Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

Or was it illusion?

I saw how circumstance had completed most of the preparations required for an invocation: fasting, self-denial and the many hours without sleep that would separate me from this world, leaving me open to the higher spheres. And yet…

‘There are things I still can’t comprehend,’ I told the Virgin. ‘I know not what was here before you. How far it all goes back. How Brynglas became a place of healing before it was a place of killing. Where lies the power? ’

Was there some energy in the very earth which was released in places such as this for the healing of the body and the expansion of human thought?

Perhaps it had begun not here at all, but with the river and the tump that was raised within its curve. With whoever had been buried there at a time when there were no English and the word Welsh, meaning – obscurely – foreigner or stranger , had not been invented. Had that been Pilleth’s golden time?

And when was it turned bad? When was the tump become a cauldron of spiritual pestilence from the second sphere? And the hill… was its natural vigour fouled by that single act of treachery by the Welsh bowmen? Or was this ruinous reversal of allegiance, as the church burned, itself effected by something here already become malign?

All I knew was that the roiling air of betrayal seemed to have become an engine in itself, a pestilence possessed of a dark intelligence which was become manifest in extremes of thought, extremes of behaviour only held in balance by a mingling of spiritual disciplines as divers as the pulleys that made my Mortlake owls flap their wings and make hoot.

I thought of the fevered swooping of the women with their knives, wondering if it was even true or just corrosive gossip of the kind that had the Queen pregnant with Dudley’s child. How could it ever be proved when privy parts have no bones?

I looked up into the lowered eyelids of the stone mother.

‘Are we able to reverse it?’ I asked her. ‘Is it in our power to restore life and health to this valley?’

A shadow was fallen across the Virgin and me, and I turned and looked up into open eyes the colour a sky is meant to be in summer.

‘I was looking for you,’ Anna Ceddol said.

Her wet hair hung black as a raven’s wings. She pushed it back behind her ears. Must have washed it to be rid of the blood. In the river, or one of Siôn’s wells.

‘Too quiet, see,’ she said. ‘Too quiet at the Bryn. They told me to try and sleep, so I took a potion. But I could not sleep for the quiet.’

I rose to my feet. I understood. She faced me, wet-haired, dry-eyed.

‘They say you saw it done.’

I nodded.

‘It was… very quick. Gone like a… moth. A butterfly. I saw what might be about to happen and ran—’

‘He’s in the church,’ she said quickly. ‘On the bier.’

‘Does Daunce…?’

‘Daunce has been summoned to Presteigne,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘Where the bishop lodges. I know not where Siôn will lie.’

‘I’ll talk to the bishop,’ I said. ‘If it’s necessary.’

Knowing I must needs talk to him anyway. About many things.

‘They say he’s killed,’ Anna said. ‘The Welshman.’

‘They say he killed himself. Were you not there?’

‘When he let me go, I ran away. I saw no more of him.’

‘It’s as well,’ I said. ‘He… killed without a thought. He was driven by a demonic madness. The man who you and the shepherd found, all cut about… the man Stephen Price buried to prevent panic… he can only have been killed by Gethin.’

Anna Ceddol looked down at the stain on her dress, then up at the statue of the Virgin.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Mercy?’

‘No more lies. You’ve been good to me. I won’t—’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I may have brought a terrible sorrow to you and everyone here. Stephen Price saw me as a saviour but I think, in truth, that I’m just part of the curse.’

‘I won’t lie to you,’ she said, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I know how that man died, and I know how he was cut about.’

I stared at her.

‘Because I cut him.’ Her voice was soft as moss. ‘I took his apparel and then I set about his face with a spade.’

My body jerked back against the statue’s stone robe.

‘What are you saying?’

‘So that no one would ever know who he was,’ she said rapidly. ‘That he was my father. And Siôn’s father.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me any of this. It’ll go no further, but you still don’t have to tell me. No one will ever know any of it from me.’

She looked up at the statue.

‘The Holy Mother will know.’

Tomos Ceddol. The man who, Anna had told me, had courted her mother but was deemed by her mother’s parents as not of their level. Who, when Anna’s mother died, had begun to drink to excess. Who had been driven to violence by the ravings of their youngest child, barely weaned when his mother had died.

‘Not true,’ Anna said. ‘She was not his mother. When she died, I was already with child. I was twelve years old.’

Oh, dear God.

‘She was unwell for nearly a year, my mother. After a while, he began to touch me. He’d get drunk on strong ale. He was a big man. Resisting him would only lead – did lead – to injury.’

She was hardly the first this had happened to. Hardly the first who’d gone on to give birth to her own father’s child. I believed that most women stayed, made the best of it, at least until the child was old enough to leave home.

But this child would never be old enough to leave. And Anna would blame her father for the boy’s idiocy. Her father… and herself.

‘When I found out I was with child, I tried to… make away with him. Went to a wise woman in the next village, who charged me all I had for a potion that made me sick for days. But the babe continued to grow. It wasn’t until he was nearly two years that I knew he must be damaged in the head. And knew why.’

‘You don’t know that,’ I said, but she seemed not to hear.

She’d never let her father touch her again. She’d been sleeping with a kitchen knife since first learning there was a child on the way.

The night she’d found him kicking Siôn, to quieten him – that was true enough and happened just as she’d told me. What she hadn’t told me was that, when they left home, taking all his money, Tomos Ceddol had gone in search of them. This was why they’d moved from village to village down the border.

‘He found you?’ I said. ‘He found you here?’

‘I’d become careless. It was over twelve years since we’d left. I’d thought he’d surely given up, found a woman somewhere. I thought we were safe in the Bryn. The first real home we’d had.’

His approach had been slow and careful at first. He’d watched for whole nights from the oak wood – one of the Thomas boys had seen him twice, thought him a thief, though nobody was ever robbed… not then. I imagined Tomos Ceddol catching sight of his daughter – even more beautiful than he’d remembered. All the money he’d spent trying to find her. She was his daughter and the father of his child, who should have been disposed of long ago.

God’s tears.

The night he broke in, he was drunk, having found a barrel of cider left over from the harvest festival. They heard later he’d been driven out of his own village after two rapes, although the women would not name him.

Anna Ceddol stopped, as though that were the end of the story.

‘How did he die?’ I said at last, in dread of the answer. ‘Not that you have to—’

‘Nor will I. I awoke and he was in my bed. Naked. And some men… some have thinner skulls than others.’