The Heresy of Dr Dee

XXI

Rowly’s Boy





COLD IN THE parlour now, with that jagged hole in the window and water beginning to pool around Dudley’s fine riding boots. When we were alone, he stood up, regarding me sideways, dark eyes aslant.

‘I don’t think… that should we get involved in this, John.’

‘Did I suggest we might?’

He snorted like a stallion.

‘You eel! I was watching your face. All that talk of Glyndwr’s magic and altering the weather and the curse of Prys Gethin? John Dee in the land of Merlin? A pig in shit. As for this boy Vaughan…’

‘Mmm.’ I nodded. ‘He’s sitting on eggs. He’s a lawyer, but also border-raised, and he doesn’t think free pies can cure fear. Mortimer’s army would have been drawn from places like Presteigne. The presence in the town of another Gethin…’

‘So called. And in chains.’

‘Freed himself from his bonds on the road to New Radnor,’ I said. ‘So that he was able to point the finger in malevolence…’

‘Jesu, don’t you start.’ Dudley rubbed his hands together to make heat. ‘Gives me shivers, this place, somehow, even more than Glastonbury. How far to Wigmore from here?’

‘Seven miles. Eight? You weren’t thinking of riding there in this?’

‘First light, I was thinking,’ Dudley said. ‘Assuming we aren’t all drowned by then.’

I shook my head.

‘No real use in riding out to Wigmore until we have a better idea of exactly what we’re looking for. I gather there are people we might talk to in this town first.’

It was the first chance I’d had to tell him what I’d learned from John Scory in Hereford. Dudley listened without interruption, only the occasional raised eyebrow.

‘You saying the Bishop of Hereford knew of the stone?’

‘But not where it is – or the former abbot. But he did say Presteigne would be a good place to start looking. Not least because much of the property here once belonged to the abbey.’

‘And then gathered in by the Crown, and the Crown would sell it off. I don’t see how there’d be a connection any more.’

‘Just telling you what he said. He also thought it worth talking to my cousin Nicholas Meredith. Who also seems to be a substantial property owner.’

I was recalling how Scory had laughed on learning that Meredith was my cousin, when a man appeared in the doorway, bearing a broom and glowering at the remains of the window.

‘God’s blood! Profuse apologies, my masters. The glazier’s art is yet in its infancy round yere.’

He began sweeping the shards of glass into a corner with his broom, then gave up and tossed the broom across the parlour.

‘I’ll have it shuttered. He’ll not get paid for this.’ Wiping his wet hands on his apron, straightening up and jabbing a thumb at his chest. ‘Jeremy Martin. Keeper of this inn.’

A powerfully built man of late middle-years. Dense grey hair winged back behind his ears.

‘Least there’ll be no broken glass in your bedchamber this night, my masters.’

‘Although wouldn’t that be because it’s yet without any kind of glass?’ Dudley said.

Jeremy Martin grinned.

‘On the list, that is. Glass in all the windows next year, sure to be. Proper glass. I en’t been yere long enough to do all as needs doing, but this’ll be the finest inn in the west ’fore long. Can I replenish your jug, my masters? On the house?’ Picking up the beer jug, he sniffed it with suspicion. ‘Holy blood, you’re drinking ale! You have a flagon of my ole cider, masters, and I’ll tell you, you en’t gonner go back to this bat’s piss in a hurry.’

Dudley looked pained. One virtue of high social status, he’d been known to remark, was that it spared you the crude predations of the serving classes.

‘Master Martin,’ I said, ‘would you happen to know where we might find Nicholas Meredith?’

‘Won’t be far away. He’s in town. Friend of yours?’

‘My cousin.’

‘You’re his cousin? From London? You en’t a lawyer, then?’

‘I… No. Not as such.’

Martin took a step back into the pooled water, inspecting me from head to feet and back again.

‘Holy blood! You en’t…?’ His eyes widened, and then his arms were thrown wide as if he’d embrace me. ‘Rowly Dee’s boy? The man who… Holy blood…’

‘You knew my father?’

‘Rowland Dee? All the talk was about him at one time. How close he was to the ole King. How well-favoured. And now it’s his son and the ole King’s daughter. Holy blood! I tell you… Master Meredith, when the pamphlets come from London after the crowning, he’s in yere reading it all out. His uncle’s boy calculing the stars for the new queen. Well, well… Do he know you’re yere?’

‘I wrote to him but… no, he doesn’t. Not yet.’

‘Aye, I thought… He’d known you was coming, we’d never’ve yeard the last of it. So you en’t nothing to do with the judge?’

I assured him we were merely travelling with the judge’s company, while inspecting manuscripts from disassembled libraries. Taking the opportunity to make a visit to my family’s old home.

‘Nant-y-groes? Master Stephen Price, he’s there now, see. You know Master Price? He was down London. MP for Radnorshire.’

‘Why’s he living at Nant-y-groes?’

‘Building a new home down the valley, by the ole monastery grange. Gotter keep his family somewhere, meanwhile.’

‘So he’s only renting it.’

‘Master Nick likely owns it yet.’

‘And much of this town?’

‘Not as much as Master Bradshaw – big wool merchant.’ Jeremy Martin beamed. ‘Wool, cloth and the law, my masters. As good a foundation as you’ll find anywhere. Used to be religion, now it’s wool, cloth and the law.’



The rain stopped not long before twilight. Within half an hour, a piercing red sun lit the street, and Dudley and I walked out into a town that you could feel to be growing around you.

Signs of building on a scale I hadn’t encountered since leaving Cecil’s house in the Strand. Piles of bricks everywhere and frames of green oak for new houses. Poke into any alleyway, and you’d find old barns and outhouses being converted into business premises.

We edged around a puddle the size of a duckpond, the sun floating there like an orange.

‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘why this town makes you shiver.’

Dudley looked across the street where the ground rose towards a castle, fallen into ruin on its green mound, much of its stone already plundered.

‘I do mistrust sudden wealth.’

‘As distinct from inherited wealth?’

He didn’t rise to that. The sun spread a glowing hearthlight over a wall of new brick, and a stout man in clerk’s apparel crossed the street in front of us, bearing a pile of leather-bound documents.

‘It’s in a hurry, this town, to leave something behind,’ Dudley said. ‘Don’t you feel that?’

‘Poverty, perhaps?’

He eyed me.

‘Why so frivolous tonight?’

‘That’s frivolous?’

Dudley frowned. The ostler, who’d stabled our horses, led two more past us towards the entrance to the mews at the side of the Bull. It was not hard to imagine my tad here, carousing with his friends on the hot summer nights of old. I felt sad.

‘Tell me about Cumnor Place,’ I said.

No reply. Doors were opening, people threatening to throng the streets. I waited until we could no longer hear the *ter of hooves.

‘Better here than back at the inn,’ I said. ‘You never know who’s listening at the door of a bedchamber.’

We’d come to the corner of the wide street leading down to the church and the sheriff’s house. All was yet quiet here. If they’d brought Prys Gethin from New Radnor, another crowd would have formed in no time, but the street was empty. At the bottom, just past the church, a stone bridge over the river carried a narrow road into the hills, where a castle occupied a gap in the forest. Probably back in England.

‘I don’t know what to do about it,’ Dudley said.

‘About what… exactly?’

He stopped, glanced behind him to where the lurid sun was down on the horizon, poking through the layered clouds like the tip of a tongue betwixt reddened lips.

‘The murder of my wife. Beyond all doubt, now.’