Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

‘I believe so.’

I took an instinctive step back, down the hillside, for Prys Gethin, even after walking from Presteigne, gave off such animation, such an energy. Perhaps the energy of freedom after a long captivity. Or perhaps something more. There was little doubt he knew where he was standing. Did he believe the spirit of the man whose name he’d borrowed had come into him while he sat waiting on the hill?

A spirit now burning inside him?

Not possible. An occupying spirit could not be of human origin, only demonic.

Christ.

I felt my own energy seeping away into the ground. I was near exhaustion and, despite the extreme danger here, felt I might fall to sleep on my feet like a horse. We were in Gethin’s hands and he knew it.

Time passed, the voice piping on, as if delivering a sermon, the Welsh rising and dipping like a liturgy, and then Thomas Jones replying, this time also in Welsh, still now, looking beyond me down the hill, his eyes black. I felt like a watcher from another, smaller world.

Thomas Jones was nodding now, a faint smile upon his plumpen features.

‘ Da iawn ,’ he said.

Very good. Both men smiling.

All three of them.

Jesu.

The third man was unknown to me. He was a large man. His hair was short and crinkled, his beard grey, his arms bare and muscular. Silver sweat shone from his face and a dagger from a fist.

Thomas Jones nodded to him.

‘John, this is Master Gerallt Roberts.’

Oh God, he must have moved silently out of the pines, lower down the hill from where we stood, and simply walked up, silently over the sheep-cropped turf.

We were equal in number now, but you only had to look at Gerallt Roberts to know that, in truth, we were outnumbered.

A long silence, and then Prys Gethin spoke again, in Welsh.

‘John…’ Thomas Jones looking down the slope at me. ‘Prys tells me we are upon the very spot at which the Welsh archers hired by the English were caused to turn and loose their arrows into the English army. Thus redeeming their heritage.’

‘And how can he know that?’

Nobody replied. Having retreated a little way down the hill, I had my back to those first pale lights of pre-dawn, looking up at two men who were still in night.

‘A place of redemption indeed.’ Thomas Jones approached me, looking sorrowful. ‘It’s been conveyed to me that this may be my last chance to regain my honour.’

‘Honour?’

‘After my cowardly acceptance of mercy from a woman who will never be Queen of Wales.’

I looked for a smile, but his face was empty.

‘We’ll never be part of that. Of England. Owain, with his English education and his smooth English speech, made that all too explicit.’

‘My father achieved it,’ I said.

‘Traitors don’t count, John.’ Thomas Jones sighed. ‘Prys says that redemption requires of me one simple, perfect act.’

I heard his kindly voice as if from a great distance.

‘Your decapitation,’ it said.

I said nothing. It was a play. I was not part of it. The only reality was the ache in my head and even that was dulled now.

‘How can we let you live, knowing what you know?’

We?

I saw that he’d plucked the dagger from my belt. I stared into his eyes, but they would not meet mine.

Look at me, boy – fallen Welshman, recipient of an English pardon. See what it does to me, this place.

Thomas Jones brought up the butcher’s knife, ran a thumb along the blade.

It was a play. It could not be happening. I must endeavour not to make him laugh. I turned to Gethin.

‘The sheriff’s men will be here soon. You do know that?’

‘The sheriff.’ He smiled patiently. ‘The sheriff, at whose behest I was comfortably accommodated for a few hours, until all the hotheads waiting to kill me had dispersed. In whose covered cart I was safely conveyed beyond the boundaries of Presteigne. That sheriff?’

‘How many murders do you want to be tried for this time?’

‘This is murder?’ Gethin spread his hands. ‘Oh, I think not, Dr Dee. Not in my country.’

I saw that only he and Thomas Jones were standing on the higher ground. The big man, Roberts, was gone.

And then I heard his slow breathing from behind me, even smelling it. Foul. The reek of betrayal. Or did that come from the ground, where a history of it glittered in the very dew?

‘Where’s Lord Dudley?’ I said. ‘You might as well tell me. You owe me that much.’

‘I owe nothing… to you or any man of your mongrel race. No one will ever know where Lord Dudley died, and all that will remain of his body will be his cock – the cock which impregnated the English queen—’

‘For God’s sake, the Queen—’

‘—to be dried and powdered and sold to make fertility potions for old men. In England, of course.’

‘The Queen,’ I said, ‘has not given birth to Dudley’s child… and neither did his wife, after ten years of marriage.’

He seemed not to hear me, nodded to Thomas Jones, who looked uncomfortable, weighing the long knife in two hands, one clasped over the other because of the shortness of the wooden handle.

‘Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?’ I said to Gethin. ‘I’m thinking of the man you killed and chopped off his privy parts and cut off his face?’

‘He talks drivel,’ Gethin said. ‘Position him.’

Something spoken in Welsh, Thomas Jones nodding, then gesturing toward an area of turf a yard or so out from his boots.

‘I am… required to invite you, John, to kneel and bow your head.’

I looked at the selected turf and backed away from it, into the arms of Gerallt Roberts who pulled me close, sharply, and I felt what could only be his head butting the back of mine, bursting open my wound, and I must have screamed as I sank in agony to my knees.

‘What a night for this,’ Prys Gethin said. ‘Did you see the star earlier? I witnessed it as I walked here. Crossed the whole of the sky, like the one which fired the heavens just before the start of Owain’s war. You’d know of that, as an astrologer.’

Through the pain came outrage. In 1402, a comet widely seen across Europe had been viewed as a portent of the End-time but hailed by Glyndwr as inscribing across the night sky the trajectory of his campaign. I’d charted the frequency of comets and if there’d been one this night I was no astronomer. This man was mad, and I could not believe that someone at the highest level of English government would bargain with him. Maybe it was the French or the Spaniards or some unbalanced independent contender like the preening Earl of Arundel.

‘When you are ready,’ Prys Gethin said, ‘it will be easier for all of us if you pull your hair to one side to enable a clean cut. Don’t think to further demean your race by attempting to run, or to struggle. The end of it would be the same, only bloodier.’

For just a moment – as I came stubbornly to my feet, yet refusing to believe – by some trick of the paling moon, his empty socket seem to glow, as if this imaginary comet burned inside his skull.

In such a man it could only portend horror and tragedy.

As it would.

I STOOD, SWAYING, hands on my gut where the Wigmore shewstone swelled out of my jerkin like a cyst. Thomas Jones bent and laid down the butcher’s knife.

‘Let me talk to him,’ he said to Gethin. ‘With some small privacy. He was, after all, to have become my cousin.’

Gethin picked up the long knife.

‘Make it swift.’

He stood back and signalled to the big man to do the same. Thomas Jones came forward, not a weapon betwixt us. I wondered if, as a known sorcerer, a curse from me might have any effect. In such moments, you’ll consider anything.