by Phil Rickman
‘All for Wales?’
Smart sat down on the edge of the tump, as though the burden of his past were become too much to support.
‘Once made the mistake of going whoring with him. Learning that we had… very different needs. Later, a particular canon who sought to gather evidence of my misconduct… had an accident. After a while, even I was in dismay over the depth of the boy’s depravity. Quite relieved when our ways diverged.’
We sat in silence for a while. I knew that everything he’d told me might later be denied.
‘I wanted him to hang,’ Smart said. ‘I did not want him back in my life. And when, after he was freed, the sheriff brought him to me, as he’d apparently requested…’
‘What did you do?
‘What do you think I did? I greeted him cordially, as an old friend. With great celebration. Fed him well and gave him drink. Told him how much I was in his debt for all he’d done for me twenty years ago. Said I’d help him any way I could.’
‘Of course you did.’
‘And, in time, he told me where he wanted to go, and I took him part-way there, hidden in my cart. Saying I’d return for him in the morning, with trusted friends. Men he could rely on.’
‘The Presteigne boys.’
‘Regular customers of mine, in the lower parlour. Roisterers, street-fighters. As I said, Jeremy Martin is ever generous with ale and cider and a bed for the night, and they were the first hunting party to return to Presteigne – this was after you and your Welsh friend had left. Much competition that night over who’d find Prys Gethin. So I told them I’d received information as to his whereabouts and could perhaps lead them there. Giving them more drink before we rode off.’
‘You know where he was going. You knew his plans.’
Smart smiled and tapped his nose.
‘Best outcome, Dee. We don’t need another trial. Not for a while. And you don’t need to know any more about my role in Gethin’s demise. Just as, in the matter of Master Roberts, I have no need at all to know who he is.’
* * *
I walked with Smart to the Nant-y-groes bridge where the Presteigne boys waited with the horses and his cart.
The day was brighter now, though the sky was white. When we were in first sight of the company, I brought the shewstone from my bloodied jerkin, quite alarmed at how full of heat it was, having spent the whole night next to my lower abdomen.
Yes, I know… which is the home of the second mind where lie the deepest feelings, the unspoken perceptions. There must needs be a close bond ’twixt the crystal and the scryer, my friend Jack Simm, the apothecary, had said. I wondered if, at this moment, in its swirling depths, the sigil of St Michael would be aglow.
When I gave the stone back to John Smart, he accepted it without a word, and I was glad. The circumstance was not right. It was not the time, although in some odd way, it had served a purpose.
I said, ‘You scry, Abbot?’
‘Martin,’ he said. ‘Call me Martin. No I don’t scry. That… was another of his tasks.’
‘I— Gethin?’
‘He saw. In the stone. He saw what would come. At my house in the abbey, we’d spend whole hours before the stone.’
Thomas Jones had said Gethin was reputed to have the Sight, but…
‘God’s tears. This was his stone?’
‘No, it’s mine. But he was the scryer. A scryer need not be a spiritual man. Or so I thought.’
I also thought to ask if he had acquaintance with a certain Brother Elias, but guessed there’d be no straight answer.
He stowed the stone away in his saddlebag.
‘Should you ever have need of a scryer, Dee, I’d advise you to have a care over whom you choose.’
I did not look at the Presteigne boys. I nodded and turned away and walked back towards the river of light. I lay flat on its bank, hanging down, reaching to splash bright water on my face.
When I went back to the tump, the hole – the wound in its side – had collapsed in upon itself, and the stench had gone, leaving only the sharp, bitter essence of autumn.
LV
For Tonight
ALL WIDE AWAKE now and in need of someone with whom to talk it all through, I walked up, through the cloistered oaks, to the church and sat on the step below Our Lady of Pilleth.
Her demure, chipped face shone through a dappled haze and a rediscovered beatific smile, which led me to suppose that Roger Vaughan had been back.
There was no sign of Matthew Daunce, with whom I’d nothing to discuss.
I let my head fall into my hands. It no longer bled or ached so badly, but whatever part of it enclosed my creative thoughts felt beaten thin as an old drumskin.
I’d bathed my head and eyes again, this time with water from the holy well, unable to shake off the vibrant feeling that I’d been used… had been, for a short time, part of some engine of change.
Or was it illusion?
I saw how circumstance had completed most of the preparations required for an invocation: fasting, self-denial and the many hours without sleep that would separate me from this world, leaving me open to the higher spheres. And yet…
‘There are things I still can’t comprehend,’ I told the Virgin. ‘I know not what was here before you. How far it all goes back. How Brynglas became a place of healing before it was a place of killing. Where lies the power?’
Was there some energy in the very earth which was released in places such as this for the healing of the body and the expansion of human thought?
Perhaps it had begun not here at all, but with the river and the tump that was raised within its curve. With whoever had been buried there at a time when there were no English and the word Welsh, meaning – obscurely – foreigner or stranger, had not been invented. Had that been Pilleth’s golden time?
And when was it turned bad? When was the tump become a cauldron of spiritual pestilence from the second sphere? And the hill… was its natural vigour fouled by that single act of treachery by the Welsh bowmen? Or was this ruinous reversal of allegiance, as the church burned, itself effected by something here already become malign?
All I knew was that the roiling air of betrayal seemed to have become an engine in itself, a pestilence possessed of a dark intelligence which was become manifest in extremes of thought, extremes of behaviour only held in balance by a mingling of spiritual disciplines as divers as the pulleys that made my Mortlake owls flap their wings and make hoot.
I thought of the fevered swooping of the women with their knives, wondering if it was even true or just corrosive gossip of the kind that had the Queen pregnant with Dudley’s child. How could it ever be proved when privy parts have no bones?
I looked up into the lowered eyelids of the stone mother.
‘Are we able to reverse it?’ I asked her. ‘Is it in our power to restore life and health to this valley?’
A shadow was fallen across the Virgin and me, and I turned and looked up into open eyes the colour a sky is meant to be in summer.
‘I was looking for you,’ Anna Ceddol said.
Her wet hair hung black as a raven’s wings. She pushed it back behind her ears. Must have washed it to be rid of the blood. In the river, or one of Siôn’s wells.
‘Too quiet, see,’ she said. ‘Too quiet at the Bryn. They told me to try and sleep, so I took a potion. But I could not sleep for the quiet.’
I rose to my feet. I understood. She faced me, wet-haired, dry-eyed.
‘They say you saw it done.’
I nodded.
‘It was… very quick. Gone like a… moth. A butterfly. I saw what might be about to happen and ran—’
‘He’s in the church,’ she said quickly. ‘On the bier.’
‘Does Daunce…?’
‘Daunce has been summoned to Presteigne,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘Where the bishop lodges. I know not where Siôn will lie.’
‘I’ll talk to the bishop,’ I said. ‘If it’s necessary.’
Knowing I must
needs talk to him anyway. About many things.
‘They say he’s killed,’ Anna said. ‘The Welshman.’
‘They say he killed himself. Were you not there?’
‘When he let me go, I ran away. I saw no more of him.’
‘It’s as well,’ I said. ‘He… killed without a thought. He was driven by a demonic madness. The man who you and the shepherd found, all cut about… the man Stephen Price buried to prevent panic… he can only have been killed by Gethin.’
Anna Ceddol looked down at the stain on her dress, then up at the statue of the Virgin.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Mercy?’
‘No more lies. You’ve been good to me. I won’t—’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I may have brought a terrible sorrow to you and everyone here. Stephen Price saw me as a saviour but I think, in truth, that I’m just part of the curse.’
‘I won’t lie to you,’ she said, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I know how that man died, and I know how he was cut about.’
I stared at her.
‘Because I cut him.’ Her voice was soft as moss. ‘I took his apparel and then I set about his face with a spade.’
My body jerked back against the statue’s stone robe.
‘What are you saying?’
‘So that no one would ever know who he was,’ she said rapidly. ‘That he was my father. And Siôn’s father.’
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me any of this. It’ll go no further, but you still don’t have to tell me. No one will ever know any of it from me.’
She looked up at the statue.
‘The Holy Mother will know.’
* * *
Tomos Ceddol. The man who, Anna had told me, had courted her mother but was deemed by her mother’s parents as not of their level. Who, when Anna’s mother died, had begun to drink to excess. Who had been driven to violence by the ravings of their youngest child, barely weaned when his mother had died.
‘Not true,’ Anna said. ‘She was not his mother. When she died, I was already with child. I was twelve years old.’
Oh, dear God.
‘She was unwell for nearly a year, my mother. After a while, he began to touch me. He’d get drunk on strong ale. He was a big man. Resisting him would only lead – did lead – to injury.’
She was hardly the first this had happened to. Hardly the first who’d gone on to give birth to her own father’s child. I believed that most women stayed, made the best of it, at least until the child was old enough to leave home.
But this child would never be old enough to leave. And Anna would blame her father for the boy’s idiocy. Her father… and herself.
‘When I found out I was with child, I tried to… make away with him. Went to a wise woman in the next village, who charged me all I had for a potion that made me sick for days. But the babe continued to grow. It wasn’t until he was nearly two years that I knew he must be damaged in the head. And knew why.’
‘You don’t know that,’ I said, but she seemed not to hear.
She’d never let her father touch her again. She’d been sleeping with a kitchen knife since first learning there was a child on the way.
The night she’d found him kicking Siôn, to quieten him – that was true enough and happened just as she’d told me. What she hadn’t told me was that, when they left home, taking all his money, Tomos Ceddol had gone in search of them. This was why they’d moved from village to village down the border.
‘He found you?’ I said. ‘He found you here?’
‘I’d become careless. It was over twelve years since we’d left. I’d thought he’d surely given up, found a woman somewhere. I thought we were safe in the Bryn. The first real home we’d had.’
His approach had been slow and careful at first. He’d watched for whole nights from the oak wood – one of the Thomas boys had seen him twice, thought him a thief, though nobody was ever robbed… not then. I imagined Tomos Ceddol catching sight of his daughter – even more beautiful than he’d remembered. All the money he’d spent trying to find her. She was his daughter and the father of his child, who should have been disposed of long ago.
God’s tears.
The night he broke in, he was drunk, having found a barrel of cider left over from the harvest festival. They heard later he’d been driven out of his own village after two rapes, although the women would not name him.
Anna Ceddol stopped, as though that were the end of the story.
‘How did he die?’ I said at last, in dread of the answer. ‘Not that you have to—’
‘Nor will I. I awoke and he was in my bed. Naked. And some men… some have thinner skulls than others.’
Siôn had done this? Struck his father…
… with the thigh bone?
It took me about three hours get him out to the hill,’ Anna said. ‘I had to do it myself.’
He didn’t find that man, she’d said, of Siôn. He wouldn’t even come out that day. He was afraid and clung to the fire.
‘I smashed his face with the spade. And then took the spade to him… down there. Bore it on the spade into the wood. I suppose the pigs ate it. Pedr Morgan found him next day and his wife came to me to ask what we should do.’
I thought of Stephen Price who’d buried Tomos Ceddol, not knowing who he was. Buried him twice. In the tump.
Why? Because it was the only place I could think of where the mad boy wouldn’t find him.
But no one lay easy in the tump.
She felt… what he wanted to do to her. Felt it inside.
I would talk to Scory. This was a matter for a priest of the old kind. Someone practised in the cure of souls.
‘Come home with me,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘Please come home with me. For tonight.’
PART FIVE
Here the vulgar eye will see
nothing but obscurity
and will despair considerably
JOHN DEE Monas Hieroglyphica
LVI
From an Angel
HE REFUSED WINE, accepting small beer. There was a ring of blood around the pupil of his left eye.
No longer wearing mourning, though his apparel was of earth colours, he’d ridden alone to Mortlake, and I wondered if this meant he no longer feared for his life… or if he no longer cared. I wondered if he’d been shown the letter from Thomas Blount. I wondered if he’d tell me if he had. I wondered too much.
There was an unseasonably close air for that time of year when late afternoon and evening are become one and the traffic of wherries on the river is thinned. Dudley leaned back on the bench in my workroom, the long board betwixt us, his shoulders against the wall.
‘So you gave it back.’
Oft-times you don’t choose the stone, Jack Simm had said, reporting the words of Elias the scryer. The stone chooses you.
I didn’t remind Dudley of this: my feeling was that if that stone had chosen me it was not for anything good.
But it hadn’t, anyway. It had been given either as a bribe for my silence or…
I didn’t know enough about the properties of crystal, though I could almost feel its weight again, pressed against the bottom of my gut, the lower mind. Had my clumsy, if heartfelt, invocation of the archangel in some way altered its vibration? Altered me? For altered I was.
‘Smart’s scryer was Gethin,’ I said.
‘And that taints it?’
‘Who can say what was invoked through Gethin’s madness? Who knows what lived in him? You’d really want to risk loosing something… uncertain into the Queen’s—?’
‘All right.’ A gloved hand was raised, a frown flickering across Dudley’s damaged face. ‘I understand. I’m already accused of carrying some satanic spore, so I’ll bow to your superior knowledge of the Hidden.’
I sighed.
‘For the first time in years I’m beginning to wonder if I truly—’
‘You do.’ His bloodied eyes hardened. ‘Never forget that, or you’ll be beggi
ng on the fucking streets.’
I said nothing. Could only wonder if such a simple life as that might not be preferable. Too many things which my poor mind was unable to arrange into the roughest of geometric patterns. I was humbled. I’d lost all faith in the power of my library. I lowered my hands and stared into them, watching them tremble.
‘I suppose… another crystal stone will come. When I’m deemed ready. If ever.’
‘Gethin,’ Dudley said, ‘fixed me with his eye and said I’d be dead within the week, and instead… he is.’
I said carefully, ‘Did you see it done?’
‘Saw his body. Saw it loaded on to a handcart.’
Not what I’d asked.
A silence. The air was like sand.
‘I suppose,’ Dudley said, ‘that I owe you my life.’
‘Not me. Thomas Jones, perhaps.’
‘Tell me I don’t have to thank him.’
‘I doubt he’ll be holding his breath in anticipation. How are you now?’
‘Better.’
As good as his word, for once, John Smart had indeed provided, for Dudley’s recovery, a good bedchamber with window glass. But not at the Bull.
‘How you could stay with the doxy after what she…’
‘Branwen Laetitia Swift,’ Dudley said.
Almost fondly.
‘Did she give you a potion? Did she aid in your abduction?’
All this yet worried me. How could Smart, in his role as her fishmonger and former associate of Gethin’s, not have been part of it? The most likely explanation, it seemed to me now, was that Smart had not realised for a while how high the plot went. Maybe not realised that the target was Lord Robert Dudley, panicked when he found out. Let’s say I thought it was ill-advised and might rebound. On him and his comfortable retirement.
‘Who knows?’ Dudley said. ‘I was taken in the street. Hit from behind, thrown into an alley. Dragged out as if drunk. And then beaten, tied down in a cart.’ He drained his cup. ‘Don’t want to talk about it. It demeans me.’
