The Heresy of Dr Dee (29 page)

Not entirely of this world, I’d have sworn that.

‘Sometimes,’ Anna Ceddol said as we pursued him up the hill, ‘I think I can see lights around him. Little winking lights at his shoulders.’

People talk of foreshadows of the End-time. Lights in the sky. Prophecy in dreams. Voices in the night. Footsteps in empty rooms. The dead among the living. I hear of these things all the time.
I draw glyphs and sigils and mark wondrous geometry in the night sky to calcule how celestial configurations might alter our humour. Yet how can I know what is real and what is imagined?

He spun, red-crested, amongst the curling leaves, swirling in the energy of autumn. He was of nature, she said. The woods would feed him. He would wind himself around the twisted trees,
occasionally snapping off twigs which would come alive like extra fingers, twitching and dipping.

Although not so much now. He seemed to find that unnecessary now, she said, as though he could conjure invisible twigs and follow where they led.

Natural magic.

‘You took it up there?’

Anna Ceddol had stopped halfway up the slope, drawing her woollen shawl around her. The church tower had appeared above the trees. I looked at her, worried.

‘I thought to take it somewhere he might not normally go. Was that wrong?’

The secret
, she’d said earlier,
is in making him want to do it. He has no care for how you regard him. Will show no real love for any of us. Only need, which is not the same. He
feels only for himself, and oft-times, it’s hard not to think the worst of him.

‘Not,’ she said, ‘if it proves something to you.’

But I saw she was anxious.

Once you understand, you can feel only pity… the pity that you know he’ll never feel for you. You can’t teach him to obey commands, like a dog, because a dog wants to
please and he doesn’t care. You have to know when to catch his attention and point it at what you seek.

What he was seeking now, on Brynglas Hill, was an earth-browned thigh bone.

Anna Ceddol had presented it to me while he was outside.

His favourite bone. The first he found here, a few feet from our door. I could never take it to be reburied because he won’t be parted from it. Sometimes he holds it next to him as he
sleeps.

I’d asked her what she wanted me to do with it, and she’d bid me take it and hide it. Anywhere. Then come back. Which was what I’d done. It had felt unreal walking through the
mist carrying a thigh bone before me like a talisman, to leave in a place where I’d felt it would be in the care of a higher presence.

Returning to the Bryn, I’d heard his vixen scream and the angry toppling of wood from the fireside pile and wondered how Anna Ceddol could go on living with this, year upon year. He was
already near as tall as her, would soon be bigger, a grown man with a grown man’s urges and living alone with his sister.
Dear God in heaven.

When he’d registered that the bone was gone, I’d watched him running from the hovel, hands clawed, face contorted in rage, staring at me with a clear and focused hatred, Anna Ceddol
watching him, impassive. Used to this – his humours changing faster than clouds in a windy dawn.

We stood and watched his red hat bobbing in the grass.

‘Do you never go to town, mistress?’

‘When I’ve something to sell.’

‘You have no cart… no horse.’

‘Nor stabling for one. No need. Horses won’t rest at the Bryn. Ewes won’t graze. Chickens escape. When I go to town, we walk. It’s not far. On a fine day.’

‘Why won’t animals live here?’

‘At the Bryn? I’d have thought you’d know, master.’

‘I’ll put it another way, then – how can
you
live here? You’re clearly an educated woman. How came you here?’

‘I…’

She bit her lip. Her hair was not braided this morning, and the breeze blew it back. I drew breath; her beauty unnerved me.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I said.

‘Beg mercy,’ she said. ‘I called you master. It’s doctor, isn’t it? You treat the sick also?’

‘I… treat nobody and nothing,’ I said. ‘And cure even less. The doctorate’s something I picked up in the course of a long education. Which will never
finish.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t
have
to tell you anything.’

Tomos Ceddol, her father, had laboured on her grandparents’ farm. Good looking, and her mother had fallen for him and determined to marry him against her own
father’s wishes. Anna’s mother had been the youngest of six.

Had Tomos Ceddol expected some kind of dowry? Had he expected to be rich, wed to a big farmer’s daughter? Whatever, he was soon embittered.

‘Not a good marriage,’ Anna Ceddol said, ‘and my mother, as soon as I could understand, was telling me I must never make the same mistake, to marry below me. My father had to
go farther away to find work. My grandfather wanted nothing to do with him. While he was away, my mother taught me to read. Secretly. If he’d known, he’d have beaten her. And then my
mother died of the summer plague, and we were left alone with him.’

‘How old was your brother?’

‘Very young. We didn’t know then that he wasn’t… as he should be.’

Some time had passed before it became clear that Siôn was not as other children. Crying in the night… that didn’t stop. Nor pissing his bed. His sister washed his sheets daily
and made more in secret, or her father would have had him sleeping on straw. Soon Tomos Ceddol was become ashamed of his son. Could not bear to look at him.

‘Spent as much time away from the house as he could. He’d come home drunk – so as to get to sleep, he said. But oft-times, the noise was too much. He’d awake in a tearing
rage and… hurt Siôn. One night he took him out to the barn. I found him kicking my brother where he lay, and I pulled him away, and he hit me until I knew not where I was. The next
day, I loaded a handcart and took my brother away.’

‘Where could you go?’

She shrugged.

‘Kept on walking until we were too far away for my father to find us. I’d robbed him, see.’ She looked at me, eyes wide open and unmoving. ‘Took all the money he had in
the house. Well… he’d no cause for complaint. It would have cost him more if we’d stayed.’

‘Where was this? Where did you live?’

‘A good distance away. You’ll excuse me, Dr Dee, for not saying where. If he hasn’t drunk himself to death in a ditch by now, I don’t want him finding us.’

‘Did you know by then of Siôn’s… qualities?’

She shook her head.

‘We came down the border, village to village, for some years. For some time I had work caring for the small daughters of a widowed gentleman who paid a village woman to look after
Siôn by day. It seemed a good situation until I learned that I was expected to marry him. He was older than my father, and I… Anyway, it was back on the road until the money was all
gone.’

I waited.

‘Then another rich man took us in.’

Looking at her, was it any surprise? All the rich men would be waiting in line.

‘He gave me money and offered me a house to live in. In Presteigne.’

‘Generous,’ I said.

‘It was a good dwelling, behind one of the clothing workshops. Too good to be given without demands on my… time.’

They were walking out of town when a man and his family stopped and gave them a ride on their stock cart. Pedr Morgan, shepherd of Pilleth, returning from taking fat lambs to market.
They’d spent the night in his stable. She’d asked if there was anywhere she might find work and somewhere to live for a while.

‘The rest… is of small import. Save that it took time. The people here are slow to befriend a stranger. But at least there are no rich men, save Master Price. Rich men have not been
good for me.’

‘Nor poor men, it sounds like.’

‘Except for Pedr Morgan.’

Who had lost his finest fleecing shears – must have fallen off the cart in one of the fields, he had no idea which. Been searching for a fortnight and more. Taking Anna’s advice,
he’d shown his old pair to Siôn Ceddol, who had found the missing shears within an hour. Within a week, he’d found two new springs in the hillside. Wells were sunk, the Ceddols
given food and offered dry barns to sleep in. And then Anna Ceddol had happened upon the Bryn, where nobody wanted to live and could be hers, for nothing.

And then Siôn Ceddol had found the thigh bone. The first of hundreds of body parts.

‘Where’s he gone?’ I said.

All the time she’d been talking, the red hat had been bobbing above the yellowing grass. No sign of it now.

‘He won’t be far away,’ she said. ‘Where did you put the bone? You might as well tell me.’

I told her I’d gone up to the little church, finding it empty. And then, walking around the side, had come upon…

‘Oh Jesu,’ Anna Ceddol said.

Already she was running up the hill, lifting her skirts, her breath coming hard.

I caught her up.

‘Mistress, it was the best test of him I could think of. A place he’s not used to going – a place he might avoid – though quite close. I needed to know
how—’

‘I thought you understood!’

It was almost a scream. The most emotion I’d seen her show, and made me sick to my heart.

‘Listen,’ I said, running alongside of her, panting. ‘Please… I think I do understand. I think your brother possesses rare natural skills of a kind which are yet…
fully explicable by emerging science. I’d like to… to help him develop them.’

‘That’s not possible.’

She stumbled on, the mist gathering more densely around us. Her head was lifted to the obscured sky, and her lips were moving in what looked to be rapid prayer, as we came up to the
church’s grey walls. The tower was darkly garlanded in mist which seemed to hide no sun, trees bending away into the sloping churchyard. A cawking of crows and ravens, intimate in the fog,
and, mingled with them, a kind of liquid wailing which sent Anna Ceddol, sobbing in relief, forward in a rush, to follow the church wall to the holy shrine of Our Lady of Pilleth.

I’d been in a hurry when I’d brought the bone and now saw the shrine and holy well as if for the first time: the green-slimed rocks, the steps down to the spring-fed pool, the stone
wall built around it making it look like an open tomb.

On her ledge against the church walls, the mother of our saviour was smirched by the grime of neglect. Abandoned. Behind the body of the church, almost certainly older in its origins, the shrine
of the holy virgin had been given back to nature.

And the bone given back to Siôn Ceddol.

He sat with his legs overhanging the pool, rocking from side to side, the dripping thigh bone in his arms, a gurgling in his throat.

He
could
, I suppose, have found it by accident, but why would he even come this way? And I’d hidden it close to the edge of the well, where bushes concealed the shallow water, and
covered it over with silt and sodden leaves.

It was conclusive enough for me. I turned to his sister.

‘I do understand him. I know what he does.’

As if this were all that mattered.

Oh, the blindness of science.

I went down to the holy well, where rough steps sank towards the water, the mist gathered above it like a soiled veil. Siôn Ceddol clutched his bone to his chest and looked up at me as
though he’d never seen me before and snarled, his face twisting like to a gargoyle’s.

And then…

‘
He makes mockery of God!
’

Christ,
no.

Turning slowly to see the rector, in his long black coat. Everything happening as though darkly ordained for my undoing.

‘He is a walking blasphemy,’ Matthew Daunce said.

Anna Ceddol’s eyes closed, her shoulders falling, the shawl dropping to her elbows. Oh, dear God, oh, Christ, what had I done? What had I set in train here?

‘No,’ I said. ‘You know not what you’re saying.’ I stood up. ‘Mistress Ceddol. It’s best if you go. And the boy.’

Her eyes moved from the rector to me, and she took the boy’s arm and pulled him to his feet. He writhed, and she held him and the bone and dragged him away and looked at me.