The Heresy of Dr Dee

communal shuffling, and then Sir Christopher Legge slips in through a small Gothic-pointed door behind the judge’s bench.

* * *

Only after the prayers to a just God are delivered and the charges read out, is Prys Gethin’s red-stubbled chin seen to rise from his chest.

And through witchcraft did bring about the deaths of Thomas Harris and Hywel Griffiths in the county of Radnorshire on the night of September 20th, in the year of Our Lord 1560.

There were other charges relating to the stealing of cattle. Enough, on their own, to stow Gethin in the deepest cell for many a long year. Perhaps even hang him.

‘How do you plead, Master Gethin?’

Legge barely glancing at the accused. The sunbeams from the high windows create dusty cloisters in the air above the dock and the jury box.

A silence. Legge looking mildly irritated.

‘What have you to say, Master Gethin? If you wish to make plea in your own tongue, we have an interpreter.’

Glancing at Roger Vaughan.

Prys Gethin looks the judge full in the face.

‘I’ll not require an interpreter, my Lord, having spent considerable time in England. I plead not guilty to all charges.’

Legge nods. What else would he expect? The prisoner clears his throat.

‘And if I may be permitted to say, at this early stage, my Lord, my name is not Gethin but Gwilym Davies, gentleman farmer of Carmarthen. Something I’ve been trying to tell your minions, who seem strangely predisposed not to listen.’

Dudley sits up hard and, for just a moment, his eyes meet the prisoner’s one eye, where he sees laughter flaring like raging flames.

XXXIV Adversary

SUCH WAS THE density of the fog now, it was as though the rector and I were set in wax. His body was like to a scarecrow’s, but his face shone as marble. I looked at him and saw an effigy from a tomb dressed in cast-out apparel, and his eyes were lit, I’d swear, with madness.

The air was grown thick as a damp, grey blanket around the forlorn shrine. The walls of the church were now as far as I could see. Shivering in my cheap jerkin, I felt that this was no longer a normal autumnal mist but a fogging of the senses. I breathed in its bitterness and spoke with insistence.

‘Let me tell you… about Sion Ceddol…’

‘There is nothing’ – his voice coming back at me like a horsewhip – ‘that you can tell me about Sion Ceddol. Nothing that will change my opinion of him as an inhuman carrier of demons, who should never have been born into this world.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Who are you to tell me—?’

‘What Sion Ceddol does,’ I said, ‘religion has no bearing upon it.’

‘Religion has a bearing on everything. Are you a fool as well?’

‘As well as what?’

Standing at the top of the steps, where Sion Ceddol had sat, my breath was coming harder. If a place of healing is a place of inherent power, there was no sense of healing here now. Only the power, and that was a cold power with none of the promise of transcendence implied by an old sacred site. Within the quaking mist, I was aware of an ancient conflict, shafts of darkness and light twisting like blades.

‘As well as what?’ I said quietly. ‘Say it.’

‘I shall not. You know what you are and appear to live with it. But I don’t have to. I do not have to tolerate your presence here. Get yourself away from my church, conjuror.’

‘There,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it?’

‘Get out of here!’

His narrow body jerking in fury, elongating like a shadow.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not before I tell you the truth about Sion Ceddol.’

He’d turned away from me, so that I was speaking to his back.

‘How much do you know about water divining?’

‘Of the devil,’ he told the fog.

I shook my head with confidence.

‘A human faculty, known since early times, which may soon be explained by science. But only now are scholars finding it can be applied to more than the finding of water. Though the fact that Sion Ceddol can find water as well as bones is surely proof—’

‘That he’s riddled with demons. Don’t waste my time.’

I would not give up. Spoke to the rector’s back about the great natural philosophers – Paracelsus, whom he’d have heard of as a healer, even if he disapproved. And the German, Georgius Agricola, of whom he probably would be ignorant.

‘This is the man who’s become the best known diviner in Europe. Who began with water, but then extended his art to finding metals and ore for mining. Using the same fork of hazel, which twisted and turned in his hands when he stood over an underground spring.’

I’d learned about Agricola at Louvain and, of course, had tried it myself, to no avail, before sending a report on it to Cecil, suggesting he might strike a bargain with one of the German experts to establish a mining enterprise in England. Cecil had seemed interested, but I’d heard nothing since and assumed he’d dispatched spies to Europe in the hope of acquiring the knowledge for no cost.

‘You don’t see it, do you?’ Daunce said. ‘You do not see the obvious. A demon enters a man and gives him knowledge he could not otherwise possess. Causing his limbs to move on their own. Snatching his body from the reins of his mind. I’ve watched that creature, seen its eyes go white as its hands burrow in the earth to bring up the dead.’

‘It’s becoming known that the mind can be attuned to whatever it needs to unearth.’

‘And what if there is no mind?’ His rage throwing him back to face me. ‘The brain of that monstrous boy will ever be in ruins, and ruins are where demons walk unchecked.’

Turning away his head again, in contempt. It was like talking to the rocks. But at least I’d told him what I believed to be the truth; maybe he’d think about it.

Though probably, he wouldn’t.

I said wearily, ‘What are you doing here, Daunce? You hate this place. You distress its people. They’re not theologians eager to embrace the rigid tenets of Lutherism. They’re not going to change their ways with a snap of the fingers.’

‘The word of God will change their ways.’

It had long seemed to me that the word of God as filtered through a Puritan’s rigid liturgy would change nothing for the better.

I thought of the boy who hanged himself because he could see no future here. Who might normally have gone to his priest for advice. And the old man who did go to Daunce, with his fears of night walkers and was told it was the devil making him see what was not there.

I said, ‘Does Bishop Scory know of your… way of thinking?’

But if I thought to put him in fear…

‘Scory? That heretic? A man who worships the lewd and the sacrilegious in a secret chamber in the Cathedral itself?’