The Collected Connoisseur

by Valentine, Mark

  ‘Shortly afterwards I left that place, and have never returned. Once I noticed a cryptic paragraph in the main newspaper of that region, but that has been all. I made my report to my employers, and, while the outcome in this case was not what they had been hoping for, they accepted the judgement I had arrived at. The evidence for it was, as I have said, plentiful and unambiguous; but if it had not been, I would have made sure that it became so.’

  It was a few months later, during one of my regular visits, that The Connoisseur spoke again of his employment with the Clerks of the Boundaries. ‘Do you remember that I had just received a most interesting letter from Colonel Gaspard?’

  I said that I did.

  ‘Well, I have lately received another.’ He showed me a similar envelope to before: one much creased and folded, covered with colourful postage stamps, postmarks, and handwritten scrawls.

  ‘I will never venture to criticise our Post Office, not so long as they can still manage to deliver Gaspard’s letters. They must be a veritable trial for them!’ The Connoisseur extracted the few flimsy sheets of paper from their tattered envelope. ‘I take it that you recall my visit to Fineshade?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Gaspard’s letter shows that he is still cognisant of my charge to him, to try to be a secret guardian to the boy. But there are regions where even he must tread warily: and the boy is not easily bridled,’ he said, lightly, though I could tell he was troubled. ‘It is quite possible that all sorts of new possibilities might be opening up. I will summarise for you some of what the Colonel has written in his letter, for I can plainly see the scene that Gaspard invokes.

  ‘A pale young man emerges from a shop that sells second-hand religious impedimenta, at that doubtful point where the quarters of Trebizond—Ottoman, Armenian, Bessarabian, Russian—meet and blend. He carries a neat packet, the size of a slice of bread, a slice cut from the small dark sour loaves they sell on Old Prospekt Street. It is wrapped in purple waxed paper that bears the imprint of a Patriarch, secured not without trouble many years ago by the enterprise of Mr Basilides, the owner, although that holy authority has perhaps long ago expired. As he walks away, he is watched by two old men, nibbling almonds and playing at backgammon beneath the shade of the plane trees: and they are later rewarded by Gaspard for their diligence. One of them rubs a passementerie of silver upon his jaws, and says—“The Cappadocian, perhaps”—speculating upon what ikon lies within the parcel the boy carries. The other raises a dark, calligraphic eyebrow in his face of vellum, and looks long at the figure, now passing hurriedly beyond their view. “No,” says he, “not the Cappadocian. It might be St Seraphim.” They are both wrong. They return their attention to the red and black tongues on the board before them, and the white counters waiting to be placed.

  ‘Though their gaze has left him, the boy strides through stone alleys and archways, still holding hard to his packet of waxed paper, until his way emerges into a sudden onrush of light, strong yellow-white light.

  ‘Meanwhile, Mr Basilides is surprised with himself, as he later explains to our grim-faced Gaspard. He has held that ikon for longer than he can remember, for it would never sell, being grimed with the candle-smoke of centuries and the fumes of the deepest incenses. It is all but black. All but: for on occasions, when he took it out of its velvet-lined drawer to see again if he might discern something of its history, for he was determined it must have one, then he would see dim glimpses of buried colour, if that were not merely the trick of glintings from the other sacred treasures in his hoard. The boy, said Mr Basilides, simply asked after a darkened ikon: and he, a merchant of no little reputation for keen trading, asked no price, but gave it to him: gave it to him. And where was the boy bound next? That he did not say.’

  The Connoisseur halted. ‘And Gaspard has also copied out and translated for me a passage from that book by Essad Bey.’ He passed it over to me and my eyes flickered quickly over its taunting phrases:

  ‘Just as the Orthodox world is devoted to the wonders associated with holy ikons, the prayers answered, miracles performed, intercessions achieved, the great peace granted, so it is whispered that there exist black ikons, not made by the hands of hermits or monks, which have other powers. To the profane they may seem merely panels of darkened wood: to those that know, to the true princes and lords of this world, they are very much more. Blood and precious oils go into their making, it is said: from them may come visions, violations, vast as the last night of the world. Where to find them? Ah, that, my friend, I cannot say…perhaps they will find you.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

  The Connoisseur sighed, and his voice became distant, almost chant-like. ‘He is gathering unto himself the secret treasures of Trebizond. He is seeking the perfection and accomplishment of the Rite. He is resuming the office of his lineage, becoming the Lord Acolyth. All that he accomplishes here will fortify the spiritual Empire he serves.’

  The Serpent, Unfallen

  A bony-faced, hollow-cheeked man, with wisps of rather wild grey hair, occupied a winged armchair in the study of The Connoisseur, looking from one to the other of us. He fiddled with the leather-covered buttons on his old, peppery tweed jacket, and his knobbly hands clutched a walking stick almost as gnarled.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose it all began when I noticed that someone had stolen a piece of the red elephant in the church. Mrs Westerling, who does the flowers most weeks —and I must say gives the place part of the grace that people say they feel—had in fact noticed a bit of the mermaid’s tail missing. But she put that down to carelessness by one of the visitors, or pilgrims as she prefers to call them, and I think rightly. As she says, though, you can’t treat the church as a museum. Things, even very old and precious things, are bound to get knocked about a bit over the years.’

  We nodded encouragingly. ‘The point is,’ he continued, ‘if they’d stuck with the lower beasts, as we might call them, then my suspicions might never have been aroused. But the elephant is quite high up, and you could only get to him by standing on a pew, so when some of his old red flesh went missing, I thought it was no accident. Mrs W said it might have been done though if someone overbalanced while trying to take a close-up picture, and I suppose she might be right, though she always does think the best of everyone. As well as doing the flowers and, it must be said, most of the cleaning, Mrs Westerling runs the Fellowship. I try to go along to the evening meetings, which are held on the feast days of certain saints, and—because Mrs W has always been nothing if not very ecumenical—on the high days celebrated by certain other faiths. She says it’s for tea, a chat and oh you know, “trying for a deepening of our spiritual apprehension”. However, I digress.

  ‘I might just be making a fuss over this—but, well, I don’t know whether it’s the only red elephant in all the churches in England, but I would think it must be one of the finest.’ There was a hesitant pride in the assertion, as if he thought we might be inclined to dispute the honour.

  ‘It has for company, the elephant,’ he went on, ‘a veritable bestiary of dragon, unicorn, cockatrice, mermaid, owl, hounds, hare, and much more. Like these and all the other medieval wall-paintings we have—sinners, angels, animals, monsters, a lovely St Catherine, and a great grey demon in the act of falling, his horny limbs flailing, watched by a crowned black snake, on the apse—it has lost most of its original colours. But each image has retained its outline in what I’ve always thought of as red ochre, a sort of dim and faded rose. I’ve often wondered why that colour has survived so well when all the blues, yellows and greens have faded so much. Anyway, the elephant has it most distinctly, and someone has taken a piece of his pink hide away.’

  ‘Most deplorable,’ murmured my friend. ‘But I gather that it is not this, but other matters that have brought you to me.’

  Our visitor nodded. ‘Yes: well, I see I’ve got this far without mentioning our grander neighbour. Tom Ascherson, the young man who looks after its gatehouse, would smile
at that, because he noticed often how we do that, when he first came here. So I should say next that across the road from us is the entrance to the abbey ruins. The ruins get quite a few visitors and they are in the care of a Trust, who employ Tom. Most of the visitors come to us afterwards, which is just as well, because we are a long way off the beaten track, and since there is no village as such here, we need their small donations to help keep us going. But there isn’t much of the abbey left above ground, apart from clumps of stone and some mounds, and you’d certainly need the eye of faith to imagine what it was once like when its great towers loomed over our steeple. Tom tells me though there are some days when hardly anyone comes to Saltway—the abbey—and so he occupies himself tidying the grounds, and he also looks in on our church, because we can’t always be there. Tom is a real scholar too and has been documenting the symbolism of the paintings.

  ‘Well, here’s a slightly peculiar thing. Our only other regular caretaker, as it were, is Maud Orntree from the farm. Last week, she asked me what service we’d been having there. I knew there had been none, so of course I asked her why. It seems then when she’d called in there was a strong and deep smell of incense inside, which she said reminded her of the way some evergreens give off a leafy, earthy sort of scent in the summer warmth. There was also some other tang, something of bitter spices. She said she noticed it so much because it was far richer than the wafts of incense she’d known when she’d ventured inside “higher churches”: much richer. She was surprised because she knows our parson—who is not around for most of the time, he has seven parishes, bless him—is distinctly “low”.’

  The Connoisseur breathed in deeply, as if he were trying to taste this strange incense. ‘I see. These are curious matters: but I sense there is something else still?’

  The churchwarden adjusted his gaze to the middle distance, as if not wanting to look at us directly, and his pale thin fingers worked away at his ancient jacket.

  ‘Yes, that is so. This is rather the hardest part to tell. Last week we had a day when the weather just seemed to dominate everything: do you know? You just can’t get away from it. There was a gloomy stillness all around, with a brittle edge, as if a storm were brooding within itself on whether to break or not. The day never really drew any light to itself. Over our bit of country, just fields and minor roads and a few patches of wood, and some narrow silver streams, there was cast a really great bank of dark cloud, black and scowling as could be, with just a hint of hidden illumination behind, which only made it seem even more resonantly black, if you follow me.

  ‘I took refuge in the church from the downpour I was sure we would soon get. Even with our lights on, it was very dusk-like inside; I had hardly opened the doors when I caught a strong waft—no more, very fleeting—of what must have been the scent that Maud Orntree had noticed. It was there, then gone, though it lingered in my memory. I sat down on a pew towards the back to think. It was all very silent. No-one else had come out here on a day like this. I am used to it being quiet, of course. I like it. But this was somehow different. It was a sort of—waiting silence. Then it seemed to grow even murkier inside. And I had the very odd sensation—I really cannot say how—that the dark was coming from within the church, not from the great clouds without. It was emanating from high up in the arched wall of the apse.

  ‘Gentlemen, I am a conventional son of the Established Church. I just do my duties there, worship when I can, and I do not believe I am a man of imagination. Yet as true as I sit here, I can only tell you what I am sure happened next.’

  Nevertheless, he halted there. For a moment it seemed to me as if we were sitting with him in the little ancient church, garnished with its flowers, within its ancient painted walls, and sharing the experience of the foreboding from the patient silence and the descending dark.

  Our visitor drew himself up, as if summoning the resolve to continue. ‘In the gloom up in the apse, at the height of the painting, there is the faded outline of a crowned snake, as if done in smudged charcoal. That outline seemed in my sight to have taken on the luminous black of the clouds I had seen outside, a kind of bright, glowing dark. It was no longer a veiled grey, but a deep, utter pit of shadow. I had the distinct sense that it was moving, alive, pulsing, I cannot quite say what, but it was certainly not now some dead image of long ago. I do not know how long I sat there, unable to draw my gaze away. But I must not have latched the doors properly when I entered. Because a sudden rising of the wind threw them open and let in a light that even from that dim and drained day was greater than the gloom inside. It took me too out of my transfixed reverie. I rose and shook myself and stared hard above. There was a fading again, as if the greater dark were funnelling away. As I watched, all things seemed to be restored to their usual form, and I might doubt that what I saw had ever happened. But it did: I am certain of that. I have thought about it deeply since. And I know what I saw. There it is.’

  The Connoisseur regarded him steadily for a few moments in silence. Then he thanked the troubled churchwarden very cordially and gave him a strong reassurance that he would look into the matter. When he had gone, he stared into the unlit grate of his fireplace.

  ‘There is something very deeply amiss at Saltway,’ he said, at last, ‘If all the implications I can discern are true.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I must know more about the abbey first. Will you see to that? Go along and look at it, and have a word with this Tom Ascherson, though I suggest you say nothing about our mission. You’re just an intelligent visitor. Get everything you can about the abbey, no matter how slight—or how strange. As for me, well, I find that I must replenish my stock of sacred incense. And this time I need something very particular indeed. There are only four or five suppliers in Britain who might be able to make it, and perhaps only one of them will really have it. We shall see.’

  ***

  We met together again in my friend’s rooms two days later. The Connoisseur insisted upon hearing my research first.

  ‘Ascherson was most informative about Saltway Abbey,’ I began, ‘It was a quiet day at the ruins, so I engaged him in conversation, and ended up at his little cottage on the edge of the grounds, because he wanted to chase up a reference. He said it was once one of the most visited pilgrim places in England, next only to Canterbury and Walsingham. It was founded by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, who was crowned King of the Romans with the silver crown of Germany at Aachen, but never (though he intrigued for it) made Holy Roman Emperor. He is buried, the exact site of his grave now unknown, at the abbey. His son Edmund endowed it with a phial of Christ’s own blood, a gift from the Cathedral at Aachen. And this was then much reverenced through the centuries: and Edmund too is buried at the abbey. When the wrath of Henry VIII was visited upon the monasteries and they were closed down and plundered, the phial was seized and declared to be not blood, but just honey tinted with saffron and rhubarb. It was destroyed, it was said, along with all the abbey’s other relics.’

  ‘Or was it?’ my friend put in, ‘They must have known what was coming.’

  ‘Precisely. Ascherson, it must be said, stuck to the official line: it was all destroyed at the Dissolution. But I’ve been digging deeper. There’s a tradition he didn’t mention. The relics were under the guardianship of a Brother Lucius, who had attained the then really remarkable age of eighty. He was a man so evidently venerable that even these persecutors dared not touch him, so that he lingered, it appears, a few years after the order was attainted and the abbey abandoned, stripped of its precious contents, unroofed, and allowed to fall into ruin. He became a sort of unofficial hermit, surreptitiously supported by the local people, until he died. And the tradition says that this Lucius in fact kept the vial of the real blood—or what worshippers had for centuries venerated as the real blood—and gave Henry’s commissioners some substitute.’

  ‘Most important,’ said The Connoisseur, ‘And what, I wonder, did he do with the original when he knew his end was near?’


  I shrugged. The Connoisseur sighed.

  ‘There is now in the nearest hallowed place to his ruined abbey a certain colour that does not fade. Somebody wants it enough to steal it from the poor pictured elephant, and mermaid. Why? Because, I suggest, they think Brother Lucius smeared the walls of the church with what he thought was Christ’s blood… .’

  I whistled. ‘Modern day relic hunters who’ll stick at nothing?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, much more than that, I’m afraid. As my visit to Ferdinand Muscott demonstrated. He was the last of the specialist incense-makers on my list: all of the others said only he could help. One, who admittedly goes by the winceable name of Airs & Graces, was quite icy toward me. Oh yes, he said, I know the kind of thing you’re after. Mummy dust, lichen, yewberries and so forth. Muscott. He’ll have it.’

  ‘My journey,’ my friend said, ‘was into a hitherto almost uncharted world for me. A certain area embedded deep in the sprawling suburbia of west Middlesex. I knew the place as a location on the map. Rarely have I encountered somewhere that felt so remote and removed from the world, while all the time being surrounded by railways and roads, and under the incessant flight-paths to and from a major aerodrome.

  ‘At the station, I looked around the platform, and saw a few rather woebegone beech trees in a small park on the other side of the tracks. That was the direction I wanted. At one time those trees had been part of a sizeable wood, which in turn had helped to supply the small village which furnishes the name of the station. Of course, that was then swamped by suburbia. But nonetheless, I hoped that there might be one or two survivals of a bygone age. In that, I wasn’t to be too disappointed.