Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

‘Ah, Brinsop,’ he said. ‘The jewel in my crown.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve never been before.’

‘Then I mustn’t spoil it for you, Merrily. Is there a problem there? I certainly haven’t heard of one, but when one hears, out of the blue, from your good self…’

‘Do you know a guy called Byron Jones? Colin Jones?’

‘Ah, now, that would be the man with the private army base?’

‘Say that again.’

‘I exaggerate. He calls it The Compound. Once a pig farm, a mile or so out of what used to be the village. The farm became derelict, the house was sold off and this chap bought the land. Lived there in a caravan, then suddenly built this rather lavish bungalow, as if he’d come into money.’

‘What did you mean by private army?’

‘Not an army, a base. He has a training area with an assault course and all that sort of thing. He run courses for military enthusiasts, and the place is done out like a real army base with high wire fencing and authentic warning signs. Part of the mystique, I suppose. Looks more secret and exciting than the actual SAS place down the road. Boys will always be boys, Merrily.’

‘He had planning permission for all this?’

‘Not always needed. And some of the objectors were appeased when, at his own expense, he planted extensive woodland to conceal the site. That was about a year ago.’

‘Mr Jones is ex-SAS, I believe.’

‘Well, yes, that always helps, doesn’t it? Especially in this area.’

‘Does he come to church?’

‘If he does, it’s not when there’s a service on,’ Dick Willis said.

The sun was just visible through the cloud, like a pound coin in a handkerchief, as Merrily got out and locked the car. She shook herself, felt a little better.

The site was fairly remote, but the churchyard was well looked after. Nothing overgrown here, and most of the uncrowded gravestones were upright. A huge sentinel evergreen stood beyond the wooden gate, looking taller than the church which sat behind it, under the hill. A compact greystone church with a conical bell-tower. More central Wales than Herefordshire, but comfortable in its lusher ground.

And the site… Jane might well be interested. Different levels, perhaps a suggestion of earthworks and, across the lowest field beyond the church, a small, dark-green lake. Or a big reeded pond. Or, possibly, a moat, all wooded-in.

A lovely spot, really. This was one of those churches that had had to be here, Jane would say. Had to be here. Sacred ground long before Christianity.

Merrily walked past the church porch towards the water and was pulled up by a name on a gravestone, directly in front. Not ornate, but tall and prominently sited and making an instant connection with one of the paperbacks on Syd Spicer’s desk.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JANE WINDER WHO WAS BORN AT KESWICK, CUMBERLAND AND DIED AT BRINSOP COURT, IN THIS PARISH OCTOBER 16, 1843 IN THE 43 YEAR OF HER AGE.

This Stone is erected by WILLIAM and MARY WORDSWORTH, of Rydal Mount

Westmoreland in affectionate and grateful remembrance of her faithful services continued through fifteen years.

Good God. Merrily began to tingle. That sense of the preordained. A piece of an unknown jigsaw. The piece that slotted in to tell you there was a jigsaw.

William and Mary. Rydal Mount. Westmoreland. The Wordsworths – the Wordsworths – were here?

She walked back to the porch, went in. Always the same when you approached an unknown church, that frisson of mild apprehension, as you turned the ring handle. Some resistance, but the door wasn’t locked. It gave, and she went in, and whatever she was expecting – perhaps, given the location, something frugal, cold, drab, rudimentary – it wasn’t.

No smell of stone or damp. She made out lurking colours, and not only in the windows. Much metallic glistening from the chancel.

Merrily waited at the bottom of the nave. Waited for something to happen, something to move, shadows to part.

‘Blimey,’ she said, to nobody she could see.

This was all strongly medieval. Medieval like in the actual Middle Ages. A concave golden canopy was shining over the altar, like the reflector on a lamp. There were three gilded angels, wings aggressively spread, brandishing candles.

A treasure house. Out here in the deep sticks it was all so entirely unexpected as to be approaching the surreal. Merrily picked up a leaflet from the pile and took a seat at the back. Chairs, light-coloured wood, not pews. A lot of money had been spent since medieval times, enhancing what was here. The angels were confidently balanced on the top edge of the chancel screen, guarding a Christ on the cross. A chess-piece kingly Christ in a golden crown. Not suffering, but proud and triumphant. In control.

And when you looked more carefully, you began to see all the dragons. Merrily came back to her feet.

Everywhere, dragons were dying.

There he was, red-crossed, in a window. And here he was again, more modern and explicit, on a pedestal, in full armour with his foot on the dragon’s neck, his spear down its throat.

Merrily opened the leaflet. St George. Brinsop Church was dedicated to the dragon-slaying patron saint of England. The leaflet said the church had been saved from ‘certain ruin’ in the mid-nineteenth century, old windows rediscovered and restored. It had never looked back since, acquiring much sympathetic embellishment by Sir Ninian Comper, ecclesiastical architect and Gothic revivalist, in the early twentieth century. His work included the angels on the wooden screen. And yet, for all Comper’s bling, it still felt like a country church, small enough to be welcoming. Some bright, modern stained glass: a St Francis window with birds. A First World War window with crucifixion symbolism. And one…

In memory of Wm Wordsworth, poet laureate.

A frequent sojourner in this parish.

Back to the leaflet. Wordsworth’s wife, Mary, had been a sister of Thomas Hutchinson, who was leasing the twelfth-century Brinsop Court, the poet often spending holidays here, with his wife and his sister, Dorothy.

Merrily stood up, feeling ignorant… parochial. Why hadn’t she known about this? The next church to Traherne’s, at Credenhill. Traherne and Wordsworth… separated by more than a century, but two poets with a lot in common. Lovers of landscape, solitude. Nature mystics.

Odd. Was it odd? She walked into the chancel, looked back to where the far window was halved by the bar of the screen, split by the shaft of the cross. This was very much a theme church, St George the principal one. Why did you always feel sorry for the dragon, instantly disliking the smug bastard with the spear? The charitable view was that – lance, deep throat – it was a piece of early sexual symbolism.

She padded across the nave. As usual, alone in a church, Merrily didn’t feel alone, but this time it wasn’t just about God. That little green book of Wordsworth poems suggested that Syd Spicer had been here.

Byron and Syd? Byron who despised Christianity… not a man’s religion, not a soldier’s religion. She felt Syd pondering this, lighting up. He’d want to smoke in here. Too rich for Syd, this place. Wouldn’t have liked the golden angels. Phoney High Church iconography , he’d said of what had been inflicted on his own church at Wychehill. Grotesque.

Syd, you just knew, preferred drab, damp and frugal.

Merrily moved on to a small lady chapel with more Wordsworth memorials. A medieval stone coffin lid in the floor reminded her of the Knights Templar church at Garway. Stories everywhere, written in glass and stone, many of them modern and literal but no less effective for that.

And then she came to what, unmistakably, was the real thing. Out of place, isolated, but probably pre-dating the wall into which it was set.