graveyard, but it has no graves.
Ambrose Wykes, 1819-1898, was the only son of a successful Dundee jute merchant; he built up the business, turned a small fortune into a large one, and moved to Glasgow to oversee the establishment of another commercial empire in the early 1850s, shipping tobacco from America. He had always been mildly eccentric, dressing his servants as ship's crew — the head butler was the captain, the maids were cabin boys — and equipping his villa in Bearsden with a small lighthouse which attracted the wrath of his neighbours and considerable numbers of migratory birds, but by Victorian standards his oddities were not extreme, and he was a devout Catholic, a responsible husband and a loving father.
At least, he was these things until May l864, when his wife Mary and their only child were killed in a train crash. The boy was only two weeks old, and unbaptised. Ambrose's grief was deepened by the knowledge that the infant's soul was forever denied entrance to the kingdom of heaven; he began to drink too much, and couldn't sleep; his doctor prescribed laudanum.
Ambrose's mourning went beyond the bounds of good taste; he had the whole of the Bearsden house, and his villa at Hunter's Quay on the Holy Loch, draped in black canvas. The furniture was reupholstered in black, the carpets replaced with black felt, black canvas was placed over all the pictures and portraits, and the servants were suddenly required to dress as undertakers. Most of them left.
Ambrose paid frequent visits to his priest, accompanied by an embarrassed but well paid lawyer, apparently trying to find some loophole in the divine legal code which would let his dead son's soul gain everlasting peace. The priest, his bishop, and several Jesuits all tried to reason with him, but Ambrose refused their comfort. He stopped going to church, he refused to confess.
His business affairs began to deteriorate as he spent increasing amounts of time writing letters to priests, bishops, cardinals, and even the Vatican itself, urging that some sort of special dispensation be found which would allow the soul of his son to rest in peace; he published pamphlets advocating the reinterpretation of certain Biblical verses. Then he began to picket his local chapel; sitting outside the church in an undertaker's carriage he'd purchased, while some of his warehouse workers paraded round with placards urging reform.
These workers, themselves Catholics, were persuaded by their own priests that taking part in such unseemly demonstrations, even at triple time, was bad for their souls, and would do no good for the dead child. So Ambrose hired drunks from the Glasgow slums instead; they swore at the churchgoers, pissed against the church and fought with the police.
Ambrose had ignored the increasingly stern warnings and frosty advice of his few friends, and soon found himself without any at all. By this time his neglected business empire was on the verge of collapse, so he sold out. Injunctions eventually prevented him from picketing effectively, and he withdrew, broken and bitter but still obsessed, a rich but almost powerless man.
His frustration turned to hatred. The pamphlets began to vilify the church on every possible ground, until they too became unsupportably scandalous, and the printers refused to print them. Ambrose bought his own printing company and kept going for a while, until that too was buried under a blizzard of injunctions and prosecutions. He was excommunicated in 1869.
Ambrose remained determined to get back at the church somehow. His solution, after much thought and more brandy, was to make use of one of the few pieces of property he still owned; an empty site on St Vincent Street, between Elmbank Street and Holland Street. He sold almost everything else he owned, paid a great deal of money to an architect who has remained anonymous to this day, and — the rumour goes — an even larger sum to at least one member of the City Council to make sure there were no problems over building permission.
He built his own church. A Gothic design one architectural guidebook calls 'a bastardised blend of truncated Pearsonesque Normandy Gothic and facetious, ill-proportioned Lombardy'. The church was correct in almost every detail: nave, transepts, choir, vestry, crypt, pews, altar; even bells in the tower (Ambrose had them cast cracked so they sounded awful, but another injunction prevented them being rung).
The spare ground at the rear of the plot he turned into a mock graveyard, hiring Protestant stonemasons to turn out gravestones for each of the many enemies he'd made during the previous decade. Each stone gave the correct date of birth, but the following date recorded the death of Ambrose's friendship with whoever the stone purported to commemorate; the time when Ambrose had decided this person wasn't fit to live. His priest, a bishop, two cardinals and a variety of Jesuits seemingly lay beside a collection of lawyers, businessmen, judges, newspaper journalists, city councillors and building contractors, all apparently wiped out in some terrible, class-conscious plague which swept the city from 1865 almost to the end of the century.
The place was known as Wykes' Folly, or — in memory of Ambrose's original business — St Jute's. It became famous, a Glasgow landmark. Guidebooks mentioned it, people wrote to newspapers demanding it be torn down, a small group of free thinkers formed a Friends of St Jute's Society, and various bits of stonework were chipped off — and various insulting words scrawled onto — those parts of the church accessible from the pavement.
Ambrose retaliated by having a madonna and child statue made which showed his own Mary as the Blessed Virgin, and his unchristened son as the baby Jesus.
Ambrose was later to claim — in a pamphlet published privately, long after his death — that his son had indeed been the result of a virgin birth; in attempting to consummate his marriage on his wedding night, Ambrose had suffered a premature ejaculation while just inches from his goal; he retired in confusion, and claimed that he was afterwards too embarrassed to try again. His seed, however, had proved to be made of sterner stuff; it survived its short airborne journey and found what must have been a rather tenuous hold within the flower of Mary's womanhood; just a dewdrop within the heart of the rose, but sufficient to provide one sperm which must have wriggled past Mrs Wykes' maidenhead and connected with an egg. Ambrose thought this little short of a miracle, and it had been one of the reasons he had wanted his child given special treatment in the afterlife... but it was also a detail of such an exquisitely personal nature that he had felt unable to mention to the relevant theological authorities.
Ambrose died after his collection of papers, pamphlets and tracts went up in flames on Good Friday l898, seriously damaging the north transept. Ambrose suffered extensive burns, and despite holding on — and even seemingly improving — in the Royal Infirmary, finally died a few weeks later, on Ascension Day.
Ambrose had left enough money in his will for the folly to be maintained; this money proved sufficient to repair the fabric of the building, though slowly. The ownership of the place was turned over to the still surviving Friends of St Jute's, who used it as a storehouse for atheist publications. They abandoned it in the early 'twenties but couldn't sell it; a term of Ambrose's will had been that the place was not to be demolished or significantly changed from its original plan. I bought St Jute's in 1982, when I decided to make my own retreat from the world at large, and have felt thoroughly at home in it ever since.
The door bell rang about lunchtime, as I was making some ideologically sound Nicaraguan coffee; I don't just have jars of coffee, I have crates of the stuff.
I'd spent the time since breakfast working in the studio in the crypt, just fiddling about with the synthesiser and reading the manual on my new sequencer. I still write tunes; jingles, TV themes, the occasional film score, just to keep my hand in. I don't need the money but it passes the time. The jingles and the themes are two of the reasons I hate watching television or listening to the radio. Haven't been able to stand my own stuff since the band broke up, not once it's out there, public, no longer mine.
I thought it might be Blythswood Betty at the door. Betty is a whore who visits me every couple of days or so, just to keep me from getting too attached to my hand I guess. Nice woman; no nonsense type. I didn't think she was due today, but I lose track easily. I went to see who it was.
Ambrose had had hefty doors and barred windows fitted to his folly, but I have gone one better; closed circuit TV guarding all the entrances. The Holland Street door monitor, heaped in with most of St Jute's other non-musical electronic gear behind the pulpit, showed it was McCann, swaying in the small porch, holding his head and grimacing up at the camera and jabbing a finger at the door. His mouth was working.
I turned on the mike. '... pen the fuckin door, eh?'
I pressed the appropriate button and went to meet him.
'Jesus,' I said when I saw the blood, 'McCann, what... ?'
'Ah, ma heid,' McCann said, stumbling up the steps to the choir, holding a reddened hanky to his forehead. I led him to the bathroom in the bottom of the tower.
'What happened to you?' I put the hanky in the sink and got antiseptic and plasters.
