The Heresy of Dr Dee

XXVII

Likely a Sin





‘THERE’S A STORY mabbe you’ll’ve heard? How the Welshie women who followed Rhys Gethin’s army, they come down from the hill when it was all over? With knives. Come with knives. All gleeful and laughing. Set about the remains of the English.’

Stephen Price gazed over the humps in the field bordering the church where the risen dead had been laid to rest. Below us was the cluster of houses I’d seen from Nant-y-groes, with pens for chickens and pigs, and a handful of people about their tasks and all the distant sheep, like maggots on decaying meat.

‘Normal enough to cut the apparel from the slain,’ Price said. ‘Take the weaponry and the leather.’

Maybe I knew what was coming. Maybe I had heard it somewhere.

‘The privy parts.’ He looked away, down the hill. ‘Stuffed them into their mouths, so they’re hanging down, kind o’ thing. A mockery. If there’s any worse humiliation for a man, then I en’t yeard of it.’

I winced.

‘Hatred of the Norman Marcher lords, see. Taught, from birth, to hate. And the hatred hangs in the air, yet. Close your eyes by yere and stare into the full sun and all you see is black. That’s what they say. Never tried it myself.’

I kept my eyes full open. Not that there was sun this day.

‘When did the church catch fire?’

‘Before the battle. Glyndwr would burn any church as paid tithes to England. And the English seen the smoke and flames from the house of God, like a sign before the battle. Rebuilt now, but it’s a sad place.’

I’d marked how, the more he spoke, the more his accent deepened, as if he was retreating not so much into his own past, but Pilleth’s. He looked into his hands, as if the geometry of the land was etched there.

‘Used to be a place of pilgrimage. Shrine of the Virgin behind the tower, next to the well – the holy well. A healing place. For the eyes, mainly. For clear sight.’

‘No one comes now?’

‘No one gets near the well. The rector don’t hold with it. Papism.’

I sighed. Thinking there should be a middle way. Hearing Bishop Scory in Hereford talking of how old beliefs yet held sway on the border. It seemed to me that one could either respond with a Bonner-like ferocity or with a tolerance bordering on the spiritually lax… I chose tolerance.

‘Isn’t this yet Bishop Scory’s diocese?’ I said to Price. ‘Scory’s a man of moderation. Why would he appoint a Puritan?’

Stephen Price’s laugh was arid.

‘Mabbe he didn’t. Belief can change in a blinking. Mabbe the rector had a moment of revelation. Educated man, used to be a canon in Hereford. The ole boy who was yere before him, Father Walter, he used to have to hop over the big words in the Bible but, by God, he was the man for this parish. He’d do a Sunday worship with hands still wet from pulling a new lamb in your barn.’

‘A practical man.’

‘Aye. New rector talks of a calling. First sign of the way things were going was when an ole boy – widower, living alone – goes to him real scared by… what he seen. Asks for the ghosts to be sent away from his door. Rector shows him a face like stone and tells him the devil makes them see things as don’t exist and to fall down on his knees and pray for the forgiveness of his sins.’

‘He must be an inspiration to you all,’ I said.

Price sat down on the little promontory, the hills around him like rough blankets, the horizon broken by the distant castle mound, with its forked fingers of stone.

‘See, this… this en’t a bad place, that’s the thing. Good light, good shelter and you can see the weather coming. And all the families yere owns their own land. Village as should be five times the size it is, but folks don’t come and the folks that’s yere… there’s no good fortune.’

Price looked up the slope of Brynglas towards the little church tower.

‘Take the Thomas boy. Fine boy, good farmer, and then he’s telling his mother he can’t see no future yere. Hangs himself in the oak wood. Rector denies him burial in the churchyard for his sin. Now he lies with the ole warriors and no cross. Well, that en’t right. That makes nobody happy.’

‘Except the rector.’

‘He don’t know what happiness is. Likely a sin.’ Price raised his eyes to mine. ‘I’m the squire. What should I do?’

I’d seldom felt more useless. A student of the Hidden who observed and took notes for all the books he’d one day write. A collector of manuscripts, an aspirant to alchemical transformation and a maker of owls that flapped their wings and went woo-woo.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘It’s a battle site. When men die in fear and torment, embittered by treachery, and then their bodies are abused and left to rot where they fell… then spirits may linger and there’s an air of unhappiness which might last many years.’

‘It’s come back,’ he said.

‘What has?’

‘We… buried another. Few days ago.’ He’d dropped his gaze to the ground and his voice to a murmur. ‘Buried him at night. Me and Morgan, the shepherd. Well… I had to do most of it. Pedr Morgan, he wouldn’t touch it, but he done the digging. Never told the vicar. I said a few prayers, for what that was worth.’

I came down from the mound. Stephen Price kept on talking softly to the grass.

‘I was thinking at first as we’d do what we sometimes does when it’s more’n a few bones. When it’s a man. Put him on an ole bier and take him into the church. We leave ’em there overnight covered in sacking and then take ’em out for burial. Well… clear soon enough we couldn’t do that with this ’un.’

‘Why?’

‘Normal thing’s to alert the coroner. And the sheriff.’

‘About old bones?’

‘And mabbe the sheriff’d raise the hue and cry, kind o’ thing, and it’d be all over the county and beyond. And nobody’d get caught, and that’d only make it worse.’

Price looked up.

‘All torn as if killed in battle, this man. But dead no more’n a day. Naked. We never found his apparel. Or his cock.’

‘You hid a murder?’

‘All gone,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘A bloody, black hole. Nothing in his mouth. Not much mouth left. Face was carved up. Beyond recognising.’

‘Master Price, let me get this right. You are saying this was done by human means.’

‘Not crows, nor foxes. Well, God’s blood, what was I supposed to do, Dr Dee? Nobody knowed about him except Pedr Morgan and Mistress Ceddol. And no local man was missing, far as I could ascertain, not yere, not in Presteigne, not in—’

‘Who’s Mistress Ceddol?’

‘Sister of the mad boy who finds the dead. She en’t mad, not by any means. Her and Morgan comes to me. Me. Stephen Price of Pilleth, the squire. Bad summer, nights full of ghosts, best tell Stephen Price, of Pilleth. Ask Stephen Price of Pilleth what he’s gonner do about the man carrying the spirit of Rhys Gethin back to Brynglas. Ask him what he’s gonner do about a dead man with no cock…’

‘Master Price—’

‘What would you do, Dr Dee?’

I didn’t know. I yet couldn’t think why he was telling me, a stranger. A student of natural philosophy.

‘There’s nothing of the Hidden about a man fresh-killed,’ I said. ‘Though, given what was done to him, and given when it was done, you might be talking about supporters of Plant Mat out to revive old fears.’

Price nodded soberly.

‘A good reason, it seemed to me, not to go to the sheriff. Hue and cry, the spreading of terror…’

‘Is it your feeling that this might be Plant Mat? Putting out a warning of what might happen if Gethin hangs?’

‘If nobody knows, there won’t be no terror.’

‘So you buried him.’

‘Drags him into the ole sheep shelter, covers him with straw. And then we… we come at night and takes him out and Pedr Morgan digs a grave by candlelight and we buries him, and yere he lies.’

‘Here? Where we stand?’

‘Not yere. Be too obvious. We couldn’t leave no sign of a burial.’ Price considered for a moment, before jerking a thumb behind him, down the valley towards the river. ‘There’s an ole tump down there beyond the trees. Nobody goes there.’

‘Tump?’

‘Grave of the ole Britons, down by the river.’ He pointed. ‘Other side of the wood down the western slope.’

‘An ancient burial mound?’

‘Nobody goes near them. You know that.’

Always been superstition about ancient mounds, warning tales of what had happened to treasure hunters who had plundered them – usually finding nothing.

‘We dug a deep hole in the side, put him in.’ Price’s voice, of a sudden, was raw as bone. ‘Pedr Morgan, he was frit to hell, but we didn’t have no choice.’

He was still turned away from the river as if he could not bear to remember what he’d done. It was yet unclear to me why I’d been told. Why share the secret of a misdemeanour with a stranger?

But Stephen Price wasn’t letting go. He insisted we should walk to the village, or what remained of it. Leading me on the path towards the church until it divided and the cluster of grey cottages was revealed gradually, through thinning trees already shedding their rusty leaves.

And at last, with a strange heart-lurch, I saw it.

Rowland Dee’s Wales, where men were bent to the wind like thorn trees, their skin scoured raw, while the light – ever-changing but ever cold – was chopping their world into jagged shards of anguish.