‘All for Wales?’
Smart sat down on the edge of the tump, as though the burden of his past were become too much to support.
‘Once made the mistake of going whoring with him. Learning that we had… very different needs. Later, a particular canon who sought to gather evidence of my misconduct… had an accident. After a while, even I was in dismay over the depth of the boy’s depravity. Quite relieved when our ways diverged.’
We sat in silence for a while. I knew that everything he’d told me might later be denied.
‘I wanted him to hang,’ Smart said. ‘I did not want him back in my life. And when, after he was freed, the sheriff brought him to me, as he’d apparently requested…’
‘What did you do?
‘What do you think I did? I greeted him cordially, as an old friend. With great celebration. Fed him well and gave him drink. Told him how much I was in his debt for all he’d done for me twenty years ago. Said I’d help him any way I could.’
‘Of course you did.’
‘And, in time, he told me where he wanted to go, and I took him part-way there, hidden in my cart. Saying I’d return for him in the morning, with trusted friends. Men he could rely on.’
‘The Presteigne boys.’
‘Regular customers of mine, in the lower parlour. Roisterers, street-fighters. As I said, Jeremy Martin is ever generous with ale and cider and a bed for the night, and they were the first hunting party to return to Presteigne – this was after you and your Welsh friend had left. Much competition that night over who’d find Prys Gethin. So I told them I’d received information as to his whereabouts and could perhaps lead them there. Giving them more drink before we rode off.’
‘You know where he was going. You knew his plans.’
Smart smiled and tapped his nose.
‘Best outcome, Dee. We don’t need another trial. Not for a while. And you don’t need to know any more about my role in Gethin’s demise. Just as, in the matter of Master Roberts, I have no need at all to know who he is.’
I walked with Smart to the Nant-y-groes bridge where the Presteigne boys waited with the horses and his cart.
The day was brighter now, though the sky was white. When we were in first sight of the company, I brought the shewstone from my bloodied jerkin, quite alarmed at how full of heat it was, having spent the whole night next to my lower abdomen.
Yes, I know… which is the home of the second mind where lie the deepest feelings, the unspoken perceptions. There must needs be a close bond ’twixt the crystal and the scryer, my friend Jack Simm, the apothecary, had said. I wondered if, at this moment, in its swirling depths, the sigil of St Michael would be aglow.
When I gave the stone back to John Smart, he accepted it without a word, and I was glad. The circumstance was not right. It was not the time, although in some odd way, it had served a purpose.
I said, ‘You scry, Abbot?’
‘Martin,’ he said. ‘Call me Martin. No I don’t scry. That… was another of his tasks.’
‘I— Gethin?’
‘He saw. In the stone. He saw what would come. At my house in the abbey, we’d spend whole hours before the stone.’
Thomas Jones had said Gethin was reputed to have the Sight, but…
‘God’s tears. This was his stone?’
‘No, it’s mine. But he was the scryer. A scryer need not be a spiritual man. Or so I thought.’
I also thought to ask if he had acquaintance with a certain Brother Elias, but guessed there’d be no straight answer.
He stowed the stone away in his saddlebag.
‘Should you ever have need of a scryer, Dee, I’d advise you to have a care over whom you choose.’
I did not look at the Presteigne boys. I nodded and turned away and walked back towards the river of light. I lay flat on its bank, hanging down, reaching to splash bright water on my face.
When I went back to the tump, the hole – the wound in its side – had collapsed in upon itself, and the stench had gone, leaving only the sharp, bitter essence of autumn.
LV
For Tonight
ALL WIDE AWAKE now and in need of someone with whom to talk it all through, I walked up, through the cloistered oaks, to the church and sat on the step below Our Lady of Pilleth.
Her demure, chipped face shone through a dappled haze and a rediscovered beatific smile, which led me to suppose that Roger Vaughan had been back.
There was no sign of Matthew Daunce, with whom I’d nothing to discuss.
I let my head fall into my hands. It no longer bled or ached so badly, but whatever part of it enclosed my creative thoughts felt beaten thin as an old drumskin.
I’d bathed my head and eyes again, this time with water from the holy well, unable to shake off the vibrant feeling that I’d been used… had been, for a short time, part of some engine of change.
Or was it illusion?
I saw how circumstance had completed most of the preparations required for an invocation: fasting, self-denial and the many hours without sleep that would separate me from this world, leaving me open to the higher spheres. And yet…
‘There are things I still can’t comprehend,’ I told the Virgin. ‘I know not what was here before you. How far it all goes back. How Brynglas became a place of healing before it was a place of killing. Where lies the power?’
Was there some energy in the very earth which was released in places such as this for the healing of the body and the expansion of human thought?
Perhaps it had begun not here at all, but with the river and the tump that was raised within its curve. With whoever had been buried there at a time when there were no English and the word Welsh, meaning – obscurely – foreigner or stranger, had not been invented. Had that been Pilleth’s golden time?
And when was it turned bad? When was the tump become a cauldron of spiritual pestilence from the second sphere? And the hill… was its natural vigour fouled by that single act of treachery by the Welsh bowmen? Or was this ruinous reversal of allegiance, as the church burned, itself effected by something here already become malign?
All I knew was that the roiling air of betrayal seemed to have become an engine in itself, a pestilence possessed of a dark intelligence which was become manifest in extremes of thought, extremes of behaviour only held in balance by a mingling of spiritual disciplines as divers as the pulleys that made my Mortlake owls flap their wings and make hoot.
I thought of the fevered swooping of the women with their knives, wondering if it was even true or just corrosive gossip of the kind that had the Queen pregnant with Dudley’s child. How could it ever be proved when privy parts have no bones?
I looked up into the lowered eyelids of the stone mother.
‘Are we able to reverse it?’ I asked her. ‘Is it in our power to restore life and health to this valley?’
A shadow was fallen across the Virgin and me, and I turned and looked up into open eyes the colour a sky is meant to be in summer.
‘I was looking for you,’ Anna Ceddol said.
Her wet hair hung black as a raven’s wings. She pushed it back behind her ears. Must have washed it to be rid of the blood. In the river, or one of Siôn’s wells.
‘Too quiet, see,’ she said. ‘Too quiet at the Bryn. They told me to try and sleep, so I took a potion. But I could not sleep for the quiet.’
I rose to my feet. I understood. She faced me, wet-haired, dry-eyed.
‘They say you saw it done.’
I nodded.
‘It was… very quick. Gone like a… moth. A butterfly. I saw what might be about to happen and ran—’