Turning slowly to see the rector, in his long black coat. Everything happening as though darkly ordained for my undoing.
‘He is a walking blasphemy,’ Matthew Daunce said.
Anna Ceddol’s eyes closed, her shoulders falling, the shawl dropping to her elbows. Oh, dear God, oh, Christ, what had I done? What had I set in train here?
‘No,’ I said. ‘You know not what you’re saying.’ I stood up. ‘Mistress Ceddol. It’s best if you go. And the boy.’
Her eyes moved from the rector to me, and she took the boy’s arm and pulled him to his feet. He writhed, and she held him and the bone and dragged him away and looked at me.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Go.’
‘You also.’ The rector’s face was a ball of white light in the mist. ‘Now I know who you are. You are not wanted here. You’re filled with dark sprites. The filth oozes from you.’
I said nothing. Watched the Ceddols backing away, Anna dragging the boy with his thigh bone bumping off the trees, leaving me staring into the rector’s pointing, rigid finger.
‘Go with your whore and her demonic sibling.’ His forefinger twisting as if to bore a hole between my eyes. ‘Go on! Before I call upon the Lord God to hurl you out.’
‘No,’ I said.
The word emerging fainter than I’d wanted, for I found I had no breath. Could almost see it leaving me, fading into the mist as, from the woods below the church, the horrific, faerie, vixen shriek of Siôn Ceddol tore the morn into dark strips.
XXXIII
The Single Eye
DUDLEY HAS TRIED several times to meet the single eye of Prys Gethin, determined to send back the curse to its source by force of will.
Like most of those around the Queen, he’s seen the advantages in a mild study of practical magic and is prepared for an exchange of black chemistry across the already tense courtroom.
But never once does he entrap the Welshman’s gaze.
Gethin stands limply in a corner of the prisoner’s dock, which is close to the centre of the courtroom, hands manacled behind him, two armed guards his companions in the wooden pen, the jury seated along the wall to his right.
Access to the court, not surprisingly, is limited. Dudley has gained his place by following Roger Vaughan into the attorneys’ enclosure. Five of them in there, with their books of notes. Hard to see what function they each perform, but the judge will have his reasons. Sir Christopher Legge is nothing if not coldly efficient, and such men as him, Dudley freely admits, are necessary.
The law is not about humanity.
Already, the rough-beamed former barn has taken on an air of London. Banners are hung on the wall behind the judge’s bench of green oak, reflecting the Queen’s Majesty, a royal authority. Something to be feared.
Yet it’s all too big for this petty affair, and Dudley is tormented with suspicion.
The judge’s bench rises several feet higher than the attorneys’ to its right and the seats to its left which soon begin to be occupied by a handful of men who Vaughan says are the JPs from Radnorshire and neighbouring counties.
‘Come to see how it’s done?’ Dudley whispers. ‘How real justice is administered?’
‘Certainly, no one will have seen it done like this before,’ Vaughan tells him. ‘A trial here rarely takes longer than half an hour. Twenty cases might be heard in a morning. I’m thinking this will go on most of the day.’
God’s bollocks, Dudley thinks. Only a royal trial matches this.
He draws in a steadying breath and tries again to catch the eye of Prys Gethin, but Gethin is looking down, his face without expression. Has he been tortured, Dudley wonders, for the names of his fellow brigands in Plant Mat? Is he cowed from a night of beatings?
Nothing evident.
Outside, the sound of a massing of people, a dull roar, but in here the public gallery along the back wall is big enough only for about two dozen – Dudley marking one of them at once: Thomas Jones of Tregaron. Why is this bastard here? What’s his interest? Who let him in?
‘What have they told you, Vaughan?’
‘I’m a child in this. They tell me nothing. Only ask me questions about local matters and how people feel about them.’
They are at one end of the attorneys’ bench and Vaughan glances warily towards the other, where one of the older lawyers might only appear to be consulting his notes.
Dudley gets the message and keeps quiet, observing a man in a bishop’s mitre, attended by two clerics, entering through the main doors and approaching the bench, where two men in dark robes are arranging large books before the judge’s throne.
The bishop inclines his head and… hell, it’s John Scory of Hereford. They’ve brought the Bishop of Hereford here to represent God. Whose judgement is yet final, of course, in an English court. As if to confirm this, the morning sun at last breaks through, filling one of the high windows, and the air shimmers with dust motes.
The bishop goes out again. A robed usher enters, calls for silence and for every man to stand, and there’s a communal shuffling, and then Sir Christopher Legge slips in through a small Gothic-pointed door behind the judge’s bench.
Only after the prayers to a just God are delivered and the charges read out, is Prys Gethin’s red-stubbled chin seen to rise from his chest.
And through witchcraft did bring about the deaths of Thomas Harris and Hywel Griffiths in the county of Radnorshire on the night of September 20th, in the year of Our Lord 1560.
There were other charges relating to the stealing of cattle. Enough, on their own, to stow Gethin in the deepest cell for many a long year. Perhaps even hang him.
‘How do you plead, Master Gethin?’
Legge barely glancing at the accused. The sunbeams from the high windows create dusty cloisters in the air above the dock and the jury box.
A silence. Legge looking mildly irritated.
‘What have you to say, Master Gethin? If you wish to make plea in your own tongue, we have an interpreter.’
Glancing at Roger Vaughan.
Prys Gethin looks the judge full in the face.
‘I’ll not require an interpreter, my Lord, having spent considerable time in England. I plead not guilty to all charges.’
Legge nods. What else would he expect? The prisoner clears his throat.
‘And if I may be permitted to say, at this early stage, my Lord, my name is not Gethin but Gwilym Davies, gentleman farmer of Carmarthen. Something I’ve been trying to tell your minions, who seem strangely predisposed not to listen.’
Dudley sits up hard and, for just a moment, his eyes meet the prisoner’s one eye, where he sees laughter flaring like raging flames.
XXXIV
Adversary
SUCH WAS THE density of the fog now, it was as though the rector and I were set in wax. His body was like to a scarecrow’s, but his face shone as marble. I looked at him and saw an effigy from a tomb dressed in cast-out apparel, and his eyes were lit, I’d swear, with madness.
The air was grown thick as a damp, grey blanket around the forlorn shrine. The walls of the church were now as far as I could see. Shivering in my cheap jerkin, I felt that this was no longer a normal autumnal mist but a fogging of the senses. I breathed in its bitterness and spoke with insistence.
‘Let me tell you… about Siôn Ceddol…’
‘There is nothing’ – his voice coming back at me like a horsewhip – ‘that you can tell me about Siôn Ceddol. Nothing that will change my opinion of him as an inhuman carrier of demons, who should never have been born into this world.’
‘You’re wrong.’