The Heresy of Dr Dee jdp-2

by Phil Rickman

  ‘My name’s John Dee,’ I said.

  Standing betwixt the oak wood and the doorway. Anna Ceddol looked at me with small curiosity. Siôn Ceddol scowled and picked up a stick. The rain fell upon the chessboard.

  ‘My father was born down at Nant-y-groes.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘They’ve talked about you in the village.’

  ‘My… my tad left many years ago, to live in London. It’s the first time I’ve been here.’

  ‘The royal conjuror, is it?’ Anna Ceddol said.

  No apparent malice or even an awareness of saying anything that might cause offence. Of a sudden, I was weary of denying it. I may even have nodded.

  The rain was seeping uncomfortably through my jerkin. Anna Ceddol held the door wider.

  ‘You’d best come in. You’ll be soaked.’

  ‘Thank you. I… left my wizard’s hat in my saddlebag in the stable at Nant-y-groes.’

  She didn’t smile. The boy, Siôn Ceddol, kicked sulkily at a thorn-tree root. About half an acre of ground beside the cottage had been cleared of brambles, bushes and undergrowth. Some of it had been cultivated for vegetables, with rotted horseshit spread on top before the winter. Some appeared good pasture. But there was no stock on it. No chickens pecked the ground.

  I went in. The boy followed me, picking up a bundle of small sticks from beside the door. He wore a bright red hat pulled down over his eyes.

  ‘I… went into the wood to shelter,’ I said. ‘Seeing the rain about to come on.’

  She shook her head, as if disappointed that I’d lied so glibly. I felt a weight of shame. I’d not lie again.

  ‘Stephen Price brought me,’ I said.

  The Bryn was even lower than it had seemed from outside. My height, which comes from the men of Kent on my mother’s side, made it impossible for me to stand even with bent neck.

  Anna Ceddol pointed to a three-legged stool by the fire, which was on a raised hearth, against one wall, with the smokehole above. Two large upright stones backing on to the wall might have been supports for an ingle beam, had there been one. Rainwater fizzed on the red embers, although I guessed the hill rising so close behind the cottage would be shielding us from the worst of it.

  ‘Master Price thought I might talk to you,’ I said. ‘And your brother.’

  For a moment, Anna Ceddol appeared to smile, and then it was gone, fleet as a clouded moonbeam.

  ‘Well perhaps not your brother,’ I said. ‘That is—’

  ‘Master Price doesn’t come here. His wife would not like it.’

  ‘I’ve not met his wife.’

  ‘Me neither. A quiet woman. Or so they say. Sits before the kitchen fire, goes out to listen to the priest on a Sunday and then goes home and worries. Quietly.’

  No particular expression in her voice, except maybe a resignation. Her overdress was the colour of sacking, its hem frayed and flaked with mud. God’s tears, why had no one warned me about her? I’d seen women this lovely at court, but their faces were paled, their lips reddened like cherries. They were ladies; this was a woman, with all the timeless beauty of an unadorned statue. Long face, full lips, heavy hair. A sense of grace about her… and, although she was slim and lithe, a certain weight.

  She said, ‘Can I fetch a drink for you, Dr Dee? We have good water, from a spring. I… regret if I insult you, but they say that the water in London…’

  ‘No, no, it’s true. The water in London kills.’

  She inclined her head. Her eyes were vividly blue, although her hair, all bound into a thick braid, was dark as rich earth. I was somehow glad when she turned away and went to a pitcher which stood amid the rushes on the floor, leaving me sitting in the feebly sparking firelight listening to my own fraught breathing.

  The Bryn: from the outside, it had looked like the worst of hovels, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness I saw that the inner walls were all scrubbed and the rushes on the floor clean and dry. The boy sat in a corner beyond the fire, quiet now, but watching me, the way a cat does.

  The chessboard expanded and shrank in my fogged head.

  ‘Mistress,’ I said at last, ‘I confess I know not what I’m doing here.’

  ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you were sent to see if we’re drenched in evil?’

  ‘Mistress, I—’

  ‘Sooner or later, wherever we go, this is what happens. All’s well till something goes amiss and we’re blamed. And then we’ll move on. They’re good people here, but it can’t be long now before we’re made to go. Not without regret, mind, after all the work we’ve done to make this a home.’

  She gave me water in a wooden cup. I drank, tentatively at first, and then… Jesu, liquid alchemy from the rocks, water from Eden.

  ‘Your brother found this?’

  ‘One of his less disturbing skills. And our most gainful, I suppose.’

  ‘He has an instinct for where best to sink wells?’

  ‘Farmers ever think they can do it, but not many can. Anyway,’ she shrugged, ‘the rector won’t have it in his font.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘The rector.’

  ‘Anything that can’t be explained, it’s either the will of God and must not be questioned, or the work of Satan… and must be destroyed. And he’s our closest neighbour.’

  I watched her solemn face. There was a silken calm behind it that I found almost eerie. What also surprised me was the eloquence of her speech. I’d expected a woman living in such humble circumstance, with an idiot brother, to be uneducated, barely coherent. It was clear now why Stephen Price found her alarming and the rector, held in the ligature of Lutherism, feared the demonic.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I know not what they say about me in the village. What you’re told to your face is seldom what’s in people’s minds. But my tad came from here, and I doubt they’d mean me harm. And Stephen Price, against all his inclinations, he believes this place cursed by its history. And thinks, with all my fabled learning, that I might at least be able to direct him to a cure. I doubt I can do that, but now I… I do feel driven to try.’

  Found I was leaning from the stool, my voice rising in urgency. Anna Ceddol stared at me, with an evident consternation that reassured me of her humanity. I fell back under the weight of my own inadequacy.

  ‘I consider myself a natural philosopher. A man of science. Half of London – maybe more than half – yet thinks me a sorcerer, and not so many years ago I was close to being burned for it. And you know the bitter truth of this, Mistress Ceddol? I can rhyme off the theory for hours… but I can’t do what your brother’s said to do. Nothing approaching it.’

  ‘Then perhaps,’ she said, ‘you should thank God for that.’

  ‘Mistress, I don’t thank God for that. My whole life is focused towards a need to enter the Hidden. And I know now that it can’t be done by books alone. Not by all the books in the libraries of the world. All that the books can hope to do is make sense of it.’

  I drained my cup of the sublime water that Siôn Ceddol, the idiot, had found in the rocks of Brynglas.

  ‘I yet need something of which to make sense,’ I said.

  Some of my long-held despair doubtless showing itself – to a stranger in a house like a cave.

  ‘My brother?’ She smiled at last, though it was smirched with rue. ‘Does it not occur to you that when the circumstances of birth leave a child damaged or crippled in his body or his mind then sometimes God will make amends by giving him other gifts?’

  ‘I think,’ I said carefully, ‘that this is not always true.’

  ‘No.’ She looked into the fire. ‘I suppose not. Sometimes I wish God had left him alone with his ills. We’ve been driven from too many towns. At first they value him and then, when there’s water enough for everyone…’

  ‘It’s more than water, isn’t it?’

  Mistress Ceddol drew a bench across the rushes, so that she sat opposite me, the fire betwixt us. The boy crawled across the floor and nestled close to her skirts,
looking at me, wide-eyed but silent.

  ‘The dead?’ She tossed back her dense, braided hair like a ship’s mooring rope. ‘What do you want me to say? That the dead have been kinder to him than the living? Look… what happens with the bones… that’s not happened before. Only here.’

  ‘The obvious explanation being the large number of bones here,’ I said. ‘So close to the surface.’

  Now looking away, though, because I knew it was more than the physical fact of broken bodies absorbed into the hill. This countryside reeked of the numinous. Why else had it been chosen for a shrine to the holy virgin, its spring sanctified, probably to more than one god?

  ‘What I’m saying…’ Anna Ceddol squeezed her eyes shut, her calmness lost for a moment to exasperation. ‘…and what I’ve said to others… is that the bones are not the dead. Only what’s left.’

  ‘But what of the man who was found more recently dead? And… cut about.’

  With no warning, the boy let out his vixen shriek, and I sprang back in alarm, almost toppling the stool.

  Siôn Ceddol grinned. Anna Ceddol pressed down upon his red hat, and he squirmed and giggled, and she laughed for his benefit but addressed me in a darker humour, her eyes steady and intense.

  ‘He didn’t find that man. He wouldn’t even come out that day. He was afraid and clung to the fire.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No, look at him. He’s ever in his own place, and a big part of him is missing. He feels no responsibility, no obligation to any of us. When he shits, I wipe his arse and change his napkin. He expects it and always will. He doesn’t understand. He feels no need to understand anything beyond his own needs. Other people don’t matter to him – never have, never will. Not the living, nor the dead.’

  Her face as calm as ever, but behind it pulsed an old and constant sorrow, always on the edge of despair. Sweet woodsmoke caught in my throat and made me cough, and I felt sorely shamed by my concern with – in comparison – such small frustrations.

  ‘Listen, he’s tired now,’ she said. ‘Maybe, if you can come back tomorrow…’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘If you come back in the morning, I can show you what he does and you can judge for yourself whether it’s the devil in him.’

  Siôn Ceddol was sitting up now, still giggling. Reaching out his arms – I thought at first to me, but his eyes were on something to the side of me, where smoke hung over a stack of cut logs.

  The boy reached out to the space above the logs, making kittenish noises. If there had been heat from the fire there was none now.

  Anna Ceddol said sharply, ‘No.’

  Her brother began to pant, his hands held out before him as though he held a holy chalice. The fire’s cold red embers shone in his eyes.

  ‘He’s tired,’ Mistress Ceddol said. ‘You should go.’

  * * *

  Another oak wood bearded the lower western slope of Brynglas. An old wood, where some trees had boles with the girth of the late King Harry.

  I hesitated on its threshold. If there had been a path through it, it was long obscured.

  The sky would go dark soon. I should collect my horse from Nant-y-groes and ride back to Presteigne. But the rain had stopped and something beckoned, something beyond the wood.

  I went in, as to a country church, the branches above me like twisted rafters, the crunching of acorns under my boots. There ought to be pigs here, but nothing moved except a man who felt himself drawn deep into something he did not understand, surrounded by people who thought he should.

  Anna Ceddol: I felt a profound sadness for her situation. And more than a little desire of her body, which I could only regret for she was in need of better than that.

  And I had a sense of what this boy was about and, if only for Mistress Ceddol’s sake, must needs prove it.

  Tomorrow.

  Who was I fooling? It was as much for my own sake, or – as I might claim – for the furtherance of learning. The boy had found a link to the land, something of another sphere that was channelled through him.

  The oaks shone dully from the rain, and the old churchiness of the wood was as strong as if it were perfumed with incense. I thought of priests, ancient priests in robes of deathly black, with hair in disarray, as Tacitus would have it.

  The Druids, the priestly class of ancient Britain. Made demonic by the invading Romans who would slaughter them on the Isle of Mona in the north-west of Wales – surely demolishing a shining spiritual engine, for was not Merlin himself a Druid?

  Ever the fate of the magician, to be demonised and put to the sword.

  Sooner than I’d expected, I emerged from the wood’s cloister onto a plateau of land overlooking low ground suggestive of marshland, to which I at once slid down.

  For, against the darkening sky, I’d seen it.

  Normally, I’d need no alerting to a man-made bump in the land. Oft-times they hold a promise of treasure which, as I’ve said, almost always comes to naught.

  This tump was low and regular, too small and shallow to be a castle motte. It was nothing in itself and yet, as I crossed the low ground towards it, it seemed to sing to me. That is, I was sure I could hear a low humming in the air. Maybe the sound of my own excitement, for ancient earthworks tantalised me, made my hands tingle, and I knew not why.

  Found myself murmuring a prayer in Latin as I stood at the foot of the tump. The grass on its sides was clearly of a different colour to the turf of the land on which it sat.

  I stood looking up to the summit, where another oak tree grew, like an emissary from the wood.

  What was it about these lonely old graves? The graves of men who were here, I believe, before the Romans, before Arthur. Of a race who lived according to an old magic linked to an arcane knowledge of the sun and the moon and the planets… but who lacked the means or the ability to write any of this down. These were men whom I’m sure would have known some of what Pythagoras knew, but by instinct. Men whose remains – oft-times no more than cremation dust in a pot vessel – were too meagre for such an upheaval of earth.

  This was the treasure: the old knowledge, the ancient wisdom. The tumps were like books made of soil and turf, if only we could read them. Whatever guardian rose up to frighten those who would dig into the tumps in vain search of gold – and I’ll confess that I was once inclined to be amongst them – was perhaps in defence of old secrets.

  It was easy to climb to the summit, where the oak tree stood like a bent old blackfriar. I stood with a hand on the tree and looked all around, and my breath caught in my chest.

  Even from such a modest height, the view was immoderately enhanced. The shape of the nearby river could now be seen, a gleaming eel, brighter than the sky, gathering light from a source I could not see.

  The River Lugg.

  Lugg?

  How might this be spelt? Could it not be a local pronunciation of Lugh, an old British god of light and the harvest? Was this the holy river of Lugh?

  Was the sloping oak-wood the remains of a sacred grove of the Druids?

  The presence of a holy well near the church on the hill that rose before me was a further indication that this had been a place of worship older than the Christian church. And I could see now that the tump on which I stood was set into a curve of the river – the sacred river? – which, it seemed to me, was like to its own shape.

  Indeed, it seemed, at that moment, as if the whole valley had been formed around this tump. When I came down, it was on the other side, nearest the river, and I was marking the dints where it had been invaded by Stephen Price and Morgan the shepherd.

  A body introduced where a body was not meant to lie. A violated body.

  A kind of sacrilege, I thought, as the air of the place was pulled around me like a damp old cloak.

  XXXI

  A Popular Knave

  IN PRESTEIGNE, THE night was alive with lights and the wailing of a fiddle and flute band which was led, I saw, by the chief ostler from the Bull, in a yellow
hat with a feather, plucking at a battered lute.

  And so many more people this night. The constant clatter of shod hooves. Messengers, likely from the Council of Wales at Ludlow, coming to feed and water their horses and take meat before going back on the road. New pitch-torches were set to burn all night outside the sheriff’s house, and extra guards had been posted outside.

  The roistering was not a paid-for merriment; something had taken fire. If all this was over the trial of one man, it still made not full sense to me, despite what Roger Vaughan had said about the scratching of an old itch. I wondered, as I led my horse into the mews at the Bull, to what extent the wound had been inflamed by the manner of the deaths of the men who’d brought Prys Gethin out of Radnor Forest.

  Lights against the perceived darkness of witchcraft?

  ‘Sorcerer!’

  At the entrance to the mews, something stinking slapped into my left cheek. A child’s screech was followed by an ooze of grown man’s laughter, as I winced, plucking at the mess of rotting fruit on my face. Clearly my cousin Nicholas had not been inactive this day.

  Quick footsteps behind me in the mews, and I froze, my horse’s hot breath on my neck. No way of knowing how many of them were in the shadows, or if they were all children.

  ‘No use in hiding…’ A voice more Welsh than any I’d heard in Presteigne or Pilleth. ‘Seen your faces now, boys.’

  A voice familiar to me.

  ‘And here’s the thing,’ it said. ‘If I see your faces again this night and there’s no one about, I shall have no choice but to drown the both of you in the river. Leave you floating faces-down all the way to Hereford. A pity, but there it is. Cannot abide impoliteness in the young.’

  Silence, then the voice came back quieter, with perhaps an edge of amusement.

  ‘I think there’s a horse trough just behind you, John.’

  God’s blood. I found the tank and bent to it, splashing the cold water on my face and rising, dripping.