The Heresy of Dr Dee (46 page)

‘Master Roberts?’

‘The so-called
Master Roberts
is taken by cart back to Presteigne, where I’ll find a better bedchamber for his recovery.’ A wry smile. ‘With glass in its windows.
As befits his status.’

I was watching his hands, both exposed, both empty. No sign of weaponry.

‘I’m not
lying
to you, Dee.’

‘Why would Gethin think that, Abbot? That the angry boys from Presteigne were on his side?’

‘Call me Martin. Odd, is it not, the way men’s minds work
in extremis.
’

‘Jesu, Smart, you weren’t even born here, and you can’t give a straight answer to a straight question.’

‘Met Scory last night,’ he said, ‘for the first time. Still in town, after giving evidence to the court. This was before you arrived, all full of wild accusations.’ Smart
chuckled. ‘Poor old Bradshaw. He was far more surprised than I was.’

I sighed.

‘What did you discuss with Scory?’

‘Talked about the problems of survival in the Church in a time of constant change. Scory’s less adventurous than me in my younger days, but he likes to, as you might say, put some
modest items discreetly in store for his future comfort. But that’s an aside.’

It seemed the Bishop of Hereford knew more about Abbot Smart and his circumstances than he’d confided to me. What a bag of adders the Church of England already was become.

‘Good man, Scory, make no mistake,’ John Smart said. ‘But, as he may have indicated to you, working the Welsh borderlands does require a certain… adaptability.
He’s become quite exercised over the conduct of this man Daunce, who, it might be said, has too much God in him.’

More energy in Smart now, his cheeks pinkened.

I said, ‘Once again, why
did
Gethin think the Presteigne boys were on his side?’

The sun had broken through again. Smart clapped his hands.

‘What a fine morning this is become.’ He peered at me. ‘Are you sure you haven’t performed some kind of invocation, Dr Dee? All manner of stories are told about
you.’

‘Most of them exaggerated.’

‘I know the feeling.’

‘I think you knew Mistress Ceddol?’

‘Did I?

‘But how well did you know Prys Gethin?’

I knew not where this question came from. Maybe I’d thought back to what Bonner had said about simony, the ordination of fifty paying candidates,
a small coterie of thoroughly
reprehensible followers.
Or maybe it was given to me by the Archangel Michael.

‘Was he at the Abbey of Wigmore?’ I said. ‘Was he given Holy Orders?’

Smart said, ‘Gethin trusted the Presteigne boys because I’d told him he could. And because
I
was with them.’

‘My thanks,’ I said. ‘Now to go back to my previous question…’

Smart’s face had visibly darkened. His eyes grown still. He looked down at what I yet held: the butcher’s knife, laden with dried blood. I let go of it and it fell to my feet,
bounced and slid in the slick grass towards the foot of the tump.

‘Thank you,’ Smart said. ‘This is very much not the place to keep a weapon too close.’

‘Or an obsessive killer? God’s tears, Smart, you can’t just tell me what you want me to know and expect me to take my nose out of your stinking midden and walk away.’

Smart sighed at last.

‘There were times, in the years before and during the Reform, when an abbot of the Welsh Borderlands was in need of personal protection. I was, I suppose, threatened more than most. In
divers ways.’

‘You ordained him… as your guard?’

He shrugged.

‘Knowing
what he was
?’

‘All right, it was not my holiest act. Look, Dee, if you’ve seen the report made to Cromwell, that was not fully accurate, but some of it… had foundation. I knew it was
coming. I knew Cromwell was committed to taking virtually all of us down; the abbeys, by whatever means, and I knew there’d be no great difficulty doing it to me. I’d already journeyed
to London,
cwtching
up to the wily bastard, offering my services…’

‘In what way?’

‘Matter of survival, Dee. I’m not proud of it. Not my behaviour then, nor my behaviour now, although old Jeremy Martin…’

‘Is a different man.’

‘And a good innkeeper, generous with his ale and cider and ever offering a night’s sleep to those in need.’

He smiled, and then it died.

‘An innkeeper hears everything. An innkeeper with a host of old acquaintances and friends in London is able to form an impression of what’s taking shape under his nose and…
use it. When it came to my notice that certain men were entrusting the man now known as Prys Gethin with a task of considerable delicacy… let’s say I thought it was ill-advised and
might rebound.’

‘On whom?’

‘I remember what he did, in my defence, twenty years ago when he was little more than a boy. In those days, his excuse would have been that he was doing it for the Church. Now he’s
been…’

‘All for Wales?’

Smart sat down on the edge of the tump, as though the burden of his past were become too much to support.

‘Once made the mistake of going whoring with him. Learning that we had… very different needs. Later, a particular canon who sought to gather evidence of my misconduct… had an
accident. After a while, even I was in dismay over the depth of the boy’s depravity. Quite relieved when our ways diverged.’

We sat in silence for a while. I knew that everything he’d told me might later be denied.

‘I wanted him to hang,’ Smart said. ‘I did not want him back in my life. And when, after he was freed, the sheriff brought him to me, as he’d apparently
requested…’

‘What did you do?

‘What do you think I did? I greeted him cordially, as an old friend. With great celebration. Fed him well and gave him drink. Told him how much I was in his debt for all he’d done
for me twenty years ago. Said I’d help him any way I could.’

‘Of course you did.’

‘And, in time, he told me where he wanted to go, and I took him part-way there, hidden in my cart. Saying I’d return for him in the morning, with trusted friends. Men he could rely
on.’

‘The Presteigne boys.’

‘Regular customers of mine, in the lower parlour. Roisterers, street-fighters. As I said, Jeremy Martin is ever generous with ale and cider and a bed for the night, and they were the first
hunting party to return to Presteigne – this was after you and your Welsh friend had left. Much competition that night over who’d find Prys Gethin. So I told them I’d received
information as to his whereabouts and could perhaps lead them there. Giving them more drink before we rode off.’

‘You know where he was going. You knew his plans.’

Smart smiled and tapped his nose.

‘Best outcome, Dee. We don’t need another trial. Not for a while. And you don’t need to know any more about my role in Gethin’s demise. Just as, in the matter of Master
Roberts, I have no need at all to know who
he
is.’

I walked with Smart to the Nant-y-groes bridge where the Presteigne boys waited with the horses and his cart.

The day was brighter now, though the sky was white. When we were in first sight of the company, I brought the shewstone from my bloodied jerkin, quite alarmed at how full of heat it was, having
spent the whole night next to my lower abdomen.

Yes, I know… which is the home of the second mind where lie the deepest feelings, the unspoken perceptions.
There must needs be a close bond ’twixt the crystal and the
scryer,
my friend Jack Simm, the apothecary, had said. I wondered if, at this moment, in its swirling depths, the sigil of St Michael would be aglow.

When I gave the stone back to John Smart, he accepted it without a word, and I was glad. The circumstance was not right. It was not the time, although in some odd way, it had served a
purpose.

I said, ‘You scry, Abbot?’

‘Martin,’ he said. ‘Call me Martin. No I don’t scry. That… was another of
his
tasks.’

‘I— Gethin?’

‘He saw. In the stone. He saw what would come. At my house in the abbey, we’d spend whole hours before the stone.’

Thomas Jones had said Gethin was reputed to have the Sight, but…

‘God’s tears. This was
his
stone?’

‘No, it’s mine. But he was the scryer. A scryer need not be a spiritual man. Or so I thought.’

I also thought to ask if he had acquaintance with a certain Brother Elias, but guessed there’d be no straight answer.

He stowed the stone away in his saddlebag.

‘Should you ever have need of a scryer, Dee, I’d advise you to have a care over whom you choose.’

I did not look at the Presteigne boys. I nodded and turned away and walked back towards the river of light. I lay flat on its bank, hanging down, reaching to splash bright water on my face.

When I went back to the tump, the hole – the wound in its side – had collapsed in upon itself, and the stench had gone, leaving only the sharp, bitter essence of autumn.

LV

A
LL WIDE AWAKE
now and in need of someone with whom to talk it all through, I walked up, through the cloistered oaks, to the church and sat on the step
below Our Lady of Pilleth.

Her demure, chipped face shone through a dappled haze and a rediscovered beatific smile, which led me to suppose that Roger Vaughan had been back.

There was no sign of Matthew Daunce, with whom I’d nothing to discuss.

I let my head fall into my hands. It no longer bled or ached so badly, but whatever part of it enclosed my creative thoughts felt beaten thin as an old drumskin.

I’d bathed my head and eyes again, this time with water from the holy well, unable to shake off the vibrant feeling that I’d been used… had been, for a short time, part of
some engine of change.

Or was it illusion?

I saw how circumstance had completed most of the preparations required for an invocation: fasting, self-denial and the many hours without sleep that would separate me from this world, leaving me
open to the higher spheres. And yet…

‘There are things I still can’t comprehend,’ I told the Virgin. ‘I know not what was here before you. How far it all goes back. How Brynglas became a place of healing
before it was a place of killing.
Where lies the power?
’

Was there some energy in the very earth which was released in places such as this for the healing of the body and the expansion of human thought?

Perhaps it had begun not here at all, but with the river and the tump that was raised within its curve. With whoever had been buried there at a time when there were no English and the word
Welsh, meaning – obscurely –
foreigner
or
stranger
, had not been invented. Had that been Pilleth’s golden time?

And when was it turned bad? When was the tump become a cauldron of spiritual pestilence from the second sphere? And the hill… was its natural vigour fouled by that single act of treachery
by the Welsh bowmen? Or was this ruinous reversal of allegiance, as the church burned, itself effected by something here already become malign?

All I knew was that the roiling air of betrayal seemed to have become an engine in itself, a pestilence possessed of a dark intelligence which was become manifest in extremes of thought,
extremes of behaviour only held in balance by a mingling of spiritual disciplines as divers as the pulleys that made my Mortlake owls flap their wings and make hoot.

I thought of the fevered swooping of the women with their knives, wondering if it was even true or just corrosive gossip of the kind that had the Queen pregnant with Dudley’s child. How
could it ever be proved when privy parts have no bones?

I looked up into the lowered eyelids of the stone mother.

‘Are we able to reverse it?’ I asked her. ‘Is it in our power to restore life and health to this valley?’

A shadow was fallen across the Virgin and me, and I turned and looked up into open eyes the colour a sky is meant to be in summer.

‘I was looking for you,’ Anna Ceddol said.

Her wet hair hung black as a raven’s wings. She pushed it back behind her ears. Must have washed it to be rid of the blood. In the river, or one of Siôn’s wells.

‘Too quiet, see,’ she said. ‘Too quiet at the Bryn. They told me to try and sleep, so I took a potion. But I could not sleep for the quiet.’

I rose to my feet. I understood. She faced me, wet-haired, dry-eyed.

‘They say you saw it done.’

I nodded.

‘It was… very quick. Gone like a… moth. A butterfly. I saw what might be about to happen and ran—’

‘He’s in the church,’ she said quickly. ‘On the bier.’

‘Does Daunce…?’

‘Daunce has been summoned to Presteigne,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘Where the bishop lodges. I know not where Siôn will lie.’

‘I’ll talk to the bishop,’ I said. ‘If it’s necessary.’

Knowing I must needs talk to him anyway. About many things.

‘They say he’s killed,’ Anna said. ‘The Welshman.’

‘They say he killed himself. Were you not there?’

‘When he let me go, I ran away. I saw no more of him.’