The Heresy of Dr Dee jdp-2

by Phil Rickman

  ‘What are you saying, Bishop?’ the judge demands irritably. ‘That witchcraft is so deeply embedded in the religious practices of these counties that it goes unrecognised as heresy and blasphemy?’

  Scory beams.

  ‘Precisely, my Lord. Were every man or woman who practises what we might consider a form of witchcraft to be brought before a court, most villages would be left derelict and the land untilled.’

  Legge sits up, his chair creaking. This testimony has not taken the path which he – or Dudley – would have wished.

  ‘And what of curses?’

  ‘As old as time.’

  ‘And in your experience of this area, can curses yet kill?’

  ‘In my experience…’ Scory wrinkles his nose. ‘…a countryman believing himself cursed will oft-times curl up and die.’

  ‘You are saying the curse works.’

  ‘I believe that, in the right circumstances, some curses do indeed work. Especially, as I say, if a man knows himself cursed. If he falls ill, he’ll be inclined to believe the curse is come upon him.’

  ‘And the inflictor of the curse may issue it with this intent?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Scory says, gazing into the air. ‘However, I confess I’d find it rather harder to explain how such a man may seek to persuade let us say a bridge that its timbers are fatigued to the extent that the said bridge gives up its struggle against collapse just as the recipient of a curse is passing over it. Probably a gap in my occult knowledge, my Lord, which I must needs address.’

  Silence, and then the sound of laughter.

  Which, Dudley is dismayed to discover, comes from his own throat.

  Scory retains his solemnity as the laughter spreads in slow ripples through the court.

  ‘Thank you,’ Legge says coldly. ‘I have no more questions for this witness and will shortly adjourn this hearing for a period to consider all the evidence before addressing the jury.’

  He glances disdainfully at the prisoner, who yet stands as though a noose is already in place. Dudley eyes the doors. No better time, as the judge prepares to rise, for a rescue attempt.

  Legge delves among his papers.

  ‘But before I adjourn… I had considered giving the prisoner an opportunity to speak for himself – on the understanding that it would be in English – but now see no need for this. However, a written statement has been presented to the court by the prisoner, writing in the name of Gwilym Davies, the substance of which I shall now disclose.’

  The judge tells the court that the man calling himself Gwilym Davies and professing to be a farmer of Carmarthen, claims that, on the night in question, he and his fellows had driven a herd of black cattle to the London markets and were returning through Radnor Forest when they were set upon in darkness.

  ‘Believing their assailants to be murderous robbers, they fled,’ Legge said. ‘But Davies, being lame, was captured and thrown into a cart. Being much beaten about by men who, he says, gave no evidence of being officers of the law, he admits to subjecting them to a tirade of abuse after one of them spat into his empty eye-socket. He denies issuing a formal death curse. Claims he…’ The judge sniffs. ‘… would not know how to.’

  In the dock, the prisoner is nodding very slowly.

  What unmitigated shit. If there was anyone more practised in the art of cursing than this one-eyed man, Dudley has yet to encounter him. Deserves to dangle for these lies alone.

  ‘He also repeats his assertion,’ Legge continues, ‘that the name Prys Gethin was pressed upon him by his captors. This being a name which, as the sheriff has told us, is calculed to spread a particular fear in this area of the borderlands.’

  The judge smiles thinly and sceptically before adjourning the hearing for two hours – an extraordinary amount of time for such a petty case, Dudley thinks.

  He leaves the court and walks down to piss in the river.

  Only wishing he could have taken the stand himself and declared how the man had cursed him. Here in the marketplace without a second thought, the malevolence springing full-formed to his lips as if directed from some outside force.

  But then, what nest of wasps might Dudley have kicked if he were to have given evidence as Master Roberts, the antiquary?

  Walking back up the street in the dimming afternoon, he marks a tall woman in a dark green cape, gliding towards him from the centre of town.

  By the finery of her apparel alone, it can only be the whore calling herself Amy.

  They draw level in the marketplace, now filling with people awaiting the conclusion of the trial that will scratch a twenty-year-old itch. The piemen gathering.

  Amy smiles, reaches up quite openly and touches Dudley’s cheek.

  ‘Now, my Lord?’

  The title delivered in a coquettish, mocking way, but Dudley still can’t help wondering if she knows who he is. All the men of influence she must bed. And introducing herself as Amy. Could that…?

  Enough. She’s a woman. Dudley can handle women.

  ‘You can take me to him now?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then I’m in your hands.’

  ‘Time for that as well, if we’re quick,’ Amy says.

  XXXVII

  Falling Away

  I MUST HAVE gone stumbling down the path like a hunchback, and the hunch was Brynglas Hill itself and all the weight of worship piled upon it – one religion grinding against another, the fog before me lit with frictive sparks. Why is it that all faiths founder upon the jagged rocks at their extremities?

  Towards the foot of the hill, the fog thinned to a mist again before revealing a sky of amber-grey and the smoke from the Pilleth fires which I hurried towards… and then cried out as the path crumbled before me.

  Losing my footing, and the land was all atilt. Then came the shock of cold water – treacherous mud had flung me headlong into a brown, stagnant puddle.

  God damn. I lay soaked, twisted and dazed, close to weeping in frustration like an infant. Jesu, what was I become? The adversary? Truly, I’ve never in my life wanted to challenge God, only to understand some small part of his mind. Is that the worst kind of heresy?

  Blinking away the dirt in my eyes, I thought for a moment that I saw my tad with that expression of both sympathy and scorn which all good fathers wear when a child falls and explodes into self-pitying tears.

  And then found I was looking up into the calm, weather-browned face of Anna Ceddol.

  ‘Mistress…’ Coming at once, red-faced and dripping to my feet, brushing wet earth and slimed leaves from my sopping jerkin, feeling more foolish than I could ever remember. ‘Oh God, Mistress Ceddol… what have I done without thinking.’

  Or, more likely, while thinking too much.

  Anna Ceddol nodded towards the boy, who was scrabbling among the damp ashes on the midden.

  ‘He does everything without thinking. Or, at least, not as we know thinking.’

  Yet still achieved more than me, for all my years of study. A bookman who thinks only of how his learning might grow. Making him more of scholar, but less of a man.

  Anna Ceddol took my arm.

  ‘You’re shivering. Come by the fire.’

  Leading me inside the Bryn, where she propped three logs in conical shape upon the smouldering hearth, drawing me towards the new flames.

  ‘It was coming, anyway,’ she said.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The rector. Sooner or later he was going to move against us. He was only gathering kindling for his blaze.’

  ‘We can stop him.’

  ‘Don’t waste your time, Dr John.’

  ‘I’ll find the sheriff tonight,’ I said. ‘Before Daunce gets to him. And bring Stephen Price down from the wall, on your side. He’s halfway there. Can’t deny the malady affecting the valley. Can’t be the political man turning from the old ways. If he’s to have the rest of his life here, he must needs face…’

  I knew not how to put it and fell back on Price’s own word
s.

  ‘He must needs face what is,’ I said. ‘And that the Pilleth ills will never be cured by a Puritan whose answer to anything he doesn’t understand is to condemn it as satanic and shut it out.’

  In that enclosure of firelight and shadows, it was all very clear to me now. I saw the shrine left to crumble and rot, the holy well overgrown, sucked back into the earth which gave out old corpses in profusion.

  ‘I’ll tell the bishop he has the wrong cleric,’ I said.

  Yet I knew how hard it could be to remove a priest. Especially one who knew where a murdered man’s body lay and who put it there. I closed my eyes.

  Then opened them quickly.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Perhaps I’d gone rigid, still lacking confidence in the close company of a woman, especially when she was…

  … undoing my jerkin.

  ‘Jesu—’

  ‘They’ll dry more quickly if you take them off.’

  ‘Mistress, is this…?’

  ‘Seemly?’ Peeling my shirt from my skin. ‘Who can ever say? Does it matter?’

  Drying my chest now with a cloth of sacking, both her hands moving under it. She’d closed the door so the boy was shut out, and also much of the light. The smoke from the fire was sweet-smelling. Apple wood, clouding the air with fragrance, filling the head.

  ‘The hose?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘I’ll need your hose.’

  Her long hands gently fumbling at my waist.

  ‘Now I’m all wet, too,’ she said.

  Oh, dear God.

  ‘These things happen,’ Anna Ceddol said.

  Her voice small now. I could barely draw breath. In the dimness, I saw her overdress falling away. Gave in to the smoke and the soft weight of a breast falling forward into my palm.

  * * *

  I slept. It was a mistake. When I awoke, on the pallet amongst the rushes, there was a smell of stew and herbs from the pot over the fire, and the door was open to the dusk.

  Sitting up, I marked my apparel hanging from a beam and Anna Ceddol full-dressed watching the boy playing with his favourite thigh bone on the edge of the hearth, rolling it along the stones, humming to himself like a drone of bees.

  She smiled.

  ‘Is it your wish to pass the night here, Dr John?’

  ‘I… can’t. I’m expected back at the Bull in Presteigne. And I must needs find the sheriff.’

  Thinking I could reach him through Roger Vaughan. That Vaughan would surely vouch for my sanity.

  I stretched out my legs, feeling warm and fulfilled in the simplest, most physical sense. She was only the second woman in this world I’d lain with, and my life was turned over again. I couldn’t look at her without wanting her again, wanting her forever.

  How easy it is to fall into love.

  ‘Yet I don’t want to leave you,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid of what the rector will do. The rector’s mad.’

  ‘I’ve faced worse.’

  ‘I’m not sure you have.’

  She looked at Siôn Ceddol, rolling his bone from one side of the hearth to the other, the eerie drone never ceasing.

  ‘People like to say he’s of the faerie. When he wants to find something, the faerie tell him where it lies – or the dead. Some say it’s the same thing. That the faerie are the spirits of the dead.’

  ‘I doubt that.’ The mingling of spheres – this I felt, but what did I know? ‘I think the faerie are the essences of things. The spirits of life in the land – in the trees and the rivers and the rocks.’

  ‘The rocks live?’

  ‘Some rocks, you can see the life in them. Crystals. It’s my aim to study this for myself. Make experiments.’

  I thought of the scryer, Brother Elias, in Goodwife Faldo’s hall, how my attempts to observe and understand had led me only further into darkness and confusion. The perceived shade grown from the shewstone that night… the mention of bones drawing me at once to my guilt over Benlow, the Glastonbury boneman, when it might have been some strange foretelling of my encounter with Siôn Ceddol. The trickery our minds perform.

  And then I thought of something else that Matthew Daunce had said.

  ‘Anna…’

  She was carefully detaching my jerkin and hose from the nail in the beams, shaking them out as if they were apparel of quality rather than the rubbish I wore.

  ‘You needn’t worry you might’ve given me a child,’ she said. ‘I’m barren.’

  ‘I wasn’t—’

  ‘And glad of it. I’ve been raped twice. Would have been three times, but the third time I agreed, and then he couldn’t do it.’ She took down the items of apparel and laid them by me on the pallet. ‘A young woman alone with an idiot boy, it’s the least a man expects.’

  ‘You can’t go on,’ I said. ‘You can’t go on with this life.’

  I looked at Siôn Ceddol who seemed to have fallen to sleep with his arms around the bone. With closed eyes he looked like any other boy and harmless.

  ‘Come back with me,’ I said.

  ‘To London. With him?’ She laughed. ‘They’d have him in Bedlam before the week was out. Don’t you see? We can only ever live in places like this.’

  ‘He has a skill. An important skill.’

  I had a momentary crazed vision of presenting Siôn Ceddol to Cecil as the only dowser I’d known who might be able to replicate the wonders of Georgius Agricola.

  ‘Don’t even think of it,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘The city would terrify him. Me as well. We’re country people. If he wanders out in the night here, as oft-times he does, I know he’ll come to no harm. What were you about to ask me?’

  I ached in my breast for her and the gloomed years ahead. Changing his rag every day, washing the shit from him in the stream. Worst of all, never letting him be alone with those his age, particularly the maidens. None of this would be so bad if she wasn’t educated. If she hadn’t the wit to imagine what her life might have been.

  I let go a sigh.

  ‘When Daunce… when he was in full, abusive spate, he spoke of you as… the… the Great Papist’s…’

  ‘Whore?’

  Her eyes were like rock.

  I nodded, turning away from her, beginning quickly to drag on my apparel.

  ‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘But it might have been.’

  I stopped dressing.

  ‘I think I told you of a rich man who offered me a home in Presteigne. I’d spent one night with him. Or half a night. He gave me money. He’d been… a monk. At the head of a monastery.’

  ‘John Smart…?’

  I stumbled, half into my hose. Could hardly say the name.

  ‘He had a reputation,’ she said. ‘Even when in Holy Orders. Could not keep it in his robe.’

  I sat down on the stool by the fire to put on my boots, shaking my head. How could this woman consider herself so worthless that she’d give herself to a man such as this even for one night?

  Siôn Ceddol, awake again, came and sat on the rushes a few feet from me. He was looking to the side of me where the tall stones rose like the remains of an ingle.

  As if watching something.

  He smiled.

  ‘He likes you,’ Anna said.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  Thinking he hadn’t liked me up at the holy well, when he thought I’d stolen his thigh bone.

  ‘He’s within a few feet of you,’ she said, ‘and he isn’t screaming the walls down.’

  ‘Where…’ I didn’t really want to ask her. ‘Where was he when you… were with Smart?’

  ‘There was a housekeeper. A young woman. She survived the night by plying Siôn with sweetmeats. My feeling was that she was one of several woman who… worked for him.’

  ‘And this was all in Presteigne?’

  She nodded.

  ‘He’s still there?’

  ‘They say he pulls a good income from Presteigne. That’s what’s said. Only gossip, but the same gossip from diff
erent ends of town. Yes, he’s there.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  While she told me what she knew and what she’d heard of John Smart and his dealings, Siôn Ceddol gazed placidly into the smoke. Holding out his hands in it, as though to accept a gift. But, conspicuously, not from me. His white hands swam up in the blue-grey smoke like flatfish and seemed to grasp something.

  Something heavy.

  Holding it up to look at it.

  Holding up nothing.

  Of a sudden there was no heat from the fire.

  Anna Ceddol said quietly, ‘There’s someone with you.’

  I stiffened. The fire burned white.

  The boy turned and picked up his beloved earth-brown thigh bone and laid it on the hearth and then pushed it forward as if he were offering it for inspection to whoever sat next to me.

  And then sat back and waited as I shivered.

  * * *

  I should have gone then to Stephen Price, told him what had happened this day – some of it, anyway – but I couldn’t face it. Needed some time to separate the truth from the madness. Besides, I knew I had to reach the sheriff before Daunce could get to him, although I couldn’t, at this moment, even remember his name.

  I stole around to the stables at the rear of Nant-y-groes and found my mare. She knew me at once and was silent as I nuzzled her and saddled her and led her quietly out of the stable and down to the road. I’d come back tomorrow. By tomorrow I would have thought of something. Some way of persuading Anna Ceddol to return with me to London. What did it matter to me that she was incapable of childbearing? There was neither time nor money in my life for children.

  I mounted up and followed the silvered ribbon of road with ease, giving brief thought to what I’d do when we arrived at my mother’s house. How my mother would react to my appearance in Mortlake with a beautiful woman and an idiot. The truth of it – I didn’t care. The moon rose, close to full in the clearing sky, and I felt hollow and sad and yet exalted.

  We’d covered the few miles to Presteigne before I knew it, the mare and I, pounding the moonlit track.