Falling Idols (23 page)

“And this followed him everywhere he worked?” she asked.

“More or less. Although — and mind, I’ve never undertaken a formal study — it would seem that the later in Geoffrey’s life he worked on a church, the more instances you have of people claiming to see movement in the carvings he did there. Makes sense, though. He continually refines his skills, his works appear progressively more lifelike.”

“And the Church of St. John the Baptist is…?” Kate said. “My grandmother told us…”

Crenshaw nodded proudly. “The last and greatest jewel in our Geoffrey’s formidable crown.”

“So most of those reported movements, they’ve come from here, then,” she said. “Have you ever…?”

“Oh heavens no. Perhaps I stare at them too directly for them to ever get the better of me.”

He filled in the sketchy background. Blackburn had supposedly apprenticed under the master sculptor hired for the Octagon at Ely Cathedral, built to replace a tower that had collapsed in 1322.

“Surviving records indicate he worked on the roof bosses.” Crenshaw pointed to a face leering from a junction of two ceiling beams. “Same thing, only in stone, and much higher. Where the ribs of the vaults meet. Gossip had it that his master was more than a bit consumed with jealousy by the end of his apprenticeship.”

After Ely, he’d worked on other churches, abbeys, and priories in East Anglia, and within a decade his reputation had taken him even to France, to supervise the sculpture workshop at the cathedral nearing completion in Chutreaux.

It was this aspect of construction that gave her pause. That Geoffrey had been the master sculptor of record someplace — or one of many, on a two-century project like Chutreaux — didn’t mean any particular piece had come from his chisel. In fact, most couldn’t have. A few, maybe, but the rest only done under his tutelage.

“When comparing, one can tell,” said Crenshaw. “I’ve been to Chutreaux. Been to most of the others. And everywhere, it’s two different classes of work: Geoffrey’s. And everyone else’s.”

“But here, though. My gran said he—”

“Did very nearly the whole thing. Yes. You’ll find the odd bit here and there that doesn’t seem up to his standards, so he must’ve had apprentices from time to time. But overall? If you see it, chances are he did it. Evidently devoted the last two decades of his life to just this one building.”

“Wouldn’t that have been a little atypical?”

“Too right. Perhaps a bit mad, considering the ah, well … subject matter.”

“Are there any records saying why?”

“Nothing ever found from the time, no. References in a couple of late-sixteenth century histories, now, yes, claiming all sorts of deviltry had been got up to here, but one must consider intent. They’d just had the Reformation, so such accounts do tend to smack of appalled Puritans tarnishing the repute of Catholic leftovers.” He broke with an unexpectedly mirthful smile. “Rather like what those two lavender-scented lovelies will be telling whomever will listen about your gentleman friend.”

Alain. She’d forgotten about him, and glanced around until Crenshaw pointed him out, dozing on a seat while slumped against the outer wall of one of the congregational stalls.

“Except,” Kate went on, “I don’t see anything here that’s patently Catholic.”

“Precisely why the Calvinists and their ilk were convinced that Catholics were idolaters, if not outright devil-worshippers. Quite the inharmonious—”

Abruptly, Crenshaw cut himself off in mid-sentence, glaring across the church at something behind her. Kate’s first thought was that Alain had roused, and what was he desecrating?

“You there!” Crenshaw shouted. “Get out of here! Right now!”

She turned. Not Alain — he was blinking drowsily at the ruckus. Instead, it was somebody past him, lingering beside one of the carved pillars. Kate couldn’t see him well. He was backlit by the light coming in through a lancet window.

“Out of here this minute or I’ll have the police down, this is the last time, do you hear me?”

He was a sturdy sort, she could tell that much, with broad, heavy shoulders, and hair that in silhouette appeared shaggy and unkempt. When he moved out of the direct light, she saw that he wore a topcoat that might’ve once been pricey, but had more likely been salvaged from a wealthier man’s trash, and beneath it, a dark cableknit sweater, tattered here, unraveling there. His beard hadn’t fully grown in, a few weeks’ worth. Age? Hard to determine. Old enough to have earned a few lines. More than she had.

“He’s only annoyed he didn’t collect his fee.” It took Kate a moment to realize the man was addressing her. He then turned his amusement on Crenshaw. “Oh, I
have
it. All you need do is come take it from me. Fair enough, innit?”

Crenshaw didn’t move, seething at the man, who held his own ground. Alain glanced back and forth between them as though having awakened in the middle of the wrong movie. Finally the man relented, but with an air of having once more proved a point he’d proven times before. He strolled toward the narthex and Crenshaw followed, marching a consistent dozen paces behind, until the man was out the door, leaving behind his own distinctive odor.

“Bloody vagabond,” Crenshaw said. “How it is he gets in here I’ll never know.”

“There aren’t any other entrances?”

“None we’ve found in six hundred years. Slips in when both Mrs. Webster and I are distracted, then hides, is my guess, but I’ll give him this: He’s a first-rank sneak. Been doing it for years, on and off, and we’ve never caught him.”

“Do you even know who he is?”

Alain was walking up, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “Somebody who’s never learned why God invented Calvin Klein.”

“Must live around here somewhere,” said Crenshaw. “I’m sure the locals know him, but Mrs. Webster and I motor up from Ludlow, so these are hardly our people.” He shook his head. “Never harms anything, it’s just the idea. But should you encounter him whilst taking your pictures, I’d keep my distance if I were you.”

Kate nodded, more to pacify than agree, then registered with a shock what she’d missed until now. Surely she’d have seen it as a child, but the recollection wasn’t there. Today, for all intents and purposes, was the first time.

It stood upon the wide platform above the doors, a lifesize effigy whose heavy-lidded eyes stared the length of the nave, toward the rose window where he would greet each rising sun. In shadows now, his mystery was heightened tenfold, hunching with muscled body and sinewed limbs, balanced on wide-stanced cloven feet. His magnificent head was ever-so-slightly inclined downward, as though deigning to acknowledge whoever paused to stare. Alain, she knew, would kill for his cheekbones, while shunning the wild serpentine beard. And he’d have no use at all for the goat horns, sprouting robustly from either side of the forehead, curving back and to each side. A long tongue wagged from between parted lips with a grin of lascivious delight.

Here was the face that had given medieval churchmen all the devil they’d ever needed.

“Pan, right?” she said.

“Or Cernunnos. Call him what you will.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t notice him before now.”

“You’d be amazed how many don’t, until they leave,” Crenshaw said. “One could be excused for thinking he enjoys it that way.”

*

She was a betting woman all right, but knew no one here well enough to make the bet in the first place. It was nothing to be proud of, anyway: She was giving the relationship another week at most, after which Alain would find an excuse to go home early.

It’d been entirely physical anyway, had just run its course sooner than expected. With his mussed raven hair and caramel skin and long-lashed eyes, he’d never been less than beautiful, always a willing model for her artier, more indulgent shots. Most were admittedly Mapplethorpe-influenced, somewhere between deifying and fetishizing. She’d strip him down and zoom in for the kill, the shadowy, side-lit curves of his arm or ass like a blown-glass vase, then devour everything the camera had left. By now, it didn’t amount to much.

After early enthusiasm, Alain now hated England, she deduced, because nobody recognized him. Maybe two dozen ads and dialogue-free parts in three music videos meant he didn’t have to walk far back home before inspiring double-takes, but fame apparently ended in U.S. territorial waters and it was eating him alive.

He sulked. He was depressed by British television — not enough channels and he claimed he couldn’t find anything but snooker tournaments and sheepdog trials. He logged epic phone time calling home to reassure himself that his world still existed. She’d thrust the keys to the rental car at him — “Take it, go, go find something you
are
interested in” — but he wouldn’t hear of it. Steering from the right on the wrong side of the road? It was no way to drive, not on these twisty, narrow lanes.

Meanwhile, Kate settled day by day into this green and misty autumn sojourn, realizing, Alain’s kvetching aside, she’d not been this content in … she couldn’t remember.

Nigel Crenshaw entrusted her with a spare key to the church so she could come early or stay late if she pleased. He loaned her books about the region, which she eagerly perused at the bed-and-breakfast in Craven Arms and in the area pubs. Little, if anything, was said about Geoffrey Blackburn, but they did help her lift him farther out of the vacuum of dry intellect and make him into a fuller person, in the context of a real time and place.

With every day, the more her camera captured of his labors, the more Kate wondered about him: What had driven him to such excellence instead of settling for being a merely competent artisan; why he’d so thoroughly committed himself to rendering the grotesque instead of threatless, tranquil beauty.

She thought she understood after a few days, understood as one can only after admitting to infatuation with someone not only never met, but who never could be.

Perhaps, despite the institution behind his commissions, he had seen enough of the world to harbor no illusions of any divine goodness, and spent a lifetime chipping its cruelty into something more manageable. Or making intimate friends of its harsher faces. Or telling everyone else what he knew in metaphors they would understand.

She could identify. So maybe Geoffrey Blackburn wasn’t so much ancestor as mirror.

Despite everything it had brought her, she often felt that winning the Pulitzer for that hateful photo had been the worst thing that could’ve happened to her, at least at such a young age. Not that recognition itself was harmful; more that she’d been left with the inevitable what-next syndrome. The odds against her ever again being in such a right time and place were astronomical.

And she doubted she would have the stomach to again witness anything comparable. Even the first time, she’d shot the picture like a pro, but later cried for a day and a half.

She’d shot news only for another thirteen months.

Commercial photography paid better, after all, and nobody died in front of the lens. Only their careers, if they’d had the audacity to age badly, or even at all.

*

At least once per day, while working outside the church, she caught him watching from varying distances and differing vantages: the man Crenshaw seemed to believe he’d run off.

Some days he stood in the meadows, others near the treeline. Never any threat, hardly a movement at all out of him, he’d stand with his hands in his pockets while autumn’s bluster flapped his coat about his knees; stand there like a displaced and rough-hewn Heathcliff.

At first she ignored him, turning away nearly as soon as she saw him. He’d be gone the next time she checked. Day by day she grew bolder, returning his gaze unfazed, and finally snapping his picture, then crossing arms over chest, determined to outstare him. He threw his head back with a hearty laugh, then walked into the trees until trunks and leaves swallowed him up.

She inquired about him of the locals — as long as there were pubs, there was no shortage of opinions on anything — finding that no one knew much about him, only that if he made his home nearby, none could tell you how to get there.