The Heresy of Dr Dee (8 page)

Anna Ceddol, the boy’s sister. Who speaks both English and Welsh and also, it seems, faerie. She’s approaching twenty-nine years and unmarried – because of her brother,
obviously. An old maid in waiting. Their parents are dead, she’s all he has. And who would have the mad boy?

And so no one has her. Which is a crime against all creation, Price thinks, marking how lovely she is, in a way not of her class. Head held high, hair brushed back and eyes wide open, unafraid
to the point of insolence.

‘What’s he doing?’ Stephen Price demands of her.

Speaking roughly, no doubt to ride over a surging of desire – as Siôn Ceddol teeters on the edge of the nearest of the foundation trenches and then jumps down into it.

‘Wait,’ Anna Ceddol says. ‘If you please, Master Price.’

And so they all wait, Stephen Price and his sons behind him and his servants behind them, as Siôn Ceddol’s red hat is seen bobbing along the top of the trench, suggesting that surely
he can only be crawling along the bottom.

I was not, of course, there, but I can feel the air, as I write, all aglow with trepidation and awe. And an unnatural excitement – the soul of a village briefly lit by the glow of its
disease. After some minutes, the boy emerges crawling, like to a spider, from the trench. Kneeling, he takes the hat off his tousled black hair, beating it against an arm and then turning it in his
hands as if to make sure it’s clean of mud before replacing it on his head.

‘Ner,’ he says.

His bottom lip thrust out, sullen.

‘Nothing there,’ Anne Ceddol tells Stephen Price.

The boy has stepped back from the trench and now walks towards the beginnings of another, his hands splayed in front of him, stiffly at first and then aquiver, as he reaches it. It’s not a
warm day – few of those this summer – but the sun is well aloft and lights the shallow trench as he drops into it, then disappears from sight, and there’s the sound of scratting,
and a mist of earth flies up.

‘Fetch him a scratter.’

Stephen Price tosses the instruction to his eldest son, annoyed that he can’t take his eyes away from the place where Siôn Ceddol disappeared. When a trowell is produced Anna Ceddol
accepts it and takes it to her brother and returns to Price.

‘Thank you.’

She stands so close that her beauty must be disturbing the hell out of him. Can’t avoid marking the form of her breasts, where her overdress is worn thin. The dress is the colour of the
soil-spatter thrown up from the trench before a screech like to a barn-owl drives the people back in a panic of excitement.

And now Siôn Ceddol’s on his feet again, his face lit with a broad, pink grin.

Though not, it must be said, as broad as the grin of the earth-browned human skull now held up, clasped tightly between the boy’s eager hands to keep the jaw attached.

Weeks hence, when his barn is built and the summoning of Siôn Ceddol is raised one market day in the new Bull Inn at Presteigne, Stephen Price may be heard making dust of
it. How the idiot boy was putting on a show of searching the ground, foot by foot, when he knew all along where the bones lay… having, Price is convinced, buried them there the night before.
Either him or that sister of his who oft-times disturbs Price even more and in ways he’d rather not tell you about.

Well, he says in the Bull, to Bradshaw and Beddoes and Meredith, en’t as if they’d have had difficulty finding bones on Brynglas. Like to a charnel house this year.

‘An omen, they’re saying, the villagers. Like the weather. A reminder.’

Bradshaw eases his weight upon the bench and farts.

‘Don’t they know of the capture of this man Gethin? Is that not a good sign for them?’

‘Hell, no.’ Stephen Price almost laughs aloud. ‘It’s another sign that it’s all coming back, the blood and the fire, and they’re unprotected.’

‘Well, it’ll be good for us,’ Bradshaw says. ‘They’ve never recognised us in the west, as the county town. Now we’re settling their score for them.’

Stephen Price says nothing. Bradshaw’s from Off. Crossed the border to swell his fortune. He thinks wealth is the balm for all wounds.

Price buys more wine he can ill afford this year, to dull the fears that chatter in his head like the restless sprites that he’s sure no one he met in Parliament believes in. Blanking out
the image of the skull the boy found. One eye-hole twice the size of the other, where the blade went in.

The night before last, Stephen Price woke in a sweat from a dream where he saw a man lying, all cut about, on his back, in his own blood, on the side of Brynglas Hill, with another man standing
above him twisting the squat blade of his pike round and back and round again in that left eye while the dying man screams to heaven.

Price drinking harder to drown out the voice of the new and forbidding rector, the narrow, white-faced man arching his spine, peering into his face, asking him,
Master Price, why
do
you let the devil have rein in Pilleth?

X

T
HE COLD RAIN
was lashing us by the time I was led to the scaffold.

More rickety than the last time I’d been here, some of the frame hanging loose. It might bear the weight of a man, but not for long. Clearly had not been used for some time, and its poor
condition seemed in keeping with the rumours I’d heard.

‘Why did you not say where we were going?’

Angry now, but the man in the rusted doublet ignored my question, as he had every one since we’d left Mortlake. We passed under the scaffold to the front door, opened as we reached it, by
an armed servant.

And then up the stairs. I knew the way. The owner used to call it his
cottage
. It was three storeys high and now had several new-made windows taller than a man. When last I’d been
here, builders had been intensively at work on the scaffold, seemingly engaged on turning this into the finest house on the Strand. But rumour had suggested this might not be the London home of the
secretary of state for much longer.

‘Was to have been another large window in the master bedroom by now,’ the secretary said mournfully when I was shown into his work chamber. ‘Foolish of me to wait for fine
weather in a summer like this.’

‘Anything else, Sir William?’

The man who’d brought me loitered in the doorway until Cecil raised a dismissive hand from the folds of his drab robe.

‘No, no, thank you, Fellows. I’ll send for you when Dr Dee’s ready to leave.’

‘No need,’ I said curtly. ‘I’ll hail a wherry.’

Cecil peered at me.

‘Sit down, John?’

I stayed on my feet, behind the proffered chair. The usual mean coal fire smouldered in the hearth behind me and the rain rattled the panes. Whenever I was here, there would be rain.

‘If I’d refused to step into that barge, Sir William, would they have brought me here in chains?’

Cecil’s guard-dog eyes widened fractionally.

‘You think chains would have been necessary to restrain you? Taking more exercise nowadays, is it?’

‘Bigger books,’ I said. ‘Higher shelves.’

He didn’t laugh. For Cecil, banter was never indulged in for its own sake, only to grant himself more time to think. I noticed he’d put on more fat since last I’d seen him, as
if to make himself harder to shift. Fewer than forty years behind him, but you’d have thought at least fifty.

‘John, I regret that we haven’t spoken a great deal since your return from Somerset with the, ah… remains of King Arthur.’

‘The Queen—’ I cleared my throat. ‘The Queen believes it was Dudley’s mission. I was there to hold his bridle while he resolved matters.’

I wouldn’t normally have passed this on, but I was tired of being undervalued and thus underpaid and guessed that, for the first time, this man, who had survived service to three
successive monarchs, would begin to understand.

‘Oh
really
,’ Cecil said mildly, ‘What else would you have expected?’

There was considerable tension this year between Cecil and Dudley, whose star had grown brighter in the royal firmament than Venus at dawn. Cecil, meanwhile, had been deemed a disappointment for
his failure, in negotiations with the French, to regain Calais for England. This had ever been unlikely, but the idea that it was even possible had been put into the Queen’s head by…
Dudley, of course.

I said nothing. The word was that Cecil had felt himself abused to the point where he’d tendered his resignation to the Queen. But then Amy Robsart, who had become Amy Dudley, had died and
something had snapped like an overwound crossbow.

Cecil went to sit down behind his trestle. The great window’s lower frames were barricaded from outside by the builders’ scaffold, but when he leaned back, tilting his oaken chair on
two legs against the sill, at least half the spires of London were, once again, at his elbows, blurred by rain.

‘John, would you happen to know why Mistress Blanche wanted to see you?’

‘Would you?’

‘I might.’

‘However,’ I said, ‘when she – and, presumably the Queen – find out that you physically prevented the meeting taking place, as arranged—’

‘She’ll simply realise that you didn’t receive the letter. I gather it was left with your mother, you being absent at the time.’

How the
hell
did he know all this?

‘Having gone off on one of your… expeditions in search of the Hidden.’ Cecil leaned forward until the front legs of his chair met the floor. ‘Do you want to know what
this visit may have been about, John?’

And what was I supposed to say to that? Cecil half stood to pull off his bulky black robe, revealing a doublet in what was, for him, the somewhat frivolous colour of charcoal. He tossed the robe
across the wide trestle in front of him.

‘Now
sit down
,’ he said.

The people of the Welsh border take a long path to the point. My father loved to explain that this was because, in an area ever riven by conflict between the Welsh and the
English, they would need to know precisely where a visitor’s allegiances lay before entrusting him with even the most trivial intelligence.

I’d oft-times marked this approach in the manners of Blanche Parry, who retained her accent, but was inclined to forget that the family of William Cecil – from whose tones all trace
of Welshness had long ago been smoothed – had once spelled its name
Seisyllt.

‘Did you know Amy Robsart, John?’

‘I wouldn’t say I knew her. She tended not to come very much to town.’

An understatement. The Queen was not exactly approving of wives brought to court, or even to London. Especially Dudley’s wife, obviously. In the absence of a Dudley country mansion, Amy
had spent most of her married life as a guest of various friends of her husband. A dismal existence.

‘Met her once,’ I said. ‘On one of her rare visits to Dudley’s house at Kew.’

‘And what thought you of her?’

At last I sat down. Truth was I’d thought Amy quite beautiful. Also intelligent, lively and warm. In my view – was this treason? – as a wife, the Queen would not quite compare.
God help me, I’d even caught myself, wishing that circumstances had been such that I might have met her before Dudley.

‘You’re blushing,’ Cecil said.

‘Heat of the fire.’

Cecil laughed.

‘What a waste, eh, John? As I oft-times think about a carnal marriage—’

‘Starts in joy, ends in tears?’

Cecil frowned. I’d gone too far.

‘A perceptive saying of yours oft-times retold,’ I said, in placation.

He made a steeple of his fingers. His own first marriage may even have been a carnal union, but his second one, to the severe Mildred, could only have been founded on a need for reliability and
circumspection. Cecil was a man long wed to his career.

‘Do you know when he last saw her alive?’

I did but said nothing, remembering something else I’d noticed at my one meeting with Amy. While she was – of necessity, no doubt – fairly compliant, there was a certain
equality in her union with Dudley. She was not nobility, merely the daughter of a country squire, yet seemed in no awe of the son of the Duke of Northumberland. To his credit, he seemed to like
that about her.