‘You’d best come in. You’ll be soaked.’
‘Thank you. I… left my wizard’s hat in my saddlebag in the stable at Nant-y-groes.’
She didn’t smile. The boy, Sion Ceddol, kicked sulkily at a thorn-tree root. About half an acre of ground beside the cottage had been cleared of brambles, bushes and undergrowth. Some of it had been cultivated for vegetables, with rotted horseshit spread on top before the winter. Some appeared good pasture. But there was no stock on it. No chickens pecked the ground.
I went in. The boy followed me, picking up a bundle of small sticks from beside the door. He wore a bright red hat pulled down over his eyes.
‘I… went into the wood to shelter,’ I said. ‘Seeing the rain about to come on.’
She shook her head, as if disappointed that I’d lied so glibly. I felt a weight of shame. I’d not lie again.
‘Stephen Price brought me,’ I said.
The Bryn was even lower than it had seemed from outside. My height, which comes from the men of Kent on my mother’s side, made it impossible for me to stand even with bent neck.
Anna Ceddol pointed to a three-legged stool by the fire, which was on a raised hearth, against one wall, with the smokehole above. Two large upright stones backing on to the wall might have been supports for an ingle beam, had there been one. Rainwater fizzed on the red embers, although I guessed the hill rising so close behind the cottage would be shielding us from the worst of it.
‘Master Price thought I might talk to you,’ I said. ‘And your brother.’
For a moment, Anna Ceddol appeared to smile, and then it was gone, fleet as a clouded moonbeam.
‘Well perhaps not your brother,’ I said. ‘That is—’
‘Master Price doesn’t come here. His wife would not like it.’
‘I’ve not met his wife.’
‘Me neither. A quiet woman. Or so they say. Sits before the kitchen fire, goes out to listen to the priest on a Sunday and then goes home and worries. Quietly.’
No particular expression in her voice, except maybe a resignation. Her overdress was the colour of sacking, its hem frayed and flaked with mud. God’s tears, why had no one warned me about her? I’d seen women this lovely at court, but their faces were paled, their lips reddened like cherries. They were ladies; this was a woman, with all the timeless beauty of an unadorned statue. Long face, full lips, heavy hair. A sense of grace about her… and, although she was slim and lithe, a certain weight.
She said, ‘Can I fetch a drink for you, Dr Dee? We have good water, from a spring. I… regret if I insult you, but they say that the water in London…’
‘No, no, it’s true. The water in London kills.’
She inclined her head. Her eyes were vividly blue, although her hair, all bound into a thick braid, was dark as rich earth. I was somehow glad when she turned away and went to a pitcher which stood amid the rushes on the floor, leaving me sitting in the feebly sparking firelight listening to my own fraught breathing.
The Bryn: from the outside, it had looked like the worst of hovels, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness I saw that the inner walls were all scrubbed and the rushes on the floor clean and dry. The boy sat in a corner beyond the fire, quiet now, but watching me, the way a cat does.
The chessboard expanded and shrank in my fogged head.
‘Mistress,’ I said at last, ‘I confess I know not what I’m doing here.’
‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you were sent to see if we’re drenched in evil?’
‘Mistress, I—’
‘Sooner or later, wherever we go, this is what happens. All’s well till something goes amiss and we’re blamed. And then we’ll move on. They’re good people here, but it can’t be long now before we’re made to go. Not without regret, mind, after all the work we’ve done to make this a home.’
She gave me water in a wooden cup. I drank, tentatively at first, and then… Jesu, liquid alchemy from the rocks, water from Eden.
‘Your brother found this?’
‘One of his less disturbing skills. And our most gainful, I suppose.’
‘He has an instinct for where best to sink wells?’
‘Farmers ever think they can do it, but not many can. Anyway,’ she shrugged, ‘the rector won’t have it in his font.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘The rector.’
‘Anything that can’t be explained, it’s either the will of God and must not be questioned, or the work of Satan… and must be destroyed. And he’s our closest neighbour.’
I watched her solemn face. There was a silken calm behind it that I found almost eerie. What also surprised me was the eloquence of her speech. I’d expected a woman living in such humble circumstance, with an idiot brother, to be uneducated, barely coherent. It was clear now why Stephen Price found her alarming and the rector, held in the ligature of Lutherism, feared the demonic.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I know not what they say about
Found I was leaning from the stool, my voice rising in urgency. Anna Ceddol stared at me, with an evident consternation that reassured me of her humanity. I fell back under the weight of my own inadequacy.
‘I consider myself a natural philosopher. A man of science. Half of London – maybe more than half – yet thinks me a sorcerer, and not so many years ago I was close to being burned for it. And you know the bitter truth of this, Mistress Ceddol? I can rhyme off the theory for hours… but I can’t do what your brother’s said to do. Nothing approaching it.’
‘Then perhaps,’ she said, ‘you should thank God for that.’
‘Mistress, I
I drained my cup of the sublime water that Sion Ceddol, the idiot, had found in the rocks of Brynglas.
‘I yet need something of which to make sense,’ I said.
Some of my long-held despair doubtless showing itself – to a stranger in a house like a cave.
‘My brother?’ She smiled at last, though it was smirched with rue. ‘Does it not occur to you that when the circumstances of birth leave a child damaged or crippled in his body or his mind then sometimes God will make amends by giving him other gifts?’
‘I think,’ I said carefully, ‘that this is not always true.’
‘No.’ She looked into the fire. ‘I suppose not. Sometimes I wish God had left him alone with his ills. We’ve been driven from too many towns. At first they value him and then, when there’s water enough for everyone…’
‘It’s more than water, isn’t it?’
Mistress Ceddol drew a bench across the rushes, so that she sat opposite me, the fire betwixt us. The boy crawled across the floor and nestled close to her skirts, looking at me, wide-eyed but silent.
‘The dead?’ She tossed back her dense, braided hair like a ship’s mooring rope. ‘What do you want me to say? That the dead have been kinder to him than the living? Look… what happens with the bones… that’s not happened before. Only here.’
‘The obvious explanation being the large number of bones here,’ I said. ‘So close to the surface.’
Now looking away, though, because I knew it was more than the physical fact of broken bodies absorbed into the hill. This countryside reeked of the numinous. Why else had it been chosen for a shrine to the holy virgin, its spring sanctified, probably to more than one god?
‘What I’m saying…’ Anna Ceddol squeezed her eyes shut, her calmness lost for a moment to exasperation. ‘…and what I’ve said to others… is that the bones are not the dead. Only what’s left.’
‘But what of the man who was found more recently dead? And… cut about.’
With no warning, the boy let out his vixen shriek, and I sprang back in alarm, almost toppling the stool.
Sion Ceddol grinned. Anna Ceddol pressed down upon his red hat, and he squirmed and giggled, and she laughed for his benefit but addressed me in a darker humour, her eyes steady and intense.
