by Phil Rickman
‘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 th
rough 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…
