by Phil Rickman
‘Would indeed have been useful to know that before we came.’
‘It’s not the impression I had from the Bishop of Hereford.’
I recalled John Scory’s words exactly: I don’t know where Smart is, though I do hear word of him from time to time.
‘You think Meredith was lying?’
‘Scory was spare with actual facts, but more generous with hints. He implied that my cousin might have things to hide. He said Presteigne, despite its appearance, was… a place of dark alleys.’
‘I told you there was something wrong here. You lose religion and let a town become ruled by commerce and greed…’
‘Dr Dee…’
A man drew level with us at the corner of the street. Dudley’s elbows bent, one hand forming a fist.
‘This one,’ he said, ‘I’ll deal with now.’
‘If I may have a word, Dr Dee?’
The moon showed me a man who, though shortish, was yet built like a brick privy.
‘Make it very quick, fellow,’ Dudley said.
The man didn’t move, as though the word quick had little meaning for him.
‘Only I overheard your cousin’s tirade, see.’
Dudley starting forward, but the man was standing his ground, like a bull in a meadow.
‘And was surprised,’ he said, ‘at how he spoke. Seein’ as when I was in London, I heard naught but good words of you. And knew of your father when he was at Nant-y-groes and I was a child down the valley. He was ever merry and, as you said, generous – especially with apples, as I recall.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Master…’
‘Stephen Price.’
‘Then you…’
‘Lease Nant-y-groes from Nicholas Meredith, and I wondered… Well, it would seem a pity if you’d come all this way without seeing your father’s birthplace.’
Found myself nodding, grasping at a friendly hand.
‘And as I’ll be riding back there at dawn… no wish to watch all the paid-for glee at the arrival of the Welshie in chains. So if you wanted to ride back with me, I’d deem it an honour to show you around the place. And your companion, of course.’
* * *
‘He wants something,’ Dudley said in darkness.
The shutters were up at the window but left open. Dudley had the four-poster. I’d taken – by choice – the truckle pulled from under it, though he’d tossed me an extra pillow in a bere.
‘I doubt Price means us ill,’ I said. ‘And I would like to see the house and its situation. Maybe the only chance I’ll ever have if it’s owned by my cousin. Don’t mind riding out with him alone. It’s but a few miles. Could be back soon after noon.’
‘I was about to suggest it. Let Meredith think he’s driven you away. Would give me chance to ask a few questions while the town’s in holiday mood over the trial. Be a pity to leave empty-handed.’
‘You’re yet determined to have the stone?’
‘I’ve faith in your learning, John. And if France’s poisonous prophet’s making use of scrying, it’s our duty. I’ll let it be known I’m an antiquary collecting gemstones and prepared to pay good money for intelligence about Smart.’
‘Well, keep away from my cousin.’
‘I could deal with the likes of your cousin in my sleep. It’s interesting, though, John. What’s behind it? Why’s he want you out of here? What’s he not want you to find out? Is there money here you’re entitled to? Property?’
‘Don’t raise my hopes. Money and the Dees—’
‘His approach to you seemed a little too conspicuously aggressive. As if he sought to draw you into public conflict.’
‘I should call him out?’
‘Big books at dawn?’ Dudley said. ‘Goodnight, John.’
* * *
I lay in the truckle bed next to the door. A haloed moon was visible where the shutters had been left open so I’d awaken at first light, and I looked for known stars. Wondering why we were here, what the future might hold for Dudley. If he’d ever find out how Amy died and at whose hands and if that would free him or expose him to more threat. On the rim of sleep, I found myself considering if it might even be true that the Queen carried Dudley’s child. So many months had passed since she’d summoned me. How many others had seen her in that time?
Among the stars, I saw images of Elizabeth walking alone in the private gardens of Richmond, all big of belly, gazing out to the fabricated island where Robert Dudley had lain his head betwixt her feet.
If he’d stopped at her feet. I saw him as he was an hour ago, when first he’d seen the ripe-bosomed young woman who had shown us to our chamber and turned out to be the innkeeper’s wife. A movement in his jaw, a tightening of wires.
I shut my eyes on the stars, wrapping the sheets twice round me because of the cold. Knowing not that I’d slept until I awoke to Dudley’s scream.
XXIV
All Heavy with Old Death
THERE WERE TWO families of ducks on the good-sized pond in front of Nant-y-groes. Sheep grazed the land down to the river and more sheep were on the opposite bank until the valley floor was lost into woodland.
Beyond which was the hill, a pale and almost luminous green under the heavy sky.
The hill of ghosts.
‘Be glad when I don’t have to see it every morning,’ Stephen Price said. ‘Or watch it under the last lights.’
‘And when will that be?’
‘One year, mabbe two. Fair bit of work to be done on the new place yet.’
He stood firm on this land. Short, thick-built, weathered of face, and showing more confidence than he had in Presteigne last night, as he spoke of the house his family was rebuilding in the next valley, a former abbey grange, Monaughty, from the Welsh for monastery.
An easy walk from here, but its aspect was different.
‘Keeping an air of the holy,’ Stephen Price said. ‘We’d like it to be…’ He glanced back at Nant-y-groes. ‘…three, four times this size. Bigger families in the years to come. As you doctors learn to stop disease leaving empty cribs.’
‘Not that kind of doctor, Master Price. Or… well, not beyond a small knowledge of anatomy.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded his big, squarish head and led me along a path towards the river and a new barn of green oak. Though obviously of the gentry, he spoke simply, in a farmer’s way, as if with an inborn sense of the rudiments of life which the time he’d spent in London could not take away.
‘If the new house was a monastery grange,’ I said, ‘would that mean for Wigmore?’
‘No, no. Abbey Cwmhir in the west. Wigmore land stopped at Presteigne. That’s English, see – wherever they draws the boundary. This… is where Wales begins.’
* * *
I’d tried to feel it. Tried to feel the weight of my ancestry, back from my grandfather Bedo Ddu – an ebullient man whom, my father said, had ordered the font filled with wine at the baptism of his first son. Back through Llewelyn Crugeryr, who had a castle, and Prince Rhys ap Tewdwr, which would give me common ancestry with the Queen… all the way back, my tad would insist, to Arthur himself.
Out of Presteigne, the country had changed: a darkening of the soil but a lightening of the hills, close shaven by sheep. Although there were no jagged peaks, you could sense the rock under the green, the bones of the land. The ruins of a small castle stood like a skeletal fist across the river, and a small grey church was tucked into the hill of Pilleth with a cluster of mean houses below.
I saw all this, but felt no pull of the heart.
Found no sense of my tad in the house which lay behind us, a solid dwelling of timber and rubblestone, with a good hall and inglenook and a new chimney. An old housekeeper had been making flat cakes on a bakestone, with dried currants and shavings of apple. Welsh cakes, I guessed – my tad used to say proudly that he’d taught the King’s cooks how to make them for the royal table. I’d told the housekeeper this, and she’d given me one to eat and said she remembered Master
Rowly when he was a boy, him and all his jests. But the taste of the Welsh cake brought back only memories of Mortlake.
At the riverside, I turned to Stephen Price.
‘You said you recalled my father?’
‘I well recall him. Too young, mind, to know him as a man. I was sent away to an uncle up at Llanbister, to be tutored, as you might say, in the arts of marketing and butchery. When I came back, Master Dee was gone to London. Sought to look him up when I was down there for the parliaments, but he was dead by then.’
‘Must have been strange,’ I said, ‘coming back from London to this…’
‘Wilderness?’ It was the first time I’d seen him smile. It found shape as slowly as his way of speech. ‘Never thought of it that way, Dr Dee. Not till I came back that first time after three weeks in London. Couldn’t settle back to it, not for a while. So quiet after London that you were listening to your own breaths.’
‘Did Nicholas Meredith ever live out here?’
‘Not that I’d know. Presteigne boy, see. Presteigne… it en’t London, but it aims to be.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t enquire into the doings of Master Meredith or how he got his money. En’t my business, and I’m living in a house that belongs to him and plan to carry on leasing the farm after we moves out to Monaughty. But the way he was to you last night… spoke of more than I could understand.’
I looked him in the eyes.
‘Left me mystified, also,’ I said.
‘Injured, too, I’d reckon. Come all this way, and your own family don’t wanner know you.’
‘I suppose.’
A pensive tightening of Price’s lips.
‘You must needs have care,’ he said at last. ‘Big man in Presteigne now. Him and Bradshaw. Ole John Bradshaw, down from Ludlow with all his wool money and the lease on most of the abbey property from the Crown. So Presteigne’s yet owned by England, and the Council of the Marches gets its bidding done by the wool men. Who are also the magistrates, and so on. You getting the picture?’
‘Do you know anything at all of the last Abbot of Wigmore? John Smart?’
‘You keeps coming back to that, Dr Dee.’
‘He’s the reason I’m here. He’s said to have in his charge a gemstone – a crystal stone, a beryl, I believe, which I and my colleague hope to acquire from him. For my research.’
‘On the Queen’s behalf?’
‘Everything I do,’ I said honestly and more than a little sadly, ‘is for the Queen’s Majesty.’
‘What you do… relating to the Hidden?’
‘One day it will no longer be hidden. Open to everyone. That’s my hope.’
Thinking of my library, which anyone who could read was free to consult, not that many did.
‘You think that’s wise, Dr Dee? That all should be known?’
Stephen Price was watching me. It seemed that Dudley had been right, this man wanted something from me – perhaps what Vaughan had hinted at on the road to Hereford – and, in his border way, was taking the long route. I, however, continued to be direct and honest.
‘What I’m seeking, Master Price, is a stone through which I believe knowledge can be obtained. The kind of knowledge that can’t be learned from books or tutors, only by the lifting of the mind. It’s said to have healing qualities. And is in the possession of John Smart. Do you know him?’
‘Knows of him, that’s all. A holy knave, by all accounts. Babbies everywhere.’
‘You know if he’s yet about?’
‘Never had cause to. He don’t enter my life. I got enough troubles. Some of the ole monks, they never went away. Abbots, you don’t see much of them, but he could be around.’
If Price knew more, it was clear he felt not safe in the discussion of it. He folded his arms, rocking to and fro at the river’s edge. Looking up for a hint of sun, to work out the time.
I said, ‘You think they’ll have brought their prisoner from New Radnor?’
‘Sure to.’
‘You said last night that you had no wish to watch all the glee. I think you said paid-for glee.’
‘Time off work, free pies. A holiday. A fair.’
‘To cover up fear?’
He eyed me.
‘Feel it, did you, in Presteigne?’
‘Not to any great extent.’
‘Pies are working then, ennit?’ He looked up at the hill, a pale green wall before us: steep sides, a flat top. ‘Nothing works yere.’
‘Brynglas Hill?’
‘And Pilleth. The village. What’s left of it.’
He took in a long breath, as if he was absorbing something of the humour of the place.
‘There was no village left even before the battle, see. Just Nant-y-groes and a couple more farms, a way off. When they thought the battle was forgot, my ancestors set aside some ground east of the hill to build houses for a blacksmith, and woodsmen, cottagers to work the land. Then they rebuilt the church that was burned down, and Pilleth was become a proper village, mabbe for the first time. Seventy folks there at one time, they reckon. Mabbe twenty-five now.’
I waited in silence, recalling Vaughan’s words.
A place where a thousand men have been slaughtered is not exactly the easiest place to make a home.
Price looked up the hill towards the church, which Brynglas held, as it were, to its breast.
‘When I was told, as a boy,’ he said, ‘that you wouldn’t find no sheep up there after sundown, I never questioned it.’
‘The sheep won’t sleep on the hill?’
‘Nor anywhere ’twixt the hill and the river. As a man, riding to London, I never thought about it. It was just ole country lore. In London, I’d be with men who’d laugh. Or mabbe men such as yourself, who’d say, but why’s it true?’
‘And?’
‘In Pilleth, it just is.’ Price stood solid as a boar, his back to the river. ‘This is a hard place to live. I been told nobody should be living yere at all. But the folks at Pilleth, they’ve learned how to withstand what has to be withstood. And I thought they were stronger for it, but now I en’t sure. I never quite seen the truth of it till I went away and come back. And even then it took a while. Well, London – you know what that’s like.’
‘The biggest, noisiest city in the world.’
‘Aye, and back from London, you think you’re a big man – MP for Radnorshire. But what’s it mean? Less than it sounds. You’re rarely called to Parliament, and your vote don’t count for more’n a fart – Privy Council opens a window and it’s gone. And then you come back home, with all your big ideas, to find they’ll pay more heed to an idiot boy as talks to the dead. ’Cause that’s real, for them. That’s there.’
What?
I said carefully, ‘Some matters… some matters are as hard – if not harder – for men of intellect to discuss as they are for the uneducated.’
Looking out over the pale brown river and thinking of Dudley, as he’d been this dawn as I dressed and prepared to leave for Nant-y-groes. Dudley mumbling about bad dreams, but sleepily.
Not in the way he had some hours earlier. No screams, no sweat, no panting. No…
* * *
Jesu… he’s gone.
Who?
Sitting up on his high bolster, clutching the bed curtains.
You didn’t see him? Standing beside your bed?
No.
Holding death, John. In his hands.
And me – I was no better. Keeping my voice steady, the words coming out as if spoken by someone else.
It was… a dream. A bad dream, that’s all.
Knowing then, rolling over, staring out at the cold stars, that he’d be back to sleep long before I would.
* * *
‘Who’s the idiot boy, Master Price?’
The sky hung low, like a soiled pillow that might suffocate all below it. Twenty people left in that grey community under the hill. And one of them talking to the dead?
Price stood beside the brown and roiling river, breathing h
eavily.
‘This boy… latest in a long line of strange folk as fetches up in Pilleth, like it was ordained. But I chose not to believe. Big man, back from London, full of new ideas, man with his eyes open full wide. We… got ourselves a new rector and his eyes is full open, too. Least to some things. To others, his eyes is shut tight. One of the new breed.’
‘A Bible man?’
‘Lutheran to the core, and he don’t like what he sees. Most of all, he don’t like the boy. The idiot. I call him an idiot because there’s no harm in an idiot. But, to the rector, he’s gone to Satan.’
‘Because he talks to the dead?’
‘Because he finds them, Dr Dee. He finds the dead. On the hill. He puts out his hands, and the ole dead… it’s like they reach out to him.’
‘You mean the dead… from the battle?’
Stephen Price stared down into the muddy river. A mewling hawk glid over us.
‘The battle… when it was fought, 1402, they reckon it was a summer just like this. Not much of a summer at all. The ground all waterlogged. Not much of a harvest. Omens. Folk seeing omens everywhere. Like they’re seeing now, with the return of Rhys Gethin.’
‘Prys. And he’s—’
‘A common bandit, aye. But is he? I don’t see omens, but I don’t feel good about Pilleth. And I’m the squire of yere, and my family goes back likely longer than yours, and it’s my responsibility. And it en’t Presteigne, it’s a lonely place, all heavy with ole death. You can’t buy off fear in Pilleth with free pies.’
Oh God. Here it was, coming out backwards and sideways and from under the feet, in the old Border way.
I made a stand.
‘Master Price, some people think… In truth, I’m not a priest. I’m a scholar, a natural philosopher, a man of science. I study. I can’t—’
‘I know what you do, Dr Dee. I once talked to… another MP who knows you. Francis Walsingham?’
‘You talked to Walsingham?’
‘He came to me one time. Asking about your family.’
Well, the bastard would, wouldn’t he? Francis Walsingham traded in intelligence, most of it passed to Cecil in the event of it being required to measure me for the gallows drop.