The Heresy of Dr Dee

XXXIII

The Single Eye





DUDLEY HAS TRIED several times to meet the single eye of Prys Gethin, determined to send back the curse to its source by force of will.

Like most of those around the Queen, he’s seen the advantages in a mild study of practical magic and is prepared for an exchange of black chemistry across the already tense courtroom.

But never once does he entrap the Welshman’s gaze.

Gethin stands limply in a corner of the prisoner’s dock, which is close to the centre of the courtroom, hands manacled behind him, two armed guards his companions in the wooden pen, the jury seated along the wall to his right.

Access to the court, not surprisingly, is limited. Dudley has gained his place by following Roger Vaughan into the attorneys’ enclosure. Five of them in there, with their books of notes. Hard to see what function they each perform, but the judge will have his reasons. Sir Christopher Legge is nothing if not coldly efficient, and such men as him, Dudley freely admits, are necessary.

The law is not about humanity.

Already, the rough-beamed former barn has taken on an air of London. Banners are hung on the wall behind the judge’s bench of green oak, reflecting the Queen’s Majesty, a royal authority. Something to be feared.

Yet it’s all too big for this petty affair, and Dudley is tormented with suspicion.

The judge’s bench rises several feet higher than the attorneys’ to its right and the seats to its left which soon begin to be occupied by a handful of men who Vaughan says are the JPs from Radnorshire and neighbouring counties.

‘Come to see how it’s done?’ Dudley whispers. ‘How real justice is administered?’

‘Certainly, no one will have seen it done like this before,’ Vaughan tells him. ‘A trial here rarely takes longer than half an hour. Twenty cases might be heard in a morning. I’m thinking this will go on most of the day.’

God’s bollocks, Dudley thinks. Only a royal trial matches this.

He draws in a steadying breath and tries again to catch the eye of Prys Gethin, but Gethin is looking down, his face without expression. Has he been tortured, Dudley wonders, for the names of his fellow brigands in Plant Mat? Is he cowed from a night of beatings?

Nothing evident.

Outside, the sound of a massing of people, a dull roar, but in here the public gallery along the back wall is big enough only for about two dozen – Dudley marking one of them at once: Thomas Jones of Tregaron. Why is this bastard here? What’s his interest? Who let him in?

‘What have they told you, Vaughan?’

‘I’m a child in this. They tell me nothing. Only ask me questions about local matters and how people feel about them.’

They are at one end of the attorneys’ bench and Vaughan glances warily towards the other, where one of the older lawyers might only appear to be consulting his notes.

Dudley gets the message and keeps quiet, observing a man in a bishop’s mitre, attended by two clerics, entering through the main doors and approaching the bench, where two men in dark robes are arranging large books before the judge’s throne.

The bishop inclines his head and… hell, it’s John Scory of Hereford. They’ve brought the Bishop of Hereford here to represent God. Whose judgement is yet final, of course, in an English court. As if to confirm this, the morning sun at last breaks through, filling one of the high windows, and the air shimmers with dust motes.

The bishop goes out again. A robed usher enters, calls for silence and for every man to stand, and there’s a communal shuffling, and then Sir Christopher Legge slips in through a small Gothic-pointed door behind the judge’s bench.



Only after the prayers to a just God are delivered and the charges read out, is Prys Gethin’s red-stubbled chin seen to rise from his chest.

And through witchcraft did bring about the deaths of Thomas Harris and Hywel Griffiths in the county of Radnorshire on the night of September 20th, in the year of Our Lord 1560.

There were other charges relating to the stealing of cattle. Enough, on their own, to stow Gethin in the deepest cell for many a long year. Perhaps even hang him.

‘How do you plead, Master Gethin?’

Legge barely glancing at the accused. The sunbeams from the high windows create dusty cloisters in the air above the dock and the jury box.

A silence. Legge looking mildly irritated.

‘What have you to say, Master Gethin? If you wish to make plea in your own tongue, we have an interpreter.’

Glancing at Roger Vaughan.

Prys Gethin looks the judge full in the face.

‘I’ll not require an interpreter, my Lord, having spent considerable time in England. I plead not guilty to all charges.’

Legge nods. What else would he expect? The prisoner clears his throat.

‘And if I may be permitted to say, at this early stage, my Lord, my name is not Gethin but Gwilym Davies, gentleman farmer of Carmarthen. Something I’ve been trying to tell your minions, who seem strangely predisposed not to listen.’

Dudley sits up hard and, for just a moment, his eyes meet the prisoner’s one eye, where he sees laughter flaring like raging flames.





XXXIV

Adversary





SUCH WAS THE density of the fog now, it was as though the rector and I were set in wax. His body was like to a scarecrow’s, but his face shone as marble. I looked at him and saw an effigy from a tomb dressed in cast-out apparel, and his eyes were lit, I’d swear, with madness.

The air was grown thick as a damp, grey blanket around the forlorn shrine. The walls of the church were now as far as I could see. Shivering in my cheap jerkin, I felt that this was no longer a normal autumnal mist but a fogging of the senses. I breathed in its bitterness and spoke with insistence.

‘Let me tell you… about Siôn Ceddol…’

‘There is nothing’ – his voice coming back at me like a horsewhip – ‘that you can tell me about Siôn Ceddol. Nothing that will change my opinion of him as an inhuman carrier of demons, who should never have been born into this world.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Who are you to tell me—?’

‘What Siôn Ceddol does,’ I said, ‘religion has no bearing upon it.’

‘Religion has a bearing on everything. Are you a fool as well?’

‘As well as what?’

Standing at the top of the steps, where Siôn Ceddol had sat, my breath was coming harder. If a place of healing is a place of inherent power, there was no sense of healing here now. Only the power, and that was a cold power with none of the promise of transcendence implied by an old sacred site. Within the quaking mist, I was aware of an ancient conflict, shafts of darkness and light twisting like blades.

‘As well as what?’ I said quietly. ‘Say it.’

‘I shall not. You know what you are and appear to live with it. But I don’t have to. I do not have to tolerate your presence here. Get yourself away from my church, conjuror.’

‘There,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it?’

‘Get out of here!’

His narrow body jerking in fury, elongating like a shadow.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not before I tell you the truth about Siôn Ceddol.’

He’d turned away from me, so that I was speaking to his back.

‘How much do you know about water divining?’

‘Of the devil,’ he told the fog.

I shook my head with confidence.

‘A human faculty, known since early times, which may soon be explained by science. But only now are scholars finding it can be applied to more than the finding of water. Though the fact that Siôn Ceddol can find water as well as bones is surely proof—’

‘That he’s riddled with demons. Don’t waste my time.’

I would not give up. Spoke to the rector’s back about the great natural philosophers – Paracelsus, whom he’d have heard of as a healer, even if he disapproved. And the German, Georgius Agricola, of whom he probably would be ignorant.

‘This is the man who’s become the best known diviner in Europe. Who began with water, but then extended his art to finding metals and ore for mining. Using the same fork of hazel, which twisted and turned in his hands when he stood over an underground spring.’

I’d learned about Agricola at Louvain and, of course, had tried it myself, to no avail, before sending a report on it to Cecil, suggesting he might strike a bargain with one of the German experts to establish a mining enterprise in England. Cecil had seemed interested, but I’d heard nothing since and assumed he’d dispatched spies to Europe in the hope of acquiring the knowledge for no cost.

‘You don’t see it, do you?’ Daunce said. ‘You do not see the obvious. A demon enters a man and gives him knowledge he could not otherwise possess. Causing his limbs to move on their own. Snatching his body from the reins of his mind. I’ve watched that creature, seen its eyes go white as its hands burrow in the earth to bring up the dead.’

‘It’s becoming known that the mind can be attuned to whatever it needs to unearth.’

‘And what if there is no mind?’ His rage throwing him back to face me. ‘The brain of that monstrous boy will ever be in ruins, and ruins are where demons walk unchecked.’

Turning away his head again, in contempt. It was like talking to the rocks. But at least I’d told him what I believed to be the truth; maybe he’d think about it.

Though probably, he wouldn’t.

I said wearily, ‘What are you doing here, Daunce? You hate this place. You distress its people. They’re not theologians eager to embrace the rigid tenets of Lutherism. They’re not going to change their ways with a snap of the fingers.’

‘The word of God will change their ways.’

It had long seemed to me that the word of God as filtered through a Puritan’s rigid liturgy would change nothing for the better.

I thought of the boy who hanged himself because he could see no future here. Who might normally have gone to his priest for advice. And the old man who did go to Daunce, with his fears of night walkers and was told it was the devil making him see what was not there.

I said, ‘Does Bishop Scory know of your… way of thinking?’

But if I thought to put him in fear…

‘Scory? That heretic? A man who worships the lewd and the sacrilegious in a secret chamber in the Cathedral itself?’

I realised he must mean Scory’s treasured map of the world, Scory himself having said some canons had been in fear of it and wanted it burned. Daunce, unsurprisingly, must have been one of them. I didn’t pursue this, but I’d not give up.

‘What progress can we ever make if we put everything we don’t understand at the door of the devil? If a man sees the ghost of his dead wife and we tell him, that was not your wife, that was an image wrought by the devil to torment you…’

‘The truth is not always easy to face,’ he said calmly. ‘But faced it must be.’

‘And there can be no ghosts of the dead because the Lutheran faith has decided there’s no purgatory?’

‘All papist myth and must be revealed as such. Stripping away these fondly held archaic beliefs is bound to cause a small period of pain, before the clear light is seen.’

Well, of course, he’d see it as a challenge, a mission. Slicing through all the layers of the place with the clean, cold butcher’s blade of the new Puritanism.

I glanced at the statue of the Virgin in her grotto in the rocks above the water, marking the green slime on her brow and her robes all smirched with slug-trails and dead insects. Whatever power was here now, the Virgin was no longer the source of it.

‘You can’t be said to have taken care of her, Rector.’

He didn’t look at the shrine. Or I don’t think he did; his eyes were no more than smudges in the fog.

‘A papist conceit, perpetuating an old evil. I’d have it smashed. Maybe I will. I’ll certainly be erecting a barrier to keep people away. Let the brambles and thorns do the rest.’

‘Isn’t she the reason for this church? Our Lady of Pilleth?’

A silence, and then he eyed me, a slight smile on his dry, pale lips.

‘And who is she? Who is the lady?’

‘Who do you think she is?’

‘Can you not feel her?’

I said nothing.

‘I’ve never felt her so strongly. Our Lady of Slime.’

Dear God.

‘I found here a long tradition of dark worship which had never been challenged. This well was made by the old Britons, doubtless in veneration of some predatory water goddess. They would have performed sacrifice here, thrown the heads of their enemies into the pool.’

I could only nod. This married with my own findings from old English manuscripts.

‘The papists take a pagan well,’ Daunce said, ‘and claim it for the Virgin and nothing changes… because the practices of the Catholic Church, like those of the heathens, like those of the Druids, are founded upon magic and sorcery. You, of all people, should know that.’

Well, of course I knew that. Bishop Scory knew that. The Queen herself would acknowledge that high magic was a ceremonial gateway to knowledge.

And was a simpler magic so wrong for a place like this, the valley of the river of the god of light, dotted with ancient mounds, scattered with the remains of the violently killed? A place where a careful balance must needs be maintained?

‘I presume you know that Owain Glyndwr worshipped here before the battle,’ Daunce said. ‘In his desperate need for a great victory. But did he worship at the church? No, he burned it down. He worshipped here, at the pagan shrine. Glyndwr invoked the heathen goddess – the devil, in other words.’

I said nothing. Given Owain Glyndwr’s knowledge of magic and that he or Rhys Gethin appeared to have chosen this site for the conflict, I’d come to a not entirely dissimilar conclusion myself. But was disinclined to voice agreement with anything this man came out with.

‘Invoking the power of Satan,’ Daunce said, ‘and it was given to him. His name was exalted all over Europe. For a while – the devil’s favours last only so long. As you’re probably already finding out.’

I was feeling very cold now in my thin jerkin, with no hat, but felt that Daunce was not. That he was, in some twisted way, beginning finally to relish this encounter. He came closer to me, his coat hanging limp around him like damp and blackened leaves.

‘And they worship here yet. This so-called holy well dedicated to the Virgin Mary, who’s but a screen around the heathen goddess… is yet a shrine to evil. For I’ve seen— I have seen them anointing themselves here at night, in the heathen way.’

‘Who?’

‘If I’d gone close enough to see they would have set on me and killed me. God told me this. I’ve heard God’s voice in the night.’

‘How do you know it was God’s voice?’

‘You’d try and make me doubt it?’ His whole body shaking. ‘You’d make me out a madman?’

‘Father Daunce, you’re alone in a place you don’t understand and maybe never will. You’re prey to divers fears and fancies. You believe everyone’s your enemy—’

‘I’ve only one enemy, though he wears many faces, and I’m looking into one at this moment, asking myself is it a coincidence that England’s most famous sorcerer should arrive here… now? The adversary?’

I reeled back.

‘Adversary?’

‘Oh, I was warned in my prayers that one would come. I’d thought it was the demon inhabiting the boy. But it’s a subtler devil. A manifestation of one that’s been here for generations. Dee… ddu… black! All black as sin.’

His face was blanched and his lips were parched. I began to see where this was going.

‘Rector, you’re—’

‘Your grandfather… was he not Bedo Ddu, who filled the font with wine? No sacrilege worse than that at the baptism of a child, when all evil’s expelled.’

‘It was done in merriment, it—’

‘And the tainted wine flowed in the blood of your father, who went on to steal from the Church.’

Jesu, who’d told him that? What had I walked into?

‘But it found its full flowering…’ The rector folded his arms, as if sitting in judgement. ‘…in his heretical son…’

So close now I seemed to see a white light in his eyes.

‘… who stood trial for sorcery… and was saved by Satan in the guise of a papist monster who made him his chaplain.’

Bonner.

‘Are you yet a priest of the papist church, Dr Dee?’

He’d done his studies and found the most vulnerable part of my skin. There was nothing I could say that would not make this worse. How easy it must be to see everything in black and white. But there was no black here and no white. The mist would tell you this.

His finger came up.

‘Let not this place be tainted by your presence. Take yourself away from here while you can. Crawl back to your London lair. And when the Welshman’s sentenced, I’ll visit the sheriff and have charges of witchcraft brought against the monster and his sister, the Great Papist’s whore.’

What?

‘There’s no workable witchcraft law in this country,’ I said. ‘The Plant Mat case was only set in train because it was an accusation of murder by sorcery and two men were dead. There’s been no murder here. Only a mass slaughter a century and a half ago.’

A silence, then Daunce walked away, turning back to face me only when he reached the church wall.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘we both know better than that. And what lies in an ancient grave.’

I rose up, would have raced after him, grabbed him, maybe thrown him in the pool.

But what use would that do?

The balance was tipped against me. He knew about the mutilated man secretly buried by Stephen Price and Morgan the shepherd.

And he was mad enough to loose a witch-hunt upon Pilleth.

A weight of weariness came over me, and I sank to my knees in the mud.