The Heresy of Dr Dee (25 page)

‘Preferably upstairs,’ Dudley says, ‘in case of flood.’

‘Ever a sensible precaution.’

Dudley nods soberly at the wisdom of this.

‘Are you with an attorney, mistress?’

‘Not at the moment. They haven’t caught me yet.’

She looks him up and down, her gaze lingering on those exceptional riding boots. Now he can smell her perfume. And her interest.

‘You live near here, mistress?’

‘Within a short walk.’

She smiles. The condition of her teeth suggests she’s no older than he is. He moves his purse around to the front of his belt.

‘It’s a good day for a walk,’ Dudley says.

And off they go together, Dudley priding himself on his ability to mark a whore from thirty paces.

‘You know what’s different about you, master?’

‘Modesty forbids me to ask.’

‘You can make a woman laugh. That’s rare.’

She’s not the first to have said that.

‘Yet I feel’ – she lays a finger on the tip of his nose – ‘that something unfortunate has happened to you today. Did you quarrel with your wife before you left
London?’

‘I don’t have a wife.’

‘Ever?’

‘Any more.’

‘Oh. Well…’ She strokes his cheek. ‘You’ll find another.’

Dudley is lying on his back. He can’t place her accent. It isn’t local to the area, but he thinks it’s Welsh and, in view of what they’ve just been doing, that pleases
him.

‘What’s your name?’ he says.

‘Amy.’

When his muscles lock into rigidity, she leans over him in the bed.

‘What did I say?’

He doesn’t answer. He looks up into her face. She’s nothing like his dead wife. Her eyes are far apart, her mouth is wide and her hair, hanging now over his cheeks, is more the
colour of the Queen’s. He lets out his breath. He smiles.

‘A good living, is it, mistress – with all the attorneys and the judges at the Great Sessions?’

‘Some sessions are greater than others,’ she says.

Clever, too.

‘And who pays for your time, apart from attorneys?’

‘You ask a lot of questions.’

What about the wool merchants from Ludlow? You ever had Old Bradshaw up here?’

‘Him?’ She gives a yelp of amusement. ‘He won’t even be seen walking past my door.’

‘What about Nicholas Meredith?’

‘Master Roberts,’ she says, ‘if it’s intelligence you’re seeking, which may be used for some nefarious purpose… you must needs know I’m a woman who
keeps her secrets. An element of mystery, in my trade, is’ – she touches the tip of her nose with a forefinger – ‘of the essence.’

Her house is ’twixt two workshops down an alley close to the centre of town. The ceiling of her bedchamber is very low and, of a sudden, in the scored and fissured black beams, he sees the
dark, leathery face of Prys Gethin. A knot in the wood has become that one eye. Dudley feels a pressure in the centre of his forehead. He turns away, towards Amy the whore, pulling the sheet from
her left breast and lowering his face.

‘You only paid for once,’ she reminds him. ‘Not that it lasted particularly long.’

‘I’ll pay for thrice if you talk to me.’

She pushes him gently away and sits up, her smile fading.

‘Who are you? I don’t think you’re an attorney.’

Dudley says. ‘I’m an antiquary.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A man who likes old things.’

‘Well, thank
you!
’

‘And you, mistress… are too clever to be a nun.’

‘No,’ she says, pushing back her ginger hair. ‘I’m simply too clever to be a nun in Bristol or London. Here, I’m like the ironmonger, the apothecary, the
blacksmith, the fruiterer.’

‘Yes, I did mark your ability to squeeze a pair of plums.’

‘That’s a common farmer’s jest.’ She rolled away from him. ‘In a few years I’ll be forced to marry a farmer or somebody and the past will be the past. But if
that doesn’t happen… I’ll always have money. And the means to make more. I might start a school. My father was a schoolmaster in Brecon.’

That would explain much. Dudley persists.

‘What about priests?’

‘Find absolution by marrying a
priest
?’

‘Or a former monk? Have you known monks – in the biblical sense or otherwise? What about the former Abbot of Wigmore?’

He’s approached it too quickly. Her eyes narrow. The chamber is lit by a single glazed pane under the eaves, and she blocks it with her body, rising up.

‘I’m an antiquary,’ Dudley says. ‘I’m told he may have some… relics. For sale.’

‘You would expect…’ She laughs, incredulous. ‘You’d expect the abbot of a monastery taken by the Crown to be selling holy relics twenty years
afterwards?’

Dudley’s at once excited.
The man’s about.

‘Not a holy relic, mistress… as such. I and my friend have an interest in a certain gemstone which we believe the former abbot has. Its value is purely…
historical.’

‘You have the money?’

‘You know I have the money.’

‘How long,’ she asks, ‘will you be here?’

An hour and a half later, with a sense of returning strength and well-being following a lunch of beef and gravy at the Bull, Dudley walks back into the marketplace and marks
Roger Vaughan entering through the sheriff’s gates, with documents under an arm. Hurries to catch him up.

‘It’s beginning, Master Vaughan?’

‘Jury’s being sworn in. You want to see?’

The guards are preventing people from using the main entrance, lest the entire town should come to watch. Vaughan leads Dudley down an alleyway, and soon they’re in a cloisterlike passage,
where the slit windows are barred down the middle. At the end of it, an oak door hangs ajar and there’s much commotion.

The courtroom is bigger than he’d expected in a place like Presteigne. Like to a barn, with low-hung rafters, as though a loft has been removed. Perhaps a barn was what it used to be.

A one end, steps lead to a structure like to a long pulpit where, presumably, the judge will sit, although there’s yet no sign of Sir Christopher Legge. Or, indeed, the prisoner. Vaughan
guides Dudley to a corner near a platform with bars around it which extend well beyond head-height. It’s empty. A procession of men is winding from a doorway halfway up the courtroom.

Vaughan says, ‘He’ll leave it to one of the local JPs to swear in the jurymen.’

And so it turns out. The JP is snowy-haired and vague and barely looks at the members of the jury as, in turn, they swear upon the Bible that they will consider all the evidence laid before them
and return a fair and honest verdict.

The JP looks uncertainly around the court, and an attorney in robes leans over and whispers something.

Dudley is marking each of the jurymen with a slow and faintly incredulous smile as the old JP announces that the trial of Prys Gethin for murder by witchcraft and cattle theft will commence on
the morrow at ten of the clock.

‘Hmmm,’ Vaughan says, as the courtroom clears. ‘They’re taking no chances, are they?’

‘I counted seven,’ Dudley says.

‘That would be about right. A safe majority. The fear is that a jury of all local men… that their families would be threatened. That retribution might be made against them, even
years later. Never feel safe again.’

‘Also, I expect that seven extra members of Legge’s guard will come in quite useful if Gethin tries to escape.’

However important it may be that all possibilities of an acquittal for Prys Gethin should be sealed like cracks in the masonry, Robert Dudley, as an English gentleman, yet finds it distasteful
that Sir Christopher Legge should feel the need to bring his own jurymen.

And however much he now wants the swift disposal of the man who slipped him a smiling curse from the back of a cart, Dudley begins to wonder, for the first time, what might be hiding behind the
façade of this small, provincial trial.

XXIX

D
EAR
G
OD, MY
father had me trapped. Walking towards the village, he was with us all the way. I saw him sitting before our
Christmas fire, mellowed by good wine, telling me about my forebears, all the way back to Arthur. All for Wales, my tad.

All for this?

Jesu.

Poor Pilleth, all grey and cowering. Huddled under the hill, waterlogged paths separating the mean, sunken homes with their mud and rubblestone walls, their rotting roofs, smoke-holes in the
ridges and maybe a dozen small, shuttered windows.

There
was
a glow of life here, but only as from a rush-light which burns feebly and lives not long. And the shade of Rowland Dee.

‘Said he’d be in London for five years at the outside,’ Goodwife Thomas laughing shrilly. ‘Just enough time for him to scrape some of the gold off the streets, he used to
say. Scrape the gold off the streets!’

Oh, I could hear that, the way he’d say to my mother,
A proper tapestry, one day, Janey. Telling you now, I am, as God’s my living witness, you’ll be ripping down the ole
wall hangings by New Year, you mark my words, girl.

My tad, a good-looking, lively boy for whom, everyone knew, Pilleth and even Presteigne were too small.

‘And then he’d be coming back, see, to put glass in all our windows,’ Goodwife Thomas said. ‘
Glass
, master! Glass for the likes of we! Well… we knew
we’d never see him again, but he was never thrifty with his dreams.’

How true that was. I brushed aside a small, bitter tear as if it were a fly. Goodwife Thomas, sparse-haired and thin as a rib, was laughing again, saying she could see some of him in me, so
mabbe he’d come back after all, Master Rowly.

‘My, but you’re a good-looking boy, too, Dr Dee. Have you no wife?’

Trying to press upon me a slice of her
bara brith
but, seeing how little of it remained and knowing how few berries the summer would have yielded, I refused, with many thanks, saying
I’d eaten too well at Nant-y-groes.

A mean wood fire burned beneath a stewpot. Children’s faces peered out of the smoky gloom. Stephen Price had said the Thomas family lived in Pilleth’s best house – a long house
with barn attached for the animals, not that there were many now. When a dwelling was abandoned its fabric was plundered to strengthen the others.

‘Dr Dee advises the Queen,’ Price said. ‘He can help us.’

I felt near-sick. What the hell had Walsingham told him about me?

‘Tell him about your grandson.’

Wariness washed over me with the realisation of who her grandson must be. The old woman bowed her head.

‘He don’t want to know our troubles.’

‘I want him to know,’ Price said. ‘He’s one of us. Rowly’s boy. He’s studied these matters, he can see what we can’t because we’re too close to
it.’ He turned to me. ‘In the weeks before his death, the boy’s dreams were troubled. He saw the church afire again and the graves—’

‘Stephen,’ Goodwife Thomas said. ‘No more.’

‘Didn’t he say he saw the old graves opened and awoke and wouldn’t go back to sleep for fear of what he seen coming from the graves?’

‘Please, Stephen…’ The old woman leaning forward on her bench. ‘The rector, he said the devil had got in him and we must not speak of it. The boy took his own life and
that’s one of the worst of sins.’ Wiping her eyes with a cloth. ‘And I want to pray for his soul. But I don’t… I don’t know where it is.’

Behind her, a child had begun to sniffle. From outside in the misty distance, there came a yelping cry. Like to a vixen, but I knew it was human.