The Heresy of Dr Dee

relative dark.

‘Nevertheless, a man not short of gemstones, I’d guess,’ Scory said.

What choice did I have? I told him the beryl was famous as a spiritual device and heard him laugh.

‘The magician arises. You’ve come all this way for a fortune-telling stone?’

‘In the cause of, um, scientific study.’ I was beginning to feel like a prating prick. ‘The way such stones have been studied in Europe.’

He shrugged.

‘I’ll grant you that. I’m hardly in a position to dismiss miracle and magic when we have here in the cathedral the shrine of one of my distant predecessors, whose boiled bones seem to have cured thousands and still draw pilgrimages.’

He meant St Thomas Cantilupe. My library had several manuscripts on the tomb of this most famous bishop of Hereford and other healing shrines where tapers were lit and the bodies of the sick measured to the saints.

‘Indeed,’ Scory said. ‘So a small brown stone dedicated in the names of several prominent angels which not only foretells the future but gives off healing rays—’

‘So you know of it.’

‘I’ve heard of it. But it’s all gossip and myth and legend and I know not where it might be found. But I can tell you that if Smart has it, it won’t come cheap. Unless you – or more likely Lord Dudley – are in a position to, ah, apply some physical pressure?’

‘That was never my intention,’ I said honestly. ‘Do you have any idea where Smart might be found? Assuming he’s still alive.’

‘Oh, he’ll be alive, unless the border’s ridden with some vengeful plague I’ve not yet heard of.’

‘How did he escape… well, at least imprisonment, when the charges against him were presented to Cromwell?’

I was thinking of poor pious Abbot Whiting of Glastonbury, who’d been hanged, drawn and quartered for less.

‘Blood of Christ, Dr Dee,’ Scory said, ‘I didn’t know, until this night, how you yourself escaped the stake at the hands of Bonner. And no, I don’t know where Smart is, though I do hear word of him from time to time. If I were to say…’

His back hunched in deliberation, he walked along the moonlit riverbank, looking down at his entwined fingers.

‘What can I tell you…? Except… as the rest of them are going to Presteigne, why not begin your inquiries there? The Abbey of Wigmore owned most of that town at one time.’

When I told him my cousin, Nicholas Meredith, lived there, Scory’s laughter went skimming over the Wye like a hail of pebbles.

‘And Meredith, I was about to say, owned much of the rest. And now appears to own even more. Oh, yes, he might be a very good man to talk to…’

‘Bishop, I get weary of saying I don’t understand, but—’

‘No, no, no…’ Scory moved away, separating his hands and wiping the air betwixt us. ‘You’ll get no more from me on this particular bag of adders. All I’ll say is it’s worth remembering that Presteigne still has its share of dark alleys. Anyway, you might see me there.’

‘You?’

‘The judge has asked me to give evidence to his court. Come along, Dr Dee. Past my bedtime, and past yours, too, if you don’t want to fall off your horse tomorrow.’

‘Evidence?’

‘In the matter of witchcraft,’ Scory said.

The river licked at the bank below my thin boots, like the sound of quiet, sardonic laughter, and I turned away from it and followed him back to his palace.

XIX Dungheap

FOR A WHILE, the land was all red soil, as if the earth itself had been stained by the blood shed in the Glyndwr wars and the bitter battles through which the Tudors rose.

All was heavy under luminous grey cloud as we rode past the remains of castles, with towers like broken teeth, and bared mottes from which the stone had been stolen to build the farms in the valleys. And then the road was gloomed with forest to either side, dim as a church aisle at dusk, as we made our quiet and watchful way into Wales.

One day you’ll go back, boy. One day.

My tad, Rowland Dee. All for Wales, but he never went back.

Welsh towns and villages… I’d learned that they were all stark and wind-flayed, their stone houses long and low and slit-windowed, as much against the weather as attack. Hard, cold houses occupied by the race of strong, sinewy men my father had spoken of.

Bending to the wind like hawthorn trees, boy, and no less prickly.

My tad describing all this to me as a child as though he, too, had been raised as a man of the mountains. As he was neither sinewy nor hard, I recall wondering if he’d been sent into exile for being insufficiently Welsh.

It was only when the road emerged from the forest and we crested a hill and I was at last looking down upon my family’s local town… that I saw the dispiriting truth of it.

I urged my mare ahead to join Dudley, who was riding alone, having bid his man John Forest to remain in Hereford to receive any mail which might arrive from London and bring it on to Presteigne. Dudley had told me that Thomas Blount, at Kew, was on constant watch for anything new which might emerge in regard to Amy’s death.

And something had happened. Something he could not even whisper about inside this quiet company of judicial strangers.

‘John!’ Dudley calling to me with unnecessary volume, as if to ridicule the silence of the company behind us. ‘Will your letter have reached your cousin yet?’

‘Who knows – can we ever rely on the post? If not we’ll hope for an inn.’

‘Plenty good beds in an assize town… all those fastidious fucking lawyers to accommodate.’

I felt the chilled silence of the attorneys behind us. By now, the wind had died back, but no one spoke above the measured clop of hooves and the creaking of the well-laden carts on the pitted track. Below us, across a quiet river, was tended pasture-land, farms and old cottages with frames of gnarled grey oak.

And this town. This Welsh town.

If the ghost of my tad were with us, I only hoped its face was red.

Lying low at the centre of the well-tamed land, snug as a ground-nesting bird, was this bright and modern country settlement, its buildings elegantly structured with red brick and new timber-framing. I marked a proud, towered church with a flag of St George.

And sensed a glow about the place. A glow of… wealth… contentment?

What the hell?

I called across to Dudley.

‘We didn’t turn back upon ourselves somehow? This is… Wales?’

‘What did you expect?’

‘Didn’t expect it took so much like… like England. More like England than anywhere we’ve passed since Hereford. And that was England.’

I looked out, as if cheated, towards wooded hills. Maybe Wales was a country of the mind that was never reached.

‘Actually, I’m told it gets wilder the further west you go,’ Dudley said. ‘This is an English town in a way, grown rich on the wool trade. One of the canons in Hereford was telling me it’s even on the English side of King Offa’s dyke.’