And what had happened in the thirty long years since I lectured in the celebrated School of the Sorbonne with learned scholars for pupils and a King and a Duke eager to hear me? Which was the thorn bush that had caught the eagle’s wings as it strove toward the sun? In what fowler’s net had he become enmeshed so that an eagle shared with thrushes and finches the fate of a household pet, and still had to thank the Lord that he had not shared the pot with partridges?!
On that tranquil Easter morning I saw my whole life pass before me: not in the usual manner as one would speak of memories of the past; I saw my physical body, the larval form of each period of my life, and from my earliest awareness to the present day I have tasted again and again the torment of having to crawl back into each cast-off husk of the body. But this voyage through the hell of my vain endeavours was still not without its usefulness, for my astonishment threw a harsh, clear light on the confused route of my wanderings. And it seemed good to me to use this day and the experience it had brought me and to write down all that I had “seen”. So I shall use these pages to record everything that has happened in the last twenty-eight years as a Rhodri Mawr – Roderick the Great – of Wales was my ancestor and Hywel Dda – Hywel the Good –, who has been celebrated in folk songs down the centuries, is the pride or our line. Thus I come from a line of blood that is older than that of the “twin roses” of England and as royal as any that has ruled in the Kingdom.
My pride in our blood is no whit lessened by the fact that the lands and titles of the Earls of Dee have been blown away by the winds of time. My father, Rowland Dee, Lord of the Manor of Gladhill, a madcap and a rake-hell, preserved little of the family inheritance apart from the fortress of Deestone and tolerably extensive estates, the rent from which sufficed to gratify both his coarse passions and his inexplicable ambition to cultivate in me, his only son and the last of the ancient line, a blossom that would renew the old glory of our house.
As if he were determined to make good the omissions of generations of Dees, he restrained his wild nature wherever my future was concerned and although he only observed me from afar and we were as different in character as fire and water, yet it is him alone that I have to thank that my every inclination was allowed free rein and every wish, however contrary to his own, was granted. This man, who had a horror of all books and naught but mockery for all learning, most solicitously encouraged the development of my intellectual gifts and ensured, herein showing his old pride, that I enjoyed the most excellent schooling, as any rich and honourable gentleman in England. In London and Chelmsford he retained the first teachers of the day.
I completed my studies at St. John’s College in Cambridge in the company of the noblest and keenest minds in the country. And when, at the age of twenty-one I received my Master of Arts from Cambridge, it was bought neither with money nor influence. On that occasion, my father gave a feast at Deestone which compelled him to mortgage one third of his possessions in order to pay the truly royal debts which he had incurred in celebrating my graduation as sumptuously as possible. It was soon after that that he died.
As my mother, a quiet and sensitive woman whose life had been embittered, had died many years ago, I found myself at twenty-two the sole heir to a not inconsiderable estate and an ancient name.
If at first I so strongly emphasised how contrary our two natures were, I did it on purpose to reveal the miracle of the soul of a man who, himself living only for the clash of arms, the roll of dice, the excitement of the hunt or the cup, yet held the seven free arts, which he surely despised, important enough to hope they might, through my love of them, bring new glory to what was a somewhat blotched and weatherbeaten family escutcheon. However, I did not want to suggest that I myself had not inherited a goodly part of my father’s wild and unbridled nature. Drinking, brawling and other, even more questionable sides to my character had, in earlier years, led me into the most ticklish situations, at times even into mortal danger. The old affair with the leader of the Ravenheads – a youthful prank as much as a real revolt – was by no means the worst, though it was to have the most fateful consequences for my life.
So it was a devil-may-care love of adventure and a complete lack of concern about the future which led me, immediately upon my father’s death, to leave my castle and estate in the hands of my steward and to travel the world like a lord with more than sufficient means at my disposal. I attended the great Schools at Louvain and Utrecht, at Leyden and Paris, attracted by the company of scions of the noblest houses in Europe and also, of course, by their blossoming reputation in the Natural and Occult Sciences.
I studied under Gemma Frisius, worthy successor to Euclid in the northern latitudes, and under the celebrated Gerardus Mercator, foremost among men skilled in measuring the earth and the heavens. I returned home with a reputation in Mathematics and Astronomy second to none in England. And all this before I had completed my twenty-fourth year! I felt no
