Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

A LOG THE size of a side of mutton was in slumber in the ingle at Nant-y-groes. I bent over the meagre glow from its underside, needing bodily heat more than ever I could remember. But Stephen Price was a farmer and wouldn’t even think to awaken his fire before morning.

‘Not that I sleep much these nights,’ he said. ‘Three or four hours, then I’ll awake and get dressed, have a bite to eat, and then mabbe doze till dawn, if I can. And tonight, with this Gethin let loose…’

‘You know about this?’

‘The whole country knows of it by now.’

I looked around. The moon was a wavering lamp in the poor, blued glass of a deep-hewn window. I could hear Clarys the housekeeper clattering somewhere. In the brightness of pain, my thoughts were voiced, fast as arrows.

‘Where’s your wife? Why do I never see your wife?’

Price shuffled uncomfortably on his stool.

‘Gone.’

‘I’m… very sorry to hear that.’

‘To Monaughty farm. To stay with my brother’s family.’

I’d thought he’d meant dead. A quiet woman , Anna Ceddol had said. Sits before the kitchen fire, goes out to listen to the priest on a Sunday and then goes home and worries. Well, I was glad she wasn’t dead, but why had she gone to stay at another farm, not even two miles away?

Stephen Price was asking me if I wanted to lie down. I shook my head… but slowly, the pain scraping ceaselessly at my head like a wind-driven bough against a window. I’d bathed it in the holy well and again with well-water in the yard at Nant-y-groes. The good housekeeper, Clarys, had applied a nettle balm, but it had begun to bleed again.

‘I’ll recover,’ I said.

Looked like you were rehearsing alone for some Christmas play , Thomas Jones had said, shaken. Pretending the other actors were there all around. Frit the hell out of me, boy.

‘I did not mean for this to happen,’ Price said. ‘I didn’t think it would happen to you.’

He hadn’t even asked why I, accompanied by two others, had come this night to Brynglas, seeming only grateful that I was attempting, in my way, to uncover what was wrong here. And if he hadn’t thought that anything would happen to me he seemed not unhappy that something had.

‘Didn’t think such things could happen to me either,’ I said dully.

And had once been foolish enough to think that if they ever did I’d feel… favoured ? Maybe one day I’d be far enough removed from it to consider the science, but not now, when I felt as if my very soul had been snatched out and left to go cold.

Could not smother another spasm of shivering, and at last Stephen Price pulled down an iron poker from the wall and raised the log until a flame came tonguing through.

‘I… was not as forthright with you,’ he said stiffly, as I might’ve been. Never told you nothing wrong, but could’ve told you more.’

There was a clopping of hooves from the yard outside. The horses still were edgy, frit and sweating. I’d asked if we might leave all three at Nant-y-groes for a while, to calm down while we considered our situation. And so Vaughan and Thomas Jones had followed Price’s sons to the stables. Leaving us alone, Price and me.

We’d moved on, widely skirting the tump and the marshy ground. Leading the horses, at last, through the oak wood and up to Pilleth church.

Jones and I had waited in the trees while Vaughan crept up alone to the church, where it took him not long to establish that the building and surrounds were deserted. He said later that he’d stifled a cry when, on peering around the wall of the tower, he’d encountered the stone virgin on her plinth, her face so tainted that she seemed to sneer into his eyes. I think he meant to pray to her and could not.

But at least the cold virgin was alone, so we came down from the hill the more direct way, veering from the path only once, so that I might be sure that the door and shutters of the Bryn were closed tight against invasion.

At first despondent over our failure to find Dudley, I was briefly lit by a small hope that we’d been wildly wrong and that he was back in Presteigne in some other whore’s bed.

But that light soon went out.

‘Thing was, I was affeared she’d die.’

‘Your wife?’

I looked blearily at Price, my hair and face stiff with dried blood.

‘Couldn’t sleep, would not eat. Would not go out, not even in daylight. Gone thin as a rib. Sent her down to Monaughty farm to be cared for by my brother’s wife. Mabbe she won’t be back. It’s all different down there, see. Not much more’n a mile, but it lies easy.’

‘A monastery farm.’

‘A safer air. She never liked this house, or this valley, that’s what it come down to. Couldn’t wait to move to Monaughty where there’d be more company. More company… and less company.’

He looked down at the fire, shaking his head.

‘Wanted me to spend more money on the building work, finish the extension at Monaughty, so we could go. It led to much quarrelling at first. I was glad to get away to London, truth be told. You know what women are like, think you’re tight with money, don’t understand what you gotter spend keeping your ground in good heart, and…’

He looked up, stricken, his face all creased.

‘Truth of it is, I never want to go to Monaughty. Two brothers, one farm, divers sons, it don’t work. Stephen Price of Pilleth, that’s me. Was gonner make Meredith an offer for this house.’

‘It’s all your land down here?’

‘Most of it. But no house. Joan was all, “Oh thank God it’s only rented. We can be out of yere.” We’d signed for the place for two years. I thought to… mend things, somehow. Thought mabbe ole Walter, the priest, could change it for us. When we first come, if my wife or anybody seen anything, we’d send for Walter. And sometimes Marged, the wise woman. Mother Marged and Walter the priest… they had an understanding.’

‘What did they think was the problem here?’

‘Never listened much to ole Marged, it was all mumbles and spells. Father Walter, he’d say that, if you had the Sight, living yere you’d ever need the Saviour’s protection.’

‘What did he mean?’

‘Shrine to the Holy Mother, place of pilgrimage – you come, you pay your respects and then you leave with faith renewed. No one should live too close to such places, Walter said, ’cept mabbe monks and hermits trained to thrive on spiritual agony. The ole priest, you never knowed when he was serious, but he knowed what he was about. And then he died. And then ole Marged. Both gone, one after the other.’

‘And then all you had,’ I said quietly, ‘was a boy who brought death out of the earth but could not talk. And a new priest, all for the Bible.’

‘Had hopes for Daunce at first. That he’d bring some sense, with the new religion. Plain talking. But, in the end…’ Price stabbed the poker into the heart of the fire. ‘…putting it all down to the devil, that was the last thing we needed.’

‘So you came to me.’

‘You were sent to us. That’s how I seen it.’ He leaned away from the fire. ‘The boy with you out there. Was that young Vaughan of Hergest?’

‘And the man with him is my… my cousin, Thomas Jones, from the west of Wales.’

He and Vaughan had said they’d stay outside, watch the night, watch the hill for movement. Anything.

‘My wife’s been like this all her life,’ Price said. ‘Some has it, most of us en’t. I thought it didn’t bother her much any more.’

‘But it was different here?’