The Heresy of Dr Dee

‘What’s it mean?’

‘All these heathen sacred places all clustered together. The river and the hill. It’s clear that in the time before Christ some places were seen as more suited to worship and communion with the beyond. Places where there might be passage through the spheres, one to another.’

Dudley took a step back, cider spilling over his wrist.

‘Beg mercy, John, I may have asked the wrong question. What I meant was, what the fuck does any of this matter?’

I looked up at him, perhaps vaguely.

‘I don’t know. I need to think on it. But it’s clear, is it not, that the battlefield was chosen by Glyndwr and Rhys Gethin? And Glyndwr studied magic and would see the power in this place.’

‘Jesu,’ Dudley said wearily. ‘You never change, do you? This is all because some failed MP from the rear benches asks you to explain why his village is dying on its feet.’

‘My father’s village.’

‘Your father’s dead! And it was so much his village that he took the first opportunity to put it a three-day ride behind him and never go back to the dismal hole.’

I shook my head. I’d fought against it and lost, for reasons I’d refused even to explain to myself.

‘I felt no particular kinship with it at first. Felt nothing of my tad there. And then mysteries appeared. As important, in their way, as… as the shewstone, I suppose.’

‘As important to the Queen?’

‘Possibly not.’

‘Your mysticism leads you by the nose,’ Dudley said. ‘So Pilleth’s dying. Villages die all the time, from the plague, or the river dries up, or—’

‘One more day.’

‘You’re going back?’

‘Maybe not more than half a day.’

Dudley thrust his face up to mine.

‘Can it be that you’ve forgotten why we came here? You’re leaving me to find the shewstone, while you waste another day trying to restore the reputation of the fucking Dees?’

‘Give me one day, Robbie,’ I said. ‘Just one day.’

* * *

Maybe I should’ve told him about the Ceddols. Maybe if he’d known there was a startlingly beautiful and mysterious woman in Pilleth he would even have come with me.

Maybe some people would not have died so cruelly.

Maybe.

But I said nothing. When I crept from my truckle at first light, my head was all full of writings about a man called Agricola who I thought might answer the mystery of Sion Ceddol. And Dudley was yet sleeping in the high bed.

The early ostler was saddling my faithful mare when, of a sudden, he climbed the ladder to his loft and returned with a fold of stiff paper.

‘Left for you last night, master.’

John, the message said. We must needs talk, boy. Alone. And with some urgency.

Had there been any sign of Thomas Jones on the streets of Presteigne as I rode out, I would of course have stopped.

Maybe I should have asked him where he was lodging.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

Dear God.

PART FOUR

… that he the said abbot hath lived viciously, and kept to concubines divers and many women that is openly known.

… that the said abbot doth yet continue his vicious living, as it is known, openly.

… that the said abbot hath spent and wasted much of the goods of the said monastery upon the foresaid women.

Articles to be objected against John Smart, Abbot of the Monastery of Wigmore, in the county of Hereford, to be exhibited to the Right Honourable Lord Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal

XXXII Given Back

NOW THAT WE were well into autumn, the mist was dense and speckled with white and gold, showing that the sun was yet alive somewhere. The boy was running ahead of us into the mist, arms flung wide, flapping like the wings of a ground-hopping bird.

Not entirely of this world, I’d have sworn that.

‘Sometimes,’ Anna Ceddol said as we pursued him up the hill, ‘I think I can see lights around him. Little winking lights at his shoulders.’

People talk of foreshadows of the End-time. Lights in the sky. Prophecy in dreams. Voices in the night. Footsteps in empty rooms. The dead among the living. I hear of these things all the time. I draw glyphs and sigils and mark wondrous geometry in the night sky to calcule how celestial configurations might alter our humour. Yet how can I know what is real and what is imagined?

He spun, red-crested, amongst the curling leaves, swirling in the energy of autumn. He was of nature, she said. The woods would feed him. He would wind himself around the twisted trees, occasionally snapping off twigs which would come alive like extra fingers, twitching and dipping.

Although not so much now. He seemed to find that unnecessary now, she said, as though he could conjure invisible twigs and follow where they led.

Natural magic.

‘You took it up there?’

Anna Ceddol had stopped halfway up the slope, drawing her woollen shawl around her. The church tower had appeared above the trees. I looked at her, worried.

‘I thought to take it somewhere he might not normally go. Was that wrong?’

The secret, she’d said earlier, is in making him want to do it. He has no care for how you regard him. Will show no real love for any of us. Only need, which is not the same. He feels only for himself, and oft-times, it’s hard not to think the worst of him.

‘Not,’ she said, ‘if it proves something to you.’

But I saw she was anxious.

Once you understand, you can feel only pity… the pity that you know he’ll never feel for you. You can’t teach him to obey commands, like a dog, because a dog wants to please and he doesn’t care. You have to know when to catch his attention and point it at what you seek.

What he was seeking now, on Brynglas Hill, was an earth-browned thigh bone.

Anna Ceddol had presented it to me while he was outside.

His favourite bone. The first he found here, a few feet from our door. I could never take it to be