The Heresy of Dr Dee

I realised he must mean Scory’s treasured map of the world, Scory himself having said some canons had been in fear of it and wanted it burned. Daunce, unsurprisingly, must have been one of them. I didn’t pursue this, but I’d not give up.

‘What progress can we ever make if we put everything we don’t understand at the door of the devil? If a man sees the ghost of his dead wife and we tell him, that was not your wife, that was an image wrought by the devil to torment you…’

‘The truth is not always easy to face,’ he said calmly. ‘But faced it must be.’

‘And there can be no ghosts of the dead because the Lutheran faith has decided there’s no purgatory?’

‘All papist myth and must be revealed as such. Stripping away these fondly held archaic beliefs is bound to cause a small period of pain, before the clear light is seen.’

Well, of course, he’d see it as a challenge, a mission. Slicing through all the layers of the place with the clean, cold butcher’s blade of the new Puritanism.

I glanced at the statue of the Virgin in her grotto in the rocks above the water, marking the green slime on her brow and her robes all smirched with slug-trails and dead insects. Whatever power was here now, the Virgin was no longer the source of it.

‘You can’t be said to have taken care of her, Rector.’

He didn’t look at the shrine. Or I don’t think he did; his eyes were no more than smudges in the fog.

‘A papist conceit, perpetuating an old evil. I’d have it smashed. Maybe I will. I’ll certainly be erecting a barrier to keep people away. Let the brambles and thorns do the rest.’

‘Isn’t she the reason for this church? Our Lady of Pilleth?’

A silence, and then he eyed me, a slight smile on his dry, pale lips.

‘And who is she? Who is the lady?’

‘Who do you think she is?’

‘Can you not feel her?’

I said nothing.

‘I’ve never felt her so strongly. Our Lady of Slime.’

Dear God.

‘I found here a long tradition of dark worship which had never been challenged. This well was made by the old Britons, doubtless in veneration of some predatory water goddess. They would have performed sacrifice here, thrown the heads of their enemies into the pool.’

I could only nod. This married with my own findings from old English manuscripts.

‘The papists take a pagan well,’ Daunce said, ‘and claim it for the Virgin and nothing changes… because the practices of the Catholic Church, like those of the heathens, like those of the Druids, are founded upon magic and sorcery. You, of all people, should know that.’

Well, of course I knew that. Bishop Scory knew that. The Queen herself would acknowledge that high magic was a ceremonial gateway to knowledge.

And was a simpler magic so wrong for a place like this, the valley of the river of the god of light, dotted with ancient mounds, scattered with the remains of the violently killed? A place where a careful balance must needs be maintained?

‘I presume you know that Owain Glyndwr worshipped here before the battle,’ Daunce said. ‘In his desperate need for a great victory. But did he worship at the church? No, he burned it down. He worshipped here, at the pagan shrine. Glyndwr invoked the heathen goddess – the devil, in other words.’

I said nothing. Given Owain Glyndwr’s knowledge of magic and that he or Rhys Gethin appeared to have chosen this site for the conflict, I’d come to a not entirely dissimilar conclusion myself. But was disinclined to voice agreement with anything this man came out with.

‘Invoking the power of Satan,’ Daunce said, ‘and it was given to him. His name was exalted all over Europe. For a while – the devil’s favours last only so long. As you’re probably already finding out.’

I was feeling very cold now in my thin jerkin, with no hat, but felt that Daunce was not. That he was, in some twisted way, beginning finally to relish this encounter. He came closer to me, his coat hanging limp around him like damp and blackened leaves.

‘And they worship here yet. This so-called holy well dedicated to the Virgin Mary, who’s but a screen around the heathen goddess… is yet a shrine to evil. For I’ve seen— I have seen them anointing themselves here at night, in the heathen way.’

‘Who?’

‘If I’d gone close enough to see they would have set on me and killed me. God told me this. I’ve heard God’s voice in the night.’

‘How do you know it was God’s voice?’

‘You’d try and make me doubt it?’ His whole body shaking. ‘You’d make me out a madman?’

‘Father Daunce, you’re alone in a place you don’t understand and maybe never will. You’re prey to divers fears and fancies. You believe everyone’s your enemy—’

‘I’ve only one enemy, though he wears many faces, and I’m looking into one at this moment, asking myself is it a coincidence that England’s most famous sorcerer should arrive here… now? The adversary?’

I reeled back.

‘Adversary?’

‘Oh, I was warned in my prayers that one would come. I’d thought it was the demon inhabiting the boy. But it’s a subtler devil. A manifestation of one that’s been here for generations. Dee… ddu… black! All black as sin.’

His face was blanched and his lips were parched. I began to see where this was going.

‘Rector, you’re—’

‘Your grandfather… was he not Bedo Ddu, who filled the font with wine? No sacrilege worse than that at the baptism of a child, when all evil’s expelled.’

‘It was done in merriment, it—’

‘And the tainted wine flowed in the blood of your father, who went on to steal from the Church.’

Jesu, who’d told him that? What had I walked into?

‘But it found its full flowering…’ The rector folded his arms, as if sitting in judgement. ‘…in his heretical son…’

So close now I seemed to see a white light in his eyes.

‘… who stood trial for sorcery… and was saved by Satan in the guise of a papist monster who made him his chaplain.’

Bonner.

‘Are you yet a priest of the papist church, Dr Dee?’

He’d done his studies and found the most vulnerable part of my skin. There was nothing I could say that would not make this worse. How easy it must be to see everything in black and white. But there was no black here and no white. The mist would tell you this.

His finger came up.

‘Let not this place be tainted by your presence. Take yourself away from here while you can. Crawl back to your London lair. And when the Welshman’s sentenced, I’ll visit the sheriff and have charges of witchcraft brought against the monster and his sister, the Great Papist’s whore.’

What?

‘There’s no workable witchcraft law in this country,’ I said. ‘The Plant Mat case was only set in train because it was an accusation of murder by sorcery and two men were dead. There’s been no murder here. Only a mass slaughter a century and a half ago.’

A silence, then Daunce walked away, turning back to face me only when he reached the church wall.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘we both know better than that. And what lies in an ancient grave.’

I rose up, would have raced after him, grabbed him, maybe thrown him in the pool.

But what use would that do?

The balance was tipped against me. He knew about the mutilated man secretly buried by Stephen Price and