The Heresy of Dr Dee (47 page)

‘It’s as well,’ I said. ‘He… killed without a thought. He was driven by a demonic madness. The man who you and the shepherd found, all cut about… the man
Stephen Price buried to prevent panic… he can only have been killed by Gethin.’

Anna Ceddol looked down at the stain on her dress, then up at the statue of the Virgin.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Mercy?’

‘No more lies. You’ve been good to me. I won’t—’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I may have brought a terrible sorrow to you and everyone here. Stephen Price saw me as a saviour but I think, in truth, that I’m just part of the
curse.’

‘I won’t lie to you,’ she said, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I know how that man died, and I know how he was cut about.’

I stared at her.

‘Because I cut him.’ Her voice was soft as moss. ‘I took his apparel and then I set about his face with a spade.’

My body jerked back against the statue’s stone robe.

‘What are you saying?’

‘So that no one would ever know who he was,’ she said rapidly. ‘That he was my father. And Siôn’s father.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me any of this. It’ll go no further, but you still don’t have to tell me. No one will ever know any of it from
me.’

She looked up at the statue.

‘The Holy Mother will know.’

Tomos Ceddol. The man who, Anna had told me, had courted her mother but was deemed by her mother’s parents as not of their level. Who, when Anna’s mother died, had
begun to drink to excess. Who had been driven to violence by the ravings of their youngest child, barely weaned when his mother had died.

‘Not true,’ Anna said. ‘She was not his mother. When she died, I was already with child. I was twelve years old.’

Oh, dear God.

‘She was unwell for nearly a year, my mother. After a while, he began to touch me. He’d get drunk on strong ale. He was a big man. Resisting him would only lead –
did
lead – to injury.’

She was hardly the first this had happened to. Hardly the first who’d gone on to give birth to her own father’s child. I believed that most women stayed, made the best of it, at
least until the child was old enough to leave home.

But this child would never be old enough to leave. And Anna would blame her father for the boy’s idiocy. Her father… and herself.

‘When I found out I was with child, I tried to… make away with him. Went to a wise woman in the next village, who charged me all I had for a potion that made me sick for days. But
the babe continued to grow. It wasn’t until he was nearly two years that I knew he must be damaged in the head. And knew why.’

‘You don’t know that,’ I said, but she seemed not to hear.

She’d never let her father touch her again. She’d been sleeping with a kitchen knife since first learning there was a child on the way.

The night she’d found him kicking Siôn, 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.’

Siôn 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 Siôn.
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.’

Monas Hieroglyphica

LVI

H
E 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?’

All this yet worried me. How could Smart, in his role as her fishmonger and former associate of Gethin’s,
not
have been part of it? The most likely explanation, it seemed to me now,
was that Smart had not realised for a while how high the plot went. Maybe not realised that the target was Lord Robert Dudley, panicked when he found out.
Let’s say I thought it was
ill-advised and might rebound.
On him and his comfortable retirement.

‘Who knows?’ Dudley said. ‘I was taken in the street. Hit from behind, thrown into an alley. Dragged out as if drunk. And then beaten, tied down in a cart.’ He drained
his cup. ‘Don’t want to talk about it. It demeans me.’

Did it? I was inclined to think that now he was out of it, he found it perversely flattering, the lengths to which they’d gone. And that coming through it had strengthened his cause.

He’d remained with Mistress Swift until he was fit enough to mount a horse his broken arm still bound. Three days – Dudley healed quickly. And ever thought the best of women, and
they of him.

‘She had new boots made for me,’ he said. ‘Man must’ve been working day and night.’

‘With a sheath in the side?’

We’d not discussed this. For all his soldierly training, I suspected this might have been the first time he’d actually fought for his life.

‘You’d taken out the blade after they searched you but before they stole the boots – as obviously they would, boots of such quality.’

‘Secreted the blade into my sleeve. It took a couple of painful hours, but eventually I had the ropes stripped to a thread. When the older man left us alone, it was the obvious time. The
boy had been taunting me in his halting English. How they’d be cutting off my cock and what they’d do with it.’

‘So
they
knew who you were.’

‘Evidently. It delighted them. Lost count of the beatings.’ His jaw tightening at the memory. ‘When the moment came, the boy made the first move. When his brother hadn’t
returned by first light, he was on his feet, blade out. I think he’d have cut my throat if I hadn’t snapped the threads and… Not at my best, I have to say, but with surprise on
my side…’ He shrugged. ‘You seen Cecil since your return?’

‘He hasn’t summoned me.’

Nor had his muscle come to snatch me into a barge. Cecil’s silence had said all I needed to hear.

‘However,’ I said, ‘a royal barge did arrive this morning.’

‘Jesu!’ Dudley sat up hard, with a clacking of the bench-feet on the flags. ‘
Bess?
’

My mother also had wondered as much and had been driven into a panic.

I shook my head.

‘Blanche.’

My cousin. The Queen’s senior gentlewoman and closest confidante. A social visit. Much circumspect Border-talk with never a mention of either astrology or wedding dates.

Dudley leaned forward across the board.

‘You told her?’

‘Everything.’

Dudley expelled a long long breath.

‘Hell’s bells, John.’

‘Who better?’ I said. ‘She won’t tell the Queen unless it becomes necessary. But she might have words with Cecil.’

‘You clever bastard.’ He sat back, smiling again. ‘What about Legge? Did he know why he was sent to Presteigne?’

‘Only to an extent, I’d guess. He’d simply know his duty was to see that Gethin was acquitted. He’s not a fool. Had he asked too many questions, well… would he
even have arrived back in London?’

‘How would he not, with several dozen armed men?’

‘It would take but one man,’ I said, ‘to smother him in his chamber during some overnight—’

‘God’s bollocks, John! I always took you for an innocent.’

‘Me too,’ I said ruefully. ‘What will you do now?’

Soon wishing I hadn’t asked. In some awful way, fortified, convinced that God had brought him through for only one purpose, what he’d do was to continue as before, in pursuit of his
life’s goal.

A spear of late sunlight lit the glass eyes of my finest owl, sitting stately on his window sill. The one that flapped his wings and said
woo-woo.