‘Not before she’s dead. And more of you with her.’
Even from this distance, I saw Gethin’s smile open up, a split in the wood. The silence around him was waxen, Price’s round face was pale and sagging. Helpless. A whole community held at bay by one man, who believed himself more than a man. Who looked like more than a man. I sensed a demon moving inside a puppet of skin.
‘Untethered,’ Thomas Jones said, ‘from all human constraint.’
Anna Ceddol sagged in Gethin’s grip. My breath was rapid, my thoughts feverish. It would be unwise to kill her now, he’d know that, but I didn’t doubt that he’d deform her and take pleasure in it. I wondered if I could cross from the church to the pines, go further down the hill from Price and Vaughan, maybe come out behind him.
Thomas Jones said, ‘Whatever you’re thinking…’
‘I know. I know.’
He’d moved too far away from the pines; wherever I was coming from he’d see me running out, and his knife hand would twitch.
And then Gethin spoke, so quietly that I caught only half of it.
‘—who I want.’
The sun had gone in. Gethin waited.
Until, out of the pines, not too far from the churchyard where we stood, came the ruins of a man.
His long face discoloured, lips cut and swollen.
One eye enpurpled and abulge with blood. One arm bound up in a sling ill-made of rope. A man so beaten he could no longer stand aright.
It took me a moment. Even me.
‘So let her go.’
The voice was a rasp against dry stone.
Prys Gethin said, ‘Where’s your blade?’
A stillness for maybe three heartbeats, then something dropped to the turf.
‘Further out,’ Gethin said.
Robert Dudley looked down for a moment and then stepped over the body of Siôn Ceddol.
‘You.’ With Anna Ceddol’s head crooked in an elbow, Gethin pointed, with the tip of his blade, at Roger Vaughan. ‘Come out.’
Even from here I marked the terror in Vaughan’s face as he left the shelter of the pine wood, glancing behind him at Price’s face, impassive.
‘Take the rope from his arm,’ Gethin said. ‘Do it, or she—’
‘Yes…’
Vaughan put up his hands, found the knot in the sling. No resistance from Dudley and no scream when his arm was freed, only a tightening of the mouth that might have cracked teeth. The way the arm fell from the rope made clear that it was broken. Prys Gethin pointed his blade at the rope where it lay on the ground.
‘Pick it up. Bind his hands. Behind his back.’
Price said, ‘But his arm’s—’
‘Do it!’ The blade moved against Anna’s throat. ‘Bind it tight…’
Dudley’s face creasing, pale as cloud, as he bit down on his agony whilst the binding was done.
‘Now take his boots,’ Gethin said.
Dudley sniffed, kicked off one of Gwyn Roberts’s boots. It came easily from his foot. He said something that I took to be derogatory about Welsh leather, and I felt a foolish admiration for him. This absurd hauteur in the face of imminent death.
I’d kept looking down the hill and across the valley for a sign of the hundred armed men promised by John Forest. Nothing. Betrayal at every level. I felt the Wigmore shewstone pressing through the worn fabric of my jerkin into my abdomen, reminding me how all this had started. In the noble cause of expanding the Queen’s vision. Would she ever know how it had ended?
Vaughan knelt and pulled off the second boot.
‘You can go back now,’ Gethin said.
With the tip of his knife, he beckoned Dudley forward. Some women were turned away looking at the ground, averting their eyes from an expected execution.
Thomas Jones looked at me, baffled.
‘He can’t kill Dudley whilst holding the woman. If he lets the woman go, some of these men may try and take him. And succeed.’
But Gethin didn’t let the woman go.
He pointed down the hill, towards the river, sent Dudley limping barefoot ahead of him.
‘I hear anyone following us,’ Gethin said, ‘and you know what will happen.’
‘His fucking mind’s gone,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘He can’t do this. He cannot do it on his own.’
The progress was slow and awkward, Gethin holding Anna Ceddol tight and the knife tighter, Dudley shuffling and stumbling a few feet in front, head thrown back in obvious agony.
‘Then either he believes himself not alone,’ I said. ‘Or he isn’t.’
As they crossed the hill and entered a small copse of birch and rowan, I saw that the petal on Anna’s breast was become a rose in full bloom.
I seized the butcher’s knife.
‘Tell them where I’ve gone,’ I said.
‘Where? For God’s sake—’
‘You know where.’
LIV
I RAN DOWN the oak wood’s primitive cloister. Early light flickered amongst the dry leaves and acorns under what felt like someone else’s racing feet.
Running against sombre reason and the cold denial of the Puritans. Running against a sorry sense of my own failings. Running hardest of all against the images crowding into the mind’s poor glass: the blade at the woman’s throat, the blooming of the blood-flower. At the start of a second day without sleep or much food, I was become a creature of little more than air, while the world was a faerie blur, the dark oaks swelling and then shrinking before me like illusions in the distorting mirror I keep in my library at Mortlake.
Emerging from the wood on to the sheep-cropped turf, I ran, in a fever, calling upon an archangel’s energy, throwing his sigil into the air, pure white against the small pale sun and the still-visible moon, waxing close to full. I ran, panting like a hound and bathed with sweat and prayer, until I stopped before the alien green of the old tump in the river’s bend, knowing I’d be here a good while before Gethin and his captives.
By daylight, it was clear the hole in the side had been redug in haste. The displaced soil lay in two heaps either side of it, the cut turves lain against the bottom of the tump. There was still a stench of putrefaction, but nowhere near as strong as it had been last night.
Who’d dug it out again? The Roberts boys? I could see no other explanation. It would be done here. The corpse tidily tucked into the earth. Then across the river they’d all go and away into the real Wales.
I prayed that Thomas Jones was assembling those who would understand, ready to move fast. I prayed that Dudley had some reserve of ingenuity. I prayed to God and Christ and the Holy Virgin and the Archangel Michael that Anna Ceddol would not lose her life.
Turning my back on the hole, I saw the bough which had ploughed the furrow in my head, upthrust from the twisted bole of a thorn tree grown from the foot of the tump. Picked up a forked twig, its bark stripped away by my head before the twig was snapped from the tree in my helpless writhing.
Only good can fight evil, and, God knows, there was little enough of it in me. Against all my rage, I sought to gather in all the good I’d met or heard around Brynglas hilclass="underline" the souls of Father Walter and Marged the wisewoman and the unknown anchoress said to have lived where the church now stood, by the shrine of the Virgin, who I visualised unsmirched and shining, blessing the pure spring below. Conjuring a peace over Brynglas, a blue glow upon its slopes on which the sigil, in my mind, was etched.
The twig twisted in my hands, lit by a shaft of amber sunlight, my arms afire before the light was, in an instant, extinguished from above.