a bit of a makeover now that the rail link has come here.”
“Saint Pancras,” Bryant mused. “He was fourteen when he died, wasn’t he? A Christian martyr, decapitated on the orders of the Emperor Diocletian. I read somewhere that his severed head still exists in the reliquary in the Basilica of San Pancrazio.”
“You’re absolutely right, although Heaven alone knows why you’d want to retain such information. His name was anglicised.” Puffing out his cheeks, Potterton leaned back and looked at the old building.
“The place doesn’t look like much, does it?” said a new voice. A minuscule vicar appeared from behind the fountain. He gave the impression of warily walking on tiptoe, as if checking for broken glass. He clasped Bryant’s hand and gave it a limp shake. “The Reverend Charles Barton. Welcome to St Pancras Old Church. This is a very well-connected little parish. We’d be terribly proud of it, if pride wasn’t a sin, ha-ha.”
Bryant refused to laugh. He rarely chose to make friends with clergymen.
“I’m not, ah, part of the usual ecclesiastical team here. I’m sort of filling in.” Charles Barton was young and untested, of ineffectual appearance and extremely pale, as if he had been washed clean too many times. There were vicars who fought battles for the souls of their parishioners, and vicars who were more interested in pointing out the stained glass. Barton was of the latter sort.
“Are you acquainted with some of the illustrious residents in our little churchyard?” he asked.
“Do introduce me,” Bryant suggested, offering up a frightening smile.
“Well, Sir John Soane, the architect of the Bank of England, has his tomb here. Charles Dickens makes reference to it in
“No,” Bryant lied. In fact he had sat under it when he was a child, before railings had been placed around it. The old ash tree was beset by great grey gravestones, laid end on end against the trunk like a rising tide of stone, so that the wood had grown over them, nature engulfing the remains of man. Hardy was forever linked with Wessex, and it was odd to think of him here in town, fighting with locals over land the railway had usurped.
“Most of the graves – some eight thousand of them – were relocated to Highgate and Kensal Green,” Barton told them. “The young Thomas Hardy helped to clear them, and spent many hours in this churchyard. I’m just brewing up. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Good idea, Rev, I’m spitting feathers.”
Barton led the way to the vestry, where a brown china teapot stood warming on an electric ring. Potterton joined them unasked and squeezed himself into a wicker chair, ready to be served.
“Apparently Thomas Hardy was very upset about the lack of respect shown to the graves when they were moved,” Potterton explained. “It sounds like many of the bodies were simply shoved in together.”
“We found this in the sacristy.” The vicar clearly did not like Potterton usurping his position as parish historian, but was not the sort to complain, at least within earshot. Barton detached a yellowed scrap of lined paper from the stack of documents on his desk and carefully unfurled it. “Hardy wrote a little poem which he called ‘The Levelled Churchyard.”
“Mary Shelley predates Hardy by quite a bit, doesn’t she?” asked Bryant. “When she walked with her lover through the churchyard it would still have been its original size.”
“Quite so. She often popped in to put flowers on her mother’s grave.”
“You don’t suppose she first caught a glimmer of the idea that would become
“No, she wrote that while summering on Lake Geneva,” Potterton reminded Bryant.
“But imagine how the churchyard would have looked in those days, wild and overgrown. The bodies weren’t always buried properly, you know. The trees uprooted coffins, thrusting them to the surface. Human remains, bones and skulls would have been found all over the site. The church had a much more cavalier attitude to death in those days. What a ghoulishly picturesque place for inspiration! Of course the story goes that Shelley wrote the story in Switzerland, but ideas take a long time to come bubbling up through the soul, and this was her spiritual home, after all.”
“Oh, you just like to imagine her sitting under a London plane tree creating monsters.”
“I suppose so. Austin, you usually know about these things. Is there any history of strange sightings in the area?”
“Are you being funny?”
“No, why?”
“Arthur, I thought you would know more than anyone. The entire area is rife with them. It’s long been associated with pagan hauntings. There’s a pre-Christian barrow around here somewhere.”
The vicar harrumphed childishly at the mention of paganism.
“I know a little about the hauntings,” Bryant admitted.
“This area was also known as the Brill, the site of Caesar’s camp. The Romans had a colony at nearby Horsfall. They supposedly fought Boudicca, the Queen of the Iceni, and her army of Britons right here – their encampment was literally opposite the church – and most died on this spot, which as a result became known as Battle Bridge. The bridge itself used to cross the river Fleet. The spirits of the dead armies were seen here for centuries after.”
“No, no, no.” Bryant raised a protesting hand. “That story turned out to be a hoax. Queen Victoria transformed Boudicca into a heroine of Albion because she wanted to be seen as sharing the same qualities. Lewis Spence’s book immortalised the legend and wrongly sited Boudicca’s death at Battlebridge. It’s just an urban myth that she was buried under a platform at King’s Cross station.”
“I know that,” said Potterton, nettled, “but the general public doesn’t. The power of any preacher can only be created by his believers, after all.”
The Reverend Charles Barton appeared discomfited by this turn in the conversation, and went off to annoy the grave digger.
“This must be one of the most underrated sites of theological importance in the whole of Great Britain,” Potterton continued. “Not only did the Emperor Constantine found the oldest church in London here; it was the last place in the country where Catholic Mass was spoken before the Reformation.”
“So you have a tangle of paganism, Catholicism and Christianity leaving a trail of spectral figures through the forest, and even though you cut down all the trees and erect factories and office buildings, the ghosts of the past continue to resurface,” said Bryant, pleased at the thought.
“Oh, the diocese is very aware of its religious heritage. That’s why the place has been cleaned up. A couple of months ago they employed an archivist to supervise a dig in the vault – Dr Leonid Kareshi, he consults at the Hermitage in St Petersburg and is very highly thought of. Would you like to see what he’s found?”
The church was dark, and smelled of damp and disuse. The greenish light gave it the impression of being underwater, but the calm was spoiled by a wonky recording of a choir singing ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ slightly too loudly from speakers above the pews. At the rear of the building, a stairwell led underneath the floor to a small domed area that was formerly part of the crypt. Bryant followed Potterton, carefully picking his way between dislodged piles of bricks. He arrived at a ragged hole in the end wall, around which a rickety trio of arc lights had been erected. A broad-bodied man was bent over a trestle table, and turned to face them. He looked more like a Russian gangster than an archivist. Leonid Kareshi was not a man you’d pick a fight with.
“I am happy to make your acquaintance.” Kareshi made no attempt to shake Bryant’s proffered hand. He had a thick Slavic accent.
“Mr Bryant knows a lot about London,” Potterton explained. “Perhaps he can help you.”
“You have good knowledge of this city?” Kareshi raised a thick eyebrow.
“Oh, he’s been here since it was founded,” Potterton joked, but Kareshi did not laugh.
