by Phil Rickman
The river lay brown and morose under dour cloud, wherries busy, as I waited at the top of the stone steps. A black barge was moored where the beer had been loaded yesterday, several men sitting in it as if waiting for cargo. But the river traffic was nearly all London-bound. No sign of flags or the glint of helm and pike blade. Nor, I guessed, would there be.
My poor mother. I looked back towards the house, my only home now, and thought I marked her face, all blurred in the window of her parlour. River water lay in shallow pools around the stilts supporting the parlour and hall. Far from the most distinguished dwelling, this, even in Mortlake.
Saddening to think that several properties had once been owned by my father, who had first come to London as a wool merchant, progressing to the import and export of cloth. This was before his appointment as gentleman server to the King, who also made him packer of goods for export – and that paid a good income. Oh, an important man, my tad, for a while. Until the financial collapse which left him with a cluster of riverside outbuildings bought cheaply and linked together to form a most eccentric dwelling which yet looked temporary.
From the river steps I could see, to one side of the house, the orchard and the small pasture rented for crumbs to William Faldo. It was yet my aim to use part of it to extend the house for further accommodation of my library – consisting at this time of two hundred and seventy-seven books, many of them the only editions to be found anywhere in England. I’d offered them to the Queen and to Queen Mary before her, for the foundation of a national library of England. But a monarch would ever rather spend money on war than learning. Unless, of course, it was the kind of learning that might effectively be used in war.
One thing was sure. If there was no improvement in my situation, then, God help me, I might have to sell books to repair the roof and find work teaching the sons of whichever of the moneyed gentry were prepared to employ an infamed conjurer.
‘Dr Dee?’
Two men had climbed from the black barge at the river’s edge and were approaching the steps. I was fairly sure I knew them not and made no reply.
‘Sent to fetch you, Doctor.’
‘Oh?’
Naturally, I was wary. I’d heard of men who’d been taken aboard such vessels as this, robbed and killed for their valuables and their remains thrown in the river. And no, the irony was not lost on me.
I didn’t move. When the first of them reached the top step, I saw that he was young, small-bearded and well-clad, in rusted doublet, high leather boots and good gloves. He looked impatient.
‘The circumstances of your appointment have now been changed, Doctor.’
‘My appointment?’
He let a low breath through his teeth.
‘Mistress Blanche… has been called away to attend to the Queen’s majesty but expects to be free to speak to you by the time we reach Greenwich.’
‘I see.’
‘Well then…?’
He stood aside, extending an arm to where his companions and the oarsmen waited in the black barge. I had no choice but to follow him down the steps. At the bottom, he stood back while I boarded the barge, and then leapt in after me, and the oarsmen pushed us hastily from the bank.
Too hastily, it seemed to me. I yet felt all was not right and stood close to the bow of the vessel.
‘Sit down, please, Doctor,’ the young man said.
It sounded more like an instruction than an invitation, but there were good cushions to sit on. Though hardly luxurious, this clearly was not a cargo barge, and I was not alarmed until, as we moved downriver towards the steaming midden of Southwark, it was steered sharply away from another barge coming out of London towards Mortlake.
This one had no flags, but there were at least seven armed men aboard. And one woman, subduedly cloaked and gazing ahead of her.
When I thought to hail my cousin and half-rose, I heard movement behind me and, twisting round, I saw the first man reaching to his belt.
‘Either you hold your tongue at this moment, Dr Dee,’ he said pleasantly, ‘or I must needs slice it off at the root.’
PART TWO
I have no way to purge myself of the malicious talk that I know the wicked world will use
ROBERT DUDLEY, in a letter to his steward Thomas Blount
IX
The Summoning of Siôn Ceddol
Autumn, 1560. The Welsh Border.
MY FATHER GREW up in a modest farmhouse below the hill called Brynglas, at Pilleth on the border of England and Wales – the Welsh side.
The house, Nant-y-groes, is now the home of Stephen Price who, until recently, was Member of Parliament for this area, thus spending much time in London. More than was necessary, if truth be known, for Master Price was much taken with the excitement of London life and, on his increasingly infrequent returns home, would tend to find the place of his birth rather dull and – for the first time – strange.
Now he’s home for good. Fighting the drabness of his life with ambitious plans for his farm, but finding that life at Pilleth soon brings out the negative aspects of his essentially choleric temperament.
He’s dismayed, for example, when the village men won’t help him build his new barn. He has – intentionally, perhaps – forgotten how, below Brynglas, even the most commonplace activity is oft-times governed by custom and ritual.
‘I can’t,’ he says, when Pedr Morgan, the shepherd, tentatively offers him advice. ‘I’m supposed to be— I am the squire.’ He twists away. ‘Anyway, the boy’s the lowest kind of idiot. I can hardly be seen to consult an idiot before initiating something as fundamental as building a barn.’
Master Price likes to use some of the longer words he picked up in Parliament. This will not last.
Pedr Morgan shrugs his scrawny shoulders, no doubt wishing he were somewhere else – this is common on Brynglas at twilight.
‘It’s just what he does,’ Morgan says, uncomfortable. ‘You knows how it is.’
‘I know how it was,’ Master Price says with resignation. ‘Well, my thanks to you, Morgan, but I’ll have men brought in from Off. Local boys don’t want my money, that’s their choice, ennit?’
Pedr Morgan nods. He won’t press the matter and won’t be telling anybody what Master Price has said about Siôn Ceddol. Has no wish to stir up resentment against his master, but, hell, it must be some Godless place, that London. Sodom and Gomorrah and London, that’s how the new rector puts it. The rector’s this bone-faced Bible-man, and he doesn’t like Siôn Ceddol either, and that’s not good at all… for the rigid attitudes of a bone-faced Bible man will never bend.
Stephen Price stamps irritably away, and Pedr Morgan, thin and tired, most of his hair gone before its time, looks down to where his wife is waiting by the bridge with their three young children. She won’t follow him up the slope of Brynglas at close of day, any more than she’ll pass the earthen grave of the old dead. Even the sheep flee this hill before sunset.
And Price knows all that, at the bottom of him. But he’s been away too many times. He’s seen the shining towers of the future, and the future looks not like Pilleth. None of the fine towns he’s seen on his travels has risen out of old fear and clinging superstition. This can lead only to a mortal decay – the decay that Pilleth wears like a rancid old coat which no one must tear from its body lest the body itself falls away into rotten strips.
Pedr Morgan raises a hand to tell his wife he’s coming down, then turns briefly towards the church of St Mary, set into the hill halfway up, and crosses himself as he always does.
Except when the rector’s there.
I suppose I too was inclined to be dismissive and superior when my father spoke of his birthplace, putting on the accents which, he would say, might vary from country English to country Welsh within a mile.
For I was younger then and deep into my studies of Mathematics and Greek and the works of Euclid and Plato. Convinced that all knowledge and wisdom came from the Classical world, long gone. Unaware of the rivers
of the divine and the demonic which rush invisibly through and around places like Pilleth.
And I suppose my tad’s fond memories of the border were shaped around the knowledge that he was unlikely ever to be going back.
A month has passed. Stephen Price has new cattle in the lower field, the first frosts cannot be far off. Yet only foundations for the new barn have been dug – painfully and laboriously by himself and his sons, assisted fearfully by the servants at Nant-y-groes.
To his fury, Price has failed to recruit skilled labour in Presteigne, the prosperous assize town a few miles from here – every man he’s approached claiming an obligation to work elsewhere or some affliction that renders him incapable of heavy labour.
It’s those great shelves of rock, found less than a foot down, that finished it. After three long days of struggle and the wrenching of a muscle in his back, he finally walks out to find Pedr Morgan, the shepherd.
Grumpily requesting him to talk to Mistress Ceddol about the employment of her damned brother.
He says nothing to his wife who, during his time as an MP, preferred to live down the valley with his older brother’s family. Joan doesn’t like it here and probably hopes that all his plans will fail so they don’t have to stay.
On the morning Siôn Ceddol comes, the land appears luminous, the shaven hay-meadows all aglisten from the rain following a thunderstorm which broke over Radnor Forest in the early hours, awakening the whole wide valley before dawn.
The strangeness soon becomes apparent to Stephen Price. It’s as though the summoning of Siôn Ceddol has set into a motion some ancient engine.
People come, as if to prepare the way. First to appear is the new Rector of Pilleth, full-robed and carrying his prized copy of the New English Prayerbook. Arriving at sun-up, he stands alone in the shorn grass, the prayer book open in his twiggy hands. His lips are seen to be moving although his voice is so hushed, rapid and intense that nobody hears the substance of it. Approaching him, as he knows must be expected of him, Price is wishing to God that Father Walter had not died when he did. Father Walter was no papist but he understood the ways of Pilleth.
The rector’s look would turn fresh apples black.
‘That you, of all men,’ he says, ‘would bend a knee to Satan…’
‘And you’d have all my cattle dead by Christmas, would you, Rector?’
‘If God wills it.’
If God wills it, Price thinks, feeling his face redden, likely we’ll have a new rector by All Souls Day.
Stephen Price stands his ground. For all he dismisses superstition, he carries no candles for a God with all the pity of a Norman baron.
After a few minutes, the rector throws back his bony head and, with the book under an arm, walks stiffly away in the direction of the hillside church. At the same time, villagers begin appearing on the boundaries of Stephen Price’s ground, like the risen dead.
‘Master Stephen… he’s yere.’
The housekeeper, Clarys, at his elbow. A woman who was at Nant-y-groes long before Stephen Price and may even have been known to my tad. Clarys nods towards the lower gate that gives entrance to the Presteigne road and the river bridge. Two figures stand behind it, male and female.
Stephen Price raises a weary hand towards the gate and beckons once before thrusting the hand away, embarrassed. When the two people pass through, one is walking an irregular path, watching the ground, like a dog responding to a scent.
It’s the first time Stephen Price has seen Siôn Ceddol. He doesn’t even know how the boy and his sister came to be in Pilleth village. They seem to have arrived during one of his periods in London, the mad boy apparently receiving the blessing of Mother Marged, the wise woman, before her death.
Through the sunhaze, he marks a scrawny boy of some sixteen years, wearing an ill-fitting jerkin and a red hat. When the boy reaches the platter of land on which the barn is marked out, he stops and turns the hat around on his head and sniffs the air like some wary animal. Never once looking at Stephen Price or anyone, and when he speaks it’s only to the woman with him and is neither in English nor Welsh, but some language of his own which ranges from mumbling to screams and yelps, like to a fox. Price has been told that many people believe this to be a faerie language.
Yet are drawn to him, it’s said, like night-moths to a taper. Already the people on the southern boundary hedge number twenty or more, watching the idiot boy pacing rapid circles in the grass.
‘This is madness,’ Price mutters.
Drawing a sharp look from the one person here who appears to understand what Siôn Ceddol is saying.
Anna Ceddol, the boy’s sister. Who speaks both English and Welsh and also, it seems, faerie. She’s approaching twenty-nine years and unmarried – because of her brother, obviously. An old maid in waiting. Their parents are dead, she’s all he has. And who would have the mad boy?
And so no one has her. Which is a crime against all creation, Price thinks, marking how lovely she is, in a way not of her class. Head held high, hair brushed back and eyes wide open, unafraid to the point of insolence.
‘What’s he doing?’ Stephen Price demands of her.
Speaking roughly, no doubt to ride over a surging of desire – as Siôn Ceddol teeters on the edge of the nearest of the foundation trenches and then jumps down into it.
‘Wait,’ Anna Ceddol says. ‘If you please, Master Price.’
And so they all wait, Stephen Price and his sons behind him and his servants behind them, as Siôn Ceddol’s red hat is seen bobbing along the top of the trench, suggesting that surely he can only be crawling along the bottom.
I was not, of course, there, but I can feel the air, as I write, all aglow with trepidation and awe. And an unnatural excitement – the soul of a village briefly lit by the glow of its disease. After some minutes, the boy emerges crawling, like to a spider, from the trench. Kneeling, he takes the hat off his tousled black hair, beating it against an arm and then turning it in his hands as if to make sure it’s clean of mud before replacing it on his head.
‘Ner,’ he says.
His bottom lip thrust out, sullen.
‘Nothing there,’ Anne Ceddol tells Stephen Price.
The boy has stepped back from the trench and now walks towards the beginnings of another, his hands splayed in front of him, stiffly at first and then aquiver, as he reaches it. It’s not a warm day – few of those this summer – but the sun is well aloft and lights the shallow trench as he drops into it, then disappears from sight, and there’s the sound of scratting, and a mist of earth flies up.
‘Fetch him a scratter.’
Stephen Price tosses the instruction to his eldest son, annoyed that he can’t take his eyes away from the place where Siôn Ceddol disappeared. When a trowell is produced Anna Ceddol accepts it and takes it to her brother and returns to Price.
‘Thank you.’
She stands so close that her beauty must be disturbing the hell out of him. Can’t avoid marking the form of her breasts, where her overdress is worn thin. The dress is the colour of the soil-spatter thrown up from the trench before a screech like to a barn-owl drives the people back in a panic of excitement.
And now Siôn Ceddol’s on his feet again, his face lit with a broad, pink grin.
Though not, it must be said, as broad as the grin of the earth-browned human skull now held up, clasped tightly between the boy’s eager hands to keep the jaw attached.
Weeks hence, when his barn is built and the summoning of Siôn Ceddol is raised one market day in the new Bull Inn at Presteigne, Stephen Price may be heard making dust of it. How the idiot boy was putting on a show of searching the ground, foot by foot, when he knew all along where the bones lay… having, Price is convinced, buried them there the night before. Either him or that sister of his who oft-times disturbs Price even more and in ways he’d rather not tell you about.
Well, he says in the Bull, to Bradshaw and Beddoes and Meredith, en’t as if they’d have had difficulty findin
g bones on Brynglas. Like to a charnel house this year.
‘An omen, they’re saying, the villagers. Like the weather. A reminder.’
Bradshaw eases his weight upon the bench and farts.
‘Don’t they know of the capture of this man Gethin? Is that not a good sign for them?’
‘Hell, no.’ Stephen Price almost laughs aloud. ‘It’s another sign that it’s all coming back, the blood and the fire, and they’re unprotected.’
‘Well, it’ll be good for us,’ Bradshaw says. ‘They’ve never recognised us in the west, as the county town. Now we’re settling their score for them.’
Stephen Price says nothing. Bradshaw’s from Off. Crossed the border to swell his fortune. He thinks wealth is the balm for all wounds.
Price buys more wine he can ill afford this year, to dull the fears that chatter in his head like the restless sprites that he’s sure no one he met in Parliament believes in. Blanking out the image of the skull the boy found. One eye-hole twice the size of the other, where the blade went in.
The night before last, Stephen Price woke in a sweat from a dream where he saw a man lying, all cut about, on his back, in his own blood, on the side of Brynglas Hill, with another man standing above him twisting the squat blade of his pike round and back and round again in that left eye while the dying man screams to heaven.
Price drinking harder to drown out the voice of the new and forbidding rector, the narrow, white-faced man arching his spine, peering into his face, asking him, Master Price, why do you let the devil have rein in Pilleth?
