The Heresy of Dr Dee

XXVI

Blade’s Edge





STANDING BY THE sheriff’s gate, Dudley finds himself meeting the sardonic gaze of the outlaw, Prys Gethin, as the prisoner is conveyed to one of the holding dungeons behind the court.

Other men, knowing the story of the curse and the subsequent deaths, might look away at once, but Dudley is Dudley. The role of Master Roberts dropping from his shoulders like a cheap cloak, he’s giving the man a hard stare, a falcon watching a pigeon.

Except this man is not a pigeon. Anyone can see that.



It’s market day in Presteigne. Soon after I left with Stephen Price, Dudley heard the sounds of stalls being erected in the streets and went out to find the sheriff’s men assembling at the junction for the ride to New Radnor Castle.

The sheriff’s men and more. The judge was obviously taking no chances. This time, he’d sent most of his guard with them.

Roger Vaughan was watching them set off, and Dudley went across the street to join him.

‘If anyone’s planning an ambush, Master Roberts, they’ll need a small army. Aim is to start the trial this afternoon. Swear the jury in, at least.’

‘Not wasting any time.’

‘Would you? Where’s Dr Dee?’

‘Gone to find his family.’

‘Master Meredith?’ Vaughan looked surprised. ‘Only what I yeard…’

‘Not a big town this, is it?’

‘Wasn’t gossip, Master Roberts. I was there, near enough. Not as you had to be that close – Master Meredith sounded like he wanted it to be yeard far and wide.’

‘So I noticed.’

‘Also mabbe letting it be known that this is no time to have a… natural philosopher in town.’

Dudley smiled.

‘That was the phrase he used – natural philosopher?’

‘Conjuror,’ Vaughan said.

Makes me sick to recount it but, because it’s of some importance, I’m putting this conversation together from what Dudley has told me. Trusting that he was as strong in his defence of my profession as he insists. Not that this was necessary with Roger Vaughan.

‘It’s used in contempt, that word, but it—’

‘Conjuror?’

‘Bad word in London. Meant badly by Meredith. But it en’t always bad in these parts. Hides a deep need in… mabbe not all of us, but enough, yet. We got a few working conjurers round yere, Master Roberts, and even more the further you gets into Wales. What en’t always easy is to find the ones as knows what they’re doing. Seems to me a man like Dr Dee who approaches it with learning and also has… the ole skills… Mabbe that’s exactly what we need right now.’

‘Old skills?’

‘Way I sees it,’ Vaughan said, ‘a man wouldn’t study the hidden as assiduously as Dr Dee does unless he was trying to make sense of his own strange… qualities.’

Dudley, who knows better than anyone the sad truth of this, tells me he held his silence.

‘The conjurors and the cunning men, they yet make a good living in these parts, no question,’ Vaughan said. ‘Better now than before the Reform, I reckon. This was always a Catholic town, see, and the Catholic Church carried some of the old traditions along with it. Least, in these parts it did. The Protestants, the Bible men, in particular, they makes fewer allowances for us to know what’s happening to us. Just accept it, it’s the will of God. The cunning men and the wise women, they provides what we used to get from the Church.’

‘You employ one yourself, Master Vaughan?’

‘No. But I’m hoping that Dr Dee will be able to give me some advice when this is over.’

‘And what… what think you he can do here?’

Dudley marked the way Vaughan was looking around before he spoke, for this was not safe talk, not even on the edge of Wales. But there were only the market traders assembling their stalls for the sale of fresh meat and fruit and fruit pies and honey, fish from the rivers, wool, fleeces and woollen garments from the local workshops. He saw men rehanging the ropes of pennants pulled down last night by those angry at the delay in bringing Prys Gethin to justice.

Mainly men on the streets, few women, fewer children. Despite the flags, there was no conspicuous gaiety.

‘It’s on a blade’s edge, ennit?’ Vaughan said.

Dudley, a man who ever relishes a blade’s edge, tried not to show his heightened interest.

‘How so?’

‘En’t sure, Master Roberts. I was born and raised yere, and it en’t… stable. It en’t balanced. You goes away and you comes back, and somewhere ’twixt Hereford and yere, the air changes. Things happen as don’t happen anywhere else. Or they happens faster, so you don’t see it coming. The way sometimes you don’t see a storm till it breaks. Things yere can change in a lightning flash. So if you got a circumstance…’

Dudley says Vaughan had begun to look flushed with embarrassment. Having, perhaps, started something he no longer wanted to finish. Dudley prompted him.

‘The trial of a man linked – or felt to be linked – to local history?’

‘Aye. Recent history and not so recent. It all stirs something inside… not just people’s feelings, but the feeling of the whole place.’

‘Does a place have feelings?’

‘Some places you can sense it more than others,’ Vaughan said. ‘Dunno why. Mabbe Dr Dee can tell you. But when you try and cover it up with new ways – industry, trade, too much wealth too quick, you’re risking something going off like fireworks. The Ludlow men, the Bradshaws, the Beddoes, they come in, pulling men like Meredith behind them – the ambitious local families… and the greedy. Keeping the Church out of it, far back as they can. That en’t good.’

Maybe Vaughan was raising matters with Dudley with the intention that they should get back to me.

‘John’s gone to his old family home,’ Dudley told him, ‘with the man who lives there now.’

‘Price. He’s got a good head on him. The people of Pilleth need that. En’t easy living on a battleground. Not that one, anyway.’

‘Battle like any other,’ Dudley said. ‘I’ve seen—’ Stopping himself, thinking that no antiquary would have seen nearly as much fighting or as much death as Lord Robert Dudley. ‘That is, collecting documents takes me to places that’ve seen conflict. I know what happened at Pilleth.’

Vaughan looked at him.

‘Do you? No offence, Master Roberts, but I doubt you do. This was a border battle, in every sense. The Welsh, they knew what they were fighting for. The Mortimer army didn’t. Put that together with… the power of the place, and anything can happen. And it did. Why did the Welsh bowmen on Mortimer’s side start killing their own comrades?’

Because they were f*cking Welsh, Dudley thought.

But said nothing.

‘If you ask them even now,’ Vaughan said, ‘they wouldn’t be able to tell you.’

‘Easy to say that, Vaughan. No one likes to admit to plain treachery.’

Dudley marked a quick and angry movement in Vaughan’s eyes.

‘Master Roberts, I once talked to a man whose great grandfather was a soldier at Pilleth – an archer. A legend in the family. After the battle, he went back to his farm and never picked up his bow again. Didn’t trust himself, that was what was told to me. Didn’t trust himself to fit an arrow, draw back his arm and know where that arrow was going.’

Dudley would have smiled, making no comment. But don’t think he’d dismiss this as folklore and nonsense. I know this man, and his mind is far from closed to matters of the hidden.

‘I think,’ he said to Vaughan, doubtless with a deceptive diffidence, ‘that you spoke of… the power of the place?’

If you ask me, I’m also sure that Roger Vaughan had a good idea, by now, of the true identity of Master Roberts. I don’t believe that Judge Legge would have gone out of his way to conceal it.

‘A holy hill,’ Vaughan said. ‘Brynglas.’

‘What’s it mean?’

‘The blue hill. Behind the church there’s a holy well, dedicated to the mother of Our Saviour. Many people have been healed there.’

‘And even more killed,’ Dudley said brutally.

‘Well, there you are, Master Roberts. Healing power can be turned around. Dr Dee would know that.’

Dudley frowned.

‘You… seem to know a good deal about it. For such a young man.’

Vaughan laughed, and Dudley tells me there was a high, wild edge to it.

‘I’m a Vaughan,’ the boy said. ‘My whole family’s haunted.’



Three hours have passed. It would not have been the plan to bring Prys Gethin into Presteigne on market day, Dudley thinks. But after losing a day to unforeseen rain they could hardly afford to lose another.

The cart, high-sided, is close to the front of the procession. Hands and feet in rusting manacles, he’s sprawled lazily in the straw at the back, as though it’s a royal coach.

With his grey-black hair back over his ears. His one eye cold and steady; only taut skin and a ridged scar where the other one used to be.

Dudley, for a moment, admires his nerve. The way, he tells me, he once admired a one-eyed stag, cornered by the hunt, returning his gaze with an old warrior’s arrogance that Dudley recognised at once, and let him escape. With a kind of joy that surprised him.

Prys Gethin’s one eye has a rare brilliance and intensity, as if it no longer ever blinks. He looks at Dudley as though they’re old friends.

Dudley is aware of the smell of hot pies and gravy. He can hear whoops and cheers and halloos from the people assembled for the arrival of the prisoner. The crowd is swelled by those here for the market, many from out of town. But the whoops and cheers and halloos seemed muted compared with yesterday, when there was no prisoner to hear them.

Two men colourfully dressed as jesters, wearing masks, arrive out of the throng, carrying ropes woven into hangman’s nooses which, hopping like frogs, they dangle in front of the occupant of the cart.

One of them is so encouraged by the mild, uncertain laughter that he leans into the cart, tightening and loosening his noose and then tightening it again and cackling.

Until Prys Gethin inclines his head and smiles gently.

‘You’ll die within the week, friend,’ he says drily, in the perfectly rounded English of a priest making a pronouncement from his pulpit.

But he hasn’t even looked at the sneering clowns.

His gaze has not shifted from Dudley.