The Fabric of Sin mw-9

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Nothing I could do,’ Mum said. ‘Fait accompli. Ruth Wisdom couldn’t make it, Sophie asked around by email, Siân offered.’

  ‘Sophie accepted that?’

  ‘If she’d said no, how suspicious would that have looked? Siân’s … highly placed in the Diocese. I wouldn’t want Sophie to get on the wrong side of her over something like this.’

  ‘I have to stay here with this monster?’

  ‘She’s not a monster, Jane. She’s just an ambitious, very smart, exbarrister with … some kind of calling.’

  Mum started to laugh. One of those laughs where things really can’t get any worse.

  ‘Your builder guy,’ Jane said. ‘There’s a news bill outside Prosser’s. It says the girlfriend’s …’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was worse than Jane had expected. Immediately, she was imagining doing it: one ear squashed into the cold steel track, the other exposed to the enormous saw-bench scream of the oncoming train. Did she lie facing it, watching the lights? Or was she turned away, feeling the vibration inside her brain, her whole body hunched and tensed, foetal? What could make a fairly young and apparently beautiful woman batter to death somebody she’d loved and then have herself demolished, her face ground into fragments of bone, shreds of tissue?

  Jane pulled the plug on it. She dragged over the other chair and sat down.

  ‘Why does Callaghan-Clarke want to come here? Like, what’s the ulterior motive?’

  ‘Jane, there—’

  ‘I’m not a kid any more, Mum, I can keep my mouth shut and I’ve been around this situation long enough to get a feel for seedy C of E politics. Why?’

  ‘OK,’ Mum said, ‘to look at it charitably—’

  ‘Oh, yeah, sure, let’s all be terribly Christian about it—’

  ‘To look at it charitably, first … Maybe she just wanted to help out, knowing this was a job that the Bishop’s keen we deal with efficiently and it would need to be a woman.’

  ‘She wants to be the first woman bishop, right?’

  ‘Archdeacon, apparently. In the short term.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The present Archdeacon’s coming up to retirement, possibly next year. Becoming Archdeacon would be a good stepping stone to a Bishop’s Palace, when that becomes a possibility for a woman.’

  Jane thought about this. As she understood it, the Archdeacon was like the Bishop’s chief of staff, the Head of Human Resources in the Diocese. He — or she — organized priests.

  ‘The Archdeacon’s in charge of like not replacing vicars who retire or burn out, so the rest of you can all have seventeen parishes each? The Bishop’s axeman. Or woman.’

  ‘Something like that.’ Mum wasn’t laughing now. ‘The word is — according to Sophie — that Siân’s shadowing Archdeacon Neale for a month, using the time to put together a new game plan for rationalizing the Diocese. I’ve known for a while that I could be affected.’

  ‘But you can say no to more parishes, can’t you?’

  ‘I can. But I’m on a five-year contract, which may not be renewed if I don’t agree with whatever they propose. No getting round the fact that I’m one of the very few to have only one church. Because I’ve also got Deliverance.’

  ‘She wants to figure out how to turn you into the Vicar of North Herefordshire, with South Shropshire, and no time for Deliverance?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘You sound like you don’t care.’

  ‘What can I do, anyway? Siân’s view has always been that Deliverance should be spread out over quite an extensive team. So you have a larger number of clergy with rudimentary training in aspects of healing and deliverance. Like the way — stupid analogy, but it’s all I can think of — a percentage of police are firearms-trained. Many more now than there used to be.’

  ‘And you’d …’ Jane was dismayed ‘… you’d actually go along with that?’

  ‘I think too many armed cops can be dangerous. Better to have a handful who know when not to shoot. But I didn’t get ordained to become Deliverance Consultant.’

  ‘You’re good at it. I don’t care what you say.’

  ‘Anyway, it might all be academic. She may not become Archdeacon. And there’s nothing she can do in a few days.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘Just stay cool, disappear into your apartment, feed the cat and don’t get into arguments.’

  ‘Me? Arguments?’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘I’ll try not to antagonize her. But I will be keeping an eye on her.’

  ‘Just don’t make it too obvious.’

  ‘Discretion is my middle name.’

  Mum smiled this weak kind of if only smile. Her face looked drawnin, blotchy.

  ‘You know what?’ Jane said. ‘You shouldn’t be going to Garway, you should be going to the doc’s.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘Have you looked at yourself?’

  ‘Just need a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘No, you just don’t want to give Kent Asprey the satisfaction of having you at his mercy.’

  ‘I’m all right. Probably one of those twenty-four-hour bugs. Be fine tomorrow. Why are you hugging that case?’

  ‘You weren’t fine yesterday.’ Jane took her airline bag over to the desk and unzipped it. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid this isn’t going to help you sleep.’

  Mum stiffened.

  ‘What’ve you done?’

  ‘No, it’s not … I was talking to Robbie Williams. The head of history?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He’s a medieval historian, and he knows a lot about the Crusades and the Knights Templar.’

  ‘Jane, you didn’t—?’

  ‘I didn’t say a word about you. I just said I’d been across to Garway and got interested. Bottom line is, I asked him about the green man, and he said he thought the one at Garway Church was a representation of … something else.’

  Jane pulled out her plastic document case and opened it out. All the stuff she’d printed out from the net.

  For some reason — Sod’s Law — it opened to the crude engraving of the dark and devilish bearded figure with a goat’s head and cloven hooves, wings and a woman’s breasts and a candle burning on its head between the horns.

  Mum went, ‘Oh, for God’s sake …’

  26

  Scarecrow for the Vulgar

  An image oozing calculated perversity. Paint it in blood on the wall, in the soiled sanctity of some abandoned crypt: the Devil, the Antichrist, the Beast 666. The oldest enemy.

  Introduced into the vicarage, inevitably, by little Jane.

  Merrily’s first instinct was to cover it up with the mouse mat, take it away, but that would be playing into its … hooves.

  Don’t let Siân see it. Siân, whose upper lip would pucker in distaste — not revulsion, no nervous fingering of the pectoral cross here, merely distaste at the medievalism of it.

  Only, it wasn’t medieval. Nineteenth century, probably.

  Merrily propped up the plastic folder against the computer and gazed into the smudgy smirk of the goat/man/woman/demon. The face of bored decadence. The face of look-at-me-I’m-so-twisted-and-satanic-and-don’t-you-just-love-it?

  The red and black ink had blurred, making it look even more perverse. Hints of blood and lipstick.

  ‘It’s an old printer and I probably whipped the paper out too fast,’ Jane said. ‘You’ve got to be a bit careful about what you download, Morrell has occasional dawn swoops. Anyway, this is the work of Eliphas Levi. You have heard of him?’

  ‘Heard of him?’ Merrily turned wearily to Jane. ‘Flower, I’ve worn his jeans.’

  Jane scowled. Merrily smiled fractionally.

  ‘Sorry. Yeah, I have heard of him. French occultist, late nineteenth century or thereabouts, who, under his real name, was an ordained priest. Although he and the Catholic Church became increasingly estranged — didn’t help when he ran off with a sixtee
n-year-old girl. Like Aleister Crowley, who claimed to be his reincarnation, he really wanted to be a rock star but, unfortunately for both of them, rock music wouldn’t be invented for another century.’

  ‘I hate it when you’re flip,’ Jane said. ‘Although I realize it’s essentially a defensive thing.’

  Merrily felt the thickness of the file. Must have taken Jane quite a long time to collect all this.

  ‘Sorry. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble. Yeah, I suppose you could be pointing me in a direction I hadn’t thought of. Both Levi and Crowley, as I recall, were, at some stage in their murky careers, into what they saw as the tradition of the Knights Templar.’

  ‘If you already know it all I’ve been wasting my time.’

  Jane snatched down the copy of the engraving, looking quite hurt. Merrily sighed.

  ‘I’ve probably forgotten most of it. Remind me.’

  ‘That woman will be down soon.’

  ‘No, she won’t. She’ll see the value of giving us some time to talk before I leave.’

  It was like this: in 1307, with no crusades on the agenda, the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon were no longer even pretending to be poor. They were multinational bankers: a wealthy, powerful, secretive and formidable presence.

  The guardians of too many arcane secrets — that was Jane’s view of it, but to orthodox historians they were simply a threat to the French monarchy. And the Pope. This Pope, anyway, Clement V, based at Avignon and therefore under the protection of the French king, Philip IV. A puppet Pope.

  Jane talked and it all came back.

  How the list of charges against the Templars was drawn up, or dreamed up, nobody could quite say, but it was impressively damning: they denied Christ, they didn’t believe in the Mass, they practised sodomy and exchanged obscene kisses on being received into the Order. They were taught that the Masters of the Order — none of them ordained priests — could absolve them from sin.

  And they worshipped this bearded head, which came to be known as Baphomet. Mr Williams had told Jane that the name was seen by some sources as a corruption of Muhammad, but Merrily vaguely remembered other interpretations.

  ‘It was quite clever,’ Jane said. ‘If you look closely at the charges, you can definitely see where some of them are coming from.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. The denial of Christ could mean that they were simply denying the divinity of Christ because they were supposed to have known the so-called truth: that he’d died, leaving behind his girlfriend, Mary Magdalene and their family. On the same basis, you have the rejection of the Mass, because — allegedly — they knew there could be no transubstantiation.’

  ‘Right. And then we come to the head.’

  ‘OK, tell me about the head.’

  ‘Probably goes back to the Celtic cult of the head,’ Jane said.

  ‘I hadn’t heard of that connection.’

  ‘The Celts saw the head as the receptacle of the spirit, right?’

  ‘Mr Williams thinks the Templars actually did worship the head?’

  ‘Or maybe just recognized it as symbolic of something? Consider the fact that the Templars were linked to the Cistercians and gnostic sects.’

  ‘Here we go …’

  ‘And other guys who weren’t stupid enough to reject centuries of pre-Christian knowledge of nature and harmony with the land and … and a lot of other practical stuff that you can’t get in any way from the Bible.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it must’ve been symbolic of something. However, if the bearded head represents that revolting joke’ — Merrily jerked a thumb at the engraving of the horned beast with the candle on its head — ‘then it really doesn’t say a lot to me about mankind’s links with the earth. Especially as it also features in black masses and is often found above the altars of satanic temples.’

  ‘You haven’t actually read Levi, have you?’

  ‘Somehow, that thing with the teenage girl kind of said it all for me. But go on …’

  ‘What it basically comes down to …’ Jane shuffled papers ‘… is whole centuries of superstition, smears and misrepresentation. It’s a hieroglyphic representing male and female and illumination — the candle? It’s also Pan, the goat-foot god, the spirit of nature. OK, listen to this: “The symbolic head of the Goat of Mendes is occasionally given to this figure and it is then the Baphomet of the Templars and the Word of the Gnostics … bizarre images which became scarecrows for the vulgar.”’

  ‘So only thick people think there could be anything evil here. And the Church, of course.’

  Jane shrugged.

  ‘Well, thank you, flower, you’ve converted me. I’ll pack in all this Christian crap, put up a Goat of Mendes poster in the hall — only ten dollars from the Church of Satan and All Fallen Angels, Sacramento — and once I’ve popped into the church and spat on the altar—’

  ‘All right … you can mock.’ Jane stood up. ‘I’m just trying to show you what you’re dealing with, that’s all. There are two sides to everything.’

  ‘So the Garway Green Man is actually Baphomet. Mr Williams thinks that?’

  ‘He knows Garway church, and he thinks it makes sense. And if what you found inside the inglenook at the Master House was a replica of the Baphomet in the church …’

  ‘You didn’t tell Robbie Williams about that?’

  ‘No, I just asked about it in a general kind of way.’

  ‘Only I would hate any of this to get back to your beloved head teacher, because if Morrell thought I was involving you, a minor, in what he regards as my unscientific, primitive and superstitious occupation …’

  ‘It’s OK. I don’t think Robbie Williams likes Morrell either. And in case …’ Jane’s gaze softened. ‘In case you were fearing the worst, even I would be a bit wary of bending a knee to Baphomet. Or the Goat of Mendes.’

  She came over, and Merrily half-rose and then they were spontaneously hugging. Ridiculous. Embracing your heathen daughter because she’d granted you the concession of drawing the line at actual devil worship.

  More probably, Merrily guessed, it was the formal sealing of a pact against what was upstairs.

  ‘Jane, look … I’m sorry. It was a bad night, and it’s not been a great day. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing. Going over to Garway — it could be a wasted exercise. Even Huw Owen’s telling me to back off, because whatever happened there concerns ancient secrets that aren’t going to get cracked. Definitely not by someone like me.’

  ‘He actually said that?’

  ‘I don’t think he meant it in any mystical sense. I think he was saying I’d just tie myself up in knots, getting nowhere. And when you come home and hang all this on me, with the saintly Siân upstairs …’

  Merrily was feeling almost painfully tired. Tired and inept. Huw was probably right: tamp it down, walk away and, with any luck, it won’t flare again in your lifetime.

  ‘Listen, there’s one final thing, Mum. Jacques de Molay?’

  ‘The last Grand Master of the Templars.’

  ‘I think there’s an engraving of him here. I’ve got it … there … He looks a bit like Baphomet himself, doesn’t he?’

  Merrily looked at the drawing of the figure with the cross on his surcoat. Dignified but defiant. Che Guevara. Or maybe just the quiet one from some electric-folk band in the 1970s.

  ‘He was burned at the stake?’

  Jane nodded. ‘After refusing to confess to sodomy, sacrilege and the rest of it. Most of the others who were arrested did confess after being threatened and tortured. But De Molay insisted to the end that he was a good Christian. He said he wanted to die facing the Church of Our Lady. But — get this — before the flames took him, he said that God would avenge him. He said the Pope and the King of France could expect to see him again before too long.’

  ‘I know. De Molay’s dying curse. Where’s this going, Jane?’

  ‘Neither the King nor the Pope lasted a year. And Jacques de Molay became
this kind of cult figure. Still is, apparently.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There was some guy in the French Revolution,’ Jane said, ‘and when they guillotined Louis XVI he was like, This is for Jacques de Molay.’

  Merrily thought she could hear footsteps on the stairs and stood up. Felt, for a moment, slightly dizzy.

  ‘Suppose I’d better show Siân around.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Jane said, ‘I haven’t told you, yet.’

  ‘Sorry. Only—’

  ‘And this isn’t, like, supposition or legend or anything. This is official history. I think it was 1294.’

  ‘All right.’ Merrily paused, holding the door handle, aching for a cigarette. ‘What happened in 1294?’

  ‘That was the year Jacques de Molay came to Garway,’ Jane said.

  27

  Bev and Rev

  Setting out a place by the window in the whitewashed dairy, now the guests’ dining room, Beverley Murray glanced at Teddy across the table, and you could almost see it happening: this smouldering issue reigniting in the air between them.

  Then Beverley went back to the cutlery tray, and Teddy said, ‘If handled discreetly, I think it would be sensible. Discretion being the operative word.’

  ‘When was there—?’ Beverley letting the cutlery clink more than was necessary. ‘When was there ever discretion in a place like this? Sometimes I think that damned radio mast picks up everything we say and broadcasts it into everybody’s living room.’

  ‘In which case, Merrily needs to get it all done and dusted before too many people find out.’

  By ‘too many people’ Teddy presumably meant some of the cranks likely to descend on Garway next weekend for the Templar memorial service.

  ‘Quick as I possibly can.’ Merrily was not feeling up to an argument. ‘As soon as I can establish what we’re looking at.’

  Meaning help me here. Teddy prised out a reluctant chuckle.

  ‘Merrily has a most unenviable job. Bumps in the night being an area most of us tend to steer clear of. Too many pitfalls.’