‘Jesu, Twm, is this a matter for poetry?’
‘I’m Welsh. It’s in the blood. His wife, now – did I tell you about his wife? Said to have fled within a month of their wedding. To England, I believe, which did not improve his love of our neighbour. Word was that he liked to do her while covered in pig blood, still wet. She seems to have been a religious woman who would not have a child conceived in pig blood.’
‘Did she also put out his eye before she left?’
‘Put it out himself, they say, in a drunken rage. Tell me when you’ve heard enough of this?’
‘Sounds like horseshit to me.’
‘Who am I to say otherwise? All right. In truth, little is known about the man. I do not, for example, believe that Gwilym Davies is his name any more than is Prys Gethin. The legend says he was born in Tregaron, where Plant Mat began, all those years ago. I can tell you, boy, that he was not. He acquired an old farm in the hills near there, which he claims as his ancestral home. It is not. I’m from Tregaron and I know.’
‘Where’s he come from then?’
‘Don’t know that. By his accent, I’d say north rather than south. But Welsh is his language and thieving is certainly his trade. He inspires fear and respect over a wide area, and not only through his looks. And the killing and the rape, that is not all legend.’
‘He lives by thieving?’
‘Lives by farming, now. Oh, and slaughtering. So loves to slaughter stock – anybody’s stock, and not quickly. After a successful cattle raid, he’ll sacrifice one of the beasts on a hilltop under a beacon fire. I know this, I’ve seen the flames from afar.’
‘Sacrificed to God?’
‘Some god. Or the demon he’s invested with the spirit of Rhys Gethin. Who knows? He was rambling over all this as we drank. Full of the Old Testament.’
Thomas Jones sat very still in the grey light, his habitual levity long shed. I waited for him to continue, but he said nothing.
I said, ‘So the curse…’
Thinking not only of the two dead men but of Dudley in the marketplace in Presteigne.
‘Cursing… we might consider that to be a woman’s preserve,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Also the Sight, and yet he has that, too, or so it’s claimed. Styling himself as a man who walks with his ancestors. Journeying to the wild and barren places to meet with Owain and Rhys. The time I drank with him, he told me what they looked like now, how they’d not aged. How, in the other world, all the grey had gone from Owain’s forked beard and his powers were there to be called upon in the cause of Wales.’
‘He’s mad?’
‘Increasingly, I’d say.’
‘So the bridge from which the farmer fell—’
‘Ach, let’s not get swept away. It might just as easily have had an axe taken to it by Gethin’s followers in the Plant. Who then drowned the poor old boy and left him all entangled in the ruins of it.’
‘How many followers does Gethin have?’
‘Hard to be sure. But two of them were in Presteigne – the day I found you at the inn. The Roberts brothers, this is, Gerallt and Gwyn. That is, I’ve known them only as woodsmen and hunters on his estate and both are men of violence – short-temper, alehouse fights. But not high in intellect.’
‘Just the two?’
‘May have been more I didn’t recognise. I thought at first there might be some plan to free Prys from the gaol or the court. So I followed them, keeping a safe distance behind. They took this road. All the way to Brynglas Hill. Where they stopped.’
I may have blinked.
‘What did they do there?’
‘Didn’t go close enough to find out, boy. Remembering too well the face of a man beaten in Tregaron town by Gerallt Roberts. Most of his teeth gone and his jaw too close to an ear than a jaw was ever meant to be. However… I did see two other men on the hill, one of whom bore a close resemblance to my old friend John Dee.’
‘When was this?’
But I knew, recalling two horsemen I’d noticed down by Nant-y-groes when I was on first the hill, with Stephen Price.
‘The same Dee I saw again that night, in Presteigne,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Well, well… why then was the Queen’s conjurer in town? Was he there to give evidence to the court on aspects of the Hidden relating to Prys Gethin and death by cursing?’
‘No,’ I said with caution. ‘He wasn’t.’
‘Anyway, it seemed useful to seek you out. I even wondered if you’d been followed to Brynglas by the Roberts brothers.’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘So I left you a message, which you, with your renowned intelligence, contrived to ignore.’
‘Consider my head hung in shame,’ I said. ‘But the Roberts brothers had no need to free Gethin from the court.’
‘None at all.’
‘And you think they knew this?’
Thomas Jones shrugged.
‘What’s happening here?’ I said. ‘How could the truth about Prys Gethin have failed to come out in court?’
‘Because it was an English court.’
‘Not good enough. Legge knew. Legge knew everything before the trial began. You’d told… whoever you told. You’d told them all about Prys Gethin – no such thing as a free pardon? I don’t understand. Why did you even come to the trial?’
‘Not such a long ride from my home.’
‘That’s no answer.’
‘No.’ He looked down at his enfolded fingers. ‘I suppose not. Does it make more sense that I came to court because I was most explicitly warned not to?’
‘In truth?’
He looked up at me.
‘You think I would not like to see an end to Prys Gethin? Look, the woman… I’ll tell you… the young woman who was raped and then choked to death and her husband killed, that was no myth, they were neighbours of my aunt at Llanddewi, not far from Tregaron. Everyone knew who’d done it, but it would never be proved, so I… Thinking it cowardly to finger Prys from behind, I offered to give evidence to the court regarding his reputation.’
‘But you—’
‘And was told, boy, that it would not be necessary. Told my presence would not be useful. Told to keep my head down in the west and forget the foregoing conversation had ever taken place. So why, after that, would I not come to the trial?’
Movement overhead – a bat flittering tree to tree, followed by another. Thomas Jones leaned back, hands clasped behind his head.
‘Does all this then suggest anything to you, John?’
The wood all around us let off a smell of voracious decay. I sat down upon a stump with a jagged edge that hurt my arse. I didn’t care; pain sharpens the senses.
Monstrous constellations, like the grotesque creatures on Scory’s map, were finding form in the firmament of my head, and it felt as if the cold moon itself were lodged in my breast.
XLV
Cold Geometry
IT FELT LIKE they were here with us now, skulking and scurrying amid the rotting trees: Cecil in shadow, long-nosed and mastiff-eyed, with his intelligence gatherer Walsingham running hither and thither, ratlike, getting things done.
Getting things done.
And, of course, none of it would ever lead back.
Nothing ever did.
Hell, I didn’t even know if this was Cecil. Felt my fists clenching and unclenching, my body all aquiver. Asking Thomas Jones when he’d been approached by the man he would not name who might have been of Cecil’s Welsh kin.