The Heresy of Dr Dee

King’s cooks how to make them for the royal table. I’d told the housekeeper this, and she’d given me one to eat and said she remembered Master Rowly when he was a boy, him and all his jests. But the taste of the Welsh cake brought back only memories of Mortlake.

At the riverside, I turned to Stephen Price.

‘You said you recalled my father?’

‘I well recall him. Too young, mind, to know him as a man. I was sent away to an uncle up at Llanbister, to be tutored, as you might say, in the arts of marketing and butchery. When I came back, Master Dee was gone to London. Sought to look him up when I was down there for the parliaments, but he was dead by then.’

‘Must have been strange,’ I said, ‘coming back from London to this…’

‘Wilderness?’ It was the first time I’d seen him smile. It found shape as slowly as his way of speech. ‘Never thought of it that way, Dr Dee. Not till I came back that first time after three weeks in London. Couldn’t settle back to it, not for a while. So quiet after London that you were listening to your own breaths.’

‘Did Nicholas Meredith ever live out here?’

‘Not that I’d know. Presteigne boy, see. Presteigne… it en’t London, but it aims to be.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t enquire into the doings of Master Meredith or how he got his money. En’t my business, and I’m living in a house that belongs to him and plan to carry on leasing the farm after we moves out to Monaughty. But the way he was to you last night… spoke of more than I could understand.’

I looked him in the eyes.

‘Left me mystified, also,’ I said.

‘Injured, too, I’d reckon. Come all this way, and your own family don’t wanner know you.’

‘I suppose.’

A pensive tightening of Price’s lips.

‘You must needs have care,’ he said at last. ‘Big man in Presteigne now. Him and Bradshaw. Ole John Bradshaw, down from Ludlow with all his wool money and the lease on most of the abbey property from the Crown. So Presteigne’s yet owned by England, and the Council of the Marches gets its bidding done by the wool men. Who are also the magistrates, and so on. You getting the picture?’

‘Do you know anything at all of the last Abbot of Wigmore? John Smart?’

‘You keeps coming back to that, Dr Dee.’

‘He’s the reason I’m here. He’s said to have in his charge a gemstone – a crystal stone, a beryl, I believe, which I and my colleague hope to acquire from him. For my research.’

‘On the Queen’s behalf?’

‘Everything I do,’ I said honestly and more than a little sadly, ‘is for the Queen’s Majesty.’

‘What you do… relating to the Hidden?’

‘One day it will no longer be hidden. Open to everyone. That’s my hope.’

Thinking of my library, which anyone who could read was free to consult, not that many did.

‘You think that’s wise, Dr Dee? That all should be known?’

Stephen Price was watching me. It seemed that Dudley had been right, this man wanted something from me – perhaps what Vaughan had hinted at on the road to Hereford – and, in his border way, was taking the long route. I, however, continued to be direct and honest.

‘What I’m seeking, Master Price, is a stone through which I believe knowledge can be obtained. The kind of knowledge that can’t be learned from books or tutors, only by the lifting of the mind. It’s said to have healing qualities. And is in the possession of John Smart. Do you know him?’

‘Knows of him, that’s all. A holy knave, by all accounts. Babbies everywhere.’

‘You know if he’s yet about?’

‘Never had cause to. He don’t enter my life. I got enough troubles. Some of the ole monks, they never went away. Abbots, you don’t see much of them, but he could be around.’

If Price knew more, it was clear he felt not safe in the discussion of it. He folded his arms, rocking to and fro at the river’s edge. Looking up for a hint of sun, to work out the time.

I said, ‘You think they’ll have brought their prisoner from New Radnor?’

‘Sure to.’

‘You said last night that you had no wish to watch all the glee. I think you said paid- for glee.’

‘Time off work, free pies. A holiday. A fair.’

‘To cover up fear?’

He eyed me.

‘Feel it, did you, in Presteigne?’

‘Not to any great extent.’

‘Pies are working then, ennit?’ He looked up at the hill, a pale green wall before us: steep sides, a flat top. ‘Nothing works yere.’

‘Brynglas Hill?’

‘And Pilleth. The village. What’s left of it.’

He took in a long breath, as if he was absorbing something of the humour of the place.

‘There was no village left even before the battle, see. Just Nant-y-groes and a couple more farms, a way off. When they thought the battle was forgot, my ancestors set aside some ground east of the hill to build houses for a blacksmith, and woodsmen, cottagers to work the land. Then they rebuilt the church that was burned down, and Pilleth was become a proper village, mabbe for the first time. Seventy folks there at one time, they reckon. Mabbe twenty-five now.’

I waited in silence, recalling Vaughan’s words.

A place where a thousand men have been slaughtered is not exactly the easiest place to make a home.

Price looked up the hill towards the church, which Brynglas held, as it were, to its breast.

‘When I was told, as a boy,’ he said, ‘that you wouldn’t find no sheep up there after sundown, I never questioned it.’

‘The sheep won’t sleep on the hill?’

‘Nor anywhere ’twixt the hill and the river. As a man, riding to London, I never thought about it. It was just ole country lore. In London, I’d be with men who’d laugh. Or mabbe men such as yourself, who’d say, but why’s it true?’

‘And?’

‘In Pilleth, it just is.’ Price stood solid as a boar, his back to the river. ‘This is a hard place to live. I been told nobody should be living yere at all. But the folks at Pilleth, they’ve learned how to withstand what has to be withstood. And I thought they were stronger for it, but now I en’t sure. I never quite seen the truth of it till I went away and come back. And even then it took a while. Well, London – you know what that’s like.’

‘The biggest, noisiest city in the world.’

‘Aye, and back from London, you think you’re a big man – MP for Radnorshire. But what’s it mean? Less than it sounds. You’re rarely called to Parliament, and your vote don’t count for more’n a fart – Privy Council opens a window and it’s gone. And then you come back home, with all your big ideas, to find they’ll pay more heed to an idiot boy as talks to the dead. ’Cause that’s real, for them. That’s there.’

What?

I said carefully, ‘Some matters… some matters are as hard – if not harder – for men of intellect to discuss as they are for the uneducated.’

Looking out over the pale brown river and thinking of Dudley, as he’d been this dawn as I dressed and prepared to leave for Nant-y-groes. Dudley mumbling about bad dreams, but sleepily.

Not in the way he had some hours earlier. No screams, no sweat, no panting. No…

* * *

Jesu… he’s gone.

Who?

Sitting up on his high bolster, clutching the bed curtains.

You didn’t see him? Standing beside your bed?