by Alan Moore
He’s parked in sight of the twelfth-century parish church, its spire rising above the neighbouring chimneys and its stonework with an unevenly toasted look, although in somewhere Weston Favell’s size it would be near enough impossible to find a place from which you couldn’t see it, if he’s honest. Holdall slung across a shoulder that is hunched against the world’s anticipated brickbats, Studs is shortly pushing open a wrought-iron gate with a worse rasp than his own; mounting hewn steps onto the raised-up consecrated ground around the pretty chapel. There’s a faint breeze, but apart from that, he notes with some surprise, it’s an unusually idyllic afternoon. It ain’t his customary milieu, that’s for certain. Sunlight falls like syrup on the neatly tended grass and there can’t be a faulty neon sign for miles, much less a craps game.
Disappointingly, the church itself is closed and, more disheartening still, James Hervey’s final resting place is not among the smattering of headstones to be found in the building’s vicinity. Most of these unassuming markers, with their names and information almost lost to a few centuries of moss or weather, seem to be exclusively for Jacobean stiffs who hung up their plumed hats during the sixteen-hundreds and long before Hervey saw the light of day in 1714. Studs finds a bluish lozenge not much bigger than a boot-scrape, colonised by varicoloured lichens and apparently commemorating no one in particular, being instead a generalised memento mori. With a little scrutiny he works out that the disappearing characters once spelled out O REMEMBER/ PASSERS BY/ AS THOU ART/ SO WAS I ANNO/ 1656. Sure, buddy. Thanks for that. Give my regards to the black plague. These may or may not be the tombs that Hervey meditated when he was amongst, but it’s a safe bet they’re the ones that he saw every day when he was preacher here, perhaps contributing to his notoriously sunny disposition.
Having reached a dead end, Studs elects to play his visit like he meant it. Checking first to find out if the turf is damp he lowers himself gingerly onto the verge, lounging insouciantly at full length on his side with ankles crossed, propped on one elbow like a sensitive Edwardian bachelor while he hurriedly unzips his holdall and retrieves the Hervey printout from its depths. He may as well bone up on his elusive quarry while he’s here, even if the distinguished cleric’s actual bones aren’t anywhere around. Considering the scarcity of the surrounding monuments and slabs, he wonders if this churchyard might be one of those where graves, in short supply back in the day, were by no means a final resting place. There’d be a brief immersion in the soil, maybe a week or two before the flesh and stink were gone, and then the stripped-clean sticks would be dug up and scattered to make room for the next occupant, a bit like hospital beds on the NHS. He can recall a scene from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones where an altercation at a wedding sees the combatants throw decomposing skulls at one another, since these would indeed have been the handiest form of ammunition readily available in churchyards of the period. If Hervey suffered a short-stay interment of that nature there’d be nothing left of him today, the cranium that once contained all his conjectures on the afterlife long since used to concuss a bridesmaid. Lacking any physical remains or similar DNA evidence to process through a piece of high-tech CSI crime-solving apparatus, Studs resigns himself to reconstructing Hervey from the dozen or so printed sheets already in his grasp and cockling with the perspiration. Carefully removing almost rimless reading glasses from his jacket’s inside pocket, balancing them on the tomahawk blade of his nose, he sinks into the grey miasma of the text.
As he’d suspected, there’s more to this holy-roller Hervey character than meets the eye. Born to a preaching family at Hardingstone and in the shadow of the headless cross, the first King Edward’s monument to his dead Eleanor, James Hervey gets packed off to grammar school during 1721 when he’s aged seven. Studs thinks this unreasonably young when everybody he knows went there only after passing their Eleven-Plus, but he assumes that educative practice in Northampton was a different animal nearly three hundred years ago. Hell, education in the town had always been of an entirely separate species to that elsewhere in the country. Back there in the 1970s and 1980s the town’s children had been casually subjected to an educational experiment involving a three-tier system and the introduction of a ‘middle school’, attended for a few years in between the junior and senior establishments and therefore doubling the dislocation and disruption to which pupils in pursuit of learning were subjected. Unsurprisingly the scheme was a conspicuous dud and had been quietly dumped some years back, with a generation of Northampton school kids written off as no more than collateral damage. Still obscurely nagged by the “aged seven” business and the sense that there’s unanswered questions hanging over the prestigious boys’ school, Studs reads on.
A decade later, at the age of seventeen Hervey goes up to Oxford where he runs into John Wesley’s clique of proto-Methodists, a bunch of cold-eyed pious young punks known disparagingly to their fellow students as “the Holy Club”. Studs nods in weary recognition. That’s the way it is out on the mean streets of religion these days, decent kids forced into joining one gang or another, not because they want to but because they figure it improves their chance of spiritual survival. But then, once they’ve been sworn in, once they’ve kneecapped a Baptist as a part of their initiation, they find that it ain’t so easy getting out again. That’s how it goes with Hervey. For a long time there he’s Wesley’s top enforcer as the most successful writer in the Holy Club, but soon he’s hankering to set up his own racket. Rumours get around that he’s developing a soft spot for the evangelicals and that he calls himself a moderate Calvinist, which ain’t what Wesley wants to hear. There’s plainly an almighty shoot-out brewing, and when Hervey publishes three volumes of his Theron and Aspasio in 1755 it’s like he isn’t giving the great hymnist any choice except to take it to the street. Wesley denounces his former lieutenant’s work as antinomianism, an old-fashioned heresy which holds that everything is predetermined, and before a guy can say a paternoster the air’s full of theological hot lead. Hervey’s outgunned and takes one in the faith, is trying to return fire in Aspasio Vindicated when consumption finally decides he’s ready for his dirt-nap at the age of forty-five. John Wesley, who’s been piling on the pressure from the cover of his pulpit even when his target’s clearly dying, finally reads Hervey’s posthumously published refutation of his hatchet-job and in a wounded tone declares that Hervey has died “cursing his spiritual father”. Wesley makes sure that he gets the last word; puts a round into Hervey’s posterity. That’s Methodists, Studs muses. They’re methodical.
Stretched on the grass among the sparsely distributed headstones in the pale May radiance he realises he’s enjoying this, this day-pass from his city of ongoing dreadful night. It’s a surprise to find that sunlight isn’t always striped. Somewhere a blackbird sings like an interrogated felon and the temporarily non-noir detective turns the drift of his attention to the next of the assorted reference pages, which appears to be by a foot-soldier from the Wesley mob. Ostensibly a Hervey profile, it paints Theron and Aspasio’s author as the stumblebum whose florid literary style contributed to a decline of taste in English letters, somebody whose pompous prose had a degenerative influence on nearly all the other preachers of his day “save the robust John Wesley”. As a demonstration of the author’s point regarding Hervey’s vulgar affectations and impoverished ideas, a small slab of the Weston Favell rector’s writings are reprinted. Understanding that these will have almost certainly been chosen to best show off Hervey’s flaws, Studs prods his slipping spectacles back to the top of his toboggan-run proboscis and starts reading:
I can hardly enter a considerable town but I meet a funeral procession, or the mourners going about the street. The hatchment suspended on the wall, or the crepe streaming in the air, are silent intimations that both rich and poor have been emptying their houses, and replenishing their sepulchres.
Reclining as he is propped on one elbow and thus unable to marshal either shoulder into any kind of shrug, Studs lets his overgrown vac
ant-lot eyebrows and wasp-chewing bulldog lower lip perform that function in their stead. Sure, Hervey’s stuff is sombre in a decorative way, but that don’t mean it’s for the birds. He personally rather likes the business with crepe streaming in the air and wishes he got lines of dialogue like that. He wishes he got lines of dialogue, period. Focussing upon the print again, he carries on with his assessment of the dead divine’s rhetorical abilities:
There’s not a newspaper comes to my hand, but, amidst all its entertaining narrations, reads several serious lectures of mortality. What else are the repeated accounts – of age, worn out by slow-consuming sicknesses – of youth, dashed to pieces by some sudden stroke of casualty – of patriots, exchanging their seats in the senate for a lodging in the tomb – of misers, resigning their breath, and (O relentless destiny!) leaving their very riches for others! Even the vehicals of our amusement are registers of the deceased! And the voice of fame seldom sounds but in concert with the knell!
Yeah, now, see, admittedly, that’s pretty morbid. And the last few sentences, where Hervey’s gone bananas with the exclamation marks, they read as though he’s hammering his fist down on the pulpit, or maybe a coffin lid, for emphasis. Studs can see how material like that could be a buzz-kill. With contrived dramatic timing the sun slides behind a cloud and everything is overlaid by a dot screen of half-tone grey. The final two lines might have been contrived with Studs himself in mind. The vehicles of our amusement, many of which he’s appeared in, are indeed the registers of the deceased, are chiselled cemetery credits that roll on forever, miserable ledgers of extinguished stars. As for the voice of fame he doubts he’ll recognise it even if he ever gets to hear it, which he definitely won’t if Hervey’s on the level and it sounds in concert with his knell. Actually, that would be okay, once he’s considered it. Most people only get the knell.
Its brief sulk over with, the sun comes out again. The next sheet in his slender pile presents the lyrics from what must presumably be Hervey’s only extant hymn, Since All the Downward Tracts of Time: “Since all the downward tracts of time/ God’s watchful eye surveys/ O who so wise to chose our lot/ Or to appoint our ways?” Studs likes the fatalism, which he feels would sit well in a Continental Op or Phillip Marlowe outing, the idea that all our future dooms and disappointments are already written and just waiting for us patiently further along the highway, on the downward tracts of time. He figures he and Hervey could at least agree upon the direction of travel, and supposes that this must be all the antinomian predestination bullshit which brought matters to a head between John Wesley and his former sidekick. Nearby, bees are mumbling imprecations to the year’s first flowers as Studs continues working his way through the stack of data.
It has never previously occurred to him that all the major English hymns and their composers seem to blossom from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that fertile Restoration loam enriched by civil war’s important nutrients, equestrian and human bio-feed or fired cathedral nitrates. Roundhead Bunyan cranking out “To Be a Pilgrim” while the scabs on Naseby’s green slopes were still fresh, then Wesley, Cowper, Newton, Hervey, Doddridge, Blake, the usual suspects, pinned down in the crossfire of their different times and different conflicts, trying to replace the whistling musket-balls with songs. Oliver ‘Bugsy’ Cromwell’s contract hit on Charles the First had changed a lot of things in England, now Studs thinks about it. It went further than the sudden fusillade of hymns. Didn’t he hear that billiards only came into fashion in that post-war period, the pastime’s complex but predictable ballistics helpfully providing Isaac Newton with a paradigm to hang his laws of motion on? And where would noir detectives like Studs be without the morally insanitary pool hall, its resentful shadows and its mercilessly pouring light? There’s something about lines here, staves and lines of verse, trajectories of ball and bullet, things an actor has to learn, vectors of monarchy or the plot-threads of history. The idea’s messy and elusive, lacks the vital piece of evidence that ties it all up in a bow. Aware that his attention’s wandering he turns it back to the increasingly humid and wilting papers in his knotty claw.
The page he’s looking at, while not immediately encouraging, at least explains why Studs has thus far drawn a blank in his attempts to track down Hervey’s body. It appears the corpse in question currently resides beneath the church floor, to the south of the communion table in the chancel. Studs nods knowingly. The last place anyone would think to look for it. Yeah, that makes sense. There’s some kind of a marker near the spot which talks of Hervey as “that very pious man, and much-admired author! who died Dec. the 25th, 1758, in the 45th year of his age.” He passed away on Christmas day and even slipped an exclamation mark into his epitaph, Studs notes admiringly. Below all the forensic details there’s a verse in which the author of the piece, Hervey presumably, explains the want of a more visible memorial:
Reader, expect no more; to make him known
Vain the fond elegy and figur’d stone:
A name more lasting shall his writings give;
There view display’d his heav’nly soul, and live.
Again the lip and eyebrow shrug. It seems a reasonable proposition. Hervey, judging from the text in front of him, wanted no monument save that he might “leave a memorial in the breasts of his fellow creatures.” This chimes with Studs’ personal philosophy; basically kill them all and leave God or posterity to sort them out. He isn’t sure whether he’s left memorials in the breasts of many fellow creatures, unless by memorials you mean slugs from a .48, but all in all he finds this Hervey character is growing on him like moss on a mausoleum.
The unnaturally perfect afternoon wears on in dandelion-clock increments, and in the houses that surround his elevated churchyard perch the only movement is that of the sun upon blonde stone. Studs has been lying here for getting on an hour and as yet none of Weston Favell’s natives have seen fit to venture out onto its sleepy, winding streets. Could be that everybody’s dead in some Midsomer Murder spree got out of hand, in some statistically improbable convergence of completely separate and unconnected homicides, where the last major general or former district nurse left standing is brought low by a slow-acting poison secretly administered by someone he or she has stabbed with pinking shears during the opening scene. He thinks it makes a more compelling plot idea than Murder on the Orient Express, if only because in his narrative not only does it turn out everyone’s the murderer, but everyone turns out to be the victim too. It’s an ingenious double twist, the kind of ending nobody sees coming. He indulges in a few moments’ consideration of the actors, other than himself, that he’d cast in a movie version but gives up on noticing that, other than himself, the people on his wish-list are all dead, a register of the deceased, which brings him back to Hervey.
The succeeding item in his in-tray, which is what he presently prefers to call his hand, is somewhat more intriguing. Studs has only to catch sight of the name Philip Doddridge halfway down the page to realise that his previously stone-cold trail is warming up, and by the time he’s read a paragraph or two it’s sizzling like a black Texan guy with learning disabilities in the electric chair. From what he’s reading, Doddridge and James Hervey were much tighter than Hervey and Wesley were, with Doddridge even seeming to have had more influence on Hervey’s spiritual career than Wesley ever managed to exert. According to the story, after Hervey takes over his father’s duties as the parish priest of Collingtree and Weston Favell, he’s out walking in the fields when he comes on a ploughman trying to till the soil. Now, Hervey’s got this sawbones, probably the kind who’ll dig the slugs out of a bullet-riddled soul but won’t ask questions, and he recommends that Hervey take the healthy country air by hanging out with honest rural workers as they go about their business. So the preacher walks along beside the labourer and, as a fully paid up member of the Holy Club, decides to give this working stiff a free taste of his pious product. Hervey asks the rube for his opinion on the hardest thing about religion. When Joe Average predi
ctably replies that as a farmhand he’s less qualified to answer that enquiry than an educated parson, Hervey launches gladly into his stealth-sermon. He suggests that to deny one’s sinful self is Christianity’s most difficult achievement and proceeds to lecture the beleaguered ploughman on the great importance of adhering to a morally straight path, just when the man is trying to concentrate upon accomplishing the physical equivalent.
When finally the priest is all out of material, the man from simple peasant stock pulls the old switcheroo when he contends that surely a much harder struggle comes in the denying of one’s righteous self; in getting past all the self-righteous, sanctimonious bullshit that the Wesley outfit revels in. Seeing that he’s got Hervey on the moral ropes, the backwoods slugger presses his advantage: “You know that I do not come to hear you preach, but go every Sabbath, with my family, to Northampton, to hear Dr. Doddridge. We rise early in the morning, and have prayers before we set out, in which I find pleasure. Walking there and back I find pleasure; under the sermon I find pleasure; when at the Lord’s Table I find pleasure. We read a portion of the Scriptures and go to prayers in the evening, and we find pleasure; but to this moment, I find it the hardest thing to deny righteous self. I mean the instance of renouncing our own strength, and our own righteousness, not leaning on that for holiness, not relying on that for justification.”
Hervey later cites this moment as a bolt of sudden understanding from the clear blue Weston Favell sky. Before long he decides to follow the rustic’s example and at last meets up with Philip Doddridge. They become firm friends, and with the help of Doddridge-convert Dr. Stonhouse, who’s “a most abandoned rake and an audacious deist”, found the first infirmary outside of London. It turns out that Hervey’s closeness with the evangelical dissenting Christians in the Doddridge gang is what earns his dismissal from John Wesley’s Holy Mob. The elbow Studs is leaning on sleeps with the fishes, is completely numb, but he’s too caught up in the case to ease off now. The dots are all connecting and the puzzle-pieces are all falling into place. The game’s afoot. He shuffles through the last leaves in his heap with mounting eagerness and finds an unexpected essay linking Hervey with the birth of the Gothic tradition. Studs, who’d thought his earlier musings on the sumptuously morbid Hervey’s Goth credentials were a cynical conceit, is stunned. He’s seen more crazy hunches in his long career than Notre Dame cathedral – there was that time he was sure Roman Polanski would cast him as Fagin if he just wrote the director a brief letter stridently insisting on it – but to have one of his long shots finally limp in across the finish line is an unprecedented novelty. Dizzy with newfound confidence in his abilities he reads on, hardly daring to believe his luck.