The Heresy of Dr Dee (41 page)

‘What did he mean?’

‘Shrine to the Holy Mother, place of pilgrimage – you come, you pay your respects and then you leave with faith renewed. No one should live too close to such places, Walter said,
’cept mabbe monks and hermits trained to thrive on spiritual agony. The ole priest, you never knowed when he was serious, but he knowed what he was about. And then he died. And then ole
Marged. Both gone, one after the other.’

‘And then all you had,’ I said quietly, ‘was a boy who brought death out of the earth but could not talk. And a new priest, all for the Bible.’

‘Had hopes for Daunce at first. That he’d bring some sense, with the new religion. Plain talking. But, in the end…’ Price stabbed the poker into the heart of the fire.
‘…putting it all down to the devil, that was the last thing we needed.’

‘So you came to me.’

‘You were sent to us. That’s how I seen it.’ He leaned away from the fire. ‘The boy with you out there. Was that young Vaughan of Hergest?’

‘And the man with him is my… my cousin, Thomas Jones, from the west of Wales.’

He and Vaughan had said they’d stay outside, watch the night, watch the hill for movement. Anything.

‘My wife’s been like this all her life,’ Price said. ‘Some has it, most of us en’t. I thought it didn’t bother her much any more.’

‘But it was different here?’

‘She liked to walk. In the evening, when the air was soft.’

‘Not any more.’

‘No. Never any more.’

His accent was thicker this night, but his voice was higher, querulous.

‘What did she see?’

‘The dead?’ He prodded at the fire. ‘But not in a goodly way.’

‘You mean from the battlefield…’

‘Confused. Looking for a home. Fragments of them. She’d be walking through them, like they were part of the wind, blowing down the hill, scattered like leaves – that was how
she described it. After a while, she wouldn’t go up the hill at all, except to church, in a group of us.’

‘Where did she walk then?’

‘By the river.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘Quieter down there, see, until—’

I leaned forward, driven by sudden and powerful insight.

‘Until you buried a man’s body in the old grave mound?’

I sat back, into shadow. Felt I was close to the very heart of it. If it was just the fears of villagers, he’d pass it off as the superstitions of the uneducated. But his own wife…
domestic troubles, matrimonial strife. His desire to remain here, in his own place, tempered by that fear that his wife, if they stayed, might even die of it.

I said, ‘Did she know what you’d buried in the mound?’

‘Christ, no.’

Of course not. It was even possible that his wife’s fear of Brynglas had been another good reason to dispose of the remains… before she could find out about it. The thought of what
that
might do to her.

‘Why did you bury him there?’

‘
Why
? Because it was the only place I could think of where the mad boy wouldn’t find him. Or, if he did, nobody would dig there because they all knowed it was an ole grave.
Nobody disturbs a known grave.’

‘No.’ I nodded. ‘Can you tell me what happened down by the river… with your wife?’

Price sat staring at the window and the smeared moon.

‘Gone to walk. Around dusk. Pleasant, warm evening. Come back not an hour later… worst I’ve ever seen her. Close to swooning in distress. Face white as clouds. Took until next
day ’fore she could even tell me.’

‘What was it she saw?’

‘Saw… smelled… felt.’

I nodded. I’d thought the smell would cling to my apparel, but when I left there it was gone. The smell had been part of the place. Part of what was there. And for the first time I’d
been thankful that I did not see, like Mistress Price.

‘No more’n a white mist, at first,’ her husband said. ‘Drifting across the marsh. Taking shape when it got close. Too close to run from.’

‘What shape did it take?’

‘A man.’ He swallowed, shifting on his stool. ‘Clothed only… only in his rage.’

‘You mean naked?’

‘Violence.’ Price poked angrily at the log. ‘She felt the violence in him. A
dirty
violence. She
felt
… what he wanted to do to her. Felt it inside.’
He threw down the poker, turned away from the fire. ‘
Inside
. You know what I’m saying, Dr Dee? You know what it felt like? You heard of anything like that before.’

‘No.’

Though maybe read of it. I wasn’t sure. Horrified, I sought to reassure Price, telling him that no one was mad, that the old priest had been right about the peculiar air of a place of
pilgrimage which might have its origins long before the shrine of the Virgin. That it seemed to me the tump had itself been placed in geometric accordance with the hill, the river, the
shrine’s heathen precursor and perhaps other monuments now vanished – even the sun and moon and the stars – to give this place a certain mystic resonance. Maybe empowering the
spirit of whoever lay within the tump. And anyone who disturbed it… might themselves be disturbed.

All of this unloaded unrefined from my hurting head. Years of study might make it no clearer. And I knew that, but for my own experience at the tump this night, I’d be inclined to say that
Mistress Price had created the whole story in her head to persuade her husband to turn his back on Brynglas Hill.

‘We buried a naked man in the tump,’ Price said. ‘A man whose spirit did not rest. Who walked, and… more.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘She hadn’t been out of her bed for three days. After I’d spent the day with you on the hill, came back home and Clarys said Joan hadn’t been able to keep food down.
Death was coming for her. Got the ole cart out, and we carried her on it, me and Clarys, took her down to Monaughty. And later, when all were abed, I went to the tump.’

‘On your own?’

‘With a lantern. And the bier from the church.’

I sought to frame a question; it would not come.

‘It was my fault,’ Price said. ‘My wife had been near death. My fault to put right. Like you say, it was the wrong place.’ He wiped his brow with a sleeve. ‘Not the
pleasantest task. He stank to deepest hell. He was… green and going to fluids. Pieces were coming away from him. But I done it.’

‘What?’

I’d reared back.

‘Dug him out and took him away. Buried him the other side of the hill, behind the pines. Laid the turf on top and packed it tight. And said what prayers I could think of over
him.’

‘No one saw you?’

‘Not as I know of. Doubt if I cared by then. Had to be done. Why? Was it wrong? Against the laws of God? I think not.’

‘Only the laws of man.’

‘Aye. Mabbe. But what choice did I have? Tell me that.’

I leaned forward, looking into Price’s round, firelit face.

‘So there’s nothing in there now. Nothing in the tump.’

‘Only what was there before. Whatever that may be.’

‘And the hole,’ I said. ‘The hole remains.’

‘No hole. I filled it in. Who would not?’

I gripped the wooden seat of my stool, my aching head all aswirl. I’d gone most of a day and a night without sleep, had little to eat and taken a blow to the head.

But I knew that I’d gone into the hole and… nothing there but a foul miasma and a swirling hatred and—

‘John, boy?’

Thomas Jones standing in the doorway, hands behind his back. How long he’d been there I knew not, but I knew the tilted smile on his face was no portent of good fortune.

‘Beg mercy if I interrupt you, John, but I thought you might want to know that at this moment there is a man walking quite openly along the road towards us, from the direction of
Presteigne. Evidently making for the hill.’

I stood up.

‘Someone you know?’

‘Well… he’s yet some distance away, so we cannot be entirely sure. But, Vaughan and I are in general agreement that it might well be the man who likes to call himself Prys
Gethin.’

I stood unsteadily, a hand on the ingle beam.

‘John, you look worse,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘You should stay here. Vaughan and I will follow him.’

‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I must needs come.’

For I was hearing his voice from earlier.

Killing and rape… as natural to him as taking a piss… O liked to do her while covered in pig blood, still wet… the demon he’s invested with the spirit of Rhys
Gethin…

I stood pushing my hands back through my blood-stiffened hair, regardless of the pain, and then turned to Price and asked him what I’d thought, as a bookman and a philosopher, never to ask
any man.

‘Master Price,’ I said, ‘have you weaponry here?’

XLIX

A
T FIRST SIGHT
, looking down, you might almost have thought him drunk. Trying to stay upright, hands extended either side of his body, upturned as if
weighing the air.

It was the first time I’d seen him.

We watched from a small orchard growing on a shelf of higher ground behind Nant-y-groes, standing inside a lattice of shadows and speaking in low voices. Stephen Price had offered to come with
us, bringing both his sons, maybe rousing some of the local men. But Thomas Jones had pointed out that too many of us on Brynglas would only draw attention.

Besides, I’d no wish for too many people to know about Robert Dudley.

‘If it
is
Gethin,’ Vaughan said. ‘How did he avoid half the men of Presteigne?’

‘They’ll have given up long ago,’ I said, ‘though that doesn’t tell us how they failed to see him on the road.’

‘Unless,’ Vaughan said, ‘he was given help. Nobody saw him leave the court. He may have been smuggled away later than we think.’

‘It being important that he reaches his destination,’ I said.

It was all aglow again. The night alive and me half dead.

‘We have a choice,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘We could simply wait here until he goes past and then follow him in the assumption that he’ll lead us to wherever your friend is
held. If he still lives.’

‘We’d have the moonlight on our side, so we could leave a reasonable distance between him and ourselves.’

I pointed to a line of pines on the eastern side of Brynglas Hill, which hid the village and would offer us some cover.

‘More copses and dingles up there than you’d imagine,’ Roger Vaughan said. ‘Plenty of places he can disappear if he
does
see us. Especially if he knows the
hill.’

‘I think we can take it he knows the hill all too well,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Having been here many times, following in the steps of Rhys Gethin, calling Rhys’s spirit
into him. Rhys in the time of triumph.’

I said nothing. None of my mentors – Agrippa, Trithemius – would deem it possible for a man to summon another’s ghost into himself, except in his imagination. Which would have
more effect on himself than upon others and should not be too much feared.

We could see him more clearly now, a sprightly puppet-figure under the moon, and sometimes it looked as if he was almost dancing and then his pace was slowed and he was walking down the middle
of the road as if in a procession. As if he was not alone.

I felt Vaughan’s shudder.

‘Something unearthly about this.’

‘He’s happy, that’s all,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘He’s walked free from the highest court ever held in Presteigne. And he’s on his way to do a
killing.’

‘Something even more than that.’ I marked how his hands seem to gather-in the bright night. ‘He feels himself entranced.’

The arms of the figure on the road were opening and hands reaching out, as if he might clasp the hill to his bosom.

‘We might simply go down to him,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Present ourselves. Three against one and we have… this.’

The blade of the butcher’s chopping knife was near two feet long. Stephen Price had handed it to me as we left and I’d unloaded it upon Thomas Jones at the earliest opportunity. He
held it point down behind an apple tree so that its blade should not reflect the moonlight.

‘A scholar,’ he said, ‘a lawyer… and a man who, since his pardon, has become rather too fond of his meat. Against a man of considerable strength who’s driven to
kill. Yes, I suppose we could do that. Demand he tells us where they have your friend. And, when he refuses, lop off one of his hands.’ He ran a tentative thumb along the blade. ‘Sharp
enough, certainly. Will it be you, John, to do the first hand?’

‘We’ll follow him,’ I said.

Nearly halfway up Brynglas, not far below the church, Prys Gethin stopped and sat down on a small tump in the grass. To gain the cover of the last stand of pine before the
church wall, we’d had to creep, one by one, to higher ground and so looked down on Gethin now.

Both Thomas Jones and Vaughan had been able to verify to their satisfaction that this
was
Gethin. And there was confirmation for me, too, when he turned his head and the moon lit the grim
cavity where an eye once had lodged.

I looked at Thomas Jones in frustration. He shrugged. There was nothing we could do but wait. After several minutes, Gethin had not moved, sitting quite still, as though in meditation. Or was
he
waiting for someone? I leaned against one of the pines, fatigue weighting my legs. The only warmth came from the new blood on my brow, the deep gash in my head having opened again,
tributaries channelled either side of my nose.