The Heresy of Dr Dee

Roberts conceit. ‘You seen him this night? Or earlier?’

‘You mean he’s not here?’

‘Missing.’

‘Since when?’

‘Not sure.’

He was silent for a moment. I looked over to the stables; we must surely have disturbed the night ostler in his loft.

‘All right,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘As you seem to be wearing your day apparel, if I were you, I’d come down.’

‘From the window?’

‘Unless you want to rouse everyone. We can’t talk like this, people will think we’re lovers.’

I raised myself up in the window, threw a tentative leg over the sill and then slid back into the bedchamber and grabbed the shewstone from the board. Stowed it away in my jerkin, and then, before I could think too hard about it, was out into the night, holding to the ivy.

Which came away in my hands, halfway down, and I tumbled to the cobbles, stifling a cry.

Thomas Jones stood looking down at me, not assisting.

‘Not used to this, are you, John?’

‘Not broken into as many houses as you.’

Picking myself up, hoping the moon would not expose my swollen eyes or any other evidence of how close I’d been to parting with my mind.

‘Fetch your horse,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Quietly.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘To begin with, somewhere we can talk in normal voices.’

‘In relation to Dudley?’

I must have sounded like a child.

‘Who knows, boy? I fear we’re close to the heart of something quite unpleasant.’

* * *

We had disturbed the night ostler, but half the money in my purse secured, I hoped, his silence. He helped me saddle up and we went out to where Thomas Jones’s horse was tethered at the entrance to the mews. Riding out of Presteigne on a moon-barred road that now was become all too familiar to me.

‘Would’ve told you this the other night,’ Thomas Jones said, as we dismounted a mile from town. ‘But not in front of that cocky scut.’ He sniffed. ‘Even if he’s dead, I might not take that back.’

‘Dead?’

‘I don’t say that he’s dead, but these are not the kindest of men.’

‘Who?’

He made no reply, leading his horse along the side of the road. Without too much reference to Dudley’s private and public troubles, I’d explained to him why we’d come here. His only reaction had been a slow nodding of his head.

Could I trust this man, you might ask. Well… he was betrothed to my cousin and had been pardoned by the Queen. There were those I’d trust less.

‘Men?’ I said. ‘Not the kindest?’

‘I’ll get to it.’

If you’re wondering about the true nature of his knavery, I know little, preferring the legend of a Welsh Robin Hood who, for a brief period, would prey upon the Norman dynasties holding the best farmland in the far west of Wales. All of it stolen, Thomas Jones would allege, and who was I to argue? Wales was, they said, a land ruled at every level by brigands. Some of them in London now.

He tilted his hat over his eyes, for the moon was become oppressively bright.

‘Some of the company I kept in my former life, John, was, ah…’

‘You need not explain,’ I said.

‘Kind of you.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘The point is that there is no such thing as a free pardon.’

‘You mean you once thought there was?’

‘I was therefore quietly approached for intelligence about our friends in Plant Mat.’

‘Who made the approach?’

‘I won’t answer that, and it matters not. Suffice to say that some of your masters in London have kin this side of the border. Let’s say I was approached by a friend, who has… other friends.’

‘Sir William Cecil has family in Wales.’

‘Does he?’

‘You’re now a spy for Cecil?’

‘How would I know that?’

He wouldn’t. I’d thought of Cecil several times on the way here, my mind more alert in the open air, under stars. Thoughts turning, inevitably, to the content of the letter from Amy Dudley’s London dressmaker. It was said there had been a number of meetings over the past few months between Cecil and the Spanish ambassador, la Quadra. Who, if they had but one aim in common, it would be to keep the Queen and Dudley out of wedlock.

But, dear God… to have Amy murdered lest she suffered from some fatal malady or was of a mind to take her own life?

And why, in God’s name, would Cecil want to know about Plant Mat? I stared up into the night for enlightenment. Compared with the twisting mesh of London politics, the formation of the stars seemed constant and reassuringly familiar.

‘And were you able,’ I asked, ‘to supply the intelligence?’

Thomas Jones blew breath through his teeth.

‘Why does every bastard think that if you have a history of thieving you’re part of some hidden body of neckweed-contenders, all known to the others? Even I wouldn’t have dealings with Plant Mat.’

‘So you had nothing to tell them?’

‘On the contrary, boy, I had a great to deal to tell them. Particularly about Gwilym Davies, who likes to call himself Prys Gethin. Who also calls himself a gentleman farmer and collects land with the alacrity of a Norman baron after the conquest. Well… buying some of it, of course, but where’s the money come from? But I’ll get to him. Plant Mat, yes… oh, how the romantic legends are formed around them. Like graveyard mist, boy.’

‘Do Plant Mat even exist, now? Legge’s verdict might suggest not.’

‘Indeed they exist. And profess themselves driven by love of their country. Don’t fool yourself, boy, there’s a good deal of hatred in Wales for the English. And for so-called Welsh towns like Presteigne, where the old language is let rot by English pouring in, looking to increase their ill-grown wealth.’

‘Hatred? Despite the Tudor line? Jesu, Jones, we’re all of us ruled by Welshmen, now.’

‘Ach!’ He waved a hand as if to swat a fly. ‘What a prime piece of English rookery that is. Even though most of us are content to float with it. Arthurian descent? Bollocks. The truth is that Wales is yet a Catholic country, and as long as little Bess permits Catholic worship, she’ll get no shit from this side of the border.’

‘Except from Plant Mat?’

‘All right, let me tell you.’

The original Plant Mat, he said, were the three children, two sons and a daughter, of an innkeeper in his own home town of Tregaron. The family had become famous robbers, gathering others to them and inhabiting a cave, with an entrance so narrow that only one man at a time might pass through. A cave in a place laden with legend, which people kept away from because it was said the devil himself climbed those rocks.

‘The cave was their… what’s the word in English… temple? Certainly of some almost ritual significance. They were inside the land, see… in the heart of Wales. I don’t know what they did in there, maybe just got drunk. But the legend of that cave grew – that they drew their power from the land around them. Thus, out of the past. Out of their heritage.’