The Heresy of Dr Dee by Phil Rickman Read Free Book Online Page B

side.
    The house, Nant-y-groes, is now the home of Stephen Price who, until recently, was Member of Parliament for this area, thus spending much time in London. More than was necessary, if truth be
known, for Master Price was much taken with the excitement of London life and, on his increasingly infrequent returns home, would tend to find the place of his birth rather dull and – for the
first time – strange.
    Now he’s home for good. Fighting the drabness of his life with ambitious plans for his farm, but finding that life at Pilleth soon brings out the negative aspects of his essentially
choleric temperament.
    He’s dismayed, for example, when the village men won’t help him build his new barn. He has – intentionally, perhaps – forgotten how, below Brynglas, even the most
commonplace activity is oft-times governed by custom and ritual.
    ‘I
can’t
,’ he says, when Pedr Morgan, the shepherd, tentatively offers him advice. ‘I’m supposed to be— I
am
the
squire
.’ He twists
away. ‘Anyway, the boy’s the lowest kind of idiot. I can hardly be seen to consult an idiot before initiating something as fundamental as building a barn.’
    Master Price likes to use some of the longer words he picked up in Parliament. This will not last.
    Pedr Morgan shrugs his scrawny shoulders, no doubt wishing he were somewhere else – this is common on Brynglas at twilight.
    ‘It’s just what he does,’ Morgan says, uncomfortable. ‘You knows how it is.’
    ‘I know how it
was
,’ Master Price says with resignation. ‘Well, my thanks to you, Morgan, but I’ll have men brought in from Off. Local boys don’t want my
money, that’s their choice, ennit?’
    Pedr Morgan nods. He won’t press the matter and won’t be telling anybody what Master Price has said about Siôn Ceddol. Has no wish to stir up resentment against his master,
but, hell, it must be some Godless place, that London. Sodom and Gomorrah and London, that’s how the new rector puts it. The rector’s this bone-faced Bible-man, and he doesn’t
like Siôn Ceddol either, and that’s not good
at all
… for the rigid attitudes of a bone-faced Bible man will never bend.
    Stephen Price stamps irritably away, and Pedr Morgan, thin and tired, most of his hair gone before its time, looks down to where his wife is waiting by the bridge with their three young
children. She won’t follow him up the slope of Brynglas at close of day, any more than she’ll pass the earthen grave of the old dead. Even the sheep flee this hill before sunset.
    And Price
knows
all that, at the bottom of him. But he’s been away too many times. He’s seen the shining towers of the future, and the future looks not like Pilleth. None of
the fine towns he’s seen on his travels has risen out of old fear and clinging superstition. This can lead only to a mortal decay – the decay that Pilleth wears like a rancid old coat
which no one must tear from its body lest the body itself falls away into rotten strips.
    Pedr Morgan raises a hand to tell his wife he’s coming down, then turns briefly towards the church of St Mary, set into the hill halfway up, and crosses himself as he always does.
    Except when the rector’s there.

    I suppose I too was inclined to be dismissive and superior when my father spoke of his birthplace, putting on the accents which, he would say, might vary from country English to
country Welsh within a mile.
    For I was younger then and deep into my studies of Mathematics and Greek and the works of Euclid and Plato. Convinced that all knowledge and wisdom came from the Classical world, long gone.
Unaware of the rivers of the divine and the demonic which rush invisibly through and around places like Pilleth.
    And I suppose my tad’s fond memories of the border were shaped around the knowledge that he was unlikely ever to be going back.

    A month has passed. Stephen Price has new cattle in the lower field, the first frosts cannot be far off. Yet only