‘Don’t even think of it,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘The city would terrify him. Me as well. We’re country people. If he wanders out in the night here, as oft-times he does, I know he’ll come to no harm. What were you about to ask me?’
I ached in my breast for her and the gloomed years ahead. Changing his rag every day, washing the shit from him in the stream. Worst of all, never letting him be alone with those his age, particularly the maidens. None of this would be so bad if she wasn’t educated. If she hadn’t the wit to imagine what her life might have been.
I let go a sigh.
‘When Daunce… when he was in full, abusive spate, he spoke of you as… the… the Great Papist’s…’
‘Whore?’
Her eyes were like rock.
I nodded, turning away from her, beginning quickly to drag on my apparel.
‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘But it might have been.’
I stopped dressing.
‘I think I told you of a rich man who offered me a home in Presteigne. I’d spent one night with him. Or half a night. He gave me money. He’d been… a monk. At the head of a monastery.’
‘John Smart…?’
I stumbled, half into my hose. Could hardly say the name.
‘He had a reputation,’ she said. ‘Even when in Holy Orders. Could not keep it in his robe.’
I sat down on the stool by the fire to put on my boots, shaking my head. How could this woman consider herself so worthless that she’d give herself to a man such as this even for one night?
Siôn Ceddol, awake again, came and sat on the rushes a few feet from me. He was looking to the side of me where the tall stones rose like the remains of an ingle.
As if watching something.
He smiled.
‘He likes you,’ Anna said.
‘How can you tell?’
Thinking he hadn’t liked me up at the holy well, when he thought I’d stolen his thigh bone.
‘He’s within a few feet of you,’ she said, ‘and he isn’t screaming the walls down.’
‘Where…’ I didn’t really want to ask her. ‘Where was he when you… were with Smart?’
‘There was a housekeeper. A young woman. She survived the night by plying Siôn with sweetmeats. My feeling was that she was one of several woman who… worked for him.’
‘And this was all in Presteigne?’
She nodded.
‘He’s still there?’
‘They say he pulls a good income from Presteigne. That’s what’s said. Only gossip, but the same gossip from different ends of town. Yes, he’s there.’
‘Tell me.’
While she told me what she knew and what she’d heard of John Smart and his dealings, Siôn Ceddol gazed placidly into the smoke. Holding out his hands in it, as though to accept a gift. But, conspicuously, not from me. His white hands swam up in the blue-grey smoke like flatfish and seemed to grasp something.
Something heavy.
Holding it up to look at it.
Holding up nothing.
Of a sudden there was no heat from the fire.
Anna Ceddol said quietly, ‘There’s someone with you.’
I stiffened. The fire burned white.
The boy turned and picked up his beloved earth-brown thigh bone and laid it on the hearth and then pushed it forward as if he were offering it for inspection to whoever sat next to me.
And then sat back and waited as I shivered.
I should have gone then to Stephen Price, told him what had happened this day – some of it, anyway – but I couldn’t face it. Needed some time to separate the truth from the madness. Besides, I knew I had to reach the sheriff before Daunce could get to him, although I couldn’t, at this moment, even remember his name.
I stole around to the stables at the rear of Nant-y-groes and found my mare. She knew me at once and was silent as I nuzzled her and saddled her and led her quietly out of the stable and down to the road. I’d come back tomorrow. By tomorrow I would have thought of something. Some way of persuading Anna Ceddol to return with me to London. What did it matter to me that she was incapable of childbearing? There was neither time nor money in my life for children.
I mounted up and followed the silvered ribbon of road with ease, giving brief thought to what I’d do when we arrived at my mother’s house. How my mother would react to my appearance in Mortlake with a beautiful woman and an idiot. The truth of it – I didn’t care. The moon rose, close to full in the clearing sky, and I felt hollow and sad and yet exalted.
We’d covered the few miles to Presteigne before I knew it, the mare and I, pounding the moonlit track.
As if she knew I was trying to shake something off.
Someone.
Even the mare knew something was wrong in Presteigne, starting and throwing back her head as the town houses sprang up to either side.
Most of them with light inside, even the poorer homes on the edge of town, where you’d have expected the families to settle down for their first sleep.
I dismounted and led the mare slowly toward the marketplace, now abuzz with groups of people, who spoke in low voices. No piemen. No merriment. The town was aslant, its balance altered, the sheriff’s building in darkness, all the pitch-torches snuffed, while only the inns were ablaze with hard light and the jagged air of a pervading rage.
XXXVIII
Unholy Glamour
THEN I SAW men with lanterns, horses saddled. Men with swords strapped on and hard faces, some gathered in small groups, as if waiting for a leader.
I espied Roger Vaughan walking alone, seeming to be going nowhere. The white, fattened moon illumined the sweat which spiked his hair and smeared his face like melted tallow. He looked like a man newly claimed by the plague, trying to absorb the awful knowledge of it.
‘I’ve just ridden from Nant-y-groes,’ I said. ‘What’s—?’
Vaughan shook his head, blinking, kept on walking until I could position myself and the horse in front of him. He stopped by an abandoned stall, the smell of fruit about it, slippery skins underfoot.
I waved a hand at the crowd.
‘A hue and cry?’
‘You could very well say that, Dr Dee.’
A young man came shouldering betwixt us, sliding his sword in and out of its sheath, shouting back at someone.
‘Be dead before midnight, if I finds him, tell you that much, boy.’
‘Who’s he talking about?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘If I knew—’
‘The one-eyed man,’ Vaughan said.
‘Gethin? Hell.’ I took a step back. ‘He’s escaped?’
‘You could say that, too.’
‘What about all the guards?’
His smile was crooked.
‘Dr Dee, the damn jury freed him. Under the explicit guidance of Sir Christopher Legge. The jury was as good as ordered to acquit him of all charges, and that’s what they did.’
A moment of waxen silence, like when an ear pops. The night took on a strange, spherical quality, as if I’d stepped out of it like a bubble.
‘Forgive me. The judge was sent from London with the specific purpose of convicting Gethin.’
‘That did seem to be the plan.’
‘Where is he? Where’s Legge?’
‘Gone. Ridden out within minutes of the verdict, with a small guard and no carts to delay them. Before the local people could storm the court.’
‘Jesu, Vaughan…’
‘Don’t try to make sense of it, Dr Dee. There en’t none.’
‘Where’s Dud— Where’s Roberts?’
‘Wouldn’t know. He was with me in earlier in court.’