by Brian Hodge
“Look on the bright side,” Kate told him. “It does wonders for your complexion. No sun? Might as well not even have packed your moisturizers. You’ll go home looking like a milkmaid.”
There. That made him happy. She was looking pretty peaches and cream herself, while the damp had fluffed her hair, not quite shoulder length, just enough to make her want to grow it again, renew the wild black mass it used to be before she got practical.
But shoot Alain in the same frame as some of the millennium-old carvings strewn about the region, and the contrasts between skin and stone would never be any more pronounced. Along with the other big difference: Some of those graven faces actually smiled, without fear of giving themselves wrinkles.
Between the two, she was already anticipating which would be better company the next few days.
The thing about England was, you could scarcely throw a mossy stone without hitting something to remind you of how vastly old the place was. Back home, Kate Haskins had snapped her cameras across a country that had been given birth by this one, but had lost its mother’s stately sense of time. A century just didn’t mean as much to one as it did the other.
Kate’s grandmother had cherished the antiquity of her birth country, and the history, myths, and legends left behind. Normans, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Romans, Celts … from Bronze Age on, each had left its imprint on both land and psyche. The island absorbed them all, wasting nothing.
The Church of St. John the Baptist was just such a reservoir of essence. Buildings from the Middle Ages could today be found in total ruin or as well-preserved as last week’s corpse, and here stood one of the more fortunate. Stood as paradox — both monument to time, and entirely divorced from it.
West of the motorway, it was shielded from passing sight by hills, and by sufficient oaks and ash to retain just enough of the fourteenth century to send most people seeking a warm hearth the moment the sun began to blend into the Welsh border.
It had been her gran who’d discovered it to be something of a legacy from the earliest known roots of their family.
St. John the Baptist came from the second phase of English Gothic architecture known as Decorated, while still showing clear Norman roots, from the semi-circular arches of its walls, to the square bell-tower whose parapet looked better suited to archers than priests. The leaded glass of the rose window would catch the morning sun, when it shone at all. Rain or shine, though, the stone walls emitted an earthier feel. Once brownish-gray, they were now mottled green with lichen, as though having come to peaceful co-existence with the land on which they stood — a part of it, rather than its conqueror.
“So this is it?” Alain said. “This is all there is to it?”
“This may surprise you, but there’s also an inside.”
They were still in the car, parked. Alain was starting early today. If he was too bored, their bed-and-breakfast down in Craven Arms wasn’t out of hiking distance. Two mirrors, too; those would keep him entertained awhile.
“Well, the way you were talking, I was expecting, like, Notre Dame.” He shrugged. “Color me underwhelmed.”
“If we were at Notre Dame, you’d be underwhelmed because it wasn’t the Taj Mahal. Anyway, what can your family lay claim to creating?”
He turned toward her with lifted eyebrows and an upturning of the corners of his mouth that passed for a smile without actually creasing anything. “Well … me.”
“See if you’re still standing in six hundred years,” she said. “Then we’ll talk.”
They began circling the outside of the church. The closer she got, the greater the hand-me-down pride in one remote ancestor and his hammers and chisels.
The place was a well-kept wonder, a menagerie of impossible life seeming to burst from inert stone. The downspout carvings themselves were only the most obvious, jutting from the roofline as though in that instant before springing free. Here, a lion-faced dragon with fangs bared. There, a gigantic snake with its coils bunched against the eaves, mouth yawning wide. Next, a pensive creature with an apelike face and feathered wings, perhaps stymied by its own contradictions.
“Hey, look at this!” Glancing at each once and getting it over with, Alain was ahead of her, around the southwest corner. When she caught up to him, he pointed with delight.
The figure overhead was entirely human, enviably limber. Its feet and face were flush with the stone, while it bent double, thrusting a naked rump toward Wales. Undeniably male — a plump scrotum bulged down between its legs — his hands reached back to grip both buttocks and wrench them wide apart. On rainy days … well, no imagination needed.
“There’s a rumor going around that’s how Fabio got his big break,” Alain said. “I might’ve been the one who started it, too. I can’t remember.”
She stared without comment. This was the first one that she suddenly remembered, the first thread between now and nearly three decades ago. Her parents had brought her on vacation — seven, eight years old, had she been? — and it made sense that nudity would’ve made the biggest impression. At that age, fanciful beasts were one thing, but genitalia quite another. Each inspired its own terror, curiosity, and awe; but for staying power it was no contest.
Kate remembered her mother’s hand on the back of her head, trying to redirect her attention. More than once. Inside and out, icons of fertility and sexuality abounded here, to the chagrin of parents of precocious children: a man sporting ram’s horns and a proud erection; a hag stretching open her oversized vagina. And every few minutes, Mom’s hand and an exclamation of wonder at some more benign thing invariably in the opposite direction. Must’ve thought she was being subtle about it, as subtle as the carvings weren’t, but the real message had been quite clear.
Their circuit brought them back around to the front, where serpents twined up the columns on either side of the wooden double-doors. Every overlapping scale was distinct, while together the serpents made a weave of Celtic knotwork too intricate for her eye to unravel. Each column was crowned with a fearsome head whose toothy mouth chomped down over its top with grim relish.
The bas-relief arch above the doorway showed a row of bearded Celtic heads, smooth-faced and oval-eyed. Below them, a row of ravens whose beaks pecked and tore at less placid faces. And below those, the centerpiece: a huge, robust face grinning defiantly from out of a nest of oak leaves. Between face and hair and leaf there was no distinction. All were one and the same.
“The Green Man,” Kate murmured.
Alain blinked up at him. “You mean one of these ugly things really has a name?”
“He’s a kind of forest spirit. Growth, regeneration, renewal, like that,” she said. “It’s all coming back now. My gran used to tell me about some of this ancient imagery. And they’re not ugly.”
“Between me or him, now, really: Whose tongue would you rather suck on?”
“You never know. Maybe I wouldn’t mind a mouthful of sap.”
“I think you may be as kinked as your—” Alain rolled his eyes up at the carvings “—whatever he was to you.”
“Grandfather, a few dozen times removed. And he had a name. Geoffrey Blackburn.”
And here he’d stood. Shaped that stone, breathed life into it as surely as those he’d chiseled it for believed God had breathed life into Adam. She wished she could see with gargoyles’ eyes, back through time, see him as these sculptures would’ve seen the face of their maker. What Geoffrey had looked like, if after six-and-a-half centuries there was still some family resemblance.
Had he used himself as a model? Left his face slyly wrought somewhere in these stone tapestries? You’d think so, that there’d have to be enough ego to strive for whatever immortality it could. Maybe right above these doors, in the Green Man himself.
Sacred? This place was that, all right. But it was becoming harder and harder to think of it as a site that would’ve had any connection with Rome.
Certainly Rome — as well as the Anglicans — had nothing to do with it now. The C
hurch of St. John the Baptist was time’s relic, administered by English Heritage. That they charged her a fee to get past the door seemed a minor slight; but how would they know?
Inside, more of everything … more faces, more beasts, more fabulous hybrids. If there’d ever been so much as one crucifix here, it had been carried away, rather than anchored in rock.
Besides the woman posted at the door, there were only three others here. The man she took for the curator was serving as guide to a pair of elderly women who clutched ghastly handbags and hung on his every word.
“Oh yes, quite the risqué rogue, was our Geoffrey,” he was saying. “Didn’t waste many opportunities to raise an eyebrow.”
“Filthy, just dreadfully filthy,” one of the ladies said. “I can scarcely bring myself to even look at some of them.”
“You must put yourself in the medieval mind.” The curator was all tweeds and patience. “Had a belief, they did, that the forces of darkness and evil were all around, but one good look beneath a pair of dropped knickers was enough to send them running.”
“Why, good lord. Whatever for?” said the other woman. “No. Don’t tell me. I don’t wish to know.”
“Shame, maybe,” Alain muttered to Kate, but by some prank of acoustics the other three heard him plainly as well. An audience was irresistible, so he elaborated: “I mean, you always think of demons as being well-hung, don’t you? But what if they’re not? What if that’s part of their punishment?”
They simply stared, all three, with their mortified British faces. One of the women lingered on Kate’s photographer’s vest and its bulging pockets as though they must’ve held weapons.
Don’t mind us, she wanted to tell them. Just the barbarians from America.
“No?” Alain said to their silence. “Just a thought.”
“First one today?” Kate whispered through clenched teeth.
So much for a genteel homecoming.
After she’d tried her best to salvage first impressions, the curator, Nigel Crenshaw, began to thaw. The old women wasted no time in retreating, trailing wisps of lavender in their wake, but Crenshaw seemed to study her and Alain as if they were as exotic as anything chipped out of limestone here.
“A Pulitzer, how very interesting,” Crenshaw said. “Yes, I remember that photo quite well. Not often that one sees so much historical nastiness summed up so … succinctly.”
Nastiness. Typical British understatement. Her famous photo had been taken during a protest siege laid to government land in South Dakota’s Black Hills by militants who’d broken away from the American Indian Movement. She’d been clicking away on one of their leaders, on an observation deck, the instant he’d been shot by a sniper with the U.S. Marshals Service. By a fluke of perspective, a streamer of the man’s blood looked as though it might spatter the four gargantuan witnesses behind him: the sixty-foot granite heads of Mt. Rushmore.
Everyone remembered that photo. She’d met a few who hated her for it, but only in her own country. Crenshaw wasn’t one of them.
He was, in fact, delighted by the documentation showing her to be a lineal descendant of Geoffrey Blackburn. Her grandmother had spent a quarter-century tracing the family tree to learn this, finding Blackburn and his works quite the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Maybe it would pass, but Kate had been bitten by the notion that there might be a photo book in him. If Hildegard von Bingen could become fashionable, why not Geoffrey Blackburn?
On the spot, Crenshaw began bursting with fact, hearsay, and legend — his, the zeal of a man who’d devoted his life to something without having found nearly enough ears to share it with.
“You know what they called him, don’t you? ‘The Michelangelo of the Gargoyles’?”
She’d heard that much, at least.
“Predated Michelangelo by a century, so not in Geoffrey’s time, of course. But what a testament to the man’s genius, that that’s the artistic standard future generations measured him by. Some of the work he did, why, stand it next to ‘David,’ I say.”
“Wouldn’t you have to break it loose of the church first?”
Crenshaw sighed. “Thereby hangs the pity.”
The makers of most ecclesiastical sculpture had labored in anonymity, he told her, but even in his own lifetime Blackburn had enjoyed renown, although some would’ve said infamy was the better word. Wherever he employed his craft, there soon followed claims of people seeing movement in his creations.
“Not just the common rabble, either,” Crenshaw said. “Plenty of priests, too. Bishops, cardinals. Even a pope or two. People have been claiming it for centuries. Still do, but it wouldn’t be force of suggestion. I daresay most have never even heard of Geoffrey Blackburn or his reputation.”
“And this followed him everywhere he worked?” she asked.
“More or less. Although — and mind, I’ve never undertaken a formal study — it would seem that the later in Geoffrey’s life he worked on a church, the more instances you have of people claiming to see movement in the carvings he did there. Makes sense, though. He continually refines his skills, his works appear progressively more lifelike.”
“And the Church of St. John the Baptist is…?” Kate said. “My grandmother told us…”
Crenshaw nodded proudly. “The last and greatest jewel in our Geoffrey’s formidable crown.”
“So most of those reported movements, they’ve come from here, then,” she said. “Have you ever…?”
“Oh heavens no. Perhaps I stare at them too directly for them to ever get the better of me.”
He filled in the sketchy background. Blackburn had supposedly apprenticed under the master sculptor hired for the Octagon at Ely Cathedral, built to replace a tower that had collapsed in 1322.
“Surviving records indicate he worked on the roof bosses.” Crenshaw pointed to a face leering from a junction of two ceiling beams. “Same thing, only in stone, and much higher. Where the ribs of the vaults meet. Gossip had it that his master was more than a bit consumed with jealousy by the end of his apprenticeship.”
After Ely, he’d worked on other churches, abbeys, and priories in East Anglia, and within a decade his reputation had taken him even to France, to supervise the sculpture workshop at the cathedral nearing completion in Chutreaux.
It was this aspect of construction that gave her pause. That Geoffrey had been the master sculptor of record someplace — or one of many, on a two-century project like Chutreaux — didn’t mean any particular piece had come from his chisel. In fact, most couldn’t have. A few, maybe, but the rest only done under his tutelage.
“When comparing, one can tell,” said Crenshaw. “I’ve been to Chutreaux. Been to most of the others. And everywhere, it’s two different classes of work: Geoffrey’s. And everyone else’s.”
“But here, though. My gran said he—”
“Did very nearly the whole thing. Yes. You’ll find the odd bit here and there that doesn’t seem up to his standards, so he must’ve had apprentices from time to time. But overall? If you see it, chances are he did it. Evidently devoted the last two decades of his life to just this one building.”
“Wouldn’t that have been a little atypical?”
“Too right. Perhaps a bit mad, considering the ah, well … subject matter.”
“Are there any records saying why?”
“Nothing ever found from the time, no. References in a couple of late-sixteenth century histories, now, yes, claiming all sorts of deviltry had been got up to here, but one must consider intent. They’d just had the Reformation, so such accounts do tend to smack of appalled Puritans tarnishing the repute of Catholic leftovers.” He broke with an unexpectedly mirthful smile. “Rather like what those two lavender-scented lovelies will be telling whomever will listen about your gentleman friend.”
Alain. She’d forgotten about him, and glanced around until Crenshaw pointed him out, dozing on a seat while slumped against the outer wall of one of the congregational stalls.
“Except,” Kate went on, “I don’t see anything here that’s patently Catholic.”
“Precisely why the Calvinists and their ilk were convinced that Catholics were idolaters, if not outright devil-worshippers. Quite the inharmonious—”
Abruptly, Crenshaw cut himself off in mid-sentence, glaring across the church at something behind her. Kate’s first thought was that Alain had roused, and what was he desecrating?
“You there!” Crenshaw shouted. “Get out of here! Right now!”
She turned. Not Alain — he was blinking drowsily at the ruckus. Instead, it was somebody past him, lingering beside one of the carved pillars. Kate couldn’t see him well. He was backlit by the light coming in through a lancet window.
“Out of here this minute or I’ll have the police down, this is the last time, do you hear me?”
He was a sturdy sort, she could tell that much, with broad, heavy shoulders, and hair that in silhouette appeared shaggy and unkempt. When he moved out of the direct light, she saw that he wore a topcoat that might’ve once been pricey, but had more likely been salvaged from a wealthier man’s trash, and beneath it, a dark cableknit sweater, tattered here, unraveling there. His beard hadn’t fully grown in, a few weeks’ worth. Age? Hard to determine. Old enough to have earned a few lines. More than she had.
“He’s only annoyed he didn’t collect his fee.” It took Kate a moment to realize the man was addressing her. He then turned his amusement on Crenshaw. “Oh, I have it. All you need do is come take it from me. Fair enough, innit?”
Crenshaw didn’t move, seething at the man, who held his own ground. Alain glanced back and forth between them as though having awakened in the middle of the wrong movie. Finally the man relented, but with an air of having once more proved a point he’d proven times before. He strolled toward the narthex and Crenshaw followed, marching a consistent dozen paces behind, until the man was out the door, leaving behind his own distinctive odor.
“Bloody vagabond,” Crenshaw said. “How it is he gets in here I’ll never know.”
“There aren’t any other entrances?”