The Heresy of Dr Dee

possesses rare natural skills of a kind which are yet… fully explicable by emerging science. I’d like to… to help him develop them.’

‘That’s not possible.’

She stumbled on, the mist gathering more densely around us. Her head was lifted to the obscured sky, and her lips were moving in what looked to be rapid prayer, as we came up to the church’s grey walls. The tower was darkly garlanded in mist which seemed to hide no sun, trees bending away into the sloping churchyard. A cawking of crows and ravens, intimate in the fog, and, mingled with them, a kind of liquid wailing which sent Anna Ceddol, sobbing in relief, forward in a rush, to follow the church wall to the holy shrine of Our Lady of Pilleth.

I’d been in a hurry when I’d brought the bone and now saw the shrine and holy well as if for the first time: the green-slimed rocks, the steps down to the spring-fed pool, the stone wall built around it making it look like an open tomb.

On her ledge against the church walls, the mother of our saviour was smirched by the grime of neglect. Abandoned. Behind the body of the church, almost certainly older in its origins, the shrine of the holy virgin had been given back to nature.

And the bone given back to Sion Ceddol.

He sat with his legs overhanging the pool, rocking from side to side, the dripping thigh bone in his arms, a gurgling in his throat.

He could, I suppose, have found it by accident, but why would he even come this way? And I’d hidden it close to the edge of the well, where bushes concealed the shallow water, and covered it over with silt and sodden leaves.

It was conclusive enough for me. I turned to his sister.

‘I do understand him. I know what he does.’

As if this were all that mattered.

Oh, the blindness of science.

I went down to the holy well, where rough steps sank towards the water, the mist gathered above it like a soiled veil. Sion Ceddol clutched his bone to his chest and looked up at me as though he’d never seen me before and snarled, his face twisting like to a gargoyle’s.

And then…

‘He makes mockery of God!’

Christ, no.

Turning slowly to see the rector, in his long black coat. Everything happening as though darkly ordained for my undoing.

‘He is a walking blasphemy,’ Matthew Daunce said.

Anna Ceddol’s eyes closed, her shoulders falling, the shawl dropping to her elbows. Oh, dear God, oh, Christ, what had I done? What had I set in train here?

‘No,’ I said. ‘You know not what you’re saying.’ I stood up. ‘Mistress Ceddol. It’s best if you go. And the boy.’

Her eyes moved from the rector to me, and she took the boy’s arm and pulled him to his feet. He writhed, and she held him and the bone and dragged him away and looked at me.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Go.’

‘You also.’ The rector’s face was a ball of white light in the mist. ‘Now I know who you are. You are not wanted here. You’re filled with dark sprites. The filth oozes from you.’

I said nothing. Watched the Ceddols backing away, Anna dragging the boy with his thigh bone bumping off the trees, leaving me staring into the rector’s pointing, rigid finger.

‘Go with your whore and her demonic sibling.’ His forefinger twisting as if to bore a hole between my eyes. ‘Go on! Before I call upon the Lord God to hurl you out.’

‘No,’ I said.

The word emerging fainter than I’d wanted, for I found I had no breath. Could almost see it leaving me, fading into the mist as, from the woods below the church, the horrific, faerie, vixen shriek of Sion Ceddol tore the morn into dark strips.

XXXIII The Single Eye

DUDLEY HAS TRIED several times to meet the single eye of Prys Gethin, determined to send back the curse to its source by force of will.

Like most of those around the Queen, he’s seen the advantages in a mild study of practical magic and is prepared for an exchange of black chemistry across the already tense courtroom.

But never once does he entrap the Welshman’s gaze.

Gethin stands limply in a corner of the prisoner’s dock, which is close to the centre of the courtroom, hands manacled behind him, two armed guards his companions in the wooden pen, the jury seated along the wall to his right.

Access to the court, not surprisingly, is limited. Dudley has gained his place by following Roger Vaughan into the attorneys’ enclosure. Five of them in there, with their books of notes. Hard to see what function they each perform, but the judge will have his reasons. Sir Christopher Legge is nothing if not coldly efficient, and such men as him, Dudley freely admits, are necessary.

The law is not about humanity.

Already, the rough-beamed former barn has taken on an air of London. Banners are hung on the wall behind the judge’s bench of green oak, reflecting the Queen’s Majesty, a royal authority. Something to be feared.

Yet it’s all too big for this petty affair, and Dudley is tormented with suspicion.

The judge’s bench rises several feet higher than the attorneys’ to its right and the seats to its left which soon begin to be occupied by a handful of men who Vaughan says are the JPs from Radnorshire and neighbouring counties.

‘Come to see how it’s done?’ Dudley whispers. ‘How real justice is administered?’

‘Certainly, no one will have seen it done like this before,’ Vaughan tells him. ‘A trial here rarely takes longer than half an hour. Twenty cases might be heard in a morning. I’m thinking this will go on most of the day.’

God’s bollocks, Dudley thinks. Only a royal trial matches this.

He draws in a steadying breath and tries again to catch the eye of Prys Gethin, but Gethin is looking down, his face without expression. Has he been tortured, Dudley wonders, for the names of his fellow brigands in Plant Mat? Is he cowed from a night of beatings?

Nothing evident.

Outside, the sound of a massing of people, a dull roar, but in here the public gallery along the back wall is big enough only for about two dozen – Dudley marking one of them at once: Thomas Jones of Tregaron. Why is this bastard here? What’s his interest? Who let him in?

‘What have they told you, Vaughan?’

‘I’m a child in this. They tell me nothing. Only ask me questions about local matters and how people feel about them.’

They are at one end of the attorneys’ bench and Vaughan glances warily towards the other, where one of the older lawyers might only appear to be consulting his notes.

Dudley gets the message and keeps quiet, observing a man in a bishop’s mitre, attended by two clerics, entering through the main doors and approaching the bench, where two men in dark robes are arranging large books before the judge’s throne.

The bishop inclines his head and… hell, it’s John Scory of Hereford. They’ve brought the Bishop of Hereford here to represent God. Whose judgement is yet final, of course, in an English court. As if to confirm this, the morning sun at last breaks through, filling one of the high windows, and the air shimmers with dust motes.

The bishop goes out again. A robed usher enters, calls for silence and for every man to stand, and there’s a