“Why, good lord. Whatever for?” said the other woman. “No. Don’t tell me. I don’t wish to know.”
“Shame, maybe,” Alain muttered to Kate, but by some prank of acoustics the other three heard him plainly as well. An audience was irresistible, so he elaborated: “I mean, you always think of demons as being well-hung, don’t you? But what if they’re not? What if that’s part of their punishment?”
They simply stared, all three, with their mortified British faces. One of the women lingered on Kate’s photographer’s vest and its bulging pockets as though they must’ve held weapons.
“No?” Alain said to their silence. “Just a thought.”
“First one today?” Kate whispered through clenched teeth.
So much for a genteel homecoming.
*
After she’d tried her best to salvage first impressions, the curator, Nigel Crenshaw, began to thaw. The old women wasted no time in retreating, trailing wisps of lavender in their wake, but Crenshaw seemed to study her and Alain as if they were as exotic as anything chipped out of limestone here.
“A Pulitzer, how very interesting,” Crenshaw said. “Yes, I remember that photo quite well. Not often that one sees so much historical nastiness summed up so … succinctly.”
Nastiness. Typical British understatement. Her famous photo had been taken during a protest siege laid to government land in South Dakota’s Black Hills by militants who’d broken away from the American Indian Movement. She’d been clicking away on one of their leaders, on an observation deck, the instant he’d been shot by a sniper with the U.S. Marshals Service. By a fluke of perspective, a streamer of the man’s blood looked as though it might spatter the four gargantuan witnesses behind him: the sixty-foot granite heads of Mt. Rushmore.
Everyone remembered that photo. She’d met a few who hated her for it, but only in her own country. Crenshaw wasn’t one of them.
He was, in fact, delighted by the documentation showing her to be a lineal descendant of Geoffrey Blackburn. Her grandmother had spent a quarter-century tracing the family tree to learn this, finding Blackburn and his works quite the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Maybe it would pass, but Kate had been bitten by the notion that there might be a photo book in him. If Hildegard von Bingen could become fashionable, why not Geoffrey Blackburn?
On the spot, Crenshaw began bursting with fact, hearsay, and legend — his, the zeal of a man who’d devoted his life to something without having found nearly enough ears to share it with.
“You know what they called him, don’t you? ‘The Michelangelo of the Gargoyles’?”
She’d heard that much, at least.
“Predated Michelangelo by a century, so not in Geoffrey’s time, of course. But what a testament to the man’s genius, that that’s the artistic standard future generations measured him by. Some of the work he did, why, stand it next to ‘David,’ I say.”
“Wouldn’t you have to break it loose of the church first?”
Crenshaw sighed. “Thereby hangs the pity.”
The makers of most ecclesiastical sculpture had labored in anonymity, he told her, but even in his own lifetime Blackburn had enjoyed renown, although some would’ve said infamy was the better word. Wherever he employed his craft, there soon followed claims of people seeing movement in his creations.
“Not just the common rabble, either,” Crenshaw said. “Plenty of priests, too. Bishops, cardinals. Even a pope or two. People have been claiming it for centuries. Still do, but it wouldn’t be force of suggestion. I daresay most have never even heard of Geoffrey Blackburn or his reputation.”
“And this followed him everywhere he worked?” she asked.
“More or less. Although — and mind, I’ve never undertaken a formal study — it would seem that the later in Geoffrey’s life he worked on a church, the more instances you have of people claiming to see movement in the carvings he did there. Makes sense, though. He continually refines his skills, his works appear progressively more lifelike.”
“And the Church of St. John the Baptist is…?” Kate said. “My grandmother told us…”
Crenshaw nodded proudly. “The last and greatest jewel in our Geoffrey’s formidable crown.”
“So most of those reported movements, they’ve come from here, then,” she said. “Have you ever…?”
“Oh heavens no. Perhaps I stare at them too directly for them to ever get the better of me.”
He filled in the sketchy background. Blackburn had supposedly apprenticed under the master sculptor hired for the Octagon at Ely Cathedral, built to replace a tower that had collapsed in 1322.
“Surviving records indicate he worked on the roof bosses.” Crenshaw pointed to a face leering from a junction of two ceiling beams. “Same thing, only in stone, and much higher. Where the ribs of the vaults meet. Gossip had it that his master was more than a bit consumed with jealousy by the end of his apprenticeship.”
After Ely, he’d worked on other churches, abbeys, and priories in East Anglia, and within a decade his reputation had taken him even to France, to supervise the sculpture workshop at the cathedral nearing completion in Chutreaux.
It was this aspect of construction that gave her pause. That Geoffrey had been the master sculptor of record someplace — or one of many, on a two-century project like Chutreaux — didn’t mean any particular piece had come from his chisel. In fact, most couldn’t have. A few, maybe, but the rest only done under his tutelage.
“When comparing, one can tell,” said Crenshaw. “I’ve been to Chutreaux. Been to most of the others. And everywhere, it’s two different classes of work: Geoffrey’s. And everyone else’s.”
“But here, though. My gran said he—”
