So when a question arose about Black Masses, I knew just where to go.
Clarissa Ledger was a Huxley—cousin of some sort to Thomas Henry, “Darwin's Bulldog,” whose grandson Aldous looked to be the literary world's latest enfant terrible. Clarissa Ledger was also C. H. Ledger, M.D., D. Phil, one-time Warden of St Hilda's, author of fourteen books on religious topics ranging from Chinese Taoism to the Sufis of the Arabian peninsula, a woman of enormous curiosity, determination, physical courage (I had seen her initiation scars from a two-year sojourn in the mountains of East Africa), and mental agility, all of which persisted into her eighty-seventh year. To her immense irritation, her body's infirmities meant that now, the world must come to her.
I found her at home, as usual on a Sunday, returned, fed, and rested after attending early Communion at one or another of the rich array of Oxford churches. This morning it had been St. Michael's, which she pronounced “deliciously gloomy,” and delivered a wickedly perceptive and academically precise flaying of the rector's homily, making me snort with unkind laughter. Her attendant granddaughter shook her head in disapproval, and served us cups of weak tea and tasteless biscuits before leaving us to our talk.
Professor Ledger gazed mournfully down at the liquid in her cup. “One of the medicine men pronounced on the evils of strong drink, which caused my family to unite against me and deny me coffee. I think they are hoping it may have a calming effect on my tongue as well.”
“I remember your coffee. Perhaps they are merely hoping to preserve the china from dissolving altogether.”
“I threatened to move bag and baggage back to the desert, but they did not take the threat seriously.” She looked up from her cup, and fixed me with a beady blue gaze. “If you receive a wire from me demanding assistance, know to bring your passport with you.”
I laughed—slightly uncomfortably, I admit, since it was exactly the sort of thing this old lady would do. “Or, I could bring you coffee from time to time.”
“That might be better, Mary. I'm not sure how my bones would care for sleeping on the ground now.”
We talked for a while about adventures, and I told her about my time in India earlier that year, and about the spring in Japan. I thought she might disapprove of the interference such investigations had on my academic career, but she saw past that to the riches of experience. Eventually, she asked me what brought me to see her.
“I need to know about the Black Mass.”
“Not here,” she said immediately. “If you want to talk about that, we need to be in the sunshine.”
I found myself smiling at her. “How would you feel about punting?”
Her wizened face lit up. “So long as I am not in charge of the pole, I should love it.”
So in the end, I did spend the day messing about in a boat. Her granddaughter and I trundled Professor Ledger around to St Hilda's in a Bath chair, chatting all the while about northern India. Once there, it was no effort at all to transfer her slight weight onto one of the college's boats, which had been draped with cushions and rugs to rival Cleopatra's barge. The granddaughter added food and drink sufficient to an Arctic expedition, a large umbrella, and a parcel of smelling salts and aspirins. I stepped onto the stern, rolled up my sleeves, and pushed away upstream, the granddaughter's voice still calling instructions from the bank.
A punt is twenty-four feet of low, blunt-ended boat propelled by dropping the end of a young tree into the river bottom, leaning on it with precision, then snapping the dripping pole up, hand over hand, until all sixteen feet of it are clear of the water. Several hundred of these repetitions go into a day's entertainment. It is a skill that, once learnt, comes back naturally, although after a long hiatus, disused muscles protest.
We dawdled around the cricket grounds, past the Sunday throng sunning themselves at the Botanic Gardens, dodging amateur boats-men and the seal-like heads of boys swimming in the high, mud coloured water. The sun-dappled contrast to last night's rainy preoccupation with a series-murderer made me feel as if I were emerging from an opium dream into fresh air. From time to time, my elderly companion would engage the occupants of other boats—once when she sweetly but inexorably exchanged our six bottles of picnic lemonade for one bottle of champagne belonging to a group of Balliol students (they had several more) and later absently to stuff that now-empty bottle into the throat of an adjoining row-boat's blaring gramophone—but for the most part, she talked. The subject matter caused nearby boats to linger for a moment, uncertain that they had overheard correctly, then hastily paddle or shove away when they had confirmed that yes, that extraordinary old lady had in fact just said such a thing.
“The Black Mass is, essentially, magic,” she began. “One might, of course, make the same accusation of the Church's own ritual Mass, depending on how seriously one interprets the idea of Transubstantiation and the transformation of the communicants who partake of Christ's body.” A pimpled boy at the oars ten feet away dropped his jaw at this statement, staring at Professor Ledger until the shouts of his passengers drew his attention to the upcoming collision. She went blithely on.
“No doubt, a high percentage of communicants over the centuries have taken the symbol as actual, and indeed, the Church itself encourages the belief that the Host is literally transformed from wheat flour into the body of Christ, and that when we take of His flesh, we are ourselves transformed into His flesh. Cannibals the world around would instantly agree, that eating a person imbues one with his essence. Speaking of which, did my granddaughter pack along those little meat pies I asked her for? Ah yes, there they are. Would you like one?”
I permitted the punt pole to drift behind us in the water, steering but not propelling, while I accepted one of the professor's diminutive game pies. I took a bite.
“Grouse?” I asked.
“One of my grandsons takes a house in Scotland for the Twelfth every year,” she said.
“Very nice.” Also very small. I took the glass I had propped among the boards at my feet, washed the pie down with champagne, and resumed the pole.
Professor Ledger jammed a clean handkerchief into the neck of the bottle and tied a piece of string around it, then dropped it over the side to keep it cool but unsullied in the river water—a very practiced move, indeed. She then held up a morsel of the pie in her gnarled fingers, eyeing it with scientific detachment. “One must wonder, if one partakes of the essence of grouse, how does it manifest? Does one explode into violent flight, or begin to make odd noises, or start to reproduce spectacularly?” This time a courting couple on the bank overheard her; as we drifted past, they craned after us so far, I expected to hear two large splashes.
“In any event, if one insists on a magical element to religion, one cannot then be surprised when magic is taken seriously. The Black Mass developed originally from the Feast of Fools, when idiots ruled the day and strong drink and carnality flowed unchecked. Harmless parody helps relieve pressure, and by keeping it under the auspices of the Church, one might say that licentiousness was kept licensed.
“However, with a work of magic at its core, the Mass was vulnerable to the most crass of interpretations: that the Host itself was where the power lay. If it all comes down to the Host, then equally it all flows back from that same place, so that, by using that scrap of unleavened bread as the point of the wedge, the authority of the Mass, and of the Church, and of God himself, could be turned on its head.
“The Black Mass was originally intended to profane the Host so as to turn its power to profane uses. From that beginning, the Black Mass grew like lichen on a rock, until one finds, say, the mass performed by Étienne Guibourg in the Seventeenth Century, in which the mistress of Louis Quatorze was stretched out on the altar with the chalice between her bare breasts”—a bespectacled undergraduate walking the path along Christchurch meadow dropped his book of poetry, bent to pick it up while looking over his shoulder at us, and fell on his face—“while the priest chanted his Latin to the devil.
?
??Sexuality, of course, is the central element in many of these Black celebrations, doubtless because the Church has aligned itself so definitively against free sexual expression. You've read the Marquis de Sade?”
“Er,” I replied. I felt a bit like the bespectacled undergraduate.
“Well, then you'll remember how often his corrupt sexuality contains reference to elements of the Church—the Host, the Mass, monks, priests.”
“What about blood?” I asked, a bit desperately.
Professor Ledger's bright eyes came to rest on my face. “My dear, why don't you tell me what you're after? Is this academic? Or one of your little investigations?”
I took the boat to the side opposite the footpath and worked the pole into the muck below, trapping us against the tree-lined bank. Once secure, I stepped over to the centre and settled onto cushions, retrieving the champagne and topping up our glasses.
“It's a case,” I answered, and told her about it, my voice just loud enough for her aged ears. I did not tell her all: not Holmes' personal stake in it, nor the identity of the dead woman found ten miles from my home. I think she guessed that I was leaving out a large part of it, but she did not comment.
“So,” I concluded some quarter hour later, “when there were objects that resemble quill trimmings at the murder sites, stained by what appears to be dried blood, and bits of black candle-wax as well, we had to wonder.”
“Necromancy,” she pronounced, her old voice quivering with distaste. “From nekros and manteid: ‘dead divination.’ Blood spells and invocations. Sealing a covenant. The darkest of the dark arts. And to use fresh blood, in situ …” She shook her head. “You must stop this person, Mary.”
I forbore to make reference to her deprecating “little investigations” comment, but dug the rucksack I had brought from London out from under half a dozen rugs, and handed her the Adlers' copy of Testimony. “It might help, if you were to look at this and tell me what you see.”
“Of course,” she said, although her hand hesitated, just a moment, before closing on the book's cover.
“I have to take it back to London with me,” I said in apology.
She patted her pockets until she found a pair of reading glasses, and opened the book.
I extricated the pole from the sucking mud without swamping the boat, and continued idly downstream to the Isis proper, then looped back up the Cherwell. We passed under Magdalen Bridge and were nearly to Mesopotamia when the aged academic closed the book and removed her spectacles.
I continued to punt in silence, though my muscles burned and my back ached.
“He writes as if in conversation with himself,” she mused. “No explanation, no attempt at a reasoned argument, no discursus at all, except to enjoy the sound of his own voice. And yes, it is a he, most definitely.”
“Yet this is not a journal, it is a printed book, of which there are at least two in existence,” I said.
“If there are two, there will be more. This is an esoteric document to be presented only to True Believers. I should imagine he may have another, either in existence or in preparation, to set his beliefs before the outer world.”
“The Text of Lights,” I said. “That was what one of his disciples called it.”
“Light indeed seems to be the basis of his cosmology—or rather, as you say, lights of various sorts: sun, moon, comets. Which reminds me, which comet do you imagine he was born under?”
“We think that of September 1882. There were no meteors then, as far as I can find, but he seems more than a little flexible when it comes to chronology. And to astronomy and geography, for that matter.”
“Hare-brained thinking at its best,” she said in disapproval.
“Madness being no excuse for sloppy ratiocination?” I asked, half joking.
She was not amused. “When one encounters a mystical system based upon the physical universe, it is generally manifested by a tight, even obsessive internal logic.”
“However,” I replied, “internal logic is not the same as rationality. ‘The desperation to support an untenable position to which one is nonetheless committed has caused centuries of extreme mental gymnastics.’”
The statement was a direct quote, levelled at me some years before during the defence of a paper by none other than Professor Clarissa Ledger.
She remembered, and laughed. “I believe that was the only time I heard you apply volume over logic.”
“Around you, only the once. But I think the author of Testimony never had you as a teacher.”
“Pray God, no.” The idea was, clearly, repugnant.
“Does the book suggest anything else about the man?” I asked her.
“He has a particular fascination for Scandinavian mythology, which I should suppose ties in with his interest in light—how the soul craves sunlight in the depths of a northern winter! I don't suppose you found any of the bodies hanging from trees?”
I glanced involuntarily around, but for once, there were no innocents in earshot. “Sorry, no.”
“So he is not specifically fixed on Woden.”
“No, but Norse myth, yes. He served a gathering of his closest followers a drink based on mead, which I think of as very Norse.”
“Just mead?”
“It was drugged as well, with hashish and some kind of toadstool.”
“Oh! Oh dear, that is not at all good.”
“Er, why?”
She looked up, surprise battling the fatigue in her wrinkled features. “Ragnarok, of course. The final battle between chaos and order, the end of times and the beginning of a new age. I should say that, considering the impetus towards synthesis evinced by Testimony's author, the deluded soul that wrote these words sincerely believes that by committing sacrifice under the influence of the ‘Lights,’ he can bring about the end of the world.”
Great Work (2): The thrice-born man shapes the world
by learning to focus his will and the will of his community.
He uses the Tool to cut through empty pretence and loose
the contents of a vessel. He calculates the hour and
place to align the Universe with his act. This together
makes his Great Work.
Testimony, IV:1
ARMAGEDDON?” HOLMES STARED AS IF I WERE THE one about to initiate the events of Ragnarok.
“Not precisely, but essentially, yes.”
He had been at Mycroft's flat when I returned at five-thirty and found him disgruntled at failing to locate a seller of illicit drugs on a Sunday afternoon. My own return—glowing with sun, exercise, and information—did not make matters smoother.
“We're not after a gibbering idiot ripe for Bedlam, Russell.”
“No, we're after a very clever fanatic obsessed with dark religion. A man practical enough to use Millicent Dunworthy as a keystone to his church, and at the same time, mad enough to believe in human sacrifice. Holmes, the man makes careful annotations in his books with blood, he doesn't splash it across people in his meeting hall.”
“Not yet,” he retorted grimly.
Mycroft came in then from his daily perambulation, jauntily tipping his cane into the stand and tossing his hat onto the table. He rubbed his hands together, an anticipatory gesture, and went to survey the bottles of wine awaiting his attention.
Holmes glowered at the broad back of this second self-satisfied member of his immediate family, and demanded, “I don't suppose you made any progress in locating the so-called Reverend?”
Mycroft spoke over his shoulder, his hands pulling out one bottle, pushing it back, then sliding out the next. “My dear Sherlock, it is Sunday; my men may work, but the rest of the world is, I fear, enjoying what may be the last sunshine of the summer.”
With an oath, Holmes seized his hat and flung himself down the hallway towards the study's hidden exit. Mycroft looked around, then raised his eyebrows at me. “What did I say?”
Holmes returned late, radiating failure. The next morning found him staring
gloomily into his coffee; when I left, he was heaping an armful of cushions into a corner of Mycroft's study, making himself a nest in which to smoke and think. I was just as happy to make my escape before the reek of tobacco settled in.
Yesterday's warmth was indeed looking to be the last of the summer, and the dull sky suggested the rain would return, in earnest, before long. I took an umbrella with me as I set off with my copy of Testimony and my photograph of the Shanghai Reverend, to explore the possibilities of the book-binding trade.
I had a list—Mycroft might not be much for active footwork, but he was a magnificent source of lists—and started with the printers and binders nearest the meeting hall. There were a lot of names on the page, five of them in a circle around the Museum of Natural History. The morning wore on, one printer after another taking Testimony in his ink-stained hand, paging through it with a professional eye, then shaking his head and handing it back to me. I drank a cup of tea in the Cromwell Road, a glass of lemonade with a sliver of rapidly melting ice near the Brompton Hospital, and a cup of coffee on Sloane Street. The photograph grew worn. My right heel developed a blister. At two o'clock I had covered less than a third of Mycroft's list, and I was sick of the smell of paper and ink.
The bell in my next shop tinkled, and I had to stifle an impulse to rip it from its bracket. The shopkeeper was finishing with a customer, a woman with a particularly irritating whine in her voice and an even more irritating inability to make up her mind. I squelched the urge to elbow her to the side, and eventually she dithered her way into an order and left. I marched up to the man and thrust the book out at him.
“Do you know who printed this?”
He raised an eyebrow at the book under his nose, then turned the raised eyebrow on me. I shut my eyes for a moment. “I beg your pardon. It's been a hot and tiresome morning, but that's no excuse. Do you by any chance know who might have printed this book?”
Mollified, he took the thing and opened it, as twenty-one men already had that day. He, too, ran an interested professional eye across it; he, as the other twenty had, paused to study the illustrations; then he, as they had, swung his heavy head to one side.