The Heresy of Dr Dee

‘Was this here when the battle was fought?’ I asked Price.

‘Here, but not lived in. It’s said once to have been the cell of an anchoress, living alone here for many years. But that was long before the battle, when there was just a shrine. The anchoress looked after the shrine, and when she was gone, the brambles took over.’

‘That’s what it’s called? The Bryn. As if it’s part of the hill itself?’

His face twisted.

‘For years, it was Ty Marw.’

I looked at him.

‘The house of death. Charnel house. When someone went in, after the battle, they found it filled to the rafters with dried-out bodies. In the end, they got taken out and buried with the rest, but nobody wanted to live there… until Mistress Ceddol came yere with her brother. I was in London at the time, learning about Parliament and how it all worked.’

‘Was this woman told of its history when they came to live here?’

‘You’ve met the local people, Dr Dee.’

I nodded. They’d tell her, of course they would.

‘She must be a remarkable woman. Or very desperate for somewhere to live.’

‘Made it habitable mostly by herself, last summer. A better summer than this. She and the boy lay nights under bent-over saplings covered with sheepskins, while she worked. Had I been here, I’d’ve found them shelter in the outhouses at Nant-y-groes. I think it was the Puw brothers who came to help in the end – first Pilleth people to go inside the Bryn for generations. And then gradually more of them came to help. She’d insist on paying them with what she was earning through the sale of potions and ointments she’d made from herbs and sheep fat, to sell at the apothecary’s in Presteigne.’

‘Where did they come from, the woman and the boy?’

‘Somewhere north of here, Shropshire mabbe. Driven away from home, she’ll readily admit, because of her brother. Her father couldn’t live with his wailing, his sudden rages, ramblings in the night. Especially when their mother died not long after he was born.’

As if to prove the nuisance of it, there came that vixen shriek from within the little house – within the hill, it sounded like – followed by a woman’s laughter. A smittering of slow rain began to rattle the crispen oak leaves, and Price led us into deeper shelter.

‘Her patience with him appears endless.’

‘The sister brought him up?’

‘No choice. People are afraid of him. Stricken from birth with some malady of the mind. And yet… possessed of this… talent.’

He told me how the boy had found a skull in the foundation for his new barn, Price dismissing it as rookery until, just over a week later, he’d given instruction for a new field drain to be dug, and nobody would sink a spade until Sion Ceddol had been sent to walk the pegged-out route. The boy had stopped three quarters of the way to the last peg where, subsequently, a whole skeleton had been unearthed.

In the oak wood, I carefully prised away a bramble which had coiled like a monk’s manacle around my wrist. The path through the wood ended at the Bryn. It was all too clear that this was our final destination and the reason I’d been brought to Pilleth. The Bryn was either the cause of the sickness or, in some strange way, its possible solution. Whatever Sion Ceddol was possessed of, Price didn’t understand it and was afraid of where it would end, especially under the eyes of the new rector, Daunce.

‘Whenever the boy’s called out to search for bones, he’ll know, and he’ll go there first and mumble his prayers into the ground and then walk away and have no part in what follows. Preaches on a Sunday about the devil in our midst, but he don’t name names. Not yet. But he sows unrest where once there was acceptance.’

‘Acceptance?’

‘There’s always been a wise woman yere, or a cunning man.

The last one died about five years ago. Mother Marged. Blind in both eyes. Blind to the world, but there was a calm around her. After she died, her ghost was said to walk through the village every night just beyond sunset. Me, I think they just wanted to see her, with her hands out in benediction. A comfort. But when the boy came, she was seen no more.’

‘A successor.’

‘Most of the cunning people, they got something wrong with ’em. Blind or deformed. They need your help, and they give it back in kind. Sion Ceddol, he can’t talk, in English or Welsh. The sounds that come out of him, all with dribbling and swivelly eyes, people say it’s the faerie tongue. Most of the time he can’t even walk a straight line. But he walks ’twixt the living and the dead, and there’s no fear in him.’

‘Finds the bones.’

‘En’t only the bones, he’ll show you where to dig for a well. You tell his sister what you need, she gets through to… to where he is. And when he understands, he’s straight to it, like a digging dog. And they’re paid in meat and clothing and a few yards of land and the help to manage it. And if he won’t go in the church after he shit hisself in there once… well, they’ll stand outside and she’ll join in with the hymns and prayers, and the boy’s scampering around the churchyard like a rabbit, making his noises. A harmless idiot.’

‘The rector won’t see it that way,’ I said.

‘No,’ Price said. ‘He don’t.’

I looked out between the wet trees at the low crooked rock-house once called Ty Marw. Built into Brynglas Hill. Grown into the hill. A slow spiral of smoke curled from the hole in the roof, meeting the steady rain.

Now I wanted badly to know about this boy. If he did what they said he did, and how.

‘I can make an introduction, if you like,’ Price said.

I sensed he didn’t want to. Didn’t even want to be here, now that he’d shown me the place.

‘Have you ever been in there?’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘Foolish, ennit?’

‘I’ll go alone,’ I said. ‘See what I can see. And come back to you.’

I felt I was misleading him because this was little more than scientific curiosity on my part, a scrabbling amongst the thickets of the hidden. I marked the relief in his eyes with a certain horror.

The door of the Bryn was black with damp. It was opened as if I’d already knocked upon it, and a woman stood there. As if she knew I was here, though I was sure she couldn’t see us for the trees.

And, oh my God, why had no one warned me about her?

XXX More Than Water

WE ARE MOVED – I know this – according to the configurations of the stars and the interplay of planetary rays. We are moved like chesspieces on a board, and oft-times I think of myself as the knight, placed with an oblique mathematical precision, but unpredictably. The knight, who never knows which direction he’ll be made to face next.

‘My name’s John Dee,’ I said.

Standing betwixt the oak wood and the doorway. Anna Ceddol looked at me with small curiosity. Sion Ceddol scowled and picked up a stick. The rain fell upon the chessboard.

‘My father was born down at Nant-y-groes.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘They’ve talked about you in the village.’

‘My… my tad left many years ago, to live in London. It’s the first time I’ve been here.’

‘The royal conjuror, is it?’ Anna Ceddol said.

No apparent malice or even an awareness of saying anything that might cause offence. Of a sudden, I was weary of denying it. I may even have nodded.

The rain was seeping uncomfortably through my jerkin. Anna Ceddol held the door wider.