The Heresy of Dr Dee

by Phil Rickman

  ‘You mean the dead… from the battle?’

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

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

  ‘Prys. And he’s—’

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

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

  I made a stand.

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

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

  ‘You talked to Walsingham?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Healing. Aye. That’s what’s needed.’

  Dear God, I was digging my own pit.

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

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

  Keeping an air of the holy.

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

  ‘You’re a clever man, Master Price.’

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

  I stared at the ground.

  ‘Probably not.’

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

  XXV

  Thrown From the Body

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Yet slaughtered by half as many Welsh?’

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

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

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

  ‘They simply waited?’

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

  ‘Steeper than it looks.’

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

  Price looked back the way we’d come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘A planned treachery?’

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

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

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

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

  Price shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘And do the dead then rest?’ I asked.

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

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

  ‘Or…?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  XXVI

  Blade’s Edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Not wasting any time.’

  ‘Would you? Where’s Dr Dee?’

  ‘Gone to find his family.’

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

  ‘Not a big town this, is it?’

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

  ‘So I noticed.’

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

  Dudley smiled.

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

  ‘Conjuror,’ Vaughan said.

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

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

  ‘Conjuror?’

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

  ‘Old skills?’

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

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

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

  ‘You employ one yourself, Master Vaughan?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘How so?’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Does a place have feelings?’

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

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

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

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

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

  Vaughan looked at him.