That would most certainly demean him if it became public knowledge. And what would it achieve if Dudley knew? Murder by some Spanish assassin could never be proven now. There was little doubt that the inquest jury would return a verdict of death by accident.
Forest had perhaps reminded Blount that messengers were apt to be blamed. He himself had been embarrassed, on his return from Ludlow with twenty-five armed men, to find that Dudley was back in Presteigne and had commanded him, without explanation, to return to London.
My own greatest regret was that I’d not insisted on seeing Gethin’s body. I did not trust John Smart, who only wanted to protect his business and the reputation of Jeremy Martin.
While I had no doubt that Gethin was dead, I realised that he was only dead in the sense that his hero, Owain Glyndwr, was dead. No one knew where his body lay and perhaps no one ever would. Which would make a legend of him – stories told to children that he would one day return, this black sprite, if the spiritual defences of Brynglas were ever lowered.
And how could they be lower than they were now?
While Dudley had lain at the home of Branwen Laetitia Swift, Roger Vaughan and I had met with Bishop John Scory in the privacy of the church in Presteigne. Scory, with many threats and much bad feeling, was in the process of prising Matthew Daunce out of Pilleth and would choose his successor with care. The statue would be scrubbed and the church lightened with more windows.
Daunce, he said, would doubtless go to London where he had friends at the heart – if you could ever call it that – of the new Puritanism. I suspected his clerical career would rise. It was the way things were going.
Pilleth, however, would require spiritual ministry, of a more traditional kind. An old magic. John Scory asked my advice, as he had about the mysterious map of the world. I’d told him that Brynglas and its environs were no less mysterious to me now.
A lesson to be learned. I said I’d write in some detail to Scory when I’d given it more thought. It’s part of me now, that place, and I think I may have to return ere long.
After Siôn Ceddol was buried, not far from the church, I’d sought to persuade Anna to return with me to London, but had known it was unlikely. By Christmas I’d learn, in a letter from Stephen Price, that she was betrothed to a schoolmaster in Hereford.
Within three weeks of my return home, Thomas Jones came to Mortlake with my cousin Joanne, and we discussed these matters in some depth. I was intrigued to learn that five parish churches in the area of Pilleth and the Radnor Forest were dedicated to the Archangel Michael, which made me wonder if I’d not been drawn, that strange and tragic morn, into some archaic circus of power, long buried.
Who can say? Yet while the Wigmore shewstone remained there, I did take something away, which I was able to demonstrate to Thomas Jones… and hoped one day to show to the Queen in the gardens at Richmond.
The first instinct of it had been beside the tump, when the twig which had scored my head had twitched in my hand.
In my mother’s garden at Mortlake, I found forked twigs, of birch and hazel, with which, to my great joy, I was able to discover a new well betwixt our orchard and the church.
On another occasion, when Goodwife Faldo lost not a ring (thank God) but a copper brooch, I was able to find it for her – in the hedge by the road leading to the brewery – by walking with the twig held out before me and awaiting its response.
Feeling my wrists seized by an unknown force. Learning, by trial, that I should simply let it happen, for, when I tried to study how it happened, it would not. It was about… setting aside all intellect.
Several times, I’d swear that when my wrists moved I would look up and think I’d caught a bright bobbing movement over a hedge or a wall, like the progress of a red hat.
But, of course, this was in my mind, for I do not See.
Notes and Credits
A YEAR AFTER it was opened, the inquest into the death of Amy Dudley did indeed end, as John Dee expected, with a verdict of Accidental Death. It made no difference. Dudley would never marry Elizabeth.
Most of the theories about Amy’s death are explored in depth in Death and the Virgin by Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth and Leicester by Sarah Gristwood. A letter, dated August 24 – a fortnight before her death – from Amy to her dressmaker, places an order for the alteration of a velvet gown.
In these increasingly secular times, it’s easy to underestimate the influence of religion, superstition and magic in Tudor England and Wales. Often, advances in science only added credibility to the concept of magic.
For anyone still sceptical, the classic Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas and The Arch-Conjurer of England by Glyn Parry will explain everything in scholarly detail.
Once again, I also relied on The Queen’s Conjurer by Benjamin Woolley, John Dee by Richard Deacon, John Dee, The World of an Elizabethan Magus by Peter J. French and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age by Frances Yates. Some informed speculation about the Dee dwelling at Mortlake can be found in John Dee of Mortlake by Nicholas Dakin, published by the Barnes and Mortlake History Society. Damon Albarn’s music for his opera Dr Dee shows a sympathetic understanding of Mortlake’s finest and is well worth a listen.
Dee’s abilities as a dowser are fairly well chronicled. John Aubrey records how he’d find missing items for his Mortlake neighbour, Goodwife Faldo. The Faldo family of Mortlake were long-time neighbours of John Dee and his mother. It may have been the daughter-in-law of the Goodwife Faldo mentioned in this manuscript, who, as an old woman, gave an account of the tall, good-looking and generous Dr Dee to Aubrey.
Dee’s scrying sessions, in later life, with the medium, Edward Kelley, are well chronicled. He apparently told people his crystal had come ‘from the angels’ but where his scrying activities began is less certain. The Queen’s interest is well known, as is her visit to Dee’s house to examine his scrying equipment for herself. It’s likely she was accompanied on this visit by Robert Dudley. The beryl in the British Museum may have been Dee’s… or may not.
Dowsing is the only fringe-psychic gift he appeared to have possessed. Thanks to Ced Jackson, John Moss, Graham Gardner and Helen Lamb of the British Society of Dowsers for background. And Caitlin Sagan for the BM pictures.
The story of how Presteigne became the assize town of Radnorshire is well documented. The Mid Wales organised-crime syndicate, Plant Mat, based in a cave in the Devil’s Bridge area of Ceredigion, accepted responsibility for the murder of a judge at Rhayader and some of its members were subsequently hunted down.
The Prices did finish their new home, still known as Monaughty and still the most impressive Elizabethan house in Radnorshire, standing alone, in a curve of the road from Knighton to Penybont.
John Dee is recorded as visiting Wigmore in 1576, when he found discarded manuscripts, which he considered to be of some value, in the remains of the chapel at Wigmore Castle, already falling into ruin. Today, the castle is far more visible than the abbey. The abbot’s house is now the home of John and Carol Challis, who were kind enough to show us around… and put me on to Abbot Smart, more of whose alleged misdeeds were uncovered by John Grove, of the Mortimer History Society.