“If we were at Notre Dame, you’d be underwhelmed because it wasn’t the Taj Mahal. Anyway, what can your family lay claim to creating?”
He turned toward her with lifted eyebrows and an upturning of the corners of his mouth that passed for a smile without actually creasing anything. “Well …
“See if you’re still standing in six hundred years,” she said. “Then we’ll talk.”
They began circling the outside of the church. The closer she got, the greater the hand-me-down pride in one remote ancestor and his hammers and chisels.
The place was a well-kept wonder, a menagerie of impossible life seeming to burst from inert stone. The downspout carvings themselves were only the most obvious, jutting from the roofline as though in that instant before springing free. Here, a lion-faced dragon with fangs bared. There, a gigantic snake with its coils bunched against the eaves, mouth yawning wide. Next, a pensive creature with an apelike face and feathered wings, perhaps stymied by its own contradictions.
“Hey, look at this!” Glancing at each once and getting it over with, Alain was ahead of her, around the southwest corner. When she caught up to him, he pointed with delight.
The figure overhead was entirely human, enviably limber. Its feet and face were flush with the stone, while it bent double, thrusting a naked rump toward Wales. Undeniably male — a plump scrotum bulged down between its legs — his hands reached back to grip both buttocks and wrench them wide apart. On rainy days … well, no imagination needed.
“There’s a rumor going around that’s how Fabio got his big break,” Alain said. “I might’ve been the one who started it, too. I can’t remember.”
She stared without comment. This was the first one that she suddenly remembered, the first thread between now and nearly three decades ago. Her parents had brought her on vacation — seven, eight years old, had she been? — and it made sense that nudity would’ve made the biggest impression. At that age, fanciful beasts were one thing, but genitalia quite another. Each inspired its own terror, curiosity, and awe; but for staying power it was no contest.
Kate remembered her mother’s hand on the back of her head, trying to redirect her attention. More than once. Inside and out, icons of fertility and sexuality abounded here, to the chagrin of parents of precocious children: a man sporting ram’s horns and a proud erection; a hag stretching open her oversized vagina. And every few minutes, Mom’s hand and an exclamation of wonder at some more benign thing invariably in the opposite direction. Must’ve thought she was being subtle about it, as subtle as the carvings weren’t, but the real message had been quite clear.
Their circuit brought them back around to the front, where serpents twined up the columns on either side of the wooden double-doors. Every overlapping scale was distinct, while together the serpents made a weave of Celtic knotwork too intricate for her eye to unravel. Each column was crowned with a fearsome head whose toothy mouth chomped down over its top with grim relish.
The bas-relief arch above the doorway showed a row of bearded Celtic heads, smooth-faced and oval-eyed. Below them, a row of ravens whose beaks pecked and tore at less placid faces. And below those, the centerpiece: a huge, robust face grinning defiantly from out of a nest of oak leaves. Between face and hair and leaf there was no distinction. All were one and the same.
“The Green Man,” Kate murmured.
Alain blinked up at him. “You mean one of these ugly things really has a name?”
“He’s a kind of forest spirit. Growth, regeneration, renewal, like that,” she said. “It’s all coming back now. My gran used to tell me about some of this ancient imagery. And they’re
“Between me or him, now, really: Whose tongue would you rather suck on?”
“You never know. Maybe I wouldn’t mind a mouthful of sap.”
“I think you may be as kinked as your—” Alain rolled his eyes up at the carvings “—whatever he was to you.”
“Grandfather, a few dozen times removed. And he had a name. Geoffrey Blackburn.”
And here he’d stood. Shaped that stone, breathed life into it as surely as those he’d chiseled it for believed God had breathed life into Adam. She wished she could see with gargoyles’ eyes, back through time, see him as these sculptures would’ve seen the face of their maker. What Geoffrey had looked like, if after six-and-a-half centuries there was still some family resemblance.
Had he used himself as a model? Left his face slyly wrought somewhere in these stone tapestries? You’d think so, that there’d have to be enough ego to strive for whatever immortality it could. Maybe right above these doors, in the Green Man himself.
Sacred? This place was that, all right. But it was becoming harder and harder to think of it as a site that would’ve had any connection with Rome.
Certainly Rome — as well as the Anglicans — had nothing to do with it now. The Church of St. John the Baptist was time’s relic, administered by English Heritage. That they charged her a fee to get past the door seemed a minor slight; but how would they know?
Inside, more of everything … more faces, more beasts, more fabulous hybrids. If there’d ever been so much as one crucifix here, it had been carried away, rather than anchored in rock.
Besides the woman posted at the door, there were only three others here. The man she took for the curator was serving as guide to a pair of elderly women who clutched ghastly handbags and hung on his every word.
“Oh yes, quite the risque rogue, was our Geoffrey,” he was saying. “Didn’t waste many opportunities to raise an eyebrow.”
“Filthy, just dreadfully filthy,” one of the ladies said. “I can scarcely bring myself to even look at some of them.”
“You must put yourself in the medieval mind.” The curator was all tweeds and patience. “Had a belief, they did, that the forces of darkness and evil were all around, but one good look beneath a pair of dropped knickers was enough to send them running.”
