Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

Besides, I’d no wish for too many people to know about Robert Dudley.

‘If it is Gethin,’ Vaughan said. ‘How did he avoid half the men of Presteigne?’

‘They’ll have given up long ago,’ I said, ‘though that doesn’t tell us how they failed to see him on the road.’

‘Unless,’ Vaughan said, ‘he was given help. Nobody saw him leave the court. He may have been smuggled away later than we think.’

‘It being important that he reaches his destination,’ I said.

It was all aglow again. The night alive and me half dead.

‘We have a choice,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘We could simply wait here until he goes past and then follow him in the assumption that he’ll lead us to wherever your friend is held. If he still lives.’

‘We’d have the moonlight on our side, so we could leave a reasonable distance between him and ourselves.’

I pointed to a line of pines on the eastern side of Brynglas Hill, which hid the village and would offer us some cover.

‘More copses and dingles up there than you’d imagine,’ Roger Vaughan said. ‘Plenty of places he can disappear if he does see us. Especially if he knows the hill.’

‘I think we can take it he knows the hill all too well,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Having been here many times, following in the steps of Rhys Gethin, calling Rhys’s spirit into him. Rhys in the time of triumph.’

I said nothing. None of my mentors – Agrippa, Trithemius – would deem it possible for a man to summon another’s ghost into himself, except in his imagination. Which would have more effect on himself than upon others and should not be too much feared.

We could see him more clearly now, a sprightly puppet-figure under the moon, and sometimes it looked as if he was almost dancing and then his pace was slowed and he was walking down the middle of the road as if in a procession. As if he was not alone.

I felt Vaughan’s shudder.

‘Something unearthly about this.’

‘He’s happy, that’s all,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘He’s walked free from the highest court ever held in Presteigne. And he’s on his way to do a killing.’

‘Something even more than that.’ I marked how his hands seem to gather-in the bright night. ‘He feels himself entranced.’

The arms of the figure on the road were opening and hands reaching out, as if he might clasp the hill to his bosom.

‘We might simply go down to him,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Present ourselves. Three against one and we have… this.’

The blade of the butcher’s chopping knife was near two feet long. Stephen Price had handed it to me as we left and I’d unloaded it upon Thomas Jones at the earliest opportunity. He held it point down behind an apple tree so that its blade should not reflect the moonlight.

‘A scholar,’ he said, ‘a lawyer… and a man who, since his pardon, has become rather too fond of his meat. Against a man of considerable strength who’s driven to kill. Yes, I suppose we could do that. Demand he tells us where they have your friend. And, when he refuses, lop off one of his hands.’ He ran a tentative thumb along the blade. ‘Sharp enough, certainly. Will it be you, John, to do the first hand?’

‘We’ll follow him,’ I said.

Nearly halfway up Brynglas, not far below the church, Prys Gethin stopped and sat down on a small tump in the grass. To gain the cover of the last stand of pine before the church wall, we’d had to creep, one by one, to higher ground and so looked down on Gethin now.

Both Thomas Jones and Vaughan had been able to verify to their satisfaction that this was Gethin. And there was confirmation for me, too, when he turned his head and the moon lit the grim cavity where an eye once had lodged.

I looked at Thomas Jones in frustration. He shrugged. There was nothing we could do but wait. After several minutes, Gethin had not moved, sitting quite still, as though in meditation. Or was he waiting for someone? I leaned against one of the pines, fatigue weighting my legs. The only warmth came from the new blood on my brow, the deep gash in my head having opened again, tributaries channelled either side of my nose.

Vaughan raised a hand, making motion towards the church. I looked at Thomas Jones and he nodded: we might as well take this opportunity to leave the pines and reach the cover of the church wall, for if Gethin rose now and moved ahead of us, he’d have an open view of the whole valley and might well mark us.

We moved, as before, one by one. I waited another minute before running in a crouch, half blinded by the blood-flow, to join the other two behind the low trees and bushes which enclosed the church on three sides. Below us to the left, the village lay lightless and silent.

We approached the church itself with greater caution this time, but a window of plain glass showed that there was still no one inside, only a sheet of moonlight over the altar. The raised churchyard gave us a plateau from which we could watch Prys Gethin, still as a monument and far enough away for us to commune in whispers as we crouched among outlying tombs behind a loose wall of bushes.

‘You might almost imagine that he knew he was watched,’ Roger Vaughan said.

‘I doubt that.’ Thomas Jones prodded the earth with the butcher’s blade. ‘It seems more likely that he’s waiting for someone. We could be here until sunrise. Let me think on it.’ He sat down on a low tomb, the blade across his knees. ‘Go and bathe your head in the well, John. If he moves we’ll come for you.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ Vaughan said. ‘It’s on the dark side of the church, and the steps to the well are worn.’

An owl’s call across the valley was returned, as I followed Vaughan around the body of the church. The area of the well was darkened not only by the tower but the line of tall pines on the other side. Vaughan stopped, stood with his back against the church wall. I could not see his face, only hear the desolation in his voice.

‘The truth is, I must needs pray to the holy mother.’

‘Vaughan—’

‘I’ve no confidence in surviving this night.’

I stopped under the grey diamond panes of the steep end window, and sighed.

‘Because of what you saw down by the tump.’

‘And felt. And smelled.’

‘A man?’

‘Mabbe. Came and went. In a blinking.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Sometimes we throw pictures from our thoughts into the night air, and in some places the air is more receptive. If the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians before them were so far ahead of where we are, even now, in matters of the Hidden… then we mustn’t be too quick to dismiss the ancient Britons with their standing stones and their rough, earthen monuments. More than just graves.’

It seemed a rare madness, delivering a lecture on antiquities to a gathering of one in a moonlit churchyard. But it was clear to me now that the skin of this valley and the fabric betwixt the spheres must be rendered muslin-thin.

‘It would have…’ Vaughan held his back against the church wall. ‘If I’d died from the fear of it… I felt it would’ve relished that. Do you see?’

No, I did not see.

But I nodded.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Pray to the Lady. If you dip your sleeve in the holy well and wipe the grime from her brow, she might even respond.’

If his glance at me was in search of irony, he’d find no sign of it this night.

‘Roger,’ I said. ‘Don’t dwell on it and it won’t reach you.’

He nodded and picked his way to where the sad, smirched Virgin stood atop her ridge of rubble-stones, watching over the stone-lined vault in the earth which held the holy well. A well older than Christianity, where the heads of dead enemies would have been sunk in veneration of some forgotten druidic deity later, perhaps, invoked by Owain Glyndwr and Rhys Gethin.