The Heresy of Dr Dee (43 page)

A long silence, and then Prys Gethin spoke again, in Welsh.

‘John…’ Thomas Jones looking down the slope at me. ‘Prys tells me we are upon the very spot at which the Welsh archers hired by the English were caused to turn and loose
their arrows into the English army. Thus redeeming their heritage.’

‘And how can he know that?’

Nobody replied. Having retreated a little way down the hill, I had my back to those first pale lights of pre-dawn, looking up at two men who were still in night.

‘A place of redemption indeed.’ Thomas Jones approached me, looking sorrowful. ‘It’s been conveyed to me that this may be my last chance to regain my honour.’

‘Honour?’

‘After my cowardly acceptance of mercy from a woman who will never be Queen of Wales.’

I looked for a smile, but his face was empty.

‘We’ll never be part of that. Of England. Owain, with his English education and his smooth English speech, made that all too explicit.’

‘My father achieved it,’ I said.

‘Traitors don’t count, John.’ Thomas Jones sighed. ‘Prys says that redemption requires of me one simple, perfect act.’

I heard his kindly voice as if from a great distance.

‘Your decapitation,’ it said.

I said nothing. It was a play. I was not part of it. The only reality was the ache in my head and even that was dulled now.

‘How can we let you live, knowing what you know?’

We?

I saw that he’d plucked the dagger from my belt. I stared into his eyes, but they would not meet mine.

Look at me, boy – fallen Welshman, recipient of an English pardon. See what it does to
me,
this place.

Thomas Jones brought up the butcher’s knife, ran a thumb along the blade.

It
was
a play. It could not be happening. I must endeavour not to make him laugh. I turned to Gethin.

‘The sheriff’s men will be here soon. You do know that?’

‘The sheriff.’ He smiled patiently. ‘The sheriff, at whose behest I was comfortably accommodated for a few hours, until all the hotheads waiting to kill me had dispersed. In
whose covered cart I was safely conveyed beyond the boundaries of Presteigne.
That
sheriff?’

‘How many murders do you want to be tried for this time?’

‘This is murder?’ Gethin spread his hands. ‘Oh, I think not, Dr Dee. Not in my country.’

I saw that only he and Thomas Jones were standing on the higher ground. The big man, Roberts, was gone.

And then I heard his slow breathing from behind me, even smelling it. Foul. The reek of betrayal. Or did that come from the ground, where a history of it glittered in the very dew?

‘Where’s Lord Dudley?’ I said. ‘You might as well tell me. You owe me that much.’

‘I owe nothing… to you or any man of your mongrel race. No one will ever know where Lord Dudley died, and all that will remain of his body will be his cock – the cock which
impregnated the English queen—’

‘For God’s sake, the Queen—’

‘—to be dried and powdered and sold to make fertility potions for old men. In England, of course.’

‘The Queen,’ I said, ‘has not given birth to Dudley’s child… and neither did his wife, after ten years of marriage.’

He seemed not to hear me, nodded to Thomas Jones, who looked uncomfortable, weighing the long knife in two hands, one clasped over the other because of the shortness of the wooden handle.

‘Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?’ I said to Gethin. ‘I’m thinking of the man you killed and chopped off his privy parts and cut off his face?’

‘He talks drivel,’ Gethin said. ‘Position him.’

Something spoken in Welsh, Thomas Jones nodding, then gesturing toward an area of turf a yard or so out from his boots.

‘I am… required to invite you, John, to kneel and bow your head.’

I looked at the selected turf and backed away from it, into the arms of Gerallt Roberts who pulled me close, sharply, and I felt what could only be his head butting the back of mine, bursting
open my wound, and I must have screamed as I sank in agony to my knees.

‘What a night for this,’ Prys Gethin said. ‘Did you see the star earlier? I witnessed it as I walked here. Crossed the whole of the sky, like the one which fired the heavens
just before the start of Owain’s war. You’d know of that, as an astrologer.’

Through the pain came outrage. In 1402, a comet widely seen across Europe had been viewed as a portent of the End-time but hailed by Glyndwr as inscribing across the night sky the trajectory of
his campaign. I’d charted the frequency of comets and if there’d been one this night I was no astronomer. This man was mad, and I could not believe that someone at the highest level of
English government would bargain with him. Maybe it was the French or the Spaniards or some unbalanced independent contender like the preening Earl of Arundel.

‘When you are ready,’ Prys Gethin said, ‘it will be easier for all of us if you pull your hair to one side to enable a clean cut. Don’t think to further demean your race
by attempting to run, or to struggle. The end of it would be the same, only bloodier.’

For just a moment – as I came stubbornly to my feet, yet refusing to believe – by some trick of the paling moon, his empty socket seem to glow, as if this imaginary comet burned
inside his skull.

In such a man it could only portend horror and tragedy.

As it would.

LI

I
STOOD, SWAYING,
hands on my gut where the Wigmore shewstone swelled out of my jerkin like a cyst. Thomas Jones bent and laid down the butcher’s
knife.

‘Let me talk to him,’ he said to Gethin. ‘With some small privacy. He was, after all, to have become my cousin.’

Gethin picked up the long knife.

‘Make it swift.’

He stood back and signalled to the big man to do the same. Thomas Jones came forward, not a weapon betwixt us. I wondered if, as a known sorcerer, a curse from me might have any effect. In such
moments, you’ll consider anything.

‘Kneel, John,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘If you please.’

‘Piss off.’

‘There’s no way out of this,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘And yet you know there is. You know of these matters. If you go quietly—’

‘That will not happen.’

‘You
know
… that if you go quietly and with humility, your soul will slip away from this place in peace and grace. Whereas if you resist and must needs be ignominiously cut
down, your embittered ghost will join all the other unquiet spirits which crowd Brynglas like crows.’

I would have had an answer for that, and a good and informed one, but then Thomas Jones was stepping away, holding out a hand to Gethin for the butcher’s knife. Hefting it from hand to
hand, testing its balance. The big man, Roberts, was come close behind me again. The smell of his breath was worse at this moment than the stench of rotting flesh from the hole in the tump by the
river.

I couldn’t speak. I stood swaying, new blood stiff on my cheeks. I was aware of Gethin walking over. Heard his rich, bladder-pipe voice, in Welsh, and then it broke off.

‘Translate for him,’ he said.

With no expression in his voice, Thomas Jones did as bid.

‘John, the Prince of Wales is with us now. He who could never leave while the English yoke lies heavily upon us.’

More Welsh, but all I heard was the voice of Thomas Jones from earlier.

…not saying he
lives
… but something of him does. And, if it’s anywhere, it’s here.

And now, having watched Prys Gethin sitting upon the hill, as if in silent summons, I was afraid.

I cleared my throat.

‘He was, in his way,’ I said, ‘a man of honour. I believe my family might even have supported his cause. And yet…’ I looked into the powdery night ’twixt
Thomas Jones and Prys Gethin. ‘…he looks not happy. And who
would
be, knowing that his only representative on the hill of his finest day was a one-eyed, twisted scut
who—’

A grunt from behind, and an agony as if my skull were cleaved open, but this time I stayed on my feet.

‘—who cares not a toss for the future of Wales, but only to satisfy his need for—’

‘Do it,’ Prys Gethin said.

When I knelt, every muscle and sinew in my legs was straining against it. The body fighting to live, the mind in furious, bitter conflict with itself over what to believe, who
to trust. The need to hold on to the last small hope that a man you’d liked, who’d oft-times made you laugh, was not, after all, to be your murderer.

His voice at my ear.

‘I’m trying to help you, boy. To give you the quick and merciful passing that’s mete for a man of your standing.’

Shifting his gaze when I looked up at him. I knelt in the wet turf, and they stood in silence around me. With my head bowed, all I could see was their boots – one pair, worn by Roberts
were all smirched with mud and pine needles but not enough to obscure the fine leather and good stitching and—

Oh God. Robbie…

When my head jerked, the wound under my hair sprang apart yet again and blood begin to run, down into my eyes. When the head was severed it would stop.

I let the breath go from my chest to my abdomen, beginning to pray, and in my head, against a cloth of deep blue, the sigil of St Michael appeared for a moment – Michael who brings
courage.

Michael who is also the angel of death, weighing the soul, conveying it to where it must go.

Out of the corner of one eye, I saw the knife leave the ground. Then I saw, on the grey grass, the shadow of a raised blade extended from bowed arms.

Breath froze in my throat, silence roared in my ears. I saw the shadow of the blade at an oblique angle. Not the slender, fine-honed blade that beheaded Anne Boleyn in one stroke, but a rude
butcher’s knife, made for mutton. I fell into prayer, as the shadow-blade twitched once and then fell with the echo of a cry across the night. Then came a brutal blow, my body tipping
sideways, my head fallen heavily into the grass.

All shadow. Moments of emptiness, then wet splatter. Hot blood on my cheeks, in my mouth, in my eyes.

Through it, I saw the blade falling again and again and again. More blood flying up.

Up.

‘Up, John!’

The hand of God reaching down for me.

I didn’t move. Lay on my side, looking up through the blood into the face of Thomas Jones, his panicked eyes under a blur of madness and tears, as he kicked me over on to my back.

‘Get up, John…
Get the fuck up…
’

I could feel my hands, fingers flexing and then moving with an exploratory slowness to my neck, which somehow seemed yet to be held ’twixt my collar bones. Sitting up, now, in a pond of
blood, looking down on the body of the big man, Roberts, heaving and squirming in the grass, his face a dark red carnival mask, and then flinching away from the sight of the thick blade coming down
on him, and I heard Thomas Jones sob and, over the sickening splinter of bone, I heard the vixen shriek.

It came down the hillside with all the force of an arrow that would pierce my heart and, in a blinking, I was struggling to my feet. Fresh blood was slicked under my boots, and I stumbled and
fell, dragged myself up again, scraping the salty blood from my eyes as I clambered up into the dregs of the night, and there was Prys Gethin creeping through the muddy dawn.

Quite some distance ahead of me, close to the church, something up there having trapped his attention.

A pale fluttering.

Gethin still now.

Standing, dagger in hand, feet apart. Waiting for the figure in the ragged white nightshirt to come down from the hill like a summoned ghost.

Oh, no. Oh dear God, no.

I ran crookedly up the steepening side of Brynglas. Stumbling twice and clawing at the grass. Knowing these two, black and white, would come together long before I could reach them, I began to
cry out urgently and was answered, the way one owl answers another.

The nightshirt billowed. The long bone was raised. The vixen shriek resounded down the valley.

I saw what might have been the first pale rays of the rising sun in Prys Gethin’s blade as it was drawn quickly back and then pushed, with a practised ease, under the boy’s jaw.