The Heresy of Dr Dee

nobody’d get caught, and that’d only make it worse.’

Price looked up.

‘All torn as if killed in battle, this man. But dead no more’n a day. Naked. We never found his apparel. Or his cock.’

‘You hid a murder?’

‘All gone,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘A bloody, black hole. Nothing in his mouth. Not much mouth left. Face was carved up. Beyond recognising.’

‘Master Price, let me get this right. You are saying this was done by human means.’

‘Not crows, nor foxes. Well, God’s blood, what was I supposed to do, Dr Dee? Nobody knowed about him except Pedr Morgan and Mistress Ceddol. And no local man was missing, far as I could ascertain, not yere, not in Presteigne, not in—’

‘Who’s Mistress Ceddol?’

‘Sister of the mad boy who finds the dead. She en’t mad, not by any means. Her and Morgan comes to me. Me. Stephen Price of Pilleth, the squire. Bad summer, nights full of ghosts, best tell Stephen Price, of Pilleth. Ask Stephen Price of Pilleth what he’s gonner do about the man carrying the spirit of Rhys Gethin back to Brynglas. Ask him what he’s gonner do about a dead man with no cock…’

‘Master Price—’

‘What would you do, Dr Dee?’

I didn’t know. I yet couldn’t think why he was telling me, a stranger. A student of natural philosophy.

‘There’s nothing of the Hidden about a man fresh-killed,’ I said. ‘Though, given what was done to him, and given when it was done, you might be talking about supporters of Plant Mat out to revive old fears.’

Price nodded soberly.

‘A good reason, it seemed to me, not to go to the sheriff. Hue and cry, the spreading of terror…’

‘Is it your feeling that this might be Plant Mat? Putting out a warning of what might happen if Gethin hangs?’

‘If nobody knows, there won’t be no terror.’

‘So you buried him.’

‘Drags him into the ole sheep shelter, covers him with straw. And then we… we come at night and takes him out and Pedr Morgan digs a grave by candlelight and we buries him, and yere he lies.’

‘Here? Where we stand?’

‘Not yere. Be too obvious. We couldn’t leave no sign of a burial.’ Price considered for a moment, before jerking a thumb behind him, down the valley towards the river. ‘There’s an ole tump down there beyond the trees. Nobody goes there.’

‘Tump?’

‘Grave of the ole Britons, down by the river.’ He pointed. ‘Other side of the wood down the western slope.’

‘An ancient burial mound?’

‘Nobody goes near them. You know that.’

Always been superstition about ancient mounds, warning tales of what had happened to treasure hunters who had plundered them – usually finding nothing.

‘We dug a deep hole in the side, put him in.’ Price’s voice, of a sudden, was raw as bone. ‘Pedr Morgan, he was frit to hell, but we didn’t have no choice.’

He was still turned away from the river as if he could not bear to remember what he’d done. It was yet unclear to me why I’d been told. Why share the secret of a misdemeanour with a stranger?

But Stephen Price wasn’t letting go. He insisted we should walk to the village, or what remained of it. Leading me on the path towards the church until it divided and the cluster of grey cottages was revealed gradually, through thinning trees already shedding their rusty leaves.

And at last, with a strange heart-lurch, I saw it.

Rowland Dee’s Wales, where men were bent to the wind like thorn trees, their skin scoured raw, while the light – ever-changing but ever cold – was chopping their world into jagged shards of anguish.

XXVIII The Jury

A CRAB, WHEN threatened, may move sideways.

Dudley, disgusted to find himself alarmed, slips into an alleyway, pulling out a kerchief, scrubbing at the unexpected sweat. Hands flat on a stone wall, forehead pressed into a patch of damp moss, he draws long breaths until his foul fear is reborn as fury.

But the single eye of Prys Gethin is yet boring through him, a dark diamond turning in bone.

It’s not the you’ll die within a year that’s affected him. There have been times when he’s been told he’ll be dead within the hour. It’s the words that followed, none of which he understood. He’s been cursed in French and cursed in Spanish, and the spittle-slicked tirades barely reached him before they went to vapour. Gethin’s language, he knows, is far older in these islands than his own and comes out like clotted honey, every opaque sentence an incantation.

It annoys him, the way a common brigand hides his villainy under a cloak of false patriotism, assuming a resonant name and the glow of dark magic around a long-dead national hero.

Dudley reminds himself why he’s here. Prays silently, feeling around himself – as oft-times I’ve advised him – a white-gold protective light. I hold this to be angelic light but Dudley, I suspect, sees the glitter of the English crown. He and the Queen, twin souls, born – he yet insists – in the same hour of the same day, under the sign of Cancer, the crab. Dancing together with effortless elegance, iridescent like dragonflies on the water, peering with delight into the pools of one another’s minds.

But Dudley never wants to hear Bess using words like those which issued from that prison cart. Regardless of the trail of horseshit left behind by her grandfather, he doesn’t want to believe that the woman he desires more than long life is, in any respect, Welsh.

Prising himself from the stone wall, he stands warily at the top of the alleyway, watching a goodwife of Presteigne bartering for bruised apples. A foretelling of his death will ever send him in angry pursuit of something life-affirming.

Within moments, he’s marked the woman wearing a green velvet gown, easily the most expensive in the market, and the kind of French hood once favoured by the Queen’s mother. Carrying an empty basket over an arm, buying nothing.

Dudley watches this woman for no more than a minute before wandering over to stand quietly next to her at a stall selling pomegranates from the Holy Land.

At once, she’s aware of his presence and, with a twist of the hips, is looking up into his eyes.

‘A true feel of autumn today, master.’

‘Yes,’ Dudley says. ‘It may rain again.’

‘A good day to be indoors.’

‘Preferably upstairs,’ Dudley says, ‘in case of flood.’

‘Ever a sensible precaution.’

Dudley nods soberly at the wisdom of this.

‘Are you with an attorney, mistress?’

‘Not at the moment. They haven’t caught me yet.’

She looks him up and down, her gaze lingering on those exceptional riding boots. Now he can smell her perfume. And her interest.

‘You live near here, mistress?’

‘Within a short walk.’