The Heresy of Dr Dee

XXXII Given Back

NOW THAT WE were well into autumn, the mist was dense and speckled with white and gold, showing that the sun was yet alive somewhere. The boy was running ahead of us into the mist, arms flung wide, flapping like the wings of a ground-hopping bird.

Not entirely of this world, I’d have sworn that.

‘Sometimes,’ Anna Ceddol said as we pursued him up the hill, ‘I think I can see lights around him. Little winking lights at his shoulders.’

People talk of foreshadows of the End-time. Lights in the sky. Prophecy in dreams. Voices in the night. Footsteps in empty rooms. The dead among the living. I hear of these things all the time. I draw glyphs and sigils and mark wondrous geometry in the night sky to calcule how celestial configurations might alter our humour. Yet how can I know what is real and what is imagined?

He spun, red-crested, amongst the curling leaves, swirling in the energy of autumn. He was of nature, she said. The woods would feed him. He would wind himself around the twisted trees, occasionally snapping off twigs which would come alive like extra fingers, twitching and dipping.

Although not so much now. He seemed to find that unnecessary now, she said, as though he could conjure invisible twigs and follow where they led.

Natural magic.

‘You took it up there?’

Anna Ceddol had stopped halfway up the slope, drawing her woollen shawl around her. The church tower had appeared above the trees. I looked at her, worried.

‘I thought to take it somewhere he might not normally go. Was that wrong?’

The secret, she’d said earlier, is in making him want to do it. He has no care for how you regard him. Will show no real love for any of us. Only need, which is not the same. He feels only for himself, and oft-times, it’s hard not to think the worst of him.

‘Not,’ she said, ‘if it proves something to you.’

But I saw she was anxious.

Once you understand, you can feel only pity… the pity that you know he’ll never feel for you. You can’t teach him to obey commands, like a dog, because a dog wants to please and he doesn’t care. You have to know when to catch his attention and point it at what you seek.

What he was seeking now, on Brynglas Hill, was an earth-browned thigh bone.

Anna Ceddol had presented it to me while he was outside.

His favourite bone. The first he found here, a few feet from our door. I could never take it to be reburied because he won’t be parted from it. Sometimes he holds it next to him as he sleeps.

I’d asked her what she wanted me to do with it, and she’d bid me take it and hide it. Anywhere. Then come back. Which was what I’d done. It had felt unreal walking through the mist carrying a thigh bone before me like a talisman, to leave in a place where I’d felt it would be in the care of a higher presence.

Returning to the Bryn, I’d heard his vixen scream and the angry toppling of wood from the fireside pile and wondered how Anna Ceddol could go on living with this, year upon year. He was already near as tall as her, would soon be bigger, a grown man with a grown man’s urges and living alone with his sister. Dear God in heaven.

When he’d registered that the bone was gone, I’d watched him running from the hovel, hands clawed, face contorted in rage, staring at me with a clear and focused hatred, Anna Ceddol watching him, impassive. Used to this – his humours changing faster than clouds in a windy dawn.

We stood and watched his red hat bobbing in the grass.

‘Do you never go to town, mistress?’

‘When I’ve something to sell.’

‘You have no cart… no horse.’

‘Nor stabling for one. No need. Horses won’t rest at the Bryn. Ewes won’t graze. Chickens escape. When I go to town, we walk. It’s not far. On a fine day.’

‘Why won’t animals live here?’

‘At the Bryn? I’d have thought you’d know, master.’

‘I’ll put it another way, then – how can you live here? You’re clearly an educated woman. How came you here?’

‘I…’

She bit her lip. Her hair was not braided this morning, and the breeze blew it back. I drew breath; her beauty unnerved me.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I said.

‘Beg mercy,’ she said. ‘I called you master. It’s doctor, isn’t it? You treat the sick also?’

‘I… treat nobody and nothing,’ I said. ‘And cure even less. The doctorate’s something I picked up in the course of a long education. Which will never finish.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’

Tomos Ceddol, her father, had laboured on her grandparents’ farm. Good looking, and her mother had fallen for him and determined to marry him against her own father’s wishes. Anna’s mother had been the youngest of six.

Had Tomos Ceddol expected some kind of dowry? Had he expected to be rich, wed to a big farmer’s daughter? Whatever, he was soon embittered.

‘Not a good marriage,’ Anna Ceddol said, ‘and my mother, as soon as I could understand, was telling me I must never make the same mistake, to marry below me. My father had to go farther away to find work. My grandfather wanted nothing to do with him. While he was away, my mother taught me to read. Secretly. If he’d known, he’d have beaten her. And then my mother died of the summer plague, and we were left alone with him.’

‘How old was your brother?’

‘Very young. We didn’t know then that he wasn’t… as he should be.’

Some time had passed before it became clear that Siôn was not as other children. Crying in the night… that didn’t stop. Nor pissing his bed. His sister washed his sheets daily and made more in secret, or her father would have had him sleeping on straw. Soon Tomos Ceddol was become ashamed of his son. Could not bear to look at him.

‘Spent as much time away from the house as he could. He’d come home drunk – so as to get to sleep, he said. But oft-times, the noise was too much. He’d awake in a tearing rage and… hurt Siôn. One night he took him out to the barn. I found him kicking my brother where he lay, and I pulled him away, and he hit me until I knew not where I was. The next day, I loaded a handcart and took my brother away.’

‘Where could you go?’

She shrugged.

‘Kept on walking until we were too far away for my father to find us. I’d robbed him, see.’ She looked at me, eyes wide open and unmoving. ‘Took all the money he had in the house. Well… he’d no cause for complaint. It would have cost him more if we’d stayed.’

‘Where was this? Where did you live?’

‘A good distance away. You’ll excuse me, Dr Dee, for not saying where. If he hasn’t drunk himself to death in a ditch by now, I don’t want him finding us.’

‘Did you know by then of Siôn’s… qualities?’

She shook her head.

‘We came down the border, village to village, for some years. For some time I had work caring for the small daughters of a widowed gentleman who paid a village woman to look after Siôn by day. It seemed a good situation until I learned that I was expected to marry him. He was older than my father, and I… Anyway, it was back on the road until the money was all gone.’

I waited.

‘Then another rich man took us in.’

Looking at her, was it any surprise? All the rich men would be waiting in line.

‘He gave me money and offered me a house to live in. In Presteigne.’

‘Generous,’ I said.

‘It was a good dwelling, behind one of the clothing workshops. Too good to be given without demands on my… time.’

They were walking out of town when a man and his family stopped and gave them a ride on their stock cart. Pedr Morgan, shepherd of Pilleth, returning from taking fat lambs to market. They’d spent the night in his stable. She’d asked if there was anywhere she might find work and somewhere to live for a while.

‘The rest… is of small import. Save that it took time. The people here are slow to befriend a stranger. But at least there are no rich men, save Master Price. Rich men have not been good for me.’

‘Nor poor men, it sounds like.’

‘Except for Pedr Morgan.’

Who had lost his finest fleecing shears – must have fallen off the cart in one of the fields, he had no idea which. Been searching for a fortnight and more. Taking Anna’s advice, he’d shown his old pair to Siôn Ceddol, who had found the missing shears within an hour. Within a week, he’d found two new springs in the hillside. Wells were sunk, the Ceddols given food and offered dry barns to sleep in. And then Anna Ceddol had happened upon the Bryn, where nobody wanted to live and could be hers, for nothing.

And then Siôn Ceddol had found the thigh bone. The first of hundreds of body parts.

‘Where’s he gone?’ I said.

All the time she’d been talking, the red hat had been bobbing above the yellowing grass. No sign of it now.

‘He won’t be far away,’ she said. ‘Where did you put the bone? You might as well tell me.’

I told her I’d gone up to the little church, finding it empty. And then, walking around the side, had come upon…

‘Oh Jesu,’ Anna Ceddol said.

Already she was running up the hill, lifting her skirts, her breath coming hard.

I caught her up.

‘Mistress, it was the best test of him I could think of. A place he’s not used to going – a place he might avoid – though quite close. I needed to know how—’

‘I thought you understood!’

It was almost a scream. The most emotion I’d seen her show, and made me sick to my heart.

‘Listen,’ I said, running alongside of her, panting. ‘Please… I think I do understand. I think your brother possesses rare natural skills of a kind which are yet… fully explicable by emerging science. I’d like to… to help him develop them.’

‘That’s not possible.’

She stumbled on, the mist gathering more densely around us. Her head was lifted to the obscured sky, and her lips were moving in what looked to be rapid prayer, as we came up to the church’s grey walls. The tower was darkly garlanded in mist which seemed to hide no sun, trees bending away into the sloping churchyard. A cawking of crows and ravens, intimate in the fog, and, mingled with them, a kind of liquid wailing which sent Anna Ceddol, sobbing in relief, forward in a rush, to follow the church wall to the holy shrine of Our Lady of Pilleth.

I’d been in a hurry when I’d brought the bone and now saw the shrine and holy well as if for the first time: the green-slimed rocks, the steps down to the spring-fed pool, the stone wall built around it making it look like an open tomb.

On her ledge against the church walls, the mother of our saviour was smirched by the grime of neglect. Abandoned. Behind the body of the church, almost certainly older in its origins, the shrine of the holy virgin had been given back to nature.

And the bone given back to Siôn Ceddol.

He sat with his legs overhanging the pool, rocking from side to side, the dripping thigh bone in his arms, a gurgling in his throat.

He could, I suppose, have found it by accident, but why would he even come this way? And I’d hidden it close to the edge of the well, where bushes concealed the shallow water, and covered it over with silt and sodden leaves.

It was conclusive enough for me. I turned to his sister.

‘I do understand him. I know what he does.’

As if this were all that mattered.

Oh, the blindness of science.

I went down to the holy well, where rough steps sank towards the water, the mist gathered above it like a soiled veil. Siôn Ceddol clutched his bone to his chest and looked up at me as though he’d never seen me before and snarled, his face twisting like to a gargoyle’s.

And then…

‘He makes mockery of God!’

Christ, no.

Turning slowly to see the rector, in his long black coat. Everything happening as though darkly ordained for my undoing.

‘He is a walking blasphemy,’ Matthew Daunce said.

Anna Ceddol’s eyes closed, her shoulders falling, the shawl dropping to her elbows. Oh, dear God, oh, Christ, what had I done? What had I set in train here?

‘No,’ I said. ‘You know not what you’re saying.’ I stood up. ‘Mistress Ceddol. It’s best if you go. And the boy.’

Her eyes moved from the rector to me, and she took the boy’s arm and pulled him to his feet. He writhed, and she held him and the bone and dragged him away and looked at me.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Go.’

‘You also.’ The rector’s face was a ball of white light in the mist. ‘Now I know who you are. You are not wanted here. You’re filled with dark sprites. The filth oozes from you.’

I said nothing. Watched the Ceddols backing away, Anna dragging the boy with his thigh bone bumping off the trees, leaving me staring into the rector’s pointing, rigid finger.

‘Go with your whore and her demonic sibling.’ His forefinger twisting as if to bore a hole between my eyes. ‘Go on! Before I call upon the Lord God to hurl you out.’

‘No,’ I said.

The word emerging fainter than I’d wanted, for I found I had no breath. Could almost see it leaving me, fading into the mist as, from the woods below the church, the horrific, faerie, vixen shriek of Siôn Ceddol tore the morn into dark strips.

XXXIII The Single Eye

DUDLEY HAS TRIED several times to meet the single eye of Prys Gethin, determined to send back the curse to its source by force of will.

Like most of those around the Queen, he’s seen the advantages in a mild study of practical magic and is prepared for an exchange of black chemistry across the already tense courtroom.

But never once does he entrap the Welshman’s gaze.

Gethin stands limply in a corner of the prisoner’s dock, which is close to the centre of the courtroom, hands manacled behind him, two armed guards his companions in the wooden pen, the jury seated along the wall to his right.

Access to the court, not surprisingly, is limited. Dudley has gained his place by following Roger Vaughan into the attorneys’ enclosure. Five of them in there, with their books of notes. Hard to see what function they each perform, but the judge will have his reasons. Sir Christopher Legge is nothing if not coldly efficient, and such men as him, Dudley freely admits, are necessary.

The law is not about humanity.

Already, the rough-beamed former barn has taken on an air of London. Banners are hung on the wall behind the judge’s bench of green oak, reflecting the Queen’s Majesty, a royal authority. Something to be feared.

Yet it’s all too big for this petty affair, and Dudley is tormented with suspicion.

The judge’s bench rises several feet higher than the attorneys’ to its right and the seats to its left which soon begin to be occupied by a handful of men who Vaughan says are the JPs from Radnorshire and neighbouring counties.

‘Come to see how it’s done?’ Dudley whispers. ‘How real justice is administered?’

‘Certainly, no one will have seen it done like this before,’ Vaughan tells him. ‘A trial here rarely takes longer than half an hour. Twenty cases might be heard in a morning. I’m thinking this will go on most of the day.’

God’s bollocks, Dudley thinks. Only a royal trial matches this.

He draws in a steadying breath and tries again to catch the eye of Prys Gethin, but Gethin is looking down, his face without expression. Has he been tortured, Dudley wonders, for the names of his fellow brigands in Plant Mat? Is he cowed from a night of beatings?

Nothing evident.

Outside, the sound of a massing of people, a dull roar, but in here the public gallery along the back wall is big enough only for about two dozen – Dudley marking one of them at once: Thomas Jones of Tregaron. Why is this bastard here? What’s his interest? Who let him in?

‘What have they told you, Vaughan?’

‘I’m a child in this. They tell me nothing. Only ask me questions about local matters and how people feel about them.’

They are at one end of the attorneys’ bench and Vaughan glances warily towards the other, where one of the older lawyers might only appear to be consulting his notes.

Dudley gets the message and keeps quiet, observing a man in a bishop’s mitre, attended by two clerics, entering through the main doors and approaching the bench, where two men in dark robes are arranging large books before the judge’s throne.

The bishop inclines his head and… hell, it’s John Scory of Hereford. They’ve brought the Bishop of Hereford here to represent God. Whose judgement is yet final, of course, in an English court. As if to confirm this, the morning sun at last breaks through, filling one of the high windows, and the air shimmers with dust motes.

The bishop goes out again. A robed usher enters, calls for silence and for every man to stand, and there’s a communal shuffling, and then Sir Christopher Legge slips in through a small Gothic-pointed door behind the judge’s bench.

Only after the prayers to a just God are delivered and the charges read out, is Prys Gethin’s red-stubbled chin seen to rise from his chest.

And through witchcraft did bring about the deaths of Thomas Harris and Hywel Griffiths in the county of Radnorshire on the night of September 20th, in the year of Our Lord 1560.

There were other charges relating to the stealing of cattle. Enough, on their own, to stow Gethin in the deepest cell for many a long year. Perhaps even hang him.

‘How do you plead, Master Gethin?’

Legge barely glancing at the accused. The sunbeams from the high windows create dusty cloisters in the air above the dock and the jury box.

A silence. Legge looking mildly irritated.

‘What have you to say, Master Gethin? If you wish to make plea in your own tongue, we have an interpreter.’

Glancing at Roger Vaughan.

Prys Gethin looks the judge full in the face.

‘I’ll not require an interpreter, my Lord, having spent considerable time in England. I plead not guilty to all charges.’

Legge nods. What else would he expect? The prisoner clears his throat.

‘And if I may be permitted to say, at this early stage, my Lord, my name is not Gethin but Gwilym Davies, gentleman farmer of Carmarthen. Something I’ve been trying to tell your minions, who seem strangely predisposed not to listen.’

Dudley sits up hard and, for just a moment, his eyes meet the prisoner’s one eye, where he sees laughter flaring like raging flames.

XXXIV Adversary

SUCH WAS THE density of the fog now, it was as though the rector and I were set in wax. His body was like to a scarecrow’s, but his face shone as marble. I looked at him and saw an effigy from a tomb dressed in cast-out apparel, and his eyes were lit, I’d swear, with madness.

The air was grown thick as a damp, grey blanket around the forlorn shrine. The walls of the church were now as far as I could see. Shivering in my cheap jerkin, I felt that this was no longer a normal autumnal mist but a fogging of the senses. I breathed in its bitterness and spoke with insistence.

‘Let me tell you… about Siôn Ceddol…’

‘There is nothing’ – his voice coming back at me like a horsewhip – ‘that you can tell me about Siôn Ceddol. Nothing that will change my opinion of him as an inhuman carrier of demons, who should never have been born into this world.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Who are you to tell me—?’

‘What Siôn Ceddol does,’ I said, ‘religion has no bearing upon it.’

‘Religion has a bearing on everything. Are you a fool as well?’

‘As well as what?’

Standing at the top of the steps, where Siôn Ceddol had sat, my breath was coming harder. If a place of healing is a place of inherent power, there was no sense of healing here now. Only the power, and that was a cold power with none of the promise of transcendence implied by an old sacred site. Within the quaking mist, I was aware of an ancient conflict, shafts of darkness and light twisting like blades.

‘As well as what?’ I said quietly. ‘Say it.’

‘I shall not. You know what you are and appear to live with it. But I don’t have to. I do not have to tolerate your presence here. Get yourself away from my church, conjuror.’

‘There,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it?’

‘Get out of here!’

His narrow body jerking in fury, elongating like a shadow.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not before I tell you the truth about Siôn Ceddol.’

He’d turned away from me, so that I was speaking to his back.

‘How much do you know about water divining?’

‘Of the devil,’ he told the fog.

I shook my head with confidence.

‘A human faculty, known since early times, which may soon be explained by science. But only now are scholars finding it can be applied to more than the finding of water. Though the fact that Siôn Ceddol can find water as well as bones is surely proof—’

‘That he’s riddled with demons. Don’t waste my time.’

I would not give up. Spoke to the rector’s back about the great natural philosophers – Paracelsus, whom he’d have heard of as a healer, even if he disapproved. And the German, Georgius Agricola, of whom he probably would be ignorant.

‘This is the man who’s become the best known diviner in Europe. Who began with water, but then extended his art to finding metals and ore for mining. Using the same fork of hazel, which twisted and turned in his hands when he stood over an underground spring.’

I’d learned about Agricola at Louvain and, of course, had tried it myself, to no avail, before sending a report on it to Cecil, suggesting he might strike a bargain with one of the German experts to establish a mining enterprise in England. Cecil had seemed interested, but I’d heard nothing since and assumed he’d dispatched spies to Europe in the hope of acquiring the knowledge for no cost.

‘You don’t see it, do you?’ Daunce said. ‘You do not see the obvious. A demon enters a man and gives him knowledge he could not otherwise possess. Causing his limbs to move on their own. Snatching his body from the reins of his mind. I’ve watched that creature, seen its eyes go white as its hands burrow in the earth to bring up the dead.’

‘It’s becoming known that the mind can be attuned to whatever it needs to unearth.’

‘And what if there is no mind?’ His rage throwing him back to face me. ‘The brain of that monstrous boy will ever be in ruins, and ruins are where demons walk unchecked.’

Turning away his head again, in contempt. It was like talking to the rocks. But at least I’d told him what I believed to be the truth; maybe he’d think about it.

Though probably, he wouldn’t.

I said wearily, ‘What are you doing here, Daunce? You hate this place. You distress its people. They’re not theologians eager to embrace the rigid tenets of Lutherism. They’re not going to change their ways with a snap of the fingers.’

‘The word of God will change their ways.’

It had long seemed to me that the word of God as filtered through a Puritan’s rigid liturgy would change nothing for the better.

I thought of the boy who hanged himself because he could see no future here. Who might normally have gone to his priest for advice. And the old man who did go to Daunce, with his fears of night walkers and was told it was the devil making him see what was not there.

I said, ‘Does Bishop Scory know of your… way of thinking?’

But if I thought to put him in fear…

‘Scory? That heretic? A man who worships the lewd and the sacrilegious in a secret chamber in the Cathedral itself?’

I realised he must mean Scory’s treasured map of the world, Scory himself having said some canons had been in fear of it and wanted it burned. Daunce, unsurprisingly, must have been one of them. I didn’t pursue this, but I’d not give up.

‘What progress can we ever make if we put everything we don’t understand at the door of the devil? If a man sees the ghost of his dead wife and we tell him, that was not your wife, that was an image wrought by the devil to torment you…’

‘The truth is not always easy to face,’ he said calmly. ‘But faced it must be.’

‘And there can be no ghosts of the dead because the Lutheran faith has decided there’s no purgatory?’

‘All papist myth and must be revealed as such. Stripping away these fondly held archaic beliefs is bound to cause a small period of pain, before the clear light is seen.’

Well, of course, he’d see it as a challenge, a mission. Slicing through all the layers of the place with the clean, cold butcher’s blade of the new Puritanism.

I glanced at the statue of the Virgin in her grotto in the rocks above the water, marking the green slime on her brow and her robes all smirched with slug-trails and dead insects. Whatever power was here now, the Virgin was no longer the source of it.

‘You can’t be said to have taken care of her, Rector.’

He didn’t look at the shrine. Or I don’t think he did; his eyes were no more than smudges in the fog.

‘A papist conceit, perpetuating an old evil. I’d have it smashed. Maybe I will. I’ll certainly be erecting a barrier to keep people away. Let the brambles and thorns do the rest.’

‘Isn’t she the reason for this church? Our Lady of Pilleth?’

A silence, and then he eyed me, a slight smile on his dry, pale lips.

‘And who is she? Who is the lady?’

‘Who do you think she is?’

‘Can you not feel her?’

I said nothing.

‘I’ve never felt her so strongly. Our Lady of Slime.’

Dear God.

‘I found here a long tradition of dark worship which had never been challenged. This well was made by the old Britons, doubtless in veneration of some predatory water goddess. They would have performed sacrifice here, thrown the heads of their enemies into the pool.’

I could only nod. This married with my own findings from old English manuscripts.

‘The papists take a pagan well,’ Daunce said, ‘and claim it for the Virgin and nothing changes… because the practices of the Catholic Church, like those of the heathens, like those of the Druids, are founded upon magic and sorcery. You, of all people, should know that.’

Well, of course I knew that. Bishop Scory knew that. The Queen herself would acknowledge that high magic was a ceremonial gateway to knowledge.

And was a simpler magic so wrong for a place like this, the valley of the river of the god of light, dotted with ancient mounds, scattered with the remains of the violently killed? A place where a careful balance must needs be maintained?

‘I presume you know that Owain Glyndwr worshipped here before the battle,’ Daunce said. ‘In his desperate need for a great victory. But did he worship at the church? No, he burned it down. He worshipped here, at the pagan shrine. Glyndwr invoked the heathen goddess – the devil, in other words.’

I said nothing. Given Owain Glyndwr’s knowledge of magic and that he or Rhys Gethin appeared to have chosen this site for the conflict, I’d come to a not entirely dissimilar conclusion myself. But was disinclined to voice agreement with anything this man came out with.

‘Invoking the power of Satan,’ Daunce said, ‘and it was given to him. His name was exalted all over Europe. For a while – the devil’s favours last only so long. As you’re probably already finding out.’

I was feeling very cold now in my thin jerkin, with no hat, but felt that Daunce was not. That he was, in some twisted way, beginning finally to relish this encounter. He came closer to me, his coat hanging limp around him like damp and blackened leaves.

‘And they worship here yet. This so-called holy well dedicated to the Virgin Mary, who’s but a screen around the heathen goddess… is yet a shrine to evil. For I’ve seen— I have seen them anointing themselves here at night, in the heathen way.’

‘Who?’

‘If I’d gone close enough to see they would have set on me and killed me. God told me this. I’ve heard God’s voice in the night.’

‘How do you know it was God’s voice?’

‘You’d try and make me doubt it?’ His whole body shaking. ‘You’d make me out a madman?’

‘Father Daunce, you’re alone in a place you don’t understand and maybe never will. You’re prey to divers fears and fancies. You believe everyone’s your enemy—’

‘I’ve only one enemy, though he wears many faces, and I’m looking into one at this moment, asking myself is it a coincidence that England’s most famous sorcerer should arrive here… now? The adversary?’

I reeled back.

‘Adversary?’

‘Oh, I was warned in my prayers that one would come. I’d thought it was the demon inhabiting the boy. But it’s a subtler devil. A manifestation of one that’s been here for generations. Dee… ddu… black! All black as sin.’

His face was blanched and his lips were parched. I began to see where this was going.

‘Rector, you’re—’

‘Your grandfather… was he not Bedo Ddu, who filled the font with wine? No sacrilege worse than that at the baptism of a child, when all evil’s expelled.’

‘It was done in merriment, it—’

‘And the tainted wine flowed in the blood of your father, who went on to steal from the Church.’

Jesu, who’d told him that? What had I walked into?

‘But it found its full flowering…’ The rector folded his arms, as if sitting in judgement. ‘…in his heretical son…’

So close now I seemed to see a white light in his eyes.

‘… who stood trial for sorcery… and was saved by Satan in the guise of a papist monster who made him his chaplain.’

Bonner.

‘Are you yet a priest of the papist church, Dr Dee?’

He’d done his studies and found the most vulnerable part of my skin. There was nothing I could say that would not make this worse. How easy it must be to see everything in black and white. But there was no black here and no white. The mist would tell you this.

His finger came up.

‘Let not this place be tainted by your presence. Take yourself away from here while you can. Crawl back to your London lair. And when the Welshman’s sentenced, I’ll visit the sheriff and have charges of witchcraft brought against the monster and his sister, the Great Papist’s whore.’

What?

‘There’s no workable witchcraft law in this country,’ I said. ‘The Plant Mat case was only set in train because it was an accusation of murder by sorcery and two men were dead. There’s been no murder here. Only a mass slaughter a century and a half ago.’

A silence, then Daunce walked away, turning back to face me only when he reached the church wall.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘we both know better than that. And what lies in an ancient grave.’

I rose up, would have raced after him, grabbed him, maybe thrown him in the pool.

But what use would that do?

The balance was tipped against me. He knew about the mutilated man secretly buried by Stephen Price and Morgan the shepherd.

And he was mad enough to loose a witch-hunt upon Pilleth.

A weight of weariness came over me, and I sank to my knees in the mud.

XXXV The Etiquette of Cursing

THE PRISONER SAYS, ‘They told me my name was Prys Gethin.’

He sounds bewildered, as if the name has no significance for him. The judge leans back in his oaken chair.

‘Who did?’

‘The gaolers at New Radnor Castle, my Lord. When they overpowered me and took me to New Radnor, kept telling me my name was Prys Gethin, they did. All the time Prys Gethin. Would not have it any other way.’

The court billows with whispers, which are only hushed when the pikes are lifted and Sir Christopher Legge turns his anvil head, under its triangular black hat, towards the prisoner.

‘So… you accept that you were the man taken to New Radnor Castle by the sheriff and constables.’

‘I do, my Lord, but—’

‘Enough! You have pleaded not guilty to the offences with which you are charged, and that’s all the court wishes to hear from you until the case against you has been heard. You will, therefore, be silent until then. Is that understood?’

The prisoner nods his head with, Dudley notes, conspicuous courtesy and a certain grace. The clever bastard. It could be that his real name is indeed Gwilym Davies, that he’s known only within Plant Mat as Prys Gethin. It ought to change nothing. He glances at Vaughan, who looks a touch apprehensive, as though wondering if there’s any way he might be blamed for this oversight.

Evan Lewis, the sheriff, is called to give evidence. He is a bulky, brown-haired man who, unsurprisingly, appears slightly in awe of the London court visited upon Presteigne.

Legge has before him the sheriff’s written account of what occurred when the farm workers, who had lain in wait for many a long night, finally surprised the band of cattle raiders.

‘And how did they know, Sheriff, that these cattle thieves were the brigands calling themselves Plant Mat?’

The eyes of Evan Lewis flicker from side to side with transparent uncertainty. Dudley casts his own gaze to the ceiling, despairing of the quality of men responsible for upholding the law in these distant counties. They just wait in line, these farmers, for their turn at being sheriff.

‘Perhaps,’ the judge says helpfully, ‘these brigands were known to boast about their activities in local taverns. Determined to perpetuate their… legend?’

‘Exac’ly, my Lord.’ The sheriff’s body sags in his gratitude. ‘That’s as I believe—’

‘Yet, in the end, only this one was apprehended. How many others escaped?’

‘Hard to say, my Lord. Could have been a dozen or more. But they were fortunate that the one made lame by a fall readily identified himself to them as the leader, Prys Gethin.’

‘How very generous of him.’

‘My Lord, this was to open the way for a bargain. He said his fellows would pay handsomely for his release and if he was freed they could count on their land being safe from raids in the future. While if anything was to happen to him…’ The sheriff pauses and looks around the court. ‘…then every man who’d laid hands on him would be cursed to hell.’

A communal indrawing of breath in the courtroom. The judge holds up papers.

‘I have here statements taken down from four of the farm men which confirm what the sheriff has just told the court. I see no point in having each of them read out, but they are available for inspection, signed with the marks of the named individuals… whom I understand, Sheriff, were reluctant to appear before this court in person.’

‘My Lord. These are men who fear for their lives and their families.’

‘That they might be made targets of Plant Mat?’

Dudley smiles at Legge’s affected, faintly Gallic, pronunciation of the words – Plaunt Met.

‘And also they fear… his eye,’ the sheriff says, his cheeks turned a little pink.

Legge peers, in an exaggerated fashion, towards the prisoner’s dock. Laughter from the jury’s box. The prisoner looks down.

‘So,’ Legge says. ‘What was the response to this offer of a bargain?’

The sheriff straightens his back.

‘The landowners were summoned from their beds and would hear none of it, my Lord. No one should make deals with notorious thieves. They had him tied to a cart and taken to New Radnor. Calling in at my farm, where I was roused and, realising the importance of this arrest, sent at once for constables.’

‘And while you were waiting for the castle dungeons to be unlocked and prepared, I gather there was intercourse between the prisoner and the landowners, Thomas Harris and Hywel Griffiths?’

‘My Lord…’ Roger Vaughan comes hesitantly to his feet. ‘It’s, um… it’s pronounced Howell.’

‘What is?’

‘Hywel Griffiths, my Lord. Pronounced Howell. I just thought—’

‘Very useful, I’m sure, Master Vaughan,’ Legge says with venom. ‘Let us proceed.’

Vaughan sits down, eyes closing in embarrassment. Dudley smiles. Legge pretends to have lost the thread of his questioning and consults his papers, turning back a page.

‘How would you describe the nature of this intercourse between the prisoner and the owners of the cattle he’s accused of attempting to steal?’

‘Well… heated, my Lord. The prisoner, having failed to make a deal for his release, tried to escape and was restrained. It was then that he… uttered curses.’

‘Hmm.’ Legge pinching his sharp chin. ‘Consider, for a moment, your use of the word “curses”. In the heat of the moment, a man might shout abuse…?’

‘No, my Lord. This was delivered in what I can only describe as cold blood.’

‘You were witness to it.’

‘Indeed I was, my Lord. I saw and heard all of it, although – my Welsh having fallen away in recent years – I was not able to understand every word.’

‘You’re saying that the alleged curses were phrased in the language of the Welsh?’

‘They were. With finger pointed, under a full moon, which is said to give more power to—’

‘Yes, yes. I believe we shall shortly be hearing more expert testimony as to the, ah, etiquette of cursing. Was any of it delivered in the Queen’s English?’

‘Enough to convince me of the nature of it.’

‘Which was?’

‘That my neighbours, Thomas Harris and Hywel Griffiths would be dead before the new moon.’

‘And indeed there seems little doubt that both men… were.’

‘No doubt at all, my Lord.’

‘In ways… unexpected?’

‘One of a sudden fever.’

‘Hardly uncommon in itself, Sheriff.’

‘The other drowning when a sudden, ferocious wind smashed an old and narrow footbridge over the River Irfon as he was crossing it.’

‘You were not there at the time, I take it.’

‘I was not. However, I was summoned within hours, after the dead body was recovered from the river. My home is but a few miles away, see, and I can testify that this particular day was one of an unusual stillness. Not a breath of wind in the Radnor Forest.’

The judge nods, extracting a paper from the pile before him.

‘I also have a statement here, signed by the son of Master Hie-well Griffiths’ – flinging a cold glance at poor Vaughan – ‘giving testimony that he was at that time burning twiggery from a tree-felling not two fields distant from the point in the river where his father met his death and felt no hint of a breeze. Saying the smoke from his fire rose steadily throughout the morning.’

Strong evidence, Dudley thinks. In the absence of a specific Witchcraft Act, cases of causing injury or death by force of magic are become difficult to prove. Given her own interest in magic and alchemy, Bess might dither for years over this issue. Meanwhile, the power of malevolence conjured through focused thought and satanic ritual will go unchecked.

Dudley, who more than once has felt himself to be the target of a distant hatred made toxic by dark arts, is himself convinced that Prys Gethin, or whoever else he claims to be, does indeed have a stare of practised malignancy through that one eye.

And Dudley also knows that, where the use of magic is concerned, a sense of self-belief takes the practitioner more than halfway along the shadowed road. He stares hard at Prys Gethin.

Look up, you bastard, look up.

‘These two deaths,’ Sir Christopher Legge says. ‘How far apart were they, in time?’

The prisoner makes no move. His head is bowed, as if for the rope, as the sheriff replies.

‘My Lord, the fever struck the night before the collapse of the bridge.’

A hiss rushes round the old barn as if a cold river has been directed through it.

‘I think,’ the judge says over it, ‘that it is incumbent upon this court to learn more about the practice of witchcraft along this border. After our midday meal, I shall call the Lord Bishop of Hereford to give evidence. In the meantime, Sheriff, perhaps you might enlighten me as to the significance for this county, of the name Prys Gethin.’

XXXVI In Dark Arts

JOHN SCORY has removed his mitre and wears a small hat of an academic kind. He takes the oath with a knowing half-smile. Legge consults his papers, then sits back in his big chair and looks up.

‘My Lord Bishop, you are, I believe, my last witness.’

Scory looks perturbed.

‘Not the last ever, I trust, Sir Christopher. One would hate to think the fear of a Welsh curse might drive you from the Bench.’

Legge scowls. Dudley grins. He rather likes Scory, a bishop in perhaps his last see who gives not a whit for anyone, least of all an ambitious judge from London.

The light in here has gloomed since midday, the banners fading into shadow, the old barn’s beams and pillars giving the court the illumination of a forest clearing.

The judge starts again.

‘You’ve been Bishop of Hereford since…?’

‘Last year.’

Legge frowns. He evidently thought it was longer.

‘But in that time,’ Scory tells him, ‘I’ve studied in some detail the religious beliefs and practices on the fringes of the diocese.’

‘By which you mean the area in which we now sit?’

‘And some regions further west.’

‘You’re saying that beliefs in this area may differ in some ways from the accepted faith of the land?’

‘Only in the way that faith might be interpreted,’ Scory says. ‘Wales and the Border country are not noted as areas of religious rebellion, but old beliefs die hard.’

Legge waits. Now Dudley begins to see where the judge is going with this. He’ll have the court presented with clear proof that Wales is yet riddled with witchcraft and that it’s entirely reasonable to suppose that a man like Prys Gethin was schooled in dark arts.

It should make for an entertaining hour or so. Dudley has eaten passably well in the Bull, drained a flagon of the innkeeper’s finest cider and then emerged to find the whore, Amy, waiting for him in the marketplace. Telling him that if he comes to her after court’s out, she may well be able to point him towards the man he seeks.

Perfect. With any luck they could be out of here on the morrow, with the Wigmore shewstone all packed away. He has the money… and the menace, if required, as it usually is.

‘Coming out here,’ Scory says, ‘was a rather bewildering experience for someone used to softer climes. I found things remarkably different from Chichester in the south-east, where I was bishop in… in earlier times. There, for most people, worship was seen primarily as essential preparation for the life which is to follow.’

‘And is it not, my Lord Bishop?’

A suitably pious consternation creasing Legge’s brow.

‘Oh, most certainly it is, my Lord,’ Scory says. ‘However, in the wilder country, worship and ritual are seen also as serving a practical purpose in the surviving of this life. Isolated country people depend far more than do we upon a relationship with the land and its elements… perceiving themselves closer to the, ah, spirits which – under God – maintain the fertility of crops and stock, and hold the seasons in place.’

Legge’s eyes close in upon the blade of his nose.

‘Spirits?’

‘Country people, inevitably, are closer to what you may prefer to think of as the elements of nature. Not as close as our ancestors might have been but closer than most city people can imagine. Few have not had some experience of natural powers which have raised them up or – more often – reduced them to fear for their livelihoods. And life itself.’

Scory pauses, casts his gaze around the rustic courtroom as though it were become his cathedral. The air is clouded in here now, but not dark enough for candles.

‘My point is that they are constantly aware of the fragility of their lives and why a balance must be found and held. And, in finding this balance, are oft-times inclined – by instinct – to mingle the rituals and liturgy of the modern Christian church with the time-honoured customs of the area. Which some may see as witchcraft, but these simple folk—’

‘What are you saying, Bishop?’ the judge demands irritably. ‘That witchcraft is so deeply embedded in the religious practices of these counties that it goes unrecognised as heresy and blasphemy?’

Scory beams.

‘Precisely, my Lord. Were every man or woman who practises what we might consider a form of witchcraft to be brought before a court, most villages would be left derelict and the land untilled.’

Legge sits up, his chair creaking. This testimony has not taken the path which he – or Dudley – would have wished.

‘And what of curses?’

‘As old as time.’

‘And in your experience of this area, can curses yet kill?’

‘In my experience…’ Scory wrinkles his nose. ‘…a countryman believing himself cursed will oft-times curl up and die.’

‘You are saying the curse works.’

‘I believe that, in the right circumstances, some curses do indeed work. Especially, as I say, if a man knows himself cursed. If he falls ill, he’ll be inclined to believe the curse is come upon him.’

‘And the inflictor of the curse may issue it with this intent?’

‘Indeed,’ Scory says, gazing into the air. ‘However, I confess I’d find it rather harder to explain how such a man may seek to persuade let us say a bridge that its timbers are fatigued to the extent that the said bridge gives up its struggle against collapse just as the recipient of a curse is passing over it. Probably a gap in my occult knowledge, my Lord, which I must needs address.’

Silence, and then the sound of laughter.

Which, Dudley is dismayed to discover, comes from his own throat.

Scory retains his solemnity as the laughter spreads in slow ripples through the court.

‘Thank you,’ Legge says coldly. ‘I have no more questions for this witness and will shortly adjourn this hearing for a period to consider all the evidence before addressing the jury.’

He glances disdainfully at the prisoner, who yet stands as though a noose is already in place. Dudley eyes the doors. No better time, as the judge prepares to rise, for a rescue attempt.

Legge delves among his papers.

‘But before I adjourn… I had considered giving the prisoner an opportunity to speak for himself – on the understanding that it would be in English – but now see no need for this. However, a written statement has been presented to the court by the prisoner, writing in the name of Gwilym Davies, the substance of which I shall now disclose.’

The judge tells the court that the man calling himself Gwilym Davies and professing to be a farmer of Carmarthen, claims that, on the night in question, he and his fellows had driven a herd of black cattle to the London markets and were returning through Radnor Forest when they were set upon in darkness.

‘Believing their assailants to be murderous robbers, they fled,’ Legge said. ‘But Davies, being lame, was captured and thrown into a cart. Being much beaten about by men who, he says, gave no evidence of being officers of the law, he admits to subjecting them to a tirade of abuse after one of them spat into his empty eye-socket. He denies issuing a formal death curse. Claims he…’ The judge sniffs. ‘… would not know how to.’

In the dock, the prisoner is nodding very slowly.

What unmitigated shit. If there was anyone more practised in the art of cursing than this one-eyed man, Dudley has yet to encounter him. Deserves to dangle for these lies alone.

‘He also repeats his assertion,’ Legge continues, ‘that the name Prys Gethin was pressed upon him by his captors. This being a name which, as the sheriff has told us, is calculed to spread a particular fear in this area of the borderlands.’

The judge smiles thinly and sceptically before adjourning the hearing for two hours – an extraordinary amount of time for such a petty case, Dudley thinks.

He leaves the court and walks down to piss in the river.

Only wishing he could have taken the stand himself and declared how the man had cursed him. Here in the marketplace without a second thought, the malevolence springing full-formed to his lips as if directed from some outside force.

But then, what nest of wasps might Dudley have kicked if he were to have given evidence as Master Roberts, the antiquary?

Walking back up the street in the dimming afternoon, he marks a tall woman in a dark green cape, gliding towards him from the centre of town.

By the finery of her apparel alone, it can only be the whore calling herself Amy.

They draw level in the marketplace, now filling with people awaiting the conclusion of the trial that will scratch a twenty-year-old itch. The piemen gathering.

Amy smiles, reaches up quite openly and touches Dudley’s cheek.

‘Now, my Lord?’

The title delivered in a coquettish, mocking way, but Dudley still can’t help wondering if she knows who he is. All the men of influence she must bed. And introducing herself as Amy. Could that…?

Enough. She’s a woman. Dudley can handle women.

‘You can take me to him now?’ he asks.

‘Of course.’

‘Then I’m in your hands.’

‘Time for that as well, if we’re quick,’ Amy says.

XXXVII Falling Away

I MUST HAVE gone stumbling down the path like a hunchback, and the hunch was Brynglas Hill itself and all the weight of worship piled upon it – one religion grinding against another, the fog before me lit with frictive sparks. Why is it that all faiths founder upon the jagged rocks at their extremities?

Towards the foot of the hill, the fog thinned to a mist again before revealing a sky of amber-grey and the smoke from the Pilleth fires which I hurried towards… and then cried out as the path crumbled before me.

Losing my footing, and the land was all atilt. Then came the shock of cold water – treacherous mud had flung me headlong into a brown, stagnant puddle.

God damn. I lay soaked, twisted and dazed, close to weeping in frustration like an infant. Jesu, what was I become? The adversary? Truly, I’ve never in my life wanted to challenge God, only to understand some small part of his mind. Is that the worst kind of heresy?

Blinking away the dirt in my eyes, I thought for a moment that I saw my tad with that expression of both sympathy and scorn which all good fathers wear when a child falls and explodes into self-pitying tears.

And then found I was looking up into the calm, weather-browned face of Anna Ceddol.

‘Mistress…’ Coming at once, red-faced and dripping to my feet, brushing wet earth and slimed leaves from my sopping jerkin, feeling more foolish than I could ever remember. ‘Oh God, Mistress Ceddol… what have I done without thinking.’

Or, more likely, while thinking too much.

Anna Ceddol nodded towards the boy, who was scrabbling among the damp ashes on the midden.

‘He does everything without thinking. Or, at least, not as we know thinking.’

Yet still achieved more than me, for all my years of study. A bookman who thinks only of how his learning might grow. Making him more of scholar, but less of a man.

Anna Ceddol took my arm.

‘You’re shivering. Come by the fire.’

Leading me inside the Bryn, where she propped three logs in conical shape upon the smouldering hearth, drawing me towards the new flames.

‘It was coming, anyway,’ she said.

‘What was?’

‘The rector. Sooner or later he was going to move against us. He was only gathering kindling for his blaze.’

‘We can stop him.’

‘Don’t waste your time, Dr John.’

‘I’ll find the sheriff tonight,’ I said. ‘Before Daunce gets to him. And bring Stephen Price down from the wall, on your side. He’s halfway there. Can’t deny the malady affecting the valley. Can’t be the political man turning from the old ways. If he’s to have the rest of his life here, he must needs face…’

I knew not how to put it and fell back on Price’s own words.

‘He must needs face what is,’ I said. ‘And that the Pilleth ills will never be cured by a Puritan whose answer to anything he doesn’t understand is to condemn it as satanic and shut it out.’

In that enclosure of firelight and shadows, it was all very clear to me now. I saw the shrine left to crumble and rot, the holy well overgrown, sucked back into the earth which gave out old corpses in profusion.

‘I’ll tell the bishop he has the wrong cleric,’ I said.

Yet I knew how hard it could be to remove a priest. Especially one who knew where a murdered man’s body lay and who put it there. I closed my eyes.

Then opened them quickly.

‘What are you doing?’

Perhaps I’d gone rigid, still lacking confidence in the close company of a woman, especially when she was…

… undoing my jerkin.

‘Jesu—’

‘They’ll dry more quickly if you take them off.’

‘Mistress, is this…?’

‘Seemly?’ Peeling my shirt from my skin. ‘Who can ever say? Does it matter?’

Drying my chest now with a cloth of sacking, both her hands moving under it. She’d closed the door so the boy was shut out, and also much of the light. The smoke from the fire was sweet-smelling. Apple wood, clouding the air with fragrance, filling the head.

‘The hose?’

‘I—’

‘I’ll need your hose.’

Her long hands gently fumbling at my waist.

‘Now I’m all wet, too,’ she said.

Oh, dear God.

‘These things happen,’ Anna Ceddol said.

Her voice small now. I could barely draw breath. In the dimness, I saw her overdress falling away. Gave in to the smoke and the soft weight of a breast falling forward into my palm.

I slept. It was a mistake. When I awoke, on the pallet amongst the rushes, there was a smell of stew and herbs from the pot over the fire, and the door was open to the dusk.

Sitting up, I marked my apparel hanging from a beam and Anna Ceddol full-dressed watching the boy playing with his favourite thigh bone on the edge of the hearth, rolling it along the stones, humming to himself like a drone of bees.

She smiled.

‘Is it your wish to pass the night here, Dr John?’

‘I… can’t. I’m expected back at the Bull in Presteigne. And I must needs find the sheriff.’

Thinking I could reach him through Roger Vaughan. That Vaughan would surely vouch for my sanity.

I stretched out my legs, feeling warm and fulfilled in the simplest, most physical sense. She was only the second woman in this world I’d lain with, and my life was turned over again. I couldn’t look at her without wanting her again, wanting her forever.

How easy it is to fall into love.

‘Yet I don’t want to leave you,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid of what the rector will do. The rector’s mad.’

‘I’ve faced worse.’

‘I’m not sure you have.’

She looked at Siôn Ceddol, rolling his bone from one side of the hearth to the other, the eerie drone never ceasing.

‘People like to say he’s of the faerie. When he wants to find something, the faerie tell him where it lies – or the dead. Some say it’s the same thing. That the faerie are the spirits of the dead.’

‘I doubt that.’ The mingling of spheres – this I felt, but what did I know? ‘I think the faerie are the essences of things. The spirits of life in the land – in the trees and the rivers and the rocks.’

‘The rocks live?’

‘Some rocks, you can see the life in them. Crystals. It’s my aim to study this for myself. Make experiments.’

I thought of the scryer, Brother Elias, in Goodwife Faldo’s hall, how my attempts to observe and understand had led me only further into darkness and confusion. The perceived shade grown from the shewstone that night… the mention of bones drawing me at once to my guilt over Benlow, the Glastonbury boneman, when it might have been some strange foretelling of my encounter with Siôn Ceddol. The trickery our minds perform.

And then I thought of something else that Matthew Daunce had said.

‘Anna…’

She was carefully detaching my jerkin and hose from the nail in the beams, shaking them out as if they were apparel of quality rather than the rubbish I wore.

‘You needn’t worry you might’ve given me a child,’ she said. ‘I’m barren.’

‘I wasn’t—’

‘And glad of it. I’ve been raped twice. Would have been three times, but the third time I agreed, and then he couldn’t do it.’ She took down the items of apparel and laid them by me on the pallet. ‘A young woman alone with an idiot boy, it’s the least a man expects.’

‘You can’t go on,’ I said. ‘You can’t go on with this life.’

I looked at Siôn Ceddol who seemed to have fallen to sleep with his arms around the bone. With closed eyes he looked like any other boy and harmless.

‘Come back with me,’ I said.

‘To London. With him?’ She laughed. ‘They’d have him in Bedlam before the week was out. Don’t you see? We can only ever live in places like this.’

‘He has a skill. An important skill.’

I had a momentary crazed vision of presenting Siôn Ceddol to Cecil as the only dowser I’d known who might be able to replicate the wonders of Georgius Agricola.

‘Don’t even think of it,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘The city would terrify him. Me as well. We’re country people. If he wanders out in the night here, as oft-times he does, I know he’ll come to no harm. What were you about to ask me?’

I ached in my breast for her and the gloomed years ahead. Changing his rag every day, washing the shit from him in the stream. Worst of all, never letting him be alone with those his age, particularly the maidens. None of this would be so bad if she wasn’t educated. If she hadn’t the wit to imagine what her life might have been.

I let go a sigh.

‘When Daunce… when he was in full, abusive spate, he spoke of you as… the… the Great Papist’s…’

‘Whore?’

Her eyes were like rock.

I nodded, turning away from her, beginning quickly to drag on my apparel.

‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘But it might have been.’

I stopped dressing.

‘I think I told you of a rich man who offered me a home in Presteigne. I’d spent one night with him. Or half a night. He gave me money. He’d been… a monk. At the head of a monastery.’

‘John Smart…?’

I stumbled, half into my hose. Could hardly say the name.

‘He had a reputation,’ she said. ‘Even when in Holy Orders. Could not keep it in his robe.’

I sat down on the stool by the fire to put on my boots, shaking my head. How could this woman consider herself so worthless that she’d give herself to a man such as this even for one night?

Siôn Ceddol, awake again, came and sat on the rushes a few feet from me. He was looking to the side of me where the tall stones rose like the remains of an ingle.

As if watching something.

He smiled.

‘He likes you,’ Anna said.

‘How can you tell?’

Thinking he hadn’t liked me up at the holy well, when he thought I’d stolen his thigh bone.

‘He’s within a few feet of you,’ she said, ‘and he isn’t screaming the walls down.’

‘Where…’ I didn’t really want to ask her. ‘Where was he when you… were with Smart?’

‘There was a housekeeper. A young woman. She survived the night by plying Siôn with sweetmeats. My feeling was that she was one of several woman who… worked for him.’

‘And this was all in Presteigne?’

She nodded.

‘He’s still there?’

‘They say he pulls a good income from Presteigne. That’s what’s said. Only gossip, but the same gossip from different ends of town. Yes, he’s there.’

‘Tell me.’

While she told me what she knew and what she’d heard of John Smart and his dealings, Siôn Ceddol gazed placidly into the smoke. Holding out his hands in it, as though to accept a gift. But, conspicuously, not from me. His white hands swam up in the blue-grey smoke like flatfish and seemed to grasp something.

Something heavy.

Holding it up to look at it.

Holding up nothing.

Of a sudden there was no heat from the fire.

Anna Ceddol said quietly, ‘There’s someone with you.’

I stiffened. The fire burned white.

The boy turned and picked up his beloved earth-brown thigh bone and laid it on the hearth and then pushed it forward as if he were offering it for inspection to whoever sat next to me.

And then sat back and waited as I shivered.

I should have gone then to Stephen Price, told him what had happened this day – some of it, anyway – but I couldn’t face it. Needed some time to separate the truth from the madness. Besides, I knew I had to reach the sheriff before Daunce could get to him, although I couldn’t, at this moment, even remember his name.

I stole around to the stables at the rear of Nant-y-groes and found my mare. She knew me at once and was silent as I nuzzled her and saddled her and led her quietly out of the stable and down to the road. I’d come back tomorrow. By tomorrow I would have thought of something. Some way of persuading Anna Ceddol to return with me to London. What did it matter to me that she was incapable of childbearing? There was neither time nor money in my life for children.

I mounted up and followed the silvered ribbon of road with ease, giving brief thought to what I’d do when we arrived at my mother’s house. How my mother would react to my appearance in Mortlake with a beautiful woman and an idiot. The truth of it – I didn’t care. The moon rose, close to full in the clearing sky, and I felt hollow and sad and yet exalted.

We’d covered the few miles to Presteigne before I knew it, the mare and I, pounding the moonlit track.

As if she knew I was trying to shake something off.

Someone.

Even the mare knew something was wrong in Presteigne, starting and throwing back her head as the town houses sprang up to either side.

Most of them with light inside, even the poorer homes on the edge of town, where you’d have expected the families to settle down for their first sleep.

I dismounted and led the mare slowly toward the marketplace, now abuzz with groups of people, who spoke in low voices. No piemen. No merriment. The town was aslant, its balance altered, the sheriff’s building in darkness, all the pitch-torches snuffed, while only the inns were ablaze with hard light and the jagged air of a pervading rage.

XXXVIII Unholy Glamour

THEN I SAW men with lanterns, horses saddled. Men with swords strapped on and hard faces, some gathered in small groups, as if waiting for a leader.

I espied Roger Vaughan walking alone, seeming to be going nowhere. The white, fattened moon illumined the sweat which spiked his hair and smeared his face like melted tallow. He looked like a man newly claimed by the plague, trying to absorb the awful knowledge of it.

‘I’ve just ridden from Nant-y-groes,’ I said. ‘What’s—?’

Vaughan shook his head, blinking, kept on walking until I could position myself and the horse in front of him. He stopped by an abandoned stall, the smell of fruit about it, slippery skins underfoot.

I waved a hand at the crowd.

‘A hue and cry?’

‘You could very well say that, Dr Dee.’

A young man came shouldering betwixt us, sliding his sword in and out of its sheath, shouting back at someone.

‘Be dead before midnight, if I finds him, tell you that much, boy.’

‘Who’s he talking about?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘If I knew—’

‘The one-eyed man,’ Vaughan said.

‘Gethin? Hell.’ I took a step back. ‘He’s escaped?’

‘You could say that, too.’

‘What about all the guards?’

His smile was crooked.

‘Dr Dee, the damn jury freed him. Under the explicit guidance of Sir Christopher Legge. The jury was as good as ordered to acquit him of all charges, and that’s what they did.’

A moment of waxen silence, like when an ear pops. The night took on a strange, spherical quality, as if I’d stepped out of it like a bubble.

‘Forgive me. The judge was sent from London with the specific purpose of convicting Gethin.’

‘That did seem to be the plan.’

‘Where is he? Where’s Legge?’

‘Gone. Ridden out within minutes of the verdict, with a small guard and no carts to delay them. Before the local people could storm the court.’

‘Jesu, Vaughan…’

‘Don’t try to make sense of it, Dr Dee. There en’t none.’

‘Where’s Dud— Where’s Roberts?’

‘Wouldn’t know. He was with me in earlier in court.’

‘Then where…?’

‘There was an adjournment while Legge considered the evidence. Mabbe he couldn’t get back in through the crush to hear the death sentence.’

Vaughan laughed dully, bent and picked up a stray plum and hurled it at the nearest wall, making a sucking phat.

‘Death sentence.’ He made gesture at the horsemen, beginning to move off in groups. ‘They think to catch Gethin on the road. Bring him back and have their own trial. Or mabbe just hang him theirselves.’

‘They won’t find him, I’m guessing.’

It was just young men with a need to turn anger into action – the twenty-year-old itch violently inflamed. They’d rampage across the hills for an hour or two, until the drink ran out, and stagger back into town, while the lights were gradually doused and the muttering about betrayal died until morning.

I pointed Vaughan down towards the river and the church, where it looked to be quieter.

‘Tell me about this, would you? In detail.’

He shrugged and followed me and the mare.

‘Some of the ole boys are even saying the judge was bewitched,’ he said.

The man known as Prys Gethin… he’d be well away, back into the heartland. Even if the angry men of Presteigne had caught up with him, who among them would have risked his own life administering rustic justice to a man so firmly acquitted by the Queen’s court?

Vaughan leaned over the bridge barrier, staring down at shards of the moon in the swirling waters of the River Lugg.

‘The judge told the jury that a hundred years ago – even fifty or less – they wouldn’t have had to think twice about their verdict. But the world was in the throes of mighty change and such matters as witchcraft were become subject to new thought.’

‘Legge said that?’

He must himself have undergone mighty change since the days when he’d conspired with my enemies to get me burned for using dark magic against Queen Mary.

‘He said that the two principal witness were also the victims, so called, and therefore dead. Told the jury that, as none of the men present had a proper knowledge of the Welsh speech, there was no evidence that a death curse had been delivered. But that it was reasonable to suppose – as implied by the Bishop of Hereford – that being abused in Welsh might have led Thomas Harris to believe that he was cursed.’

‘The Bishop of Hereford? Scory?’

‘Scory as good as said that witchcraft was the religion of Radnorshire. As for the collapse of the bridge in a sudden high wind… while there was much evidence of places nearby where there was no wind, what testimony was there to show there had been a violent storm in such a confined area? Only one man could say for certain, and he was drowned.’

‘Where did the story of the wind come from?’

Vaughan shrugged.

‘Legge asked that. To which there was no firm answer. It was all round the villages at the time but they clearly couldn’t find anyone to describe it to the court. The truth is, it was an old bridge. The judge said the jury would have to decide whether it believed that bitter words spoken by one man could cause timbers in that bridge to weaken it to the point of collapse. Drawing here on the evidence of Bishop Scory.’

‘Why was Scory even called?’

‘Ah…’ Vaughan pushed himself back from the bridge. ‘Now that… is of interest in itself, ennit? Sounded like Legge’d been expecting Scory to paint a dark and damning picture of Wales as a stinking midden of sorcery. Instead we heard of an almost benign heathenism which, enmingled with the Christian faith, gave country folk their own practical religion.’

‘Which is true, to an extent, is it not?’

‘Aye, course it’s true. But it en’t what you say to a court when you’re bent on getting a bad man hanged.’

‘A judge like Legge,’ I said, ‘never calls upon a witness without knowing in advance the nature of his testimony.’

‘Oh, he was heard to try and prod Scory back on to the path. And then ending his testimony at a stroke when it was clear he wasn’t gonner play ball… but too late. Clever, eh?’

‘You think Legge knew that Scory would be showing witchcraft in a different light… but pretended he didn’t?’

‘We had it all wrong. From the start. Assuming he was sent here to make sure of a conviction which a local judge might be affeared to preside over… when in fact he was sent to… make sure of an acquittal?’

‘But why?’

Well, that’s the big question, ennit? A few are saying it was done because the Queen seeks to hold favour with the Welsh.’

‘The victims were Welsh.’

‘Not as Welsh as the accused.’

‘It’s still against reason,’ I said. ‘Saving one man, only to make an enemy of a complete county? That makes not a whit of sense.’

‘Gotter be something we don’t know, ennit? See, even if Legge hadn’t brought half a jury with him, he could’ve turned it either way. He could have asked why there were no statements from Gwilym Davies’s fellow cattle-drovers to support his story of returning from London.’

‘And why were there not, do you suppose?’

‘Because all of them knew that if the case went against Gwilym they would have identified themselves as members of Plant Mat.’

I nodded.

‘Legge commented on the fact that neither the sheriff nor any of his constables were there when the ambush was laid. Wouldn’t it be normal, if a trap were laid, to include constables? The truth is that it’s a big patch and there en’t enough constables to send out night after night, week after week, when there’s no proof a raid’s to take place. Gethin could’ve been convicted. Easily. All the evidence was there, and all the focus of Legge’s questioning was upon conviction. Nobody was even called to say cattle had been stolen – well, none had, they’d been discovered in the act. Ah… cleverest piece of double-twist I ever saw… and the horses all saddled up in the street at the back.’

I stood at the edge of the bridge.

‘What about you? Where does this leave you?’

He shrugged.

‘I came down with Legge. I was his interpreter. His guide to the thinking of Radnorshire folk. And he used what I told him. Oh hell, aye. Used it to aim his final bolt at us. Right at the start, the prisoner – before he was shut up – told the court they gave him the name Prys Gethin, see?’

‘His captors? The sheriff?’

‘Who knows? But Legge, in his address to the jury, came back to that. Saying the name carried what he called an unholy glamour. Particularly in this county. As if it had been introduced deliberately to give the capture of a common thief a significance it wasn’t worth. As if it was all a piece of elaborate theatre to heighten the status of Presteigne as county town. In the west, see, they’ve ever resented it. Despising this place as an offcut from England.’

I could see the logic here. But why had Legge become such an enemy of this town?

‘You had no opportunity to question, if not Legge himself, then, one of the other attorneys?’

‘They’d cleared off within minutes of the verdict. The guards and jurymen split up into pairs and took off separately. Me…’ Vaughan drew a rough breath. ‘Two of the local boys had me up against a wall, would’ve beaten the shit out of me if a couple of Evan’s constables hadn’t come over, dragged them away.’

‘He’ll look a fool, too.’

‘The sheriff? Aye, nobody’ll come out of this unsullied. They think we’re all in it. And half of Wales here to see the humiliation. A man was even pointed out to me as Twm Siôn Cati, the famous robber of the west – and he got away with it, too. They’re laughing at us, Dr Dee. Mabbe I’ll take the coward’s way out on the morrow. See the kin at Hergest then ride back to London.’

I sighed.

‘Twm Siôn Cati is to marry my cousin. He’s a scholar now. I, um, try not to think about his past.’

He was silent a moment, then he smiled.

‘No offence meant.’

‘Nor taken. You believe Gethin was wholly guilty?’

‘I believe he was, Dr Dee, I’ve looked into the bastard’s eye. I believe there’s evil in him. But then… I’m a local boy.’

XXXIX Property of the Abbey

GREEN OAK AND clean new brick were aged by crowding shadows, alleyways become caverns. Behind the gloss of commerce, this was an old town with old ways.

We walked back towards a quietened market place, where you could smell the pitch from the dead torches. No lights in the sheriff’s house. He’d be back in his farm, the other side of Radnor Forest, nursing his wounded reputation. Lights could yet be seen in the hills where the young men of Presteigne pursued a quarry they must have known they’d never find. I guessed it was become a game now, Prys Gethin already become a phantom.

I said, ‘How did he get out of the court unmolested?’

‘Mabbe the same way they got the judge out.’ Vaughan stared ahead to where the castle mound loomed grey in the moonlight. ‘There’s a yard at the back, with a gate to an alley… and back to the road out of town. You’d expect him to take one of the two roads west, but who knows? He’d be safer in England tonight.’

‘It deceives you, this town,’ I said. ‘So many alleyways, so many hidden houses.’

‘England. Welsh towns are simpler.’

‘Many of the houses and workshops were once owned, I’m told, by Wigmore Abbey.’

‘Much of the town was owned by the abbey,’ Vaughan said. ‘It was how a wool merchant like Bradshaw could buy into Presteigne so quickly. Grabbing the old abbey property from the Crown as soon after the dissolution as deals could be done.’

‘And is it possible,’ I said, ‘that deals may have been done before—?’

‘Dr Dee!’ A shout. A man approaching us briskly out of the shadows. ‘Forest, Dr Dee. John Forest.’

Dudley’s man, who we’d left behind in Hereford to intercept any significant messages from London. When the devil had he returned?

‘My master, Dr Dee… he’s not with you?’

‘No, I… haven’t seen him since this morning. I had business at my family’s home, I—’

I saw the serious, gaunt-faced Forest glancing warily at Vaughan, who at once held out a hand for the reins of my mare.

‘Take your horse to Albarn, Dr Dee?’

‘Mercy?’

‘The ostler at the Bull?’

‘Oh… yes… thank you.’

He’d yet go far, this boy. Knew when to fade into shadow. When we were alone, Forest placed a hand on his leather jerkin, at the breast.

‘I’ve a letter here – for my Lord Dudley. From Thomas Blount. His steward?’

‘I know.’

‘I’m given to understand that it…’ He hesitated. ‘That is, I think it’s of considerable import. In relation to the continuing inquiries into the death of Lady Dudley.’

‘You’ve been to the Bull?’

‘He’s not at the inn, although his horse is. No one there I spoke to can recall seeing Lord… Master Roberts. Not tonight, not this afternoon. I’ve since been all over the town.’

‘He was in the courtroom earlier.’

‘Then where in God’s name is he? God’s bones, Dr Dee, this is Lord Dudley— Master of the Horse.’ Forest smashed a fist into a palm. ‘I warned him – tried to – against this folly. Felt better when I saw all the armed men with the judge, but now…’

‘You know what’s happened here?’

‘Be hard not to. The place is collapsed into insanity! Do you have any idea where he might have gone?’

‘He’d be furious at the verdict,’ I said. ‘He’d want answers.’

‘You think he went after the judge? With one of the hunting parties?’

I hadn’t thought of that. In normal circumstance, Dudley would have been leading them.

‘I don’t know.’ I spun around wildly. ‘He’s less driven by impulse these days, but… you said his horse was still stabled at the Bull?’

Of a sudden, none of this looked good.

‘Let’s go back to there,’ I said. ‘Make sure he hasn’t returned.’

Yet knowing he wouldn’t be there. Thinking now of Dudley telling me how the whore had implied she could put him in touch with Abbot Smart. When he’d told me, I hadn’t been too convinced. But that was before I’d spoken with Anna Ceddol and drawn certain conclusions about the abbey property.

It took not long to find the narrow house in the alley, dark workshops either side of it. Glass in its windows, the moon in the glass.

John Forest beat upon the door with a gloved fist, then again, louder and harder, until an upstairs window set into a small gable was pushed open with some difficulty.

‘Come back tomorrow!’

Her face was furrowed with shadows in the moonlight; she pulled hair out of her eyes.

‘We’re looking for Master Roberts,’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘Master Rob—’

‘Never heard of him. You have the wrong door.’

‘Tall,’ Forest said. ‘Not yet thirty years. A fine, handsome man such as you won’t see around here too often.’

‘Then I’d remember. Go away.’

You could hear the woman battling to close the window, its iron frame grinding.

‘Wait,’ I shouted. ‘Amy…’

No reply, but she left the window ajar.

‘Your name is Amy?’ I said.

‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Mistress Branwen Laetitia Swift. Ask anyone in this town.’

‘You told Master Roberts your name was Amy,’ I said, thoughtful now. ‘How came you by that name?’

‘I never came by it, for, as I’ve just told to you, it’s not my name. Now leave me alone. You’re both in your cups. Get off to your homes and sleep it off.’

‘He came tonight, didn’t he? You told him you might help him in his search for a man who was called John Smart.’

‘You’re at the wrong house.’

‘Is Master Roberts in there still?’

‘Must needs we break down the door?’ Forest said.

‘Holy Mother, do you want me to shout for a constable?’ She turned her back to the window, speaking to someone in the room, not bothering to lower her voice. ‘You… show them your face… another half hour if you show them your face.’

The face that came eventually to the window was plumpen, white-haired and stayed there not long. I looked at Forest. I thought we could take it that Dudley would not be in there with another man in her bed.

‘Was he here earlier?’ I asked. ‘The man we’re seeking.’

‘I swear I know not what you’re—’

‘This house, mistress. Was it once the property of the Abbey of Wigmore?’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘To whom do you pay a portion of your earnings for its use?’

‘I bid you goodnight, masters,’ the woman who was not called Amy said.

And the window slammed and rattled.

‘Amy?’ Forest said.

‘Dudley told me that was what she called herself, when he… when he spoke with her. She was lying, of course. She knew who we meant.’

It all seemed less innocent now. For the first time this night, I began to fear for Dudley’s welfare. We came out into the alley, Forest resting a hand on the hilt of his sword.

‘Where now?’

I was not confident about this, but saw no other way.

‘I think… the abbot himself.’

XL Paper Kites

WITH THE YOUNGER men out on the hills, the main parlour of the Bull was only half full, but the power behind the new Presteigne was here, its red-veined faces flushed in the creamy light of stubby candles on a round board.

Many a sideways glance for Forest and me, as we drank small beer served by the innkeeper, Jeremy Martin, whose agreeable manner was, for once, muted. For I, too, had journeyed here with the judge’s company and my name would, by now, have been well blackened by my cousin, Nicholas Meredith, who sat amongst his elders and did not acknowledge me.

Half a dozen of them, all well dressed and drinking French wine.

Forest and I took stools at the serving board and drank silently, listening, but our entry had dampened their discussion. Then the urgency of the situation broke upon me and I gave Forest a nod.

He stood up.

‘I come from Hereford with a letter for Master Roberts, the antiquary. I’m unable to find him. Does anyone here know where he might have gone?’

Nobody replied. None of them said a word. As if we might simply disappear if they made no response to us.

I looked at the innkeeper.

‘Martin?’

‘En’t seen Master Roberts since he broke his fast. Off to the court, he reckoned.’

‘Looks to me like the court’s over,’ John Forest said.

‘With a unfortunate verdict for this town,’ I said to the company at the candlelit board.

A heavy-set man with crinkled grey hair set down his goblet, his voice a reluctant, weighted drawl.

‘An unfortunate verdict, one might say, for the superstitious.’

‘By which you mean the local people?’

‘We,’ he said, ‘are the local people.’

‘My name is John Dee,’ I said. ‘And you are?’

‘Bradshaw.’

I nodded. The wealthiest wool merchant in Presteigne, the owner of many of the one-time abbey properties.

‘Half the townsmen are out on the hills,’ I said, ‘thinking to recapture Prys Gethin. What think you of that… as a magistrate?’

‘What I’m thinking, Master Dee, is that while we may not agree with the verdict, no one can deny that the trial was good for the town. Never done better trade. More lawyers than we’ve ever seen. Guards, attendants. Every room taken at every inn.’

‘Better than a visit by the Queen.’

‘The lawyers,’ he said sourly, ‘pay for their accommodation.’

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘As a man of stature here, did you know how it might end? Did you have a meeting with Sir Christopher Legge before the trial?’

Bradshaw sniffed.

‘Your knowledge of the processes of the law seems somewhat lacking, Master Dee.’

My cousin, Nicholas Meredith, stirred, his beard jutting, anger deepening the lines of wear on his otherwise bland face.

‘You accuse his worship of irregular conduct?’

‘Is that what it sounds like, cousin?’

He rose.

‘Why don’t you just go back to London? You’ve seen your father’s place of birth, what else is here for you?’

‘I’d hoped,’ I said, ‘before I left, to meet the former abbot of Wigmore, of whom I wrote in my letter to you.’

‘And I told you I knew not where he was.’

I placed both hands on the round board.

‘And I don’t believe you. Cousin.’

Meredith turned to Jeremy Martin.

‘Innkeeper, this man offends me. Perhaps you might summon a constable.’

I smothered laughter.

‘Now I know,’ I said, ‘that my mention of John Smart was the main reason you were less than joyous at my arrival…’

Only gossip, Anna Ceddol had said, but the same gossip from different ends of town. Taking me back to the guarded words of Bishop John Scory as we walked by the Wye. The abbey owned most of it at one time. And Meredith… owned the rest. And now appears to own even more. Oh, yes, he might be a very good man to talk to.

‘Having done business with Smart,’ I said. ‘Around the time of the dissolution of the abbey.’

‘Have a care, Dr Dee,’ Bradshaw said.

‘Who does own this inn,’ I asked Meredith. ‘Is it you?’

‘Of course it’s me.’

‘In your own right… or as his guise? What I’m told is that the good abbot, knowing what fate was to befall the abbey at the hands of Lord Cromwell might have sought to dispose of certain abbey property—’

‘Get yourself off my property,’ Meredith said. ‘Conjurer.’

‘—by sale or rent, before the axe, as it were… fell.’

Bradshaw grunted.

‘What drivel is this? Nothing got past Cromwell.’

‘Divers deals were done in the confusion of Reform,’ I said. ‘Deeds of property discreetly transferred, oft-times with the cooperation of the local gentry who told themselves they were only helping the true Church from being plundered by the Protestants. The word is that Abbot Smart was already proficient in… matters of finance. After a while, I’d guess, it would not always be easy for the agents of the Crown to work out precisely what the abbey owned. Especially out here.’

‘Where’s your proof of that?’ Bradshaw said. ‘For if you don’t want to spend the night in the sheriff’s dungeon—’

‘The sheriff’s gone home to sulk. Now listen to me. Although I’m good with numbers, the fiscal side of them is not my country. But I’m sure the office of Sir William Cecil, scenting riches which should be in the Queen’s treasury, would waste no time in appointing accountants to unravel what we might call the discrepancies in Presteigne.’

There was a long silence, tense as a bowstring. What the hell kind of place was this, where a disgraced former abbot could be running whores and collecting money for the tenure of houses he’d corruptly removed from the ownership of the Church? I was aware that John Forest had his hand upon his sword. I had, in truth, never thought it might come to this.

‘I don’t believe,’ Bradshaw said to Meredith, ‘that this man knows anything. I think he flies paper kites.’

‘You’ll have noticed,’ I said, ‘that I put my questions to you, rather than the abbot himself. Knowing of his obvious need to walk in stealth in order to live a full life. Which, for the lascivious former abbot, must needs include a ready supply of woman’s crack.’

Throwing down the vulgarity like a stone into a placid garden pond, watching Bradshaw wince.

‘While deriving a little extra income from whorehouse takings,’ I said.

‘What do you want?’

I turned slowly, the question having come from the serving board behind me.

‘Where’s my friend?’

‘I’ve already told you. I know not where he’s gone.’

But I’d not previously seen the plumpen, brown-faced innkeeper, Jeremy Martin, so far from a smile.

‘Earlier, he was with – I think I have this right – Branwen Laetitia Swift? One of your whores?’

‘Letty? Keeps her own affairs, Dr Dee. A clever woman, whom men pay for more than her body.’

‘Which men?’

‘Not my affair,’ Martin said.

Had I misheard, or was his cheerful border-country accent fallen away?

No matter, this was going not as well as I’d hoped. What if these knaves truly had no knowledge of Dudley? I moved myself further away from the innkeeper, so that I might see every man in the well-lit parlour.

My cousin watched me in silence, his face in collapse. What must his thoughts have been when he’d received my letter asking if he knew the whereabouts of the former Abbot of Wigmore? And then, when I arrived without warning, a man with links at the highest level of government, who might shatter his little world like poor glass.

But how dare the bastard point the finger at my father for the foolish and desperate sale of church plate in a time of dire need?

I stood up.

‘Think on it,’ I said. ‘If anything useful occurs to you, we’ll be in my chamber.’

On the way out, I looked at the hands of Jeremy Martin – hands too plump and smooth to have spent years hefting barrels from a cellar.

Thought of those hands on Anna Ceddol.

Turned away.

XLI Personal Dressmaker

‘OH, THAT WAS a mistake,’ Forest said. ‘And coming up here was an even worse one.’

He went to the window, pushed open the shutters to look down into the moonwashed mews.

No one there, not even the ostler.

‘We can get out this way, if needs be. Not much of a drop. Grab hold of the ivy, you’ll be—’

‘They’re merchants and dealers,’ I said, ‘not men of violence.’

Forest swung round to face me.

‘Such men live only for money. And you’ve threatened their life’s income, Dr Dee. Not to say their freedom. Even their necks. You’re alone in a strange town in the midst of nowhere. If you fail to arrive back in London… well, anything could’ve happened along the road. That’s what they’ll say when nobody even finds your body.’

He went to make sure the door of the bedchamber was bolted. I recalled the parting words of John Scory.

… worth remembering that Presteigne still has its share of dark alleys.

Was all this well known? Or only to a circumspect and pragmatic bishop.

Forest slumped back on to the truckle bed, rubbing his eyes. Cold in here, but he was sweating.

‘Did I understand that aright? It’s your opinion that the fat innkeeper is the former Abbot of Wigmore?’

‘He didn’t deny it, did he?’

‘God’s blood.’ Forest was shaking his head. ‘How’s he got away with it for so long? It’s not as if he’s invisible.’

‘No better place to hide than in full view. And if a man’s added immeasurably to the prosperity of a town and all who live there, a wall of silence will be erected about him.’

‘A whoremaster, too?’

‘Well qualified,’ I said, recalling Bonner in the Marshalsea.

Poking maids and goodwives over quite a wide area.

‘If even half of what you came out with down there is true,’ Forest said, ‘it’s clear you can’t lie here tonight. Nor anywhere in this town. You have to get out, and soon. And I mean soon. Might be the best thing if you were to ride back with me to Hereford, after—’

‘What about Dudley?’

‘—after we make full sure that Lord Dudley is not here.’ Forest wiped sweat from his brow with a sleeve. ‘Jesu, how can he be away from here without a horse? This looks not good, Dr Dee. Is he robbed? Is he beaten? Is he…? What can we do? You know this shithole better than me. Where’ve we failed to search?’

‘I think, for a start, we might open his letter.’

‘No. Never. I’m entrusted to bring it to him.’

‘I say this not lightly. What if it offers some possible reason for his disappearance? Or suggests something we might do… somewhere we might look?’

‘I’ve never opened my lord’s correspondence.’

‘Then I’ll open it,’ I said.

I took a candle on a tray, went out and fired it from the sconce on the landing, glancing down the oaken stairs to the lower hall, where another single sconce lit an oak pillar.

All was quiet down there.

Too quiet, maybe.

It made little sense at first.

There was a letter within a letter, the outer and shorter of which was to Dudley from his steward, evidently written in haste and signed TB.

May it please your lordship, I enclose correspondence recently discovered by Sir Anthony Forster between the pages of a book in his library but not disclosed to the coroner whose inquiries were deemed to be completed.

I broke the inner seal and uncovered a bill of work from Lady Dudley’s London dressmaker, William Edney, for the alteration of two gowns.

Well, I knew of this from Dudley. One of the best indications that Amy had been in relatively good heart within days of her death was her continuing interest in fashionable apparel. The only other possible explanation was that she’d wanted her corpse to be found well and elegantly clad.

Attached to the bill was a note from Edney on which some lines had been underscored in thick ink strokes, presumably by Blount.

My lady’s personal dressmaker will attend upon her, as arranged, on the first Friday of next month, September 6.

It was dated August 27.

This, to me, was new. There had been no suggestion of Amy receiving any visitors on that last weekend.

There was another short note to Dudley from Blount which I read twice before passing the bill to Forest, who stared at it for some moments as if it might break into flames. I opened my hands, helpless.

‘I think you should read it. All of it.’ Pushing the candle towards him. ‘Did Lord Dudley have any idea that his wife was to be visited by a dressmaker two days before she died?’

‘Not to my knowledge. Can that be true?’

I passed him the small paper attached to the bill.

My Lord, Edney tells me that the personal dressmaker was unable to visit Lady Dudley, being ill with a fever during the week of the appointment. You will know of my Lady’s fondness for the Spanish styles and it seems the personal dressmaker was a well qualified Spaniard who had been in Edney’s employ these past five months and made other apparel for Lady Dudley but has since returned to Spain. I was therefore not able to establish the severity of his fever, if fever there was, during the first week of September.

Forest, looked up, squeezing his dark-bearded jaw. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Dressmaking is… a regrettable gap in my knowledge. What think you of Blount’s final sentence? “If fever there was”. It seems Blount may have had cause to think that the dressmaker might have lied about his fever to cover the fact that he made that journey to Cumnor after all. Perchance arriving…’ I broke off to read the note yet again, to be quite certain ‘…two days later than arranged.’

Forest thought on it longer than was necessary.

‘No one would know, if that were the case,’ he said at last. ‘The entire household having gone to the local fair.’

‘The entire household having been virtually dispatched to the fair. By Lady Dudley.’

Closing my eyes upon a hollow expulsion of breath. It was all too clear that Amy had gone to some considerable effort to make sure that she’d be alone in the house that day.

For the visit of a Spanish dressmaker? For the purpose of him measuring her for a gown?

‘Listen, I—’ Forest was coughing from a parched throat. ‘I can’t… can’t discuss this any further. We should never have opened it.’

‘Was Edney deceived by the Spaniard? We must needs consider the possibility of the Spaniard acting independently of Edney, having feigned a sickness to cover his movements.’

But maybe not independently of his country, its king… or his ambassador, la Quadra. And others I could think of who were not Spanish. The implications were like to a blade in the gut, and each name that arose in my mind was another savage twist.

Forest’s face was yet a mask of bewilderment as I gave voice to the unspeakable.

‘Why would Amy have gone to so much effort to make sure she was alone in the house for the visit of a Spanish dressmaker? Because, as Blount’s letter says, she knew him. He’d made gowns for her before. She was fond of the Spanish styles. So… how well did she know him?’

‘Stop!’ Forest cried out. ‘For Christ’s sake, Dr Dee, go no further with this madness until we find Lord Dudley. There’s true darkness here. Darkness on every side.’

‘Well enough to wish to be alone with him?’

‘We must needs leave this place. Without delay. Those bastards downstairs, they’d rather burn it down with us inside—’

‘A woman alone in someone else’s house?’ I couldn’t stop now. ‘A woman who’d not seen her husband for a year, only heard the persistent rumour about him siring the Queen’s child?’

‘I pray you, Dr Dee, get out of here.’

Even as Forest snatched up the letter and the bill, bundled them together and thrust the packet inside his doublet, a knock came on the door of the bedchamber.

One knock. Truly, no more than a tap but in our present mood it had the impact of a mace. A hiss issued from Forest.

‘Don’t open it.’

I said, ‘Who’s that?’

My heart leaping at the thought that it might be Dudley.

But there was no reply, only the padding of soft footsteps, I thought receding down the stairs, but could not be sure. I waited until I could hear nothing outside then brought the candle to the door. As I drew back the bolt, Forest pulled his side-sword, whispering.

‘Open it no more than an inch. Keep your hand out of the opening. Stand hard against the door.’

So I might slam it in a face?

But there was no face.

I peered through the widening gap. The only movement was the flame from the sconce on the landing slanting in the draught from the opened door. I went out, lifting the candle into the corners. No one there, no one on the stairs.

‘Nobody,’ I said.

Stumbling, then, as my left foot prodded something on the floorboards, sending it skittering.

I crouched with the candle: a sackcloth bundle, no more than a few inches wide. Unexpectedly heavy. I brought it back into the chamber and closed and rebolted the door.

Placed the bundle on the board under the window in full moonlight.

‘Careful.’ Forest laid his sword on the truckle, pulled on his leather gloves. ‘Let me do this.’

‘You think something might spring out at us?’

‘And you think it’s a bar of gold as a bribe, do you?’

I supposed that any man who’d been with the Dudley family as long as Forest would, in any situation, fear a blade from out of darkness. He pulled at the sackcloth, which came easily away, revealing another cloth underneath. Black.

‘Holy God,’ I said.

Gently lifting away the corners of soft black cloth.

What lay beneath welcomed the moon.

Forest stepped away.

‘What is it?’

Despite the circumstances of its arrival, I was stricken with awe.

‘This,’ I said, ‘would seem to be… what we came here for.’

XLII Contempt

UNDER THE CANDLE, it was a rich dark red. A swollen blood-drop.

Less than half the size of a tennis ball, but more perfectly spherical. After I blew out the candle, there were yet lights in it.

Lights that moved. A sprinkling of them. More lights than I could see in the air around us or the night sky, where the moon was so close-pressed by clouds that few stars were in evidence.

Only here in the inner firmament of the stone: points of white and piercing blue and a lambent orange, all in fluct.

As I looked at it, it seemed to breathe.

Easier than could I, who dared not touch it, this precious portal to the Hidden. Wondering: if I could have sat in this window-space, alone and concentrated, with the Trithemius manuscript and the whole untroubled night ahead of me, might I then find one of those fragments of light projected into the chamber in angelic form?

Whatever planet rules in that hour, the angel governing the planet thou shalt call,

sayeth Trithemius.

Raphael… Uriel…? I had no books or charts here. I didn’t know. Couldn’t think. And the night was far from untroubled.

‘So you were right,’ John Forest said.

‘Mercy?’

‘Everything you said to them. They’re in so much fear of how much you might know and who you might tell that they think to pay you off. Send you on your way with what you came here for.’

‘Yes. So it would appear.’

I took a last long look at the Wigmore shewstone before covering it over with the black cloth. A cloth of velvet like the one Elias, the scryer, had kept around his.

I could not believe they’d let such a treasure go so easily.

‘It must go back,’ I said.

‘What?’

Forest had snatched the stone from the boardtop, clutched it ridiculously to his breast.

‘No spiritual device should ever be acquired this way,’ I said. ‘It’s corrupted from the start. No good will come of it. Not for me or Dudley. Or the Queen.’

‘Are you gone mad?’ Forest thrust the stone at me. ‘Take it, for Christ’s sake! They’ll think you’re silenced. It’s your talisman. It’ll get you out of here. When you’re well away, throw the damned thing in the river if that’s what you want.’

‘I pray you, put it down,’ I said quietly.

John Forest weighed the stone in one hand before tossing it to the other and then he shrugged and replaced it on the board. Looking, for a moment, almost grateful, as if it had been too hot or too cold or he’d felt its alien energy racing up his arm.

‘You’d best ride back to Hereford,’ I said. ‘Where Dudley knows he can reach you. Where other letters may be waiting.’

‘And you?’

‘As you said, maybe they think I’m bought off with the shewstone.’

‘Dr John, they want you to take it and leave.’

‘I can’t leave. Not without Dudley. But you can.’

‘And leave you alone with these bastards?’

‘If I’m troubled by Bradshaw or Meredith or Martin, I’ll say I’ve written an account of all I know about property theft from the abbey and you’ve ridden with it to London. And if I’m not back there in a week, you’ll put it before whoever in the Privy Council deals with such matters, and Presteigne will be overrun with accountants. Now… go.’

Forest pulled on his leather gloves.

‘And what will you do?’

‘I’ll find him. Somehow I’ll find him.’

Hoping this sounded more confident than I felt, I dragged the board away from the window. Forest swung himself up on to the sill, looked down into the mews then back at me, his head bent under the lintel.

‘All right, I’ll go. But I’ll ride not to Hereford. Ludlow’s the place. To the Council of the Marches. Where I’ll rouse people, identify myself as Lord Dudley’s man. Tell them he’s missing within twenty miles of their stronghold. Return with a hundred armed men, at least, before sunrise. Take this town apart.’

‘And if all the time he’s with some other whore?’

He stared at me.

‘You think that, now?’

‘No,’ I said soberly. ‘Have a care. God go with you.’

I watched him lower himself from the window, gripping the ivy, his feet kicking against the wall until he could jump to the ground. Watched him leading his horse to the opening of the mews without looking up. Listened to the hooves as they gathered pace.

I’d never felt so alone, so useless. Twisted by contempt for myself and what drove me – a thirst for secret wisdom disguised as love for queen and country. I thought I might never unwrap the stone again.

The stone I’d thought to deliver to the Queen, with the promise of angelic advice on how best to exalt her majesty. The stone which might procure knowledge of which islands remained to be discovered beyond the known world, which unknown natural forces might be harnessed to the Queen’s cause.

What had led me to think that a man who could not see might walk in celestial light? The only man in the Faldos’ hall who’d caught no glimpse of even the boneman’s ghost, if such it was.

And worse, how could I have brought Dudley into this? A man with more enemies than he could name in a year. No matter that he’d leapt at it like a dog in a butcher’s shop, I was the one who’d laid the scented trail.

Hear his voice from that moment of engagement:

We’ll make a good bargain with this man, in the noble cause of expanding the Queen’s vision.

It had come too easy. The bargain was a black bargain, founded upon threats, and no good could come of it.

I gazed, without hope, at the shrouded stone. My Christian cabalism, that shield against the demonic, had been compromised by the means of its acquisition.

To begin with, how had John Smart known of my desire for it? As I’d not mentioned it in my own letter to my cousin Meredith, it surely could only have been through the whore, who’d learned of it from Dudley. The whore whose fishmonger, as we say in London, was Smart. I wondered how many bawdy houses in Presteigne were owned by this man, whose shrill laughter I could almost hear.

Go on… take the stone… for all the good it will do you.

Tainted.

I flung myself on the floor by the truckle, my teeming head buried in my quivering hands. Filled with dread, now, over Dudley who, in pursuit of my own ends, I’d left alone in a town full of hostile strangers. Where might I even begin to search for him?

Friendship apart, the thought of returning to London without him made me cold to the spine. I’d tell the Queen almost everything – for how could I not? – and be lucky to escape with my head, let alone my occasional place at court. For even though she’d ever dithered over his suitability as a husband, Dudley, beyond all doubt, was the only man she’d ever loved.

Maybe the angels could tell me where to find him. I stared at the black-wrapped stone and began to laugh, in a crazed way which could only break asunder into weeping, and then I was down on my knees in a vault of moonlight, praying for inspiration to a God who seemed this night to be very far away.

And then the King made God smaller.

Not the first time that Goodwife Faldo’s words in Mortlake church had come back to me.

XLIII Graveyard Mist

NO MEMORY OF falling back across the truckle, but that was where I lay until the moon, having shed all its cloud, awoke me with its brilliance. Or maybe it was the whispers rising like hissing steam from the mews.

The light was so bright that I sprang unsteadily to my feet, at first thinking in panic that morning was come. Slowly realising, as the moon’s position in the window was unchanged, that I could only have slept – thank Christ – for an hour or so. There was a pain in my chest from how I’d lain as I leaned out into the chill night and took breath after long breath, hanging over the sill, my hair fallen over my face and eyes.

‘John, boy…’

‘Huh?’

Raking away my hair, as he came out of shadow and stood looking up at me, removing his green, small-brimmed hat and holding it in both hands at waist level.

Thomas Jones.

Twm Siôn Cati. Plump, very Welsh, ever half-amused.

‘The inn’s all locked up. What kind of bloody inn’s all locked up before midnight?’

‘What the hell are you doing here? Time is it?’

‘Maybe not yet midnight, maybe just after. You mean you didn’t get my message?’

Oh God, it all came back, the note he’d left for me with the ostler. Seemed like weeks ago.

‘I… left very early this morning.’

‘You should know I’m not a man to waste paper, John.’

‘Beg mercy. Listen… my friend… Dudley…’ No point at all in maintaining the Master Roberts conceit. ‘You seen him this night? Or earlier?’

‘You mean he’s not here?’

‘Missing.’

‘Since when?’

‘Not sure.’

He was silent for a moment. I looked over to the stables; we must surely have disturbed the night ostler in his loft.

‘All right,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘As you seem to be wearing your day apparel, if I were you, I’d come down.’

‘From the window?’

‘Unless you want to rouse everyone. We can’t talk like this, people will think we’re lovers.’

I raised myself up in the window, threw a tentative leg over the sill and then slid back into the bedchamber and grabbed the shewstone from the board. Stowed it away in my jerkin, and then, before I could think too hard about it, was out into the night, holding to the ivy.

Which came away in my hands, halfway down, and I tumbled to the cobbles, stifling a cry.

Thomas Jones stood looking down at me, not assisting.

‘Not used to this, are you, John?’

‘Not broken into as many houses as you.’

Picking myself up, hoping the moon would not expose my swollen eyes or any other evidence of how close I’d been to parting with my mind.

‘Fetch your horse,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Quietly.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘To begin with, somewhere we can talk in normal voices.’

‘In relation to Dudley?’

I must have sounded like a child.

‘Who knows, boy? I fear we’re close to the heart of something quite unpleasant.’

We had disturbed the night ostler, but half the money in my purse secured, I hoped, his silence. He helped me saddle up and we went out to where Thomas Jones’s horse was tethered at the entrance to the mews. Riding out of Presteigne on a moon-barred road that now was become all too familiar to me.

‘Would’ve told you this the other night,’ Thomas Jones said, as we dismounted a mile from town. ‘But not in front of that cocky scut.’ He sniffed. ‘Even if he’s dead, I might not take that back.’

‘Dead?’

‘I don’t say that he’s dead, but these are not the kindest of men.’

‘Who?’

He made no reply, leading his horse along the side of the road. Without too much reference to Dudley’s private and public troubles, I’d explained to him why we’d come here. His only reaction had been a slow nodding of his head.

Could I trust this man, you might ask. Well… he was betrothed to my cousin and had been pardoned by the Queen. There were those I’d trust less.

‘Men?’ I said. ‘Not the kindest?’

‘I’ll get to it.’

If you’re wondering about the true nature of his knavery, I know little, preferring the legend of a Welsh Robin Hood who, for a brief period, would prey upon the Norman dynasties holding the best farmland in the far west of Wales. All of it stolen, Thomas Jones would allege, and who was I to argue? Wales was, they said, a land ruled at every level by brigands. Some of them in London now.

He tilted his hat over his eyes, for the moon was become oppressively bright.

‘Some of the company I kept in my former life, John, was, ah…’

‘You need not explain,’ I said.

‘Kind of you.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘The point is that there is no such thing as a free pardon.’

‘You mean you once thought there was?’

‘I was therefore quietly approached for intelligence about our friends in Plant Mat.’

‘Who made the approach?’

‘I won’t answer that, and it matters not. Suffice to say that some of your masters in London have kin this side of the border. Let’s say I was approached by a friend, who has… other friends.’

‘Sir William Cecil has family in Wales.’

‘Does he?’

‘You’re now a spy for Cecil?’

‘How would I know that?’

He wouldn’t. I’d thought of Cecil several times on the way here, my mind more alert in the open air, under stars. Thoughts turning, inevitably, to the content of the letter from Amy Dudley’s London dressmaker. It was said there had been a number of meetings over the past few months between Cecil and the Spanish ambassador, la Quadra. Who, if they had but one aim in common, it would be to keep the Queen and Dudley out of wedlock.

But, dear God… to have Amy murdered lest she suffered from some fatal malady or was of a mind to take her own life?

And why, in God’s name, would Cecil want to know about Plant Mat? I stared up into the night for enlightenment. Compared with the twisting mesh of London politics, the formation of the stars seemed constant and reassuringly familiar.

‘And were you able,’ I asked, ‘to supply the intelligence?’

Thomas Jones blew breath through his teeth.

‘Why does every bastard think that if you have a history of thieving you’re part of some hidden body of neckweed-contenders, all known to the others? Even I wouldn’t have dealings with Plant Mat.’

‘So you had nothing to tell them?’

‘On the contrary, boy, I had a great to deal to tell them. Particularly about Gwilym Davies, who likes to call himself Prys Gethin. Who also calls himself a gentleman farmer and collects land with the alacrity of a Norman baron after the conquest. Well… buying some of it, of course, but where’s the money come from? But I’ll get to him. Plant Mat, yes… oh, how the romantic legends are formed around them. Like graveyard mist, boy.’

‘Do Plant Mat even exist, now? Legge’s verdict might suggest not.’

‘Indeed they exist. And profess themselves driven by love of their country. Don’t fool yourself, boy, there’s a good deal of hatred in Wales for the English. And for so-called Welsh towns like Presteigne, where the old language is let rot by English pouring in, looking to increase their ill-grown wealth.’

‘Hatred? Despite the Tudor line? Jesu, Jones, we’re all of us ruled by Welshmen, now.’

‘Ach!’ He waved a hand as if to swat a fly. ‘What a prime piece of English rookery that is. Even though most of us are content to float with it. Arthurian descent? Bollocks. The truth is that Wales is yet a Catholic country, and as long as little Bess permits Catholic worship, she’ll get no shit from this side of the border.’

‘Except from Plant Mat?’

‘All right, let me tell you.’

The original Plant Mat, he said, were the three children, two sons and a daughter, of an innkeeper in his own home town of Tregaron. The family had become famous robbers, gathering others to them and inhabiting a cave, with an entrance so narrow that only one man at a time might pass through. A cave in a place laden with legend, which people kept away from because it was said the devil himself climbed those rocks.

‘The cave was their… what’s the word in English… temple? Certainly of some almost ritual significance. They were inside the land, see… in the heart of Wales. I don’t know what they did in there, maybe just got drunk. But the legend of that cave grew – that they drew their power from the land around them. Thus, out of the past. Out of their heritage.’

They’d use a glove to identify themselves, passed one to another. Always a sense of ritual, a mystery which they encouraged. For years they’d been simply robbers, even if some victims had lost their lives as well as their goods. But when it came to the planned murder of a judge at Rhayader…

‘All wrongdoers in the heart of Wales were pleased to have the assize court in Rhayader, see – where they had control, justices in their pockets and no jury that did not include a few of their own. Maybe they thought that if they killed an English judge the judiciary would get the message and leave them alone, I don’t know. Madness.’

‘And they paid the price.’

‘Martyrs. The sons telling glorious tales of their dead fathers and all they’d done for Wales. And the name Plant Mat was anybody’s now – any band of brigands who wanted to wear it like a black cloak. A cloak with all the weight of heritage. See?’

‘They yet live in a cave?’

‘Pah! Who lives in a cave? They live in good houses – some with big halls and spare chambers and a bwddyn or two in the grounds for the servants – like the estate of our friend Gwilym Davies. Or Prys Gethin.’

‘He claimed in court,’ I said, ‘that the name was pressed upon him by the Sheriff of Radnorshire.’

‘Which your English judge never questioned. Curious, that.’

The road was passing through what had been a long wood, sporadic trees on either side and behind them, thickets, the stumps of felled oak and heaps of discarded twiggery all caged in brambles.

I stopped walking.

‘What’s this about? Help me. Why are you telling me this now, and how does it relate to Dudley?’

Thomas Jones took off his hat.

‘Don’t think me self-righteous. I stole. I stole as a boy because my friends stole, and I stole as a man because I found I was good at it… and if I spread some of the proceeds among the needy it didn’t seem so bad to be saving some aside to spend on books. To acquire an education. But don’t think me self-righteous. I’ll do my years in purgatory, resigned to it, boy. But Prys…’

He stood in a shaft of moonlight betwixt the trees. He yet wore the russet doublet with the gold thread.

‘Prys,’ he said, ‘will one day be in the deepest chamber of hell. Though not, it seems, soon enough.’

XLIV Monstrous Constellations

‘THEY SAY HE once killed a man just to rape his wife.’

Thomas Jones was sitting amidst the fungus on a tree stump, legs apart, bunched hands swinging between his knees.

‘Not his first rape. Nor, needless to say, his first killing.’

I did not ask how the man known as Prys Gethin had remained alive and free. This is Wales, boy.

‘Then he choked the life out of the wife.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, why not? Killing and rape are as natural to him as taking a piss. Would have been a soldier, if there was a Welsh army. Like the man he believes possesses him.’

‘Possesses?’

‘It’s just a word, John. I only met him once, see. Some years ago, in an alehouse, both of us well into our cups. I recall that he invited me to join him in his work.’

‘Plant Mat?’

‘I suppose. Who knows where I’d be today if I hadn’t, at that moment, been compelled to go outside and throw up my supper? Never went back. Never saw him again.’

‘Then how,’ I asked, ‘do you know all this?’

‘Common knowledge where I come from, boy. Some of it, anyway. No one’ll touch him, see. He knows too much and he’s done too many favours. This is not London. Middle Wales is a big village, full of mountains and rivers and lakes and waterfalls and miles of emptiness, around which the legends echo. Vast whispers in the wind.’

‘Jesu, Twm, is this a matter for poetry?’

‘I’m Welsh. It’s in the blood. His wife, now – did I tell you about his wife? Said to have fled within a month of their wedding. To England, I believe, which did not improve his love of our neighbour. Word was that he liked to do her while covered in pig blood, still wet. She seems to have been a religious woman who would not have a child conceived in pig blood.’

‘Did she also put out his eye before she left?’

‘Put it out himself, they say, in a drunken rage. Tell me when you’ve heard enough of this?’

‘Sounds like horseshit to me.’

‘Who am I to say otherwise? All right. In truth, little is known about the man. I do not, for example, believe that Gwilym Davies is his name any more than is Prys Gethin. The legend says he was born in Tregaron, where Plant Mat began, all those years ago. I can tell you, boy, that he was not. He acquired an old farm in the hills near there, which he claims as his ancestral home. It is not. I’m from Tregaron and I know.’

‘Where’s he come from then?’

‘Don’t know that. By his accent, I’d say north rather than south. But Welsh is his language and thieving is certainly his trade. He inspires fear and respect over a wide area, and not only through his looks. And the killing and the rape, that is not all legend.’

‘He lives by thieving?’

‘Lives by farming, now. Oh, and slaughtering. So loves to slaughter stock – anybody’s stock, and not quickly. After a successful cattle raid, he’ll sacrifice one of the beasts on a hilltop under a beacon fire. I know this, I’ve seen the flames from afar.’

‘Sacrificed to God?’

‘Some god. Or the demon he’s invested with the spirit of Rhys Gethin. Who knows? He was rambling over all this as we drank. Full of the Old Testament.’

Thomas Jones sat very still in the grey light, his habitual levity long shed. I waited for him to continue, but he said nothing.

I said, ‘So the curse…’

Thinking not only of the two dead men but of Dudley in the marketplace in Presteigne.

‘Cursing… we might consider that to be a woman’s preserve,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Also the Sight, and yet he has that, too, or so it’s claimed. Styling himself as a man who walks with his ancestors. Journeying to the wild and barren places to meet with Owain and Rhys. The time I drank with him, he told me what they looked like now, how they’d not aged. How, in the other world, all the grey had gone from Owain’s forked beard and his powers were there to be called upon in the cause of Wales.’

‘He’s mad?’

‘Increasingly, I’d say.’

‘So the bridge from which the farmer fell—’

‘Ach, let’s not get swept away. It might just as easily have had an axe taken to it by Gethin’s followers in the Plant. Who then drowned the poor old boy and left him all entangled in the ruins of it.’

‘How many followers does Gethin have?’

‘Hard to be sure. But two of them were in Presteigne – the day I found you at the inn. The Roberts brothers, this is, Gerallt and Gwyn. That is, I’ve known them only as woodsmen and hunters on his estate and both are men of violence – short-temper, alehouse fights. But not high in intellect.’

‘Just the two?’

‘May have been more I didn’t recognise. I thought at first there might be some plan to free Prys from the gaol or the court. So I followed them, keeping a safe distance behind. They took this road. All the way to Brynglas Hill. Where they stopped.’

I may have blinked.

‘What did they do there?’

‘Didn’t go close enough to find out, boy. Remembering too well the face of a man beaten in Tregaron town by Gerallt Roberts. Most of his teeth gone and his jaw too close to an ear than a jaw was ever meant to be. However… I did see two other men on the hill, one of whom bore a close resemblance to my old friend John Dee.’

‘When was this?’

But I knew, recalling two horsemen I’d noticed down by Nant-y-groes when I was on first the hill, with Stephen Price.

‘The same Dee I saw again that night, in Presteigne,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Well, well… why then was the Queen’s conjurer in town? Was he there to give evidence to the court on aspects of the Hidden relating to Prys Gethin and death by cursing?’

‘No,’ I said with caution. ‘He wasn’t.’

‘Anyway, it seemed useful to seek you out. I even wondered if you’d been followed to Brynglas by the Roberts brothers.’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘So I left you a message, which you, with your renowned intelligence, contrived to ignore.’

‘Consider my head hung in shame,’ I said. ‘But the Roberts brothers had no need to free Gethin from the court.’

‘None at all.’

‘And you think they knew this?’

Thomas Jones shrugged.

‘What’s happening here?’ I said. ‘How could the truth about Prys Gethin have failed to come out in court?’

‘Because it was an English court.’

‘Not good enough. Legge knew. Legge knew everything before the trial began. You’d told… whoever you told. You’d told them all about Prys Gethin – no such thing as a free pardon? I don’t understand. Why did you even come to the trial?’

‘Not such a long ride from my home.’

‘That’s no answer.’

‘No.’ He looked down at his enfolded fingers. ‘I suppose not. Does it make more sense that I came to court because I was most explicitly warned not to?’

‘In truth?’

He looked up at me.

‘You think I would not like to see an end to Prys Gethin? Look, the woman… I’ll tell you… the young woman who was raped and then choked to death and her husband killed, that was no myth, they were neighbours of my aunt at Llanddewi, not far from Tregaron. Everyone knew who’d done it, but it would never be proved, so I… Thinking it cowardly to finger Prys from behind, I offered to give evidence to the court regarding his reputation.’

‘But you—’

‘And was told, boy, that it would not be necessary. Told my presence would not be useful. Told to keep my head down in the west and forget the foregoing conversation had ever taken place. So why, after that, would I not come to the trial?’

Movement overhead – a bat flittering tree to tree, followed by another. Thomas Jones leaned back, hands clasped behind his head.

‘Does all this then suggest anything to you, John?’

The wood all around us let off a smell of voracious decay. I sat down upon a stump with a jagged edge that hurt my arse. I didn’t care; pain sharpens the senses.

Monstrous constellations, like the grotesque creatures on Scory’s map, were finding form in the firmament of my head, and it felt as if the cold moon itself were lodged in my breast.

XLV Cold Geometry

IT FELT LIKE they were here with us now, skulking and scurrying amid the rotting trees: Cecil in shadow, long-nosed and mastiff-eyed, with his intelligence gatherer Walsingham running hither and thither, ratlike, getting things done.

Getting things done.

And, of course, none of it would ever lead back.

Nothing ever did.

Hell, I didn’t even know if this was Cecil. Felt my fists clenching and unclenching, my body all aquiver. Asking Thomas Jones when he’d been approached by the man he would not name who might have been of Cecil’s Welsh kin.

‘Ten days ago… a fortnight?’ he said. ‘A messenger came to me with instruction to ride to… a certain place.’

‘And what was required?’

‘I told you. As much intelligence as I could provide on the man calling himself Prys Gethin. And speedily.’

Yes, it would need to be, else how could all this have been arranged in the time?

Easily, when you thought about it. Dudley had never explained fully, but I guessed that, not wishing to attract attention by assembling his own travelling party, he would have instructed his steward Thomas Blount to cast around for a discreet but secure company journeying to the Welsh border.

And Thomas Blount being a lawyer well known in the inns of court… they would have found him. How fortunate that this should coincide with the most unusual circumstance of a London judge being sent to try a Welsh felon for a most uncertain offence.

My thoughts curled in upon themselves like eels in a bucket, and I fought to untangle them.

‘The idea of the border judiciary in fear of a band of brigands – that seemed unlikely to me from the start.’

‘If the word came down from London,’ Thomas Jones said, ‘they’d be forced to swallow their pride. Still hard, it is, to believe London would go to all that trouble, all that expense. All that connivance.’

The question of Robert Dudley and the Queen… this was the most crucial matter in England. Nay, in all Europe. A decision had therefore been taken to dispose of a man, at whatever cost.

I recalled the urgency in Cecil that day I’d been brought to him. The day it must have begun to look as if Amy’s suspicious death had not been enough to finish Dudley as a suitor. The day Cecil and Blanche Parry had conspired to ensure that she failed to deliver the message to me from the Queen seeking a suitable date for a royal wedding.

I have no doubts about your ability in this regard. Which is why I don’t want you and your fucking charts within a mile of the Queen at this time.

Watching me. How long had they been watching me? I recalled a flitting glimpse of the black-clad Walsingham, mothlike in the Strand as I was leaving Cecil’s house.

Watching Dudley, too. Well, of course. Watching Dudley, the most hated man in all England, and all his household – in particular his principal retainers, Blount and Forest.

I said, ‘How would they get to the prisoner in New Radnor castle?’

‘It’s hardly the Fleet, John.’

And if it had been the Fleet, they’d have got to him easily enough. Even quicker at Marshalsea, though it might cost a groat or two more for the guards. New Radnor castle, inside curtain walls, would be a fine place for comings and goings. Certainly better than Presteigne, with its gaol in the middle of the town, where all could see.

‘So men came to Prys Gethin’s dungeon at New Radnor, with a proposition.’

‘He’d be suspicious, of course, at first,’ Thomas Jones said, ‘if the men who came to him were English.’

‘And if they were not? If he was addressed in Welsh?’

‘Duw, you’re right. Who thinks of all this?’

I’m sure we both saw the dimensions of it now, the plan laid out with all its Euclidian precision.

The alarming thought came to me that there would have been no one better to put the proposal to Prys Gethin than Thomas Jones – Twm Siôn Cati himself.

No such thing as a free pardon.

But, no, his pardon had come from the Queen, and this plan was the most savage thrust into Elizabeth’s heart. He wouldn’t do it and they wouldn’t demand it of him for fear that he’d go along with it and then, with typical cunning, damage it at the eleventh hour.

Or was that what he was doing now? Dear Christ, I was out of my head, dizzy with imaginings.

‘Just say it, John,’ Thomas Jones said wearily.

I nodded, closing my eyes.

‘A bargain is cut. Against all reason, Prys Gethin walks free. While Robert Dudley – Master Roberts – never comes back across the border.’

I felt myself sinking inexorably into the most treacherous political marsh in the world, full of rapids and sucking pools, dark water, hanging weed.

‘Fortunate that you were out of town, when they took him,’ Thomas Jones said, ‘otherwise, they’d’ve had you as well, and we wouldn’t be sitting here working it all out. And you, I’m guessing, would have been long dead. Your value being – beg mercy, John – negligible by comparison.’

I could not argue with this.

‘They took him, how?’ I said. ‘Where?’

No sooner was the question out than I knew.

My name is Mistress Branwen Laetitia Swift. Ask anyone in this town.

Maybe a sleeping draught in a cup of wine he’d not refuse. Perhaps poison.

I stiffened.

‘I should also have told you,’ Thomas Jones said, ‘that while discreetly following the Roberts brothers around town before their departure for Brynglas, I was led to a warehouse on the outskirts. Gwyn let himself in and then came out quite quickly. I think he was just making sure it was still there. Would still be there when it was needed.’

‘What?’

‘A cart. Wooden frame and a cover. As much of it as I could see.’

‘How would they know what was required of them?’

‘I imagine a message was conveyed to them from Prys. By mouth – I’d doubt either of them can read. Likely whoever went to Gethin at New Radnor would then have conveyed instructions to the brothers.’

‘Gethin would have revealed their names to him?’

‘If his life depended on it, he’d certainly take the chance with their lives. I don’t know how it was done – likely the man would go alone, unarmed, as a sign of trust. I don’t know. All we can be sure of is that none of them will know who authorised the bargain. How high it goes. And the beauty of it, when you think about it, is that they know that Prys, as a devout Welshman, will never – not even under the most imaginative of tortures – reveal a deal struck with the English.’

Perfection. I stood up.

‘So they have Dudley. Alive or…’

‘I think we must assume they have him,’ Thomas Jones said.

Apart from the scratting of rats or badgers in the wood, there was silence.

So here it was: for the sake of England, or someone’s idea of what was best for her, it had been agreed to spare a killer. A many times murderer who relished the slick of blood upon his skin and believed himself justified… driven by the ghosts of Glyndwr and Rhys Gethin. This man released to rob and kill and rape again at will.

‘Though Gethin might end up quietly dead,’ I said. ‘Knowing what he knows.’

‘If they ever find him. And I doubt they would.’ Plump, Welsh Thomas Jones was leaned back, looking at me, his eyes slitted. ‘There we are. I’ve told you all I know. What happens next is for you to say.’

‘How sure are you that they’ve taken Dudley to Brynglas?’

‘It’s no more than an astute guess, John. Though what I might add is that, before he disappears forever, it strikes me as likely that Prys will want to come to Brynglas. I do think he believes that Rhys Gethin is within him. Is part of him. And this is Rhys’s place… the citadel of his highest triumph. So… a final pilgrimage. A meeting with Rhys.’

‘Or whatever demon he’s invested with the spirit of Rhys. You said that. What did you mean by it?’

‘Ah, well… I think we may have read some of the same books.’

‘But you more than—

‘Hush.’

Thomas Jones was on his feet. The sound of a distant horse, moving at speed, was no longer so distant.

XLVI Portal

HE’D BEEN AFRAID to sleep lest they came for him, the local men who sought Gethin.

Roger Vaughan: also a local man. The only local man within the judge’s company. Therefore, the local man who had let it happen, the young pettifogger raised beyond his abilities in return for selling his county town down its mean river. The cry of traitor resounding from an open window as he returned to his inn after taking my mare to the ostler. A big, sharp stone glancing from a wall by his head.

‘I was watching by my window, see,’ he said, ‘for those fools to come back from the hills. Trying to stay awake. Which is how I saw the arrival of Dr Jones at the Bull, and then the two of you leaving along the Knighton road, and I… felt less secure.’

He truly thought he’d feel safer with us, a conjurer and a pardoned felon, than left alone in Presteigne?

‘We’re all gone from there now,’ the boy said. ‘Every one of us who journeyed with the judge.’

A sheepish shrug as he stood there, holding his horse’s bridle. I explained our situation, telling Thomas Jones he could say what he wanted in front of Vaughan. Didn’t know how wise this was, but it was too late for secrecy. I suppose I was glad to have Roger Vaughan with us, a lawyer, with a lawyer’s sharp mind, but also a local man alert to the snares of the Hidden.

‘There might be a hundred armed men in Presteigne by morning,’ I said, ‘if Forest gets to Ludlow unharmed. But it would be foolish for us to wait for them.’

‘I know my way around Brynglas,’ Vaughan said.

‘We don’t know Dudley was taken there,’ I told him. ‘Or if he was, where exactly he might have been taken… But if these brothers have him, they’re likely to want proof that Gethin has been freed, before… they fulfil their side of the bargain.’

It was my only hope for Dudley, but I saw Thomas Jones shaking his head.

‘It’s Gethin who’ll want the proof of his freedom. The knowledge than no one is on his trail. And also, from what I know of him, he’ll want to… well, an Englishman of Dudley’s status, he’ll want to finish it himself. In some…’

He tightened his lips, half turned away.

‘Ritual fashion?’ I said.

‘He has a legend to support,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘And that’s another reason why he’d want it to be done here.’

Looking between the trees to the moon-grazed hills, I experienced that momentary sensation of being separate from the physical: the uncomfortable feeling of following yourself, just one step behind, which always comes when there’s no time to contemplate its significance.

And then it was fading, and Thomas Jones was untying his horse from the tree.

‘He may not even be there yet, especially if he’s on foot. You have weaponry, boys?’

Vaughan produced a stubby dagger. I had nothing.

‘Only your magic, eh, John?’

Thomas Jones smiled, more than a touch ruefully.

Whitton Church lay by the side of the road, amid ancient yew trees, about half a mile short of Pilleth. It was two or three hundred years old and not in good repair. But it gave us some concealment as we looked out towards Brynglas, upon whose slopes the moonlight gave the illusion of a first fall of quiet snow.

‘Been here in my dreams so often,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Every Welshmen is inclined to venerate Owain Glyndwr.’

Was this a time for following such dreams? I wondered again how far I might trust him. What if he played a double game, with his veneration of Glyndwr?

This is what the night does to you.

‘If we go directly up the hill, we’ll be seen for miles,’ Vaughan said. ‘Better to follow the river, where it winds behind the trees.’

He led us out past Nant-y-groes, where one small light shone in a downstairs room – or was it the moon’s reflection? And then we left the road to follow the River Lugg… the river of light living up to its name this night, still as a cold, white, twisting road. Behind us, a multitude of sheep lay close-packed in a corner of the pasture, like frogspawn on a pond.

‘They come down before sunset,’ I said. ‘They don’t like the hill at night.’

We kept, as far as possible, behind the trees. The ground was rough and sloping. We went carefully, passing under the towering motte of the long-ruined castle, overgrown now, the river forming a natural moat.

The moon was high and white and the clouds were rolled back, and the side of Brynglas shone now like a polished breastplate, looking bigger than I’d ever seen it. I thought of Anna Ceddol sleeping in the house that was half inside the hill – if ever there could be sleep with the mad boy in the house. Pushing back the thought, I called softly to Thomas Jones.

‘So how was it in your dreams?’

‘Brynglas? Like Jerusalem. A shrine. It makes me tremble.’

His voice low and sibilant as the wind through dead foliage.

‘There is a shrine up there,’ I said, as we stopped. ‘ To the Virgin Mary. And, um, I suppose what came before her.’

‘I know.’ Thomas Jones gazed up, between tall trees, at the silvered hillside. ‘The heathen well, where nymphs would bathe. A portal to the otherworld, the land of the dead, of the ancestors.’

‘So they say.’

‘They also say Owain went there on the night before the battle, did you know that? There’d been this huge and savage storm, the sky ripped apart with lightning.’

‘Weather again.’

‘Indeed. His war began with a fiery star crossing the heavens, followed by thunder, and so it went on. And in the silence after this fierce storm in the summer of 1402, Owain and Rhys Gethin ascended the hill to the holy well. It was June the twenty-first. Midsummer. The old festival.’

‘And the next day they set fire to the church,’ I said. ‘They stood and watched the church burn.’

Glyndwr had fired several churches on the way here, supposedly because they paid tithes into England, but I said nothing about this.

‘The new Rector of Pilleth, he’d say Glyndwr and Gethin had sold their immortal souls to the devil that night.’

‘And a goodish deal it was, boy. Imagine the terror when word of the victory reached the English court. Wondering if, by year’s end, they’d all be learning Welsh.’

‘But short-lived. Like all deals with the devil. Whatever he invoked here deserted him when he entered England. He died unfulfilled as, presumably, did Rhys Gethin.’

‘If he died.’ Thomas Jones reined in his horse. ‘Don’t make dust of this, boy. Owain’s death was never recorded, nor his burial place ever found. He simply disappeared. Oh, I’m not saying he lives… but something of him does. And, if it’s anywhere, it’s here.’

He turned slowly in the saddle to face me, his round, pale face shining like a smaller moon.

‘Look at me, boy – fallen Welshman, recipient of an English pardon. See what it does to me, this place. Oh, they all come here, at least once. Not just the handful of mad old ragamuffins in Plant Mat, but all those who yet dream of an exalted Wales. They come here to seek… renewal. And they keep coming back, oft-times for reasons they’ll never quite understand. The men I drink with in Tregaron, the poets and the dreamers. They come quietly, and quietly they leave, at dusk or before dawn. Sometimes journeying all the way on foot.’

I thought of the rector: I have seen them anointing themselves here at night, in the heathen way.

‘So this is the place for them, isn’t it? The shrine. The most likely, anyway. Where might they take him? What hiding places are there? How far is it from the village?’

‘Not within sight of the village at night,’ I said. ‘And no one comes out of there after dark. The church itself… the shrine’s behind it, and the well, a long hole in the ground, with a pine wood behind.’

And below it… the Bryn. Half sunk into the hill itself.

Like a cave.

I said nothing of this, but it would be the first place I’d go, to warn the Ceddols. I kept my voice steady.

‘There are wide views from the church,’ I said. ‘Especially on a night like this. You’d see anyone coming.’

‘Especially three of us, on horseback. If we ride directly up the hill, we’re meat. Is there another way?’

‘There is another way,’ I said. ‘With good tree cover.’

‘Fit for horses?’

‘If we dismount and lead them. I’m sure we could leave them in the stables at Nant-y-groes, but… Stephen Price is a cautious man, and the explanations would take time.’

‘We’ll continue,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘See what there is to be seen. If anything.’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘How much do you believe? Is there magic?’

‘There’s magic everywhere on a night like this, boy.’

But I had little faith that there was anything of the Hidden here. So many legends were woven with hindsight, to light mere coincidence with glamour: strange weather, moving stars, earth-tremors.

‘You feel a softening of the ground?’ Vaughan had dismounted and was tying his horse to a young oak. ‘We should be able to get through this way and up the hill from behind but not if we’re in bog.’

Damn. I should have thought. When I came down the hill, through the oak wood, I’d only gone as far as the burial tump. Now I only wanted a swift and discreet way to the church and Dudley, if Dudley was there. And also to the Bryn.

‘I’ll go through on foot for a short way,’ Vaughan said. ‘See how firm it is for the horses.’

I watched him vanish into a thickening of undergrowth, wishing there were more of us, then looked up at the hill and the moon. You could make out the grey tower of Pilleth Church, halfway up. A marker for the shrine. Of the village you could see nothing.

‘I’ve never asked,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘But why were you here when I followed the Roberts boys? I presumed just to visit your old family home, but…’

‘It’s dying,’ I said, not wanting to mention the peculiar talents of Siôn Ceddol and the lure of his sister. ‘The village is dying.’

‘I’d almost think you cared.’

‘It’s the old home of my father. My tad.’

‘Tad? That’s what you called him, in the Welsh way?’

For years I hadn’t even realised it was Welsh. I said nothing.

‘Ah, you’re one of us more than you know, John Dee. Why’s the village dying?’

‘Weight of too much killing. The dead outnumber the living, and the dead are rising. It oppresses them. There were always priests of the old kind to help them cope, but now they’re told it’s their own fault for not praising God enough.’

‘My,’ he said. ‘You do care.’

‘I hardly know anyone here. My tad told them he’d come back, when he was rich. But he never was, not for long. And he never did come back. Tell me… do have any idea how practised Gethin believes himself to be… in the ways of magic?’

‘I doubt he’s read the books, John. But he’s said to have the Sight. And the desire. And what some might call the courage… and others the madness of—’

Thomas Jones breaking off because of a sharp cry from down by the river. He began to turn his horse.

‘He’s in the marsh?’

Twisting in the saddle, I saw the water’s glitter, sword-bright through a line of trees.

‘We should all have gone.’

I slid to the ground and tied the mare to the slender trunk of the oak. Aware again of that feeling of separation from the physical, a shudder going through me, like you sometimes get in sleep – as if I were snatched out of my body and then flung back. The mare flinched, as if she’d felt it, too.

‘He’s here,’ Thomas Jones said uncertainly.

I spun round, thinking for a fearful moment that he meant Prys Gethin, then saw Roger Vaughan fading up greyly from the riverbank, the shape of him imprinted on the night, but blurred in my sight, as if the ink had run. I moved towards him.

He was limping. Not looking at either of us, only at the ground, as if he might sink into it.

‘I’m all right, Dr Dee. I’m not hurt.’

His voice was cracked like old parchment. He was not all right. He was far from all right.

XLVII Orifice

VAUGHAN’S HORSE, QUITE a big grey stallion, was straining at his tether, panting and blowing, and I saw that the others were become restive, too, their eyes all aflare.

I said to Vaughan, ‘What happened down there?’

‘I don’t know.’ He clearly was shaken. ‘That is, I’m not sure. I think… I think there might be something dead down there. The smell. Might just be a sheep, but I… It don’t feel right in any way.’

He went to soothe the stallion, putting his hands on it, I’d swear, in search of warmth and life, but the horse sheered away from him. I looked down towards the river.

‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘Find out.’

‘Leave it, John,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘We’re better moving to higher ground, where we can see anyone coming. If Dudley’s only been missing since this morning, it’s not likely that—’

‘His body will yet stink? That rather depends, doesn’t it?’

I knew not what it depended on, but must needs be sure. And I was weary of unexplained fears and shadowplay, nature’s marked cards and loaded dice. Before I could think better of it, I was scrabbling down the way Vaughan had come, over short turf which suggested the sheep had been here in profusion in daylight hours. The sheep which fled at sunset.

Divers trees sprang up around me, from half-grown saplings to old oaks with bloated, cankered boles and branches like fingers with the gnarling sickness. The river was no longer to be seen – too close, or the bank had been raised up against winter floods.

You might conclude that, on this hard moon-flayed night, I was not fully in my mind, and maybe I wasn’t. I’d experienced this in Glastonbury and other places where Christianity and old magic were interwoven – the air unsteady and full of sparks, and sometimes you thought you could hear it like the hum of bees or, indeed, smell it in a sudden rank, richness of earth.

… you’re one of us more than you know, John Dee.

I wondered now, if my tad’s evocation of Wales – the men bent like thorn trees, their skin scoured – had not simply been intended to keep me away from here, plant some deep revulsion inside me. Maybe some dark memory had lived inside him and the last thing he wanted was for his son to become one of us.

But now I was here, whether by destiny or conspiracy, an educated man grown weary of the pinches and taunts, the mists and flickerings. I wove between the trees, looking for the river, recalling my own drawing of the valley, a place given form by ancient ritual. But the river was hidden now by the earth, of a sudden, rising before me, all humped like a deathbed.

How our night-minds ever find the most sinister of likeness. It was only raised earth, an upturned bowl. Made bigger by enclosing shadows than it had looked by day, and the trees growing out of it turned into a conference of witches, one of them long-dead, naked boughs clawing for the moon. But it wasn’t the tree that stank.

In the windless night, it seemed as if the smell was all over the tump. A raw essence of decay, of corrupted flesh, sharp and hideously sweet. Stephen Price and Pedr Morgan had secretly buried a new corpse here, which by now would indeed be in a ripe condition, but… buried.

Under the moon’s lamp, I rounded the tump to where they’d dug and was driven back, as if struck, by a reek so insidiously putrid that I felt as if my own body were rotting in its blast. Was sent reeling away, a hand cupped over my nose, my feet slithering and…

Christ…

A blow – a battlefield blow. A bright, ripping pain in the back of my head had me tumbling, flung around and thrown down, my stricken head jouncing from the bole of the tree behind me, legs slithering into a bed of twiggery and stony soil.

I lay for long moments, benumbed, the night in spasm around me. I must simply have backed hard into a tree with a low and knobbled branch which had scored my skull and put me down. But it had felt like an act of violence.

Reaching up a hand, I hissed in pain on finding a flap of peeled flesh, warm blood flooding through my fingers, my hair already thick with it.

Embedded in tree roots, I stared through the pain into a blackness, as if into the cave where the children of Mat met – entrance so narrow that only one man at a time might pass through. And the devil. The hole gaped at me like an open mouth, and its breath was foul. No escape from the stench of bloating flesh from… not a cave…

…but it was an orifice in the tump’s flank, where none had been when I was here before. When I opened my mouth to call out for Thomas Jones and Vaughan, something at once rushed in, foul as returning vomit.

How can I tell you this? How can I describe the horror of closing my mouth on a mess of putrid flesh? Trying to retch, but finding no breath for it. Beginning to choke, the panic throwing me on my back amidst bone-hard roots, knowing full well that, although my throat and gut were tight with revulsion, there was nothing in my mouth.

Nothing anywhere. No air. The moon gone, darkness absolute.

Know that I like darkness. Nights when I can lie on my back, and planets and stars are laid out for me in strings and clusters like an intricate garden whose patterns I know with an intimacy as if I’d cultivated them myself.

This was a solid darkness, like stilled smoke. Should I have formed a prayer, holding it inside me, or inscribed a protective pentagram on the air? We don’t think, even those of us who’ve pored for years over the Cabala and ascended, if only in our minds, the angelic stairways. In cold life, magic has a tendency to shrink back into the books. In the struggle against hungry death, we fall back on the physical.

With the running blood pooling on my face, I pushed against the roots, dug my boots into soft earth, coming up very slowly, my back against the tree. But my body felt too heavy, and I was aware of something pulling me back.

Fighting it, cold sweat welling from my skin to join the blood, but it was too much for me and I slid back into the gleefully crackling leaves, and felt a presence, a nearness, an active resentment fast hardening into hatred as I realised I must needs go into the hole.

XLVIII Not in a Goodly Way

A LOG THE size of a side of mutton was in slumber in the ingle at Nant-y-groes. I bent over the meagre glow from its underside, needing bodily heat more than ever I could remember. But Stephen Price was a farmer and wouldn’t even think to awaken his fire before morning.

‘Not that I sleep much these nights,’ he said. ‘Three or four hours, then I’ll awake and get dressed, have a bite to eat, and then mabbe doze till dawn, if I can. And tonight, with this Gethin let loose…’

‘You know about this?’

‘The whole country knows of it by now.’

I looked around. The moon was a wavering lamp in the poor, blued glass of a deep-hewn window. I could hear Clarys the housekeeper clattering somewhere. In the brightness of pain, my thoughts were voiced, fast as arrows.

‘Where’s your wife? Why do I never see your wife?’

Price shuffled uncomfortably on his stool.

‘Gone.’

‘I’m… very sorry to hear that.’

‘To Monaughty farm. To stay with my brother’s family.’

I’d thought he’d meant dead. A quiet woman, Anna Ceddol had said. Sits before the kitchen fire, goes out to listen to the priest on a Sunday and then goes home and worries. Well, I was glad she wasn’t dead, but why had she gone to stay at another farm, not even two miles away?

Stephen Price was asking me if I wanted to lie down. I shook my head… but slowly, the pain scraping ceaselessly at my head like a wind-driven bough against a window. I’d bathed it in the holy well and again with well-water in the yard at Nant-y-groes. The good housekeeper, Clarys, had applied a nettle balm, but it had begun to bleed again.

‘I’ll recover,’ I said.

Looked like you were rehearsing alone for some Christmas play, Thomas Jones had said, shaken. Pretending the other actors were there all around. Frit the hell out of me, boy.

‘I did not mean for this to happen,’ Price said. ‘I didn’t think it would happen to you.’

He hadn’t even asked why I, accompanied by two others, had come this night to Brynglas, seeming only grateful that I was attempting, in my way, to uncover what was wrong here. And if he hadn’t thought that anything would happen to me he seemed not unhappy that something had.

‘Didn’t think such things could happen to me either,’ I said dully.

And had once been foolish enough to think that if they ever did I’d feel… favoured? Maybe one day I’d be far enough removed from it to consider the science, but not now, when I felt as if my very soul had been snatched out and left to go cold.

Could not smother another spasm of shivering, and at last Stephen Price pulled down an iron poker from the wall and raised the log until a flame came tonguing through.

‘I… was not as forthright with you,’ he said stiffly, as I might’ve been. Never told you nothing wrong, but could’ve told you more.’

There was a clopping of hooves from the yard outside. The horses still were edgy, frit and sweating. I’d asked if we might leave all three at Nant-y-groes for a while, to calm down while we considered our situation. And so Vaughan and Thomas Jones had followed Price’s sons to the stables. Leaving us alone, Price and me.

We’d moved on, widely skirting the tump and the marshy ground. Leading the horses, at last, through the oak wood and up to Pilleth church.

Jones and I had waited in the trees while Vaughan crept up alone to the church, where it took him not long to establish that the building and surrounds were deserted. He said later that he’d stifled a cry when, on peering around the wall of the tower, he’d encountered the stone virgin on her plinth, her face so tainted that she seemed to sneer into his eyes. I think he meant to pray to her and could not.

But at least the cold virgin was alone, so we came down from the hill the more direct way, veering from the path only once, so that I might be sure that the door and shutters of the Bryn were closed tight against invasion.

At first despondent over our failure to find Dudley, I was briefly lit by a small hope that we’d been wildly wrong and that he was back in Presteigne in some other whore’s bed.

But that light soon went out.

‘Thing was, I was affeared she’d die.’

‘Your wife?’

I looked blearily at Price, my hair and face stiff with dried blood.

‘Couldn’t sleep, would not eat. Would not go out, not even in daylight. Gone thin as a rib. Sent her down to Monaughty farm to be cared for by my brother’s wife. Mabbe she won’t be back. It’s all different down there, see. Not much more’n a mile, but it lies easy.’

‘A monastery farm.’

‘A safer air. She never liked this house, or this valley, that’s what it come down to. Couldn’t wait to move to Monaughty where there’d be more company. More company… and less company.’

He looked down at the fire, shaking his head.

‘Wanted me to spend more money on the building work, finish the extension at Monaughty, so we could go. It led to much quarrelling at first. I was glad to get away to London, truth be told. You know what women are like, think you’re tight with money, don’t understand what you gotter spend keeping your ground in good heart, and…’

He looked up, stricken, his face all creased.

‘Truth of it is, I never want to go to Monaughty. Two brothers, one farm, divers sons, it don’t work. Stephen Price of Pilleth, that’s me. Was gonner make Meredith an offer for this house.’

‘It’s all your land down here?’

‘Most of it. But no house. Joan was all, “Oh thank God it’s only rented. We can be out of yere.” We’d signed for the place for two years. I thought to… mend things, somehow. Thought mabbe ole Walter, the priest, could change it for us. When we first come, if my wife or anybody seen anything, we’d send for Walter. And sometimes Marged, the wise woman. Mother Marged and Walter the priest… they had an understanding.’

‘What did they think was the problem here?’

‘Never listened much to ole Marged, it was all mumbles and spells. Father Walter, he’d say that, if you had the Sight, living yere you’d ever need the Saviour’s protection.’

‘What did he mean?’

‘Shrine to the Holy Mother, place of pilgrimage – you come, you pay your respects and then you leave with faith renewed. No one should live too close to such places, Walter said, ’cept mabbe monks and hermits trained to thrive on spiritual agony. The ole priest, you never knowed when he was serious, but he knowed what he was about. And then he died. And then ole Marged. Both gone, one after the other.’

‘And then all you had,’ I said quietly, ‘was a boy who brought death out of the earth but could not talk. And a new priest, all for the Bible.’

‘Had hopes for Daunce at first. That he’d bring some sense, with the new religion. Plain talking. But, in the end…’ Price stabbed the poker into the heart of the fire. ‘…putting it all down to the devil, that was the last thing we needed.’

‘So you came to me.’

‘You were sent to us. That’s how I seen it.’ He leaned away from the fire. ‘The boy with you out there. Was that young Vaughan of Hergest?’

‘And the man with him is my… my cousin, Thomas Jones, from the west of Wales.’

He and Vaughan had said they’d stay outside, watch the night, watch the hill for movement. Anything.

‘My wife’s been like this all her life,’ Price said. ‘Some has it, most of us en’t. I thought it didn’t bother her much any more.’

‘But it was different here?’

‘She liked to walk. In the evening, when the air was soft.’

‘Not any more.’

‘No. Never any more.’

His accent was thicker this night, but his voice was higher, querulous.

‘What did she see?’

‘The dead?’ He prodded at the fire. ‘But not in a goodly way.’

‘You mean from the battlefield…’

‘Confused. Looking for a home. Fragments of them. She’d be walking through them, like they were part of the wind, blowing down the hill, scattered like leaves – that was how she described it. After a while, she wouldn’t go up the hill at all, except to church, in a group of us.’

‘Where did she walk then?’

‘By the river.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘Quieter down there, see, until—’

I leaned forward, driven by sudden and powerful insight.

‘Until you buried a man’s body in the old grave mound?’

I sat back, into shadow. Felt I was close to the very heart of it. If it was just the fears of villagers, he’d pass it off as the superstitions of the uneducated. But his own wife… domestic troubles, matrimonial strife. His desire to remain here, in his own place, tempered by that fear that his wife, if they stayed, might even die of it.

I said, ‘Did she know what you’d buried in the mound?’

‘Christ, no.’

Of course not. It was even possible that his wife’s fear of Brynglas had been another good reason to dispose of the remains… before she could find out about it. The thought of what that might do to her.

‘Why did you bury him there?’

‘Why? Because it was the only place I could think of where the mad boy wouldn’t find him. Or, if he did, nobody would dig there because they all knowed it was an ole grave. Nobody disturbs a known grave.’

‘No.’ I nodded. ‘Can you tell me what happened down by the river… with your wife?’

Price sat staring at the window and the smeared moon.

‘Gone to walk. Around dusk. Pleasant, warm evening. Come back not an hour later… worst I’ve ever seen her. Close to swooning in distress. Face white as clouds. Took until next day ’fore she could even tell me.’

‘What was it she saw?’

‘Saw… smelled… felt.’

I nodded. I’d thought the smell would cling to my apparel, but when I left there it was gone. The smell had been part of the place. Part of what was there. And for the first time I’d been thankful that I did not see, like Mistress Price.

‘No more’n a white mist, at first,’ her husband said. ‘Drifting across the marsh. Taking shape when it got close. Too close to run from.’

‘What shape did it take?’

‘A man.’ He swallowed, shifting on his stool. ‘Clothed only… only in his rage.’

‘You mean naked?’

‘Violence.’ Price poked angrily at the log. ‘She felt the violence in him. A dirty violence. She felt… what he wanted to do to her. Felt it inside.’ He threw down the poker, turned away from the fire. ‘Inside. You know what I’m saying, Dr Dee? You know what it felt like? You heard of anything like that before.’

‘No.’

Though maybe read of it. I wasn’t sure. Horrified, I sought to reassure Price, telling him that no one was mad, that the old priest had been right about the peculiar air of a place of pilgrimage which might have its origins long before the shrine of the Virgin. That it seemed to me the tump had itself been placed in geometric accordance with the hill, the river, the shrine’s heathen precursor and perhaps other monuments now vanished – even the sun and moon and the stars – to give this place a certain mystic resonance. Maybe empowering the spirit of whoever lay within the tump. And anyone who disturbed it… might themselves be disturbed.

All of this unloaded unrefined from my hurting head. Years of study might make it no clearer. And I knew that, but for my own experience at the tump this night, I’d be inclined to say that Mistress Price had created the whole story in her head to persuade her husband to turn his back on Brynglas Hill.

‘We buried a naked man in the tump,’ Price said. ‘A man whose spirit did not rest. Who walked, and… more.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘She hadn’t been out of her bed for three days. After I’d spent the day with you on the hill, came back home and Clarys said Joan hadn’t been able to keep food down. Death was coming for her. Got the ole cart out, and we carried her on it, me and Clarys, took her down to Monaughty. And later, when all were abed, I went to the tump.’

‘On your own?’

‘With a lantern. And the bier from the church.’

I sought to frame a question; it would not come.

‘It was my fault,’ Price said. ‘My wife had been near death. My fault to put right. Like you say, it was the wrong place.’ He wiped his brow with a sleeve. ‘Not the pleasantest task. He stank to deepest hell. He was… green and going to fluids. Pieces were coming away from him. But I done it.’

‘What?’

I’d reared back.

‘Dug him out and took him away. Buried him the other side of the hill, behind the pines. Laid the turf on top and packed it tight. And said what prayers I could think of over him.’

‘No one saw you?’

‘Not as I know of. Doubt if I cared by then. Had to be done. Why? Was it wrong? Against the laws of God? I think not.’

‘Only the laws of man.’

‘Aye. Mabbe. But what choice did I have? Tell me that.’

I leaned forward, looking into Price’s round, firelit face.

‘So there’s nothing in there now. Nothing in the tump.’

‘Only what was there before. Whatever that may be.’

‘And the hole,’ I said. ‘The hole remains.’

‘No hole. I filled it in. Who would not?’

I gripped the wooden seat of my stool, my aching head all aswirl. I’d gone most of a day and a night without sleep, had little to eat and taken a blow to the head.

But I knew that I’d gone into the hole and… nothing there but a foul miasma and a swirling hatred and—

‘John, boy?’

Thomas Jones standing in the doorway, hands behind his back. How long he’d been there I knew not, but I knew the tilted smile on his face was no portent of good fortune.

‘Beg mercy if I interrupt you, John, but I thought you might want to know that at this moment there is a man walking quite openly along the road towards us, from the direction of Presteigne. Evidently making for the hill.’

I stood up.

‘Someone you know?’

‘Well… he’s yet some distance away, so we cannot be entirely sure. But, Vaughan and I are in general agreement that it might well be the man who likes to call himself Prys Gethin.’

I stood unsteadily, a hand on the ingle beam.

‘John, you look worse,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘You should stay here. Vaughan and I will follow him.’

‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I must needs come.’

For I was hearing his voice from earlier.

Killing and rape… as natural to him as taking a piss… O liked to do her while covered in pig blood, still wet… the demon he’s invested with the spirit of Rhys Gethin…

I stood pushing my hands back through my blood-stiffened hair, regardless of the pain, and then turned to Price and asked him what I’d thought, as a bookman and a philosopher, never to ask any man.

‘Master Price,’ I said, ‘have you weaponry here?’

XLIX Skin of the Valley

AT FIRST SIGHT, looking down, you might almost have thought him drunk. Trying to stay upright, hands extended either side of his body, upturned as if weighing the air.

It was the first time I’d seen him.

We watched from a small orchard growing on a shelf of higher ground behind Nant-y-groes, standing inside a lattice of shadows and speaking in low voices. Stephen Price had offered to come with us, bringing both his sons, maybe rousing some of the local men. But Thomas Jones had pointed out that too many of us on Brynglas would only draw attention.

Besides, I’d no wish for too many people to know about Robert Dudley.

‘If it is Gethin,’ Vaughan said. ‘How did he avoid half the men of Presteigne?’

‘They’ll have given up long ago,’ I said, ‘though that doesn’t tell us how they failed to see him on the road.’

‘Unless,’ Vaughan said, ‘he was given help. Nobody saw him leave the court. He may have been smuggled away later than we think.’

‘It being important that he reaches his destination,’ I said.

It was all aglow again. The night alive and me half dead.

‘We have a choice,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘We could simply wait here until he goes past and then follow him in the assumption that he’ll lead us to wherever your friend is held. If he still lives.’

‘We’d have the moonlight on our side, so we could leave a reasonable distance between him and ourselves.’

I pointed to a line of pines on the eastern side of Brynglas Hill, which hid the village and would offer us some cover.

‘More copses and dingles up there than you’d imagine,’ Roger Vaughan said. ‘Plenty of places he can disappear if he does see us. Especially if he knows the hill.’

‘I think we can take it he knows the hill all too well,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Having been here many times, following in the steps of Rhys Gethin, calling Rhys’s spirit into him. Rhys in the time of triumph.’

I said nothing. None of my mentors – Agrippa, Trithemius – would deem it possible for a man to summon another’s ghost into himself, except in his imagination. Which would have more effect on himself than upon others and should not be too much feared.

We could see him more clearly now, a sprightly puppet-figure under the moon, and sometimes it looked as if he was almost dancing and then his pace was slowed and he was walking down the middle of the road as if in a procession. As if he was not alone.

I felt Vaughan’s shudder.

‘Something unearthly about this.’

‘He’s happy, that’s all,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘He’s walked free from the highest court ever held in Presteigne. And he’s on his way to do a killing.’

‘Something even more than that.’ I marked how his hands seem to gather-in the bright night. ‘He feels himself entranced.’

The arms of the figure on the road were opening and hands reaching out, as if he might clasp the hill to his bosom.

‘We might simply go down to him,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Present ourselves. Three against one and we have… this.’

The blade of the butcher’s chopping knife was near two feet long. Stephen Price had handed it to me as we left and I’d unloaded it upon Thomas Jones at the earliest opportunity. He held it point down behind an apple tree so that its blade should not reflect the moonlight.

‘A scholar,’ he said, ‘a lawyer… and a man who, since his pardon, has become rather too fond of his meat. Against a man of considerable strength who’s driven to kill. Yes, I suppose we could do that. Demand he tells us where they have your friend. And, when he refuses, lop off one of his hands.’ He ran a tentative thumb along the blade. ‘Sharp enough, certainly. Will it be you, John, to do the first hand?’

‘We’ll follow him,’ I said.

Nearly halfway up Brynglas, not far below the church, Prys Gethin stopped and sat down on a small tump in the grass. To gain the cover of the last stand of pine before the church wall, we’d had to creep, one by one, to higher ground and so looked down on Gethin now.

Both Thomas Jones and Vaughan had been able to verify to their satisfaction that this was Gethin. And there was confirmation for me, too, when he turned his head and the moon lit the grim cavity where an eye once had lodged.

I looked at Thomas Jones in frustration. He shrugged. There was nothing we could do but wait. After several minutes, Gethin had not moved, sitting quite still, as though in meditation. Or was he waiting for someone? I leaned against one of the pines, fatigue weighting my legs. The only warmth came from the new blood on my brow, the deep gash in my head having opened again, tributaries channelled either side of my nose.

Vaughan raised a hand, making motion towards the church. I looked at Thomas Jones and he nodded: we might as well take this opportunity to leave the pines and reach the cover of the church wall, for if Gethin rose now and moved ahead of us, he’d have an open view of the whole valley and might well mark us.

We moved, as before, one by one. I waited another minute before running in a crouch, half blinded by the blood-flow, to join the other two behind the low trees and bushes which enclosed the church on three sides. Below us to the left, the village lay lightless and silent.

We approached the church itself with greater caution this time, but a window of plain glass showed that there was still no one inside, only a sheet of moonlight over the altar. The raised churchyard gave us a plateau from which we could watch Prys Gethin, still as a monument and far enough away for us to commune in whispers as we crouched among outlying tombs behind a loose wall of bushes.

‘You might almost imagine that he knew he was watched,’ Roger Vaughan said.

‘I doubt that.’ Thomas Jones prodded the earth with the butcher’s blade. ‘It seems more likely that he’s waiting for someone. We could be here until sunrise. Let me think on it.’ He sat down on a low tomb, the blade across his knees. ‘Go and bathe your head in the well, John. If he moves we’ll come for you.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ Vaughan said. ‘It’s on the dark side of the church, and the steps to the well are worn.’

An owl’s call across the valley was returned, as I followed Vaughan around the body of the church. The area of the well was darkened not only by the tower but the line of tall pines on the other side. Vaughan stopped, stood with his back against the church wall. I could not see his face, only hear the desolation in his voice.

‘The truth is, I must needs pray to the holy mother.’

‘Vaughan—’

‘I’ve no confidence in surviving this night.’

I stopped under the grey diamond panes of the steep end window, and sighed.

‘Because of what you saw down by the tump.’

‘And felt. And smelled.’

‘A man?’

‘Mabbe. Came and went. In a blinking.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Sometimes we throw pictures from our thoughts into the night air, and in some places the air is more receptive. If the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians before them were so far ahead of where we are, even now, in matters of the Hidden… then we mustn’t be too quick to dismiss the ancient Britons with their standing stones and their rough, earthen monuments. More than just graves.’

It seemed a rare madness, delivering a lecture on antiquities to a gathering of one in a moonlit churchyard. But it was clear to me now that the skin of this valley and the fabric betwixt the spheres must be rendered muslin-thin.

‘It would have…’ Vaughan held his back against the church wall. ‘If I’d died from the fear of it… I felt it would’ve relished that. Do you see?’

No, I did not see.

But I nodded.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Pray to the Lady. If you dip your sleeve in the holy well and wipe the grime from her brow, she might even respond.’

If his glance at me was in search of irony, he’d find no sign of it this night.

‘Roger,’ I said. ‘Don’t dwell on it and it won’t reach you.’

He nodded and picked his way to where the sad, smirched Virgin stood atop her ridge of rubble-stones, watching over the stone-lined vault in the earth which held the holy well. A well older than Christianity, where the heads of dead enemies would have been sunk in veneration of some forgotten druidic deity later, perhaps, invoked by Owain Glyndwr and Rhys Gethin.

And then Prys Gethin, too, on one of his dark pilgrimages to Pilleth, betwixt cattle raids. No one more likely to have murdered and mutilated the man twice buried by Stephen Price, in grotesque and would-be magical re-enactment of the events of 1402. What I could not yet imagine was how the unknown man’s unquiet spirit had been invested with the base instincts of his killer.

My split head could hold no more. All logic and learning was collapsed into the midden of superstition, as we returned to the tomb. Watching Prys Gethin, so still on the hillside below us, small as a toad from here, as Venus gleamed, first signal of the coming dawn.

In my old life, which surely had ended this night, ghosts were neither good nor bad, and all they could give me was the knowledge of their existence. Fear had no role to play, for I’d not been able to understand fear of the unknown which, to me, was a wondrous thing which I’d approached eagerly with my arms spread wide.

I looked at Thomas Jones, the butcher’s knife betwixt his knees, his hands on its string-wound wooden hilt.

He leaned back, stretched, sighing.

‘He doesn’t know, boy. Doesn’t know where they are. He’s waiting for them to find him. That’s why he made no attempt to conceal his arrival. When they know he’s free, they’ll know it’s not a trick and their side of the bargain can be met without fear of reprisal.’

‘Meaning Dudley yet lives?’

‘Who can say? We don’t know where they might have him. We don’t know how many of them are holding him. If we wait for them to find him and take him to the place, yes, we can follow them. But how do we stop them putting an end to it? Prys’s moment of blood-drenched triumph. What do we do about this, John?’

‘Can only wait,’ Vaughan said, returning from his prayers. ‘What other choice do we have?’

‘The other choice is to make sure they never find Prys. Go down there now, three against one. And this…’

Thomas Jones thumbed the butcher’s blade. Roger Vaughan drew back in alarm with a rattling of bushes.

‘I’m a man of the law.’

‘So’s Legge.’

‘Master Jones, it’s one thing for a man to be legally hanged—’

‘Heroes we’d be, in Presteigne.’

‘Jesu!’

Only a hiss from Vaughan, but it was too loud, and I thought I saw Gethin’s head move, though he was too distant for me to be sure.

Thomas Jones held out a dagger to me. I took it. I saw Roger Vaughan’s eyes close momentarily.

‘Roger, you know this place. Go around the church, into the pines, wait for a while to be sure you’re not seen, then quietly follow the path back.’

‘To Nant-y-groes?’

‘Indeed,’ Thomas Jones said, catching on. ‘Fetch Price and however many sons he has over the age of six.’

‘What about you?’

‘Just do it, eh?’

Vaughan hesitated for a moment and then turned and was gone. Thomas Jones took a long breath, parted the bushes separating us from the pale hillside, peered through for a moment then let the bushes swing back and picked up his butcher’s knife from the tomb.

‘This is it, then, boy. Don’t forget your magic.’

White and amber strands in the east suggested that the moon’s dominion would end before long, and I was glad of this. The moon might be your friend on a night ride, but it meddles too much with your mind and senses.

We’d moved about fifty paces to the other end of the churchyard before easing ourselves through the bushes, so that he would not at first see us. Walking slowly towards him, for a swifter pace might have implied an attack.

Thomas Jones plucked off his green hat.

‘Bore da, Prys.’

Good morning.

A thin white line on the horizon, but the morning must be more than an hour away.

L Courtly Dance

A SILENCE FORMED, allowing me to observe Gethin for the first time.

He was perhaps a little over medium height with long, tangled, greying hair and a face like from a misericord, its lines chiselled deep in varnished oak.

My gaze was drawn inevitably to the open cavity where the left eye had been, a knot hole in the wood.

‘Twm Siôn Cati,’ he said. ‘Well, well.’

His wide lips fell easily into a loose smile, and then he spoke in Welsh so rapid that I could understand not a word of it.

Thomas Jones nodded.

‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘However, in the presence of an Englishman, I ever think it polite – for those who can – to use his language. Indeed, I’m told that Owain Glyndwr himself, when he was at the English court, was oft-times mistaken for an Englishman.’

‘While Elizabeth of England, who claims descent from Arthur’ – Prys Gethin speaking rapidly, as though his mastery of the neighbouring tongue had been impugned – ‘speaks not a word yn Gymreig.’

His voice was unexpectedly high and surprisingly melodious, like to a bladder-pipe.

‘Not entirely true,’ I said.

Foolishly. In truth I was far from sure that, for all her linguistic skills, the Queen had more than a few words of Welsh, but I’d always instinctively take her side.

‘Is it not?’ Prys Gethin glanced across at me. ‘And who are you to say, sirrah?’

Thomas Jones threw a swift warning look in my direction, but I caught it too late.

‘John Dee.’

‘Oh.’ Prys Gethin’s one eye lit up and, for a moment, I had the disturbing sensation that I was also viewed by some organ of perception behind the empty socket of the other, a secret sight which might penetrate my thoughts. ‘Her conjurer.’

I shrugged.

‘So the Queen of England saw fit to dispatch her sorcerer to Wales… along with the father of her bastard child.’

‘She doesn’t have a—’ I shook my head, and my lips tightened with the pain. ‘No matter.’

No matter, indeed, for I knew that in one sentence he’d confirmed what, until that moment, had been only an elaborate theory.

‘Where is he?’ I said.

He glanced briefly at me then looked away.

‘Where are you holding Lord Dudley?’

No reply.

‘We know why you were freed,’ I said. ‘We know about the agreement.’

Gethin spoke in Welsh to Thomas Jones, who at once translated.

‘John, he invites us to kill him.’

Gethin smiled.

Thomas Jones raised the butcher’s knife. Gethin did not flinch.

The whole texture of the night was altered. I watched the start of a dangerously delicate courtly dance in the remains of the moonlight: Prys Gethin tossing a question in Welsh at Thomas Jones, who gave no answer, Gethin then addressing him at length, still in Welsh, Thomas Jones listening without a word, hands on hips, then turning to me, his voice mild.

‘Prys wonders, John, why I’m working with the enemy.’

‘And he is not?’

Realising, too late, my possible mistake. If Gethin believed his task had been assigned by Cecil, then he might see it as some peculiarly Welsh alliance between the two of them. How much he knew of Cecil’s reasons for not wanting the Queen wed to Dudley, an Englishman, I could not say. Nor whether, from a Welsh standpoint, a Spaniard or a Frenchman would be preferable as a consort.

More Welsh from Gethin, Thomas Jones listening, then slowly shaking his head.

‘No, boy. Myself, I’ve never considered that accepting an English Queen’s pardon was any kind of treachery. But equally, I’m under no illusion about the continuing Welshness of the Tudor line.’

Silence for a while, only the call of a distant owl at night’s end. Then Gethin brought his attention to me.

‘Do you know where you are standing, Dr Dee?’

‘I believe so.’

I took an instinctive step back, down the hillside, for Prys Gethin, even after walking from Presteigne, gave off such animation, such an energy. Perhaps the energy of freedom after a long captivity. Or perhaps something more. There was little doubt he knew where he was standing. Did he believe the spirit of the man whose name he’d borrowed had come into him while he sat waiting on the hill?

A spirit now burning inside him?

Not possible. An occupying spirit could not be of human origin, only demonic.

Christ.

I felt my own energy seeping away into the ground. I was near exhaustion and, despite the extreme danger here, felt I might fall to sleep on my feet like a horse. We were in Gethin’s hands and he knew it.

Time passed, the voice piping on, as if delivering a sermon, the Welsh rising and dipping like a liturgy, and then Thomas Jones replying, this time also in Welsh, still now, looking beyond me down the hill, his eyes black. I felt like a watcher from another, smaller world.

Thomas Jones was nodding now, a faint smile upon his plumpen features.

‘Da iawn,’ he said.

Very good. Both men smiling.

All three of them.

Jesu.

The third man was unknown to me. He was a large man. His hair was short and crinkled, his beard grey, his arms bare and muscular. Silver sweat shone from his face and a dagger from a fist.

Thomas Jones nodded to him.

‘John, this is Master Gerallt Roberts.’

Oh God, he must have moved silently out of the pines, lower down the hill from where we stood, and simply walked up, silently over the sheep-cropped turf.

We were equal in number now, but you only had to look at Gerallt Roberts to know that, in truth, we were outnumbered.

A long silence, and then Prys Gethin spoke again, in Welsh.

‘John…’ Thomas Jones looking down the slope at me. ‘Prys tells me we are upon the very spot at which the Welsh archers hired by the English were caused to turn and loose their arrows into the English army. Thus redeeming their heritage.’

‘And how can he know that?’

Nobody replied. Having retreated a little way down the hill, I had my back to those first pale lights of pre-dawn, looking up at two men who were still in night.

‘A place of redemption indeed.’ Thomas Jones approached me, looking sorrowful. ‘It’s been conveyed to me that this may be my last chance to regain my honour.’

‘Honour?’

‘After my cowardly acceptance of mercy from a woman who will never be Queen of Wales.’

I looked for a smile, but his face was empty.

‘We’ll never be part of that. Of England. Owain, with his English education and his smooth English speech, made that all too explicit.’

‘My father achieved it,’ I said.

‘Traitors don’t count, John.’ Thomas Jones sighed. ‘Prys says that redemption requires of me one simple, perfect act.’

I heard his kindly voice as if from a great distance.

‘Your decapitation,’ it said.

I said nothing. It was a play. I was not part of it. The only reality was the ache in my head and even that was dulled now.

‘How can we let you live, knowing what you know?’

We?

I saw that he’d plucked the dagger from my belt. I stared into his eyes, but they would not meet mine.

Look at me, boy – fallen Welshman, recipient of an English pardon. See what it does to me, this place.

Thomas Jones brought up the butcher’s knife, ran a thumb along the blade.

It was a play. It could not be happening. I must endeavour not to make him laugh. I turned to Gethin.

‘The sheriff’s men will be here soon. You do know that?’

‘The sheriff.’ He smiled patiently. ‘The sheriff, at whose behest I was comfortably accommodated for a few hours, until all the hotheads waiting to kill me had dispersed. In whose covered cart I was safely conveyed beyond the boundaries of Presteigne. That sheriff?’

‘How many murders do you want to be tried for this time?’

‘This is murder?’ Gethin spread his hands. ‘Oh, I think not, Dr Dee. Not in my country.’

I saw that only he and Thomas Jones were standing on the higher ground. The big man, Roberts, was gone.

And then I heard his slow breathing from behind me, even smelling it. Foul. The reek of betrayal. Or did that come from the ground, where a history of it glittered in the very dew?

‘Where’s Lord Dudley?’ I said. ‘You might as well tell me. You owe me that much.’

‘I owe nothing… to you or any man of your mongrel race. No one will ever know where Lord Dudley died, and all that will remain of his body will be his cock – the cock which impregnated the English queen—’

‘For God’s sake, the Queen—’

‘—to be dried and powdered and sold to make fertility potions for old men. In England, of course.’

‘The Queen,’ I said, ‘has not given birth to Dudley’s child… and neither did his wife, after ten years of marriage.’

He seemed not to hear me, nodded to Thomas Jones, who looked uncomfortable, weighing the long knife in two hands, one clasped over the other because of the shortness of the wooden handle.

‘Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?’ I said to Gethin. ‘I’m thinking of the man you killed and chopped off his privy parts and cut off his face?’

‘He talks drivel,’ Gethin said. ‘Position him.’

Something spoken in Welsh, Thomas Jones nodding, then gesturing toward an area of turf a yard or so out from his boots.

‘I am… required to invite you, John, to kneel and bow your head.’

I looked at the selected turf and backed away from it, into the arms of Gerallt Roberts who pulled me close, sharply, and I felt what could only be his head butting the back of mine, bursting open my wound, and I must have screamed as I sank in agony to my knees.

‘What a night for this,’ Prys Gethin said. ‘Did you see the star earlier? I witnessed it as I walked here. Crossed the whole of the sky, like the one which fired the heavens just before the start of Owain’s war. You’d know of that, as an astrologer.’

Through the pain came outrage. In 1402, a comet widely seen across Europe had been viewed as a portent of the End-time but hailed by Glyndwr as inscribing across the night sky the trajectory of his campaign. I’d charted the frequency of comets and if there’d been one this night I was no astronomer. This man was mad, and I could not believe that someone at the highest level of English government would bargain with him. Maybe it was the French or the Spaniards or some unbalanced independent contender like the preening Earl of Arundel.

‘When you are ready,’ Prys Gethin said, ‘it will be easier for all of us if you pull your hair to one side to enable a clean cut. Don’t think to further demean your race by attempting to run, or to struggle. The end of it would be the same, only bloodier.’

For just a moment – as I came stubbornly to my feet, yet refusing to believe – by some trick of the paling moon, his empty socket seem to glow, as if this imaginary comet burned inside his skull.

In such a man it could only portend horror and tragedy.

As it would.

LI Ragged White

I STOOD, SWAYING, hands on my gut where the Wigmore shewstone swelled out of my jerkin like a cyst. Thomas Jones bent and laid down the butcher’s knife.

‘Let me talk to him,’ he said to Gethin. ‘With some small privacy. He was, after all, to have become my cousin.’

Gethin picked up the long knife.

‘Make it swift.’

He stood back and signalled to the big man to do the same. Thomas Jones came forward, not a weapon betwixt us. I wondered if, as a known sorcerer, a curse from me might have any effect. In such moments, you’ll consider anything.

‘Kneel, John,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘If you please.’

‘Piss off.’

‘There’s no way out of this,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘And yet you know there is. You know of these matters. If you go quietly—’

‘That will not happen.’

‘You know… that if you go quietly and with humility, your soul will slip away from this place in peace and grace. Whereas if you resist and must needs be ignominiously cut down, your embittered ghost will join all the other unquiet spirits which crowd Brynglas like crows.’

I would have had an answer for that, and a good and informed one, but then Thomas Jones was stepping away, holding out a hand to Gethin for the butcher’s knife. Hefting it from hand to hand, testing its balance. The big man, Roberts, was come close behind me again. The smell of his breath was worse at this moment than the stench of rotting flesh from the hole in the tump by the river.

I couldn’t speak. I stood swaying, new blood stiff on my cheeks. I was aware of Gethin walking over. Heard his rich, bladder-pipe voice, in Welsh, and then it broke off.

‘Translate for him,’ he said.

With no expression in his voice, Thomas Jones did as bid.

‘John, the Prince of Wales is with us now. He who could never leave while the English yoke lies heavily upon us.’

More Welsh, but all I heard was the voice of Thomas Jones from earlier.

…not saying he lives… but something of him does. And, if it’s anywhere, it’s here.

And now, having watched Prys Gethin sitting upon the hill, as if in silent summons, I was afraid.

I cleared my throat.

‘He was, in his way,’ I said, ‘a man of honour. I believe my family might even have supported his cause. And yet…’ I looked into the powdery night ’twixt Thomas Jones and Prys Gethin. ‘…he looks not happy. And who would be, knowing that his only representative on the hill of his finest day was a one-eyed, twisted scut who—’

A grunt from behind, and an agony as if my skull were cleaved open, but this time I stayed on my feet.

‘—who cares not a toss for the future of Wales, but only to satisfy his need for—’

‘Do it,’ Prys Gethin said.

When I knelt, every muscle and sinew in my legs was straining against it. The body fighting to live, the mind in furious, bitter conflict with itself over what to believe, who to trust. The need to hold on to the last small hope that a man you’d liked, who’d oft-times made you laugh, was not, after all, to be your murderer.

His voice at my ear.

‘I’m trying to help you, boy. To give you the quick and merciful passing that’s mete for a man of your standing.’

Shifting his gaze when I looked up at him. I knelt in the wet turf, and they stood in silence around me. With my head bowed, all I could see was their boots – one pair, worn by Roberts were all smirched with mud and pine needles but not enough to obscure the fine leather and good stitching and—

Oh God. Robbie…

When my head jerked, the wound under my hair sprang apart yet again and blood begin to run, down into my eyes. When the head was severed it would stop.

I let the breath go from my chest to my abdomen, beginning to pray, and in my head, against a cloth of deep blue, the sigil of St Michael appeared for a moment – Michael who brings courage.

Michael who is also the angel of death, weighing the soul, conveying it to where it must go.

Out of the corner of one eye, I saw the knife leave the ground. Then I saw, on the grey grass, the shadow of a raised blade extended from bowed arms.

Breath froze in my throat, silence roared in my ears. I saw the shadow of the blade at an oblique angle. Not the slender, fine-honed blade that beheaded Anne Boleyn in one stroke, but a rude butcher’s knife, made for mutton. I fell into prayer, as the shadow-blade twitched once and then fell with the echo of a cry across the night. Then came a brutal blow, my body tipping sideways, my head fallen heavily into the grass.

All shadow. Moments of emptiness, then wet splatter. Hot blood on my cheeks, in my mouth, in my eyes.

Through it, I saw the blade falling again and again and again. More blood flying up.

Up.

‘Up, John!’

The hand of God reaching down for me.

I didn’t move. Lay on my side, looking up through the blood into the face of Thomas Jones, his panicked eyes under a blur of madness and tears, as he kicked me over on to my back.

‘Get up, John… Get the fuck up…’

I could feel my hands, fingers flexing and then moving with an exploratory slowness to my neck, which somehow seemed yet to be held ’twixt my collar bones. Sitting up, now, in a pond of blood, looking down on the body of the big man, Roberts, heaving and squirming in the grass, his face a dark red carnival mask, and then flinching away from the sight of the thick blade coming down on him, and I heard Thomas Jones sob and, over the sickening splinter of bone, I heard the vixen shriek.

It came down the hillside with all the force of an arrow that would pierce my heart and, in a blinking, I was struggling to my feet. Fresh blood was slicked under my boots, and I stumbled and fell, dragged myself up again, scraping the salty blood from my eyes as I clambered up into the dregs of the night, and there was Prys Gethin creeping through the muddy dawn.

Quite some distance ahead of me, close to the church, something up there having trapped his attention.

A pale fluttering.

Gethin still now.

Standing, dagger in hand, feet apart. Waiting for the figure in the ragged white nightshirt to come down from the hill like a summoned ghost.

Oh, no. Oh dear God, no.

I ran crookedly up the steepening side of Brynglas. Stumbling twice and clawing at the grass. Knowing these two, black and white, would come together long before I could reach them, I began to cry out urgently and was answered, the way one owl answers another.

The nightshirt billowed. The long bone was raised. The vixen shriek resounded down the valley.

I saw what might have been the first pale rays of the rising sun in Prys Gethin’s blade as it was drawn quickly back and then pushed, with a practised ease, under the boy’s jaw.

Saw Gethin wipe the blade in the grass and stride away, not once looking back at any of us.

LII The Wasting

I KNEW HE was gone before I reached him. The old white nightshirt lay around him like the flaccid feathers of a dead bird, slowly turning red under the bloody light of early dawn. His throat was laid open, as were his mad, unseeing eyes, to the awakening day.

Sick to my soul, I came to my knees beside him. He was quite still; his spirit had flit as lightly as a moth’s. I looked up, in dread, through the dimness for sign of his sister, but there was none, only her voice in my memory.

We’re country people. If he wanders out in the night here, as oft-times he does, I know he’ll come to no harm.

I threw my fist with savagery at the turf, grief and pity turned into a useless rage, as Thomas Jones arrived at my shoulder. I looked up at him and at Brynglas, a melancholic grey without even the mystery of mist. As though the last small hope of spiritual relief for this damned hill had lodged for a while in Siôn Ceddol and now was snuffed out.

Thomas Jones was painfully panting, florid-faced, still holding the butcher’s knife, reddened to the handle.

‘Who’s this?’

‘Boy from the village. Armed—’ My voice choked on the senseless, wasteful cruelty of it. ‘Armed with a …’

I picked up the age-browned thigh bone from where it lay, close to Siôn Ceddol’s half-curled left hand. I’d not noticed he was left handed, a sinistral – though doubtless the rector would have. Another unfailing sign of the demonic. To Gethin, he’d have looked unearthly in the half light.

Like an angel.

‘He’ll kill anyone in his path, now,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘You know that…’

Then he was bent over, coughing wretchedly, his hands bloodied to the wrists, the cuffs of his doublet blackened. He came up pointing towards the thickness of pines to the left of the church.

‘Went through there. The woods, not the churchyard.’

This brought me to my feet, dizzied for a moment, too long without sleep and bleeding from the head. The sky was the colour of ale. No sun yet. I looked down at Siôn Ceddol and his favourite bone, his open throat. I swallowed bile.

‘I’ll go after him.’

Took the butcher’s knife, its handle all clammy with blood and worse.

‘We’ l l go.’ Thomas Jones had me by the shoulders. ‘Listen… remember this. Don’t think to appeal to his reason. It’s gone. In the ruins of his mind, all is justified.’

‘What did he say to you? In Welsh.’

‘He said that only one of us need die. I weighed the odds and they weren’t good. I’ve seen Roberts take three men down in a street brawl. I did all I could think to do, which was to go with him… until the moment came.’

And what if the moment had not come? What if Gethin’s attention had not been snared by the vixen shriek and the fluttering figure in white who, unknowingly, may have given his life for mine?

I turned back towards the upper part of the hill, the high pines still black on the skyline.

‘What’s up there?’ Thomas Jones said.

‘I’m not sure. I don’t know. Maybe the Rector’s house.’

Along with the wasting of an innocent life, maybe the most innocent, the thin brown light of dawn had brought a mournful uncertainty.

The pines closed around us like the pillars of a rude temple. Wandering from tree to tree, apparel stiffened with dried and drying blood, saying nothing, we must have looked like war-sick soldiers escaping the fray.

Moving with caution now, as most of the trees were well grown enough to hide a man. I’d no wish for us to die foolishly at Gethin’s hands. If he died at ours, I’d feel no regret, but how likely was that? We were soft-skinned men who lived in books – even Thomas Jones nowadays – and one of us vainly courted the angelic. The man we sought had skin like a lizard’s, was well-practised in the art of killing, driven by devils.

The wood was deeper than it had appeared from the slope below the church. It crested Brynglas and continued down the northern flank. Could be that these pines had grown upon the land where Rhys Gethin’s fiery army had waited for Edmund Mortimer’s trained soldiers, yeomen and peasants. And the Welsh archers who knew – or yet did not – what they’d do. When the moment came.

Maybe this was also where the women waited. The women who travelled with Gethin’s heroes and were said to have come scurrying down, after the battle, with their little knives.

Standing in that clearing, under a whitening sky, I threw down the butcher’s knife in horrified realisation of the recent carnage it had performed in the saving of the unworthy life of a conjurer who might never know what he’d conjured… a seer who saw nothing beyond the physical. The Wigmore shewstone was a useless weight in the front pouch of my jerkin. Had it not been for my futile pursuit of advancement and the engines of creation, we would not have come here and Siôn Ceddol would yet live. Let not this place be tainted by your presence, said Rector Daunce, perhaps, after all, with prescience.

I kicked the knife away, and the blade came to rest at the bottom of one of the pines, around which a…

‘John—’

… rope was tied.

I felt a drumming in my chest. This was not the old and rotting hemp you might expect to find at the heart of a wood, but new rope, strong rope. Bending to it, I saw that other, shorter lengths lay nearby, tossed among the needles and cones – on top, not embedded.

‘Someone was roped to this tree… and then cut loose.’

‘And not long ago,’ Thomas Jones said.

‘Was this it… Dudley’s prison?’

I picked up a strand of rope. Its ragged end was brown with blood, and almost at once, across the clearing, I saw the reason.

He lay ’twixt two young pines on the edge of the clearing, where it was beginning to thicken into something approaching forestry.

He was most conspicuously dead, face down in a bolster of browning needles, a pond of blood beneath and around him.

And barefooted.

I shut my eyes in anguish. Close to weeping with despair, I followed Thomas Jones across the clearing to the corpse. He took a breath of pine wood and bent among the day’s first flies.

‘Stabbed in more than one place.’

‘But not freshly.’

The pond of blood beneath him was congealed, like a blackberry preserve.

‘Or efficiently. Looks to me, like the mortal injuries inflicted in a fight.’

Pine needles glued together by black blood, a trail. Thomas Jones stood up then bent and turned the body over, stood looking down, hands on hips.

‘John, if you thought this was…’

I turned slowly in the oily light.

The dead man’s eyes were open. An ooze of blood linked nose and mouth. A young man, maybe not yet twenty-five. I’d never seen him before. The breath went out of me.

‘Gwyn Roberts,’ Thomas Jones said.

‘You think Dudley…?’

‘The rope’s cut, Gwyn’s stabbed to death in what looks like a fight. I don’t—’

‘And his boots taken,’ I said. ‘You may not have noticed, but the older Roberts was wearing riding boots of the finest quality. Dudley’s. In one of which he keeps a blade.’

‘In his boot?’

‘Used to, anyway.’

He’d shown it to me two or three years ago, on an older pair: the thin sheath stitched into a seam of leather, to fit beside the calf. The dagger it concealed had been no more than five inches long, including the bone handle. New boots, but he wouldn’t have abandoned an old precaution. Robert Dudley was as superstitious as anyone I knew.

‘Maybe he guessed they’d take his boots, for their value and to render him more helpless. Maybe he retrieved the knife from the boot after they’d searched him. I know not.’

‘So it’s likely he lives,’ Thomas Jones said.

‘Or lived’, I said. ‘If Gethin passed this way…’

I walked back into the clearing, wiping my mouth on a sleeve, not daring to think there was cause for hope. Finally snatching up the bloodied knife from which it seemed that destiny, that twisted joker, had decreed there could be no parting.

Flies sticking to it now.

Coming out of the pine wood, some minutes later, we found ourselves closer to the church of St Mary than I’d expected. An ominous quiet was hung upon the air. Dawn bird-sound was distant and thin. Thomas Jones went to the holy well to wash, but I sank to my knees in the grass, sucking dew into my dry mouth. This was the second dawn I’d seen since sleeping, and I knew not when I’d ever felt as weary.

Wet faced, I walked around the front of the little grey church to the now familiar view over the cauldron of hills, down the battlefield of Brynglas, becoming aware of movement, villagers gathering. A dozen or more, including several women, on the hill, under the dirty-bruised skin of the sky.

I saw old Goodwife Thomas and Gareth Puw, the blacksmith, and others I recognised but could not name, but there was no sign of Vaughan or Price and his sons.

Only, some distance away, something still as a sculpted tableau in the grass which no one approached.

Siôn Ceddol’s head lolled in his sister’s lap, her own head bowed, her dense brown hair down around her face and his. She did not seem to see any of them, kneeling in an island of grief to which none could cross.

Stabbing the knife into the ground, I stood between the small trees on the edge of the churchyard, from where we’d watched Prys Gethin summoning his demons.

Maybe it was through fatigue or because I did blame myself for the boy’s killing that I didn’t go down. There was nothing I could say to her, not in front of the villagers. The boy was slain, and I could not bring him back.

‘Who is she, John?’

Thomas Jones had come round from the well. He’d stripped away his ruined doublet, stood in his shirt, the sleeves rolled up, blood streaks not fully washed from his arms.

Anna let Siôn’s head slip from her lap and, laying it tenderly in the turf, slowly arose. Her overdress was darkened at the thighs, her lips parted in a soundless distress.

‘His mother?’

‘Sister. He was… there was something missing in his mind. But something else there… that we don’t have.’

A bar of sunlight split the fleshy cloud, lighting the hillside. I turned my head away, blinded for the moment, and then Thomas Jones was pulling me back ’twixt the trees, speaking quietly.

‘Do nothing.’

A hundred paces below us, Prys Gethin had emerged like a sprite from the pines. I reached for the butcher’s knife, but we were too far away and already it was too late.

LIII Untethered

BLACK, NOW, AGAINST the rosening sun whose rays, for a moment, seemed to sprout from his shoulders like small wings of dark fire.

Dark angel rising.

His movements had been so swift and easy that he was already half a dozen paces down the hill, taking Anna Ceddol with him, the blade which had penetrated her brother’s throat now at her own.

‘Stay where you are, John,’ Thomas Jones murmured, voice very low, heavy with warning.

Gethin had twisted her head to his chest, was pulling her backwards. One of the women cried out. I saw Gareth Puw, the blacksmith, taking steps towards him and then reeling back at what Gethin had done.

Anna’s overdress was parted at the top, a single red petal blooming above her shift.

I drew savage breath as the blade was lifted, red-edged.

‘Freshly-sharpened,’ Gethin said.

The piping voice was light and clear, risen into a kind of rapture. I made out his fingers and thumb tight around Anna Ceddol’s jaw, as if he were squeezing juice from an orange, as if his whole body was revelling in the sensation of it, bright bells pealing in his head.

‘Who wishes,’ he sang, ‘to see the ease with which it severs a breast?’

‘Do not move,’ Thomas Jones hissed. ‘If he sees either of us coming, he’ll do it.’

‘Anyone?’

Gethin’s voice risen higher, and now he faced the pines, from which men were emerging: Roger Vaughan, Stephen Price.

‘No further,’ Gethin said. ‘Or her lifeblood flows.’

‘Harm her,’ Stephen Price said hoarsely, ‘and you’ll be torn apart by all of us.’

‘Not before she’s dead. And more of you with her.’

Even from this distance, I saw Gethin’s smile open up, a split in the wood. The silence around him was waxen, Price’s round face was pale and sagging. Helpless. A whole community held at bay by one man, who believed himself more than a man. Who looked like more than a man. I sensed a demon moving inside a puppet of skin.

‘Untethered,’ Thomas Jones said, ‘from all human constraint.’

Anna Ceddol sagged in Gethin’s grip. My breath was rapid, my thoughts feverish. It would be unwise to kill her now, he’d know that, but I didn’t doubt that he’d deform her and take pleasure in it. I wondered if I could cross from the church to the pines, go further down the hill from Price and Vaughan, maybe come out behind him.

Thomas Jones said, ‘Whatever you’re thinking…’

‘I know. I know.’

He’d moved too far away from the pines; wherever I was coming from he’d see me running out, and his knife hand would twitch.

And then Gethin spoke, so quietly that I caught only half of it.

‘—who I want.’

The sun had gone in. Gethin waited.

Until, out of the pines, not too far from the churchyard where we stood, came the ruins of a man.

His long face discoloured, lips cut and swollen.

One eye enpurpled and abulge with blood. One arm bound up in a sling ill-made of rope. A man so beaten he could no longer stand aright.

It took me a moment. Even me.

‘So let her go.’

The voice was a rasp against dry stone.

Prys Gethin said, ‘Where’s your blade?’

A stillness for maybe three heartbeats, then something dropped to the turf.

‘Further out,’ Gethin said.

Robert Dudley looked down for a moment and then stepped over the body of Siôn Ceddol.

‘You.’ With Anna Ceddol’s head crooked in an elbow, Gethin pointed, with the tip of his blade, at Roger Vaughan. ‘Come out.’

Even from here I marked the terror in Vaughan’s face as he left the shelter of the pine wood, glancing behind him at Price’s face, impassive.

‘Take the rope from his arm,’ Gethin said. ‘Do it, or she—’

‘Yes…’

Vaughan put up his hands, found the knot in the sling. No resistance from Dudley and no scream when his arm was freed, only a tightening of the mouth that might have cracked teeth. The way the arm fell from the rope made clear that it was broken. Prys Gethin pointed his blade at the rope where it lay on the ground.

‘Pick it up. Bind his hands. Behind his back.’

Price said, ‘But his arm’s—’

‘Do it!’ The blade moved against Anna’s throat. ‘Bind it tight…’

Dudley’s face creasing, pale as cloud, as he bit down on his agony whilst the binding was done.

‘Now take his boots,’ Gethin said.

Dudley sniffed, kicked off one of Gwyn Roberts’s boots. It came easily from his foot. He said something that I took to be derogatory about Welsh leather, and I felt a foolish admiration for him. This absurd hauteur in the face of imminent death.

I’d kept looking down the hill and across the valley for a sign of the hundred armed men promised by John Forest. Nothing. Betrayal at every level. I felt the Wigmore shewstone pressing through the worn fabric of my jerkin into my abdomen, reminding me how all this had started. In the noble cause of expanding the Queen’s vision. Would she ever know how it had ended?

Vaughan knelt and pulled off the second boot.

‘You can go back now,’ Gethin said.

With the tip of his knife, he beckoned Dudley forward. Some women were turned away looking at the ground, averting their eyes from an expected execution.

Thomas Jones looked at me, baffled.

‘He can’t kill Dudley whilst holding the woman. If he lets the woman go, some of these men may try and take him. And succeed.’

But Gethin didn’t let the woman go.

He pointed down the hill, towards the river, sent Dudley limping barefoot ahead of him.

‘I hear anyone following us,’ Gethin said, ‘and you know what will happen.’

‘His fucking mind’s gone,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘He can’t do this. He cannot do it on his own.’

The progress was slow and awkward, Gethin holding Anna Ceddol tight and the knife tighter, Dudley shuffling and stumbling a few feet in front, head thrown back in obvious agony.

‘Then either he believes himself not alone,’ I said. ‘Or he isn’t.’

As they crossed the hill and entered a small copse of birch and rowan, I saw that the petal on Anna’s breast was become a rose in full bloom.

I seized the butcher’s knife.

‘Tell them where I’ve gone,’ I said.

‘Where? For God’s sake—’

‘You know where.’

LIV

I RAN DOWN the oak wood’s primitive cloister. Early light flickered amongst the dry leaves and acorns under what felt like someone else’s racing feet.

Running against sombre reason and the cold denial of the Puritans. Running against a sorry sense of my own failings. Running hardest of all against the images crowding into the mind’s poor glass: the blade at the woman’s throat, the blooming of the blood-flower. At the start of a second day without sleep or much food, I was become a creature of little more than air, while the world was a faerie blur, the dark oaks swelling and then shrinking before me like illusions in the distorting mirror I keep in my library at Mortlake.

Emerging from the wood on to the sheep-cropped turf, I ran, in a fever, calling upon an archangel’s energy, throwing his sigil into the air, pure white against the small pale sun and the still-visible moon, waxing close to full. I ran, panting like a hound and bathed with sweat and prayer, until I stopped before the alien green of the old tump in the river’s bend, knowing I’d be here a good while before Gethin and his captives.

By daylight, it was clear the hole in the side had been redug in haste. The displaced soil lay in two heaps either side of it, the cut turves lain against the bottom of the tump. There was still a stench of putrefaction, but nowhere near as strong as it had been last night.

Who’d dug it out again? The Roberts boys? I could see no other explanation. It would be done here. The corpse tidily tucked into the earth. Then across the river they’d all go and away into the real Wales.

I prayed that Thomas Jones was assembling those who would understand, ready to move fast. I prayed that Dudley had some reserve of ingenuity. I prayed to God and Christ and the Holy Virgin and the Archangel Michael that Anna Ceddol would not lose her life.

Turning my back on the hole, I saw the bough which had ploughed the furrow in my head, upthrust from the twisted bole of a thorn tree grown from the foot of the tump. Picked up a forked twig, its bark stripped away by my head before the twig was snapped from the tree in my helpless writhing.

Only good can fight evil, and, God knows, there was little enough of it in me. Against all my rage, I sought to gather in all the good I’d met or heard around Brynglas hill: the souls of Father Walter and Marged the wisewoman and the unknown anchoress said to have lived where the church now stood, by the shrine of the Virgin, who I visualised unsmirched and shining, blessing the pure spring below. Conjuring a peace over Brynglas, a blue glow upon its slopes on which the sigil, in my mind, was etched.

The twig twisted in my hands, lit by a shaft of amber sunlight, my arms afire before the light was, in an instant, extinguished from above.

I dropped the twig.

‘Who are you?’ I said.

He came awkwardly down from the tump, as if his limbs were afflicted by the gnarling sickness, symptoms not apparent the last time I’d seen him. He wore a peasant’s apparel, sacking around his waist, where the apron had been.

He looked tired. His grey-white hair, in disarray, was like to the tonsure he must once have worn. He was, I realised, much older than I’d thought – maybe seventy, maybe more. Too old for a satyr.

‘Ah, Dr Dee,’ he said wearily. ‘I feel you’re determined to do me harm.’

The local accent was all gone. I recalled that he’d been educated at Oxford. His background may indeed have been wealthy and privileged if, as Bishop Bonner thought, he’d actually bought his position of supremacy at Wigmore Abbey.

I followed him around to the sweeter-scented side of the tump, where the air was merely autumnally damp. In truth, I hadn’t expected him. I’d thought it might be Daunce.

‘You’re all aglow, my boy,’ he said. ‘Look like a priest who’s just celebrated the Mass.’

‘Merely tired,’ I said. ‘Abbot.’

It was true that I felt light and separate from my body. Yet my mind, freed from its weight, had a piercing focus, and when John Smart raised his hands I felt it was in defence, rather than benediction.

‘Call me Martin,’ he said. ‘Abbots are of the past.’

I looked around, warily.

‘You’re alone.’

‘I thought we should talk. Somewhere only the faeries can overhear us.’

‘Help me,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’

‘Safe, I believe. Except for Gethin, who is dead.’

I stared at him, the former abbot who’d stolen Church gold, sold the buildings around him, ran whores.

‘It’s too late for lies,’ John Smart said. ‘I can show you his body, if you like, though I’d guess you’ve seen enough of them for one morning, and it’s not pretty. He put out his own eye with his dagger. The last good eye. With some rage, so that the blade would seem to have proceeded into his brain. A swifter end than perhaps he deserved.’

And too easy.

‘Where was this?’

‘In a dingle about half a mile from the hill, not ten minutes ago.’

‘Why would he?’

‘The Presteigne boys. Out all night in the hills and angry. For some reason, he thought they were on his side, let them take the woman.’

‘So Mistress Ceddol—’

‘Safe. I believe.’

‘You believe?’

‘She ran away. She was not hurt. Not more than she had been anyway.’

‘Master Roberts?’

‘The so-called Master Roberts is taken by cart back to Presteigne, where I’ll find a better bedchamber for his recovery.’ A wry smile. ‘With glass in its windows. As befits his status.’

I was watching his hands, both exposed, both empty. No sign of weaponry.

‘I’m not lying to you, Dee.’

‘Why would Gethin think that, Abbot? That the angry boys from Presteigne were on his side?’

‘Call me Martin. Odd, is it not, the way men’s minds work in extremis.’

‘Jesu, Smart, you weren’t even born here, and you can’t give a straight answer to a straight question.’

‘Met Scory last night,’ he said, ‘for the first time. Still in town, after giving evidence to the court. This was before you arrived, all full of wild accusations.’ Smart chuckled. ‘Poor old Bradshaw. He was far more surprised than I was.’

I sighed.

‘What did you discuss with Scory?’

‘Talked about the problems of survival in the Church in a time of constant change. Scory’s less adventurous than me in my younger days, but he likes to, as you might say, put some modest items discreetly in store for his future comfort. But that’s an aside.’

It seemed the Bishop of Hereford knew more about Abbot Smart and his circumstances than he’d confided to me. What a bag of adders the Church of England already was become.

‘Good man, Scory, make no mistake,’ John Smart said. ‘But, as he may have indicated to you, working the Welsh borderlands does require a certain… adaptability. He’s become quite exercised over the conduct of this man Daunce, who, it might be said, has too much God in him.’

More energy in Smart now, his cheeks pinkened.

I said, ‘Once again, why did Gethin think the Presteigne boys were on his side?’

The sun had broken through again. Smart clapped his hands.

‘What a fine morning this is become.’ He peered at me. ‘Are you sure you haven’t performed some kind of invocation, Dr Dee? All manner of stories are told about you.’

‘Most of them exaggerated.’

‘I know the feeling.’

‘I think you knew Mistress Ceddol?’

‘Did I?

‘But how well did you know Prys Gethin?’

I knew not where this question came from. Maybe I’d thought back to what Bonner had said about simony, the ordination of fifty paying candidates, a small coterie of thoroughly reprehensible followers. Or maybe it was given to me by the Archangel Michael.

‘Was he at the Abbey of Wigmore?’ I said. ‘Was he given Holy Orders?’

Smart said, ‘Gethin trusted the Presteigne boys because I’d told him he could. And because I was with them.’

‘My thanks,’ I said. ‘Now to go back to my previous question…’

Smart’s face had visibly darkened. His eyes grown still. He looked down at what I yet held: the butcher’s knife, laden with dried blood. I let go of it and it fell to my feet, bounced and slid in the slick grass towards the foot of the tump.

‘Thank you,’ Smart said. ‘This is very much not the place to keep a weapon too close.’

‘Or an obsessive killer? God’s tears, Smart, you can’t just tell me what you want me to know and expect me to take my nose out of your stinking midden and walk away.’

Smart sighed at last.

‘There were times, in the years before and during the Reform, when an abbot of the Welsh Borderlands was in need of personal protection. I was, I suppose, threatened more than most. In divers ways.’

‘You ordained him… as your guard?’

He shrugged.

‘Knowing what he was?’

‘All right, it was not my holiest act. Look, Dee, if you’ve seen the report made to Cromwell, that was not fully accurate, but some of it… had foundation. I knew it was coming. I knew Cromwell was committed to taking virtually all of us down; the abbeys, by whatever means, and I knew there’d be no great difficulty doing it to me. I’d already journeyed to London, cwtching up to the wily bastard, offering my services…’

‘In what way?’

‘Matter of survival, Dee. I’m not proud of it. Not my behaviour then, nor my behaviour now, although old Jeremy Martin…’

‘Is a different man.’

‘And a good innkeeper, generous with his ale and cider and ever offering a night’s sleep to those in need.’

He smiled, and then it died.

‘An innkeeper hears everything. An innkeeper with a host of old acquaintances and friends in London is able to form an impression of what’s taking shape under his nose and… use it. When it came to my notice that certain men were entrusting the man now known as Prys Gethin with a task of considerable delicacy… let’s say I thought it was ill-advised and might rebound.’

‘On whom?’

‘I remember what he did, in my defence, twenty years ago when he was little more than a boy. In those days, his excuse would have been that he was doing it for the Church. Now he’s been…’

‘All for Wales?’

Smart sat down on the edge of the tump, as though the burden of his past were become too much to support.

‘Once made the mistake of going whoring with him. Learning that we had… very different needs. Later, a particular canon who sought to gather evidence of my misconduct… had an accident. After a while, even I was in dismay over the depth of the boy’s depravity. Quite relieved when our ways diverged.’

We sat in silence for a while. I knew that everything he’d told me might later be denied.

‘I wanted him to hang,’ Smart said. ‘I did not want him back in my life. And when, after he was freed, the sheriff brought him to me, as he’d apparently requested…’

‘What did you do?

‘What do you think I did? I greeted him cordially, as an old friend. With great celebration. Fed him well and gave him drink. Told him how much I was in his debt for all he’d done for me twenty years ago. Said I’d help him any way I could.’

‘Of course you did.’

‘And, in time, he told me where he wanted to go, and I took him part-way there, hidden in my cart. Saying I’d return for him in the morning, with trusted friends. Men he could rely on.’

‘The Presteigne boys.’

‘Regular customers of mine, in the lower parlour. Roisterers, street-fighters. As I said, Jeremy Martin is ever generous with ale and cider and a bed for the night, and they were the first hunting party to return to Presteigne – this was after you and your Welsh friend had left. Much competition that night over who’d find Prys Gethin. So I told them I’d received information as to his whereabouts and could perhaps lead them there. Giving them more drink before we rode off.’

‘You know where he was going. You knew his plans.’

Smart smiled and tapped his nose.

‘Best outcome, Dee. We don’t need another trial. Not for a while. And you don’t need to know any more about my role in Gethin’s demise. Just as, in the matter of Master Roberts, I have no need at all to know who he is.’

I walked with Smart to the Nant-y-groes bridge where the Presteigne boys waited with the horses and his cart.

The day was brighter now, though the sky was white. When we were in first sight of the company, I brought the shewstone from my bloodied jerkin, quite alarmed at how full of heat it was, having spent the whole night next to my lower abdomen.

Yes, I know… which is the home of the second mind where lie the deepest feelings, the unspoken perceptions. There must needs be a close bond ’twixt the crystal and the scryer, my friend Jack Simm, the apothecary, had said. I wondered if, at this moment, in its swirling depths, the sigil of St Michael would be aglow.

When I gave the stone back to John Smart, he accepted it without a word, and I was glad. The circumstance was not right. It was not the time, although in some odd way, it had served a purpose.

I said, ‘You scry, Abbot?’

‘Martin,’ he said. ‘Call me Martin. No I don’t scry. That… was another of his tasks.’

‘I— Gethin?’

‘He saw. In the stone. He saw what would come. At my house in the abbey, we’d spend whole hours before the stone.’

Thomas Jones had said Gethin was reputed to have the Sight, but…

‘God’s tears. This was his stone?’

‘No, it’s mine. But he was the scryer. A scryer need not be a spiritual man. Or so I thought.’

I also thought to ask if he had acquaintance with a certain Brother Elias, but guessed there’d be no straight answer.

He stowed the stone away in his saddlebag.

‘Should you ever have need of a scryer, Dee, I’d advise you to have a care over whom you choose.’

I did not look at the Presteigne boys. I nodded and turned away and walked back towards the river of light. I lay flat on its bank, hanging down, reaching to splash bright water on my face.

When I went back to the tump, the hole – the wound in its side – had collapsed in upon itself, and the stench had gone, leaving only the sharp, bitter essence of autumn.

LV For Tonight

ALL WIDE AWAKE now and in need of someone with whom to talk it all through, I walked up, through the cloistered oaks, to the church and sat on the step below Our Lady of Pilleth.

Her demure, chipped face shone through a dappled haze and a rediscovered beatific smile, which led me to suppose that Roger Vaughan had been back.

There was no sign of Matthew Daunce, with whom I’d nothing to discuss.

I let my head fall into my hands. It no longer bled or ached so badly, but whatever part of it enclosed my creative thoughts felt beaten thin as an old drumskin.

I’d bathed my head and eyes again, this time with water from the holy well, unable to shake off the vibrant feeling that I’d been used… had been, for a short time, part of some engine of change.

Or was it illusion?

I saw how circumstance had completed most of the preparations required for an invocation: fasting, self-denial and the many hours without sleep that would separate me from this world, leaving me open to the higher spheres. And yet…

‘There are things I still can’t comprehend,’ I told the Virgin. ‘I know not what was here before you. How far it all goes back. How Brynglas became a place of healing before it was a place of killing. Where lies the power?’

Was there some energy in the very earth which was released in places such as this for the healing of the body and the expansion of human thought?

Perhaps it had begun not here at all, but with the river and the tump that was raised within its curve. With whoever had been buried there at a time when there were no English and the word Welsh, meaning – obscurely – foreigner or stranger, had not been invented. Had that been Pilleth’s golden time?

And when was it turned bad? When was the tump become a cauldron of spiritual pestilence from the second sphere? And the hill… was its natural vigour fouled by that single act of treachery by the Welsh bowmen? Or was this ruinous reversal of allegiance, as the church burned, itself effected by something here already become malign?

All I knew was that the roiling air of betrayal seemed to have become an engine in itself, a pestilence possessed of a dark intelligence which was become manifest in extremes of thought, extremes of behaviour only held in balance by a mingling of spiritual disciplines as divers as the pulleys that made my Mortlake owls flap their wings and make hoot.

I thought of the fevered swooping of the women with their knives, wondering if it was even true or just corrosive gossip of the kind that had the Queen pregnant with Dudley’s child. How could it ever be proved when privy parts have no bones?

I looked up into the lowered eyelids of the stone mother.

‘Are we able to reverse it?’ I asked her. ‘Is it in our power to restore life and health to this valley?’

A shadow was fallen across the Virgin and me, and I turned and looked up into open eyes the colour a sky is meant to be in summer.

‘I was looking for you,’ Anna Ceddol said.

Her wet hair hung black as a raven’s wings. She pushed it back behind her ears. Must have washed it to be rid of the blood. In the river, or one of Siôn’s wells.

‘Too quiet, see,’ she said. ‘Too quiet at the Bryn. They told me to try and sleep, so I took a potion. But I could not sleep for the quiet.’

I rose to my feet. I understood. She faced me, wet-haired, dry-eyed.

‘They say you saw it done.’

I nodded.

‘It was… very quick. Gone like a… moth. A butterfly. I saw what might be about to happen and ran—’

‘He’s in the church,’ she said quickly. ‘On the bier.’

‘Does Daunce…?’

‘Daunce has been summoned to Presteigne,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘Where the bishop lodges. I know not where Siôn will lie.’

‘I’ll talk to the bishop,’ I said. ‘If it’s necessary.’

Knowing I must needs talk to him anyway. About many things.

‘They say he’s killed,’ Anna said. ‘The Welshman.’

‘They say he killed himself. Were you not there?’

‘When he let me go, I ran away. I saw no more of him.’

‘It’s as well,’ I said. ‘He… killed without a thought. He was driven by a demonic madness. The man who you and the shepherd found, all cut about… the man Stephen Price buried to prevent panic… he can only have been killed by Gethin.’

Anna Ceddol looked down at the stain on her dress, then up at the statue of the Virgin.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Mercy?’

‘No more lies. You’ve been good to me. I won’t—’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I may have brought a terrible sorrow to you and everyone here. Stephen Price saw me as a saviour but I think, in truth, that I’m just part of the curse.’

‘I won’t lie to you,’ she said, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I know how that man died, and I know how he was cut about.’

I stared at her.

‘Because I cut him.’ Her voice was soft as moss. ‘I took his apparel and then I set about his face with a spade.’

My body jerked back against the statue’s stone robe.

‘What are you saying?’

‘So that no one would ever know who he was,’ she said rapidly. ‘That he was my father. And Siôn’s father.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me any of this. It’ll go no further, but you still don’t have to tell me. No one will ever know any of it from me.’

She looked up at the statue.

‘The Holy Mother will know.’

Tomos Ceddol. The man who, Anna had told me, had courted her mother but was deemed by her mother’s parents as not of their level. Who, when Anna’s mother died, had begun to drink to excess. Who had been driven to violence by the ravings of their youngest child, barely weaned when his mother had died.

‘Not true,’ Anna said. ‘She was not his mother. When she died, I was already with child. I was twelve years old.’

Oh, dear God.

‘She was unwell for nearly a year, my mother. After a while, he began to touch me. He’d get drunk on strong ale. He was a big man. Resisting him would only lead – did lead – to injury.’

She was hardly the first this had happened to. Hardly the first who’d gone on to give birth to her own father’s child. I believed that most women stayed, made the best of it, at least until the child was old enough to leave home.

But this child would never be old enough to leave. And Anna would blame her father for the boy’s idiocy. Her father… and herself.

‘When I found out I was with child, I tried to… make away with him. Went to a wise woman in the next village, who charged me all I had for a potion that made me sick for days. But the babe continued to grow. It wasn’t until he was nearly two years that I knew he must be damaged in the head. And knew why.’

‘You don’t know that,’ I said, but she seemed not to hear.

She’d never let her father touch her again. She’d been sleeping with a kitchen knife since first learning there was a child on the way.

The night she’d found him kicking Siôn, to quieten him – that was true enough and happened just as she’d told me. What she hadn’t told me was that, when they left home, taking all his money, Tomos Ceddol had gone in search of them. This was why they’d moved from village to village down the border.

‘He found you?’ I said. ‘He found you here?’

‘I’d become careless. It was over twelve years since we’d left. I’d thought he’d surely given up, found a woman somewhere. I thought we were safe in the Bryn. The first real home we’d had.’

His approach had been slow and careful at first. He’d watched for whole nights from the oak wood – one of the Thomas boys had seen him twice, thought him a thief, though nobody was ever robbed… not then. I imagined Tomos Ceddol catching sight of his daughter – even more beautiful than he’d remembered. All the money he’d spent trying to find her. She was his daughter and the father of his child, who should have been disposed of long ago.

God’s tears.

The night he broke in, he was drunk, having found a barrel of cider left over from the harvest festival. They heard later he’d been driven out of his own village after two rapes, although the women would not name him.

Anna Ceddol stopped, as though that were the end of the story.

‘How did he die?’ I said at last, in dread of the answer. ‘Not that you have to—’

‘Nor will I. I awoke and he was in my bed. Naked. And some men… some have thinner skulls than others.’

Siôn had done this? Struck his father…

… with the thigh bone?

It took me about three hours get him out to the hill,’ Anna said. ‘I had to do it myself.’

He didn’t find that man, she’d said, of Siôn. He wouldn’t even come out that day. He was afraid and clung to the fire.

‘I smashed his face with the spade. And then took the spade to him… down there. Bore it on the spade into the wood. I suppose the pigs ate it. Pedr Morgan found him next day and his wife came to me to ask what we should do.’

I thought of Stephen Price who’d buried Tomos Ceddol, not knowing who he was. Buried him twice. In the tump.

Why? Because it was the only place I could think of where the mad boy wouldn’t find him.

But no one lay easy in the tump.

She felt… what he wanted to do to her. Felt it inside.

I would talk to Scory. This was a matter for a priest of the old kind. Someone practised in the cure of souls.

‘Come home with me,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘Please come home with me. For tonight.’