of glistening entrails left entwined like to a scatter of dull jewellery.

‘We need the cart,’ Anna says. ‘He can’t be left here much longer, or there’ll be nothing left of him.’

She looks up at the church, Our Lady of Pilleth. Miraculous cures were once recorded here, under the statue of the Holy Mother above this shallow cauldron of empty hills. That was before a thousand men were shot and hacked to death. Before the sacred spring ran brown with blood and the church itself burned. There are more bones in the earth here than tree roots and no one wants to build over an unknown grave. Which is why they send for Siôn.

Maybe she’s recalling how, when she was pulling on her shawl this morning, her brother began to howl piteously, his fingers clawing at the empty air. As if the terror of Goodwife Morgan was making divers pictures around him which he must needs rip away.

Anna has left him squatting by the fire, wrapped in a sheepskin and hugging himself. He didn’t want to go with her – as though he already knew what was here, just as he’d known what lay in the foundations of Stephen Price’s new barn.

Siôn Ceddol. A miracle in himself.

‘No sign of his apparel?’

The shepherd shakes his head, closing his eyes, as though cursing the circumstance that had him born here, as he oft-times does aloud. In the valley, fresh smoke spouts from the chimney of an oak-framed house where new braces support an upper storey.

Nant-y-groes, where my father, Rowland Dee, was born, below the hill of bones.

‘There’s more, see,’ Pedr Morgan says faintly, and Anna Ceddol stares at him. He turns to where the man with the ruined face lies on his back, half under a thorn tree. Its roots and bole are covered with vicious brambles, some of which have been dragged across the lower part of the body as if to conceal its male emblems.

Pedr Morgan pulls some of the brambles away to reveal a leg twisted at the knee.

‘I’d not have my wife see this.’

Anna Ceddol almost smiles. She’s grown used to being treated not as a normal woman. This, she knows, is because of the tasks she has to perform in the care of her brother. Their parents died within a year of one another, and so Anna has never married – too old now, at twenty-nine, she’ll say, unless some widower is in need of comfort in his dotage.

But there’s no hope of comfort with Siôn in the house – sixteen years now and terrifying to most.

‘There’s evil here,’ Pedr Morgan says.

Anna Ceddol has borrowed Pedr’s knife to cut away more brambles. When she glances up from the corpse, the shepherd is turned away, looking down the valley. She says nothing and bends to the brambles, working patiently and her hands do not tremble. She disregards the smells, seemingly unaware of the grace with which she undertakes such a foul task.

Both her hands bleeding freely from wrenching carelessly at the brambles. She slides a knife under a thick stem bristling with savage thorns and lifts. Up it comes, all of a sudden, bringing with it smaller shoots, and all is peeled away from the dead man’s thighs.

‘Oh,’ Anna says.

Of course, she’s heard the tales, still told in the alehouses of Presteigne, tales spat out like bile from the gut.

About what happened after the battle between Mortimer’s cobbled-together army of untrained English peasantry and the hungry Welsh, serving their fork-bearded wizard. On windy nights, they say, the last cries of dying men still are heard, bright threads of agony woven into the fabric of the storm.

This hill of faith and death. This holy hill soiled by slaughter and an old hatred that never quite goes away because this is border country and its air is ever ajangle with bewildered, jostling ghosts.

Anna Ceddol sees the dead man’s mouth is a mash of shattered teeth, though nothing parts them but a bloody pulp.

Betwixt his thighs, however…

Anyone can tell that’s not done by the crows.

XVI Pike-head

I WAS THROWN back at the sight of several dozen men with pikes and crossbows and a half-concealed firearm or two. And a dozen laden carts, all gathered under a whelk-shell sky in the field beyond London Bridge.

Seemed at first like an advance guard for the Queen, and it was only when I left the wherry that I marked the absence of flags, music or any hint of merriment. And saw that the shabby-clad man approaching me was Dudley.

‘Dr Dee.’ He shook my hand with formality. ‘Master Roberts. Remember me?’

First I’d seen of him since that night in my workroom. When I’d taken up his offer for me to lie at his house in Kew until our departure for Wales, he’d been absent the whole time. A bedchamber had been prepared for me and my meals made daily by the servants, while I spent long hours in solitary book-study. No one in the house appeared to know where Dudley had gone.

Master Roberts?

The name he’d been known by on our mission to Glastonbury at the end of the winter. An indication that discretion was to be exercised on this journey, for him if not for me, and yet…

…Jesu. I surveyed the clattering assembly with dismay. This was his idea of discretion? Before I could question it, Dudley led me across the well-trodden field, away from the throng.

We stopped close to the bridge itself, where it was quiet.

I said, ‘Have the trumpeters been delayed?’

The crow-picked head of a man had fallen from one of the poles and lay in the grass near our feet. I wondered if it had belonged to some executed traitor I might recognise, winced and looked away as Dudley kicked the head down the bank, then grinned.

‘All this… it’s not for me, you fool.’

Close up, I realised that shabby had been a wrong impression. If the mourning purple was gone and had not been replaced by his customary gilded splendour, his leathery apparel was still of good quality. Country landowner-class, at least, except for the exceptionally beautiful riding boots, possibly a small gift from the Queen at a time when there were no thousand-acre estates to spare.

‘It’s for the judge,’ Dudley said. ‘Sixty armed guards.’

He explained. It seemed the trial in Radnorshire was for some Welsh felon, of whom an example must needs be made. Dudley said a London judge had been requested by the Council of the Marches in Ludlow to make sure it was handled efficiently and robustly.

Well, I knew what that meant, but a London judge? Was that usual?

‘It is,’ Dudley said, ‘when the local judiciary fears for the health of its wives and children and safety of its property.’

The man on trial was the leader of Plant Mat, a brotherhood of violent cattle-thieves, highway-robbers and killers lodged in the heart of Wales. Well organised, controlling trade, smuggling goods from France, running several inns at which travellers were habitually robbed or held for ransom.

‘I’ve never heard of this. Plant Mat? Children of Matthew?’

Dudley shrugged.

‘It’s Wales. Where they seem to be regarded as heroes for the obvious reason that they’ve been preying, whenever they can, on the English. Or so they claim.’

‘Hence the guard?’

‘Procured with the full agreement of Cecil, I’d guess. Despite his being Welsh.’

I tensed.

‘That means Cecil knows we’re travelling with them?’

‘Of course not. We’re here through Blount’s connections.’

Thomas Blount, his steward, was a former attorney.

‘There’s a handful of others also travelling with us,’ Dudley said. ‘All of them well-investigated, no doubt, to make sure none are too… shall we say too Welsh?’

When he smiled, I saw that his moustache had been trimmed close to his face, his beard cut back to little more than stubble. Hardly distinguished but it was wise enough, under these circumstances. A ransom for Lord Dudley would be not inconsiderable.

‘Sure you’re quite happy with this, Robbie?’

‘Welsh banditry? God’s bollocks, John.’ Dudley sniffed in contempt and began to walk back up the field. ‘Come on, we need to fix you up with a horse. Oh, and while I remember… if anyone should ask, Dr John Dee is journeying, as he often does, in pursuit of old books and also to inspect his family’s property in the borderlands. Assisted by his old friend, Master Roberts, the antiquary. That sound plausible to you?’

Highly plausible, and it had worked in Glastonbury. Several dozen significant rare books and manuscripts in my library at Mortlake had come from the libraries of dissolved monasteries. When religious houses are plundered for treasure, either by common thieves or the Crown, the books are oft-times flung aside as worthless.

I caught him up.

‘Who knows the truth?’

‘Nobody knows the truth, John. Though obviously Legge knows who Roberts is and can think what the hell he likes about my reasons for getting out of London for a while.’

I stopped, grasping his arm.

‘Legge?’

‘The judge.’

‘Christopher Legge?’

‘Sir Christopher Legge. If you paid proper attention to the lists you’d know these things.’ Dudley scrutinised me. ‘History here?’

‘In a way.’

Five years back, when I’d been accused of conjuring against Queen Mary, several false charges had also been levelled against me by a lawyer, name of Ferrers, now himself held in suspicion after a printing press producing pamphlets full of French lies about the Queen had been found on his premises. Ferrers had oiled his way out of the Fleet by convincing the court he’d had no knowledge of the treasonous intent of a man renting his premises.

It seemed unlikely he’d yet have links with Christopher Legge who, as a young attorney, had helped process evidence against me for presentation to the Star Chamber. Evidence which, being qualified in law and so conducting my own defence, I’d assiduously broken to dust.

Legge was now a judge? He must be a couple of years younger than me, maybe not even thirty. We’d never spoken and there was no reason to suppose he bore ill will towards me, if ever he had. But, for the duration of this journey, I’d try to avoid him, nonetheless.

‘He’ll be on the Privy Council one day, from what I hear,’ Dudley said. ‘If he survives the trial.’

‘Why would he not?’

‘Just something I heard.’

He laughed, and I took the remark as being not too serious. Taking this opportunity to ask him where the hell he’d been while I was lying low at his house in Kew.

‘Later,’ Dudley said.

He walked away.

‘Robbie…’

Dudley stopped ten or so paces short of the first cart, looked over a shoulder and lowered his voice to a hiss.

‘Cumnor. I was at Cumnor.’

Rapidly, I caught him up.

‘Was that advisable?’

To my knowledge, until now he’d never been back to the house where Amy died since she was found. Would not have been seemly. Might have suggested he had traces to cover. On the surface, he’d behaved impeccably, only sending Thomas Blount to record the circumstances on his behalf.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why risk it, with the inquest still in process?’

‘Could be months before the inquest returns its verdict. I’m to be held in purgatory till then?’

‘And was it worth it? Did you learn anything?’

‘Too much.’

Ahead of us, I could now see Sir Christopher Legge. Would not have marked him if I hadn’t known he was here. He’d changed. Narrow features, which had been gawky when last I’d seen him, had hardened like a new-forged pike-head introduced to cold water. He was enclosed by a dozen attendants and minor attorneys but was somehow distant from them all.

‘Well?’ I said to Dudley.

Still unsure how far I trusted him.

‘I’ll tell you when there’s privacy.’

He began to walk up the riverside field towards the company of men and horses. His gypsy’s skin seemed darker under the pink-veined sky.

Of a sudden, he turned back.

‘There’s an evil here, John,’ he said.

XVII A Sense of the Ominous

WHEN FIRST I was known as the Queen’s astrologer, my services were in big demand, mainly from ambitious people wanting my name on their child’s birthchart. In the euphoria following the coronation there were more of these requests than I could easily deal with.

But a few others – and they still come, on occasion – related to the less-easily defined aspect of my role – adviser on the Hidden. And therein lies a dilemma.

These approaches are, as you’d expect, more discreet and come from men who feel their homes or their families to be cursed by enemies or menaced by demons and ghosts. Coming to me as if I’m believed equipped to dispel a nameless evil in the name of the Queen.

Dear God. Oft-times, I’ll make an excuse and walk away, knowing there’s confusion about the nature of my profession. While I’m no sorcerer, neither am I a proper priest.

When I was made Rector of Upton-upon-Severn, during the short reign of the boy king Edward, it was a lay appointment, designed to provide a firm income so that I might pursue my studies and also eat. Later, I did take Holy Orders and during Mary’s reign could have passed as a Catholic priest – hence my time as Bonner’s chaplain. But it seemed to me no more than a formality, little better than having conveyed a quiet gift of silver to someone like the former Abbot of Wigmore.

Even my mother fails to understand this and will, on occasion, berate me for giving up an income for life. But, dear God, I dread to think how many useless blessings have been given by unholy priests invested for money. What you must needs know is that I never believed myself to have been called to it, and thus have ever refused to accept responsibility for the cure of souls. Or the redemption of unquiet spirits.

A priest’s approach to the unseen must needs be single-minded. He must deem all ghosts satanic, attacking them with a passion, assailing them with missiles of liturgy. And must never let himself become diverted from his task by tantalising and forbidden questions: What is this? Does it exist only in my mind, or has it a chemical reality? What can it tell me about the afterlife? What knowledge can it pass on about the hidden nature of things?

The questions of a natural philosopher, a man of science. Who may have a firm grounding in divinity and a full devotion to God, but should never in this world don the robes of a practising priest.

So I must have shown little enthusiasm when, as we came towards Hereford, one of the minor attorneys, a young man called Roger Vaughan, rode alongside me and asked if I were here to offer spiritual counsel.

It was the close of our third day on the road. Such a company as ours – with ten carts and sixty armed men, for heaven’s sake – would not hope to make good progress. Neither did my relations with Vaughan get off to the most promising of starts.

‘Siarad Cymreig, Dr Dee?’

I’d picked up enough of the language from my tad to know what he was asking, but best for it to stop there.

‘No,’ I said. ‘My father spoke some Welsh, but I don’t. And never having been to Wales before—’

‘Never? Oh.’

Vaughan was a solemn young man with a half-grown gingery beard and a mild Welshness in his voice. I knew his family was long-established on the border, claiming descent from princes – as, of course, did the Dees. Now he was telling me he’d been in London to study at the inns of court.

‘Indeed I was also hoping to study with you, Dr Dee, but… I was told you were away.’

‘I do spend a deal of time away. Which is one reason I’ve never had the time to visit Wales.’

Why would he want to study with me? Although qualified in the law, I’d never practised it except in my own defence. I steadied my horse before a small pond. With all the cattle drovers passing through here, you’d surely expect these roads to be among the best in England.

‘You’re also interested in mathematics, Master Vaughan? Astrology, perhaps.’

‘I suppose… to a level. But that was not what I— That is, you’re said to be better qualified than anyone in other areas of knowledge.’

The boy was almost as hesitant as I’d been at his age.

I said, ‘You mean in matters of the Hidden?’

‘Such matters,’ Vaughan said, ‘tend to provoke sneers at the inns of court. But not to someone born and bred in the Border country.’

‘Some areas of life are not so easily manipulated as the law,’ I said.

He laughed. I knew of the Vaughans through word of the Red Book of Hergest, a manuscript in the Welsh language, now nearly two hundred years old, containing the essence of the Mabinogi, the old Welsh mythology full of ancient wisdom and symbolism.

In fact, a good reason for one day learning Welsh.

‘Your family still has the Red Book?’

‘On occasion, attempts are made to have it taken deep into Wales, but we resist. The Vaughans… we’re ever concerned with our heritage. Even have, as you may have heard, our own curse – spectral hound foretelling death in the family. However, this matter – the trial, that is – affects my family not at all. Yours, however…’

‘What?’

‘Please understand I’m not trying to pry or to intrude in any way.’ Vaughan’s face was now redder than his hair. ‘I’m simply approaching you as a neighbour, your family home being but an hour’s ride from mine.’

I had to shake my head.

‘Master Vaughan, my family home is at Mortlake on the Thames. I was born in London.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m here with my colleague to seek certain antiquities. The proximity of Nant-y-groes is purely coincidental. But if you’re saying there’s a problem there…?’

‘Not as such, no.’ Vaughan was looking directly ahead to where a spire had pierced the western clouds. God, the evasiveness of these border folk. ‘Well… not so much Nant-y-groes itself as the nearby village. Pilleth. Which stands to the side of Brynglas Hill. The site of the battle?’

‘The battle in which the English were, erm, slaughtered.’ I stared at the churned mud ahead of us, itself like a battlefield. ‘By the Welsh. Led by Owain Glyndwr.’

‘And his general, Rhys Gethin,’ Vaughan said.

My tad had spoken of this, though not in any great detail. Owain Glyndwr’s campaign had begun as a dispute over the ownership of land and developed into a bitter war against England. Glyndwr had declared himself Prince of Wales and laid waste to the border and its strongholds. But this was a hundred and fifty years ago, in the time of King Henry IV.

I remembered from my Cambridge days learning how, as a young man, Owain Glyndwr had been well known at the English King’s court. He was cultured, well educated, well qualified in the law… and also, it was said, in aspects of the Hidden. No one who knew him would have expected him to become such a ruthless and merciless opponent.

‘A place where a thousand men have been slaughtered,’ Vaughan said, ‘is not exactly the easiest place to make a home.’

‘But surely Nant-y-groes would have been there, in some form or other, before the battle?’

‘However, the village was not. Only isolated farms existed before, and no one lived there for years afterwards. But then a few dwellings were built to house farm workers and their families, and—’

Of a sudden, he urged his horse forward as if to out-race an error, calling back over his shoulder, the wind whipping at his words.

‘When you meet members of your family, please don’t mention my approach to you.’

I caught him up, but the conversation was dead. Ahead of us, the spire was become the body of what I guessed to be Hereford’s cathedral. Close by were the walls and tower of the castle, reddened not by the sun, as there was none, but by the nature of the stone itself.

Roger Vaughan looked up as an arrowhead of wild geese passed overhead. As if this might be an omen.

‘Perchance there’ll be occasion to talk again, Dr Dee,’ he said.

It had been a curiously muted journey from the start. Each night, we’d lain not at inns but at the country houses of well-off landowners, Justices of the Peace and county sheriffs, the guards all fed and bedded in their outbuildings, the horses accommodated in their stables. Everywhere, we were expected and bedchambers prepared. The talk over dinner was ever friendly but ever cautious.

Each morning, as we set out, there was, for me, a sense of the ominous. Accuse me, if you like, of living in the shadow of imagined persecution, but I could not believe that only Judge Legge knew of the presence amongst us of a suspected wife-killer believed to have bedded the Queen.

I watched Dudley riding ahead, with his man John Forest and the captain of the guard. He must have been known to at least one of the owners of the houses where we’d lain. Steps would have been taken to ensure discretion.

He’d yet told me nothing of what he’d learned at Cumnor Place. What he learned that implied evil.

Did Dudley prefer to ride at the head of the company because he was disinclined to be surrounded by unknown men with no cause to wish him a long life?

Unknown armed men. I flinched as a vision of the imagination ripped through me: riders all bunched together and then separating, leaving one man dangling from his horse, dragged by a boot in the stirrup through a river of his own blood.

And the next to die… the next would be me? The infamous conjuror said to trade with demons who would, if Ferrers and Legge had succeeded, have gone to ashes five years ago. Dear God, if I’d dwelt on this for long enough, I might have turned my horse around and galloped like a madman back into the heart of England.

Too late now. As if dropped from the sky, the city of Hereford was strewn about us, a damp untidiness of fenced fields and holdings and timbered shops and dwellings around a triangle of high-spired churches. A frontier town.

And a frontier in my life. I felt now, as I had these past three days, to be on an ill-made road leading not to the roots of my family but into somewhere far more foreign than France or the Low Countries, for at least I could speak their languages.

Guiding my mare between foot-deep puddles and mounds of rubble which had once been part of the old walls, I followed the train into a wide street, where people were gathered to watch us. One spired church lay behind us, the cathedral ahead, the last one in England. On the rim of twilight, its stones glowed the colour of the shewstone Elias had unveiled before Goodwife Faldo.

I thought of the Wigmore stone and could no longer understand how the desire for it had lured me here. There were surely other stones to be found, as potent as this one.

Across the famous River Wye, a long line of hills lay on the western horizon. The Mynydd Ddu – Black Mountains. Where Wales began. The light from a now-invisible setting sun had bled into a symmetry of cloud which hung above these mountains like half-folded wings. Gilded feathers in a holy light. As we rode on, they came apart.

XVIII Transcending the Mapper’s Craft

We lodged that night with the Bishop of Hereford at his palace by the eastern bank of the Wye, deep and fast-flowing after this drear summer of persistent rain.

As ever, in a city new to me, I would have welcomed time alone to uncover its libraries and antiquities. I’d marked the once-proud Norman castle falling into ruin, as Leland had hinted in his Itinerary: greenery up the walls, parts of the tower gone to rubble, sheep grazing the one-time courtyards. Why am I ever drawn to ruins?

But no time for closer study. Salmon had been brought up from the Wye for our evening meal in two sittings in a near-monastic, white-walled refectory. As ever, it was polite but unjovial, most of us tired and aching from the ride. The talk was of little more than hunting, and, as soon as I could slip away, I did. Suppressing fatigue, I cornered one of the canons and asked if I might speak with the bishop.

His name was John Scory, once Protestant Bishop of Chichester, deprived of his status in Mary’s reign, redeemed by Elizabeth. Yet sent out here into the wilderness, which seemed not much like redemption to me.

I was received into a crooked chamber with panelled walls of dark oak but no bookshelves. Only a Bible betwixt pen and ink and a wad of cheap paper on a narrow oaken trestle. A window was fallen open to the greying river.

Scory, plain-cassocked below his station, pulled out an uncushioned chair for me and went back behind his trestle, lit not by a candle but an old-fashioned rushlight. Possibly an indication of how brief he expected our discussion to be.

‘Forgive me, Dr Dee, but do I recall you as Bonner’s chaplain, once?’

For obvious reasons, this is not something I normally include in my curriculum vitae, particularly when dealing with Protestant bishops. I sought the short answer.

‘Better than being burned for heresy, Bishop.’

‘Oh, indeed. But why would Bonner choose to employ a man so narrowly spared from the flames? Do you mind the question?’

He was a wiry man of middle years, low-voiced for a bishop. He sat back in his chair, fixing on a pair of glasses as if fully to observe the quality of my response.

‘I believe,’ I said, ‘that this was to enable Bishop Bonner to tap into what I’d learned in… what you might call the outfields of divinity.’

‘Oh… keeping a pet magician?’ In the sallow light, a wry smile was shaped in Scory’s lean face. ‘I do beg mercy, Dr Dee, but Bonner’s a man who holds fast to his beliefs. If he’d signed to the Queen he’d be back on the streets, and the fact that he didn’t and he isn’t…’

‘Suggests he feels safer living quietly behind bars,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t pretend to understand him, but behind the history of terror there’s a questing mind. I… don’t know why, given his deplorable history, but I can find things in him to like. Which makes me wonder about myself.’

He peered at me through his glasses, then snatched them off, and a full smile at last broke through.

‘You’re clearly an honest young man, Dr Dee. As I’d heard. Also, it’s said, wondrous with numbers, more than conversant with the law, expert in geography, the arts of navigation…’ Scory’s eyebrows rose a fraction, and then he came forward, both elbows on the board. ‘So what are you doing in such alarming company?’

‘Alarming?’

‘Biggest bloody hanging-party I’ve ever seen in this part of the world.’

Scory fumbled in a locker under the board and produced a good candle which he held to the dying rushlight until it flared. Evidently, the discussion was not to be as brief as I’d expected.

Bishops have never been chosen for their nearness to God, but – unless, like Bonner, their working lives are over – most have kept close to prominent sinners. They’ll bully harmless parish priests without mercy but, in dealing with influential laity, ever walk on eggshells.

Not Scory. Curiously, he was proving to be a man who gave not a shit for status.

‘They’re hardly going to offer him an amnesty, Dr Dee.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Erm… whom?’

‘Believed to be a certain Prys Gethin.’

‘Truly?’ I said.

I’d never heard of this man, though the similarity of his name to that of Owain Glyndwr’s general had not passed me by.

Scory was silent for quite a while. Through the opened window, I could hear a rising night-breeze on the river. Scory moved back from the candle to study me.

‘Why do I have the feeling that you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about?’

‘Ah…’ I shrugged uncomfortably. ‘That’s because I’m not part of the judicial company. Just a fellow traveller.’

‘More and more mysterious. So what do you want from me, Dr Dee? Why would the Queen’s advisor on all manner of extraordinary matters want to keep a tired old cleric from his bed?’

‘Well, assuming your diocese includes the town of Wigmore, in the west, I wanted to ask what you knew about the abbey there. Whatever might be left of it.’

‘Not much. Gone to ruin since the Reform, like most of them. The abbot’s house is become a private home.’

‘The abbot, yes,’ I said. The former abbot was called John Smart? What of him?’

‘I’ve only been here a year, therefore never encountered the man in person. Only by reputation.’ Scory wrinkled his nose. ‘Why do you want to know about Smart?’

‘I gather that after the Reform, he was reported to the late Lord Cromwell for a number of crimes.’

‘And that’s unusual?’

‘Simony, I heard. And lewd behaviour with local women. And misappropriation of abbey treasure?’

‘And which of these might interest you?’ Scory said slyly. ‘Perchance… oh, let me think… the treasure?’

‘Bishop,’ I said. ‘It’s clear you have your own ideas where my particular interests lie. However—’

‘Well, yes, I do, Dr Dee, but if what I’ve heard’s correct we’re not necessarily talking of gold plate. On that ground, it may well be that our definitions of treasure would, to an extent, correspond,’ Scory said. ‘Would you like to see some of mine before you retire?’

‘Treasure?’

‘A very rare treasure, to my mind, and I’d certainly welcome your opinion… as an authority in geography, navigation… and other matters.’

Response from the clergy to what I do falls into two groups: those who damn me as a sorcerer and those who wonder if my work and theirs might one day converge. Men like Bonner, this is, even though he kept his interests secret while publicly damning sorcerers and Protestants to hell.

And Scory?

Carrying a ring of keys, he led me out through a back door of his house and across the shadowed green to the cathedral itself… and into this vast red-walled oven of a building. Simpler in form and less-adorned than some I’d been into. A few lanterns were lit, and Scory unhooked one and I followed him across the misty nave and out through another door and into a cloister, where another lamp met us.

‘Who’s—?’

‘Only me, Tom.’

‘My Lord Bishop,’ a shadow said.

‘Taking our visitor to see the treasure.’

‘Treasure, my Lord?’

Scory’s laugh mingled with the jingle of the keys as he unlocked a door to our right and held the lantern high. I followed him into a square cell with one shuttered window and no furniture except for a wide oak cupboard on the wall facing us.

‘I’d show you our library, too,’ Scory said. ‘If I wasn’t too ashamed.’

‘How so?’

‘Disordered. One day we’ll raise the money to pay someone to examine and list the books.’

‘I’d do it for nothing.’

‘If you had two years to spare.’ He handed me the lantern and reached up to unlock the cupboard on the wall. ‘Meanwhile, anything you can tell me about this…’

At first the doors jammed and then yielded and sprang open together and, by God, it was treasure. Couldn’t take it in at first.

‘Hidden away for years,’ Scory said. ‘Thought to be papist magic.’

‘My God…’

The whole world was spread before us.

‘How old?’

‘At least three hundred years. Have you ever seen its like before, Dr Dee?’

He held the lantern close, slowly moving the lights around a thousand figures and images, etched in black upon a skin stretched over a wooden frame. I saw what seemed to be biblical figures surrounded by a monstrous bestiary of birds and fishes, serpents and dragons. Horned creatures and haloed men, robed and naked, amid a maze of towers and rivers and seas, hills and islands, all of them neatly labelled in Latin and enclosed by wedges of text.

‘A map… of everything?’

‘Of the world. As it was then known.’

‘Was it made here?’

‘Nobody knows where it was made or who made it or how it came to be in Hereford. Admittedly, a world that’s less than the one known now.’

‘Or more,’ I said, thinking I could spend weeks in study of it. ‘The knowledge we’ve gained is more than equalled by the knowledge we’ve lost.’

I stood transfixed, marking the figures of a mermaid and a lion with a man’s crowned head and symbols I did not understand. Yes, primitive compared with Mercator’s globe, yet I felt in the presence of something far transcending the mapper’s craft. Evidently, the Welsh border had more secrets than I’d imagined.

‘You should know that it does inspire a level of fear, even amongst some of the canons here. They say too much contemplation of it invites madness. I’m told there’ve been attempts over the years to burn it to a crisp. I’d guess there is an element of the occluded here. So for the present, I keep it locked away. Does it speak to you?’

Scory moved the lantern and the shapes on the map seemed to shuffle like playing cards into different patterns.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I doubt it was made by one man. More likely some closed monastic order. Look.’

I pointed at the centre of the map, where something of evident importance was represented by a cogged wheel.

‘The centre of the world,’ Scory said.

‘Jerusalem.’ I nodded. ‘That could be of significance.’

I stepped back, half-closing my eyes, and new configurations began to form in the candlelight.

‘Bishop, were the, um, Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon… ever active in Hereford?’

‘The Knights Templar?’ Scory’s eyes widened. ‘Well… not in the city itself but, yes, there were several Templar communities within ten miles of here. My God, Dee…’

‘Jerusalem obviously was the centre of the Templar world. They guarded the city against the Saracen for many years, had their headquarters on the site of the Temple and, it’s said, had access to its most ancient secrets. Some of which might well be…’

I glanced at the map.

‘Enciphered here?’

‘I’d put extra locks on this cupboard… and on the door. That’s assuming you do not consider the Templars to have been, um, satanic?’

Scory smiled.

‘Part of my duty here, Dr Dee, is not to condemn but to protect what exists until such time as it might be interpreted. Well…’ He let out a breath. ‘What you say makes remarkable sense. I’d never thought of the Templars. This is, ah, better than papist magic, I think.’

‘Potentially, beyond value,’ I said. ‘Which is why I’d recommend you make it even more secure.’

‘I will. And, ah… some men, if I may say so, might have chosen to keep such a deduction about the map’s origins… to themselves.’

‘Why would they? It’s in the best place.’

He put out his hand.

‘Thank you, Dr Dee,’ he said.

As we walked back to the palace, Scory’s mood was far more open. He told me he’d once been a Dominican friar. Possibly a reason he’d been given Hereford where, until the Reform, the Blackfriars had been popular residents in the heart of the city.

‘Hereford might seem a lowly post after Chichester. But more important for being on the rim of Wales. The significance of which was made clear to me from the start – the importance of keeping Wales on the Queen’s side.’

‘The Queen’s proud to be a descendent of King Arthur of the old Britons.’

‘A descent beyond dispute, Dr Dee,’ Scory said with what might have been mock gravity. ‘Her grandfather’s progress from out of Wales to the English throne is surely confirmation of the prophecy that Arthur would rise again. And all’s been quiet on the border ever since.’

‘It has?’

‘More or less. Still recovering from the damage inflicted during the Glyndwr wars. And yet now… they’re sending a small army to convict and hang one man. One Welshman. Curious, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know enough about it.’

‘No.’

He stopped, looking out over the river, moonlit now, and then walked down towards its bank.

‘The Wye flows through a strange and individual place, Dr Dee – more so over the border. They have their own beliefs which continue regardless of the Church, whether it be Catholic or Protestant.’

‘Oh?’

‘It seemed to me that one could either respond with a Bonner-like ferocity or with a tolerance bordering on the spiritually lax.’

‘Towards what?’

I followed him down to the edge of the river, a strip of silvery linen unrolled from the hills.

‘I chose tolerance,’ he said. ‘Which is why I suspect that the behaviour of your Abbot Smart reflected no more than his own response to his bucolic situation. He feasted, he hunted, he chased after women. And caught some. Well… I’d be a fool to say that’s not how some of my fellow bishops have behaved.’

‘And the abbey treasures?’

‘Such an extravagant way of life will ever demand a certain wealth,’ Scory said.

‘Do you know what they were, these treasures?’

‘Never gone into it. What’s the treasure you seek?’

‘A gemstone. Said to have been at the abbey.’

‘And you think you’ll find it now?’

‘A gemstone which is now, apparently, for sale.’

‘Ah.’ Scory smiled. ‘Now that sounds like Smart. What kind of gemstone?’

‘We think a beryl.’

‘We?’

‘The friend who’s travelling with me.’

‘And that would be…? Come now, Dr Dee, think yourself into my situation. Here I am, leading my quiet life, learning my Welsh to talk to the neighbours… when, of a sudden, I’m invited to accommodate a company including a prominent judge, the Queen’s astrologer… and another man who, despite his dull apparel, I recognise from my time in the South as none other than the Queen’s Master of the Horse…’ Scory leaned into the candlelight ‘… at the very least.’

I sighed.

‘It is who you think, yes. Not the most popular man in London at the moment, for reasons you’re doubtless aware of. But, I believe, falsely accused.’

Did I believe that? The candle in the lantern had gone out and I was glad of the relative dark.

‘Nevertheless, a man not short of gemstones, I’d guess,’ Scory said.

What choice did I have? I told him the beryl was famous as a spiritual device and heard him laugh.

‘The magician arises. You’ve come all this way for a fortune-telling stone?’

‘In the cause of, um, scientific study.’ I was beginning to feel like a prating prick. ‘The way such stones have been studied in Europe.’

He shrugged.

‘I’ll grant you that. I’m hardly in a position to dismiss miracle and magic when we have here in the cathedral the shrine of one of my distant predecessors, whose boiled bones seem to have cured thousands and still draw pilgrimages.’

He meant St Thomas Cantilupe. My library had several manuscripts on the tomb of this most famous bishop of Hereford and other healing shrines where tapers were lit and the bodies of the sick measured to the saints.

‘Indeed,’ Scory said. ‘So a small brown stone dedicated in the names of several prominent angels which not only foretells the future but gives off healing rays—’

‘So you know of it.’

‘I’ve heard of it. But it’s all gossip and myth and legend and I know not where it might be found. But I can tell you that if Smart has it, it won’t come cheap. Unless you – or more likely Lord Dudley – are in a position to, ah, apply some physical pressure?’

‘That was never my intention,’ I said honestly. ‘Do you have any idea where Smart might be found? Assuming he’s still alive.’

‘Oh, he’ll be alive, unless the border’s ridden with some vengeful plague I’ve not yet heard of.’

‘How did he escape… well, at least imprisonment, when the charges against him were presented to Cromwell?’

I was thinking of poor pious Abbot Whiting of Glastonbury, who’d been hanged, drawn and quartered for less.

‘Blood of Christ, Dr Dee,’ Scory said, ‘I didn’t know, until this night, how you yourself escaped the stake at the hands of Bonner. And no, I don’t know where Smart is, though I do hear word of him from time to time. If I were to say…’

His back hunched in deliberation, he walked along the moonlit riverbank, looking down at his entwined fingers.

‘What can I tell you…? Except… as the rest of them are going to Presteigne, why not begin your inquiries there? The Abbey of Wigmore owned most of that town at one time.’

When I told him my cousin, Nicholas Meredith, lived there, Scory’s laughter went skimming over the Wye like a hail of pebbles.

‘And Meredith, I was about to say, owned much of the rest. And now appears to own even more. Oh, yes, he might be a very good man to talk to…’

‘Bishop, I get weary of saying I don’t understand, but—’

‘No, no, no…’ Scory moved away, separating his hands and wiping the air betwixt us. ‘You’ll get no more from me on this particular bag of adders. All I’ll say is it’s worth remembering that Presteigne still has its share of dark alleys. Anyway, you might see me there.’

‘You?’

‘The judge has asked me to give evidence to his court. Come along, Dr Dee. Past my bedtime, and past yours, too, if you don’t want to fall off your horse tomorrow.’

‘Evidence?’

‘In the matter of witchcraft,’ Scory said.

The river licked at the bank below my thin boots, like the sound of quiet, sardonic laughter, and I turned away from it and followed him back to his palace.

XIX Dungheap

FOR A WHILE, the land was all red soil, as if the earth itself had been stained by the blood shed in the Glyndwr wars and the bitter battles through which the Tudors rose.

All was heavy under luminous grey cloud as we rode past the remains of castles, with towers like broken teeth, and bared mottes from which the stone had been stolen to build the farms in the valleys. And then the road was gloomed with forest to either side, dim as a church aisle at dusk, as we made our quiet and watchful way into Wales.

One day you’ll go back, boy. One day.

My tad, Rowland Dee. All for Wales, but he never went back.

Welsh towns and villages… I’d learned that they were all stark and wind-flayed, their stone houses long and low and slit-windowed, as much against the weather as attack. Hard, cold houses occupied by the race of strong, sinewy men my father had spoken of.

Bending to the wind like hawthorn trees, boy, and no less prickly.

My tad describing all this to me as a child as though he, too, had been raised as a man of the mountains. As he was neither sinewy nor hard, I recall wondering if he’d been sent into exile for being insufficiently Welsh.

It was only when the road emerged from the forest and we crested a hill and I was at last looking down upon my family’s local town… that I saw the dispiriting truth of it.

I urged my mare ahead to join Dudley, who was riding alone, having bid his man John Forest to remain in Hereford to receive any mail which might arrive from London and bring it on to Presteigne. Dudley had told me that Thomas Blount, at Kew, was on constant watch for anything new which might emerge in regard to Amy’s death.

And something had happened. Something he could not even whisper about inside this quiet company of judicial strangers.

‘John!’ Dudley calling to me with unnecessary volume, as if to ridicule the silence of the company behind us. ‘Will your letter have reached your cousin yet?’

‘Who knows – can we ever rely on the post? If not we’ll hope for an inn.’

‘Plenty good beds in an assize town… all those fastidious fucking lawyers to accommodate.’

I felt the chilled silence of the attorneys behind us. By now, the wind had died back, but no one spoke above the measured clop of hooves and the creaking of the well-laden carts on the pitted track. Below us, across a quiet river, was tended pasture-land, farms and old cottages with frames of gnarled grey oak.

And this town. This Welsh town.

If the ghost of my tad were with us, I only hoped its face was red.

Lying low at the centre of the well-tamed land, snug as a ground-nesting bird, was this bright and modern country settlement, its buildings elegantly structured with red brick and new timber-framing. I marked a proud, towered church with a flag of St George.

And sensed a glow about the place. A glow of… wealth… contentment?

What the hell?

I called across to Dudley.

‘We didn’t turn back upon ourselves somehow? This is… Wales?’

‘What did you expect?’

‘Didn’t expect it took so much like… like England. More like England than anywhere we’ve passed since Hereford. And that was England.’

I looked out, as if cheated, towards wooded hills. Maybe Wales was a country of the mind that was never reached.

‘Actually, I’m told it gets wilder the further west you go,’ Dudley said. ‘This is an English town in a way, grown rich on the wool trade. One of the canons in Hereford was telling me it’s even on the English side of King Offa’s dyke.’

Maybe a town built as a statement of future intent. The county of Radnorshire, its few sizeable settlements small and far-flung, has no history beyond the Act of Union in King Harry’s reign. There are no ancient princes of Radnorshire, no great old families, no ancestral castles yet lived in. This is a county not as old as me, established quickly, out of expediency.

But if its county town was any indication of prosperity, nobody here would go back to the old days. It was like to a holiday. I was aware of a billowing excitement – cheers and halloos, bright flags drooped from ropes strung across the streets from gable to gable, all lurid against a sky swelling with unshed rain.

Of a sudden, my mare was rearing in fear at the sudden blast of jollity and I bent to calm her as our company thinned out to be fed into the town. Widening again as we entered a broad street leading down to the church and a bridge over the river. I marked a baker’s shop, two alehouses, a tannery with a yard, a blacksmith’s and an apothecary’s, all well built with good signs.

To a gale of cheers, we came to a forced, untidy halt about halfway down amid a confusion of roadside stalls selling apples, plums, cherries and cold pies.

A juggler in a jester’s cap sent up a spray of coloured woollen balls, while children tried to catch them. A smell of strong ale was loaded into the air and on the ground a great whooping press of townsfolk roiled and roared from the consumption of it, and I was reminded of the Queen’s coronation, the happiest day of my life.

‘Get this rabble…’

From behind me, a cultured voice, high and thin with fury, piercing the euphoria like an ornamental blade.

‘My Lord, it’s—’

‘Bring out the sheriff, sirrah. At once.’

I looked over my shoulder, saw a press of armed guards around the judge and his men. Turning back to the street, I marked faces at windows, with and without glass, and then Dudley’s horse was pulled alongside mine.

‘You do know what this is about?’

‘Some kind of harvest festival?’

‘It’s for us. Well, not us… the judge.’

I saw Roger Vaughan, the lawyer, sliding from his horse, elbowing through the crowd towards a big, walled and gated house set back from the street. There was an inset door made small by a weight of ivy set into the high oaken gates, and Vaughan began to hammer upon it. A smittering of blood on his knuckles before it was opened.

‘Where’s the sheriff?’

The door was open barely a crack, and the voice from within no more than a mouse-squeak, so I heard not a word of it above the noise of the crowd. When Vaughan came back, the door was already being latched against him and the calm he’d shown on the road was gone.

‘My Lord, I’m— The sheriff’s gone with a couple of dozen men to fetch the prisoner from… from where he’s kept.’

A horse was prodded out onto the cobbles, guards forcing the crowd back, and the judge, Sir Christopher Legge, looked down.

‘They don’t have a gaol here?’

‘It’s not the strongest, and there’s fear that Gethin’s brigands will attempt to free him. He’s been kept in a dungeon in… in another place. Until the trial.’

‘Forget the trial!’ A man’s voice from the street. ‘Just hang the fucker!’

Whoops and laughter. Vaughan accepted the reins of his horse from one of the judge’s men, stood like he knew not where to put himself. Clearly hadn’t expected this. A single raindrop stung the back of my hand resting on the mare’s neck.

‘Remarkable.’ Judge Legge rose up in his saddle. He was not tall, and his tight leather riding jerkin emphasised how lean he was, almost skeletal, his bladed face shadowed by a wide-brimmed leather hat. ‘And what, pray, are we supposed to do until the sheriff returns?’

‘My Lord, I—’

‘This, I take it, is the sheriff’s house?’

‘It is, my Lord, but—’

‘I believe… I do believe that I was told by my clerks that I’d be lying here for the duration of the trial.’ Legge’s voice seemed to prick at words like a bodkin. ‘I do believe that I was told that. Now you are the…’ He flicked a wrist, with impatience. ‘…local man, I forget—’

‘Vaughan, my Lord.’

‘Vaughan, yes. Well, perhaps you could go back, Vaughan, and tell the sheriff’s servants to throw open the sheriff’s doors. And the sheriff’s gates. And’ – he leaned forward, to the side of his horse’s head, peered down at Vaughan, his voice brought down to a hiss – ‘get us the hell out of this human dungheap.’

‘I’ll do that now,’ Vaughan said.

‘Good of you.’

The sky was like to dark purple silk, all stretched. Legge leaned back in his saddle and looked up at it, with irritation, as if he might deflate it with his bodkin.

‘I do believe it’s about to rain,’ he said.

And, by God, he was not wrong.

XX Old Itch

IT WAS AS if the sky had split like a rotted water butt, releasing the kind of rain that joins clothing to skin in seconds. A rain that blinds. We watched its torrent in the milken glass in the parlour at the rear of the Bull Inn, forming rivers on the sills, dripping to the flags.

It was not yet five in the afternoon. The splattered street empty now.

According to Vaughan, the Bull was the best of the seven inns of Presteigne. Dudley and I had been told we’d have to share a bedchamber though not, I’d been glad to discover, a bed. A back parlour, plain but well-scrubbed, had been given over for our use and that of some attorneys who were not accommodated at the sheriff’s house. Including Vaughan who came to join Dudley and me and a jug of small beer, explaining that the more senior lawyers were presently taking instruction from Legge.

‘Evidently he wasn’t expecting that,’ Dudley said. ‘I mean the crowd – not the weather.’

‘Nor I, Master Roberts,’ Vaughan said. ‘For which I’ll be held responsible for sure.’

I said, ‘You’re here to smooth the judge’s path? Interpret the ways of local people?’

‘Sent to him by one of my tutors. And making a cock of it.’

‘Not the way of the Border, is it?’ I said. ‘All this fanfare.’

‘We don’t normally make a big noise about anything,’ Vaughan said, letting the border into his voice. ‘And we don’t take sides till we knows who’ll win.’

Well, I knew this – less from my father than my dealings with Cecil and, in particular, Blanche Parry, who’d walk thrice around some matter before dropping hints as to where she stood on it. And even then you wouldn’t really know.

‘This town’s changed, see,’ Vaughan said. ‘New wealth and most of it from England. Big families in the wool trade come in from Ludlow. Experts in cloth-making brought from Flanders. And all the money from the Great Sessions – bedchambers and good food and wine for the lawyers and the judges. Like I say, it en’t England… but it en’t Wales either.’ He lifted his cup, about to drink then lowered it again. ‘As for free pies, free fruit…’

‘Free?’

‘A fresh mutton pie buys a good helping of merry cheer. In place of fear.’

He looked over to the window. A pool was spreading on the flags where rain was oozing between two badly-set panes. Dudley leaned forward on the bench.

‘You’re saying the merchants and the clothiers paid for that show of welcome for Legge? So he doesn’t think he’s come into a hostile Wales?’

‘He’s here to scratch a twenty-year-old itch, is what it is. Quick trial, nice long hanging.’

‘Itch?’

I recalled what Bishop Scory had said about the biggest hanging party he’d seen hereabouts. Vaughan blinked.

‘You do know, I take it, why the Sessions came to Presteigne?’

‘Should we?’ I said.

Preparing myself. Seemed to me that the Welsh border was like to a clinging midden, rotting history into legend so the twain could not easily be separated.

‘Twenty years ago,’ Vaughan said, ‘all the courts were held at Rhayader. Out west.’

He looked at me in query. I’d never been to Rhayader, but knew of it. A town on the edge of the bandit-riddled wilderness which Vaughan said now had been more or less ruled by the brigand gang, Plant Mat.

There had been some resentment, it seemed, over the way justice was administered by the English judiciary, with only English spoken in court.

Plant Mat fed upon it.

Vaughan talked about the year 1540, four years after the Act of Union, when Plant Mat, lodged in the neighbouring county of Cardigan, were extorting regular payments from landowners to the west of Rhayader.

‘If you didn’t pay up they’d burn your winter straw. And if that didn’t work it’d come to blood. Your stock then your family.’

I marked the suppressed rage roiling in Dudley’s eyes as Vaughan talked about a judge sent to Rhayader for the Sessions. An old man and devout. He’d ride to church before taking his seat in the court. One morning they were waiting for him in an oak grove by the river.

Plant Mat.

‘Took him down,’ Vaughan said. ‘Murdered him.’

‘The King’s justice?’ Dudley finally driven to outrage. ‘Was there no retribution for that?’

‘They knew where to hide, Master Roberts. It’s their country. There may’ve been a hanging or two, but no one knew if they’d got the judge’s killer. After that, it was deemed unsafe for judges to sit at Rhayader.’

‘Driven out? Bowing to this scum?’

‘So that was why the court was moved here. To the softer lands on the edge of England.’

‘And this man Gethin is the leader of Plant Mat. Where’s he caged?’

‘A dungeon at New Radnor Castle. Not much left of the castle since the Glyndwr wars, but still the safest prison we have.’

‘About an hour’s ride?’ I said.

‘If that. But they en’t gonner do it in this weather. They’ll want to see where they’re going, and who else is on the road. Or in the hills. If the rain en’t over well before nightfall, they’ll fetch him on the morrow. Won’t please Sir Christopher if it prolongs his stay, but what can they do?’

‘The Queen’s judiciary running in fear of petty outlaws?’ Dudley sat shaking his head in disgust. ‘Am I alone here in finding that a complete humiliation?’

‘This place might look like England, Master Roberts,’ Vaughan said. ‘But it en’t.’

‘Give us time, Vaughan.’

Dudley smiled, and I sighed and poured more beer for us all.

‘Prys Gethin, Master Vaughan… Prys the Terrible, Prys the Fierce… is that his real name?’

‘Probably some puny little turd with a withered arm,’ Dudley said.

‘Two good arms, Master Roberts,’ Vaughan said, ‘but only the one eye. His real name… well, who can say? But clearly he’s too young to be the son or even the grandson of Rhys Gethin.’

Dudley looked blank-faced for a moment as the association of names registered upon him.

‘Prys, Mr Roberts. Ap Rhys. Son of Rhys? Dr Dee your house – your family home, Nant-y-groes… under Brynglas? The hill of Pilleth?’

‘Christ’s blood, Vaughan…’ Dudley slammed down his beermug. ‘The Battle of Pilleth?

I didn’t share Dudley’s fascination with all manner of mortal conflict, human and animal, but I knew that an army hurriedly raised by Edmund Mortimer, the Marcher Lord, had been outwitted and crushed by the Welsh, with terrible carnage.

But all this was a century and a half ago.

‘They’re yet finding the remains of the Pilleth dead,’ Vaughan said. ‘Turned up by the plough. A dark place, it is. Holds terrors yet. I don’t much like where I live, but I’d not live there.’

‘And which side,’ Dudley asked me, head atilt, ‘was your father’s family supporting, John? I do believe the Dees were there at the time?’

Oh yes, they must have been there. But, God help me, I didn’t know which side they’d been on or if any of them had died in the Battle of Pilleth.

‘Hill of ghosts,’ Vaughan said. ‘I’ve heard it called that.’

I wondered which side his family had been on. He sounded Welsh, spoke Welsh and yet the house, Hergest Court, was, if only by a short distance, in England.

‘Beg mercy,’ I said, ‘but I don’t yet understand how this is linked with Prys Gethin. Glyndwr’s long gone. There’s no Welsh army any more.’

‘Not as such, no.’ Vaughan drank some beer, wiped his mouth. ‘But the ole Welsh families who ran with Glyndwr… they still dream. And some still hate the English. And don’t feel obliged to live by English laws. Plant Mat, see, the first of them were likely men who ran with Glyndwr’s army and, for them, it was never gonner be over. And as Glyndwr’s general – the man leading the Welsh in the rout of the English on Brynglas – as his name was Rhys Gethin. See?’

The cold rain rolled down the panes, and only Dudley laughed.

‘Small-time outlaw affecting the name of a famous warlord? Shrouding himself in old myth to frighten the peasants?’

No smile from Vaughan. The boy sat silent, watching the unceasing violence of water on ill-fitting glass. Me? I understood at once what local superstition this would arouse and didn’t feel it misplaced. The land remembers. Only wished now that I’d listened harder to my father’s tales, asked a few more questions. But then, I never thought I’d ever come here. I sought to quench it, all the same.

‘One hundred and fifty years ago. This man must needs be… what… a great-grandson?’

‘Or no relation at all, more like. Just a man who wants folk to think him possessed of a vengeful and still-active spirit.’ Vaughan fingered his sparse gingery beard as if there was more he might say about active spirits. ‘The thought of Gethin returned to the place where he slaughtered a thousand English – even if he’s in chains – is bound to cause unrest among the local folk. Not that it frightens the wool merchants. But they weren’t raised yere.’

‘And the judges from Ludlow and Shrewsbury fear only for their lives,’ I said. ‘After what happened twenty years ago.’

‘Legge, however,’ Dudley said, ‘comes with sixty armed guards and has no fear that can’t be overridden by his ambition. But you’re right, only a good hanging can end this.’

Vaughan slumped in a corner of the parlour settle.

‘You think?’

A cattle raid one full-moon night in the Irfon Valley, the other side of Radnor Forest. This was how they’d caught him.

Been a few raids, and all the talk was of Plant Mat, so the local squires banded together and had all their men out – farm hands and shepherds, pigmen and rickmen. Long nights waiting in the woods, all armed with axes and pitchforks and clubs. The Plant Mat raiders, when they came, were badly outnumbered and taken by surprise, for once, and fled into the hills.

Except for their leader who caught his foot in a root and twisted his ankle, and the farmers’ boys were on him. Two of the squires were summoned from their beds and came out and beat him about before having him tied, hand and foot, to a cart.

‘They know who he was?’ Dudley asked.

‘They did when he told them. Stood there all bloody and told them his brothers would pay them well if they let him go. He’d get a message back and they’d arrange an exchange, and they’d be rich men and their stock would be safe forever.’

‘Tempting,’ I said, ‘for a border farmer.’

‘But an insult to a squire,’ Vaughan said. ‘These two, they both knew what had happened over at Rhayader, when Plant Mat were taking a slice of the farmers’ meat in return for not firing their buildings. Forever’s no more’n a year in Wales. You make a deal with these brigands, they leave you alone for a few months, then they’re back, and worse.’

‘Never bargain with scum,’ Dudley said.

All they did, Vaughan said, was to have Prys Gethin tied tighter and gagged him so they didn’t have to listen to any more of his babble. And then… a triumphal torchlight procession through the hills of Radnor Forest.

‘The new sheriff, Evan Lewis, he lives at Gladestry, which was along the route, and they sent ahead to have him roused. And Evan Lewis joined them on the road to New Radnor Castle, where Prys Gethin was dragged down from the cart. Standing there, under the full moon, they were in high spirits, mabbe a bit drunk. As you might well be if you’d brought the bane of Radnorshire to justice.’

One of the squires, Thomas Harris by name, had stepped up and spat in the prisoner’s eye. Well, not in his eye, exactly, as Gethin only had the one. What Harris spat into was the shrivelled skin around the empty socket of the eye that was gone.

Prys Gethin had not wiped it away. Although he could have done. They saw his hands were freed from their bonds. How was that possible?

Vaughan drank some beer and was silent for a moment, as if unsure how the rest would be received.

‘Stood there, blood and spit on his cheeks. Pointed at the two squires who’d beaten him, tied him down, spat into his eye socket. Stood there in the light of the full moon and cursed them by turn, low in his voice, pointing with a curled finger.’

‘Cursed in Welsh?’ Dudley looked unimpressed. ‘Terrifying.’

But I noticed Vaughan’s eyes and the bleak way he was staring into his beer.

‘Within a month,’ he said, ‘Thomas Harris was dead of a fever that came overnight. And the other, Hywel Griffiths, he drowned in the river, when a new footbridge collapsed in high wind.’

I hoped Dudley would not laugh, and he didn’t. I’d be the last to deny the power of a curse, especially if the victim knows he’s cursed.

‘This wind,’ Vaughan said, ‘was sudden, fierce and unnaturally short-lived. Came and went in a matter of minutes. Taking with it the little bridge and a man’s life.’

‘And another myth was born,’ Dudley said sourly.

‘Myth?’ Roger Vaughan, for all his schooling in London and Oxford, was a man of the border yet, his accent strengthening with his anger. ‘That’s how you sees it, is it, Master Roberts?’

‘So’ – I broke in – ‘the charges will be cattle-thieving…’

‘And witchcraft,’ Vaughan said. ‘Murder by witchcraft.’

Ha. So this was where Scory came in. What evidence, I wondered, would he give to strengthen the case against this felon?

‘Not easy to prove,’ I said. ‘Not these days.’

The last Witchcraft Act, introduced by King Henry, having been repealed after his death. Everyone had expected it to be replaced by something less random, but it hadn’t happened yet, whatever Jack Simm might say about the Queen’s need to prove that she was not like her mother. Goodwife Faldo had been on firm ground when she’d said, in Mortlake Church, that she no longer feared imprisonment for inviting a scryer into her house.

But where a death was involved… well, I’d heard of cases where evidence of circumstance had been enough to hang a woman – it was usually a woman – where proof of dark threats had been given. And fear of witchcraft would never go away. Even in London, there would have been unrest under these circumstances. Out here, with all the terror of the Glyndwr war yet within local memory, it would have a considerable power to disturb.

‘Glyndwr studied magic,’ I said.

Vaughan was nodding.

‘And is said to have used it with clear intent, Dr Dee. As you likely know, it was said he could arouse spirits to change the weather – arouse storms and the like – to gain advantage on the battlefield.’

‘So a sudden wind blowing down a footbridge,’ Dudley said. ‘would suggest this man was simply calling on the same dark powers?’

‘Not too difficult to make out a case for it, Master Roberts.’

‘Especially before a man of Legge’s abilities,’ I said. ‘Was Rhys Gethin said to have dark powers?’

‘I don’t know. He was killed in battle three years after Pilleth.’ Vaughan drained his cup. ‘But what a victory that was. Against all odds. And he was Glyndwr’s best general. And they did burn down the church of the Holy Virgin before the battle. Oh God, it’s all a nest of wasps.’

‘So you’re saying the local judges… might be in fear for more than their lives?’

‘Like I said, Dr Dee, this en’t England. And it definitely en’t London. Although Plant Mat’s never been known to work so far east, the guard’s yere to make sure Sir Christopher Legge stays safe before and during the trial. And the hanging, if he stays for it.

‘As for any kind of danger that don’t involve physical attack…’

‘Legge has fairly advanced Lutheran leanings, as I understand it,’ Dudley said. ‘The Lutheran scholars are in the process of effecting a severe reduction of what we’re allowed to be afraid of.’

‘Aye, and the handful of men who own this town now are all firm reformers, too.’ Vaughan stood up, peered at the window. ‘It en’t stopping, is it? Better face the wrath of Sir Christopher. Tell him his trial en’t gonner start tomorrow.’

He flinched, as did I, at a sudden cracking of glass. The loose pane had fallen from its leading, or been blasted out by the force of the rain, and now smashed on the flooded stone flag. Shards of glass were skittering through the spill, as a second pane fell out.

‘I’ll send the innkeeper,’ Vaughan said. ‘If I can find him.’

None of us had commented on the uncommon ferocity of the rain which looked like preventing the sheriff bringing Prys Gethin from New Radnor this night.

It had, after all, been a wet summer.

XXI Rowly’s Boy

COLD IN THE parlour now, with that jagged hole in the window and water beginning to pool around Dudley’s fine riding boots. When we were alone, he stood up, regarding me sideways, dark eyes aslant.

‘I don’t think… that should we get involved in this, John.’

‘Did I suggest we might?’

He snorted like a stallion.

‘You eel! I was watching your face. All that talk of Glyndwr’s magic and altering the weather and the curse of Prys Gethin? John Dee in the land of Merlin? A pig in shit. As for this boy Vaughan…’

‘Mmm.’ I nodded. ‘He’s sitting on eggs. He’s a lawyer, but also border-raised, and he doesn’t think free pies can cure fear. Mortimer’s army would have been drawn from places like Presteigne. The presence in the town of another Gethin…’

‘So called. And in chains.’

‘Freed himself from his bonds on the road to New Radnor,’ I said. ‘So that he was able to point the finger in malevolence…’

‘Jesu, don’t you start.’ Dudley rubbed his hands together to make heat. ‘Gives me shivers, this place, somehow, even more than Glastonbury. How far to Wigmore from here?’

‘Seven miles. Eight? You weren’t thinking of riding there in this?’

‘First light, I was thinking,’ Dudley said. ‘Assuming we aren’t all drowned by then.’

I shook my head.

‘No real use in riding out to Wigmore until we have a better idea of exactly what we’re looking for. I gather there are people we might talk to in this town first.’

It was the first chance I’d had to tell him what I’d learned from John Scory in Hereford. Dudley listened without interruption, only the occasional raised eyebrow.

‘You saying the Bishop of Hereford knew of the stone?’

‘But not where it is – or the former abbot. But he did say Presteigne would be a good place to start looking. Not least because much of the property here once belonged to the abbey.’

‘And then gathered in by the Crown, and the Crown would sell it off. I don’t see how there’d be a connection any more.’

‘Just telling you what he said. He also thought it worth talking to my cousin Nicholas Meredith. Who also seems to be a substantial property owner.’

I was recalling how Scory had laughed on learning that Meredith was my cousin, when a man appeared in the doorway, bearing a broom and glowering at the remains of the window.

‘God’s blood! Profuse apologies, my masters. The glazier’s art is yet in its infancy round yere.’

He began sweeping the shards of glass into a corner with his broom, then gave up and tossed the broom across the parlour.

‘I’ll have it shuttered. He’ll not get paid for this.’ Wiping his wet hands on his apron, straightening up and jabbing a thumb at his chest. ‘Jeremy Martin. Keeper of this inn.’

A powerfully built man of late middle-years. Dense grey hair winged back behind his ears.

‘Least there’ll be no broken glass in your bedchamber this night, my masters.’

‘Although wouldn’t that be because it’s yet without any kind of glass?’ Dudley said.

Jeremy Martin grinned.

‘On the list, that is. Glass in all the windows next year, sure to be. Proper glass. I en’t been yere long enough to do all as needs doing, but this’ll be the finest inn in the west ’fore long. Can I replenish your jug, my masters? On the house?’ Picking up the beer jug, he sniffed it with suspicion. ‘Holy blood, you’re drinking ale! You have a flagon of my ole cider, masters, and I’ll tell you, you en’t gonner go back to this bat’s piss in a hurry.’

Dudley looked pained. One virtue of high social status, he’d been known to remark, was that it spared you the crude predations of the serving classes.

‘Master Martin,’ I said, ‘would you happen to know where we might find Nicholas Meredith?’

‘Won’t be far away. He’s in town. Friend of yours?’

‘My cousin.’

‘You’re his cousin? From London? You en’t a lawyer, then?’

‘I… No. Not as such.’

Martin took a step back into the pooled water, inspecting me from head to feet and back again.

‘Holy blood! You en’t…?’ His eyes widened, and then his arms were thrown wide as if he’d embrace me. ‘Rowly Dee’s boy? The man who… Holy blood…’

‘You knew my father?’

‘Rowland Dee? All the talk was about him at one time. How close he was to the ole King. How well-favoured. And now it’s his son and the ole King’s daughter. Holy blood! I tell you… Master Meredith, when the pamphlets come from London after the crowning, he’s in yere reading it all out. His uncle’s boy calculing the stars for the new queen. Well, well… Do he know you’re yere?’

‘I wrote to him but… no, he doesn’t. Not yet.’

‘Aye, I thought… He’d known you was coming, we’d never’ve yeard the last of it. So you en’t nothing to do with the judge?’

I assured him we were merely travelling with the judge’s company, while inspecting manuscripts from disassembled libraries. Taking the opportunity to make a visit to my family’s old home.

‘Nant-y-groes? Master Stephen Price, he’s there now, see. You know Master Price? He was down London. MP for Radnorshire.’

‘Why’s he living at Nant-y-groes?’

‘Building a new home down the valley, by the ole monastery grange. Gotter keep his family somewhere, meanwhile.’

‘So he’s only renting it.’

‘Master Nick likely owns it yet.’

‘And much of this town?’

‘Not as much as Master Bradshaw – big wool merchant.’ Jeremy Martin beamed. ‘Wool, cloth and the law, my masters. As good a foundation as you’ll find anywhere. Used to be religion, now it’s wool, cloth and the law.’

The rain stopped not long before twilight. Within half an hour, a piercing red sun lit the street, and Dudley and I walked out into a town that you could feel to be growing around you.

Signs of building on a scale I hadn’t encountered since leaving Cecil’s house in the Strand. Piles of bricks everywhere and frames of green oak for new houses. Poke into any alleyway, and you’d find old barns and outhouses being converted into business premises.

We edged around a puddle the size of a duckpond, the sun floating there like an orange.

‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘why this town makes you shiver.’

Dudley looked across the street where the ground rose towards a castle, fallen into ruin on its green mound, much of its stone already plundered.

‘I do mistrust sudden wealth.’

‘As distinct from inherited wealth?’

He didn’t rise to that. The sun spread a glowing hearthlight over a wall of new brick, and a stout man in clerk’s apparel crossed the street in front of us, bearing a pile of leather-bound documents.

‘It’s in a hurry, this town, to leave something behind,’ Dudley said. ‘Don’t you feel that?’

‘Poverty, perhaps?’

He eyed me.

‘Why so frivolous tonight?’

‘That’s frivolous?’

Dudley frowned. The ostler, who’d stabled our horses, led two more past us towards the entrance to the mews at the side of the Bull. It was not hard to imagine my tad here, carousing with his friends on the hot summer nights of old. I felt sad.

‘Tell me about Cumnor Place,’ I said.

No reply. Doors were opening, people threatening to throng the streets. I waited until we could no longer hear the clitter of hooves.

‘Better here than back at the inn,’ I said. ‘You never know who’s listening at the door of a bedchamber.’

We’d come to the corner of the wide street leading down to the church and the sheriff’s house. All was yet quiet here. If they’d brought Prys Gethin from New Radnor, another crowd would have formed in no time, but the street was empty. At the bottom, just past the church, a stone bridge over the river carried a narrow road into the hills, where a castle occupied a gap in the forest. Probably back in England.

‘I don’t know what to do about it,’ Dudley said.

‘About what… exactly?’

He stopped, glanced behind him to where the lurid sun was down on the horizon, poking through the layered clouds like the tip of a tongue betwixt reddened lips.

‘The murder of my wife. Beyond all doubt, now.’

XXII So She Wouldn’t Die

CUMNOR PLACE. BARELY three miles from Oxford. Hardly a demanding ride from Kew. And now his wife was dead and buried Dudley had finally made the journey.

I wondered how he’d felt, but didn’t ask.

The house was a century old, but recently made modern by Dudley’s friend and his wife’s last host, Anthony Forster. It had been divided into a number of fine apartments, one of which had become the home of Amy Dudley.

Ten years of marriage, no country house of her own and unwelcome in London town – so that the Queen could pretend she didn’t exist.

Not that she was alone at Cumnor. There were retainers, perhaps half a dozen of them. A small, itinerant household.

So where was this retinue on the day of Amy’s death?

Why… at the local fair.

Amy, it seemed, had ordered everyone – everyone, women and men – to go to the fair. Would hear no word of dissent.

I’d heard about this before and had not liked what it implied.

It had been a Sunday and the day after the Queen’s twenty-seventh birthday which Dudley, who arranged the festivities, might have claimed was also his. For his wife’s birthday, he would have sent a present.

My mother had heard gossip in Mortlake village about Amy being so stricken with darkness of mind over her husband’s neglect that she’d oft-times determined to make away with herself. And yet, not so very long before that, she seemed in good heart. Dudley had been told of a letter, dated August 24, which she’d sent to her London tailor, William Edney, with instructions for the styling of a velvet gown. She was not frugal with her clothing, having spent nearly fifty shillings on a Spanish gown of russet damask, and she urged Edney to make haste to get the latest gown to her.

Had she really wanted a new gown in which to throw herself down eight steps to a far from certain death?

Yes… a mere eight stone steps, and not even a straight flight – a bend in it, apparently.

The only sequence of events I could imagine begins in an instant of blinding despair, as Amy stands at the top of the stairs, maybe with an image all aflame in her mind of Dudley and Elizabeth dancing together on their birthday… and in her anguish she hurls herself, with some violence, from the top step to the stone flags below.

Which sat well with her ordering of everyone to the fair, so that she might be alone. No one to stop her.

‘Broken her neck.’ Dudley gazing down the sloping street and doubtless seeing stairs stretching away into a black mist. ‘That’s what I was told. What everyone was told. Including Tom Blount.’

His steward, whom he’d sent to Cumnor in his place, so that he might not be seen as attempting to interfere with the inquiry.

‘You thought she’d killed herself?’ I said.

‘My first thought, yes.’

‘Because she didn’t want to stand in your way.’

His eyes closed.

‘Yet you told me earlier this year that she believed herself mortally ill.’

‘From what she told me. But what if she was lying?’

I thought that if a wife of mine had suggested she was dying of some malady, I’d not leave her side. Must needs stop thinking like this. I was not Robert Dudley. Had never been blinded by an all-consuming sense of destiny.

There was yet more to this. Some private matter which, even as one of Dudley’s oldest friends, I’d never be told. Nor should be, I supposed.

‘Did you tell the Queen what Amy said?’

In my head the voice of Bishop Bonner.

… heard that, some days before your friend Dudley was widowed, the Queen confided to the esteemed Spanish ambassador, Bishop la Quadra, that Lady Dudley would very soon be departing this life.

Dudley having told her was the only reason I could think of for the Queen’s terrifying foresight. The only reason I dare allow myself to think of.

No reply. He’d gone to sit on the remains of a stone wall, where part of an old house was being taken down.

‘Blount told me a report had been written about the state of the… of Amy’s body. He couldn’t get a sight of the document.’

‘When it’s put before the coroner, its content should be made public.’

‘When… No date’s set for the resumption of the inquest. Knew I could demand to see it, though. If I pulled rank.’

‘And you thought that wise?’

‘God no. Didn’t even try. But did have a quiet meeting with Anthony Forster. Well, if it was your house, you’d want to know everything, wouldn’t you?’

Forster, of course, had not been there either when Amy died but, yes, he’d want to know.

‘We arrived the day after two servants had seen her ghost at the top of the stairs. Forster said the rest of them were afraid to go into that part of the house, day or night.’

‘But you went there.’

‘Oh yes. I saw the place. The chances of falling to your death from those stairs are… slight.’

‘But her neck was—’

‘Broken, yes. And she was found at the bottom of the stairs. But there were…’ He thought for a moment. ‘What’s never been talked about is that there were other injuries. Dints. In her head. Which may have been caused by hitting the stone, but one was a good two inches deep. What does that suggest to you?’

‘Something sharp. Maybe the sharp edge of a stair?’

Had the feeling I was clutching at reeds here.

‘Oh, John, come on…’

‘It might also suggest she was struck. A two-inch dint… speaks to me of a blow from a… a sword blade.’

‘If you saw that stair, then you’d know nothing else explains it. And yet… Tom Blount says he understands, from his inquiries, that the jury is not disposed to see evidence of evil.’

Dudley stood up and faced what remained of the sun. I only hoped he wasn’t seeing it as I was. The clouds like reddened lips had become the slit of an open wound, so that the sun – a sun which this day had scarce lived – looked to be dying in an ooze of sticky blood.

I said, ‘Anyone seeing the entire household, apart from Amy, at the fair… would have a good idea that she was alone. Might this be a robbery? Was anything taken?’

‘No. I’m telling you, somebody killed her, John. Somebody went into Cumnor to kill her. No doubt left.’

His face looked very dark against the low light. The gipsy, they called him, those who sought to dishonour him, and the change wrought by the butchery to his beard and moustache made this seem not unjust. Without those trademark facial twirls, even a friend might take some time to recognise Lord Dudley.

‘Let’s bring this into the air,’ I said. ‘You think someone killed her to damage you.’

‘I know it.’

‘Who?’

‘Make a list.’

‘But if it was someone who wanted to make sure you would not wed the Queen, surely it were better than Amy lived.’

‘Ah, well, you would think that, wouldn’t you? But then… perhaps you wouldn’t.’

He turned sharply and began to walk quickly away, back along the route we’d come, across the street towards the castle mound, me striding after him.

And then he called back, over a shoulder,

‘Suppose someone killed her… so she wouldn’t die?’

‘What?’

He stopped, panting, at the foot of the castle mound.

‘Yes, all right… I may have told Bess what Amy had said. About having a mortal illness. Maybe a sickness of the breast, I don’t know exactly what I said. But why the hell she had to tell that scheming bastard la Quadra, who yet wants her for the King of Spain… or some muffin appointed by Spain to snatch England back for Rome…’

‘She’d have told the Spanish ambassador simply to give Spain the message that marriage to you might no longer be out of the question. She probably regretted it as soon as it was out.’

Both of us knowing the Queen was sometimes inclined to speak with insufficient forethought, even on matters of world significance.

‘And meanwhile la Quadra blabs,’ Dudley said. ‘The man has a mouth like a slop pail. How many people have told you what the Queen said?’

He’d started to climb the castle mound between shadowy stacks of broken masonry and bushes of broom and gorse, snatching at handfuls of grass, calling back at me.

‘Jesu, John, are you not seeing this yet? If my wife had died of natural cause…’

Close to dark now, bats flittering overhead, and…

… and dear God, yes, I was seeing it now. I followed him up the mound, tripping over a slab of masonry, picking myself up, my hands slimed with mud and dew, Dudley shouting back at me, too loud.

‘If it was a natural cause, then I’d be not only free but blameless.’

Yes. For his enemies, the worst of all situations. So if Amy was to die in an unnatural way before her time – however short that time might be…

I reached the flattened top of the mound just as the last of the sun, dull as an old coin, slid down into the western hills. Soot-dark hills which gave a sense of the real Wales, its isolation, its secrecy.

… killed… so she wouldn’t die.

God…

Dudley was facing me with hands on hips.

‘If her death is unnatural, then I’m yet free but, in most people’s eyes, far from blameless. Even if nothing can be proved against me.’

‘What are you going to do, Robbie?’

‘Try not to get killed as well, I suppose. A good many men would feel justified in doing it, if I’m seen to have escaped justice for the wilful murder of my wife.’

If someone had killed Amy expecting Dudley to be held responsible and then to walk away in shame, retire to the country to live out his years in the comparative seclusion of the English squirearchy… then they knew him not as I did.

He ran fingers across the wreckage of his beard.

‘Life seems as dark to me now as when I was in the Tower awaiting the block.’

‘But if you were to find out who killed Amy…?’

‘How? Through a fucking shewstone?’ He raised both hands. ‘Ah… mercy. Look… even if it were possible to discover the killer, it would rather depend, methinks, on who it was.’

There were names I wouldn’t say out loud beyond the walls of my own home. What a wasp’s nest this country was become.

It was cold on that mound. I knew not who’d built the castle or who had destroyed it – maybe Glyndwr. But there was a feeling of hostility here; we were not wanted. I looked down at Presteigne. How tidily it sat. Glimmerings, as tapers were lit behind the windows of the wealthy.

‘Let’s go back,’ Dudley said.

I followed him, feeling sad to the soul. What if Amy had been lying about her illness to see what response she’d get from Dudley? What if she was suffering from no more than a malady of the mind, grown out of a profound loneliness?

A plea for love answered by death.

XXIII Dark Alleys

WE WALKED BACK into the town, me in a grey fog, to find that a crowd was gathered around the sheriff’s house. Pitch torches blazed either side of the gates, their reflected flames riffling like lilies on the puddles where a group of men had dismounted, ostlers hurrying to take the horses.

The sheriff’s company was back and without Prys Gethin. I saw Vaughan addressed by a red-faced man in a muddied jerkin and moved closer to listen.

‘… his humour, Roger?’

Vaughan muttered something, and the red-faced man groaned, threw up his hands, then turned and addressed the crowd.

‘Too foul, it is, see. Not safe to make the journey before nightfall. Not with a prisoner the Welsh want back.’

Evidently this year’s sheriff, Evan Lewis. His promise to ride out again to New Radnor on the morrow brought a sour response, a man asking, with sarcasm, what would happen if it was pissing down again.

‘Let him go, is it, Evan, so he’ll catch a cold?’

A rope of damp pennants fell from the darkening sky, evidently cut down. Made a mocking garland around the sheriff’s hat, Lewis wrenching it away, shouting over a river of laughter.

‘We’ll hold the trial at New Radnor, then. That what you want? Is it?’

I turned to Dudley.

‘That even possible?’

‘He’s jesting. You think he’d deprive the goodfolk of Presteigne of an entertainment they’d waited twenty years for?’

‘This talk of curses…’

‘Talk of curses? God’s bollocks, John, looks to me that Plant Mat’s brought nothing but good fortune to this town. Given it the Great Sessions, and now a good hanging? They should throw a feast for the bastard before he dangles.’

I’d found it interesting, though, the way the sheriff had said the Welsh wanted Gethin back. As if it was accepted that Presteigne was not truly Wales. Admittedly, we hadn’t been long in the town, but I’d yet to hear someone speak the language.

Evan Lewis, scowling, passed through his own gates to face the judge. Dudley turned away, in the direction of the Bull, and I was about to follow him, when someone stepped purposefully between us.

‘Dr Dee?’

By a torch’s fizzing light, I marked a man of about my own height, perhaps a few years older and fairer of hair and skin. Clad as a country gentleman in fine leather jerkin and boots that stood well in foot-deep puddles.

‘Nicholas Meredith,’ he said.

‘My God, we were trying to find you…’

I held out my hand; he didn’t take it, and it was knocked aside by a fellow pushing past. Nicholas Meredith braced himself against the sheriff’s wall. I smiled.

‘Good to meet you at last, cousin.’

‘I received a letter from you this morning, Dr Dee.’ The border accent was in his voice, but so also was an education. ‘Replying to it at once, with proper civility.’

‘Well, yes—’

‘Evidently a waste of my time. Why would you write to me, knowing you were coming here? And saying nothing of that.’

‘Cousin Nicholas, I wrote before I knew I’d be coming.’

Telling him about the providence of the judicial company. Thinking he’d understood when the dazzle of the pitch torch made it seem as if he was smiling.

In fact he was not.

‘You’ve made me look a fool, Dr Dee. Fetching up without a word, taking a chamber at my inn.’

‘Your inn? I didn’t even know that. We were simply told it was the best inn in Presteigne. My…’ I made a gesture towards Dudley. ‘This is my colleague, Master Roberts, an antiquary. We were both—’

‘Your letter’ – my cousin didn’t even look at Dudley – ‘suggests you’re here in search of treasure.’

‘Of a kind.’

‘Well, well…’ Nicholas Meredith jutted his chin. His short beard was combed to an elegant point. ‘How like your father.’

No mistaking his expression this time; I’d seen too many sneers. A low growl from Dudley.

‘That knave,’ my cousin Meredith said.

I had no response, was held in shock. Not two hours ago, the innkeeper had talked of my cousin’s pride in my father’s position at King Henry’s court. All the talk was about him. And me too. All this man’s letters to me had been invariably cordial.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said at last. ‘The innkeeper said you spoke well of my father. How close he was to the old king.’

‘I’m sure he was,’ Nicholas Meredith said. ‘Close enough to pocket the spoons.’

A long hissing breath came out of Dudley, but he was yet ignored. A few men had made a half circle around us, in the way that men do, scenting the approach of violence. Meredith raised his tone.

‘You think we’re so removed from London, Dr Dee, that we hear nothing of what goes on there? You think we know nothing of your father’s crimes? You think we weren’t dishonoured by him?’

‘I know not what you’re—’

‘In your ill-writ letter,’ my cousin said, ‘you ask if I know of the whereabouts of a gemstone, formerly the property of the Abbey of Wigmore. Possibly misappropriated. Hah, methinks, how can this man talk so loftily about the misappropriation of church treasures when his own father—’

‘My father was a kind man,’ I said softly. ‘A generous man.’

‘Particularly with the property of others.’

I’m not good at conflict, have no ready store of oiled ripostes. I stood in silence, aware of a greater gathering of onlookers and Dudley at my shoulder.

‘Forgive me for intruding, John, but why don’t we just beat the piss out of this muffin?’

I could feel how badly Dudley wanted this to become a fight, if only to relieve himself of weeks of stored-up rage. And still, Nicholas Meredith behaved as if he wasn’t there.

‘Were you about to deny that Rowland Dee, when churchwarden at St Dunstan’s in London, stole church plates left in his charge?’

Dudley’s right hand was at his belt, where he’d keep a dagger.

‘No,’ I said quietly.

Dudley stiffened. Nicholas Meredith smiled.

‘You asked about Abbot Smart? My letter, when you receive it on your return, will tell you he’s long gone. Probably into France. You’ll learn that nobody here has seen him for years. So if you’ve somewhere else on your treasure-hunting itinerary, I suggest you depart for it at first light.’

As he turned away, my hose was soaked at the groin by a splash of fire-bright water thrown up by his boot.

In my haste to avoid a further exchange, I’d walked the wrong way, and we found ourselves down by the church and the river. A mean river compared with the Wye, and the bridge was wooden and creaked when I stood upon it, but at least we seemed to be alone.

‘… doesn’t matter if it’s true,’ Dudley was hissing. ‘You don’t let any man who spoke thus walk away undamaged.’

‘It does matter,’ I said. ‘Matters to me. My father sullied his status as churchwarden at St Dunstan’s. He sold plate that certainly wasn’t his to sell. He’d lost his place at court and his business was ruined – through no fault of his own, I’d guess. I’m sure he… would have made good, when his fortunes improved.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, John, every family has some knavery to hide.’

I looked down at the moonlit river, swollen by the downpour and not far below the bridge timbers.

‘He was not a thief. He was a proud man. And he paid for the best education I could’ve had. I wish I’d been able to earn enough money to ease his old age. But he died. And now I don’t earn enough to support my mother in the way she once was used to.’

‘You’ve not done badly under the circumstances. Given that he doesn’t seem to have left you any money… or even a house.’

‘He left me an education.’

‘Which you spend all your life expanding. Is that life? Come on, let’s get back. See how this looks in daylight.’

Dudley began to walk back up the street, quieter now, fewer lights.

‘I no longer feel happy to pass the night in my cousin’s inn,’ I said.

‘We’ll we’re not spending it in a fucking field. Besides, another word with the smarmy innkeeper might not go amiss, methinks.’

‘Why would he lie?’

‘It’s what innkeepers do when you’re paying for meals and a bedchamber. But it would be worth finding out if Meredith’s been blackening your name all over town.’

Only two of the judge’s guards stood, with their pikes, outside the sheriff’s house. No one troubling them. The pitch-torches were burned low, the ropes of pennants gathering into loops and thrown over the wall.

Near the top of the street a man walked past us and sniggered. Dudley lurched towards him, and I seized his arm.

‘No—’

‘You want a reputation as a fucking Betsy by morning, John?’

‘Must needs think.’

‘Or will we even still be here by morning? Think? Well, of course. Why don’t you consult one of your books on how best to respond to an insult to your family?’

Never going to let this go, was he? But I was thinking of something else.

‘He said Abbot Smart had not been seen here in years. That he was probably in France.’

‘Would indeed have been useful to know that before we came.’

‘It’s not the impression I had from the Bishop of Hereford.’

I recalled John Scory’s words exactly: I don’t know where Smart is, though I do hear word of him from time to time.

‘You think Meredith was lying?’

‘Scory was spare with actual facts, but more generous with hints. He implied that my cousin might have things to hide. He said Presteigne, despite its appearance, was… a place of dark alleys.’

‘I told you there was something wrong here. You lose religion and let a town become ruled by commerce and greed…’

‘Dr Dee…’

A man drew level with us at the corner of the street. Dudley’s elbows bent, one hand forming a fist.

‘This one,’ he said, ‘I’ll deal with now.’

‘If I may have a word, Dr Dee?’

The moon showed me a man who, though shortish, was yet built like a brick privy.

‘Make it very quick, fellow,’ Dudley said.

The man didn’t move, as though the word quick had little meaning for him.

‘Only I overheard your cousin’s tirade, see.’

Dudley starting forward, but the man was standing his ground, like a bull in a meadow.

‘And was surprised,’ he said, ‘at how he spoke. Seein’ as when I was in London, I heard naught but good words of you. And knew of your father when he was at Nant-y-groes and I was a child down the valley. He was ever merry and, as you said, generous – especially with apples, as I recall.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Master…’

‘Stephen Price.’

‘Then you…’

‘Lease Nant-y-groes from Nicholas Meredith, and I wondered… Well, it would seem a pity if you’d come all this way without seeing your father’s birthplace.’

Found myself nodding, grasping at a friendly hand.

‘And as I’ll be riding back there at dawn… no wish to watch all the paid-for glee at the arrival of the Welshie in chains. So if you wanted to ride back with me, I’d deem it an honour to show you around the place. And your companion, of course.’

‘He wants something,’ Dudley said in darkness.

The shutters were up at the window but left open. Dudley had the four-poster. I’d taken – by choice – the truckle pulled from under it, though he’d tossed me an extra pillow in a bere.

‘I doubt Price means us ill,’ I said. ‘And I would like to see the house and its situation. Maybe the only chance I’ll ever have if it’s owned by my cousin. Don’t mind riding out with him alone. It’s but a few miles. Could be back soon after noon.’

‘I was about to suggest it. Let Meredith think he’s driven you away. Would give me chance to ask a few questions while the town’s in holiday mood over the trial. Be a pity to leave empty-handed.’

‘You’re yet determined to have the stone?’

‘I’ve faith in your learning, John. And if France’s poisonous prophet’s making use of scrying, it’s our duty. I’ll let it be known I’m an antiquary collecting gemstones and prepared to pay good money for intelligence about Smart.’

‘Well, keep away from my cousin.’

‘I could deal with the likes of your cousin in my sleep. It’s interesting, though, John. What’s behind it? Why’s he want you out of here? What’s he not want you to find out? Is there money here you’re entitled to? Property?’

‘Don’t raise my hopes. Money and the Dees—’

‘His approach to you seemed a little too conspicuously aggressive. As if he sought to draw you into public conflict.’

‘I should call him out?’

‘Big books at dawn?’ Dudley said. ‘Goodnight, John.’

I lay in the truckle bed next to the door. A haloed moon was visible where the shutters had been left open so I’d awaken at first light, and I looked for known stars. Wondering why we were here, what the future might hold for Dudley. If he’d ever find out how Amy died and at whose hands and if that would free him or expose him to more threat. On the rim of sleep, I found myself considering if it might even be true that the Queen carried Dudley’s child. So many months had passed since she’d summoned me. How many others had seen her in that time?

Among the stars, I saw images of Elizabeth walking alone in the private gardens of Richmond, all big of belly, gazing out to the fabricated island where Robert Dudley had lain his head betwixt her feet.

If he’d stopped at her feet. I saw him as he was an hour ago, when first he’d seen the ripe-bosomed young woman who had shown us to our chamber and turned out to be the innkeeper’s wife. A movement in his jaw, a tightening of wires.

I shut my eyes on the stars, wrapping the sheets twice round me because of the cold. Knowing not that I’d slept until I awoke to Dudley’s scream.

XXIV All Heavy with Old Death

THERE WERE TWO families of ducks on the good-sized pond in front of Nant-y-groes. Sheep grazed the land down to the river and more sheep were on the opposite bank until the valley floor was lost into woodland.

Beyond which was the hill, a pale and almost luminous green under the heavy sky.

The hill of ghosts.

‘Be glad when I don’t have to see it every morning,’ Stephen Price said. ‘Or watch it under the last lights.’

‘And when will that be?’

‘One year, mabbe two. Fair bit of work to be done on the new place yet.’

He stood firm on this land. Short, thick-built, weathered of face, and showing more confidence than he had in Presteigne last night, as he spoke of the house his family was rebuilding in the next valley, a former abbey grange, Monaughty, from the Welsh for monastery.

An easy walk from here, but its aspect was different.

‘Keeping an air of the holy,’ Stephen Price said. ‘We’d like it to be…’ He glanced back at Nant-y-groes. ‘…three, four times this size. Bigger families in the years to come. As you doctors learn to stop disease leaving empty cribs.’

‘Not that kind of doctor, Master Price. Or… well, not beyond a small knowledge of anatomy.’

‘Ah.’ He nodded his big, squarish head and led me along a path towards the river and a new barn of green oak. Though obviously of the gentry, he spoke simply, in a farmer’s way, as if with an inborn sense of the rudiments of life which the time he’d spent in London could not take away.

‘If the new house was a monastery grange,’ I said, ‘would that mean for Wigmore?’

‘No, no. Abbey Cwmhir in the west. Wigmore land stopped at Presteigne. That’s English, see – wherever they draws the boundary. This… is where Wales begins.’

I’d tried to feel it. Tried to feel the weight of my ancestry, back from my grandfather Bedo Ddu – an ebullient man whom, my father said, had ordered the font filled with wine at the baptism of his first son. Back through Llewelyn Crugeryr, who had a castle, and Prince Rhys ap Tewdwr, which would give me common ancestry with the Queen… all the way back, my tad would insist, to Arthur himself.

Out of Presteigne, the country had changed: a darkening of the soil but a lightening of the hills, close shaven by sheep. Although there were no jagged peaks, you could sense the rock under the green, the bones of the land. The ruins of a small castle stood like a skeletal fist across the river, and a small grey church was tucked into the hill of Pilleth with a cluster of mean houses below.

I saw all this, but felt no pull of the heart.

Found no sense of my tad in the house which lay behind us, a solid dwelling of timber and rubblestone, with a good hall and inglenook and a new chimney. An old housekeeper had been making flat cakes on a bakestone, with dried currants and shavings of apple. Welsh cakes, I guessed – my tad used to say proudly that he’d taught the King’s cooks how to make them for the royal table. I’d told the housekeeper this, and she’d given me one to eat and said she remembered Master Rowly when he was a boy, him and all his jests. But the taste of the Welsh cake brought back only memories of Mortlake.

At the riverside, I turned to Stephen Price.

‘You said you recalled my father?’

‘I well recall him. Too young, mind, to know him as a man. I was sent away to an uncle up at Llanbister, to be tutored, as you might say, in the arts of marketing and butchery. When I came back, Master Dee was gone to London. Sought to look him up when I was down there for the parliaments, but he was dead by then.’

‘Must have been strange,’ I said, ‘coming back from London to this…’

‘Wilderness?’ It was the first time I’d seen him smile. It found shape as slowly as his way of speech. ‘Never thought of it that way, Dr Dee. Not till I came back that first time after three weeks in London. Couldn’t settle back to it, not for a while. So quiet after London that you were listening to your own breaths.’

‘Did Nicholas Meredith ever live out here?’

‘Not that I’d know. Presteigne boy, see. Presteigne… it en’t London, but it aims to be.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t enquire into the doings of Master Meredith or how he got his money. En’t my business, and I’m living in a house that belongs to him and plan to carry on leasing the farm after we moves out to Monaughty. But the way he was to you last night… spoke of more than I could understand.’

I looked him in the eyes.

‘Left me mystified, also,’ I said.

‘Injured, too, I’d reckon. Come all this way, and your own family don’t wanner know you.’

‘I suppose.’

A pensive tightening of Price’s lips.

‘You must needs have care,’ he said at last. ‘Big man in Presteigne now. Him and Bradshaw. Ole John Bradshaw, down from Ludlow with all his wool money and the lease on most of the abbey property from the Crown. So Presteigne’s yet owned by England, and the Council of the Marches gets its bidding done by the wool men. Who are also the magistrates, and so on. You getting the picture?’

‘Do you know anything at all of the last Abbot of Wigmore? John Smart?’

‘You keeps coming back to that, Dr Dee.’

‘He’s the reason I’m here. He’s said to have in his charge a gemstone – a crystal stone, a beryl, I believe, which I and my colleague hope to acquire from him. For my research.’

‘On the Queen’s behalf?’

‘Everything I do,’ I said honestly and more than a little sadly, ‘is for the Queen’s Majesty.’

‘What you do… relating to the Hidden?’

‘One day it will no longer be hidden. Open to everyone. That’s my hope.’

Thinking of my library, which anyone who could read was free to consult, not that many did.

‘You think that’s wise, Dr Dee? That all should be known?’

Stephen Price was watching me. It seemed that Dudley had been right, this man wanted something from me – perhaps what Vaughan had hinted at on the road to Hereford – and, in his border way, was taking the long route. I, however, continued to be direct and honest.

‘What I’m seeking, Master Price, is a stone through which I believe knowledge can be obtained. The kind of knowledge that can’t be learned from books or tutors, only by the lifting of the mind. It’s said to have healing qualities. And is in the possession of John Smart. Do you know him?’

‘Knows of him, that’s all. A holy knave, by all accounts. Babbies everywhere.’

‘You know if he’s yet about?’

‘Never had cause to. He don’t enter my life. I got enough troubles. Some of the ole monks, they never went away. Abbots, you don’t see much of them, but he could be around.’

If Price knew more, it was clear he felt not safe in the discussion of it. He folded his arms, rocking to and fro at the river’s edge. Looking up for a hint of sun, to work out the time.

I said, ‘You think they’ll have brought their prisoner from New Radnor?’

‘Sure to.’

‘You said last night that you had no wish to watch all the glee. I think you said paid-for glee.’

‘Time off work, free pies. A holiday. A fair.’

‘To cover up fear?’

He eyed me.

‘Feel it, did you, in Presteigne?’

‘Not to any great extent.’

‘Pies are working then, ennit?’ He looked up at the hill, a pale green wall before us: steep sides, a flat top. ‘Nothing works yere.’

‘Brynglas Hill?’

‘And Pilleth. The village. What’s left of it.’

He took in a long breath, as if he was absorbing something of the humour of the place.

‘There was no village left even before the battle, see. Just Nant-y-groes and a couple more farms, a way off. When they thought the battle was forgot, my ancestors set aside some ground east of the hill to build houses for a blacksmith, and woodsmen, cottagers to work the land. Then they rebuilt the church that was burned down, and Pilleth was become a proper village, mabbe for the first time. Seventy folks there at one time, they reckon. Mabbe twenty-five now.’

I waited in silence, recalling Vaughan’s words.

A place where a thousand men have been slaughtered is not exactly the easiest place to make a home.

Price looked up the hill towards the church, which Brynglas held, as it were, to its breast.

‘When I was told, as a boy,’ he said, ‘that you wouldn’t find no sheep up there after sundown, I never questioned it.’

‘The sheep won’t sleep on the hill?’

‘Nor anywhere ’twixt the hill and the river. As a man, riding to London, I never thought about it. It was just ole country lore. In London, I’d be with men who’d laugh. Or mabbe men such as yourself, who’d say, but why’s it true?’

‘And?’

‘In Pilleth, it just is.’ Price stood solid as a boar, his back to the river. ‘This is a hard place to live. I been told nobody should be living yere at all. But the folks at Pilleth, they’ve learned how to withstand what has to be withstood. And I thought they were stronger for it, but now I en’t sure. I never quite seen the truth of it till I went away and come back. And even then it took a while. Well, London – you know what that’s like.’

‘The biggest, noisiest city in the world.’

‘Aye, and back from London, you think you’re a big man – MP for Radnorshire. But what’s it mean? Less than it sounds. You’re rarely called to Parliament, and your vote don’t count for more’n a fart – Privy Council opens a window and it’s gone. And then you come back home, with all your big ideas, to find they’ll pay more heed to an idiot boy as talks to the dead. ’Cause that’s real, for them. That’s there.’

What?

I said carefully, ‘Some matters… some matters are as hard – if not harder – for men of intellect to discuss as they are for the uneducated.’

Looking out over the pale brown river and thinking of Dudley, as he’d been this dawn as I dressed and prepared to leave for Nant-y-groes. Dudley mumbling about bad dreams, but sleepily.

Not in the way he had some hours earlier. No screams, no sweat, no panting. No…

Jesu… he’s gone.

Who?

Sitting up on his high bolster, clutching the bed curtains.

You didn’t see him? Standing beside your bed?

No.

Holding death, John. In his hands.

And me – I was no better. Keeping my voice steady, the words coming out as if spoken by someone else.

It was… a dream. A bad dream, that’s all.

Knowing then, rolling over, staring out at the cold stars, that he’d be back to sleep long before I would.

‘Who’s the idiot boy, Master Price?’

The sky hung low, like a soiled pillow that might suffocate all below it. Twenty people left in that grey community under the hill. And one of them talking to the dead?

Price stood beside the brown and roiling river, breathing heavily.

‘This boy… latest in a long line of strange folk as fetches up in Pilleth, like it was ordained. But I chose not to believe. Big man, back from London, full of new ideas, man with his eyes open full wide. We… got ourselves a new rector and his eyes is full open, too. Least to some things. To others, his eyes is shut tight. One of the new breed.’

‘A Bible man?’

‘Lutheran to the core, and he don’t like what he sees. Most of all, he don’t like the boy. The idiot. I call him an idiot because there’s no harm in an idiot. But, to the rector, he’s gone to Satan.’

‘Because he talks to the dead?’

‘Because he finds them, Dr Dee. He finds the dead. On the hill. He puts out his hands, and the ole dead… it’s like they reach out to him.’

‘You mean the dead… from the battle?’

Stephen Price stared down into the muddy river. A mewling hawk glid over us.

‘The battle… when it was fought, 1402, they reckon it was a summer just like this. Not much of a summer at all. The ground all waterlogged. Not much of a harvest. Omens. Folk seeing omens everywhere. Like they’re seeing now, with the return of Rhys Gethin.’

‘Prys. And he’s—’

‘A common bandit, aye. But is he? I don’t see omens, but I don’t feel good about Pilleth. And I’m the squire of yere, and my family goes back likely longer than yours, and it’s my responsibility. And it en’t Presteigne, it’s a lonely place, all heavy with ole death. You can’t buy off fear in Pilleth with free pies.’

Oh God. Here it was, coming out backwards and sideways and from under the feet, in the old Border way.

I made a stand.

‘Master Price, some people think… In truth, I’m not a priest. I’m a scholar, a natural philosopher, a man of science. I study. I can’t—’

‘I know what you do, Dr Dee. I once talked to… another MP who knows you. Francis Walsingham?’

‘You talked to Walsingham?’

‘He came to me one time. Asking about your family.’

Well, the bastard would, wouldn’t he? Francis Walsingham traded in intelligence, most of it passed to Cecil in the event of it being required to measure me for the gallows drop.

‘Most complimentary about you, Dr Dee. Told me how much the Queen relies on your advice.’

Reassuring only to a point; if it had suited his or Cecil’s purposes, Walsingham would just as easily have painted me black.

‘I’d thought to write to you, as a local man, kind o’ thing,’ Price said. ‘And then… yere you are, like you been sent by—’

‘No!’ Flinging up my hands. ‘I came in search of a stone, for my experiments. For knowledge… for healing.’

‘Healing. Aye. That’s what’s needed.’

Dear God, I was digging my own pit.

‘Master Price, I have to say this oft-times, but… I don’t… undertake the cure of souls.’

The Squire of Pilleth stood with his back to the flat-topped hill, a stubble of thorn bushes around its summit, half concealing the tower of the church. A church my tad had said was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, whose role was now reduced by the new theology as represented by this new vicar. But not, I guessed, for Stephen Price, clearly much heartened by the thought of a new family home grown from a monastery grange.

Keeping an air of the holy.

‘All I’m asking, Dr Dee, is for advice. Like you give to the Queen.’

‘You’re a clever man, Master Price.’

‘No. I’m a worried man. There’s things I don’t understand. And the dead are rising as never before. A place with more dead than living. Is that good?’

I stared at the ground.

‘Probably not.’

‘Come with me,’ Price said. ‘Come with me up the hill at least.’

XXV Thrown From the Body

MY TAD HAD entertained me, as a boy, with tales of the Glyndwr wars. I can see his face now, reddened by the fire, his eyes bulging like a clown’s as he relates how the rebel leader calling himself Prince of Wales rose against the English King, Henry I V, destroying all the border castles in his path. Oh, the romance of it.

A romance conspicuously missing from Stephen Price’s account of the Battle of Brynglas as we set off up the hill, Price making a hand-gesture at the steepening slope before us.

‘Imagine a thousand dead and dying men. Hear their hoarse whimpers. Many more dead men than there are sheep yere now. Arms and legs and guts. And hogsheads of blood. Imagine the sorely wounded crawling through the plashy pools of blood.’

Tad had claimed once that the Dees were descended from the same family as Glyndwr – well, who of note were we not descended from? But why don’t I remember him ever speaking of the Battle of Brynglas?

‘In a way,’ Stephen Price said, ‘it was almost separate from Glyndwr’s campaign. It was about the Welsh and the Mortimers – the arrogant Norman Marcher lords with their impregnable castles and their contempt for the Welsh – the last true Britons. The lowly Welsh hated the Mortimers. Hate beyond our understanding in these modern days.’

‘If the castles had been impregnable,’ I said, ‘would there be so many bald mounds the length of the border?’

‘Or so many well-built stone farm buildings.’

Stephen Price chuckled bleakly. Looking back, we could see my father’s birthplace, seeming the size of a candle box, and a smaller farmhouse the other side of the bridge, both part of the original Nant-y-groes estate. The English army on that June day must surely have assembled somewhere close to whatever kind of wooden bridge had crossed the river there.

And the Dees… had they just sat and watched from their farms? Or had they taken part? The previously unconsidered question of whose side my family had been on was writ now, in illuminated script across the deep grey sky.

‘They say Edmund Mortimer’s army was a ragbag of peasants, hastily recruited,’ Price said. ‘But that wasn’t it. He knew the Welshman was on his way down from the north and reckoned to crush him for good and all. Grind him into the ground. Mortimer had two thousand in his army, including a core of well-trained fighting men – his own and the men brought along by the knights supporting him. And then there were the archers. Welsh archers, many of ’em – Mortimer pulled his bowmen from both sides of the border. No, it was at least a halfway-proper army.’

‘Yet slaughtered by half as many Welsh?’

‘Don’t sound likely, do it, till you know what happened. Rhys Gethin, he had his own archers. And rage on his side, see. And cunning.’

Price pointing to the rounded top of the hill, almost violently green now against the charcoal sky. Evidently, no hay crop had been taken from Brynglas this year.

‘No armour to slow them up,’ Price said. ‘Fast on their feet. Mountain men, like goats. Over the hill, by there, I can show you a dip you can’t see from this side, all full of trees and bushes. And that’s where they hid out the night before. With their women, too. Day of the battle, they all come to the top of Brynglas. But they didn’t come down, see. Didn’t charge. If they’d charged into Mortimer’s army they’d’ve been carved up into pieces and it would have ended here.’

‘They simply waited?’

‘Forcing Mortimer’s boys to charge up the hill to attack, and it don’t matter how strong your legs are, a charge up yere…’

‘Steeper than it looks.’

Feeling the pain in my bookman’s calves already. What in God’s name was I doing here?

Price looked back the way we’d come.

‘A full charge up yere in full armour, on a day in June – even a bad June? Full into a hailstorm of arrows with the slope behind them. Havoc, boy. Bloody havoc.’

I began to see it. I could see dead and wounded men falling back on those behind, who could only go on, their faces soaked with the spurted blood of their falling comrades.

‘And then what happens?’ Price stopped. A sheep track had become a muddied footpath. ‘This is the worst of it. As the dead Englishmen start to fall back in greater numbers, Mortimer’s Welsh archers, marching with the English, of a sudden they all turns round, these Welshies, bowstrings pulled hard back…’

He did the motion, one arm outstretched, the other withdrawn to the shoulder.

‘And they all put their arrows… into their own side. And at that range, boy, they don’t miss. They does not miss.’

I must have winced, as if an arrow had rushed with crippling force into my own chest.

‘A planned treachery?’

‘Some say that, some say they just seen the way the battle was going and changed sides. Yet… all at once? As if they was all moved by the same muscles.’

I was glad he didn’t ask me what, other than an act of prearranged military precision, might have caused several dozen Welsh archers to act as one.

‘Several of the knights died and Edmund Mortimer himself was taken prisoner when the Welshies finally come charging down. Hacking through what was left. Oh, the bitterness and shame of the all-powerful Mortimers. The only time the name of Pilleth has ever been yeard in London. All of Europe, come to that.’

‘And the Dees… Which side were they on?’

Price shrugged.

‘Never that simple. Even the Norman, Mortimer… after he was took prisoner, the King of England wouldn’t pay the ransom, so all Mortimer done, he just changed sides. Married one of Owain’s daughters, in the end. No border easier to cross than this one.’

On which side might Elizabeth’s own family have fought? With which side would it look best now for my kin to have allied itself?

‘The big, old families, they just goes on,’ Stephen Price said. ‘The small men, the farmers and peasants forced into fighting – they’re the ghosts as walks the battlefields and the sad dreams of the widows, for as long as they lived.’

We were nearing the church now, a squat grey tower and nave, hard against the hill.

‘The bones are everywhere in the soil,’ he said. ‘Down the valley, far as Nant-y-groes, as I discovered quite recently. Far as the mortally wounded could crawl. Like farming a churchyard, it is.’

‘What do you do when you find the bones?’

This was like pulling rotting teeth. How he’d ever debated in Parliament was a mystery to me.

‘They gets buried again,’ he said. ‘With suitable prayer and litany. We have a place, just by yere.’ Pointing to the side of the church, where the land was level. ‘Men of either side, they goes in together. With prayer upon prayer.’

‘And do the dead then rest?’ I asked.

He looked away. I wondered about the betrayed dead, impaled on the arrows of their comrades. Imagined myself, blood welling in my mouth, helplessly gazing over the reddening shaft of the arrow through my throat… into the merciless face, already misting over, of a man I’d marched with up this hill.

‘Nobody likes to dig out a ditch up yere for fear of what they’ll find,’ Price said. ‘If a man’s bones are unearthed, all work stops till the whole body’s been dug up and reburied.’

‘Or…?’

‘Or the ghost will haunt the man who fetched up the bones. If so much as a sheep-shelter is to be built, efforts are made to be sure it en’t built on some man’s bones, else there’d be no luck there, neither. And that’s when they send for the boy.’

‘To find the bones before they rise? How often does this happen?’

‘The dead rising? Of late… too often. This summer, in all the rain… thirty or more.’

‘It’s the wet bringing them up now? The swelling of the… ground?’

My voice tailing off. There would have been many a wet summer since 1402.

The track had steepened under the church, and I stopped on a small promontory, offering a vast far-reaching aspect to the emptiness of the west. I marked two horsemen down near Nant-y-groes. Not moving, as if they were watching us. They might have been outriders from some long-gone army. How would you know when a man was a ghost?

‘Is it easy,’ I said, ‘to separate one body from another?’

‘Not really. Not much else left apart from ole brown bones. All the valuables would’ve been stripped off the corpses where they lay within days of the battle. And that wasn’t all.’

Price sucked in his breath, stared up at me almost angrily.

‘The matter of it is, Dr Dee, some of the dead… they weren’t whole, that’s what’s said. Weren’t whole for very long after they died.’

XXVI Blade’s Edge

STANDING BY THE sheriff’s gate, Dudley finds himself meeting the sardonic gaze of the outlaw, Prys Gethin, as the prisoner is conveyed to one of the holding dungeons behind the court.

Other men, knowing the story of the curse and the subsequent deaths, might look away at once, but Dudley is Dudley. The role of Master Roberts dropping from his shoulders like a cheap cloak, he’s giving the man a hard stare, a falcon watching a pigeon.

Except this man is not a pigeon. Anyone can see that.

It’s market day in Presteigne. Soon after I left with Stephen Price, Dudley heard the sounds of stalls being erected in the streets and went out to find the sheriff’s men assembling at the junction for the ride to New Radnor Castle.

The sheriff’s men and more. The judge was obviously taking no chances. This time, he’d sent most of his guard with them.

Roger Vaughan was watching them set off, and Dudley went across the street to join him.

‘If anyone’s planning an ambush, Master Roberts, they’ll need a small army. Aim is to start the trial this afternoon. Swear the jury in, at least.’

‘Not wasting any time.’

‘Would you? Where’s Dr Dee?’

‘Gone to find his family.’

‘Master Meredith?’ Vaughan looked surprised. ‘Only what I yeard…’

‘Not a big town this, is it?’

‘Wasn’t gossip, Master Roberts. I was there, near enough. Not as you had to be that close – Master Meredith sounded like he wanted it to be yeard far and wide.’

‘So I noticed.’

‘Also mabbe letting it be known that this is no time to have a… natural philosopher in town.’

Dudley smiled.

‘That was the phrase he used – natural philosopher?’

‘Conjuror,’ Vaughan said.

Makes me sick to recount it but, because it’s of some importance, I’m putting this conversation together from what Dudley has told me. Trusting that he was as strong in his defence of my profession as he insists. Not that this was necessary with Roger Vaughan.

‘It’s used in contempt, that word, but it—’

‘Conjuror?’

‘Bad word in London. Meant badly by Meredith. But it en’t always bad in these parts. Hides a deep need in… mabbe not all of us, but enough, yet. We got a few working conjurers round yere, Master Roberts, and even more the further you gets into Wales. What en’t always easy is to find the ones as knows what they’re doing. Seems to me a man like Dr Dee who approaches it with learning and also has… the ole skills… Mabbe that’s exactly what we need right now.’

‘Old skills?’

‘Way I sees it,’ Vaughan said, ‘a man wouldn’t study the hidden as assiduously as Dr Dee does unless he was trying to make sense of his own strange… qualities.’

Dudley, who knows better than anyone the sad truth of this, tells me he held his silence.

‘The conjurors and the cunning men, they yet make a good living in these parts, no question,’ Vaughan said. ‘Better now than before the Reform, I reckon. This was always a Catholic town, see, and the Catholic Church carried some of the old traditions along with it. Least, in these parts it did. The Protestants, the Bible men, in particular, they makes fewer allowances for us to know what’s happening to us. Just accept it, it’s the will of God. The cunning men and the wise women, they provides what we used to get from the Church.’

‘You employ one yourself, Master Vaughan?’

‘No. But I’m hoping that Dr Dee will be able to give me some advice when this is over.’

‘And what… what think you he can do here?’

Dudley marked the way Vaughan was looking around before he spoke, for this was not safe talk, not even on the edge of Wales. But there were only the market traders assembling their stalls for the sale of fresh meat and fruit and fruit pies and honey, fish from the rivers, wool, fleeces and woollen garments from the local workshops. He saw men rehanging the ropes of pennants pulled down last night by those angry at the delay in bringing Prys Gethin to justice.

Mainly men on the streets, few women, fewer children. Despite the flags, there was no conspicuous gaiety.

‘It’s on a blade’s edge, ennit?’ Vaughan said.

Dudley, a man who ever relishes a blade’s edge, tried not to show his heightened interest.

‘How so?’

‘En’t sure, Master Roberts. I was born and raised yere, and it en’t… stable. It en’t balanced. You goes away and you comes back, and somewhere ’twixt Hereford and yere, the air changes. Things happen as don’t happen anywhere else. Or they happens faster, so you don’t see it coming. The way sometimes you don’t see a storm till it breaks. Things yere can change in a lightning flash. So if you got a circumstance…’

Dudley says Vaughan had begun to look flushed with embarrassment. Having, perhaps, started something he no longer wanted to finish. Dudley prompted him.

‘The trial of a man linked – or felt to be linked – to local history?’

‘Aye. Recent history and not so recent. It all stirs something inside… not just people’s feelings, but the feeling of the whole place.’

‘Does a place have feelings?’

‘Some places you can sense it more than others,’ Vaughan said. ‘Dunno why. Mabbe Dr Dee can tell you. But when you try and cover it up with new ways – industry, trade, too much wealth too quick, you’re risking something going off like fireworks. The Ludlow men, the Bradshaws, the Beddoes, they come in, pulling men like Meredith behind them – the ambitious local families… and the greedy. Keeping the Church out of it, far back as they can. That en’t good.’

Maybe Vaughan was raising matters with Dudley with the intention that they should get back to me.

‘John’s gone to his old family home,’ Dudley told him, ‘with the man who lives there now.’

‘Price. He’s got a good head on him. The people of Pilleth need that. En’t easy living on a battleground. Not that one, anyway.’

‘Battle like any other,’ Dudley said. ‘I’ve seen—’ Stopping himself, thinking that no antiquary would have seen nearly as much fighting or as much death as Lord Robert Dudley. ‘That is, collecting documents takes me to places that’ve seen conflict. I know what happened at Pilleth.’

Vaughan looked at him.

‘Do you? No offence, Master Roberts, but I doubt you do. This was a border battle, in every sense. The Welsh, they knew what they were fighting for. The Mortimer army didn’t. Put that together with… the power of the place, and anything can happen. And it did. Why did the Welsh bowmen on Mortimer’s side start killing their own comrades?’

Because they were fucking Welsh, Dudley thought.

But said nothing.

‘If you ask them even now,’ Vaughan said, ‘they wouldn’t be able to tell you.’

‘Easy to say that, Vaughan. No one likes to admit to plain treachery.’

Dudley marked a quick and angry movement in Vaughan’s eyes.

‘Master Roberts, I once talked to a man whose great grandfather was a soldier at Pilleth – an archer. A legend in the family. After the battle, he went back to his farm and never picked up his bow again. Didn’t trust himself, that was what was told to me. Didn’t trust himself to fit an arrow, draw back his arm and know where that arrow was going.’

Dudley would have smiled, making no comment. But don’t think he’d dismiss this as folklore and nonsense. I know this man, and his mind is far from closed to matters of the hidden.

‘I think,’ he said to Vaughan, doubtless with a deceptive diffidence, ‘that you spoke of… the power of the place?’

If you ask me, I’m also sure that Roger Vaughan had a good idea, by now, of the true identity of Master Roberts. I don’t believe that Judge Legge would have gone out of his way to conceal it.

‘A holy hill,’ Vaughan said. ‘Brynglas.’

‘What’s it mean?’

‘The blue hill. Behind the church there’s a holy well, dedicated to the mother of Our Saviour. Many people have been healed there.’

‘And even more killed,’ Dudley said brutally.

‘Well, there you are, Master Roberts. Healing power can be turned around. Dr Dee would know that.’

Dudley frowned.

‘You… seem to know a good deal about it. For such a young man.’

Vaughan laughed, and Dudley tells me there was a high, wild edge to it.

‘I’m a Vaughan,’ the boy said. ‘My whole family’s haunted.’

Three hours have passed. It would not have been the plan to bring Prys Gethin into Presteigne on market day, Dudley thinks. But after losing a day to unforeseen rain they could hardly afford to lose another.

The cart, high-sided, is close to the front of the procession. Hands and feet in rusting manacles, he’s sprawled lazily in the straw at the back, as though it’s a royal coach.

With his grey-black hair back over his ears. His one eye cold and steady; only taut skin and a ridged scar where the other one used to be.

Dudley, for a moment, admires his nerve. The way, he tells me, he once admired a one-eyed stag, cornered by the hunt, returning his gaze with an old warrior’s arrogance that Dudley recognised at once, and let him escape. With a kind of joy that surprised him.

Prys Gethin’s one eye has a rare brilliance and intensity, as if it no longer ever blinks. He looks at Dudley as though they’re old friends.

Dudley is aware of the smell of hot pies and gravy. He can hear whoops and cheers and halloos from the people assembled for the arrival of the prisoner. The crowd is swelled by those here for the market, many from out of town. But the whoops and cheers and halloos seemed muted compared with yesterday, when there was no prisoner to hear them.

Two men colourfully dressed as jesters, wearing masks, arrive out of the throng, carrying ropes woven into hangman’s nooses which, hopping like frogs, they dangle in front of the occupant of the cart.

One of them is so encouraged by the mild, uncertain laughter that he leans into the cart, tightening and loosening his noose and then tightening it again and cackling.

Until Prys Gethin inclines his head and smiles gently.

‘You’ll die within the week, friend,’ he says drily, in the perfectly rounded English of a priest making a pronouncement from his pulpit.

But he hasn’t even looked at the sneering clowns.

His gaze has not shifted from Dudley.

XXVII Likely a Sin

‘THERE’S A STORY mabbe you’ll’ve heard? How the Welshie women who followed Rhys Gethin’s army, they come down from the hill when it was all over? With knives. Come with knives. All gleeful and laughing. Set about the remains of the English.’

Stephen Price gazed over the humps in the field bordering the church where the risen dead had been laid to rest. Below us was the cluster of houses I’d seen from Nant-y-groes, with pens for chickens and pigs, and a handful of people about their tasks and all the distant sheep, like maggots on decaying meat.

‘Normal enough to cut the apparel from the slain,’ Price said. ‘Take the weaponry and the leather.’

Maybe I knew what was coming. Maybe I had heard it somewhere.

‘The privy parts.’ He looked away, down the hill. ‘Stuffed them into their mouths, so they’re hanging down, kind o’ thing. A mockery. If there’s any worse humiliation for a man, then I en’t yeard of it.’

I winced.

‘Hatred of the Norman Marcher lords, see. Taught, from birth, to hate. And the hatred hangs in the air, yet. Close your eyes by yere and stare into the full sun and all you see is black. That’s what they say. Never tried it myself.’

I kept my eyes full open. Not that there was sun this day.

‘When did the church catch fire?’

‘Before the battle. Glyndwr would burn any church as paid tithes to England. And the English seen the smoke and flames from the house of God, like a sign before the battle. Rebuilt now, but it’s a sad place.’

I’d marked how, the more he spoke, the more his accent deepened, as if he was retreating not so much into his own past, but Pilleth’s. He looked into his hands, as if the geometry of the land was etched there.

‘Used to be a place of pilgrimage. Shrine of the Virgin behind the tower, next to the well – the holy well. A healing place. For the eyes, mainly. For clear sight.’

‘No one comes now?’

‘No one gets near the well. The rector don’t hold with it. Papism.’

I sighed. Thinking there should be a middle way. Hearing Bishop Scory in Hereford talking of how old beliefs yet held sway on the border. It seemed to me that one could either respond with a Bonner-like ferocity or with a tolerance bordering on the spiritually lax… I chose tolerance.

‘Isn’t this yet Bishop Scory’s diocese?’ I said to Price. ‘Scory’s a man of moderation. Why would he appoint a Puritan?’

Stephen Price’s laugh was arid.

‘Mabbe he didn’t. Belief can change in a blinking. Mabbe the rector had a moment of revelation. Educated man, used to be a canon in Hereford. The ole boy who was yere before him, Father Walter, he used to have to hop over the big words in the Bible but, by God, he was the man for this parish. He’d do a Sunday worship with hands still wet from pulling a new lamb in your barn.’

‘A practical man.’

‘Aye. New rector talks of a calling. First sign of the way things were going was when an ole boy – widower, living alone – goes to him real scared by… what he seen. Asks for the ghosts to be sent away from his door. Rector shows him a face like stone and tells him the devil makes them see things as don’t exist and to fall down on his knees and pray for the forgiveness of his sins.’

‘He must be an inspiration to you all,’ I said.

Price sat down on the little promontory, the hills around him like rough blankets, the horizon broken by the distant castle mound, with its forked fingers of stone.

‘See, this… this en’t a bad place, that’s the thing. Good light, good shelter and you can see the weather coming. And all the families yere owns their own land. Village as should be five times the size it is, but folks don’t come and the folks that’s yere… there’s no good fortune.’

Price looked up the slope of Brynglas towards the little church tower.

‘Take the Thomas boy. Fine boy, good farmer, and then he’s telling his mother he can’t see no future yere. Hangs himself in the oak wood. Rector denies him burial in the churchyard for his sin. Now he lies with the ole warriors and no cross. Well, that en’t right. That makes nobody happy.’

‘Except the rector.’

‘He don’t know what happiness is. Likely a sin.’ Price raised his eyes to mine. ‘I’m the squire. What should I do?’

I’d seldom felt more useless. A student of the Hidden who observed and took notes for all the books he’d one day write. A collector of manuscripts, an aspirant to alchemical transformation and a maker of owls that flapped their wings and went woo-woo.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘It’s a battle site. When men die in fear and torment, embittered by treachery, and then their bodies are abused and left to rot where they fell… then spirits may linger and there’s an air of unhappiness which might last many years.’

‘It’s come back,’ he said.

‘What has?’

‘We… buried another. Few days ago.’ He’d dropped his gaze to the ground and his voice to a murmur. ‘Buried him at night. Me and Morgan, the shepherd. Well… I had to do most of it. Pedr Morgan, he wouldn’t touch it, but he done the digging. Never told the vicar. I said a few prayers, for what that was worth.’

I came down from the mound. Stephen Price kept on talking softly to the grass.

‘I was thinking at first as we’d do what we sometimes does when it’s more’n a few bones. When it’s a man. Put him on an ole bier and take him into the church. We leave ’em there overnight covered in sacking and then take ’em out for burial. Well… clear soon enough we couldn’t do that with this ’un.’

‘Why?’

‘Normal thing’s to alert the coroner. And the sheriff.’

‘About old bones?’

‘And mabbe the sheriff’d raise the hue and cry, kind o’ thing, and it’d be all over the county and beyond. And nobody’d get caught, and that’d only make it worse.’

Price looked up.

‘All torn as if killed in battle, this man. But dead no more’n a day. Naked. We never found his apparel. Or his cock.’

‘You hid a murder?’

‘All gone,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘A bloody, black hole. Nothing in his mouth. Not much mouth left. Face was carved up. Beyond recognising.’

‘Master Price, let me get this right. You are saying this was done by human means.’

‘Not crows, nor foxes. Well, God’s blood, what was I supposed to do, Dr Dee? Nobody knowed about him except Pedr Morgan and Mistress Ceddol. And no local man was missing, far as I could ascertain, not yere, not in Presteigne, not in—’

‘Who’s Mistress Ceddol?’

‘Sister of the mad boy who finds the dead. She en’t mad, not by any means. Her and Morgan comes to me. Me. Stephen Price of Pilleth, the squire. Bad summer, nights full of ghosts, best tell Stephen Price, of Pilleth. Ask Stephen Price of Pilleth what he’s gonner do about the man carrying the spirit of Rhys Gethin back to Brynglas. Ask him what he’s gonner do about a dead man with no cock…’

‘Master Price—’

‘What would you do, Dr Dee?’

I didn’t know. I yet couldn’t think why he was telling me, a stranger. A student of natural philosophy.

‘There’s nothing of the Hidden about a man fresh-killed,’ I said. ‘Though, given what was done to him, and given when it was done, you might be talking about supporters of Plant Mat out to revive old fears.’

Price nodded soberly.

‘A good reason, it seemed to me, not to go to the sheriff. Hue and cry, the spreading of terror…’

‘Is it your feeling that this might be Plant Mat? Putting out a warning of what might happen if Gethin hangs?’

‘If nobody knows, there won’t be no terror.’

‘So you buried him.’

‘Drags him into the ole sheep shelter, covers him with straw. And then we… we come at night and takes him out and Pedr Morgan digs a grave by candlelight and we buries him, and yere he lies.’

‘Here? Where we stand?’

‘Not yere. Be too obvious. We couldn’t leave no sign of a burial.’ Price considered for a moment, before jerking a thumb behind him, down the valley towards the river. ‘There’s an ole tump down there beyond the trees. Nobody goes there.’

‘Tump?’

‘Grave of the ole Britons, down by the river.’ He pointed. ‘Other side of the wood down the western slope.’

‘An ancient burial mound?’

‘Nobody goes near them. You know that.’

Always been superstition about ancient mounds, warning tales of what had happened to treasure hunters who had plundered them – usually finding nothing.

‘We dug a deep hole in the side, put him in.’ Price’s voice, of a sudden, was raw as bone. ‘Pedr Morgan, he was frit to hell, but we didn’t have no choice.’

He was still turned away from the river as if he could not bear to remember what he’d done. It was yet unclear to me why I’d been told. Why share the secret of a misdemeanour with a stranger?

But Stephen Price wasn’t letting go. He insisted we should walk to the village, or what remained of it. Leading me on the path towards the church until it divided and the cluster of grey cottages was revealed gradually, through thinning trees already shedding their rusty leaves.

And at last, with a strange heart-lurch, I saw it.

Rowland Dee’s Wales, where men were bent to the wind like thorn trees, their skin scoured raw, while the light – ever-changing but ever cold – was chopping their world into jagged shards of anguish.

XXVIII The Jury

A CRAB, WHEN threatened, may move sideways.

Dudley, disgusted to find himself alarmed, slips into an alleyway, pulling out a kerchief, scrubbing at the unexpected sweat. Hands flat on a stone wall, forehead pressed into a patch of damp moss, he draws long breaths until his foul fear is reborn as fury.

But the single eye of Prys Gethin is yet boring through him, a dark diamond turning in bone.

It’s not the you’ll die within a year that’s affected him. There have been times when he’s been told he’ll be dead within the hour. It’s the words that followed, none of which he understood. He’s been cursed in French and cursed in Spanish, and the spittle-slicked tirades barely reached him before they went to vapour. Gethin’s language, he knows, is far older in these islands than his own and comes out like clotted honey, every opaque sentence an incantation.

It annoys him, the way a common brigand hides his villainy under a cloak of false patriotism, assuming a resonant name and the glow of dark magic around a long-dead national hero.

Dudley reminds himself why he’s here. Prays silently, feeling around himself – as oft-times I’ve advised him – a white-gold protective light. I hold this to be angelic light but Dudley, I suspect, sees the glitter of the English crown. He and the Queen, twin souls, born – he yet insists – in the same hour of the same day, under the sign of Cancer, the crab. Dancing together with effortless elegance, iridescent like dragonflies on the water, peering with delight into the pools of one another’s minds.

But Dudley never wants to hear Bess using words like those which issued from that prison cart. Regardless of the trail of horseshit left behind by her grandfather, he doesn’t want to believe that the woman he desires more than long life is, in any respect, Welsh.

Prising himself from the stone wall, he stands warily at the top of the alleyway, watching a goodwife of Presteigne bartering for bruised apples. A foretelling of his death will ever send him in angry pursuit of something life-affirming.

Within moments, he’s marked the woman wearing a green velvet gown, easily the most expensive in the market, and the kind of French hood once favoured by the Queen’s mother. Carrying an empty basket over an arm, buying nothing.

Dudley watches this woman for no more than a minute before wandering over to stand quietly next to her at a stall selling pomegranates from the Holy Land.

At once, she’s aware of his presence and, with a twist of the hips, is looking up into his eyes.

‘A true feel of autumn today, master.’

‘Yes,’ Dudley says. ‘It may rain again.’

‘A good day to be indoors.’

‘Preferably upstairs,’ Dudley says, ‘in case of flood.’

‘Ever a sensible precaution.’

Dudley nods soberly at the wisdom of this.

‘Are you with an attorney, mistress?’

‘Not at the moment. They haven’t caught me yet.’

She looks him up and down, her gaze lingering on those exceptional riding boots. Now he can smell her perfume. And her interest.

‘You live near here, mistress?’

‘Within a short walk.’

She smiles. The condition of her teeth suggests she’s no older than he is. He moves his purse around to the front of his belt.

‘It’s a good day for a walk,’ Dudley says.

And off they go together, Dudley priding himself on his ability to mark a whore from thirty paces.

‘You know what’s different about you, master?’

‘Modesty forbids me to ask.’

‘You can make a woman laugh. That’s rare.’

She’s not the first to have said that.

‘Yet I feel’ – she lays a finger on the tip of his nose – ‘that something unfortunate has happened to you today. Did you quarrel with your wife before you left London?’

‘I don’t have a wife.’

‘Ever?’

‘Any more.’

‘Oh. Well…’ She strokes his cheek. ‘You’ll find another.’

Dudley is lying on his back. He can’t place her accent. It isn’t local to the area, but he thinks it’s Welsh and, in view of what they’ve just been doing, that pleases him.

‘What’s your name?’ he says.

‘Amy.’

When his muscles lock into rigidity, she leans over him in the bed.

‘What did I say?’

He doesn’t answer. He looks up into her face. She’s nothing like his dead wife. Her eyes are far apart, her mouth is wide and her hair, hanging now over his cheeks, is more the colour of the Queen’s. He lets out his breath. He smiles.

‘A good living, is it, mistress – with all the attorneys and the judges at the Great Sessions?’

‘Some sessions are greater than others,’ she says.

Clever, too.

‘And who pays for your time, apart from attorneys?’

‘You ask a lot of questions.’

What about the wool merchants from Ludlow? You ever had Old Bradshaw up here?’

‘Him?’ She gives a yelp of amusement. ‘He won’t even be seen walking past my door.’

‘What about Nicholas Meredith?’

‘Master Roberts,’ she says, ‘if it’s intelligence you’re seeking, which may be used for some nefarious purpose… you must needs know I’m a woman who keeps her secrets. An element of mystery, in my trade, is’ – she touches the tip of her nose with a forefinger – ‘of the essence.’

Her house is ’twixt two workshops down an alley close to the centre of town. The ceiling of her bedchamber is very low and, of a sudden, in the scored and fissured black beams, he sees the dark, leathery face of Prys Gethin. A knot in the wood has become that one eye. Dudley feels a pressure in the centre of his forehead. He turns away, towards Amy the whore, pulling the sheet from her left breast and lowering his face.

‘You only paid for once,’ she reminds him. ‘Not that it lasted particularly long.’

‘I’ll pay for thrice if you talk to me.’

She pushes him gently away and sits up, her smile fading.

‘Who are you? I don’t think you’re an attorney.’

Dudley says. ‘I’m an antiquary.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A man who likes old things.’

‘Well, thank you!’

‘And you, mistress… are too clever to be a nun.’

‘No,’ she says, pushing back her ginger hair. ‘I’m simply too clever to be a nun in Bristol or London. Here, I’m like the ironmonger, the apothecary, the blacksmith, the fruiterer.’

‘Yes, I did mark your ability to squeeze a pair of plums.’

‘That’s a common farmer’s jest.’ She rolled away from him. ‘In a few years I’ll be forced to marry a farmer or somebody and the past will be the past. But if that doesn’t happen… I’ll always have money. And the means to make more. I might start a school. My father was a schoolmaster in Brecon.’

That would explain much. Dudley persists.

‘What about priests?’

‘Find absolution by marrying a priest?’

‘Or a former monk? Have you known monks – in the biblical sense or otherwise? What about the former Abbot of Wigmore?’

He’s approached it too quickly. Her eyes narrow. The chamber is lit by a single glazed pane under the eaves, and she blocks it with her body, rising up.

‘I’m an antiquary,’ Dudley says. ‘I’m told he may have some… relics. For sale.’

‘You would expect…’ She laughs, incredulous. ‘You’d expect the abbot of a monastery taken by the Crown to be selling holy relics twenty years afterwards?’

Dudley’s at once excited. The man’s about.

‘Not a holy relic, mistress… as such. I and my friend have an interest in a certain gemstone which we believe the former abbot has. Its value is purely… historical.’

‘You have the money?’

‘You know I have the money.’

‘How long,’ she asks, ‘will you be here?’

An hour and a half later, with a sense of returning strength and well-being following a lunch of beef and gravy at the Bull, Dudley walks back into the marketplace and marks Roger Vaughan entering through the sheriff’s gates, with documents under an arm. Hurries to catch him up.

‘It’s beginning, Master Vaughan?’

‘Jury’s being sworn in. You want to see?’

The guards are preventing people from using the main entrance, lest the entire town should come to watch. Vaughan leads Dudley down an alleyway, and soon they’re in a cloisterlike passage, where the slit windows are barred down the middle. At the end of it, an oak door hangs ajar and there’s much commotion.

The courtroom is bigger than he’d expected in a place like Presteigne. Like to a barn, with low-hung rafters, as though a loft has been removed. Perhaps a barn was what it used to be.

A one end, steps lead to a structure like to a long pulpit where, presumably, the judge will sit, although there’s yet no sign of Sir Christopher Legge. Or, indeed, the prisoner. Vaughan guides Dudley to a corner near a platform with bars around it which extend well beyond head-height. It’s empty. A procession of men is winding from a doorway halfway up the courtroom.

Vaughan says, ‘He’ll leave it to one of the local JPs to swear in the jurymen.’

And so it turns out. The JP is snowy-haired and vague and barely looks at the members of the jury as, in turn, they swear upon the Bible that they will consider all the evidence laid before them and return a fair and honest verdict.

The JP looks uncertainly around the court, and an attorney in robes leans over and whispers something.

Dudley is marking each of the jurymen with a slow and faintly incredulous smile as the old JP announces that the trial of Prys Gethin for murder by witchcraft and cattle theft will commence on the morrow at ten of the clock.

‘Hmmm,’ Vaughan says, as the courtroom clears. ‘They’re taking no chances, are they?’

‘I counted seven,’ Dudley says.

‘That would be about right. A safe majority. The fear is that a jury of all local men… that their families would be threatened. That retribution might be made against them, even years later. Never feel safe again.’

‘Also, I expect that seven extra members of Legge’s guard will come in quite useful if Gethin tries to escape.’

However important it may be that all possibilities of an acquittal for Prys Gethin should be sealed like cracks in the masonry, Robert Dudley, as an English gentleman, yet finds it distasteful that Sir Christopher Legge should feel the need to bring his own jurymen.

And however much he now wants the swift disposal of the man who slipped him a smiling curse from the back of a cart, Dudley begins to wonder, for the first time, what might be hiding behind the façade of this small, provincial trial.

XXIX Betwixt the Living and the Dead

DEAR GOD, MY father had me trapped. Walking towards the village, he was with us all the way. I saw him sitting before our Christmas fire, mellowed by good wine, telling me about my forebears, all the way back to Arthur. All for Wales, my tad.

All for this?

Jesu.

Poor Pilleth, all grey and cowering. Huddled under the hill, waterlogged paths separating the mean, sunken homes with their mud and rubblestone walls, their rotting roofs, smoke-holes in the ridges and maybe a dozen small, shuttered windows.

There was a glow of life here, but only as from a rush-light which burns feebly and lives not long. And the shade of Rowland Dee.

‘Said he’d be in London for five years at the outside,’ Goodwife Thomas laughing shrilly. ‘Just enough time for him to scrape some of the gold off the streets, he used to say. Scrape the gold off the streets!’

Oh, I could hear that, the way he’d say to my mother, A proper tapestry, one day, Janey. Telling you now, I am, as God’s my living witness, you’ll be ripping down the ole wall hangings by New Year, you mark my words, girl.

My tad, a good-looking, lively boy for whom, everyone knew, Pilleth and even Presteigne were too small.

‘And then he’d be coming back, see, to put glass in all our windows,’ Goodwife Thomas said. ‘Glass, master! Glass for the likes of we! Well… we knew we’d never see him again, but he was never thrifty with his dreams.’

How true that was. I brushed aside a small, bitter tear as if it were a fly. Goodwife Thomas, sparse-haired and thin as a rib, was laughing again, saying she could see some of him in me, so mabbe he’d come back after all, Master Rowly.

‘My, but you’re a good-looking boy, too, Dr Dee. Have you no wife?’

Trying to press upon me a slice of her bara brith but, seeing how little of it remained and knowing how few berries the summer would have yielded, I refused, with many thanks, saying I’d eaten too well at Nant-y-groes.

A mean wood fire burned beneath a stewpot. Children’s faces peered out of the smoky gloom. Stephen Price had said the Thomas family lived in Pilleth’s best house – a long house with barn attached for the animals, not that there were many now. When a dwelling was abandoned its fabric was plundered to strengthen the others.

‘Dr Dee advises the Queen,’ Price said. ‘He can help us.’

I felt near-sick. What the hell had Walsingham told him about me?

‘Tell him about your grandson.’

Wariness washed over me with the realisation of who her grandson must be. The old woman bowed her head.

‘He don’t want to know our troubles.’

‘I want him to know,’ Price said. ‘He’s one of us. Rowly’s boy. He’s studied these matters, he can see what we can’t because we’re too close to it.’ He turned to me. ‘In the weeks before his death, the boy’s dreams were troubled. He saw the church afire again and the graves—’

‘Stephen,’ Goodwife Thomas said. ‘No more.’

‘Didn’t he say he saw the old graves opened and awoke and wouldn’t go back to sleep for fear of what he seen coming from the graves?’

‘Please, Stephen…’ The old woman leaning forward on her bench. ‘The rector, he said the devil had got in him and we must not speak of it. The boy took his own life and that’s one of the worst of sins.’ Wiping her eyes with a cloth. ‘And I want to pray for his soul. But I don’t… I don’t know where it is.’

Behind her, a child had begun to sniffle. From outside in the misty distance, there came a yelping cry. Like to a vixen, but I knew it was human.

‘You see?’ Price said, as we walked to the wooded end of the village. ‘You see how things are? They’re afraid even to call out to God.’

We passed two ruined hovels, whose roofs had long ago been burned, only the blackened walls remaining. I was thinking that nobody I’d met in Pilleth, not the Thomases nor the Lewises nor the Puws – none of the small farmers who had known him – had made reference to my tad as a dishonest man. Nobody gave indication that they had any knowledge of what I’d been doing in London, only – well, well, Duw, Duw – this slow-smiling surprise at meeting Rowly Dee’s boy after all these years. Gareth Puw, who was also the village blacksmith, said he’d heard the new Queen was oft-times to be seen around London and was very friendly to the people, and had I ever seen her myself? I admitted that I had, said she was fair of face and full of good humour… and left it at that.

There was a quiet civility amongst these people, a hospitality I knew they could not afford. But no merriment. Even the children looked wan-faced and listless, and the air was chill, and the clouds hung like smoke from a damp fire. The sense of a community closing in upon itself. I guessed doors would be barred at sunset, tapers lit in windows, for those who could afford them.

But they would not talk about what Stephen Price wanted them to talk about.

‘The whole village will die around them,’ he said, ‘and they won’t question it.’

On the edge of the village, a door opened as we approached it, and we heard a thin wailing from within, and then a man emerged, a narrow man in a long coat.

‘Child’s gone, Master Price,’ he said without preamble.

He was built like a broken archway, face white as plaster.

Stephen Price sighed.

‘One left.’ The narrow man’s voice was from his nose. ‘The one they thought would go last year, but yet hangs on. The Lord God decides, as ever.’

I saw Price’s body quake.

‘And that’s all you got to say, is it?’

‘What would you have me say?’

‘Mabbe the Lord God got more time for some places than he got for others,’ Price said with bitterness.

A distant smile.

‘I’ll pray for you, too, Master Price.’

The man looked briefly at me and pulled his black coat around him and moved away with high, pecking steps, like a raven, as the door was barred from within.

I said, ‘That’s your rector?’

‘Matthew Daunce. Gone back to his lair, in the trees above the village.’

‘God,’ I said.

It was set tight into the hillside itself, framed by thorn trees whose twisting branches were grown over its walls. Its roof was well mossed and its open doorway like to a crack in the rockface.

This squat and crooked dwelling had not been visible during our ascent of the hill. We’d had to pass through the village and stand within a small wood of stunted oak to see it unobserved.

‘Was this here when the battle was fought?’ I asked Price.

‘Here, but not lived in. It’s said once to have been the cell of an anchoress, living alone here for many years. But that was long before the battle, when there was just a shrine. The anchoress looked after the shrine, and when she was gone, the brambles took over.’

‘That’s what it’s called? The Bryn. As if it’s part of the hill itself?’

His face twisted.

‘For years, it was Ty Marw.’

I looked at him.

‘The house of death. Charnel house. When someone went in, after the battle, they found it filled to the rafters with dried-out bodies. In the end, they got taken out and buried with the rest, but nobody wanted to live there… until Mistress Ceddol came yere with her brother. I was in London at the time, learning about Parliament and how it all worked.’

‘Was this woman told of its history when they came to live here?’

‘You’ve met the local people, Dr Dee.’

I nodded. They’d tell her, of course they would.

‘She must be a remarkable woman. Or very desperate for somewhere to live.’

‘Made it habitable mostly by herself, last summer. A better summer than this. She and the boy lay nights under bent-over saplings covered with sheepskins, while she worked. Had I been here, I’d’ve found them shelter in the outhouses at Nant-y-groes. I think it was the Puw brothers who came to help in the end – first Pilleth people to go inside the Bryn for generations. And then gradually more of them came to help. She’d insist on paying them with what she was earning through the sale of potions and ointments she’d made from herbs and sheep fat, to sell at the apothecary’s in Presteigne.’

‘Where did they come from, the woman and the boy?’

‘Somewhere north of here, Shropshire mabbe. Driven away from home, she’ll readily admit, because of her brother. Her father couldn’t live with his wailing, his sudden rages, ramblings in the night. Especially when their mother died not long after he was born.’

As if to prove the nuisance of it, there came that vixen shriek from within the little house – within the hill, it sounded like – followed by a woman’s laughter. A smittering of slow rain began to rattle the crispen oak leaves, and Price led us into deeper shelter.

‘Her patience with him appears endless.’

‘The sister brought him up?’

‘No choice. People are afraid of him. Stricken from birth with some malady of the mind. And yet… possessed of this… talent.’

He told me how the boy had found a skull in the foundation for his new barn, Price dismissing it as rookery until, just over a week later, he’d given instruction for a new field drain to be dug, and nobody would sink a spade until Siôn Ceddol had been sent to walk the pegged-out route. The boy had stopped three quarters of the way to the last peg where, subsequently, a whole skeleton had been unearthed.

In the oak wood, I carefully prised away a bramble which had coiled like a monk’s manacle around my wrist. The path through the wood ended at the Bryn. It was all too clear that this was our final destination and the reason I’d been brought to Pilleth. The Bryn was either the cause of the sickness or, in some strange way, its possible solution. Whatever Siôn Ceddol was possessed of, Price didn’t understand it and was afraid of where it would end, especially under the eyes of the new rector, Daunce.

‘Whenever the boy’s called out to search for bones, he’ll know, and he’ll go there first and mumble his prayers into the ground and then walk away and have no part in what follows. Preaches on a Sunday about the devil in our midst, but he don’t name names. Not yet. But he sows unrest where once there was acceptance.’

‘Acceptance?’

‘There’s always been a wise woman yere, or a cunning man.

The last one died about five years ago. Mother Marged. Blind in both eyes. Blind to the world, but there was a calm around her. After she died, her ghost was said to walk through the village every night just beyond sunset. Me, I think they just wanted to see her, with her hands out in benediction. A comfort. But when the boy came, she was seen no more.’

‘A successor.’

‘Most of the cunning people, they got something wrong with ’em. Blind or deformed. They need your help, and they give it back in kind. Siôn Ceddol, he can’t talk, in English or Welsh. The sounds that come out of him, all with dribbling and swivelly eyes, people say it’s the faerie tongue. Most of the time he can’t even walk a straight line. But he walks ’twixt the living and the dead, and there’s no fear in him.’

‘Finds the bones.’

‘En’t only the bones, he’ll show you where to dig for a well. You tell his sister what you need, she gets through to… to where he is. And when he understands, he’s straight to it, like a digging dog. And they’re paid in meat and clothing and a few yards of land and the help to manage it. And if he won’t go in the church after he shit hisself in there once… well, they’ll stand outside and she’ll join in with the hymns and prayers, and the boy’s scampering around the churchyard like a rabbit, making his noises. A harmless idiot.’

‘The rector won’t see it that way,’ I said.

‘No,’ Price said. ‘He don’t.’

I looked out between the wet trees at the low crooked rock-house once called Ty Marw. Built into Brynglas Hill. Grown into the hill. A slow spiral of smoke curled from the hole in the roof, meeting the steady rain.

Now I wanted badly to know about this boy. If he did what they said he did, and how.

‘I can make an introduction, if you like,’ Price said.

I sensed he didn’t want to. Didn’t even want to be here, now that he’d shown me the place.

‘Have you ever been in there?’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘Foolish, ennit?’

‘I’ll go alone,’ I said. ‘See what I can see. And come back to you.’

I felt I was misleading him because this was little more than scientific curiosity on my part, a scrabbling amongst the thickets of the hidden. I marked the relief in his eyes with a certain horror.

The door of the Bryn was black with damp. It was opened as if I’d already knocked upon it, and a woman stood there. As if she knew I was here, though I was sure she couldn’t see us for the trees.

And, oh my God, why had no one warned me about her?

XXX More Than Water

WE ARE MOVED – I know this – according to the configurations of the stars and the interplay of planetary rays. We are moved like chesspieces on a board, and oft-times I think of myself as the knight, placed with an oblique mathematical precision, but unpredictably. The knight, who never knows which direction he’ll be made to face next.

‘My name’s John Dee,’ I said.

Standing betwixt the oak wood and the doorway. Anna Ceddol looked at me with small curiosity. Siôn Ceddol scowled and picked up a stick. The rain fell upon the chessboard.

‘My father was born down at Nant-y-groes.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘They’ve talked about you in the village.’

‘My… my tad left many years ago, to live in London. It’s the first time I’ve been here.’

‘The royal conjuror, is it?’ Anna Ceddol said.

No apparent malice or even an awareness of saying anything that might cause offence. Of a sudden, I was weary of denying it. I may even have nodded.

The rain was seeping uncomfortably through my jerkin. Anna Ceddol held the door wider.

‘You’d best come in. You’ll be soaked.’

‘Thank you. I… left my wizard’s hat in my saddlebag in the stable at Nant-y-groes.’

She didn’t smile. The boy, Siôn Ceddol, kicked sulkily at a thorn-tree root. About half an acre of ground beside the cottage had been cleared of brambles, bushes and undergrowth. Some of it had been cultivated for vegetables, with rotted horseshit spread on top before the winter. Some appeared good pasture. But there was no stock on it. No chickens pecked the ground.

I went in. The boy followed me, picking up a bundle of small sticks from beside the door. He wore a bright red hat pulled down over his eyes.

‘I… went into the wood to shelter,’ I said. ‘Seeing the rain about to come on.’

She shook her head, as if disappointed that I’d lied so glibly. I felt a weight of shame. I’d not lie again.

‘Stephen Price brought me,’ I said.

The Bryn was even lower than it had seemed from outside. My height, which comes from the men of Kent on my mother’s side, made it impossible for me to stand even with bent neck.

Anna Ceddol pointed to a three-legged stool by the fire, which was on a raised hearth, against one wall, with the smokehole above. Two large upright stones backing on to the wall might have been supports for an ingle beam, had there been one. Rainwater fizzed on the red embers, although I guessed the hill rising so close behind the cottage would be shielding us from the worst of it.

‘Master Price thought I might talk to you,’ I said. ‘And your brother.’

For a moment, Anna Ceddol appeared to smile, and then it was gone, fleet as a clouded moonbeam.

‘Well perhaps not your brother,’ I said. ‘That is—’

‘Master Price doesn’t come here. His wife would not like it.’

‘I’ve not met his wife.’

‘Me neither. A quiet woman. Or so they say. Sits before the kitchen fire, goes out to listen to the priest on a Sunday and then goes home and worries. Quietly.’

No particular expression in her voice, except maybe a resignation. Her overdress was the colour of sacking, its hem frayed and flaked with mud. God’s tears, why had no one warned me about her? I’d seen women this lovely at court, but their faces were paled, their lips reddened like cherries. They were ladies; this was a woman, with all the timeless beauty of an unadorned statue. Long face, full lips, heavy hair. A sense of grace about her… and, although she was slim and lithe, a certain weight.

She said, ‘Can I fetch a drink for you, Dr Dee? We have good water, from a spring. I… regret if I insult you, but they say that the water in London…’

‘No, no, it’s true. The water in London kills.’

She inclined her head. Her eyes were vividly blue, although her hair, all bound into a thick braid, was dark as rich earth. I was somehow glad when she turned away and went to a pitcher which stood amid the rushes on the floor, leaving me sitting in the feebly sparking firelight listening to my own fraught breathing.

The Bryn: from the outside, it had looked like the worst of hovels, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness I saw that the inner walls were all scrubbed and the rushes on the floor clean and dry. The boy sat in a corner beyond the fire, quiet now, but watching me, the way a cat does.

The chessboard expanded and shrank in my fogged head.

‘Mistress,’ I said at last, ‘I confess I know not what I’m doing here.’

‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you were sent to see if we’re drenched in evil?’

‘Mistress, I—’

‘Sooner or later, wherever we go, this is what happens. All’s well till something goes amiss and we’re blamed. And then we’ll move on. They’re good people here, but it can’t be long now before we’re made to go. Not without regret, mind, after all the work we’ve done to make this a home.’

She gave me water in a wooden cup. I drank, tentatively at first, and then… Jesu, liquid alchemy from the rocks, water from Eden.

‘Your brother found this?’

‘One of his less disturbing skills. And our most gainful, I suppose.’

‘He has an instinct for where best to sink wells?’

‘Farmers ever think they can do it, but not many can. Anyway,’ she shrugged, ‘the rector won’t have it in his font.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘The rector.’

‘Anything that can’t be explained, it’s either the will of God and must not be questioned, or the work of Satan… and must be destroyed. And he’s our closest neighbour.’

I watched her solemn face. There was a silken calm behind it that I found almost eerie. What also surprised me was the eloquence of her speech. I’d expected a woman living in such humble circumstance, with an idiot brother, to be uneducated, barely coherent. It was clear now why Stephen Price found her alarming and the rector, held in the ligature of Lutherism, feared the demonic.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I know not what they say about me in the village. What you’re told to your face is seldom what’s in people’s minds. But my tad came from here, and I doubt they’d mean me harm. And Stephen Price, against all his inclinations, he believes this place cursed by its history. And thinks, with all my fabled learning, that I might at least be able to direct him to a cure. I doubt I can do that, but now I… I do feel driven to try.’

Found I was leaning from the stool, my voice rising in urgency. Anna Ceddol stared at me, with an evident consternation that reassured me of her humanity. I fell back under the weight of my own inadequacy.

‘I consider myself a natural philosopher. A man of science. Half of London – maybe more than half – yet thinks me a sorcerer, and not so many years ago I was close to being burned for it. And you know the bitter truth of this, Mistress Ceddol? I can rhyme off the theory for hours… but I can’t do what your brother’s said to do. Nothing approaching it.’

‘Then perhaps,’ she said, ‘you should thank God for that.’

‘Mistress, I don’t thank God for that. My whole life is focused towards a need to enter the Hidden. And I know now that it can’t be done by books alone. Not by all the books in the libraries of the world. All that the books can hope to do is make sense of it.’

I drained my cup of the sublime water that Siôn Ceddol, the idiot, had found in the rocks of Brynglas.

‘I yet need something of which to make sense,’ I said.

Some of my long-held despair doubtless showing itself – to a stranger in a house like a cave.

‘My brother?’ She smiled at last, though it was smirched with rue. ‘Does it not occur to you that when the circumstances of birth leave a child damaged or crippled in his body or his mind then sometimes God will make amends by giving him other gifts?’

‘I think,’ I said carefully, ‘that this is not always true.’

‘No.’ She looked into the fire. ‘I suppose not. Sometimes I wish God had left him alone with his ills. We’ve been driven from too many towns. At first they value him and then, when there’s water enough for everyone…’

‘It’s more than water, isn’t it?’

Mistress Ceddol drew a bench across the rushes, so that she sat opposite me, the fire betwixt us. The boy crawled across the floor and nestled close to her skirts, looking at me, wide-eyed but silent.

‘The dead?’ She tossed back her dense, braided hair like a ship’s mooring rope. ‘What do you want me to say? That the dead have been kinder to him than the living? Look… what happens with the bones… that’s not happened before. Only here.’

‘The obvious explanation being the large number of bones here,’ I said. ‘So close to the surface.’

Now looking away, though, because I knew it was more than the physical fact of broken bodies absorbed into the hill. This countryside reeked of the numinous. Why else had it been chosen for a shrine to the holy virgin, its spring sanctified, probably to more than one god?

‘What I’m saying…’ Anna Ceddol squeezed her eyes shut, her calmness lost for a moment to exasperation. ‘…and what I’ve said to others… is that the bones are not the dead. Only what’s left.’

‘But what of the man who was found more recently dead? And… cut about.’

With no warning, the boy let out his vixen shriek, and I sprang back in alarm, almost toppling the stool.

Siôn Ceddol grinned. Anna Ceddol pressed down upon his red hat, and he squirmed and giggled, and she laughed for his benefit but addressed me in a darker humour, her eyes steady and intense.

‘He didn’t find that man. He wouldn’t even come out that day. He was afraid and clung to the fire.’

‘But—’

‘No, look at him. He’s ever in his own place, and a big part of him is missing. He feels no responsibility, no obligation to any of us. When he shits, I wipe his arse and change his napkin. He expects it and always will. He doesn’t understand. He feels no need to understand anything beyond his own needs. Other people don’t matter to him – never have, never will. Not the living, nor the dead.’

Her face as calm as ever, but behind it pulsed an old and constant sorrow, always on the edge of despair. Sweet woodsmoke caught in my throat and made me cough, and I felt sorely shamed by my concern with – in comparison – such small frustrations.

‘Listen, he’s tired now,’ she said. ‘Maybe, if you can come back tomorrow…’

‘Here?’

‘If you come back in the morning, I can show you what he does and you can judge for yourself whether it’s the devil in him.’

Siôn Ceddol was sitting up now, still giggling. Reaching out his arms – I thought at first to me, but his eyes were on something to the side of me, where smoke hung over a stack of cut logs.

The boy reached out to the space above the logs, making kittenish noises. If there had been heat from the fire there was none now.

Anna Ceddol said sharply, ‘No.’

Her brother began to pant, his hands held out before him as though he held a holy chalice. The fire’s cold red embers shone in his eyes.

‘He’s tired,’ Mistress Ceddol said. ‘You should go.’

Another oak wood bearded the lower western slope of Brynglas. An old wood, where some trees had boles with the girth of the late King Harry.

I hesitated on its threshold. If there had been a path through it, it was long obscured.

The sky would go dark soon. I should collect my horse from Nant-y-groes and ride back to Presteigne. But the rain had stopped and something beckoned, something beyond the wood.

I went in, as to a country church, the branches above me like twisted rafters, the crunching of acorns under my boots. There ought to be pigs here, but nothing moved except a man who felt himself drawn deep into something he did not understand, surrounded by people who thought he should.

Anna Ceddol: I felt a profound sadness for her situation. And more than a little desire of her body, which I could only regret for she was in need of better than that.

And I had a sense of what this boy was about and, if only for Mistress Ceddol’s sake, must needs prove it.

Tomorrow.

Who was I fooling? It was as much for my own sake, or – as I might claim – for the furtherance of learning. The boy had found a link to the land, something of another sphere that was channelled through him.

The oaks shone dully from the rain, and the old churchiness of the wood was as strong as if it were perfumed with incense. I thought of priests, ancient priests in robes of deathly black, with hair in disarray, as Tacitus would have it.

The Druids, the priestly class of ancient Britain. Made demonic by the invading Romans who would slaughter them on the Isle of Mona in the north-west of Wales – surely demolishing a shining spiritual engine, for was not Merlin himself a Druid?

Ever the fate of the magician, to be demonised and put to the sword.

Sooner than I’d expected, I emerged from the wood’s cloister onto a plateau of land overlooking low ground suggestive of marshland, to which I at once slid down.

For, against the darkening sky, I’d seen it.

Normally, I’d need no alerting to a man-made bump in the land. Oft-times they hold a promise of treasure which, as I’ve said, almost always comes to naught.

This tump was low and regular, too small and shallow to be a castle motte. It was nothing in itself and yet, as I crossed the low ground towards it, it seemed to sing to me. That is, I was sure I could hear a low humming in the air. Maybe the sound of my own excitement, for ancient earthworks tantalised me, made my hands tingle, and I knew not why.

Found myself murmuring a prayer in Latin as I stood at the foot of the tump. The grass on its sides was clearly of a different colour to the turf of the land on which it sat.

I stood looking up to the summit, where another oak tree grew, like an emissary from the wood.

What was it about these lonely old graves? The graves of men who were here, I believe, before the Romans, before Arthur. Of a race who lived according to an old magic linked to an arcane knowledge of the sun and the moon and the planets… but who lacked the means or the ability to write any of this down. These were men whom I’m sure would have known some of what Pythagoras knew, but by instinct. Men whose remains – oft-times no more than cremation dust in a pot vessel – were too meagre for such an upheaval of earth.

This was the treasure: the old knowledge, the ancient wisdom. The tumps were like books made of soil and turf, if only we could read them. Whatever guardian rose up to frighten those who would dig into the tumps in vain search of gold – and I’ll confess that I was once inclined to be amongst them – was perhaps in defence of old secrets.

It was easy to climb to the summit, where the oak tree stood like a bent old blackfriar. I stood with a hand on the tree and looked all around, and my breath caught in my chest.

Even from such a modest height, the view was immoderately enhanced. The shape of the nearby river could now be seen, a gleaming eel, brighter than the sky, gathering light from a source I could not see.

The River Lugg.

Lugg?

How might this be spelt? Could it not be a local pronunciation of Lugh, an old British god of light and the harvest? Was this the holy river of Lugh?

Was the sloping oak-wood the remains of a sacred grove of the Druids?

The presence of a holy well near the church on the hill that rose before me was a further indication that this had been a place of worship older than the Christian church. And I could see now that the tump on which I stood was set into a curve of the river – the sacred river? – which, it seemed to me, was like to its own shape.

Indeed, it seemed, at that moment, as if the whole valley had been formed around this tump. When I came down, it was on the other side, nearest the river, and I was marking the dints where it had been invaded by Stephen Price and Morgan the shepherd.

A body introduced where a body was not meant to lie. A violated body.

A kind of sacrilege, I thought, as the air of the place was pulled around me like a damp old cloak.

XXXI A Popular Knave

IN PRESTEIGNE, THE night was alive with lights and the wailing of a fiddle and flute band which was led, I saw, by the chief ostler from the Bull, in a yellow hat with a feather, plucking at a battered lute.

And so many more people this night. The constant clatter of shod hooves. Messengers, likely from the Council of Wales at Ludlow, coming to feed and water their horses and take meat before going back on the road. New pitch-torches were set to burn all night outside the sheriff’s house, and extra guards had been posted outside.

The roistering was not a paid-for merriment; something had taken fire. If all this was over the trial of one man, it still made not full sense to me, despite what Roger Vaughan had said about the scratching of an old itch. I wondered, as I led my horse into the mews at the Bull, to what extent the wound had been inflamed by the manner of the deaths of the men who’d brought Prys Gethin out of Radnor Forest.

Lights against the perceived darkness of witchcraft?

‘Sorcerer!’

At the entrance to the mews, something stinking slapped into my left cheek. A child’s screech was followed by an ooze of grown man’s laughter, as I winced, plucking at the mess of rotting fruit on my face. Clearly my cousin Nicholas had not been inactive this day.

Quick footsteps behind me in the mews, and I froze, my horse’s hot breath on my neck. No way of knowing how many of them were in the shadows, or if they were all children.

‘No use in hiding…’ A voice more Welsh than any I’d heard in Presteigne or Pilleth. ‘Seen your faces now, boys.’

A voice familiar to me.

‘And here’s the thing,’ it said. ‘If I see your faces again this night and there’s no one about, I shall have no choice but to drown the both of you in the river. Leave you floating faces-down all the way to Hereford. A pity, but there it is. Cannot abide impoliteness in the young.’

Silence, then the voice came back quieter, with perhaps an edge of amusement.

‘I think there’s a horse trough just behind you, John.’

God’s blood. I found the tank and bent to it, splashing the cold water on my face and rising, dripping.

‘Thomas Jones?’

‘The small surprises life throws at us, eh? Keep me going, they do. How are you, boy?’

This was a man high on the list of people I’d not expected to meet in this town. But then again…

‘You’re here as a friend of the accused?’ I said.

‘Ha!’

‘To plead for his life, perhaps?’

Thomas Jones, who was betrothed to my cousin Joanne, peered at the approaching ostler.

‘Lying with the horse tonight, is it, John, or have you come into money?’

‘Living off my rich friends,’ I said. ‘As usual.’

‘I thought maybe it was that. You can buy me dinner, then.’

I’m yet unsure how my cousin Joanne, whom I’d encountered but rarely, had come to be enamoured of the man known in his own country as Twm Siôn Cati.

Thomas, son of John and Catherine, is all it means, but it’s said to ring like mocking bells in west Wales, where he was known as a scholar. And also a thief.

Thief? Listen, I know not – and take care never to ask – what he stole. According to the legend, his victims tended to be knavish landowners. Some of the proceeds of his crimes were, it is said, fed to the victims’ hard-pressed tenants… while leaving some behind for the purchase of his books, I’d guess, though never asked.

Especially since Thomas Jones – Dr Jones now – had, with little explanation, been granted a pardon by the Queen. Maybe through petition of his family to Cecil or even Blanche Parry. Who really knew how or why such pardons were granted? But Robert Dudley, when introduced, was predictably sceptical of the provenance of this one.

‘You expect me to dine with this sack of shit?’

Glaring at Thomas Jones from a corner of the parlour at the Bull, where candles flared from the walls and men I recognised as Legge’s attorneys were pressed amongst well-dressed men with a merchant air, and serving girls bore jugs of ale and cider.

Twm Siôn Cati looked hurt. He’d gained some weight since last I’d seen him, and his hair was longer, his beard shaven close. His doublet, of a warm, russet colour with threads looking suspiciously gilded, was the kind of garment that Dudley himself might have worn were he not in mourning or the guise of Master Roberts.

I did not know – and yet don’t – if there was history common to these men or whether Dudley’s disdain might even hide a well-buried respect. I might even have derived some amusement from it, had circumstances been different, for it was clear that Thomas Jones had a good idea of my companion’s identity. And Dudley’s attitude would confirm it.

‘This man’s a renowned knave. You do know that, John?’

‘Former knave,’ Thomas Jones said stiffly.

‘And you’re telling me this piece of gangrenous Welsh pus is your cousin?’

‘Soon to be, Master Roberts, by marriage.’ Thomas Jones tossed a handful of groats on to a tray and snatched up a mug of cider. ‘And may I say, John, your antiquary’s manner of speech—’

‘Tutored him myself,’ I said.

‘—is sadly typical of the vulgar way the grasping lower orders, when exposed to a little learning, choose to express themselves these days. Thank God, I say, that such a man will never be seen within a mile of the Queen’s Majesty.’

‘If I were in a position to order it,’ Dudley murmured, ‘I’d be obliged, for the good of the country and all of us, to see you hang.’

‘You’ll stay for that, masters? The hanging?’ The big, shiny face of the innkeeper was before us. ‘Likely no more than a day after the trial. And then we’ll sell some ale, sure to.’

Thomas Jones looked dubious.

‘Won’t they torture him first? Find out where the others are? Won’t they want to crush what’s left of Plant Mat once and for all?’

‘You could be right, master, could be right. Likely be dusting off the rack at New Radnor as we speaks. Might have to build the gallows a few inches higher.’

The innkeeper was near doubled up with merriment.

Dudley said, ‘You actually trust this man Jones?’

‘In a way, I probably do. But I wish I knew why he was here.’

It had not been possible, in the suffocatingly crowded inn, to discuss anything of significance. Dudley had said hardly a word. Soon after our supper, Thomas Jones had disappeared to wherever he was to lie this night and Dudley and I had taken a jug of cider to our chamber, lit a candle, closed the shutters against what remained of the revelry.

‘He’s here,’ Dudley said, ‘because he knows Prys Gethin. Why else?’

‘Robbie, he was pardoned by the Queen.’

‘Only because she likes to appear magnanimous towards the Welsh. And because he’s a popular knave. That, of course, is assuming it was her own decision, which I tend to doubt. And who can be sure that Jones isn’t one of them? Plant Mat.’

Dudley had told me about coming face to face with Prys Gethin, chained in his gaol cart. Of his conviction that he’d been cursed by the man. I knew not what to think. For any number of reasons, Dudley was in a peculiar state of mind.

‘I just… I don’t like the feel of this, John. I’m yet failing to understand why a judge of the eminence of Legge is sent here, complete with jury, to make sure that one man is seen to be tried and goes to the gallows with all ends tied. It’s too much. There’s something happening behind it.’

He’d also told me about the whore he’d lain with – why was I unsurprised to hear of this? – and his belief that she might lead him to Abbot Smart and the Wigmore shewstone.

‘And you trust her?’ I said.

‘I know women. She’ll want more of me. What are you doing?’

I’d found paper and ink in my bag and spread them out upon the board under the candle.

‘Drawing a map, from memory, of Brynglas Hill and the valley leading down to the River Lugg.’

Wishing I was in my library, with Leland’s maps, where all might be measured against what was known and recorded. So many possibilities here. Did the ancients believe that dedication of the river to the god of the harvest might ensure fertility in the valley? I drew the ancient burial mound in the river’s curve and the church with its pre-Christian well and shrine. And betwixt them the oak grove. Dudley was peering over my shoulder, a mug of cider in hand.

‘What’s it mean?’

‘All these heathen sacred places all clustered together. The river and the hill. It’s clear that in the time before Christ some places were seen as more suited to worship and communion with the beyond. Places where there might be passage through the spheres, one to another.’

Dudley took a step back, cider spilling over his wrist.

‘Beg mercy, John, I may have asked the wrong question. What I meant was, what the fuck does any of this matter?’

I looked up at him, perhaps vaguely.

‘I don’t know. I need to think on it. But it’s clear, is it not, that the battlefield was chosen by Glyndwr and Rhys Gethin? And Glyndwr studied magic and would see the power in this place.’

‘Jesu,’ Dudley said wearily. ‘You never change, do you? This is all because some failed MP from the rear benches asks you to explain why his village is dying on its feet.’

‘My father’s village.’

‘Your father’s dead! And it was so much his village that he took the first opportunity to put it a three-day ride behind him and never go back to the dismal hole.’

I shook my head. I’d fought against it and lost, for reasons I’d refused even to explain to myself.

‘I felt no particular kinship with it at first. Felt nothing of my tad there. And then mysteries appeared. As important, in their way, as… as the shewstone, I suppose.’

‘As important to the Queen?’

‘Possibly not.’

‘Your mysticism leads you by the nose,’ Dudley said. ‘So Pilleth’s dying. Villages die all the time, from the plague, or the river dries up, or—’

‘One more day.’

‘You’re going back?’

‘Maybe not more than half a day.’

Dudley thrust his face up to mine.

‘Can it be that you’ve forgotten why we came here? You’re leaving me to find the shewstone, while you waste another day trying to restore the reputation of the fucking Dees?’

‘Give me one day, Robbie,’ I said. ‘Just one day.’

Maybe I should’ve told him about the Ceddols. Maybe if he’d known there was a startlingly beautiful and mysterious woman in Pilleth he would even have come with me.

Maybe some people would not have died so cruelly.

Maybe.

But I said nothing. When I crept from my truckle at first light, my head was all full of writings about a man called Agricola who I thought might answer the mystery of Siôn Ceddol. And Dudley was yet sleeping in the high bed.

The early ostler was saddling my faithful mare when, of a sudden, he climbed the ladder to his loft and returned with a fold of stiff paper.

‘Left for you last night, master.’

John, the message said. We must needs talk, boy. Alone. And with some urgency.

Had there been any sign of Thomas Jones on the streets of Presteigne as I rode out, I would of course have stopped.

Maybe I should have asked him where he was lodging.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

Dear God.