The Heresy of Dr Dee

‘Make a list.’

‘But if it was someone who wanted to make sure you would not wed the Queen, surely it were better than Amy lived.’

‘Ah, well, you would think that, wouldn’t you? But then… perhaps you wouldn’t.’

He turned sharply and began to walk quickly away, back along the route we’d come, across the street towards the castle mound, me striding after him.

And then he called back, over a shoulder,

‘Suppose someone killed her… so she wouldn’t die?’

‘What?’

He stopped, panting, at the foot of the castle mound.

‘Yes, all right… I may have told Bess what Amy had said. About having a mortal illness. Maybe a sickness of the breast, I don’t know exactly what I said. But why the hell she had to tell that scheming bastard la Quadra, who yet wants her for the King of Spain… or some muffin appointed by Spain to snatch England back for Rome…’

‘She’d have told the Spanish ambassador simply to give Spain the message that marriage to you might no longer be out of the question. She probably regretted it as soon as it was out.’

Both of us knowing the Queen was sometimes inclined to speak with insufficient forethought, even on matters of world significance.

‘And meanwhile la Quadra blabs,’ Dudley said. ‘The man has a mouth like a slop pail. How many people have told you what the Queen said?’

He’d started to climb the castle mound between shadowy stacks of broken masonry and bushes of broom and gorse, snatching at handfuls of grass, calling back at me.

‘Jesu, John, are you not seeing this yet? If my wife had died of natural cause…’

Close to dark now, bats flittering overhead, and…

… and dear God, yes, I was seeing it now. I followed him up the mound, tripping over a slab of masonry, picking myself up, my hands slimed with mud and dew, Dudley shouting back at me, too loud.

‘If it was a natural cause, then I’d be not only free but blameless.’

Yes. For his enemies, the worst of all situations. So if Amy was to die in an unnatural way before her time – however short that time might be…

I reached the flattened top of the mound just as the last of the sun, dull as an old coin, slid down into the western hills. Soot-dark hills which gave a sense of the real Wales, its isolation, its secrecy.

… killed… so she wouldn’t die.

God…

Dudley was facing me with hands on hips.

‘If her death is unnatural, then I’m yet free but, in most people’s eyes, far from blameless. Even if nothing can be proved against me.’

‘What are you going to do, Robbie?’

‘Try not to get killed as well, I suppose. A good many men would feel justified in doing it, if I’m seen to have escaped justice for the wilful murder of my wife.’

If someone had killed Amy expecting Dudley to be held responsible and then to walk away in shame, retire to the country to live out his years in the comparative seclusion of the English squirearchy… then they knew him not as I did.

He ran fingers across the wreckage of his beard.

‘Life seems as dark to me now as when I was in the Tower awaiting the block.’

‘But if you were to find out who killed Amy…?’

‘How? Through a fucking shewstone?’ He raised both hands. ‘Ah… mercy. Look… even if it were possible to discover the killer, it would rather depend, methinks, on who it was.’

There were names I wouldn’t say out loud beyond the walls of my own home. What a wasp’s nest this country was become.

It was cold on that mound. I knew not who’d built the castle or who had destroyed it – maybe Glyndwr. But there was a feeling of hostility here; we were not wanted. I looked down at Presteigne. How tidily it sat. Glimmerings, as tapers were lit behind the windows of the wealthy.

‘Let’s go back,’ Dudley said.

I followed him, feeling sad to the soul. What if Amy had been lying about her illness to see what response she’d get from Dudley? What if she was suffering from no more than a malady of the mind, grown out of a profound loneliness?

A plea for love answered by death.

XXIII Dark Alleys

WE WALKED BACK into the town, me in a grey fog, to find that a crowd was gathered around the sheriff’s house. Pitch torches blazed either side of the gates, their reflected flames riffling like lilies on the puddles where a group of men had dismounted, ostlers hurrying to take the horses.

The sheriff’s company was back and without Prys Gethin. I saw Vaughan addressed by a red-faced man in a muddied jerkin and moved closer to listen.

‘… his humour, Roger?’

Vaughan muttered something, and the red-faced man groaned, threw up his hands, then turned and addressed the crowd.

‘Too foul, it is, see. Not safe to make the journey before nightfall. Not with a prisoner the Welsh want back.’

Evidently this year’s sheriff, Evan Lewis. His promise to ride out again to New Radnor on the morrow brought a sour response, a man asking, with sarcasm, what would happen if it was pissing down again.

‘Let him go, is it, Evan, so he’ll catch a cold?’

A rope of damp pennants fell from the darkening sky, evidently cut down. Made a mocking garland around the sheriff’s hat, Lewis wrenching it away, shouting over a river of laughter.

‘We’ll hold the trial at New Radnor, then. That what you want? Is it?’

I turned to Dudley.

‘That even possible?’

‘He’s jesting. You think he’d deprive the goodfolk of Presteigne of an entertainment they’d waited twenty years for?’

‘This talk of curses…’

‘Talk of curses? God’s bollocks, John, looks to me that Plant Mat’s brought nothing but good fortune to this town. Given it the Great Sessions, and now a good hanging? They should throw a feast for the bastard before he dangles.’

I’d found it interesting, though, the way the sheriff had said the Welsh wanted Gethin back. As if it was accepted that Presteigne was not truly Wales. Admittedly, we hadn’t been long in the town, but I’d yet to hear someone speak the language.

Evan Lewis, scowling, passed through his own gates to face the judge. Dudley turned away, in the direction of the Bull, and I was about to follow him, when someone stepped purposefully between us.

‘Dr Dee?’

By a torch’s fizzing light, I marked a man of about my own height, perhaps a few years older and fairer of hair and skin. Clad as a country gentleman in fine leather jerkin and boots that stood well in foot-deep puddles.

‘Nicholas Meredith,’ he said.