The Heresy of Dr Dee

was a child on the way.

The night she’d found him kicking Sion, to quieten him – that was true enough and happened just as she’d told me. What she hadn’t told me was that, when they left home, taking all his money, Tomos Ceddol had gone in search of them. This was why they’d moved from village to village down the border.

‘He found you?’ I said. ‘He found you here?’

‘I’d become careless. It was over twelve years since we’d left. I’d thought he’d surely given up, found a woman somewhere. I thought we were safe in the Bryn. The first real home we’d had.’

His approach had been slow and careful at first. He’d watched for whole nights from the oak wood – one of the Thomas boys had seen him twice, thought him a thief, though nobody was ever robbed… not then. I imagined Tomos Ceddol catching sight of his daughter – even more beautiful than he’d remembered. All the money he’d spent trying to find her. She was his daughter and the father of his child, who should have been disposed of long ago.

God’s tears.

The night he broke in, he was drunk, having found a barrel of cider left over from the harvest festival. They heard later he’d been driven out of his own village after two rapes, although the women would not name him.

Anna Ceddol stopped, as though that were the end of the story.

‘How did he die?’ I said at last, in dread of the answer. ‘Not that you have to—’

‘Nor will I. I awoke and he was in my bed. Naked. And some men… some have thinner skulls than others.’

Sion had done this? Struck his father…

… with the thigh bone?

It took me about three hours get him out to the hill,’ Anna said. ‘I had to do it myself.’

He didn’t find that man, she’d said, of Sion. He wouldn’t even come out that day. He was afraid and clung to the fire.

‘I smashed his face with the spade. And then took the spade to him… down there. Bore it on the spade into the wood. I suppose the pigs ate it. Pedr Morgan found him next day and his wife came to me to ask what we should do.’

I thought of Stephen Price who’d buried Tomos Ceddol, not knowing who he was. Buried him twice. In the tump.

Why? Because it was the only place I could think of where the mad boy wouldn’t find him.

But no one lay easy in the tump.

She felt… what he wanted to do to her. Felt it inside.

I would talk to Scory. This was a matter for a priest of the old kind. Someone practised in the cure of souls.

‘Come home with me,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘Please come home with me. For tonight.’

PART FIVE

Here the vulgar eye will see

nothing but obscurity

and will despair considerably

JOHN DEE Monas Hieroglyphica

LVI From an Angel

HE REFUSED WINE, accepting small beer. There was a ring of blood around the pupil of his left eye.

No longer wearing mourning, though his apparel was of earth colours, he’d ridden alone to Mortlake, and I wondered if this meant he no longer feared for his life… or if he no longer cared. I wondered if he’d been shown the letter from Thomas Blount. I wondered if he’d tell me if he had. I wondered too much.

There was an unseasonably close air for that time of year when late afternoon and evening are become one and the traffic of wherries on the river is thinned. Dudley leaned back on the bench in my workroom, the long board betwixt us, his shoulders against the wall.

‘So you gave it back.’

Oft-times you don’t choose the stone, Jack Simm had said, reporting the words of Elias the scryer. The stone chooses you.

I didn’t remind Dudley of this: my feeling was that if that stone had chosen me it was not for anything good.

But it hadn’t, anyway. It had been given either as a bribe for my silence or…

I didn’t know enough about the properties of crystal, though I could almost feel its weight again, pressed against the bottom of my gut, the lower mind. Had my clumsy, if heartfelt, invocation of the archangel in some way altered its vibration? Altered me? For altered I was.

‘Smart’s scryer was Gethin,’ I said.

‘And that taints it?’

‘Who can say what was invoked through Gethin’s madness? Who knows what lived in him? You’d really want to risk loosing something… uncertain into the Queen’s—?’

‘All right.’ A gloved hand was raised, a frown flickering across Dudley’s damaged face. ‘I understand. I’m already accused of carrying some satanic spore, so I’ll bow to your superior knowledge of the Hidden.’

I sighed.

‘For the first time in years I’m beginning to wonder if I truly—’

‘You do.’ His bloodied eyes hardened. ‘Never forget that, or you’ll be begging on the fucking streets.’

I said nothing. Could only wonder if such a simple life as that might not be preferable. Too many things which my poor mind was unable to arrange into the roughest of geometric patterns. I was humbled. I’d lost all faith in the power of my library. I lowered my hands and stared into them, watching them tremble.

‘I suppose… another crystal stone will come. When I’m deemed ready. If ever.’

‘Gethin,’ Dudley said, ‘fixed me with his eye and said I’d be dead within the week, and instead… he is.’

I said carefully, ‘Did you see it done?’

‘Saw his body. Saw it loaded on to a handcart.’

Not what I’d asked.

A silence. The air was like sand.

‘I suppose,’ Dudley said, ‘that I owe you my life.’

‘Not me. Thomas Jones, perhaps.’

‘Tell me I don’t have to thank him.’

‘I doubt he’ll be holding his breath in anticipation. How are you now?’

‘Better.’

As good as his word, for once, John Smart had indeed provided, for Dudley’s recovery, a good bedchamber with window glass. But not at the Bull.

‘How you could stay with the doxy after what she…’

‘Branwen Laetitia Swift,’ Dudley said.

Almost fondly.

‘Did she give you a potion? Did she aid in your abduction?’