Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

Lying low at the centre of the well-tamed land, snug as a ground-nesting bird, was this bright and modern country settlement, its buildings elegantly structured with red brick and new timber-framing. I marked a proud, towered church with a flag of St George.

And sensed a glow about the place. A glow of… wealth… contentment?

What the hell ?

I called across to Dudley.

‘We didn’t turn back upon ourselves somehow? This is… Wales ?’

‘What did you expect?’

‘Didn’t expect it took so much like… like England. More like England than anywhere we’ve passed since Hereford. And that was England.’

I looked out, as if cheated, towards wooded hills. Maybe Wales was a country of the mind that was never reached.

‘Actually, I’m told it gets wilder the further west you go,’ Dudley said. ‘This is an English town in a way, grown rich on the wool trade. One of the canons in Hereford was telling me it’s even on the English side of King Offa’s dyke.’

Maybe a town built as a statement of future intent. The county of Radnorshire, its few sizeable settlements small and far-flung, has no history beyond the Act of Union in King Harry’s reign. There are no ancient princes of Radnorshire, no great old families, no ancestral castles yet lived in. This is a county not as old as me, established quickly, out of expediency.

But if its county town was any indication of prosperity, nobody here would go back to the old days. It was like to a holiday. I was aware of a billowing excitement – cheers and halloos, bright flags drooped from ropes strung across the streets from gable to gable, all lurid against a sky swelling with unshed rain.

Of a sudden, my mare was rearing in fear at the sudden blast of jollity and I bent to calm her as our company thinned out to be fed into the town. Widening again as we entered a broad street leading down to the church and a bridge over the river. I marked a baker’s shop, two alehouses, a tannery with a yard, a blacksmith’s and an apothecary’s, all well built with good signs.

To a gale of cheers, we came to a forced, untidy halt about halfway down amid a confusion of roadside stalls selling apples, plums, cherries and cold pies.

A juggler in a jester’s cap sent up a spray of coloured woollen balls, while children tried to catch them. A smell of strong ale was loaded into the air and on the ground a great whooping press of townsfolk roiled and roared from the consumption of it, and I was reminded of the Queen’s coronation, the happiest day of my life.

‘ Get this rabble… ’

From behind me, a cultured voice, high and thin with fury, piercing the euphoria like an ornamental blade.

‘ My Lord, it’s— ’

‘ Bring out the sheriff, sirrah. At once. ’

I looked over my shoulder, saw a press of armed guards around the judge and his men. Turning back to the street, I marked faces at windows, with and without glass, and then Dudley’s horse was pulled alongside mine.

‘You do know what this is about ?’

‘Some kind of harvest festival?’

‘It’s for us. Well, not us … the judge.’

I saw Roger Vaughan, the lawyer, sliding from his horse, elbowing through the crowd towards a big, walled and gated house set back from the street. There was an inset door made small by a weight of ivy set into the high oaken gates, and Vaughan began to hammer upon it. A smittering of blood on his knuckles before it was opened.

‘Where’s the sheriff?’

The door was open barely a crack, and the voice from within no more than a mouse-squeak, so I heard not a word of it above the noise of the crowd. When Vaughan came back, the door was already being latched against him and the calm he’d shown on the road was gone.

‘My Lord, I’m— The sheriff’s gone with a couple of dozen men to fetch the prisoner from… from where he’s kept.’

A horse was prodded out onto the cobbles, guards forcing the crowd back, and the judge, Sir Christopher Legge, looked down.

‘They don’t have a gaol here?’

‘It’s not the strongest, and there’s fear that Gethin’s brigands will attempt to free him. He’s been kept in a dungeon in… in another place. Until the trial.’

‘Forget the trial!’ A man’s voice from the street. ‘Just hang the fucker!’

Whoops and laughter. Vaughan accepted the reins of his horse from one of the judge’s men, stood like he knew not where to put himself. Clearly hadn’t expected this. A single raindrop stung the back of my hand resting on the mare’s neck.

‘Remarkable.’ Judge Legge rose up in his saddle. He was not tall, and his tight leather riding jerkin emphasised how lean he was, almost skeletal, his bladed face shadowed by a wide-brimmed leather hat. ‘And what, pray, are we supposed to do until the sheriff returns?’

‘My Lord, I—’

‘This, I take it, is the sheriff’s house?’

‘It is, my Lord, but—’

‘I believe… I do believe that I was told by my clerks that I’d be lying here for the duration of the trial.’ Legge’s voice seemed to prick at words like a bodkin. ‘I do believe that I was told that. Now you are the…’ He flicked a wrist, with impatience. ‘…local man, I forget—’

‘Vaughan, my Lord.’

‘Vaughan, yes. Well, perhaps you could go back, Vaughan , and tell the sheriff’s servants to throw open the sheriff’s doors. And the sheriff’s gates. And’ – he leaned forward, to the side of his horse’s head, peered down at Vaughan, his voice brought down to a hiss – ‘ get us the hell out of this human dungheap. ’

‘I’ll do that now,’ Vaughan said.

‘Good of you.’

The sky was like to dark purple silk, all stretched. Legge leaned back in his saddle and looked up at it, with irritation, as if he might deflate it with his bodkin.

‘I do believe it’s about to rain,’ he said.

And, by God, he was not wrong.

IT WAS AS if the sky had split like a rotted water butt, releasing the kind of rain that joins clothing to skin in seconds. A rain that blinds. We watched its torrent in the milken glass in the parlour at the rear of the Bull Inn, forming rivers on the sills, dripping to the flags.

It was not yet five in the afternoon. The splattered street empty now.

According to Vaughan, the Bull was the best of the seven inns of Presteigne. Dudley and I had been told we’d have to share a bedchamber though not, I’d been glad to discover, a bed. A back parlour, plain but well-scrubbed, had been given over for our use and that of some attorneys who were not accommodated at the sheriff’s house. Including Vaughan who came to join Dudley and me and a jug of small beer, explaining that the more senior lawyers were presently taking instruction from Legge.

‘Evidently he wasn’t expecting that ,’ Dudley said. ‘I mean the crowd – not the weather.’

‘Nor I, Master Roberts,’ Vaughan said. ‘For which I’ll be held responsible for sure.’

I said, ‘You’re here to smooth the judge’s path? Interpret the ways of local people?’

‘Sent to him by one of my tutors. And making a cock of it.’

‘Not the way of the Border, is it?’ I said. ‘All this fanfare.’

‘We don’t normally make a big noise about anything,’ Vaughan said, letting the border into his voice. ‘And we don’t take sides till we knows who’ll win.’

Well, I knew this – less from my father than my dealings with Cecil and, in particular, Blanche Parry, who’d walk thrice around some matter before dropping hints as to where she stood on it. And even then you wouldn’t really know.