The Heresy of Dr Dee

I RAN DOWN the oak wood’s primitive cloister. Early light flickered amongst the dry leaves and acorns under what felt like someone else’s racing feet.

Running against sombre reason and the cold denial of the Puritans. Running against a sorry sense of my own failings. Running hardest of all against the images crowding into the mind’s poor glass: the blade at the woman’s throat, the blooming of the blood-flower. At the start of a second day without sleep or much food, I was become a creature of little more than air, while the world was a faerie blur, the dark oaks swelling and then shrinking before me like illusions in the distorting mirror I keep in my library at Mortlake.

Emerging from the wood on to the sheep-cropped turf, I ran, in a fever, calling upon an archangel’s energy, throwing his sigil into the air, pure white against the small pale sun and the still-visible moon, waxing close to full. I ran, panting like a hound and bathed with sweat and prayer, until I stopped before the alien green of the old tump in the river’s bend, knowing I’d be here a good while before Gethin and his captives.

By daylight, it was clear the hole in the side had been redug in haste. The displaced soil lay in two heaps either side of it, the cut turves lain against the bottom of the tump. There was still a stench of putrefaction, but nowhere near as strong as it had been last night.

Who’d dug it out again? The Roberts boys? I could see no other explanation. It would be done here. The corpse tidily tucked into the earth. Then across the river they’d all go and away into the real Wales.

I prayed that Thomas Jones was assembling those who would understand, ready to move fast. I prayed that Dudley had some reserve of ingenuity. I prayed to God and Christ and the Holy Virgin and the Archangel Michael that Anna Ceddol would not lose her life.

Turning my back on the hole, I saw the bough which had ploughed the furrow in my head, upthrust from the twisted bole of a thorn tree grown from the foot of the tump. Picked up a forked twig, its bark stripped away by my head before the twig was snapped from the tree in my helpless writhing.

Only good can fight evil, and, God knows, there was little enough of it in me. Against all my rage, I sought to gather in all the good I’d met or heard around Brynglas hill: the souls of Father Walter and Marged the wisewoman and the unknown anchoress said to have lived where the church now stood, by the shrine of the Virgin, who I visualised unsmirched and shining, blessing the pure spring below. Conjuring a peace over Brynglas, a blue glow upon its slopes on which the sigil, in my mind, was etched.

The twig twisted in my hands, lit by a shaft of amber sunlight, my arms afire before the light was, in an instant, extinguished from above.

I dropped the twig.

‘Who are you?’ I said.

* * *

He came awkwardly down from the tump, as if his limbs were afflicted by the gnarling sickness, symptoms not apparent the last time I’d seen him. He wore a peasant’s apparel, sacking around his waist, where the apron had been.

He looked tired. His grey-white hair, in disarray, was like to the tonsure he must once have worn. He was, I realised, much older than I’d thought – maybe seventy, maybe more. Too old for a satyr.

‘Ah, Dr Dee,’ he said wearily. ‘I feel you’re determined to do me harm.’

The local accent was all gone. I recalled that he’d been educated at Oxford. His background may indeed have been wealthy and privileged if, as Bishop Bonner thought, he’d actually bought his position of supremacy at Wigmore Abbey.

I followed him around to the sweeter-scented side of the tump, where the air was merely autumnally damp. In truth, I hadn’t expected him. I’d thought it might be Daunce.

‘You’re all aglow, my boy,’ he said. ‘Look like a priest who’s just celebrated the Mass.’

‘Merely tired,’ I said. ‘Abbot.’

It was true that I felt light and separate from my body. Yet my mind, freed from its weight, had a piercing focus, and when John Smart raised his hands I felt it was in defence, rather than benediction.

‘Call me Martin,’ he said. ‘Abbots are of the past.’

I looked around, warily.

‘You’re alone.’

‘I thought we should talk. Somewhere only the faeries can overhear us.’

‘Help me,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’

‘Safe, I believe. Except for Gethin, who is dead.’

I stared at him, the former abbot who’d stolen Church gold, sold the buildings around him, ran whores.

‘It’s too late for lies,’ John Smart said. ‘I can show you his body, if you like, though I’d guess you’ve seen enough of them for one morning, and it’s not pretty. He put out his own eye with his dagger. The last good eye. With some rage, so that the blade would seem to have proceeded into his brain. A swifter end than perhaps he deserved.’

And too easy.

‘Where was this?’

‘In a dingle about half a mile from the hill, not ten minutes ago.’

‘Why would he?’

‘The Presteigne boys. Out all night in the hills and angry. For some reason, he thought they were on his side, let them take the woman.’

‘So Mistress Ceddol—’

‘Safe. I believe.’

‘You believe?’

‘She ran away. She was not hurt. Not more than she had been anyway.’

‘Master Roberts?’

‘The so-called Master Roberts is taken by cart back to Presteigne, where I’ll find a better bedchamber for his recovery.’ A wry smile. ‘With glass in its windows. As befits his status.’

I was watching his hands, both exposed, both empty. No sign of weaponry.

‘I’m not lying to you, Dee.’

‘Why would Gethin think that, Abbot? That the angry boys from Presteigne were on his side?’

‘Call me Martin. Odd, is it not, the way men’s minds work in extremis.’

‘Jesu, Smart, you weren’t even born here, and you can’t give a straight answer to a straight question.’

‘Met Scory last night,’ he said, ‘for the first time. Still in town, after giving evidence to the court. This was before you arrived, all full of wild accusations.’ Smart chuckled. ‘Poor old Bradshaw. He was far more surprised than I was.’

I sighed.

‘What did you discuss with Scory?’

‘Talked about the problems of survival in the Church in a time of constant change. Scory’s less adventurous than me in my younger days, but he likes to, as you might say, put some modest items discreetly in store for his future comfort. But that’s an aside.’

It seemed the Bishop of Hereford knew more about Abbot Smart and his circumstances than he’d confided to me. What a bag of adders the Church of England already was become.

‘Good man, Scory, make no mistake,’ John Smart said. ‘But, as he may have indicated to you, working the Welsh borderlands does require a certain… adaptability. He’s become quite exercised over the conduct of this man Daunce, who, it might be said, has too much God in him.’

More energy in Smart now, his cheeks pinkened.

I said, ‘Once again, why did Gethin think the Presteigne boys were on his side?’

The sun had broken through again. Smart clapped his hands.

‘What a fine morning this is become.’ He peered at me. ‘Are you sure you haven’t performed some kind of invocation, Dr Dee? All manner of stories are told about you.’

‘Most of them exaggerated.’

‘I know the feeling.’