The Heresy of Dr Dee

They’d use a glove to identify themselves, passed one to another. Always a sense of ritual, a mystery which they encouraged. For years they’d been simply robbers, even if some victims had lost their lives as well as their goods. But when it came to the planned murder of a judge at Rhayader…

‘All wrongdoers in the heart of Wales were pleased to have the assize court in Rhayader, see – where they had control, justices in their pockets and no jury that did not include a few of their own. Maybe they thought that if they killed an English judge the judiciary would get the message and leave them alone, I don’t know. Madness.’

‘And they paid the price.’

‘Martyrs. The sons telling glorious tales of their dead fathers and all they’d done for Wales. And the name Plant Mat was anybody’s now – any band of brigands who wanted to wear it like a black cloak. A cloak with all the weight of heritage. See?’

‘They yet live in a cave?’

‘Pah! Who lives in a cave? They live in good houses – some with big halls and spare chambers and a bwddyn or two in the grounds for the servants – like the estate of our friend Gwilym Davies. Or Prys Gethin.’

‘He claimed in court,’ I said, ‘that the name was pressed upon him by the Sheriff of Radnorshire.’

‘Which your English judge never questioned. Curious, that.’

The road was passing through what had been a long wood, sporadic trees on either side and behind them, thickets, the stumps of felled oak and heaps of discarded twiggery all caged in brambles.

I stopped walking.

‘What’s this about? Help me. Why are you telling me this now, and how does it relate to Dudley?’

Thomas Jones took off his hat.

‘Don’t think me self-righteous. I stole. I stole as a boy because my friends stole, and I stole as a man because I found I was good at it… and if I spread some of the proceeds among the needy it didn’t seem so bad to be saving some aside to spend on books. To acquire an education. But don’t think me self-righteous. I’ll do my years in purgatory, resigned to it, boy. But Prys…’

He stood in a shaft of moonlight betwixt the trees. He yet wore the russet doublet with the gold thread.

‘Prys,’ he said, ‘will one day be in the deepest chamber of hell. Though not, it seems, soon enough.’

XLIV Monstrous Constellations

‘THEY SAY HE once killed a man just to rape his wife.’

Thomas Jones was sitting amidst the fungus on a tree stump, legs apart, bunched hands swinging between his knees.

‘Not his first rape. Nor, needless to say, his first killing.’

I did not ask how the man known as Prys Gethin had remained alive and free. This is Wales, boy.

‘Then he choked the life out of the wife.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, why not? Killing and rape are as natural to him as taking a piss. Would have been a soldier, if there was a Welsh army. Like the man he believes possesses him.’

‘Possesses?’

‘It’s just a word, John. I only met him once, see. Some years ago, in an alehouse, both of us well into our cups. I recall that he invited me to join him in his work.’

‘Plant Mat?’

‘I suppose. Who knows where I’d be today if I hadn’t, at that moment, been compelled to go outside and throw up my supper? Never went back. Never saw him again.’

‘Then how,’ I asked, ‘do you know all this?’

‘Common knowledge where I come from, boy. Some of it, anyway. No one’ll touch him, see. He knows too much and he’s done too many favours. This is not London. Middle Wales is a big village, full of mountains and rivers and lakes and waterfalls and miles of emptiness, around which the legends echo. Vast whispers in the wind.’

‘Jesu, Twm, is this a matter for poetry?’

‘I’m Welsh. It’s in the blood. His wife, now – did I tell you about his wife? Said to have fled within a month of their wedding. To England, I believe, which did not improve his love of our neighbour. Word was that he liked to do her while covered in pig blood, still wet. She seems to have been a religious woman who would not have a child conceived in pig blood.’

‘Did she also put out his eye before she left?’

‘Put it out himself, they say, in a drunken rage. Tell me when you’ve heard enough of this?’

‘Sounds like horseshit to me.’

‘Who am I to say otherwise? All right. In truth, little is known about the man. I do not, for example, believe that Gwilym Davies is his name any more than is Prys Gethin. The legend says he was born in Tregaron, where Plant Mat began, all those years ago. I can tell you, boy, that he was not. He acquired an old farm in the hills near there, which he claims as his ancestral home. It is not. I’m from Tregaron and I know.’

‘Where’s he come from then?’

‘Don’t know that. By his accent, I’d say north rather than south. But Welsh is his language and thieving is certainly his trade. He inspires fear and respect over a wide area, and not only through his looks. And the killing and the rape, that is not all legend.’

‘He lives by thieving?’

‘Lives by farming, now. Oh, and slaughtering. So loves to slaughter stock – anybody’s stock, and not quickly. After a successful cattle raid, he’ll sacrifice one of the beasts on a hilltop under a beacon fire. I know this, I’ve seen the flames from afar.’

‘Sacrificed to God?’

‘Some god. Or the demon he’s invested with the spirit of Rhys Gethin. Who knows? He was rambling over all this as we drank. Full of the Old Testament.’

Thomas Jones sat very still in the grey light, his habitual levity long shed. I waited for him to continue, but he said nothing.

I said, ‘So the curse…’

Thinking not only of the two dead men but of Dudley in the marketplace in Presteigne.

‘Cursing… we might consider that to be a woman’s preserve,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Also the Sight, and yet he has that, too, or so it’s claimed. Styling himself as a man who walks with his ancestors. Journeying to the wild and barren places to meet with Owain and Rhys. The time I drank with him, he told me what they looked like now, how they’d not aged. How, in the other world, all the grey had gone from Owain’s forked beard and his powers were there to be called upon in the cause of Wales.’

‘He’s mad?’

‘Increasingly, I’d say.’

‘So the bridge from which the farmer fell—’

‘Ach, let’s not get swept away. It might just as easily have had an axe taken to it by Gethin’s followers in the Plant. Who then drowned the poor old boy and left him all entangled in the ruins of it.’

‘How many followers does Gethin have?’

‘Hard to be sure. But two of them were in Presteigne – the day I found you at the inn. The Roberts brothers, this is, Gerallt and Gwyn. That is, I’ve known them only as woodsmen and hunters on his estate and both are men of violence – short-temper, alehouse fights. But not high in intellect.’

‘Just the two?’

‘May have been more I didn’t recognise. I thought at first there might be some plan to free Prys from the gaol or the court. So I followed them, keeping a safe distance behind. They took this road. All the way to Brynglas Hill. Where they stopped.’

I may have blinked.