The Heresy of Dr Dee (15 page)

‘You’re also interested in mathematics, Master Vaughan? Astrology, perhaps.’

‘I suppose… to a level. But that was not what I— That is, you’re said to be better qualified than anyone in other areas of knowledge.’

The boy was almost as hesitant as I’d been at his age.

I said, ‘You mean in matters of the Hidden?’

‘Such matters,’ Vaughan said, ‘tend to provoke sneers at the inns of court. But not to someone born and bred in the Border country.’

‘Some areas of life are not so easily manipulated as the law,’ I said.

He laughed. I knew of the Vaughans through word of the Red Book of Hergest, a manuscript in the Welsh language, now nearly two hundred years old, containing the essence of the Mabinogi, the old
Welsh mythology full of ancient wisdom and symbolism.

In fact, a good reason for one day learning Welsh.

‘Your family still has the Red Book?’

‘On occasion, attempts are made to have it taken deep into Wales, but we resist. The Vaughans… we’re ever concerned with our heritage. Even have, as you may have heard, our
own curse – spectral hound foretelling death in the family. However, this matter – the trial, that is – affects my family not at all.
Yours
, however…’

‘
What?
’

‘Please understand I’m not trying to pry or to intrude in any way.’ Vaughan’s face was now redder than his hair. ‘I’m simply approaching you as a neighbour,
your family home being but an hour’s ride from mine.’

I had to shake my head.

‘Master Vaughan, my family home is at Mortlake on the Thames. I was born in London.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m here with my colleague to seek certain antiquities. The proximity of Nant-y-groes is purely coincidental. But if you’re saying there’s a problem
there…?’

‘Not as such, no.’ Vaughan was looking directly ahead to where a spire had pierced the western clouds. God, the evasiveness of these border folk. ‘Well… not so much
Nant-y-groes itself as the nearby village. Pilleth. Which stands to the side of Brynglas Hill. The site of the battle?’

‘The battle in which the English were, erm, slaughtered.’ I stared at the churned mud ahead of us, itself like a battlefield. ‘By the Welsh. Led by Owain Glyndwr.’

‘And his general, Rhys Gethin,’ Vaughan said.

My tad had spoken of this, though not in any great detail. Owain Glyndwr’s campaign had begun as a dispute over the ownership of land and developed into a bitter war against England.
Glyndwr had declared himself Prince of Wales and laid waste to the border and its strongholds. But this was a hundred and fifty years ago, in the time of King Henry IV.

I remembered from my Cambridge days learning how, as a young man, Owain Glyndwr had been well known at the English King’s court. He was cultured, well educated, well qualified in the
law… and also, it was said, in aspects of the Hidden. No one who knew him would have expected him to become such a ruthless and merciless opponent.

‘A place where a thousand men have been slaughtered,’ Vaughan said, ‘is not exactly the easiest place to make a home.’

‘But surely Nant-y-groes would have been there, in some form or other, before the battle?’

‘However, the village was not. Only isolated farms existed before, and no one lived there for years afterwards. But then a few dwellings were built to house farm workers and their
families, and—’

Of a sudden, he urged his horse forward as if to out-race an error, calling back over his shoulder, the wind whipping at his words.

‘When you meet members of your family, please don’t mention my approach to you.’

I caught him up, but the conversation was dead. Ahead of us, the spire was become the body of what I guessed to be Hereford’s cathedral. Close by were the walls and tower of the castle,
reddened not by the sun, as there was none, but by the nature of the stone itself.

Roger Vaughan looked up as an arrowhead of wild geese passed overhead. As if this might be an omen.

‘Perchance there’ll be occasion to talk again, Dr Dee,’ he said.

It had been a curiously muted journey from the start. Each night, we’d lain not at inns but at the country houses of well-off landowners, Justices of the Peace and county
sheriffs, the guards all fed and bedded in their outbuildings, the horses accommodated in their stables. Everywhere, we were expected and bedchambers prepared. The talk over dinner was ever
friendly but ever cautious.

Each morning, as we set out, there was, for me, a sense of the ominous. Accuse me, if you like, of living in the shadow of imagined persecution, but I could not believe that only Judge Legge
knew of the presence amongst us of a suspected wife-killer believed to have bedded the Queen.

I watched Dudley riding ahead, with his man John Forest and the captain of the guard. He must have been known to at least one of the owners of the houses where we’d lain. Steps would have
been taken to ensure discretion.

He’d yet told me nothing of what he’d learned at Cumnor Place. What he learned that implied
evil.

Did Dudley prefer to ride at the head of the company because he was disinclined to be surrounded by unknown men with no cause to wish him a long life?

Unknown
armed
men. I flinched as a vision of the imagination ripped through me: riders all bunched together and then separating, leaving one man dangling from his horse, dragged by a boot
in the stirrup through a river of his own blood.

And the next to die… the next would be me? The infamous conjuror said to trade with demons who would, if Ferrers and Legge had succeeded, have gone to ashes five years ago. Dear God, if
I’d dwelt on this for long enough, I might have turned my horse around and galloped like a madman back into the heart of England.

Too late now. As if dropped from the sky, the city of Hereford was strewn about us, a damp untidiness of fenced fields and holdings and timbered shops and dwellings around a triangle of
high-spired churches. A frontier town.

And a frontier in my life. I felt now, as I had these past three days, to be on an ill-made road leading not to the roots of my family but into somewhere far more foreign than France or the Low
Countries, for at least I could speak their languages.

Guiding my mare between foot-deep puddles and mounds of rubble which had once been part of the old walls, I followed the train into a wide street, where people were gathered to watch us. One
spired church lay behind us, the cathedral ahead, the last one in England. On the rim of twilight, its stones glowed the colour of the shewstone Elias had unveiled before Goodwife Faldo.

I thought of the Wigmore stone and could no longer understand how the desire for it had lured me here. There were surely other stones to be found, as potent as this one.

Across the famous River Wye, a long line of hills lay on the western horizon. The
Mynydd Ddu
– Black Mountains. Where Wales began. The light from a now-invisible setting sun had
bled into a symmetry of cloud which hung above these mountains like half-folded wings. Gilded feathers in a holy light. As we rode on, they came apart.

XVIII

We lodged that night with the Bishop of Hereford at his palace by the eastern bank of the Wye, deep and fast-flowing after this drear summer of persistent rain.

As ever, in a city new to me, I would have welcomed time alone to uncover its libraries and antiquities. I’d marked the once-proud Norman castle falling into ruin, as Leland had hinted in
his
Itinerary
: greenery up the walls, parts of the tower gone to rubble, sheep grazing the one-time courtyards. Why am I ever drawn to ruins?

But no time for closer study. Salmon had been brought up from the Wye for our evening meal in two sittings in a near-monastic, white-walled refectory. As ever, it was polite but unjovial, most
of us tired and aching from the ride. The talk was of little more than hunting, and, as soon as I could slip away, I did. Suppressing fatigue, I cornered one of the canons and asked if I might
speak with the bishop.

His name was John Scory, once Protestant Bishop of Chichester, deprived of his status in Mary’s reign, redeemed by Elizabeth. Yet sent out here into the wilderness, which seemed not much
like redemption to me.

I was received into a crooked chamber with panelled walls of dark oak but no bookshelves. Only a Bible betwixt pen and ink and a wad of cheap paper on a narrow oaken trestle. A window was fallen
open to the greying river.

Scory, plain-cassocked below his station, pulled out an uncushioned chair for me and went back behind his trestle, lit not by a candle but an old-fashioned rushlight. Possibly an indication of
how brief he expected our discussion to be.

‘Forgive me, Dr Dee, but do I recall you as Bonner’s chaplain, once?’

For obvious reasons, this is not something I normally include in my
curriculum vitae
, particularly when dealing with Protestant bishops. I sought the short answer.

‘Better than being burned for heresy, Bishop.’

‘Oh, indeed. But why would Bonner choose to
employ
a man so narrowly spared from the flames? Do you mind the question?’

He was a wiry man of middle years, low-voiced for a bishop. He sat back in his chair, fixing on a pair of glasses as if fully to observe the quality of my response.

‘I believe,’ I said, ‘that this was to enable Bishop Bonner to tap into what I’d learned in… what you might call the outfields of divinity.’

‘Oh… keeping a
pet magician
?’ In the sallow light, a wry smile was shaped in Scory’s lean face. ‘I do beg mercy, Dr Dee, but Bonner’s a man who holds
fast to his beliefs. If he’d signed to the Queen he’d be back on the streets, and the fact that he didn’t and he isn’t…’

‘Suggests he feels safer living quietly behind bars,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t pretend to understand him, but behind the history of terror there’s a questing mind.
I… don’t know why, given his deplorable history, but I can find things in him to like. Which makes me wonder about myself.’

He peered at me through his glasses, then snatched them off, and a full smile at last broke through.

‘You’re clearly an honest young man, Dr Dee. As I’d heard. Also, it’s said, wondrous with numbers, more than conversant with the law, expert in geography, the arts of
navigation…’ Scory’s eyebrows rose a fraction, and then he came forward, both elbows on the board. ‘So what are you doing in such alarming company?’

‘Alarming?’

‘Biggest bloody hanging-party
I’ve
ever seen in this part of the world.’

Scory fumbled in a locker under the board and produced a good candle which he held to the dying rushlight until it flared. Evidently, the discussion was not to be as brief as I’d
expected.

Bishops have never been chosen for their nearness to God, but – unless, like Bonner, their working lives are over – most have kept close to prominent sinners.
They’ll bully harmless parish priests without mercy but, in dealing with influential laity, ever walk on eggshells.

Not Scory. Curiously, he was proving to be a man who gave not a shit for status.

‘They’re hardly going to offer him an amnesty, Dr Dee.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Erm… whom?’

‘Believed to be a certain Prys Gethin.’

‘Truly?’ I said.

I’d never heard of this man, though the similarity of his name to that of Owain Glyndwr’s general had not passed me by.

Scory was silent for quite a while. Through the opened window, I could hear a rising night-breeze on the river. Scory moved back from the candle to study me.

‘Why do I have the feeling that you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about?’

‘Ah…’ I shrugged uncomfortably. ‘That’s because I’m not part of the judicial company. Just a fellow traveller.’

‘More and more mysterious. So what do you want from me, Dr Dee? Why would the Queen’s advisor on all manner of extraordinary matters want to keep a tired old cleric from his
bed?’

‘Well, assuming your diocese includes the town of Wigmore, in the west, I wanted to ask what you knew about the abbey there. Whatever might be left of it.’

‘Not much. Gone to ruin since the Reform, like most of them. The abbot’s house is become a private home.’