The Heresy of Dr Dee (23 page)

‘And then what happens?’ Price stopped. A sheep track had become a muddied footpath. ‘This is the worst of it. As the dead Englishmen start to fall back in greater numbers,
Mortimer’s
Welsh
archers, marching with the English, of a sudden they all turns round, these Welshies, bowstrings pulled hard back…’

He did the motion, one arm outstretched, the other withdrawn to the shoulder.

‘And they all put their arrows… into their own side. And at that range, boy, they don’t miss. They
does not
miss.’

I must have winced, as if an arrow had rushed with crippling force into my own chest.

‘A planned treachery?’

‘Some say that, some say they just seen the way the battle was going and changed sides. Yet… all at once? As if they was all moved by the same muscles.’

I was glad he didn’t ask me what, other than an act of prearranged military precision, might have caused several dozen Welsh archers to act as one.

‘Several of the knights died and Edmund Mortimer himself was taken prisoner when the Welshies finally come charging down. Hacking through what was left. Oh, the bitterness and shame of the
all-powerful Mortimers. The only time the name of Pilleth has ever been yeard in London. All of Europe, come to that.’

‘And the Dees… Which side were they on?’

Price shrugged.

‘Never that simple. Even the Norman, Mortimer… after he was took prisoner, the King of England wouldn’t pay the ransom, so all Mortimer done, he just changed sides. Married
one of Owain’s daughters, in the end. No border easier to cross than this one.’

On which side might Elizabeth’s own family have fought? With which side would it look best now for my kin to have allied itself?

‘The big, old families, they just goes on,’ Stephen Price said. ‘The small men, the farmers and peasants forced into fighting – they’re the ghosts as walks the
battlefields and the sad dreams of the widows, for as long as they lived.’

We were nearing the church now, a squat grey tower and nave, hard against the hill.

‘The bones are everywhere in the soil,’ he said. ‘Down the valley, far as Nant-y-groes, as I discovered quite recently. Far as the mortally wounded could crawl. Like farming a
churchyard, it is.’

‘What do you do when you find the bones?’

This was like pulling rotting teeth. How he’d ever debated in Parliament was a mystery to me.

‘They gets buried again,’ he said. ‘With suitable prayer and litany. We have a place, just by yere.’ Pointing to the side of the church, where the land was level.
‘Men of either side, they goes in together. With prayer upon prayer.’

‘And do the dead then rest?’ I asked.

He looked away. I wondered about the betrayed dead, impaled on the arrows of their comrades. Imagined myself, blood welling in my mouth, helplessly gazing over the reddening shaft of the arrow
through my throat… into the merciless face, already misting over, of a man I’d marched with up this hill.

‘Nobody likes to dig out a ditch up yere for fear of what they’ll find,’ Price said. ‘If a man’s bones are unearthed, all work stops till the whole body’s
been dug up and reburied.’

‘Or…?’

‘Or the ghost will haunt the man who fetched up the bones. If so much as a sheep-shelter is to be built, efforts are made to be sure it en’t built on some man’s bones, else
there’d be no luck there, neither. And that’s when they send for the boy.’

‘To find the bones before they rise? How often does this happen?’

‘The dead rising? Of late… too often. This summer, in all the rain… thirty or more.’

‘It’s the wet bringing them up now? The swelling of the… ground?’

My voice tailing off. There would have been many a wet summer since 1402.

The track had steepened under the church, and I stopped on a small promontory, offering a vast far-reaching aspect to the emptiness of the west. I marked two horsemen down near Nant-y-groes. Not
moving, as if they were watching us. They might have been outriders from some long-gone army. How would you know when a man was a ghost?

‘Is it easy,’ I said, ‘to separate one body from another?’

‘Not really. Not much else left apart from ole brown bones. All the valuables would’ve been stripped off the corpses where they lay within days of the battle. And that wasn’t
all.’

Price sucked in his breath, stared up at me almost angrily.

‘The matter of it is, Dr Dee, some of the dead… they weren’t whole, that’s what’s said. Weren’t whole for very long after they died.’

XXVI

S
TANDING BY THE
sheriff’s gate, Dudley finds himself meeting the sardonic gaze of the outlaw, Prys Gethin, as the prisoner is conveyed to one of
the holding dungeons behind the court.

Other men, knowing the story of the curse and the subsequent deaths, might look away at once, but Dudley is Dudley. The role of Master Roberts dropping from his shoulders like a cheap cloak,
he’s giving the man a hard stare, a falcon watching a pigeon.

Except this man is not a pigeon. Anyone can see that.

It’s market day in Presteigne. Soon after I left with Stephen Price, Dudley heard the sounds of stalls being erected in the streets and went out to find the
sheriff’s men assembling at the junction for the ride to New Radnor Castle.

The sheriff’s men and more. The judge was obviously taking no chances. This time, he’d sent most of his guard with them.

Roger Vaughan was watching them set off, and Dudley went across the street to join him.

‘If anyone’s planning an ambush, Master Roberts, they’ll need a small army. Aim is to start the trial this afternoon. Swear the jury in, at least.’

‘Not wasting any time.’

‘Would you? Where’s Dr Dee?’

‘Gone to find his family.’

‘Master Meredith?’ Vaughan looked surprised. ‘Only what I yeard…’

‘Not a big town this, is it?’

‘Wasn’t gossip, Master Roberts. I was there, near enough. Not as you had to be that close – Master Meredith sounded like he wanted it to be yeard far and wide.’

‘So I noticed.’

‘Also mabbe letting it be known that this is no time to have a… natural philosopher in town.’

Dudley smiled.

‘That was the phrase he used – natural philosopher?’

‘Conjuror,’ Vaughan said.

Makes me sick to recount it but, because it’s of some importance, I’m putting this conversation together from what Dudley has told me. Trusting that he was as strong in his defence
of my profession as he insists. Not that this was necessary with Roger Vaughan.

‘It’s used in contempt, that word, but it—’

‘
Conjuror?
’

‘Bad word in London. Meant badly by Meredith. But it en’t always bad in these parts. Hides a deep need in… mabbe not all of us, but enough, yet. We got a few working conjurers
round yere, Master Roberts, and even more the further you gets into Wales. What en’t always easy is to find the ones as knows what they’re doing. Seems to me a man like Dr Dee who
approaches it with learning and also has… the ole skills… Mabbe that’s exactly what we need right now.’

‘Old skills?’

‘Way I sees it,’ Vaughan said, ‘a man wouldn’t study the hidden as assiduously as Dr Dee does unless he was trying to make sense of his own strange…
qualities.’

Dudley, who knows better than anyone the sad truth of this, tells me he held his silence.

‘The conjurors and the cunning men, they yet make a good living in these parts, no question,’ Vaughan said. ‘Better now than before the Reform, I reckon. This was always a
Catholic town, see, and the Catholic Church carried some of the old traditions along with it. Least, in these parts it did. The Protestants, the Bible men, in particular, they makes fewer
allowances for us to know what’s happening to us. Just accept it, it’s the will of God. The cunning men and the wise women, they provides what we used to get from the Church.’

‘You employ one yourself, Master Vaughan?’

‘No. But I’m hoping that Dr Dee will be able to give me some advice when this is over.’

‘And what… what think you he can do here?’

Dudley marked the way Vaughan was looking around before he spoke, for this was not safe talk, not even on the edge of Wales. But there were only the market traders assembling their stalls for
the sale of fresh meat and fruit and fruit pies and honey, fish from the rivers, wool, fleeces and woollen garments from the local workshops. He saw men rehanging the ropes of pennants pulled down
last night by those angry at the delay in bringing Prys Gethin to justice.

Mainly men on the streets, few women, fewer children. Despite the flags, there was no conspicuous gaiety.

‘It’s on a blade’s edge, ennit?’ Vaughan said.

Dudley, a man who ever relishes a blade’s edge, tried not to show his heightened interest.

‘How so?’

‘En’t sure, Master Roberts. I was born and raised yere, and it en’t… stable. It en’t balanced. You goes away and you comes back, and somewhere ’twixt
Hereford and yere, the air changes. Things happen as don’t happen anywhere else. Or they happens faster, so you don’t see it coming. The way sometimes you don’t see a storm till
it breaks. Things yere can change in a lightning flash. So if you got a circumstance…’

Dudley says Vaughan had begun to look flushed with embarrassment. Having, perhaps, started something he no longer wanted to finish. Dudley prompted him.

‘The trial of a man linked – or felt to be linked – to local history?’

‘Aye. Recent history and not so recent. It all stirs something inside… not just people’s feelings, but the feeling of the whole place.’

‘Does a place have feelings?’

‘Some places you can sense it more than others,’ Vaughan said. ‘Dunno why. Mabbe Dr Dee can tell you. But when you try and cover it up with new ways – industry, trade,
too much wealth too quick, you’re risking something going off like fireworks. The Ludlow men, the Bradshaws, the Beddoes, they come in, pulling men like Meredith behind them – the
ambitious local families… and the greedy. Keeping the Church out of it, far back as they can. That en’t good.’

Maybe Vaughan was raising matters with Dudley with the intention that they should get back to me.

‘John’s gone to his old family home,’ Dudley told him, ‘with the man who lives there now.’

‘Price. He’s got a good head on him. The people of Pilleth need that. En’t easy living on a battleground. Not that one, anyway.’

‘Battle like any other,’ Dudley said. ‘I’ve seen—’ Stopping himself, thinking that no antiquary would have seen nearly as much fighting or as much death as
Lord Robert Dudley. ‘That is, collecting documents takes me to places that’ve seen conflict. I know what happened at Pilleth.’

Vaughan looked at him.

‘Do you? No offence, Master Roberts, but I doubt you do. This was a border battle, in every sense. The Welsh, they knew what they were fighting for. The Mortimer army didn’t. Put
that together with… the power of the place, and anything can happen. And it did. Why did the Welsh bowmen on Mortimer’s side start killing their own comrades?’

Because they were fucking Welsh
, Dudley thought.

But said nothing.

‘If you ask them even now,’ Vaughan said, ‘they wouldn’t be able to tell you.’

‘Easy to say that, Vaughan. No one likes to admit to plain treachery.’

Dudley marked a quick and angry movement in Vaughan’s eyes.

‘Master Roberts, I once talked to a man whose great grandfather was a soldier at Pilleth – an archer. A legend in the family. After the battle, he went back to his farm and never
picked up his bow again. Didn’t trust himself, that was what was told to me. Didn’t trust himself to fit an arrow, draw back his arm and know where that arrow was going.’

Dudley would have smiled, making no comment. But don’t think he’d dismiss this as folklore and nonsense. I know this man, and his mind is far from closed to matters of the
hidden.

‘I think,’ he said to Vaughan, doubtless with a deceptive diffidence, ‘that you spoke of… the power of the place?’

If you ask me, I’m also sure that Roger Vaughan had a good idea, by now, of the true identity of Master Roberts. I don’t believe that Judge Legge would have gone out of his way to
conceal it.

‘A holy hill,’ Vaughan said. ‘Brynglas.’

‘What’s it mean?’

‘The blue hill. Behind the church there’s a holy well, dedicated to the mother of Our Saviour. Many people have been healed there.’

‘And even more killed,’ Dudley said brutally.

‘Well, there you are, Master Roberts. Healing power can be turned around. Dr Dee would know that.’

Dudley frowned.

‘You… seem to know a good deal about it. For such a young man.’

Vaughan laughed, and Dudley tells me there was a high, wild edge to it.

‘I’m a Vaughan,’ the boy said. ‘My whole family’s haunted.’