The Heresy of Dr Dee

* * *

The pines closed around us like the pillars of a rude temple. Wandering from tree to tree, apparel stiffened with dried and drying blood, saying nothing, we must have looked like war-sick soldiers escaping the fray.

Moving with caution now, as most of the trees were well grown enough to hide a man. I’d no wish for us to die foolishly at Gethin’s hands. If he died at ours, I’d feel no regret, but how likely was that? We were soft-skinned men who lived in books – even Thomas Jones nowadays – and one of us vainly courted the angelic. The man we sought had skin like a lizard’s, was well-practised in the art of killing, driven by devils.

The wood was deeper than it had appeared from the slope below the church. It crested Brynglas and continued down the northern flank. Could be that these pines had grown upon the land where Rhys Gethin’s fiery army had waited for Edmund Mortimer’s trained soldiers, yeomen and peasants. And the Welsh archers who knew – or yet did not – what they’d do. When the moment came.

Maybe this was also where the women waited. The women who travelled with Gethin’s heroes and were said to have come scurrying down, after the battle, with their little knives.

Standing in that clearing, under a whitening sky, I threw down the butcher’s knife in horrified realisation of the recent carnage it had performed in the saving of the unworthy life of a conjurer who might never know what he’d conjured… a seer who saw nothing beyond the physical. The Wigmore shewstone was a useless weight in the front pouch of my jerkin. Had it not been for my futile pursuit of advancement and the engines of creation, we would not have come here and Sion Ceddol would yet live. Let not this place be tainted by your presence, said Rector Daunce, perhaps, after all, with prescience.

I kicked the knife away, and the blade came to rest at the bottom of one of the pines, around which a…

‘John—’

… rope was tied.

I felt a drumming in my chest. This was not the old and rotting hemp you might expect to find at the heart of a wood, but new rope, strong rope. Bending to it, I saw that other, shorter lengths lay nearby, tossed among the needles and cones – on top, not embedded.

‘Someone was roped to this tree… and then cut loose.’

‘And not long ago,’ Thomas Jones said.

‘Was this it… Dudley’s prison?’

I picked up a strand of rope. Its ragged end was brown with blood, and almost at once, across the clearing, I saw the reason.

* * *

He lay ’twixt two young pines on the edge of the clearing, where it was beginning to thicken into something approaching forestry.

He was most conspicuously dead, face down in a bolster of browning needles, a pond of blood beneath and around him.

And barefooted.

I shut my eyes in anguish. Close to weeping with despair, I followed Thomas Jones across the clearing to the corpse. He took a breath of pine wood and bent among the day’s first flies.

‘Stabbed in more than one place.’

‘But not freshly.’

The pond of blood beneath him was congealed, like a blackberry preserve.

‘Or efficiently. Looks to me, like the mortal injuries inflicted in a fight.’

Pine needles glued together by black blood, a trail. Thomas Jones stood up then bent and turned the body over, stood looking down, hands on hips.

‘John, if you thought this was…’

I turned slowly in the oily light.

The dead man’s eyes were open. An ooze of blood linked nose and mouth. A young man, maybe not yet twenty-five. I’d never seen him before. The breath went out of me.

‘Gwyn Roberts,’ Thomas Jones said.

‘You think Dudley…?’

‘The rope’s cut, Gwyn’s stabbed to death in what looks like a fight. I don’t—’

‘And his boots taken,’ I said. ‘You may not have noticed, but the older Roberts was wearing riding boots of the finest quality. Dudley’s. In one of which he keeps a blade.’

‘In his boot?’

‘Used to, anyway.’

He’d shown it to me two or three years ago, on an older pair: the thin sheath stitched into a seam of leather, to fit beside the calf. The dagger it concealed had been no more than five inches long, including the bone handle. New boots, but he wouldn’t have abandoned an old precaution. Robert Dudley was as superstitious as anyone I knew.

‘Maybe he guessed they’d take his boots, for their value and to render him more helpless. Maybe he retrieved the knife from the boot after they’d searched him. I know not.’

‘So it’s likely he lives,’ Thomas Jones said.

‘Or lived’, I said. ‘If Gethin passed this way…’

I walked back into the clearing, wiping my mouth on a sleeve, not daring to think there was cause for hope. Finally snatching up the bloodied knife from which it seemed that destiny, that twisted joker, had decreed there could be no parting.

Flies sticking to it now.

* * *

Coming out of the pine wood, some minutes later, we found ourselves closer to the church of St Mary than I’d expected. An ominous quiet was hung upon the air. Dawn bird-sound was distant and thin. Thomas Jones went to the holy well to wash, but I sank to my knees in the grass, sucking dew into my dry mouth. This was the second dawn I’d seen since sleeping, and I knew not when I’d ever felt as weary.

Wet faced, I walked around the front of the little grey church to the now familiar view over the cauldron of hills, down the battlefield of Brynglas, becoming aware of movement, villagers gathering. A dozen or more, including several women, on the hill, under the dirty-bruised skin of the sky.

I saw old Goodwife Thomas and Gareth Puw, the blacksmith, and others I recognised but could not name, but there was no sign of Vaughan or Price and his sons.

Only, some distance away, something still as a sculpted tableau in the grass which no one approached.

Sion Ceddol’s head lolled in his sister’s lap, her own head bowed, her dense brown hair down around her face and his. She did not seem to see any of them, kneeling in an island of grief to which none could cross.

Stabbing the knife into the ground, I stood between the small trees on the edge of the churchyard, from where we’d watched Prys Gethin summoning his demons.

Maybe it was through fatigue or because I did blame myself for the boy’s killing that I didn’t go down. There was nothing I could say to her, not in front of the villagers. The boy was slain, and I could not bring him back.

‘Who is she, John?’

Thomas Jones had come round from the well. He’d stripped away his ruined doublet, stood in his shirt, the sleeves rolled up, blood streaks not fully washed from his arms.

Anna let Sion’s head slip from her lap and, laying it tenderly in the turf, slowly arose. Her overdress was darkened at the thighs, her lips parted in a soundless distress.

‘His mother?’

‘Sister. He was… there was something missing in his mind. But something else there… that we don’t have.’

A bar of sunlight split the fleshy cloud, lighting the hillside. I turned my head away, blinded for the moment, and then Thomas Jones was pulling me back ’twixt the trees, speaking quietly.

‘Do nothing.’

A hundred paces below us, Prys Gethin had emerged like a sprite from the pines. I reached for the butcher’s knife, but we were too far away and already it was too late.