When Sir John outlined the escape strategy, Verey agreed almost absently. It was shocking to see how much of the arrogance had been drained from the old man, how docile he was in accepting direction.
Sir John’s plan involved the fact that the wine cellar led into a short tunnel which connected with a deserted outbuilding where an earlier Babcock, generations back, had mounted a private winepress, long since fallen into disuse.
“They may be watching this house with binoculars or even with a high-power telescope,” he explained. “But nobody can see that old winepress cottage unless he practically falls over it. The whole area around it is now very heavily wooded.”
The clergyman nodded gloomily. He did not speak in his normal style, in fact, until they were actually in the wine cellar. “You do be keeping a great amount of spirits,” he said suspiciously, “for a Christian and sober man.”
Sir John was leading the way with a candelabra. “Family stock,” he said apologetically. “Most of the bottles are fifty or a hundred years old, or older. I hardly ever open one, except for special guests.”
“Aye,” said the hunchbacked figure in the gloom. “That’s the way it always starts. Opening a bottle occasionally, for special guests. Every wretch I have ever seen ruined by drink started that way.”
Because of the darkness, Sir John allowed himself a smile. It was comforting, in a way, to see that some of the old man’s character remained intact even after the tragedies he had endured. For a while there, Verey had seemed almost an automaton.
Then Sir John began to realize how huge the wine cellar really was, to the eyes of a Scottish Presbyterian. He hadn’t been down here since childhood, when he had explored the tunnel regularly in hopes of finding pirate treasure, or the caverns of the trolls. As they passed row after row of cob webbed bottles, Sir John began to see the Babcocks as he imagined Verey was seeing them: a family of alcoholic debauchees.
Finally, they found the tunnel. Now it was really dark and the candelabrum shed only a few feet of light in any direction. Sir John began to wish he had brought two candelabras, so that Verey could light his own way. As it was, they necessarily huddled together and walked very slowly.
A confederate in the household: Sir John remembered, suddenly, his suspicions about Verey’s brother Bertrán, back when there was only the mystery of the strangled cat to explain. Could there be a confederate of Crowley’s M.M.M. here in his own household? What might be waiting in this Stygian blackness only a few feet ahead of them?
Then he smiled again in the darkness. The servants had all been with the Babcocks for a long time: they were simple, solid souls he had trusted since childhood. This damnable mystery had begun to infect his mind with the germs of paranoia. My God, suspecting Wildeblood or Dorn or old Mrs. Maple of involvement with black magicians was as ridiculous as suspecting the Royal Family or the Archbishop of Canterbury.
There seemed to be a buzzing sound in the air of the tunnel, reminding Sir John of the insectoid hum of his dreamvisions of Chapel Perilous and Verey’s weird recording: thinking, could bees or wasps have built a hive down here?, recalling also the buzzing sound attributed to the voices of the faery by folklorists, holding on to his courage by act of Will, yet irrelevantly remembering also that the bee was for some inexplicable reason the emblem of the Bavarian Illuminati, the most atheistic and revolutionary of all Masonic offshoots. He would get a grip on himself, damn it to hell; he would not keep wandering into such unwholesome thoughts. But he was remembering an ancient Cabalistic riddle: Why does the Bible begin with B (beth) instead of A (aleph)? Answer: because A is the letter of Arar, cursing, and B the letter of Berakah, blessing. But why was the bee the symbol of the Illuminati? And what was that insectoid buzzing and who were those people in honeysuits in that early dream of Chapel Perilous?
Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure…. He was not that pitiful fieldmouse trapped in the hands of a being incomprehensible to himself. He was a Knight of the Rose Croix on God’s business and “no demon hath power over him whose armor is righteousness.”
Remembering, too, Uncle Bentley explaining that fear of the dark is one of the oldest primate emotions, dating back to the brutal ages when our mute gnomic furry ancestors were subject to clawed attack by many kinds of nocturnal carnivores, and hardly a child in the world does not have some remnant of that primordial fear, which comes back even to the adult in times of strain; and if it was grotesque to suspect the family servants, there was yet the disquieting thought of the workmen who had been all over Babcock Manor when the electricity was installed and the whole house refurbished. One of them could have been an agent of the M.M.M. who had set a trap somewhere, in a dark place like this….
“Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure,” Sir John reminded himself again. Where are you going? The East. What do you seek? The Light.
According to the Welsh, the crew that never rests lived in tunnels like this, under the earth….
With great relief, Sir John finally saw the door at the end of the tunnel. This really was a beastly horrible business, to have made a fearful ordeal out of the journey through the tunnel, which had always been an adventure to him as a boy.
Well, Jones had told him, “A real initiation never ends.” This walk through the dark legend-haunted underworld—the N or Hades stage of the I.N.R.I, process—had been another part of his initiation, another lesson in the courage which the occultist must acquire if he were not to become prey to obsession and possession by every type of demonic entity, real and imaginary. He remembered an American Negro hymn he had once heard:
I must walk this lonesome valley
I must walk it for myself
Nobody else can walk it for me
I must walk it all alone
Understanding suddenly why nun, the fish, was the letter corresponding to this experience of Hades, lord of the underworld; thinking, We do, indeed, begin as fish swimming in the amniotic waters of the womb, and the unconscious always thinks of death, symbolically, as a return to the womb; realizing even why the next stage in I.N.R.I, is Resh, the human head itself, corresponding to the dead-and-risen sun gods, Osiris and Apollo. “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”: within the head, in the cells of the brain itself. Knowing at last in the guts: A true initiation never ends: we go through the same archetypal processes, over and over, understanding them more deeply each time. Isis, Apophis, Osiris! IAO … the Virgin, the halls of Death, Godhood … The Light shined in the darkness, and the darkness knew it not….
With a grunt of male-mammal triumph, Sir John cast open the door to the winepress cottage. “Man is not subject to the angels, nor to Death entirely, save by failure of his Will,” said a Golden Dawn manual, and Sir John believed it and felt brave.
The cottage was even dirtier and more heavily cob-webbed than Sir John remembered, but the winepress still looked as sturdy and indestructible as ever. Reverend Verey stared at it in some astonishment.
“Good Lord, man,” he asked, “what is this?”
He was pointing an angry finger at the Coat of Arms on the winepress: a dark blue garter with a gold buckle, twenty-six gold garters pendant from the collar above it, motto: Honi soit qui mal y pense.
“It’s the Order of Saint George,” Sir John explained, blushing nervously. “It was given to great-grandfather by the King, for some service to the Crown.” Thinking: the nightmare is real, there is no masquerade: the name itself is the thing itself.
“Aye, I know that nobody but the King can confer the Order of the Garter,” Verey said impatiently. “But why did your great-grandfather impress it on a winepress? That indicates disrespect for the Crown and a libertine humor, I’d say.”
Sir John blushed more deeply. “Great-grandfather was a bit odd,” he said. “There are scandalous legends about him, I’m sorry to admit. He was involved with Sir Francis Dashwood and the Hellfire Club, some say. Every family has at least one rascal,” he added pointedly, “as you must know.”
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bsp; “Aye,” said Verey. “I mean no disrespect for your family. But I can see how occult leanings can be in your blood, Sir John, even if you turn them in more Christian directions than your great-grandfather did.”
It was not the most tactful apology, and Sir John found himself thinking of his blood as tainted in a most unwholesome manner. “The Order of Saint George is the highest knightly order in Great Britain,” he said, defending the Babcock genes as if somehow the accusation had arisen that lycanthropy or witchcraft might be a family trait.
Verey said, “Aye, a most exalted honor for any family to receive from the Crown. But is it not more commonly known as the Order of the Garter?”
Sir John found himself blushing again.
The hunchbacked clergyman must still be in shock, he thought; this was a most inane line of conversation. Still he was stammering as he explained, lamely, “I study much medieval history. Often, I slip into the old words and terms instead of the more modern ones. The name Order of the Gar Gar Garter was not in common use until the reign of Edward VI, although the Order goes back, as you undoubtedly know, to Edward III in 1344 and was originally called the Order of Saint George as I just said.” For some reason, he still felt as if he were in a nightmare.
“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” the clergyman read from the Coat of Arms. “A strange motto for a noble order.”
“Well you must know the story … about the Countess of Salisbury …” Sir John almost had the sensation that the hunchback was cross-examining him on a witness stand. “She dropped her gar gar garter at a dance, you know, and the King picked it up, when somebody laughed at her, and put it on his own lay lay leg, you know, and said that. Said Honi soit qui mal y pense.”
“‘Evil to him who evil thinks of it,’” Verey translated. “It’s still a strange story. And why do the Masons wear a garter in their initiations?”
“My God, man, we must be on our way!” Sir John exclaimed. “We can’t stand here discussing the obscure points of medieval history—”
In a few moments they had made their way around the winepress and out the door into a shaded grove circled on all sides by great oaks. Within the grove, beside the cottage, stood only a ghost-white marble Aphrodite.
“Heathen statues,” muttered Verey, but this time he seemed more to be talking to himself than to be accusing the Babcock family.
The walk through the woods was invigorating, after the underground passage and the idiotic but disturbing conversation in the winepress. For a while there, the clergyman had seemed almost demented; or was Sir John merely overly sensitive about great-grandfather’s eccentricities? A hidden grove dedicated to wine and Aphrodite … the rumors about connections with the libertine Hellfire Club … a taint in the blood … blue garters … white stains …
Verey kept a good pace, despite his age; but Scottish Highlanders are notorious for longevity, even fathering children at advanced ages. If only they were not so inclined to telling, with so much ghoulish relish, tales of ghosts and witches “and things that gae bump i’ the night.” But, of course, that was probably because they experienced more of these things in their cold, dank dark Northern nights. The Rationalist, scorning these simple, rugged people as superstitious, without having lived among them and shared the experiences which gave rise to those eldritch tales, was as naïvely chauvinistic as the narrow Englishman who regards all Frenchmen as immoral or all Italians as treacherous.
And then remembering that the motto of the Hellfire Club had been “Do what thou wilt,” from Rabelais, and their blasphemous ikon or idol, at the deserted abbey Sir Francis Dashwood had purchased for their orgies, was a giant phallus inscribed “Saviour of the World.” That very ikon, in fact, had been printed as frontispiece to the lascivious “Essay on Woman” clandestinely printed by John Wilkes under the salacious nom de plume “Pego Borewell”: Wilkes had been expelled from the House of Lords when his authorship of that pamphlet, and his membership in the Hellfire Club, had been exposed by the Earl of Sandwich, himself a former member who had resigned when some horrible Thing (an orang-utan unleashed as a practical joke, Wilkes later claimed) bit him during a Black Mass. All of which was regarded as comical, if unsavory, by most historians; and yet Sir John began to wonder about possible links between that strange cabal and the contemporary Grand Orient lodges of French Masonry, where strange occult and revolutionary doctrines were preached and the mysterious Count Cagliostro was a Grand Master. Were all of these, like the sinister Illuminati of Bavaria, part of the black underground tradition now incarnate in the Ordo Templi Orientis?
“I heard that story explained once,” Verey said suddenly.
The trees were so thick in here that it was heavily shadowed even now, at midday. O dark, dark amid the blaze of noon, Sir John quoted to himself. “What story?” he asked absently.
“The story about King Edward III and the Countess of Salisbury, man,” Verey said impatiently. “I don’t know if it’s true, mind you, but what I heard was that the blue garter was the insignia of a Queen of the Witches in those days. The king, by placing the garter on his own thigh, was telling everybody that they would have to denounce him to the Inquisition if they dared to denounce her. He may have saved her life. That’s the meaning of ‘Evil to him who thinks evil of it.’”
It was an unpleasant subject to be discussing with a grieving and somewhat deranged hunchback in such a dark forest. The selva oscura, Sir John thought. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said irritably, “unless the King himself were a male witch, or warlock. Is the point of the story to make us wonder if the British monarchy itself might be infested with witchery and diabolism?”
“I dinna’ know,” Verey said. “The man who told me this did have some queer notions about the knightly orders of Europe. I gather that he believed the Order of the Garter was the hidden inner circle that governs Freemasonry. Do you happen to know why Masons use garters in their initiations?”
Something flapped by overhead with a sound as if of bat’s wings. But bats did not fly in the daytime, Sir John reminded himself.
“The history of Freemasonry is very complicated,” he said. “I have written a book about it, The Secret Chiefs, and can only claim to have solved about a third of the important historical mysteries. It is true that the King is the head of the Order of the Gar Gar Garter and the Prince of Wales is always made a 33° Freemason, but there is nothing sin sin sinister about it, I assure you. The patron of the Order is Saint George, not Satan.”
“Of course,” Verey said apologetically. “I did say, did I not, that the man who told me all this had many queer notions? He even said the 26 gold garters dependent from the collar had something to do with the Mason Word, but I never understood that. It had something to do with the Jewish Cabala, I believe.”
26: Sir John remembered: Yod = 10; Hé = 5; Vau = 6; second Hé = 5. Total: 26. YHVH, the Holy Unspeakable Name of God—now, due to the hideous M.M.M., inextricably linked in his mind with suicide and madness. And hidden in the numerology of the Order of the Garter.
The bat-winged thing moved overhead again. It must be an ordinary bird. Bats did not fly at noon. And “stone should not walk in the twilight.” Where had he read that?
“It is a queer business all around,” Verey muttered. “Men in garters. Secret meetings. No women admitted. Was the whole Order of Knights Templar of Jerusalem not convicted of the unnatural sin of sodomy?”
“Dash it all!” Babcock burst out. “You have it all confused, Reverend. You are mixing up true mystical Masonry with all its perversions and counterfeits.”
The wood seemed to be growing darker all the time. The bat wings flapped again.
“I know nothing of such matters,” Verey said humbly. “I am merely reporting the opinions of a man I admitted was possessed of odd notions. Secret societies do arouse much speculation, you know. Everybody asks: If they have nothing to hide, why are they secret?”
The more the senile old fool apologized, the more offensive he became. Sir John
turned to issue a final crushing retort but then saw the paleness of Verey’s face and the lines of pain around his eyes and mouth. The old man had suffered much and deserved great tolerance. Besides, the true Brother of the Rose Croix was patient and infinitely compassionate toward those ignorant of the mysteries. Sir John said nothing and trudged on.
The bat-flapping receded behind them. Probably it had only been an ordinary bird, magnified by imagination and suggestion.
Then a clearing emerged and the towers of Greystoke were visible in the distance.
“There it is,” Sir John exclaimed, once again thrilled by a sense of adolescent adventure. “Our doorway to escape and to our own surprise counter-attack.”
Q: Cite a contemporary historian, with sufficient brevity to avoid litigation about copyrights, in re: the Countess of Salisbury and the Order of the Garter.
A: “Though the story may be apocryphal, there may be a substratum of truth in it. The confusion of the Countess was not from shock to her modesty—it took more than a dropped garter to shock a lady of the fourteenth century—but the possession of that garter proved that she was not only a member of the Old Religion but that she held the highest place in it…. It is remarkable that the King’s mantle, as Chief of the Order, was powdered over with one hundred and sixty-eight garters which, with his own garter worn on the leg, makes 169, or thirteen times thirteen—i.e., thirteen covens.” Dr. Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches.
Q: Cite, again without exceeding the legal limitations of Fair Usage, another supporting source.
A: “Thus, as we have seen, the Plantagenet [and so traditionally ‘pagan’] King threw away all pretence, and declared himself openly for the Old Religion, establishing a double-coven ‘Brains Trust’—the Order of the Garter—to ‘mastermind’ the return to what Edward and the Fair Maid of Kent, his ‘witch’ Plantagenet cousin, considered to be the True Faith…. The Tudors, too, may not escape suspicion of having belonged to what was evidently the ‘family religion’ of the British Royal Family.” Michael Harrison, The Roots of Witchcraft.
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