by Phil Rickman
‘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 knowled
ge.’
‘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.’
