The Heresy of Dr Dee

by Phil Rickman

  Wet faced, I walked around the front of the little grey church to the now familiar view over the cauldron of hills, down the battlefield of Brynglas, becoming aware of movement, villagers gathering. A dozen or more, including several women, on the hill, under the dirty-bruised skin of the sky.

  I saw old Goodwife Thomas and Gareth Puw, the blacksmith, and others I recognised but could not name, but there was no sign of Vaughan or Price and his sons.

  Only, some distance away, something still as a sculpted tableau in the grass which no one approached.

  Siôn Ceddol’s head lolled in his sister’s lap, her own head bowed, her dense brown hair down around her face and his. She did not seem to see any of them, kneeling in an island of grief to which none could cross.

  Stabbing the knife into the ground, I stood between the small trees on the edge of the churchyard, from where we’d watched Prys Gethin summoning his demons.

  Maybe it was through fatigue or because I did blame myself for the boy’s killing that I didn’t go down. There was nothing I could say to her, not in front of the villagers. The boy was slain, and I could not bring him back.

  ‘Who is she, John?’

  Thomas Jones had come round from the well. He’d stripped away his ruined doublet, stood in his shirt, the sleeves rolled up, blood streaks not fully washed from his arms.

  Anna let Siôn’s head slip from her lap and, laying it tenderly in the turf, slowly arose. Her overdress was darkened at the thighs, her lips parted in a soundless distress.

  ‘His mother?’

  ‘Sister. He was… there was something missing in his mind. But something else there… that we don’t have.’

  A bar of sunlight split the fleshy cloud, lighting the hillside. I turned my head away, blinded for the moment, and then Thomas Jones was pulling me back ’twixt the trees, speaking quietly.

  ‘Do nothing.’

  A hundred paces below us, Prys Gethin had emerged like a sprite from the pines. I reached for the butcher’s knife, but we were too far away and already it was too late.

  LIII

  Untethered

  BLACK, NOW, AGAINST the rosening sun whose rays, for a moment, seemed to sprout from his shoulders like small wings of dark fire.

  Dark angel rising.

  His movements had been so swift and easy that he was already half a dozen paces down the hill, taking Anna Ceddol with him, the blade which had penetrated her brother’s throat now at her own.

  ‘Stay where you are, John,’ Thomas Jones murmured, voice very low, heavy with warning.

  Gethin had twisted her head to his chest, was pulling her backwards. One of the women cried out. I saw Gareth Puw, the blacksmith, taking steps towards him and then reeling back at what Gethin had done.

  Anna’s overdress was parted at the top, a single red petal blooming above her shift.

  I drew savage breath as the blade was lifted, red-edged.

  ‘Freshly-sharpened,’ Gethin said.

  The piping voice was light and clear, risen into a kind of rapture. I made out his fingers and thumb tight around Anna Ceddol’s jaw, as if he were squeezing juice from an orange, as if his whole body was revelling in the sensation of it, bright bells pealing in his head.

  ‘Who wishes,’ he sang, ‘to see the ease with which it severs a breast?’

  ‘Do not move,’ Thomas Jones hissed. ‘If he sees either of us coming, he’ll do it.’

  ‘Anyone?’

  Gethin’s voice risen higher, and now he faced the pines, from which men were emerging: Roger Vaughan, Stephen Price.

  ‘No further,’ Gethin said. ‘Or her lifeblood flows.’

  ‘Harm her,’ Stephen Price said hoarsely, ‘and you’ll be torn apart by all of us.’

  ‘Not before she’s dead. And more of you with her.’

  Even from this distance, I saw Gethin’s smile open up, a split in the wood. The silence around him was waxen, Price’s round face was pale and sagging. Helpless. A whole community held at bay by one man, who believed himself more than a man. Who looked like more than a man. I sensed a demon moving inside a puppet of skin.

  ‘Untethered,’ Thomas Jones said, ‘from all human constraint.’

  Anna Ceddol sagged in Gethin’s grip. My breath was rapid, my thoughts feverish. It would be unwise to kill her now, he’d know that, but I didn’t doubt that he’d deform her and take pleasure in it. I wondered if I could cross from the church to the pines, go further down the hill from Price and Vaughan, maybe come out behind him.

  Thomas Jones said, ‘Whatever you’re thinking…’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  He’d moved too far away from the pines; wherever I was coming from he’d see me running out, and his knife hand would twitch.

  And then Gethin spoke, so quietly that I caught only half of it.

  ‘—who I want.’

  The sun had gone in. Gethin waited.

  Until, out of the pines, not too far from the churchyard where we stood, came the ruins of a man.

  His long face discoloured, lips cut and swollen.

  One eye enpurpled and abulge with blood. One arm bound up in a sling ill-made of rope. A man so beaten he could no longer stand aright.

  It took me a moment. Even me.

  ‘So let her go.’

  The voice was a rasp against dry stone.

  Prys Gethin said, ‘Where’s your blade?’

  A stillness for maybe three heartbeats, then something dropped to the turf.

  ‘Further out,’ Gethin said.

  Robert Dudley looked down for a moment and then stepped over the body of Siôn Ceddol.

  ‘You.’ With Anna Ceddol’s head crooked in an elbow, Gethin pointed, with the tip of his blade, at Roger Vaughan. ‘Come out.’

  Even from here I marked the terror in Vaughan’s face as he left the shelter of the pine wood, glancing behind him at Price’s face, impassive.

  ‘Take the rope from his arm,’ Gethin said. ‘Do it, or she—’

  ‘Yes…’

  Vaughan put up his hands, found the knot in the sling. No resistance from Dudley and no scream when his arm was freed, only a tightening of the mouth that might have cracked teeth. The way the arm fell from the rope made clear that it was broken. Prys Gethin pointed his blade at the rope where it lay on the ground.

  ‘Pick it up. Bind his hands. Behind his back.’

  Price said, ‘But his arm’s—’

  ‘Do it!’ The blade moved against Anna’s throat. ‘Bind it tight…’

  Dudley’s face creasing, pale as cloud, as he bit down on his agony whilst the binding was done.

  ‘Now take his boots,’ Gethin said.

  Dudley sniffed, kicked off one of Gwyn Roberts’s boots. It came easily from his foot. He said something that I took to be derogatory about Welsh leather, and I felt a foolish admiration for him. This absurd hauteur in the face of imminent death.

  I’d kept looking down the hill and across the valley for a sign of the hundred armed men promised by John Forest. Nothing. Betrayal at every level. I felt the Wigmore shewstone pressing through the worn fabric of my jerkin into my abdomen, reminding me how all this had started. In the noble cause of expanding the Queen’s vision. Would she ever know how it had ended?

  Vaughan knelt and pulled off the second boot.

  ‘You can go back now,’ Gethin said.

  With the tip of his knife, he beckoned Dudley forward. Some women were turned away looking at the ground, averting their eyes from an expected execution.

  Thomas Jones looked at me, baffled.

  ‘He can’t kill Dudley whilst holding the woman. If he lets the woman go, some of these men may try and take him. And succeed.’

  But Gethin didn’t let the woman go.

  He pointed down the hill, towards the river, sent Dudley limping barefoot ahead of him.

  ‘I hear anyone following us,’ Gethin said, ‘and you know what will happen.’

  ‘His fucking mind’s gone,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘He
can’t do this. He cannot do it on his own.’

  The progress was slow and awkward, Gethin holding Anna Ceddol tight and the knife tighter, Dudley shuffling and stumbling a few feet in front, head thrown back in obvious agony.

  ‘Then either he believes himself not alone,’ I said. ‘Or he isn’t.’

  As they crossed the hill and entered a small copse of birch and rowan, I saw that the petal on Anna’s breast was become a rose in full bloom.

  I seized the butcher’s knife.

  ‘Tell them where I’ve gone,’ I said.

  ‘Where? For God’s sake—’

  ‘You know where.’

  LIV

  I RAN DOWN the oak wood’s primitive cloister. Early light flickered amongst the dry leaves and acorns under what felt like someone else’s racing feet.

  Running against sombre reason and the cold denial of the Puritans. Running against a sorry sense of my own failings. Running hardest of all against the images crowding into the mind’s poor glass: the blade at the woman’s throat, the blooming of the blood-flower. At the start of a second day without sleep or much food, I was become a creature of little more than air, while the world was a faerie blur, the dark oaks swelling and then shrinking before me like illusions in the distorting mirror I keep in my library at Mortlake.

  Emerging from the wood on to the sheep-cropped turf, I ran, in a fever, calling upon an archangel’s energy, throwing his sigil into the air, pure white against the small pale sun and the still-visible moon, waxing close to full. I ran, panting like a hound and bathed with sweat and prayer, until I stopped before the alien green of the old tump in the river’s bend, knowing I’d be here a good while before Gethin and his captives.

  By daylight, it was clear the hole in the side had been redug in haste. The displaced soil lay in two heaps either side of it, the cut turves lain against the bottom of the tump. There was still a stench of putrefaction, but nowhere near as strong as it had been last night.

  Who’d dug it out again? The Roberts boys? I could see no other explanation. It would be done here. The corpse tidily tucked into the earth. Then across the river they’d all go and away into the real Wales.

  I prayed that Thomas Jones was assembling those who would understand, ready to move fast. I prayed that Dudley had some reserve of ingenuity. I prayed to God and Christ and the Holy Virgin and the Archangel Michael that Anna Ceddol would not lose her life.

  Turning my back on the hole, I saw the bough which had ploughed the furrow in my head, upthrust from the twisted bole of a thorn tree grown from the foot of the tump. Picked up a forked twig, its bark stripped away by my head before the twig was snapped from the tree in my helpless writhing.

  Only good can fight evil, and, God knows, there was little enough of it in me. Against all my rage, I sought to gather in all the good I’d met or heard around Brynglas hill: the souls of Father Walter and Marged the wisewoman and the unknown anchoress said to have lived where the church now stood, by the shrine of the Virgin, who I visualised unsmirched and shining, blessing the pure spring below. Conjuring a peace over Brynglas, a blue glow upon its slopes on which the sigil, in my mind, was etched.

  The twig twisted in my hands, lit by a shaft of amber sunlight, my arms afire before the light was, in an instant, extinguished from above.

  I dropped the twig.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said.

  He came awkwardly down from the tump, as if his limbs were afflicted by the gnarling sickness, symptoms not apparent the last time I’d seen him. He wore a peasant’s apparel, sacking around his waist, where the apron had been.

  He looked tired. His grey-white hair, in disarray, was like to the tonsure he must once have worn. He was, I realised, much older than I’d thought – maybe seventy, maybe more. Too old for a satyr.

  ‘Ah, Dr Dee,’ he said wearily. ‘I feel you’re determined to do me harm.’

  The local accent was all gone. I recalled that he’d been educated at Oxford. His background may indeed have been wealthy and privileged if, as Bishop Bonner thought, he’d actually bought his position of supremacy at Wigmore Abbey.

  I followed him around to the sweeter-scented side of the tump, where the air was merely autumnally damp. In truth, I hadn’t expected him. I’d thought it might be Daunce.

  ‘You’re all aglow, my boy,’ he said. ‘Look like a priest who’s just celebrated the Mass.’

  ‘Merely tired,’ I said. ‘Abbot.’

  It was true that I felt light and separate from my body. Yet my mind, freed from its weight, had a piercing focus, and when John Smart raised his hands I felt it was in defence, rather than benediction.

  ‘Call me Martin,’ he said. ‘Abbots are of the past.’

  I looked around, warily.

  ‘You’re alone.’

  ‘I thought we should talk. Somewhere only the faeries can overhear us.’

  ‘Help me,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Safe, I believe. Except for Gethin, who is dead.’

  I stared at him, the former abbot who’d stolen Church gold, sold the buildings around him, ran whores.

  ‘It’s too late for lies,’ John Smart said. ‘I can show you his body, if you like, though I’d guess you’ve seen enough of them for one morning, and it’s not pretty. He put out his own eye with his dagger. The last good eye. With some rage, so that the blade would seem to have proceeded into his brain. A swifter end than perhaps he deserved.’

  And too easy.

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘In a dingle about half a mile from the hill, not ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Why would he?’

  ‘The Presteigne boys. Out all night in the hills and angry. For some reason, he thought they were on his side, let them take the woman.’

  ‘So Mistress Ceddol—’

  ‘Safe. I believe.’

  ‘You believe?’

  ‘She ran away. She was not hurt. Not more than she had been anyway.’

  ‘Master Roberts?’

  ‘The so-called Master Roberts is taken by cart back to Presteigne, where I’ll find a better bedchamber for his recovery.’ A wry smile. ‘With glass in its windows. As befits his status.’

  I was watching his hands, both exposed, both empty. No sign of weaponry.

  ‘I’m not lying to you, Dee.’

  ‘Why would Gethin think that, Abbot? That the angry boys from Presteigne were on his side?’

  ‘Call me Martin. Odd, is it not, the way men’s minds work in extremis.’

  ‘Jesu, Smart, you weren’t even born here, and you can’t give a straight answer to a straight question.’

  ‘Met Scory last night,’ he said, ‘for the first time. Still in town, after giving evidence to the court. This was before you arrived, all full of wild accusations.’ Smart chuckled. ‘Poor old Bradshaw. He was far more surprised than I was.’

  I sighed.

  ‘What did you discuss with Scory?’

  ‘Talked about the problems of survival in the Church in a time of constant change. Scory’s less adventurous than me in my younger days, but he likes to, as you might say, put some modest items discreetly in store for his future comfort. But that’s an aside.’

  It seemed the Bishop of Hereford knew more about Abbot Smart and his circumstances than he’d confided to me. What a bag of adders the Church of England already was become.

  ‘Good man, Scory, make no mistake,’ John Smart said. ‘But, as he may have indicated to you, working the Welsh borderlands does require a certain… adaptability. He’s become quite exercised over the conduct of this man Daunce, who, it might be said, has too much God in him.’

  More energy in Smart now, his cheeks pinkened.

  I said, ‘Once again, why did Gethin think the Presteigne boys were on his side?’

  The sun had broken through again. Smart clapped his hands.

  ‘What a fine morning this is become.’ He peered at me. ‘Are you sure you haven’t performed some kind of invocation, Dr Dee? All manne
r of stories are told about you.’

  ‘Most of them exaggerated.’

  ‘I know the feeling.’

  ‘I think you knew Mistress Ceddol?’

  ‘Did I?

  ‘But how well did you know Prys Gethin?’

  I knew not where this question came from. Maybe I’d thought back to what Bonner had said about simony, the ordination of fifty paying candidates, a small coterie of thoroughly reprehensible followers. Or maybe it was given to me by the Archangel Michael.

  ‘Was he at the Abbey of Wigmore?’ I said. ‘Was he given Holy Orders?’

  Smart said, ‘Gethin trusted the Presteigne boys because I’d told him he could. And because I was with them.’

  ‘My thanks,’ I said. ‘Now to go back to my previous question…’

  Smart’s face had visibly darkened. His eyes grown still. He looked down at what I yet held: the butcher’s knife, laden with dried blood. I let go of it and it fell to my feet, bounced and slid in the slick grass towards the foot of the tump.

  ‘Thank you,’ Smart said. ‘This is very much not the place to keep a weapon too close.’

  ‘Or an obsessive killer? God’s tears, Smart, you can’t just tell me what you want me to know and expect me to take my nose out of your stinking midden and walk away.’

  Smart sighed at last.

  ‘There were times, in the years before and during the Reform, when an abbot of the Welsh Borderlands was in need of personal protection. I was, I suppose, threatened more than most. In divers ways.’

  ‘You ordained him… as your guard?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Knowing what he was?’

  ‘All right, it was not my holiest act. Look, Dee, if you’ve seen the report made to Cromwell, that was not fully accurate, but some of it… had foundation. I knew it was coming. I knew Cromwell was committed to taking virtually all of us down; the abbeys, by whatever means, and I knew there’d be no great difficulty doing it to me. I’d already journeyed to London, cwtching up to the wily bastard, offering my services…’