Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

‘They all began there, certainly. Yeats was prominent in it, and Elgar worked with Yeats. But his favourite was Algernon Blackwood. Did the music for Blackwood’s play The Starlight Express , and the music contained elements of The Wand of Youth . About children and the otherworld. Bit of a disaster, but they had fun. Blackwood was a likeable cove. Met him once at my uncle’s house – my Uncle Thomas was a latter-day member of the GD. Left me all his “secret papers”. Which was what started me off, I suppose.’

Athena smiled at the memory. Lol drank what remained of his Earl Grey.

‘But Elgar wasn’t a member of the Golden Dawn, was he?’

‘I think he might well have joined if it hadn’t been for his wife and her top-drawer conservative family. Alice, to whom he owed so much. Fortunately, however, Alice liked Blackwood and Blackwood liked Alice. She wrote in her diary of the “out of the world” conversations Elgar had with Blackwood. Blackwood …’

Athena pursed her lips.

‘I may have read one of his stories once,’ Lol said. ‘When I was a kid. “The Haunted and the Haunters”? Very scary.’

‘No, that was Bulwer-Lytton – ah, there , you see, Elgar liked his stories, too. Was said to have based one of his piano pieces on a novel of Bulwer-Lytton’s. Oh, Robinson, how intriguing … what is happening here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m trying to think …’ Athena pressing fingertips to her temples. ‘Yes … now … Blackwood wrote a strange novel about music, The Human Chord . It’s about a group of people – singers – brought together by a retired clergyman to intone the constituent notes in an archaic, mystical chord that will allow them to sound the secret names of God and thus draw down immense power from the heavens. It’s a mad, romantic book but – as with all Blackwood’s fiction – was drawn from his personal experience, in this case with The Golden Dawn. Now…’

Athena rose and went to one of the floor-to-ceiling cupboards. When she opened it up, Lol saw that its sagging shelves were bulging with books. Athena knew what she was looking for, however, and brought it back to her window seat.

‘We’re looking at Plato. And, of course, Pythagoras. And probably some forgotten ancient Egyptian before that. We’re looking at a time when music was not “a branch of the arts” but a medium of construction … the construction of the universe itself. Pythagoras saw an exquisite mathematical harmony in the universe, and the harmony was held together by music. Music was formed upon strict laws … music was the law. Can you comprehend any of this?’

‘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.’