The Heresy of Dr Dee (21 page)

‘Would indeed have been useful to know that before we came.’

‘It’s not the impression I had from the Bishop of Hereford.’

I recalled John Scory’s words exactly:
I don’t know where Smart is, though I do hear word of him from time to time.

‘You think Meredith was lying?’

‘Scory was spare with actual facts, but more generous with hints. He implied that my cousin might have things to hide. He said Presteigne, despite its appearance, was… a place of
dark alleys.’

‘I told you there was something wrong here. You lose religion and let a town become ruled by commerce and greed…’

‘Dr Dee…’

A man drew level with us at the corner of the street. Dudley’s elbows bent, one hand forming a fist.

‘This one,’ he said, ‘I’ll deal with now.’

‘If I may have a word, Dr Dee?’

The moon showed me a man who, though shortish, was yet built like a brick privy.

‘Make it
very
quick, fellow,’ Dudley said.

The man didn’t move, as though the word quick had little meaning for him.

‘Only I overheard your cousin’s tirade, see.’

Dudley starting forward, but the man was standing his ground, like a bull in a meadow.

‘And was surprised,’ he said, ‘at how he spoke. Seein’ as when I was in London, I heard naught but good words of you. And knew of your father when he was at Nant-y-groes
and I was a child down the valley. He was ever merry and, as you said, generous – especially with apples, as I recall.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Master…’

‘Stephen Price.’

‘Then you…’

‘Lease Nant-y-groes from Nicholas Meredith, and I wondered… Well, it would seem a pity if you’d come all this way without seeing your father’s birthplace.’

Found myself nodding, grasping at a friendly hand.

‘And as I’ll be riding back there at dawn… no wish to watch all the paid-for glee at the arrival of the Welshie in chains. So if you wanted to ride back with me, I’d
deem it an honour to show you around the place. And your companion, of course.’

‘He wants something,’ Dudley said in darkness.

The shutters were up at the window but left open. Dudley had the four-poster. I’d taken – by choice – the truckle pulled from under it, though he’d tossed me an extra
pillow in a bere.

‘I doubt Price means us ill,’ I said. ‘And I
would
like to see the house and its situation. Maybe the only chance I’ll ever have if it’s owned by my cousin.
Don’t mind riding out with him alone. It’s but a few miles. Could be back soon after noon.’

‘I was about to suggest it. Let Meredith think he’s driven you away. Would give me chance to ask a few questions while the town’s in holiday mood over the trial. Be a pity to
leave empty-handed.’

‘You’re yet determined to have the stone?’

‘I’ve faith in your learning, John. And if France’s poisonous prophet’s making use of scrying, it’s our duty. I’ll let it be known I’m an antiquary
collecting gemstones and prepared to pay good money for intelligence about Smart.’

‘Well, keep away from my cousin.’

‘I could deal with the likes of your cousin in my sleep. It’s interesting, though, John. What’s behind it? Why’s he want you out of here? What’s he not want you to
find out? Is there money here you’re entitled to? Property?’

‘Don’t raise my hopes. Money and the Dees—’

‘His approach to you seemed a little too
conspicuously
aggressive. As if he sought to draw you into public conflict.’

‘I should call him out?’

‘Big books at dawn?’ Dudley said. ‘Goodnight, John.’

I lay in the truckle bed next to the door. A haloed moon was visible where the shutters had been left open so I’d awaken at first light, and I looked for known stars.
Wondering why we were here, what the future might hold for Dudley. If he’d ever find out how Amy died and at whose hands and if that would free him or expose him to more threat. On the rim of
sleep, I found myself considering if it might even be true that the Queen carried Dudley’s child. So many months had passed since she’d summoned me. How many others had seen her in that
time?

Among the stars, I saw images of Elizabeth walking alone in the private gardens of Richmond, all big of belly, gazing out to the fabricated island where Robert Dudley had lain his head betwixt
her feet.

If he’d stopped at her feet. I saw him as he was an hour ago, when first he’d seen the ripe-bosomed young woman who had shown us to our chamber and turned out to be the
innkeeper’s wife. A movement in his jaw, a tightening of wires.

I shut my eyes on the stars, wrapping the sheets twice round me because of the cold. Knowing not that I’d slept until I awoke to Dudley’s scream.

XXIV

T
HERE WERE TWO
families of ducks on the good-sized pond in front of Nant-y-groes. Sheep grazed the land down to the river and more sheep were on the
opposite bank until the valley floor was lost into woodland.

Beyond which was the hill, a pale and almost luminous green under the heavy sky.

The hill of ghosts.

‘Be glad when I don’t have to see it every morning,’ Stephen Price said. ‘Or watch it under the last lights.’

‘And when will that be?’

‘One year, mabbe two. Fair bit of work to be done on the new place yet.’

He stood firm on this land. Short, thick-built, weathered of face, and showing more confidence than he had in Presteigne last night, as he spoke of the house his family was rebuilding in the
next valley, a former abbey grange, Monaughty, from the Welsh for monastery.

An easy walk from here, but its aspect was different.

‘Keeping an air of the holy,’ Stephen Price said. ‘We’d like it to be…’ He glanced back at Nant-y-groes. ‘…three, four times this size. Bigger
families in the years to come. As you doctors learn to stop disease leaving empty cribs.’

‘Not that kind of doctor, Master Price. Or… well, not beyond a small knowledge of anatomy.’

‘Ah.’ He nodded his big, squarish head and led me along a path towards the river and a new barn of green oak. Though obviously of the gentry, he spoke simply, in a farmer’s
way, as if with an inborn sense of the rudiments of life which the time he’d spent in London could not take away.

‘If the new house was a monastery grange,’ I said, ‘would that mean for Wigmore?’

‘No, no. Abbey Cwmhir in the west. Wigmore land stopped at Presteigne. That’s English, see – wherever they draws the boundary. This… is where Wales begins.’

I’d tried to feel it. Tried to feel the weight of my ancestry, back from my grandfather Bedo Ddu – an ebullient man whom, my father said, had ordered the font filled
with wine at the baptism of his first son. Back through Llewelyn Crugeryr, who had a castle, and Prince Rhys ap Tewdwr, which would give me common ancestry with the Queen… all the way back,
my tad would insist, to Arthur himself.

Out of Presteigne, the country had changed: a darkening of the soil but a lightening of the hills, close shaven by sheep. Although there were no jagged peaks, you could sense the rock under the
green, the bones of the land. The ruins of a small castle stood like a skeletal fist across the river, and a small grey church was tucked into the hill of Pilleth with a cluster of mean houses
below.

I saw all this, but felt no pull of the heart.

Found no sense of my tad in the house which lay behind us, a solid dwelling of timber and rubblestone, with a good hall and inglenook and a new chimney. An old housekeeper had been making flat
cakes on a bakestone, with dried currants and shavings of apple. Welsh cakes, I guessed – my tad used to say proudly that he’d taught the King’s cooks how to make them for the
royal table. I’d told the housekeeper this, and she’d given me one to eat and said she remembered Master Rowly when he was a boy, him and all his jests. But the taste of the Welsh cake
brought back only memories of Mortlake.

At the riverside, I turned to Stephen Price.

‘You said you recalled my father?’

‘I well recall him. Too young, mind, to know him as a man. I was sent away to an uncle up at Llanbister, to be tutored, as you might say, in the arts of marketing and butchery. When I came
back, Master Dee was gone to London. Sought to look him up when I was down there for the parliaments, but he was dead by then.’

‘Must have been strange,’ I said, ‘coming back from London to this…’

‘Wilderness?’ It was the first time I’d seen him smile. It found shape as slowly as his way of speech. ‘Never thought of it that way, Dr Dee. Not till I came back that
first time after three weeks in London. Couldn’t settle back to it, not for a while. So quiet after London that you were listening to your own breaths.’

‘Did Nicholas Meredith ever live out here?’

‘Not that I’d know. Presteigne boy, see. Presteigne… it en’t London, but it aims to be.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t enquire into the doings of Master Meredith
or how he got his money. En’t my business, and I’m living in a house that belongs to him and plan to carry on leasing the farm after we moves out to Monaughty. But the way he was to you
last night… spoke of more than I could understand.’

I looked him in the eyes.

‘Left me mystified, also,’ I said.

‘Injured, too, I’d reckon. Come all this way, and your own family don’t wanner know you.’

‘I suppose.’

A pensive tightening of Price’s lips.

‘You must needs have care,’ he said at last. ‘Big man in Presteigne now. Him and Bradshaw. Ole John Bradshaw, down from Ludlow with all his wool money and the lease on most of
the abbey property from the Crown. So Presteigne’s yet owned by England, and the Council of the Marches gets its bidding done by the wool men. Who are also the magistrates, and so on. You
getting the picture?’

‘Do you know anything at all of the last Abbot of Wigmore? John Smart?’

‘You keeps coming back to that, Dr Dee.’

‘He’s the reason I’m here. He’s said to have in his charge a gemstone – a crystal stone, a beryl, I believe, which I and my colleague hope to acquire from him. For
my research.’

‘On the Queen’s behalf?’

‘Everything I do,’ I said honestly and more than a little sadly, ‘is for the Queen’s Majesty.’

‘What you do… relating to the Hidden?’

‘One day it will no longer be hidden. Open to everyone. That’s my hope.’

Thinking of my library, which anyone who could read was free to consult, not that many did.

‘You think that’s wise, Dr Dee? That all should be known?’

Stephen Price was watching me. It seemed that Dudley had been right, this man wanted something from me – perhaps what Vaughan had hinted at on the road to Hereford – and, in his
border way, was taking the long route. I, however, continued to be direct and honest.

‘What I’m seeking, Master Price, is a stone through which I believe knowledge can be obtained. The kind of knowledge that can’t be learned from books or tutors, only by the
lifting of the mind. It’s said to have healing qualities. And is in the possession of John Smart.
Do
you know him?’

‘Knows
of
him, that’s all. A holy knave, by all accounts. Babbies everywhere.’