He stood firm on this land. Short, thick-built, weathered of face, and showing more confidence than he had in Presteigne last night, as he spoke of the house his family was rebuilding in the next valley, a former abbey grange, Monaughty, from the Welsh for monastery.
An easy walk from here, but its aspect was different.
‘Keeping an air of the holy,’ Stephen Price said. ‘We’d like it to be…’ He glanced back at Nant-y-groes. ‘…three, four times this size. Bigger families in the years to come. As you doctors learn to stop disease leaving empty cribs.’
‘Not that kind of doctor, Master Price. Or… well, not beyond a small knowledge of anatomy.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded his big, squarish head and led me along a path towards the river and a new barn of green oak. Though obviously of the gentry, he spoke simply, in a farmer’s way, as if with an inborn sense of the rudiments of life which the time he’d spent in London could not take away.
‘If the new house was a monastery grange,’ I said, ‘would that mean for Wigmore?’
‘No, no. Abbey Cwmhir in the west. Wigmore land stopped at Presteigne. That’s English, see – wherever they draws the boundary. This… is where Wales begins.’
I’d tried to feel it. Tried to feel the weight of my ancestry, back from my grandfather Bedo Ddu – an ebullient man whom, my father said, had ordered the font filled with wine at the baptism of his first son. Back through Llewelyn Crugeryr, who had a castle, and Prince Rhys ap Tewdwr, which would give me common ancestry with the Queen… all the way back, my tad would insist, to Arthur himself.
Out of Presteigne, the country had changed: a darkening of the soil but a lightening of the hills, close shaven by sheep. Although there were no jagged peaks, you could sense the rock under the green, the bones of the land. The ruins of a small castle stood like a skeletal fist across the river, and a small grey church was tucked into the hill of Pilleth with a cluster of mean houses below.
I saw all this, but felt no pull of the heart.
Found no sense of my tad in the house which lay behind us, a solid dwelling of timber and rubblestone, with a good hall and inglenook and a new chimney. An old housekeeper had been making flat cakes on a bakestone, with dried currants and shavings of apple. Welsh cakes, I guessed – my tad used to say proudly that he’d taught the King’s cooks how to make them for the royal table. I’d told the housekeeper this, and she’d given me one to eat and said she remembered Master Rowly when he was a boy, him and all his jests. But the taste of the Welsh cake brought back only memories of Mortlake.
At the riverside, I turned to Stephen Price.
‘You said you recalled my father?’
‘I well recall him. Too young, mind, to know him as a man. I was sent away to an uncle up at Llanbister, to be tutored, as you might say, in the arts of marketing and butchery. When I came back, Master Dee was gone to London. Sought to look him up when I was down there for the parliaments, but he was dead by then.’
‘Must have been strange,’ I said, ‘coming back from London to this…’
‘Wilderness?’ It was the first time I’d seen him smile. It found shape as slowly as his way of speech. ‘Never thought of it that way, Dr Dee. Not till I came back that first time after three weeks in London. Couldn’t settle back to it, not for a while. So quiet after London that you were listening to your own breaths.’
‘Did Nicholas Meredith ever live out here?’
‘Not that I’d know. Presteigne boy, see. Presteigne… it en’t London, but it aims to be.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t enquire into the doings of Master Meredith or how he got his money. En’t my business, and I’m living in a house that belongs to him and plan to carry on leasing the farm after we moves out to Monaughty. But the way he was to you last night… spoke of more than I could understand.’
I looked him in the eyes.
‘Left me mystified, also,’ I said.
‘Injured, too, I’d reckon. Come all this way, and your own family don’t wanner know you.’
‘I suppose.’
A pensive tightening of Price’s lips.
‘You must needs have care,’ he said at last. ‘Big man in Presteigne now. Him and Bradshaw. Ole John Bradshaw, down from Ludlow with all his wool money and the lease on most of the abbey property from the Crown. So Presteigne’s yet owned by England, and the Council of the Marches gets its bidding done by the wool men. Who are also the magistrates, and so on. You getting the picture?’
‘Do you know anything at all of the last Abbot of Wigmore? John Smart?’
‘You keeps coming back to that, Dr Dee.’
‘He’s the reason I’m here. He’s said to have in his charge a gemstone – a crystal stone, a beryl, I believe, which I and my colleague hope to acquire from him. For my research.’
‘On the Queen’s behalf?’
‘Everything I do,’ I said honestly and more than a little sadly, ‘is for the Queen’s Majesty.’
‘What you do… relating to the Hidden?’
‘One day it will no longer be hidden. Open to everyone. That’s my hope.’
Thinking of my library, which anyone who could read was free to consult, not that many did.
‘You think that’s wise, Dr Dee? That all should be known?’
Stephen Price was watching me. It seemed that Dudley had been right, this man wanted something from me – perhaps what Vaughan had hinted at on the road to Hereford – and, in his border way, was taking the long route. I, however, continued to be direct and honest.
‘What I’m seeking, Master Price, is a stone through which I believe knowledge can be obtained. The kind of knowledge that can’t be learned from books or tutors, only by the lifting of the mind. It’s said to have healing qualities. And is in the possession of John Smart. Do you know him?’
‘Knows of him, that’s all. A holy knave, by all accounts. Babbies everywhere.’
‘You know if he’s yet about?’
‘Never had cause to. He don’t enter my life. I got enough troubles. Some of the ole monks, they never went away. Abbots, you don’t see much of them, but he could be around.’
If Price knew more, it was clear he felt not safe in the discussion of it. He folded his arms, rocking to and fro at the river’s edge. Looking up for a hint of sun, to work out the time.
I said, ‘You think they’ll have brought their prisoner from New Radnor?’
‘Sure to.’
‘You said last night that you had no wish to watch all the glee. I think you said paid-for glee.’
‘Time off work, free pies. A holiday. A fair.’
‘To cover up fear?’
He eyed me.
‘Feel it, did you, in Presteigne?’
‘Not to any great extent.’
‘Pies are working then, ennit?’ He looked up at the hill, a pale green wall before us: steep sides, a flat top. ‘Nothing works yere.’
‘Brynglas Hill?’
‘And Pilleth. The village. What’s left of it.’
He took in a long breath, as if he was absorbing something of the humour of the place.
‘There was no village left even before the battle, see. Just Nant-y-groes and a couple more farms, a way off. When they thought the battle was forgot, my ancestors set aside some ground east of the hill to build houses for a blacksmith, and woodsmen, cottagers to work the land. Then they rebuilt the church that was burned down, and Pilleth was become a proper village, mabbe for the first time. Seventy folks there at one time, they reckon. Mabbe twenty-five now.’
I waited in silence, recalling Vaughan’s words.
A place where a thousand men have been slaughtered is not exactly the easiest place to make a home.