He tilted his hat over his eyes, for the moon was become oppressively bright.
‘Some of the company I kept in my former life, John, was, ah…’
‘You need not explain,’ I said.
‘Kind of you.’
‘Get to the point.’
‘The point is that there is no such thing as a free pardon.’
‘You mean you once thought there was?’
‘I was therefore quietly approached for intelligence about our friends in Plant Mat.’
‘Who made the approach?’
‘I won’t answer that, and it matters not. Suffice to say that some of your masters in London have kin this side of the border. Let’s say I was approached by a friend, who has… other friends.’
‘Sir William Cecil has family in Wales.’
‘Does he?’
‘You’re now a spy for Cecil?’
‘How would I know that?’
He wouldn’t. I’d thought of Cecil several times on the way here, my mind more alert in the open air, under stars. Thoughts turning, inevitably, to the content of the letter from Amy Dudley’s London dressmaker. It was said there had been a number of meetings over the past few months between Cecil and the Spanish ambassador, la Quadra. Who, if they had but one aim in common, it would be to keep the Queen and Dudley out of wedlock.
But, dear God… to have Amy murdered lest she suffered from some fatal malady or was of a mind to take her own life?
And why, in God’s name, would Cecil want to know about Plant Mat? I stared up into the night for enlightenment. Compared with the twisting mesh of London politics, the formation of the stars seemed constant and reassuringly familiar.
‘And were you able,’ I asked, ‘to supply the intelligence?’
Thomas Jones blew breath through his teeth.
‘Why does every bastard think that if you have a history of thieving you’re part of some hidden body of neckweed-contenders, all known to the others? Even I wouldn’t have dealings with Plant Mat.’
‘So you had nothing to tell them?’
‘On the contrary, boy, I had a great to deal to tell them. Particularly about Gwilym Davies, who likes to call himself Prys Gethin. Who also calls himself a gentleman farmer and collects land with the alacrity of a Norman baron after the conquest. Well… buying some of it, of course, but where’s the money come from? But I’ll get to him. Plant Mat, yes… oh, how the romantic legends are formed around them. Like graveyard mist, boy.’
‘Do Plant Mat even exist, now? Legge’s verdict might suggest not.’
‘Indeed they exist. And profess themselves driven by love of their country. Don’t fool yourself, boy, there’s a good deal of hatred in Wales for the English. And for so-called Welsh towns like Presteigne, where the old language is let rot by English pouring in, looking to increase their ill-grown wealth.’
‘Hatred? Despite the Tudor line? Jesu, Jones, we’re all of us ruled by Welshmen, now.’
‘Ach!’ He waved a hand as if to swat a fly. ‘What a prime piece of English rookery that is. Even though most of us are content to float with it. Arthurian descent? Bollocks. The truth is that Wales is yet a Catholic country, and as long as little Bess permits Catholic worship, she’ll get no shit from this side of the border.’
‘Except from Plant Mat?’
‘All right, let me tell you.’
The original Plant Mat, he said, were the three children, two sons and a daughter, of an innkeeper in his own home town of Tregaron. The family had become famous robbers, gathering others to them and inhabiting a cave, with an entrance so narrow that only one man at a time might pass through. A cave in a place laden with legend, which people kept away from because it was said the devil himself climbed those rocks.
‘The cave was their… what’s the word in English… temple? Certainly of some almost ritual significance. They were inside the land, see… in the heart of Wales. I don’t know what they did in there, maybe just got drunk. But the legend of that cave grew – that they drew their power from the land around them. Thus, out of the past. Out of their heritage.’
They’d use a glove to identify themselves, passed one to another. Always a sense of ritual, a mystery which they encouraged. For years they’d been simply robbers, even if some victims had lost their lives as well as their goods. But when it came to the planned murder of a judge at Rhayader…
‘All wrongdoers in the heart of Wales were pleased to have the assize court in Rhayader, see – where they had control, justices in their pockets and no jury that did not include a few of their own. Maybe they thought that if they killed an English judge the judiciary would get the message and leave them alone, I don’t know. Madness.’
‘And they paid the price.’
‘Martyrs. The sons telling glorious tales of their dead fathers and all they’d done for Wales. And the name Plant Mat was anybody’s now – any band of brigands who wanted to wear it like a black cloak. A cloak with all the weight of heritage. See?’
‘They yet live in a cave?’
‘Pah! Who lives in a cave? They live in good houses – some with big halls and spare chambers and a bwddyn or two in the grounds for the servants – like the estate of our friend Gwilym Davies. Or Prys Gethin.’
‘He claimed in court,’ I said, ‘that the name was pressed upon him by the Sheriff of Radnorshire.’
‘Which your English judge never questioned. Curious, that.’
The road was passing through what had been a long wood, sporadic trees on either side and behind them, thickets, the stumps of felled oak and heaps of discarded twiggery all caged in brambles.
I stopped walking.
‘What’s this about? Help me. Why are you telling me this now, and how does it relate to Dudley?’
Thomas Jones took off his hat.
‘Don’t think me self-righteous. I stole. I stole as a boy because my friends stole, and I stole as a man because I found I was good at it… and if I spread some of the proceeds among the needy it didn’t seem so bad to be saving some aside to spend on books. To acquire an education. But don’t think me self-righteous. I’ll do my years in purgatory, resigned to it, boy. But Prys…’
He stood in a shaft of moonlight betwixt the trees. He yet wore the russet doublet with the gold thread.
‘Prys,’ he said, ‘will one day be in the deepest chamber of hell. Though not, it seems, soon enough.’
XLIV
Monstrous Constellations
‘THEY SAY HE once killed a man just to rape his wife.’
Thomas Jones was sitting amidst the fungus on a tree stump, legs apart, bunched hands swinging between his knees.
‘Not his first rape. Nor, needless to say, his first killing.’
I did not ask how the man known as Prys Gethin had remained alive and free. This is Wales, boy.
‘Then he choked the life out of the wife.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, why not? Killing and rape are as natural to him as taking a piss. Would have been a soldier, if there was a Welsh army. Like the man he believes possesses him.’
‘Possesses?’
‘It’s just a word, John. I only met him once, see. Some years ago, in an alehouse, both of us well into our cups. I recall that he invited me to join him in his work.’
‘Plant Mat?’
‘I suppose. Who knows where I’d be today if I hadn’t, at that moment, been compelled to go outside and throw up my supper? Never went back. Never saw him again.’
‘Then how,’ I asked, ‘do you know all this?’
‘Common knowledge where I come from, boy. Some of it, anyway. No one’ll touch him, see. He knows too much and he’s done too many favours. This is not London. Middle Wales is a big village, full of mountains and rivers and lakes and waterfalls and miles of emptiness, around which the legends echo. Vast whispers in the wind.’