‘Something like that.’ Mum wasn’t laughing now. ‘The word is – according to Sophie – that Siân’s shadowing Archdeacon Neale for a month, using the time to put together a new game plan for rationalizing the Diocese. I’ve known for a while that I could be affected.’
‘But you can say no to more parishes, can’t you?’
‘I can. But I’m on a five-year contract, which may not be renewed if I don’t agree with whatever they propose. No getting round the fact that I’m one of the very few to have only one church. Because I’ve also got Deliverance.’
‘She wants to figure out how to turn you into the Vicar of North Herefordshire, with South Shropshire, and no time for Deliverance?’
‘Who knows?’
‘You sound like you don’t care.’
‘What can I do, anyway? Siân’s view has always been that Deliverance should be spread out over quite an extensive team. So you have a larger number of clergy with rudimentary training in aspects of healing and deliverance. Like the way – stupid analogy, but it’s all I can think of – a percentage of police are firearms-trained. Many more now than there used to be.’
‘And you’d …’ Jane was dismayed ‘… you’d actually go along with that?’
‘I think too many armed cops can be dangerous. Better to have a handful who know when not to shoot. But I didn’t get ordained to become Deliverance Consultant.’
‘You’re good at it. I don’t care what you say.’
‘Anyway, it might all be academic. She may not become Archdeacon. And there’s nothing she can do in a few days.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Just stay cool, disappear into your apartment, feed the cat and don’t get into arguments.’
‘Me? Arguments?’
‘Please?’
‘I’ll try not to antagonize her. But I will be keeping an eye on her.’
‘Just don’t make it too obvious.’
‘Discretion is my middle name.’
Mum smiled this weak kind of if only smile. Her face looked drawnin, blotchy.
‘You know what?’ Jane said. ‘You shouldn’t be going to Garway, you should be going to the doc’s.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘Have you looked at yourself?’
‘Just need a good night’s sleep.’
‘No, you just don’t want to give Kent Asprey the satisfaction of having you at his mercy.’
‘I’m all right. Probably one of those twenty-four-hour bugs. Be fine tomorrow. Why are you hugging that case?’
‘You weren’t fine yesterday.’ Jane took her airline bag over to the desk and unzipped it. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid this isn’t going to help you sleep.’
Mum stiffened.
‘What’ve you done?’
‘No, it’s not … I was talking to Robbie Williams. The head of history?’
‘I know.’
‘He’s a medieval historian, and he knows a lot about the Crusades and the Knights Templar.’
‘Jane, you didn’t—?’
‘I didn’t say a word about you. I just said I’d been across to Garway and got interested. Bottom line is, I asked him about the green man, and he said he thought the one at Garway Church was a representation of … something else.’
Jane pulled out her plastic document case and opened it out. All the stuff she’d printed out from the net.
For some reason – Sod’s Law – it opened to the crude engraving of the dark and devilish bearded figure with a goat’s head and cloven hooves, wings and a woman’s breasts and a candle burning on its head between the horns.
Mum went, ‘Oh, for God’s sake …’
26
Scarecrow for the Vulgar
AN IMAGE OOZING calculated perversity. Paint it in blood on the wall, in the soiled sanctity of some abandoned crypt: the Devil, the Antichrist, the Beast 666. The oldest enemy.
Introduced into the vicarage, inevitably, by little Jane.
Merrily’s first instinct was to cover it up with the mouse mat, take it away, but that would be playing into its … hooves.
Don’t let Siân see it. Siân, whose upper lip would pucker in distaste – not revulsion, no nervous fingering of the pectoral cross here, merely distaste at the medievalism of it.
Only, it wasn’t medieval. Nineteenth century, probably.
Merrily propped up the plastic folder against the computer and gazed into the smudgy smirk of the goat/man/woman/demon. The face of bored decadence. The face of look-at-me-I’m-so-twisted-and-satanic-and-don’t-you-just-love-it?
The red and black ink had blurred, making it look even more perverse. Hints of blood and lipstick.
‘It’s an old printer and I probably whipped the paper out too fast,’ Jane said. ‘You’ve got to be a bit careful about what you download, Morrell has occasional dawn swoops. Anyway, this is the work of Eliphas Levi. You have heard of him?’
‘Heard of him?’ Merrily turned wearily to Jane. ‘Flower, I’ve worn his jeans.’
Jane scowled. Merrily smiled fractionally.
‘Sorry. Yeah, I have heard of him. French occultist, late nineteenth century or thereabouts, who, under his real name, was an ordained priest. Although he and the Catholic Church became increasingly estranged – didn’t help when he ran off with a sixteen-year-old girl. Like Aleister Crowley, who claimed to be his reincarnation, he really wanted to be a rock star but, unfortunately for both of them, rock music wouldn’t be invented for another century.’
‘I hate it when you’re flip,’ Jane said. ‘Although I realize it’s essentially a defensive thing.’
Merrily felt the thickness of the file. Must have taken Jane quite a long time to collect all this.
‘Sorry. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble. Yeah, I suppose you could be pointing me in a direction I hadn’t thought of. Both Levi and Crowley, as I recall, were, at some stage in their murky careers, into what they saw as the tradition of the Knights Templar.’
‘If you already know it all I’ve been wasting my time.’
Jane snatched down the copy of the engraving, looking quite hurt. Merrily sighed.
‘I’ve probably forgotten most of it. Remind me.’
‘That woman will be down soon.’
‘No, she won’t. She’ll see the value of giving us some time to talk before I leave.’
It was like this: in 1307, with no crusades on the agenda, the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon were no longer even pretending to be poor. They were multinational bankers: a wealthy, powerful, secretive and formidable presence.
The guardians of too many arcane secrets – that was Jane’s view of it, but to orthodox historians they were simply a threat to the French monarchy. And the Pope. This Pope, anyway, Clement V, based at Avignon and therefore under the protection of the French king, Philip IV. A puppet Pope.
Jane talked and it all came back.
How the list of charges against the Templars was drawn up, or dreamed up, nobody could quite say, but it was impressively damning: they denied Christ, they didn’t believe in the Mass, they practised sodomy and exchanged obscene kisses on being received into the Order. They were taught that the Masters of the Order – none of them ordained priests – could absolve them from sin.
And they worshipped this bearded head, which came to be known as Baphomet. Mr Williams had told Jane that the name was seen by some sources as a corruption of Muhammad, but Merrily vaguely remembered other interpretations.
‘It was quite clever,’ Jane said. ‘If you look closely at the charges, you can definitely see where some of them are coming from.’