Remains of an Altar

‘I’m trying.’

Lol wondered what time it was, if Jane and Gomer had gone to find Margaret Pole’s niece, if Merrily…

‘Keep going, Athena,’ he said.

‘Oh, I could go on all night and all through tomorrow. But I think what you need to know is that the planets were said to vibrate and respond to one another in a musical sequence – the Music of the Spheres. You’ve heard the term?’

Lol nodded. ‘But I always imagined that as a poetic … metaphor?’

‘It is a metaphor, like all these images, for an internal process. As above, so below. A connection between our inner selves and God, forged through the power of music. This was studied in some depth by The Golden Dawn, and Blackwood used some of what he’d learned there in The Human Chord – Blackwood being a writer first and foremost, rather than a true seeker after cosmic consciousness. A romantic, if you like.’

‘Like Elgar.’

‘Absolutely like Elgar. And for Blackwood not to have seized the opportunity to discuss what he’d learned about the origins of music with the most famous composer in the land is … well, so unlikely as to be not worth consideration.’

Lol said, ‘The play – musical, whatever – that Elgar and Blackwood worked on. You said it was called The Starlight Express? The house where Winnie Sparke – Tim Loste’s mentor – lives, at Wychehill, is called Starlight Cottage.’

Athena White squeaked in delight.

‘Starlight, as it happens, was Elgar’s nickname for Blackwood! They used nicknames as a kind of code.’

‘There’s a letter,’ Lol said, ‘in the Wychehill parish records from someone signing himself Starlight … suggesting Wychehill as a highly suitable place for a church because no area of southern Britain was more conducive to the … to the creation and performance of the most spiritually exalted music … does that make any—?’

‘Sounds like something Blackwood would write, and if he signed himself Starlight he could only have been addressing Elgar.’

‘The letter’s to “Sirius”.’

‘The dog star?’ Athena’s eyes glittered. ‘Yes! Elgar was frightfully fond of dogs. That would make absolute sense. Oh, Robinson, I wonder … I wonder…’

Athena began leafing through the book she’d brought from the cupboard, a fairly slim hardback with a plain green cover, called City of Revelation.

‘I think where this brings us,’ she said softly, ‘is to the Whiteleafed Oak.’

43

The One Per Cent

Syd Spicer looked like a priest feeling unwelcome in his own church and uncomfortable – or was she imagining this? – in his own cassock.

‘So he’s out, right?’

Spicer looked pale. Few people, in the current weather, looked pale. Regiment men, always getting dispatched to sun-kissed hell-holes, never did; only their wives. That was the standing joke in Hereford: foolproof way of recognizing an SAS man – suntanned bloke, pale wife.

‘He was released this morning, without charge,’ Merrily said. ‘But I gather they haven’t lost interest in him.’

‘Who could?’

But, for some reason, he looked relieved. Merrily sniffed the air.

‘He burns incense in here?’

‘Not when I’m here, he doesn’t. But, yeah, who else? Or Winnie.’ He sat down in one of the choir stalls, looking down the aisle with distaste. ‘It’s got to end.’

‘What has?’

‘I don’t like this church much – have I indicated that?’

‘A few times.’

‘Sometimes there’s a peculiar energy in here. You can feel it on your skin, abrasive, like on a cold morning when you’ve cut yourself shaving. And sometimes you can still smell the incense when Loste hasn’t been in for days.’

Merrily looked around. With the afternoon sunlight in free fall through the diamond-paned windows, it was like being inside a great stone lantern.

‘Something’s needed doing for a while, but I couldn’t do it,’ Spicer said.

‘Couldn’t do what?’

‘What you do. Maybe that’s another reason I called you last weekend. Maybe I couldn’t admit it to myself, but something needs sorting here.’

She sat down next to him. ‘You trying to make me feel worthwhile or something, Syd?

He was still gazing down the nave, his eyes like currants. She could feel him becoming quiet. The screensaver routine. She looked at him, saying nothing, trying to be as still as he was. But she couldn’t manage it.

‘It’s a technique,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Makes me look heavy. On nodding terms with minor seraphim. I’m just a fucked-up old soldier, Merrily, and coming into the Church was a mistake. I can’t hack it.’

‘What?’

Spicer pulled a box of matches out of his cassock, followed by a packet of cigarettes. He flipped it open, offered it to Merrily. She blinked.

‘We’re, erm, in church.’

‘Don’t go spiritually correct on me, Merrily. You think he cares? It’s smoking, not sex.’

‘You’re right, but I don’t think I will right now, all the same.’

‘Fair enough.’

He lit up, the striking match a sacrilegious gasp. He stretched out his legs in the direction of the central aisle, watching the smoke float up and dissipate at pulpit level.

‘At the core of the Special Air Service, there’s a harsh kind of mysticism. Kind you won’t find in any other area of the armed forces. Connected with survival. I used to think survival was ninety per cent training and preparation, nine per cent luck, and one per cent … one per cent something you could call on when you were at breaking point.’

‘I can imagine the closer you get to—’

Merrily shut up. She didn’t know. How could she possibly know?

‘I’m not gonna tell you when and where this happened to me,’ Syd said. ‘But there’s always one time when it all drops away – all your training and your discipline – and your insides turn to water. At first you’re just afraid of dying. Not death, dying. The way it’s gonna happen. The fear of … of fear itself, I suppose. Of giving in to fear. Of dying in it. Dying as someone who you can only despise. And when you’re suddenly confronted with that sorry person – with the sight and the smell of your own terror … that’s a big, gaping moment, Merrily.’

She nodded. She kept quiet. They didn’t know one another, not at all. All they had in common was the one per cent.

‘So I started to pray,’ Spicer said. ‘Prayed the way those poor buggers probably prayed when they jumped off the twin towers, out of the flames.’

Merrily nodded.

‘And something happened. Not a flash-of-lightning kind of thing … just a bloke behaving in a way he wouldn’t normally behave in the circumstances, and me finding a sudden unexpected strength. I won’t go further into it … except I thought, afterwards, I can respect this. A source of strength infinitely greater than your training’s ever gonna give you – and in the Regiment, training’s all, to a level of aptitude and precision that you believe makes you equal to anyone. Any one. But in that moment, the one per