‘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.
A stone slab. Carved images. St George again, an early depiction. George in dragon-slaying mode, but on a horse this time. She consulted the leaflet: originally a tympanum, a piece of ornate masonry between the top of a door and the arch. Herefordshire Romanesque. She knew a bit about that – early medieval. The leaflet said that a stone in an adjacent field was believed to mark the actual spot where St George had killed the dragon.
Sure. The St George who apparently was Turkish, the dragon whose legend was set in the Middle East. Merrily imagined Syd tapping his ash on the saint’s helmet, knowing he could’ve taken George, unarmed, any day of the week.
Never quite understood how saints like George fitted into the fabric of Christianity. A medieval thing, probably, an excuse for crusades, brutality masquerading as valour… a frenzy of pure excitement.
There was a whiff of cigarette smoke. Syd Spicer was back.
The Syd of an overheated confessional afternoon in the church at Wychehill, when he’d used those exact words, recalling the lethal focus you acquired in the Regiment.
…a frenzy of pure excitement… I understand the rush you get when you convince yourself that, in the great scheme of things, it’s not only justified but necessary. When you know that a difficult situation can only be resolved by an act of swift, efficient, intense and quite colossal violence.
God…
Merrily was jerked back against the stone by a shuddering in a pocket of her jeans. She fumbled out the mobile.
There was no sound for a couple of seconds, wonky signal, then Fiona’s voice.
‘You’re there, aren’t you?’
‘Brinsop. At the church.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d better tell you,’ Fiona said.
36
Merrily took the phone outside and stood by the grave of the Wordsworths’ faithful servant Jane Winder. Looking across to the possible moat, the clutch of trees on what might be an island, the viridian march of conifers up the flank of Credenhill.
‘There was a party,’ Fiona said. ‘A publication party. Not for Byron: one of the other better-known SAS authors, a friend of Sam’s, so although he didn’t like parties much he thought we should go. And there were a lot of people there that Sam hadn’t seen in years, so he was doing a fair bit of catching up. Are you still there?’
‘I’ll try and improve the signal.’
Merrily moved up to the high ground behind the church, overlooking lumped and tiered fields where a village might once have stood. The signal had moved up to two stars.
‘When was this?’
‘About a month after the book was burned. I hadn’t been feeling well that night, and Sam was talking to his old mates, so I slid away and sat down at a table on my own. And then Byron was there. Not Liz, just Byron. Sam was conspicuously avoiding him, but he came up to me. Very charming and attentive. Very smooth and elegant in his Heathcliff way. Got me a brandy and sat down. Said he didn’t know what he was doing here, he’d never particularly liked… the author we were supposed to be celebrating, and his book was rubbish.’
‘This was in London?’
‘No, it was a country-house hotel, in Buckinghamshire. We’d decided to stay there, so Sam could have a few drinks. All free – the publishers were spending a lot of money on this guy at the time. A lot more than had ever been spent on Byron, anyway, and he seemed to be taking it as a personal slight. But he was very nice to me. Coming out with all sorts of bullshit. How he wished he had a wife like me, who understood.’
‘Understood what?’
‘Oh, you know, what it was like leaving the Regiment. Having to slow down your metabolism… all this. His metabolism didn’t seem to have slowed at all. He was very intense, whatever he was talking about, very concentrated. Much, I suppose, as you’d imagine he’d be on some operation behind enemy lines. In fact, I remember thinking perhaps that was how he saw this party. Someone else’s wealthy publisher, someone else’s inferior book. As though he was at war with other writers who’d been in the Regiment. The underdog, because his was a kids’ book.’