Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

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?

THE 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.