Remains of an Altar

small offerings in … what? A celebration of survival?’ She dared to touch the tree with one hand. ‘What about you?’

‘To be quite honest, it kind of excites the hell out of me.’

‘Mmm, thought it might.’

‘Like, you read about ancient theories on music, and it seems so remote and … theoretical. But when you actually find a link with a bit of landscape only an hour or so from where you live. And then you come, for the first time, and it’s…’

‘It’s a tree, Lol.’

‘Merrily, it is so palpably not … just … a … tree.’

‘Well, it … it’s certainly the oak in the big picture over Tim Loste’s fireplace. I’m sure of that.’

It was all rolling at her like the ball lightning that Spicer had talked about, connections forming: all the saplings in the pots outside Loste’s house and the one planted in his garden … had they been grown from acorns picked up here, descendants of the Whiteleafed Oak?

It was as well to keep reminding yourself that the central reason you were here was finally to get to meet Tim Loste, without whom…

Lol stepped back, as if the atmosphere was too charged so close to the massive tree. You brought a blocked musician to what was alleged to be the most powerful source of musical energy within his ambit, you had to expect a certain … fascination.

‘If a few white leaves appeared on your oak tree, it was taken as a sign of major change.’

‘Athena?’

‘So if there was a tree here that was full of white leaves, maybe it was seen as a place where you could find transformation.’

‘That figures. Winnie’s blueprint for Tim Loste seems to be all about transformation. Like The Dream of Gerontius. The processing of the soul.’

‘You mentioned there were some other pictures on Loste’s walls,’ Lol said.

‘Mostly, they were places I didn’t recognize. Hills. Churches. But some were well known.’

‘Stonehenge?’ he said. ‘Glastonbury?’

She stared at him.

‘What the hell else did that woman tell you?’

Lol sat down in the grass, outside the growing shadow of the oak.

‘I didn’t want to confuse you with the bigger picture before you rang Winnie. The Three Choirs is only the local part of the story.’

‘I’m not sure I can handle this.’

Merrily sat next to him and he told her, his face shining in the blush of evening, about the big picture: twelve of them. A dozen perpetual choirs in south-west Britain, on the perimeter of a vast circle – supposedly. Their locations including Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Llantwit Major in South Wales, site of an ancient monastic college.

Not exactly recorded history. Poetic history. It could be valid, but scepticism, Merrily thought, might be safer at this stage.

‘If you plot the big circle,’ Lol said, ‘you find Whiteleafed Oak is the centre – equidistant from Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Llantwit. The pivot.’

‘But these – Stonehenge, Glastonbury, et cetera – were the only known sites?’

‘The only ones actually named in early Welsh literature. The others have been identified in places like Meifod, near Welshpool, Llandovery in west Wales and Goring-on-Thames – the word Goring comes from Cor, which means choir.’

‘So we’re … sitting at the centre of…’

‘… Arguably the most important focus of musical energy in Britain’s oldest established culture. A culture in which music was not one of the arts, part of entertainment … but a crucial element in the structure of life. An element in religion but also part of science and mathematics. And all the more spiritual for that.’

‘So all these offerings…’

‘Oh … I should’ve mentioned that some people visiting the presumed sites of perpetual choirs have said that they can still be heard. As a kind of droning, like distant bees. But then … people are impressionable.’

‘Erm … ?’

‘Just the birds,’ Lol said.

‘Thank God for that. So, we’re assuming that Elgar knew this place.’

‘Elgar said there wasn’t a single lane in Worcestershire that he hadn’t been down. Would’ve been an easy walk from Birchwood. Where he was living when he composed Caractacus. Is this his sacred oak? Look.’

Lol stood up and walked down below the tree where, guarded by younger oaks, there was a depression in the ground, a hollow. Merrily looked down at a charcoal stain near its centre. Fires were still being lit here. Worn bits of branches were lying around in the shallow pit like discarded bones. So much here suggestive of bone. A knobbly outgrowth at the base of the great oak itself was like a big bovine skull with one jagged eye socket.

‘Everything has its dark side,’ Lol said.

The last segment of sun went into the ground like a household fire collapsing in a shower of bright red sparks.

‘So this,’ Merrily said, ‘is where New Age paganism meets High Catholicism.’

‘This very spot.’

‘The Three Counties, though … I mean, the Three Choirs Festival is this posh, prestigious … the sort of thing that Sophie attends. Are we really looking at something distantly descended from some folk memory of pagan chanting?’

‘The official version is that it was set up as a clerical charity about three hundred years ago. Religious music performed – Handel and Purcell. But who knows? Be interesting to hear what Loste has to say.’

‘Except they’re not here.’ Merrily stepping away from the edge of the pit, looking all around. ‘She said an hour.’

‘Or they might be waiting for darkness,’ Lol said. ‘According to Dan, the choirs start at nine. Until three in the morning. Would they really be here, rather than with one of the choirs?’

‘Maybe Loste standing under that tree, remotely conducting his three choirs from the centre of the circle?’

‘Maybe we’ll get to see.’

‘Don’t build up your hopes. Between us and him there’s Sparke.’

The western sky was like dull copper and the air was heavy with stored heat. Merrily noticed that she and Lol were almost whispering, as if the oak might be absorbing it all, to be replayed to future generations.

Lol said, ‘You want to go back to Wychehill, see if she’s around?’

‘What if they come here while we’re gone? They won’t necessarily come the same way we did. Loste knows the hidden paths.’

‘I’ll stay, if you like.’

‘On your own? Here?’

He shrugged. Merrily tried to make out his expression, but it was too dim now, veils of mauve and sepia.

‘It’s less than ten minutes away,’ Lol said, ‘and we’ve both got mobiles. I’ll walk with you back to the car and when you’re on your way back you call me, so I can be waiting for you. If they turn up, I’ll call you straight away.’

‘OK. Just … you know…’

‘Don’t do pagan things? Merrily, I’m not Jane. I don’t even know any pagan things.’

They walked back, hand in hand, towards the hamlet of Whiteleafed Oak. The night was warm and the air smelled like a wholefood shop. Only a few weeks to the first hay harvest and that rich caramel scent which Merrily