The Heresy of Dr Dee

No.

Holding death, John. In his hands.

And me – I was no better. Keeping my voice steady, the words coming out as if spoken by someone else.

It was… a dream. A bad dream, that’s all.

Knowing then, rolling over, staring out at the cold stars, that he’d be back to sleep long before I would.

* * *

‘Who’s the idiot boy, Master Price?’

The sky hung low, like a soiled pillow that might suffocate all below it. Twenty people left in that grey community under the hill. And one of them talking to the dead?

Price stood beside the brown and roiling river, breathing heavily.

‘This boy… latest in a long line of strange folk as fetches up in Pilleth, like it was ordained. But I chose not to believe. Big man, back from London, full of new ideas, man with his eyes open full wide. We… got ourselves a new rector and his eyes is full open, too. Least to some things. To others, his eyes is shut tight. One of the new breed.’

‘A Bible man?’

‘Lutheran to the core, and he don’t like what he sees. Most of all, he don’t like the boy. The idiot. I call him an idiot because there’s no harm in an idiot. But, to the rector, he’s gone to Satan.’

‘Because he talks to the dead?’

‘Because he finds them, Dr Dee. He finds the dead. On the hill. He puts out his hands, and the ole dead… it’s like they reach out to him.’

‘You mean the dead… from the battle?’

Stephen Price stared down into the muddy river. A mewling hawk glid over us.

‘The battle… when it was fought, 1402, they reckon it was a summer just like this. Not much of a summer at all. The ground all waterlogged. Not much of a harvest. Omens. Folk seeing omens everywhere. Like they’re seeing now, with the return of Rhys Gethin.’

‘Prys. And he’s—’

‘A common bandit, aye. But is he? I don’t see omens, but I don’t feel good about Pilleth. And I’m the squire of yere, and my family goes back likely longer than yours, and it’s my responsibility. And it en’t Presteigne, it’s a lonely place, all heavy with ole death. You can’t buy off fear in Pilleth with free pies.’

Oh God. Here it was, coming out backwards and sideways and from under the feet, in the old Border way.

I made a stand.

‘Master Price, some people think… In truth, I’m not a priest. I’m a scholar, a natural philosopher, a man of science. I study. I can’t—’

‘I know what you do, Dr Dee. I once talked to… another MP who knows you. Francis Walsingham?’

‘You talked to Walsingham?’

‘He came to me one time. Asking about your family.’

Well, the bastard would, wouldn’t he? Francis Walsingham traded in intelligence, most of it passed to Cecil in the event of it being required to measure me for the gallows drop.

‘Most complimentary about you, Dr Dee. Told me how much the Queen relies on your advice.’

Reassuring only to a point; if it had suited his or Cecil’s purposes, Walsingham would just as easily have painted me black.

‘I’d thought to write to you, as a local man, kind o’ thing,’ Price said. ‘And then… yere you are, like you been sent by—’

‘No!’ Flinging up my hands. ‘I came in search of a stone, for my experiments. For knowledge… for healing.’

‘Healing. Aye. That’s what’s needed.’

Dear God, I was digging my own pit.

‘Master Price, I have to say this oft-times, but… I don’t… undertake the cure of souls.’

The Squire of Pilleth stood with his back to the flat-topped hill, a stubble of thorn bushes around its summit, half concealing the tower of the church. A church my tad had said was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, whose role was now reduced by the new theology as represented by this new vicar. But not, I guessed, for Stephen Price, clearly much heartened by the thought of a new family home grown from a monastery grange.

Keeping an air of the holy.

‘All I’m asking, Dr Dee, is for advice. Like you give to the Queen.’

‘You’re a clever man, Master Price.’

‘No. I’m a worried man. There’s things I don’t understand. And the dead are rising as never before. A place with more dead than living. Is that good?’

I stared at the ground.

‘Probably not.’

‘Come with me,’ Price said. ‘Come with me up the hill at least.’

XXV Thrown From the Body

MY TAD HAD entertained me, as a boy, with tales of the Glyndwr wars. I can see his face now, reddened by the fire, his eyes bulging like a clown’s as he relates how the rebel leader calling himself Prince of Wales rose against the English King, Henry I V, destroying all the border castles in his path. Oh, the romance of it.

A romance conspicuously missing from Stephen Price’s account of the Battle of Brynglas as we set off up the hill, Price making a hand-gesture at the steepening slope before us.

‘Imagine a thousand dead and dying men. Hear their hoarse whimpers. Many more dead men than there are sheep yere now. Arms and legs and guts. And hogsheads of blood. Imagine the sorely wounded crawling through the plashy pools of blood.’

Tad had claimed once that the Dees were descended from the same family as Glyndwr – well, who of note were we not descended from? But why don’t I remember him ever speaking of the Battle of Brynglas?

‘In a way,’ Stephen Price said, ‘it was almost separate from Glyndwr’s campaign. It was about the Welsh and the Mortimers – the arrogant Norman Marcher lords with their impregnable castles and their contempt for the Welsh – the last true Britons. The lowly Welsh hated the Mortimers. Hate beyond our understanding in these modern days.’

‘If the castles had been impregnable,’ I said, ‘would there be so many bald mounds the length of the border?’

‘Or so many well-built stone farm buildings.’

Stephen Price chuckled bleakly. Looking back, we could see my father’s birthplace, seeming the size of a candle box, and a smaller farmhouse the other side of the bridge, both part of the original Nant-y-groes estate. The English army on that June day must surely have assembled somewhere close to whatever kind of wooden bridge had crossed the river there.

And the Dees… had they just sat and watched from their farms? Or had they taken part? The previously unconsidered question of whose side my family had been on was writ now, in illuminated script across the deep grey sky.

‘They say Edmund Mortimer’s army was a ragbag of peasants, hastily recruited,’ Price said. ‘But that wasn’t it. He knew the Welshman was on his way down from the north and reckoned to crush him for good and all. Grind him into the ground. Mortimer had two thousand in his army, including a core of well-trained fighting men – his own and the men brought along by the knights supporting him. And then there were the archers. Welsh archers, many of ’em – Mortimer pulled his bowmen from both sides of the border. No, it was at least a halfway-proper army.’

‘Yet slaughtered by half as many Welsh?’