The Heresy of Dr Dee

However important it may be that all possibilities of an acquittal for Prys Gethin should be sealed like cracks in the masonry, Robert Dudley, as an English gentleman, yet finds it distasteful that Sir Christopher Legge should feel the need to bring his own jurymen.

And however much he now wants the swift disposal of the man who slipped him a smiling curse from the back of a cart, Dudley begins to wonder, for the first time, what might be hiding behind the facade of this small, provincial trial.

XXIX Betwixt the Living and the Dead

DEAR GOD, MY father had me trapped. Walking towards the village, he was with us all the way. I saw him sitting before our Christmas fire, mellowed by good wine, telling me about my forebears, all the way back to Arthur. All for Wales, my tad.

All for this?

Jesu.

Poor Pilleth, all grey and cowering. Huddled under the hill, waterlogged paths separating the mean, sunken homes with their mud and rubblestone walls, their rotting roofs, smoke-holes in the ridges and maybe a dozen small, shuttered windows.

There was a glow of life here, but only as from a rush-light which burns feebly and lives not long. And the shade of Rowland Dee.

‘Said he’d be in London for five years at the outside,’ Goodwife Thomas laughing shrilly. ‘Just enough time for him to scrape some of the gold off the streets, he used to say. Scrape the gold off the streets!’

Oh, I could hear that, the way he’d say to my mother, A proper tapestry, one day, Janey. Telling you now, I am, as God’s my living witness, you’ll be ripping down the ole wall hangings by New Year, you mark my words, girl.

My tad, a good-looking, lively boy for whom, everyone knew, Pilleth and even Presteigne were too small.

‘And then he’d be coming back, see, to put glass in all our windows,’ Goodwife Thomas said. ‘Glass, master! Glass for the likes of we! Well… we knew we’d never see him again, but he was never thrifty with his dreams.’

How true that was. I brushed aside a small, bitter tear as if it were a fly. Goodwife Thomas, sparse-haired and thin as a rib, was laughing again, saying she could see some of him in me, so mabbe he’d come back after all, Master Rowly.

‘My, but you’re a good-looking boy, too, Dr Dee. Have you no wife?’

Trying to press upon me a slice of her bara brith but, seeing how little of it remained and knowing how few berries the summer would have yielded, I refused, with many thanks, saying I’d eaten too well at Nant-y-groes.

A mean wood fire burned beneath a stewpot. Children’s faces peered out of the smoky gloom. Stephen Price had said the Thomas family lived in Pilleth’s best house – a long house with barn attached for the animals, not that there were many now. When a dwelling was abandoned its fabric was plundered to strengthen the others.

‘Dr Dee advises the Queen,’ Price said. ‘He can help us.’

I felt near-sick. What the hell had Walsingham told him about me?

‘Tell him about your grandson.’

Wariness washed over me with the realisation of who her grandson must be. The old woman bowed her head.

‘He don’t want to know our troubles.’

‘I want him to know,’ Price said. ‘He’s one of us. Rowly’s boy. He’s studied these matters, he can see what we can’t because we’re too close to it.’ He turned to me. ‘In the weeks before his death, the boy’s dreams were troubled. He saw the church afire again and the graves—’

‘Stephen,’ Goodwife Thomas said. ‘No more.’

‘Didn’t he say he saw the old graves opened and awoke and wouldn’t go back to sleep for fear of what he seen coming from the graves?’

‘Please, Stephen…’ The old woman leaning forward on her bench. ‘The rector, he said the devil had got in him and we must not speak of it. The boy took his own life and that’s one of the worst of sins.’ Wiping her eyes with a cloth. ‘And I want to pray for his soul. But I don’t… I don’t know where it is.’

Behind her, a child had begun to sniffle. From outside in the misty distance, there came a yelping cry. Like to a vixen, but I knew it was human.

* * *

‘You see?’ Price said, as we walked to the wooded end of the village. ‘You see how things are? They’re afraid even to call out to God.’

We passed two ruined hovels, whose roofs had long ago been burned, only the blackened walls remaining. I was thinking that nobody I’d met in Pilleth, not the Thomases nor the Lewises nor the Puws – none of the small farmers who had known him – had made reference to my tad as a dishonest man. Nobody gave indication that they had any knowledge of what I’d been doing in London, only – well, well, Duw, Duw – this slow-smiling surprise at meeting Rowly Dee’s boy after all these years. Gareth Puw, who was also the village blacksmith, said he’d heard the new Queen was oft-times to be seen around London and was very friendly to the people, and had I ever seen her myself? I admitted that I had, said she was fair of face and full of good humour… and left it at that.

There was a quiet civility amongst these people, a hospitality I knew they could not afford. But no merriment. Even the children looked wan-faced and listless, and the air was chill, and the clouds hung like smoke from a damp fire. The sense of a community closing in upon itself. I guessed doors would be barred at sunset, tapers lit in windows, for those who could afford them.

But they would not talk about what Stephen Price wanted them to talk about.

‘The whole village will die around them,’ he said, ‘and they won’t question it.’

On the edge of the village, a door opened as we approached it, and we heard a thin wailing from within, and then a man emerged, a narrow man in a long coat.

‘Child’s gone, Master Price,’ he said without preamble.

He was built like a broken archway, face white as plaster.

Stephen Price sighed.

‘One left.’ The narrow man’s voice was from his nose. ‘The one they thought would go last year, but yet hangs on. The Lord God decides, as ever.’

I saw Price’s body quake.

‘And that’s all you got to say, is it?’

‘What would you have me say?’

‘Mabbe the Lord God got more time for some places than he got for others,’ Price said with bitterness.

A distant smile.

‘I’ll pray for you, too, Master Price.’

The man looked briefly at me and pulled his black coat around him and moved away with high, pecking steps, like a raven, as the door was barred from within.

I said, ‘That’s your rector?’

‘Matthew Daunce. Gone back to his lair, in the trees above the village.’

‘God,’ I said.

* * *

It was set tight into the hillside itself, framed by thorn trees whose twisting branches were grown over its walls. Its roof was well mossed and its open doorway like to a crack in the rockface.

This squat and crooked dwelling had not been visible during our ascent of the hill. We’d had to pass through the village and stand within a small wood of stunted oak to see it unobserved.