Jane stood up. Merrily sat down.
As well as the ancient Garway church itself with its (semi) detached thirteenth-century tower, there is a huge dovecote on private property on the adjoining farm …
Its doveholes number a worrying 666.
‘Oh.’
‘When are you going back?’ Jane said. ‘And can I come?’
When she went upstairs to change into jeans and sweatshirt, Merrily took the mobile with her and called Felix again from the bedroom.
Unsure, now, of how best to approach this. It was all subtly turning around, M. R. James himself becoming a player, seventy or so years after his death.
As for the dovecote … if it had been there for the best part of eight centuries, it was a bit late now to start worrying about the implications of 666 dove-chambers.
‘
The person you are calling is not available. If you would like to leave a message …
’
‘Felix, it’s Merrily. Could you or Fuchsia please call me. I need to talk about the …’ She hesitated. ‘The face of crumpled linen.’
Crumpling her cassock for the wash basket, she put on jeans and the Gomer Parry sweatshirt. The alarm clock said one-forty. Meditation was seven-thirty. She swallowed two paracetamol in the bathroom, came back downstairs to find Jane still hanging around in their chilly kitchen.
‘Not got a meeting with, erm …
Coops
today?’
Jane shook her head. She looked less happy, her face a little flushed.
There were crossroads in her life.
‘Do
you
want to drive, then?’ Merrily said.
This is wild frontier country with
an aura of barbarians roaming over
the adjacent border …
Simon Jenkins, on Garway
England’s Thousand Best Churches
W
HAT JANE KNEW
about the Templars came, of course, out of paganism.
Those difficult months when she’d been a teenage goddess-worshipper, slipping out into the vicarage garden at night to make her devotions to the Lady Moon. Partly a rebellion thing – OK, understandable in an intelligent, imaginative kid who’d been dragged away to the unknown village where her mother had become a low-paid, low-level employee of the boring, set-in-its-ways, male-dominated, hierarchical Church of England.
Jane’s paganism: partly about giving Christianity a good kicking.
Merrily watched her driving, back straight, hands textbook on the wheel, eyes unblinking. Remembering the all-time-low, a couple of years ago, with the heat of the old Aga at her back, a white-faced Jane rigid in the kitchen doorway, and their relationship trampled into the flagstones.
Nobody gives a shit for your Church. Your congregations are like laughable. In twenty years you’ll be preaching to each other. You don’t matter any more, you haven’t mattered for years. I’m embarrassed to tell anybody what you do
.
The rage had evaporated, tensions long since eased, but Jane’s pagan instincts remained – tamer now, certainly, but still feeding something inside her that was hungry for experience; up in her attic apartment she was still reading books about old gods.
‘Like, for centuries it’s been accepted that the Templars were the guardians of arcane secrets – including the Holy Grail. I mean, who better? They were spiritual warriors. They put their lives on the line to protect sacred truths. They were like … the SAS with soul?’
‘Who says the SAS have no soul?’
‘Unlike the Templars, however, they’re not known for their monastic celibacy,’ Jane said.
They’d driven in from the east, less of a back door to Garway and better roads for Jane, who was hoping to take her driving test before Christmas. The sun was low and intense, a searchlight spraying the yellowing leaves on the turning trees. When you weren’t driving, you got a more spectacular overview … or underview, maybe; all you could see of Garway Hill itself was the top of the radio mast on its summit.
Changing down for a sudden incline, Jane let the clutch slip.
‘Sorry …’
‘It’s OK. Take your time.’
Jane, red-faced, pulled the car out of its shudder, the Volvo wheezing and protesting like an old dog being dragged out for a walk by a child who didn’t understand.
‘So if
The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail
concept is that the Grail is actually the suppressed feminine principle as, like,
enshrined
by Mary Magdalene, who was Jesus Christ’s other half … and don’t look at me like that, Mum.’
‘You don’t know
how
I’m looking at you, your eyes are firmly on the road.’
‘I can feel the self-righteous hostility.’
‘It’s not self-righteous and it’s not hostility. It’s just that all that’s been discredited. Even the authors are now saying they were just testing a theory.’
‘It doesn’t change the fact that Mary Magdalene, whether or not she was Mrs Christ, represents the goddess figure which male-dominated Christianity suppressed.’
Jane’s debating skills had become formidable, but how many times had they been here?
‘Look … I accept that there may be a hidden feminine principle. What I don’t accept is Jesus and Mary Magdalene being an item, starting a bloodline. For which, when you look into it, there’s no real evidence at all.’
‘Aw, Mum, why do you have to deny the poor guy a sex life?’
‘There you go.
The guy
. If he was just a guy, just another prophet who didn’t rise again, didn’t ascend into heaven … if you want to deny his
divinity
…’
‘I don’t want to deny anybody’s divinity, I’m into divinity big time. But I don’t see why women shouldn’t have a share of it, whether it’s Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary.’
‘We won’t argue now,’ Merrily said. ‘Take this bit slowly.’
Maybe she ought to be driving instead. The lanes were proving unpredictable, and there were more of them than she’d figured. More to Garway, too, than you imagined; flushed by the low sun, it seemed like a remote and separate realm. Like Cornwall was to England. Maybe the Duchy had recognized that aspect.
Jane glanced at a signpost which seemed to have been twisted round, so that
Garway
was pointing into a field.
‘So Garway and Garway Hill are like separated, right?’
‘Looks like it. I thought the church and a few cottages nearby were the centre of the community, but apparently not. You get these separate clusters … kind of disorienting.’
After half a mile or so, the landscape broadened out and they were into a random scatter of modern housing and an open stretch of common with a children’s play area. Across the lane from the common was a pub of whitewashed stone with a swinging sign: a full moon in a deepening twilight sky.
THE GARWAY MOON.
‘Cool sign,’ Jane said. ‘Artistic. Kind of pagan.’
‘Why does the moon always have to be pagan?’
‘You tell me. Does the Bible have much to say about it?’ Jane relaxed into the driver’s seat. ‘This is very much my kind of place, Mum. It’s like frontier country. On the edge.’
‘It
is
frontier country. Those hills are Wales.’
‘I actually meant
frontier
in the deeper sense. The Knights Templar move in, monks with horses and swords, and they stamp their presence on the whole area. Infuse it with mystery. I mean like,
why out here?
Unless … maybe it was considered a really good, obscure place to conceal secrets, practise arcane … practices.’
‘Or they were just given the land. Maybe no better reason than that.’
‘There’s always a better reason,’ Jane said.
‘For you, flower, there always has to be.’
‘Don’t call me “flower”. And don’t tell me you’re not curious, too.’
‘I can be curious without having to subscribe to the whole fashionable Gnosticism thing.’
Jane slowed, as the road sloped past a modern-ish primary school on one side and a run-down village hall on the other.
‘I don’t see what’s so wrong with Gnosticism. It’s just saying that faith is not enough. The Gnostics wanted to
know
. They wanted direct experience of the reality of … something out there. God. Whatever. I don’t see why you have a problem with that.’
‘Anyway …’ Not now, huh? Too weighty. ‘… I’d’ve thought you’d lived in the sticks long enough to know it’s absolutely the
worst
place to keep a secret.’
‘Yeah,
now
. But in medieval times, when almost nobody could read.’
‘Including the Templars. Most of the Knights Templar seem to have been illiterate.’
‘Mum, they were international bankers! People could stash money at one preceptory and withdraw from another.’
‘Since when did banking demand literacy?’
‘OK, then, maybe this was just where they came to carry on their own form of Gnostic worship, which the straight Church would see as heresy.’ Jane pulled the Volvo over to the grass verge to let a tractor get past. ‘Was that all right?’
‘Except you should’ve signalled first, to let him know what you were doing. And why are we going up here?’
Inexplicably, Jane had taken an uphill right.
‘Sorry. I thought …’
‘I think the church was straight on down the hill. Never mind, carry on.’
It didn’t matter. Merrily suddenly wanted to hug Jane. If the worst you had to deal with was theological debate …
‘You OK, Mum?’
‘Mmm.’
She felt the pressure of tears, deciding that when Jane wasn’t around she was going to ring Eirion on the quiet, find out what had gone wrong between them. Just wanting the kid to be happy.
‘This sort of location is actually more suited to the Cistercians,’ Jane said. ‘They liked to be
way
out on their own. But, see, that fits, too, because the Knights Templar were connected with the Cistercians. Through Bernard of Clairvaux? The top Cistercian fixer, smartest operator in the medieval Catholic Church?’
‘I know who you mean. I’m just impressed at the extent of your knowledge.’
‘It’s in the medieval history syllabus – just. Our history guy, Robbie Williams, it’s his period. So what happened, Bernard cleared up the problem the Templars had about being devout Christians and also having to kill people on a regular basis. Simple solution: he ruled that it was OK to kill non-Christians.’
‘Especially Muslims,’ Merrily said. ‘A medieval interpretation, which now seems to operate in reverse. What’s your point?’
‘Comes back to paganism again. Of all the medieval monastic orders, the Cistercians were the ones who most reflected pre-Christian religion. The old ways.’
‘
Some
sources might say that, but—’
‘Come on – natural successors to the Druids? Sheep farmers who liked relative isolation and were into ancient sites and earth-forces and sacred springs?’
‘Natural running water was very much prized in the days before taps,’ Merrily said. ‘And, sure, maybe they dowsed for it. That doesn’t mean—’
‘Garway Church has a holy spring, doesn’t it?’
‘It does. And if you can find somewhere to turn this car around we’ll go back and check it out. No, not there. Jane, keep your eyes on the—’
‘Did you
see
that sign?’ Jane’s head swivelling. ‘On the house?’
‘Mmm. I’m afraid I did.’
They’d passed a grey stone corner house which might once have been a pub and still had a big yellow sign on the side.
THE SUN
. A mystical golden sun, with a smug-looking, curled-lipped face and waving
tendrils of radiance; below it were sunflowers and a naked figure on a horse. Merrily also noticed that the farmhouse almost opposite had a name plate:
The Rising Sun
.
‘It’s just an old pub sign, Jane, that’s all.’
‘Mum, it was like a giant tarot card. The Sun? And the Moon? This place had two pubs called The Sun and The Moon? That says
nothing
to you?’
‘I’m … reserving my opinion.’
‘I think I was probably guided to turn up this road.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘As above, so below,’ Jane said.
The holy well was at the bottom of the churchyard. Like most holy wells, it was disappointing. A trickle under the wall. Ribbons on a nearby bush, which could be down to either visiting pagans or local kids.
Jane crouched down, unzipping her white hoodie, holding cupped hands underneath the water. Merrily was reminded uncomfortably of the author Winnie Sparke, who had hung around the wells in Malvern, and what had happened to her.
‘Jane, you know how much I really hate doing the mother-hen bit, but that water …’
Jane looked into her cupped hands but didn’t drink the water. She smiled and dabbed some on her cheeks. Beyond the body of the church, the vertically-slit-eyed tower gazed down with what Merrily took to be a kind of benign cynicism.
‘If we go back to the church, we can see the outline of the original circular nave. Templar trade mark. Designed in honour of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem?’
‘On the other hand …’ Jane stood up and walked off to the edge of the churchyard ‘… if we go along here, we should be able to see the dovecote designed to commemorate the Beast 666.’
‘It’s on private land. We’d need to ask for permission.’
‘Not just to
see
it.’
Jane – why else was she here? – was already walking across a marshy-looking field towards the fringe of a farm with barns, storage tanks, a
galvanized shed and some kind of stone silo. Merrily, wrong shoes, as usual –
bugger
– stepping uncertainly across a boggy bit, following a shallow stream, while slowly realizing that the stone silo on the edge of the farmyard clutter was probably what they were looking for.
She stopped and confronted it: a squat round tower, like a sawn-off, roofless hop-kiln. The fading sun balanced on its rim, Jane shading her eyes.
‘Doesn’t look very evil from here,’ Merrily said.
‘Why should it be evil?’ Jane turning in annoyance. ‘That’s just Christian propaganda. Anyway, recent translations of the Book of
Rev
from the ancient Greek suggest it might actually be six
one
six.’