The Heresy of Dr Dee (22 page)

‘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 heavily.

‘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.

‘Most complimentary about you, Dr Dee. Told me how much the Queen relies on your advice.’

Reassuring only to a point; if it had suited his or Cecil’s purposes, Walsingham would just as easily have painted me black.

‘I’d thought to write to you, as a local man, kind o’ thing,’ Price said. ‘And then… yere you are, like you been sent by—’

‘No!’ Flinging up my hands. ‘I came in search of a stone, for my experiments. For knowledge… for healing.’

‘Healing. Aye. That’s what’s needed.’

Dear God, I was digging my own pit.

‘Master Price, I have to say this oft-times, but… I don’t… undertake the cure of souls.’

The Squire of Pilleth stood with his back to the flat-topped hill, a stubble of thorn bushes around its summit, half concealing the tower of the church. A church my tad had said was dedicated to
the Virgin Mary, whose role was now reduced by the new theology as represented by this new vicar. But not, I guessed, for Stephen Price, clearly much heartened by the thought of a new family home
grown from a monastery grange.

Keeping an air of the holy.

‘All I’m asking, Dr Dee, is for advice. Like you give to the Queen.’

‘You’re a clever man, Master Price.’

‘No. I’m a worried man. There’s things I don’t understand. And the dead are rising as never before. A place with more dead than living. Is that good?’

I stared at the ground.

‘Probably not.’

‘Come with me,’ Price said. ‘Come with me up the hill at least.’

XXV

M
Y TAD HAD
entertained me, as a boy, with tales of the Glyndwr wars. I can see his face now, reddened by the fire, his eyes bulging like a clown’s
as he relates how the rebel leader calling himself Prince of Wales rose against the English King, Henry I V, destroying all the border castles in his path. Oh, the romance of it.

A romance conspicuously missing from Stephen Price’s account of the Battle of Brynglas as we set off up the hill, Price making a hand-gesture at the steepening slope before us.

‘Imagine a thousand dead and dying men. Hear their hoarse whimpers. Many more dead men than there are sheep yere now. Arms and legs and guts. And hogsheads of blood. Imagine the sorely
wounded crawling through the plashy pools of blood.’

Tad had claimed once that the Dees were descended from the same family as Glyndwr – well, who of note were we
not
descended from? But why don’t I remember him ever speaking of
the Battle of Brynglas?

‘In a way,’ Stephen Price said, ‘it was almost separate from Glyndwr’s campaign. It was about the Welsh and the Mortimers – the arrogant Norman Marcher lords with
their impregnable castles and their contempt for the Welsh – the last true Britons. The lowly Welsh hated the Mortimers. Hate beyond our understanding in these modern days.’

‘If the castles had been impregnable,’ I said, ‘would there be so many bald mounds the length of the border?’

‘Or so many well-built stone farm buildings.’

Stephen Price chuckled bleakly. Looking back, we could see my father’s birthplace, seeming the size of a candle box, and a smaller farmhouse the other side of the bridge, both part of the
original Nant-y-groes estate. The English army on that June day must surely have assembled somewhere close to whatever kind of wooden bridge had crossed the river there.

And the Dees… had they just sat and watched from their farms? Or had they taken part? The previously unconsidered question of whose side my family had been on was writ now, in illuminated
script across the deep grey sky.

‘They say Edmund Mortimer’s army was a ragbag of peasants, hastily recruited,’ Price said. ‘But that wasn’t it. He knew the Welshman was on his way down from the
north and reckoned to crush him for good and all. Grind him into the ground. Mortimer had two thousand in his army, including a core of well-trained fighting men – his own and the men brought
along by the knights supporting him. And then there were the archers. Welsh archers, many of ’em – Mortimer pulled his bowmen from both sides of the border. No, it was at least a
halfway-proper army.’

‘Yet slaughtered by half as many Welsh?’

‘Don’t sound likely, do it, till you know what happened. Rhys Gethin, he had his own archers. And rage on his side, see. And cunning.’

Price pointing to the rounded top of the hill, almost violently green now against the charcoal sky. Evidently, no hay crop had been taken from Brynglas this year.

‘No armour to slow them up,’ Price said. ‘Fast on their feet. Mountain men, like goats. Over the hill, by there, I can show you a dip you can’t see from this side, all
full of trees and bushes. And that’s where they hid out the night before. With their women, too. Day of the battle, they all come to the top of Brynglas. But they didn’t come down, see.
Didn’t charge. If they’d charged into Mortimer’s army they’d’ve been carved up into pieces and it would have ended here.’

‘They simply waited?’

‘Forcing Mortimer’s boys to charge up the hill to attack, and it don’t matter how strong your legs are, a charge up yere…’

‘Steeper than it looks.’

Feeling the pain in my bookman’s calves already. What in God’s name was I
doing
here?

Price looked back the way we’d come.

‘A full charge up yere in full armour, on a day in June – even a bad June? Full into a hailstorm of arrows with the slope behind them. Havoc, boy. Bloody havoc.’

I began to see it. I could see dead and wounded men falling back on those behind, who could only go on, their faces soaked with the spurted blood of their falling comrades.