Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

Even my mother fails to understand this and will, on occasion, berate me for giving up an income for life. But, dear God, I dread to think how many useless blessings have been given by unholy priests invested for money. What you must needs know is that I never believed myself to have been called to it, and thus have ever refused to accept responsibility for the cure of souls. Or the redemption of unquiet spirits.

A priest’s approach to the unseen must needs be single-minded. He must deem all ghosts satanic, attacking them with a passion, assailing them with missiles of liturgy. And must never let himself become diverted from his task by tantalising and forbidden questions: What is this? Does it exist only in my mind, or has it a chemical reality? What can it tell me about the afterlife? What knowledge can it pass on about the hidden nature of things?

The questions of a natural philosopher, a man of science. Who may have a firm grounding in divinity and a full devotion to God, but should never in this world don the robes of a practising priest.

So I must have shown little enthusiasm when, as we came towards Hereford, one of the minor attorneys, a young man called Roger Vaughan, rode alongside me and asked if I were here to offer spiritual counsel.

It was the close of our third day on the road. Such a company as ours – with ten carts and sixty armed men, for heaven’s sake – would not hope to make good progress. Neither did my relations with Vaughan get off to the most promising of starts.

‘ Siarad Cymreig , Dr Dee?’

I’d picked up enough of the language from my tad to know what he was asking, but best for it to stop there.

‘No,’ I said. ‘My father spoke some Welsh, but I don’t. And never having been to Wales before—’

‘ Never? Oh.’

Vaughan was a solemn young man with a half-grown gingery beard and a mild Welshness in his voice. I knew his family was long-established on the border, claiming descent from princes – as, of course, did the Dees. Now he was telling me he’d been in London to study at the inns of court.

‘Indeed I was also hoping to study with you, Dr Dee, but… I was told you were away.’

‘I do spend a deal of time away. Which is one reason I’ve never had the time to visit Wales.’

Why would he want to study with me? Although qualified in the law, I’d never practised it except in my own defence. I steadied my horse before a small pond. With all the cattle drovers passing through here, you’d surely expect these roads to be among the best in England.

‘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.