The Heresy of Dr Dee

XXIX

Betwixt the Living and the Dead





DEAR GOD, MY father had me trapped. Walking towards the village, he was with us all the way. I saw him sitting before our Christmas fire, mellowed by good wine, telling me about my forebears, all the way back to Arthur. All for Wales, my tad.

All for this?

Jesu.

Poor Pilleth, all grey and cowering. Huddled under the hill, waterlogged paths separating the mean, sunken homes with their mud and rubblestone walls, their rotting roofs, smoke-holes in the ridges and maybe a dozen small, shuttered windows.

There was a glow of life here, but only as from a rush-light which burns feebly and lives not long. And the shade of Rowland Dee.

‘Said he’d be in London for five years at the outside,’ Goodwife Thomas laughing shrilly. ‘Just enough time for him to scrape some of the gold off the streets, he used to say. Scrape the gold off the streets!’

Oh, I could hear that, the way he’d say to my mother, A proper tapestry, one day, Janey. Telling you now, I am, as God’s my living witness, you’ll be ripping down the ole wall hangings by New Year, you mark my words, girl.

My tad, a good-looking, lively boy for whom, everyone knew, Pilleth and even Presteigne were too small.

‘And then he’d be coming back, see, to put glass in all our windows,’ Goodwife Thomas said. ‘Glass, master! Glass for the likes of we! Well… we knew we’d never see him again, but he was never thrifty with his dreams.’

How true that was. I brushed aside a small, bitter tear as if it were a fly. Goodwife Thomas, sparse-haired and thin as a rib, was laughing again, saying she could see some of him in me, so mabbe he’d come back after all, Master Rowly.

‘My, but you’re a good-looking boy, too, Dr Dee. Have you no wife?’

Trying to press upon me a slice of her bara brith but, seeing how little of it remained and knowing how few berries the summer would have yielded, I refused, with many thanks, saying I’d eaten too well at Nant-y-groes.

A mean wood fire burned beneath a stewpot. Children’s faces peered out of the smoky gloom. Stephen Price had said the Thomas family lived in Pilleth’s best house – a long house with barn attached for the animals, not that there were many now. When a dwelling was abandoned its fabric was plundered to strengthen the others.

‘Dr Dee advises the Queen,’ Price said. ‘He can help us.’

I felt near-sick. What the hell had Walsingham told him about me?

‘Tell him about your grandson.’

Wariness washed over me with the realisation of who her grandson must be. The old woman bowed her head.

‘He don’t want to know our troubles.’

‘I want him to know,’ Price said. ‘He’s one of us. Rowly’s boy. He’s studied these matters, he can see what we can’t because we’re too close to it.’ He turned to me. ‘In the weeks before his death, the boy’s dreams were troubled. He saw the church afire again and the graves—’

‘Stephen,’ Goodwife Thomas said. ‘No more.’

‘Didn’t he say he saw the old graves opened and awoke and wouldn’t go back to sleep for fear of what he seen coming from the graves?’

‘Please, Stephen…’ The old woman leaning forward on her bench. ‘The rector, he said the devil had got in him and we must not speak of it. The boy took his own life and that’s one of the worst of sins.’ Wiping her eyes with a cloth. ‘And I want to pray for his soul. But I don’t… I don’t know where it is.’

Behind her, a child had begun to sniffle. From outside in the misty distance, there came a yelping cry. Like to a vixen, but I knew it was human.



‘You see?’ Price said, as we walked to the wooded end of the village. ‘You see how things are? They’re afraid even to call out to God.’

We passed two ruined hovels, whose roofs had long ago been burned, only the blackened walls remaining. I was thinking that nobody I’d met in Pilleth, not the Thomases nor the Lewises nor the Puws – none of the small farmers who had known him – had made reference to my tad as a dishonest man. Nobody gave indication that they had any knowledge of what I’d been doing in London, only – well, well, Duw, Duw – this slow-smiling surprise at meeting Rowly Dee’s boy after all these years. Gareth Puw, who was also the village blacksmith, said he’d heard the new Queen was oft-times to be seen around London and was very friendly to the people, and had I ever seen her myself? I admitted that I had, said she was fair of face and full of good humour… and left it at that.

There was a quiet civility amongst these people, a hospitality I knew they could not afford. But no merriment. Even the children looked wan-faced and listless, and the air was chill, and the clouds hung like smoke from a damp fire. The sense of a community closing in upon itself. I guessed doors would be barred at sunset, tapers lit in windows, for those who could afford them.

But they would not talk about what Stephen Price wanted them to talk about.

‘The whole village will die around them,’ he said, ‘and they won’t question it.’

On the edge of the village, a door opened as we approached it, and we heard a thin wailing from within, and then a man emerged, a narrow man in a long coat.

‘Child’s gone, Master Price,’ he said without preamble.

He was built like a broken archway, face white as plaster.

Stephen Price sighed.

‘One left.’ The narrow man’s voice was from his nose. ‘The one they thought would go last year, but yet hangs on. The Lord God decides, as ever.’

I saw Price’s body quake.

‘And that’s all you got to say, is it?’

‘What would you have me say?’

‘Mabbe the Lord God got more time for some places than he got for others,’ Price said with bitterness.

A distant smile.

‘I’ll pray for you, too, Master Price.’

The man looked briefly at me and pulled his black coat around him and moved away with high, pecking steps, like a raven, as the door was barred from within.

I said, ‘That’s your rector?’

‘Matthew Daunce. Gone back to his lair, in the trees above the village.’

‘God,’ I said.



It was set tight into the hillside itself, framed by thorn trees whose twisting branches were grown over its walls. Its roof was well mossed and its open doorway like to a crack in the rockface.

This squat and crooked dwelling had not been visible during our ascent of the hill. We’d had to pass through the village and stand within a small wood of stunted oak to see it unobserved.

‘Was this here when the battle was fought?’ I asked Price.

‘Here, but not lived in. It’s said once to have been the cell of an anchoress, living alone here for many years. But that was long before the battle, when there was just a shrine. The anchoress looked after the shrine, and when she was gone, the brambles took over.’

‘That’s what it’s called? The Bryn. As if it’s part of the hill itself?’

His face twisted.

‘For years, it was Ty Marw.’

I looked at him.

‘The house of death. Charnel house. When someone went in, after the battle, they found it filled to the rafters with dried-out bodies. In the end, they got taken out and buried with the rest, but nobody wanted to live there… until Mistress Ceddol came yere with her brother. I was in London at the time, learning about Parliament and how it all worked.’

‘Was this woman told of its history when they came to live here?’

‘You’ve met the local people, Dr Dee.’

I nodded. They’d tell her, of course they would.

‘She must be a remarkable woman. Or very desperate for somewhere to live.’

‘Made it habitable mostly by herself, last summer. A better summer than this. She and the boy lay nights under bent-over saplings covered with sheepskins, while she worked. Had I been here, I’d’ve found them shelter in the outhouses at Nant-y-groes. I think it was the Puw brothers who came to help in the end – first Pilleth people to go inside the Bryn for generations. And then gradually more of them came to help. She’d insist on paying them with what she was earning through the sale of potions and ointments she’d made from herbs and sheep fat, to sell at the apothecary’s in Presteigne.’

‘Where did they come from, the woman and the boy?’

‘Somewhere north of here, Shropshire mabbe. Driven away from home, she’ll readily admit, because of her brother. Her father couldn’t live with his wailing, his sudden rages, ramblings in the night. Especially when their mother died not long after he was born.’

As if to prove the nuisance of it, there came that vixen shriek from within the little house – within the hill, it sounded like – followed by a woman’s laughter. A smittering of slow rain began to rattle the crispen oak leaves, and Price led us into deeper shelter.

‘Her patience with him appears endless.’

‘The sister brought him up?’

‘No choice. People are afraid of him. Stricken from birth with some malady of the mind. And yet… possessed of this… talent.’

He told me how the boy had found a skull in the foundation for his new barn, Price dismissing it as rookery until, just over a week later, he’d given instruction for a new field drain to be dug, and nobody would sink a spade until Siôn Ceddol had been sent to walk the pegged-out route. The boy had stopped three quarters of the way to the last peg where, subsequently, a whole skeleton had been unearthed.

In the oak wood, I carefully prised away a bramble which had coiled like a monk’s manacle around my wrist. The path through the wood ended at the Bryn. It was all too clear that this was our final destination and the reason I’d been brought to Pilleth. The Bryn was either the cause of the sickness or, in some strange way, its possible solution. Whatever Siôn Ceddol was possessed of, Price didn’t understand it and was afraid of where it would end, especially under the eyes of the new rector, Daunce.

‘Whenever the boy’s called out to search for bones, he’ll know, and he’ll go there first and mumble his prayers into the ground and then walk away and have no part in what follows. Preaches on a Sunday about the devil in our midst, but he don’t name names. Not yet. But he sows unrest where once there was acceptance.’

‘Acceptance?’

‘There’s always been a wise woman yere, or a cunning man.

The last one died about five years ago. Mother Marged. Blind in both eyes. Blind to the world, but there was a calm around her. After she died, her ghost was said to walk through the village every night just beyond sunset. Me, I think they just wanted to see her, with her hands out in benediction. A comfort. But when the boy came, she was seen no more.’

‘A successor.’

‘Most of the cunning people, they got something wrong with ’em. Blind or deformed. They need your help, and they give it back in kind. Siôn Ceddol, he can’t talk, in English or Welsh. The sounds that come out of him, all with dribbling and swivelly eyes, people say it’s the faerie tongue. Most of the time he can’t even walk a straight line. But he walks ’twixt the living and the dead, and there’s no fear in him.’

‘Finds the bones.’

‘En’t only the bones, he’ll show you where to dig for a well. You tell his sister what you need, she gets through to… to where he is. And when he understands, he’s straight to it, like a digging dog. And they’re paid in meat and clothing and a few yards of land and the help to manage it. And if he won’t go in the church after he shit hisself in there once… well, they’ll stand outside and she’ll join in with the hymns and prayers, and the boy’s scampering around the churchyard like a rabbit, making his noises. A harmless idiot.’

‘The rector won’t see it that way,’ I said.

‘No,’ Price said. ‘He don’t.’

I looked out between the wet trees at the low crooked rock-house once called Ty Marw. Built into Brynglas Hill. Grown into the hill. A slow spiral of smoke curled from the hole in the roof, meeting the steady rain.

Now I wanted badly to know about this boy. If he did what they said he did, and how.

‘I can make an introduction, if you like,’ Price said.

I sensed he didn’t want to. Didn’t even want to be here, now that he’d shown me the place.

‘Have you ever been in there?’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘Foolish, ennit?’

‘I’ll go alone,’ I said. ‘See what I can see. And come back to you.’

I felt I was misleading him because this was little more than scientific curiosity on my part, a scrabbling amongst the thickets of the hidden. I marked the relief in his eyes with a certain horror.

The door of the Bryn was black with damp. It was opened as if I’d already knocked upon it, and a woman stood there. As if she knew I was here, though I was sure she couldn’t see us for the trees.

And, oh my God, why had no one warned me about her?