by Phil Rickman
‘You’re thinking poison?’
‘If I died from it, people would say it was no more than divine justice.’ He stared up at me, his face twisting into wretchedness in an instant, the way a child’s does. ‘They can all say what the hell they like, now I’m exiled from court, and nobody visits me for fear they’ll come away soiled by second-hand guilt. Maybe’ – pushing himself back from the board, the bench-feet squealing on the flags – ‘you can summon Amy’s spirit into a fucking shewstone to tell us precisely how she died.’
Did I mark tears in his eyes? Finally? Tears for Amy? Tears for himself? Did he even know the difference?
‘What should I do?’ he said at last.
‘Not for me to say, Robbie. We’re acting on different stages now.’
‘You’re still my friend.’
I suppose I nodded, though I’d rarely been less sure of it.
XIV
God and All His Angels
SHE’D BEEN IN a wild mood that day, the day not so long ago when they’d talked of knowing the future and having communion with angels. Red hair all down around her shoulders, the pale sun on her pale face, a faerie light in her amber eyes… and Dudley wanting her so badly that he’d fallen to his knees in the island garden at Richmond, burying his head in the grass ’twixt her feet.
Remembering now how she’d insisted that God and all His angels must surely be on her side.
Our side, Dudley had wanted to say, but didn’t. Telling me he’d been thinking of all they’d come through, both of them losing a parent to the block. Imprisoned side by side in the Tower, not knowing if they, too, would end up there.
But how will we know, she’d said, and he recalled her voice grown thin, when what we do fails to please them, and God and all His angels begin to turn away? How will we know when evil’s at the door?
‘Do you see?’ Dudley said to me. ‘Do you see where this goes?’
‘No,’ I said.
Although of course I did and was filled with a mixture of alarm and excitement, as Dudley arose and picked up the smaller of the two globes given to me by Gerardus Mercator, with whom I’d studied at Louvain. Holding it up to the last of the light, as if it were a symbol of his destiny.
‘Spirits,’ Dudley said. ‘A shewstone can bring forth spirits. Good spirits… evil spirits?’
I watched him slowly turning Mercator’s globe. Geography is one of my less-dangerous obsessions.
‘I’m a cabalist,’ I said, ‘and also a Christian. Therefore any spirits called into the stone by me must needs be touched by the angelic.’
‘Good enough,’ Dudley said. ‘So far. Go on.’
‘The Queen knows her reign could see the meeting point of science and the spiritual. A wondrous thing. If barriers are not raised against it.’
‘Ah… that old question of religion.’
‘Not an old question at all,’ I said ruefully. ‘When I was a boy, mystery was all around us. Christ was full-manifest in the Mass. Every baptism was an exorcism of evil spirits. The world vibrated with magic. And… and if men like me sought divine inspiration in the cause of making new discoveries, it would be a long time before someone cried heresy.’
‘Except possibly the Pope.’
I nodded sadly.
‘We get rid of the Pope, and what happens? In no time at all, we’ve gone too far the other way. Christ is not manifest in the Mass. It’s all theatre. Let’s strip it away, the new Bible-men cry, not for us to ask questions. The will of God is the will of God, and you either accept it or you go to Hell. You explore nothing. Jesu, I— I’m a Protestant, Robbie, I believe in the Church of England… and yet know it could take us back centuries.’
Both of us knew where the Queen stood on this. There would be no persecution of Catholics if they worshipped privately.
Or she’d be persecuting herself.
‘Tell me how it works,’ Dudley said. ‘The shewstone.’
‘I don’t fully know how it works. I know that planetary rays are drawn into the stone through ritual and the focus of the scryer, who must needs enter an altered state to perceive the flow of messages.’
‘If this French bastard Nostradamus can do it,’ Dudley said, ‘then you can do it.’
Dear God, I’d wish for a half of his confidence. I’d met Nostradamus just the one time and didn’t believe him a rooker. Not entirely. Envied him, I’d have to admit, for his standing at the French court and the monetary favours that came his way. The way he was venerated and left to experiment unmolested by Church or Crown.
‘We’re both reaching for the same things,’ I said. ‘Though my own feeling is that his prophecies are a little too… poetic. Not the best poetry, either.’
‘And shaped to the French cause.’ Dudley was yet nursing the globe. ‘This clever stone… does Nostradamus have one?’
‘Don’t know. He claims he’s a natural scryer who needs only to look into a glass of water to connect himself to channels of prophecy. But I’m a scientist and must needs have proof. Scrying stones have been around throughout history, but only now do we have the means and the knowledge to subject them to proper scientific study.’
‘What are we seeking here, John?’
We? I sought a careful answer.
‘Knowledge of the hidden engines that power the world? The workings of the mind of God?’
Jesu, that wasn’t careful at all, was it?
‘The mind of God, John?’
Dudley took breath in a kind of shudder, and I endeavoured to back away.
‘I just don’t believe we can do anything of significance alone. All great art comes through divine inspiration. Advances in science… the same.’
Told him what I’d gleaned from Bishop Bonner about the former Abbot of Wigmore, John Smart.
‘Bonner? You consulted Bonner? And the fat bastard’s going to keep his mouth stitched?’
‘I believe he will.’
‘You’re an innocent, John.’ Dudley shaking his head in feigned wonder. ‘All right, tell me about the mysteries of divine inspiration.’
I told him that while we could hardly aspire, either side of the grave, to a direct approach to God, there were… intermediaries.
‘Angels. Archangels – Gabriel, Michael?’
‘Just names, Robbie. Just names for whatever moves the celestial forces which make us what we are. Just names for the controlling—’
‘Good enough for me, John. How much does this man want for his stone?’
‘Probably more than I have in the world.’
I looked away in sudden apprehension, heard Dudley stand up.
‘But not, presumably,’ he said, ‘more than I have.’
Oh God help me… Shutting my eyes in dismay. Had this been what I’d been hoping for all along? Was this, in truth, why I’d writ the letter to him in Bonner’s cell?
‘All right, we’ll both go,’ Dudley said. ‘You and I. We’ll make a good bargain with this man, in the noble cause of expanding the Queen’s vision.’
We? The way we brought back the bones of Arthur?
‘Her stone,’ Dudley said. ‘Dedicated to the Queen’s majesty. But as you’re the only one who knows how to make it speak, you can keep it here and study it and caress it in your bed, whatever it takes, and bring it regularly to Bess at Richmond or Windsor. Present to her whatever you see within it. Or consider it advisable to see.’
What? I drew back across the chamber, hard against the door to the library, something twisted like a knife in my chest. I began to panic.
‘Robbie, we don’t know he still has it.’
‘We don’t? I thought you were of the opinion that the scryer had deliberately conveyed to your apothecary friend just enough information to tempt the infamous Dr Dee.’
‘What if it’s a rook?’
‘Then we have the abbot brought back and thrown in the Fleet. Jesu, John, I have to do something. I’m sick to my gut of confinement at Kew, everyone regarding me with half-veiled suspicion…
barred from court for the sake of appearances. What’s the matter with you? Suddenly you don’t think yourself worthy to know the mind of God? Listen to me…’
It felt as if the surging of his energy was taking away the air, and I found it hard to breathe. A half moon, ridged by cheap glass, shone behind the owl, and Dudley’s voice rose in the darkness as if from the hollows of a dream. Talking of responsibility towards his heritage… all that his father had died for… the beheading of Jane Grey and all the other cruel deaths, the ashes of martyrs from which Elizabeth had arisen like the fresh and glistening spirit of a new age. Repeating her words from the island in the garden at the Palace of Richmond.
… how will we know when what we do fails to please them? How will we know when evil’s at the door?
And over this I heard the voice of Brother Elias, the scryer, repeating the exhortation of Trithemius of Spanheim.
‘… and whatever good gifts, whether the power of healing infirmities, or of imbibing wisdom, or discovering any evil…
Did I sense in Dudley this night a manner of madness? The haste with which he’d seized on this had made me wonder if truly he did fear for his life if he remained in London. Feared public assassination or a sordid, squirming death by poison. Or even a faked suicide. If so, what I’d told him about Cecil would scarce heighten his confidence of survival… unless…
Unless.
Across the board, his shape had almost gone to black and only the savagery of his smile shone through to show me he was afire.
Five days later, Sunday, as I returned, with my mother, from church, a letter was delivered to me by Dudley’s senior attendant John Forest who, along with Thomas Blount, his steward, seemed to have replaced his murdered servant Martin Lythgoe in the position of most-trusted.
The letter was to detail our itinerary, through Gloucester and Hereford, to the Welsh Border.
We shall be riding with a judge sent to preside over an assize court trial at Presteigne. In the border lands, in sombre attire, we should be inconspicuous in this company.
It seems likely the judge will be returning to London within a few days, which should give us ample time to conduct our business.
Until the company leaves, knowing of your problem, I should be glad to accommodate you here at Kew.
Please tell Forest if this is what you wish.
We were to travel with a judge on his way to preside over a trial? I guessed Dudley would be blind to the irony.
Still, it seemed a good and safe way to make the journey. Presteigne, county town of the new shire of Radnor, was within a few miles of my father’s old home, and my cousin Nicholas Meredith lived in the town. The invitation to stay at Kew also made sense, as long as I didn’t leave the house. And yet…
That evening, as the sun’s last amber strips tinted the river, I packed a bag with a change of doublet and my hand-scribed copy of the writings of Trithemius relating to the rituals of scrying.
Outside, Cecil’s builders, who had arrived this day to begin repairing my mother’s roof, were packing up their tools, loading them on to their cart. As it was pulled away, I stood in my workplace, next to the owl, feeling lost and solitary. Last night, I’d lain too long awake, trying to divert my thoughts from the coming journey by thinking of Nel Borrow who, in my mother’s eyes, would have made a most unsuitable wife – what Cecil would call, in contempt, a carnal marriage.
As distinct from the most dangerous of all marriages which beckoned Dudley. In writing to him from Bonner’s cell, I’d followed only my conscience, but was now become part of the engine which powered his determination to wed the Queen in the belief that it was right… for England and thus for the world.
Your Highness, the archangels Gabriel and Uriel both send their respects and what look to be dread warnings of what may happen if, to gratify the political ambition of others, you turn away from love…
Oh, you might think my part in it would be no more than smoke. For everyone who calls me a sorcerer there’s another who scorns me as a pretender to powers I don’t have. And they, God help me, may be closer to the truth.
Was I then supposed to remind Dudley that, for all my learning, I could not make the leap from the written page into the void? That the birthcharts I’d drawn were craft not prophecy, the dreams I’d so assiduously written down upon awakening were invariably mundane? That even the ghost which had travelled in my baggage all the way from Glastonbury to London was apparent to everyone but me?
That I was afraid to my gut that if we acquired the shewstone of Wigmore it would not speak to me?
And would that, anyway, stay his hand?
Last night, after my prayers, I’d told all this to Eleanor Borrow, wherever she lay. Nel, who would forever be a part of my past.
The full truth of this broke, as if the walls of our poor house were collapsing around me, and I stood with my back to the window and the owl and found myself to be weeping.
PART THREE
The shameful villainy used by the Welshwomen towards the dead carcasses was such as honest ears would be ashamed to hear and continent tongues to speak thereof
HOLINSHED
Chronicles…
XV
The Hill of Bones and Ghosts
October, 1560. Brynglas at Pilleth on the Welsh Border.
A SINGLE EYE looks up at Anna Ceddol through a veil of shivering ground-mist, and all the rest is blood.
She’s saying, ‘Who is he?’
As if anyone could be sure. You must imagine Anna Ceddol clutching her woollen shawl tight across her breast but refusing to look away. Down the valley, the early sun hangs amid rusted coils of mist.
At first she could not understand what all the fear was about – Pedr Morgan’s wife drumming with both fists on her door as the sky grew pink. A dead man found on Brynglas? Wouldn’t be the first this year, nor the twelfth. All those forlorn heaps of browning bones turned up by the plough, all ragged with the remnants of leather jerkins and makeshift armour. Too many.
The dead are removed upon an old cart kept in a tumbledown sheep shelter halfway up the lower slope. Taken for reburial with small ceremony in the field beside the church where, even after a century and a half, their descendants come to pray and visit the holy well.
But anyone can see what’s different about this one.
‘Likely been yere all night,’ Pedr Morgan, the shepherd says.
‘But no longer than that. That’s the point, isn’t it?’
The stink of blood and shit will be wafting up at Anna, and still, I imagine, she does not turn away.
His face has been split open with a spade or an axe. One eye hanging out, laid upon the remains of a cheek, while the other has been taken, most likely by a crow. The naked chest and stomach have also been ripped and plucked by scavenging birds or foxes. Bands of glistening entrails left entwined like to a scatter of dull jewellery.
‘We need the cart,’ Anna says. ‘He can’t be left here much longer, or there’ll be nothing left of him.’
She looks up at the church, Our Lady of Pilleth. Miraculous cures were once recorded here, under the statue of the Holy Mother above this shallow cauldron of empty hills. That was before a thousand men were shot and hacked to death. Before the sacred spring ran brown with blood and the church itself burned. There are more bones in the earth here than tree roots and no one wants to build over an unknown grave. Which is why they send for Siôn.
Maybe she’s recalling how, when she was pulling on her shawl this morning, her brother began to howl piteously, his fingers clawing at the empty air. As if the terror of Goodwife Morgan was making divers pictures around him which he must needs rip away.
Anna has left him squatting by the fire, wrapped in a sheepskin and hugging himself. He didn’t want to go with her – as though he already knew what was here, just as he’d known what lay in the foundations of Stephen Price’s new barn.
Siôn Ceddol. A miracle in himself.
‘No sign of his apparel?’
Nant-y-groes, where my father, Rowland Dee, was born, below the hill of bones.
‘There’s more, see,’ Pedr Morgan says faintly, and Anna Ceddol stares at him. He turns to where the man with the ruined face lies on his back, half under a thorn tree. Its roots and bole are covered with vicious brambles, some of which have been dragged across the lower part of the body as if to conceal its male emblems.
Pedr Morgan pulls some of the brambles away to reveal a leg twisted at the knee.
‘I’d not have my wife see this.’
Anna Ceddol almost smiles. She’s grown used to being treated not as a normal woman. This, she knows, is because of the tasks she has to perform in the care of her brother. Their parents died within a year of one another, and so Anna has never married – too old now, at twenty-nine, she’ll say, unless some widower is in need of comfort in his dotage.
But there’s no hope of comfort with Siôn in the house – sixteen years now and terrifying to most.
‘There’s evil here,’ Pedr Morgan says.
Anna Ceddol has borrowed Pedr’s knife to cut away more brambles. When she glances up from the corpse, the shepherd is turned away, looking down the valley. She says nothing and bends to the brambles, working patiently and her hands do not tremble. She disregards the smells, seemingly unaware of the grace with which she undertakes such a foul task.
Both her hands bleeding freely from wrenching carelessly at the brambles. She slides a knife under a thick stem bristling with savage thorns and lifts. Up it comes, all of a sudden, bringing with it smaller shoots, and all is peeled away from the dead man’s thighs.
‘Oh,’ Anna says.
Of course, she’s heard the tales, still told in the alehouses of Presteigne, tales spat out like bile from the gut.
