Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

Except when the rector’s there.

I suppose I too was inclined to be dismissive and superior when my father spoke of his birthplace, putting on the accents which, he would say, might vary from country English to country Welsh within a mile.

For I was younger then and deep into my studies of Mathematics and Greek and the works of Euclid and Plato. Convinced that all knowledge and wisdom came from the Classical world, long gone. Unaware of the rivers of the divine and the demonic which rush invisibly through and around places like Pilleth.

And I suppose my tad’s fond memories of the border were shaped around the knowledge that he was unlikely ever to be going back.

A month has passed. Stephen Price has new cattle in the lower field, the first frosts cannot be far off. Yet only foundations for the new barn have been dug – painfully and laboriously by himself and his sons, assisted fearfully by the servants at Nant-y-groes.

To his fury, Price has failed to recruit skilled labour in Presteigne, the prosperous assize town a few miles from here – every man he’s approached claiming an obligation to work elsewhere or some affliction that renders him incapable of heavy labour.

It’s those great shelves of rock, found less than a foot down, that finished it. After three long days of struggle and the wrenching of a muscle in his back, he finally walks out to find Pedr Morgan, the shepherd.

Grumpily requesting him to talk to Mistress Ceddol about the employment of her damned brother.

He says nothing to his wife who, during his time as an MP, preferred to live down the valley with his older brother’s family. Joan doesn’t like it here and probably hopes that all his plans will fail so they don’t have to stay.

On the morning Siôn Ceddol comes, the land appears luminous, the shaven hay-meadows all aglisten from the rain following a thunderstorm which broke over Radnor Forest in the early hours, awakening the whole wide valley before dawn.

The strangeness soon becomes apparent to Stephen Price. It’s as though the summoning of Siôn Ceddol has set into a motion some ancient engine.

People come, as if to prepare the way. First to appear is the new Rector of Pilleth, full-robed and carrying his prized copy of the New English Prayerbook. Arriving at sun-up, he stands alone in the shorn grass, the prayer book open in his twiggy hands. His lips are seen to be moving although his voice is so hushed, rapid and intense that nobody hears the substance of it. Approaching him, as he knows must be expected of him, Price is wishing to God that Father Walter had not died when he did. Father Walter was no papist but he understood the ways of Pilleth.

The rector’s look would turn fresh apples black.

‘That you , of all men,’ he says, ‘would bend a knee to Satan…’

‘And you’d have all my cattle dead by Christmas, would you, Rector?’

‘If God wills it.’

If God wills it , Price thinks, feeling his face redden, likely we’ll have a new rector by All Souls Day.

Stephen Price stands his ground. For all he dismisses superstition, he carries no candles for a God with all the pity of a Norman baron.

After a few minutes, the rector throws back his bony head and, with the book under an arm, walks stiffly away in the direction of the hillside church. At the same time, villagers begin appearing on the boundaries of Stephen Price’s ground, like the risen dead.

‘Master Stephen… he’s yere.’

The housekeeper, Clarys, at his elbow. A woman who was at Nant-y-groes long before Stephen Price and may even have been known to my tad. Clarys nods towards the lower gate that gives entrance to the Presteigne road and the river bridge. Two figures stand behind it, male and female.

Stephen Price raises a weary hand towards the gate and beckons once before thrusting the hand away, embarrassed. When the two people pass through, one is walking an irregular path, watching the ground, like a dog responding to a scent.

It’s the first time Stephen Price has seen Siôn Ceddol. He doesn’t even know how the boy and his sister came to be in Pilleth village. They seem to have arrived during one of his periods in London, the mad boy apparently receiving the blessing of Mother Marged, the wise woman, before her death.

Through the sunhaze, he marks a scrawny boy of some sixteen years, wearing an ill-fitting jerkin and a red hat. When the boy reaches the platter of land on which the barn is marked out, he stops and turns the hat around on his head and sniffs the air like some wary animal. Never once looking at Stephen Price or anyone, and when he speaks it’s only to the woman with him and is neither in English nor Welsh, but some language of his own which ranges from mumbling to screams and yelps, like to a fox. Price has been told that many people believe this to be a faerie language.

Yet are drawn to him, it’s said, like night-moths to a taper. Already the people on the southern boundary hedge number twenty or more, watching the idiot boy pacing rapid circles in the grass.

‘This is madness,’ Price mutters.

Drawing a sharp look from the one person here who appears to understand what Siôn Ceddol is saying.

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.