A Demon Summer (37 page)

And that not all of what she knew was a children's tale.

 

Chapter 31

IN OLDEN DAYS II

It is as valuable to read uplifting topics as it is to pray. Both honor the Creator.

—The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy

Returning to his room, Max opened the copy of Frank's book that Dame Olive had so grudgingly provided him, noting that the copy was well-worn. Also that it fell open to the passages regarding Monkbury Abbey and Temple Monkslip.

The book was, as Max remembered it, the most exasperating blend of boy's adventure fantasy and utter hogwash passing as reasoned scientific inquiry. No legend or rumor was too small not to be breathlessly repeated as established fact or extrapolated into certainty by recourse to the “research” of delusional and ill-informed “experts” who seemed to live and work somewhere on Planet Mars.

Frank's literary influences were difficult to pinpoint. Lewis Carroll meets Tolkien in
The Crystal Cave
? Max took a moment to admire Frank's photo on the back of the book, in which the author was portrayed, one arm draped over a tree branch and his eyes gazing heavenward, as if it were from there alone he drew his inspiration.

As Max began to read he wondered if there were any way to actively prevent Frank from writing any more books. He didn't suppose hiding his pens and pencils would help. When last seen, Frank had upgraded to a very thin, very expensive laptop, which he worked on at the Witches Brew coffee shop, ostentatiously channeling Ernest Hemingway or another of the Great Authors.

Flipping through the pages (and there were many), Max was reminded how right his first impressions of the book had been. It was the strangest mash-up of Mary Stewart and Thomas Mallory. Like Awena, Max loved the Arthurian legends and held them to be somewhat sacrosanct, perhaps because his mother's people came from the region of Cornwall near Tintagel where Arthur was said to have been born.

Was said.
Now he sounded like Frank, spouting wishful beliefs, sprouting whispy tendrils of history.

Max continued reading. He had brought a cup of coffee with him from the guesthouse kitchen, and it rested on the small desk, near his pen and notebook. Max grew fascinated despite himself as Frank's narrative made one of its dog-legged leaps of logic from Arthurian legend to speculation about the real, hidden purpose of the Templars, centuries later.

At one point Frank's story digressed into a discussion of a comparatively recent find, during World War II, at nearby Templecombe in Somerset. Known as the Templecombe Face, it was a painted depiction on oaken wood of a Christ-like visage, originally done in bright blues and reds, the head surrounded by golden stars. The painting had been deliberately concealed in, of all places, an outhouse—tied into the roof by wire and hidden by plaster. Hidden from whom and when and for what reason was not clear. Scientific analysis of the wood showed that it could be dated to the years when the Templars roamed the earth.

Leaving that topic for the moment, author Frank jumped back to the Holy Grail. Could this, he breathlessly asked the reader, be the sought-after Grail itself, an image of the living Christ's face?—thereby ignoring his own report that the image probably dated from the late thirteenth century.

From here Frank led the reader to Glastonbury—and why not? There were few spots in England as shrouded in legend, and much of the legend did have to do with King Arthur and his queen, Guinevere. Glastonbury Tor, near Glastonbury Abbey, Frank asserted without hesitation or a shred of proof, was the site where the Holy Grail, a bejeweled drinking chalice in this telling, had been buried. Along with many others, Frank held that the chalice originally had been carried to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea—and that it was the chalice used at the Last Supper.

Max had visited much of the world but generally had been assisted by the vast technology it now took to move one human from one end of the globe to the other. He marveled still to think of the wide-ranging travels of the largely underfunded apostles: James to Egypt, Thomas to India, Andrew clear up to Russia. He was also inclined toward the school of belief that Jesus had traveled widely during his “lost years.” The ancients were anything but stay-at-homes. So to Max the idea of Joseph of Arimathea's traveling to England was anything but outlandish. What or whom he brought with him, who could say?

But Frank stated categorically that Joseph had come to Glastonbury carrying with him the chalice that had ended up (leaping a few more centuries) in the care of the monks at Glastonbury. It had disappeared at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, along with anything else that could be melted down after first being stripped of its valuable stones, when Thomas Cromwell had sent men to denude the church at Glastonbury. The abbot had been hanged, drawn, and quartered as a traitor.

Frank also held, on no basis whatsoever, that in addition to the chalice the monks had been in charge of the Shroud of Turin—that this relict, much more so than the chalice, had been the reason for the abbot's fatal resistance to the plundering by Henry's men.

Hurtling across continents and centuries, Frank declared that until it was finally whisked to safety, the Shroud of Turin had found a home not in Italy but in England.

Finally bringing Monkbury Abbey into the tale, Frank stated without equivocation that “sources in the know” had assured him an exact copy of a contemporaneous image of Christ in death was in the care of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy. An order whose sole purpose was “to keep the secret of their Sacred Charge until it was safe to reveal it to a desperate world of non-believers” (
Wherefore Nether Monkslip
, Third Edition, p. 546).

In Frank's telling, the Knights Templar, frequent visitors to the abbey, had been in on the secret. When they were persecuted out of existence, one of them had escaped with the Shroud to Turin. The escaping knight had left behind a copy of the Face, as it was called, which had become such a draw for pilgrims that the abbey would have been financially ruined had the running knight taken it with him.

At least Frank had explained, to his own satisfaction, the odd name of the inn at Temple Monkslip.

With the dissolution of the monasteries, the Face disappeared for good. But Author Frank maintained that to this day the nuns knew exactly where it was. And as part of their initiation ceremony, they vowed never to reveal the secret.

Shades of the Masonic rites, thought Max. The story had everything but sacred oaths written in blood. It was all very “made for Hollywood,” and Max was certain it would end up there.

He read grimly on, skipping back and forth between the pages, as it seemed to make no difference where one alighted in Frank's narrative. “Rumors have abounded for years,” he read, “that in or around Temple Monkslip could be found a relic related to the famous Turin Shroud—a relic long held to have miraculous curative powers, particularly the power of restoring sight. Pilgrims were said to have traveled from all over Europe to be cured by the famous relict.

“But the Face disappeared around the time of the Reformation, denounced as a fraud, as the worst sort of emblem of a corrupt Papacy. A swindle designed to separate the gullible from their coins. Of course, the fact that these coins went into Church coffers, and not into the coffers of the State, did not go unnoticed by the cash-strapped secular authorities of the time.”

Max sat back at his desk, the small chair creaking as he resettled his weight, recalling what he knew as fact about the Crusades.

The First Crusade had been launched in 1095, when Pope Urban II put out the call. If you had no aptitude for the monastic life but were trained in warfare, here was your action-hero alternative. You could be a holy Christian warrior, your killing sanctioned and your bravery rewarded in heaven. Judging by today's headlines, thought Max, it was a case of everything old being new again. He thought of the League of the Righteous and their lethal agenda, so recently in the news.

And so the Crusaders had swarmed toward Jerusalem, where their erratic behavior had spawned conspiracy theories ever since. It was said—and there were a lot of “it was saids” in the retelling, Frank's and others'—that the Knights Templar took the opportunity to seize the folded burial shroud of Christ and carry it off with them during the chaos of the sack of Constantinople in 1204. And that they then had proceeded to worship this most holy of holy relics.

This worship had brought about their ruin—to be precise, it became the pretext for bringing about their ruin, used to justify their roundup and extermination.

The Templars were accused of, among other things, worshipping a head. It had been speculated that the “head” they worshipped was actually a face—the part of the cloth that showed when the burial shroud of Jesus was folded into a square.

Claims and counterclaims swirled about the famous Shroud of Turin, of course. What was convincing to many was the realism of the image—no early medieval artist painted in such a precise and realistic way. They simply didn't know how. Nor was any medieval artist acquainted with photographic images—for the body image on the cloth is undoubtedly a photographic negative, or a rendering of one. The cloth had been variously dated, with some claiming that parts of it dated to the time of Jesus's life.

The Templecombe Face, however, was of a different order. The painted face on wood, found hidden in an outhouse. Roughly if reverently drawn, amateurish. Was it a copy? Perhaps a copy made from memory?

Which begged the question, copy of what?

The bearded Face in St. Mary's Church in Templecombe, no great distance from the nunnery where Max sat now, was thought by some to be a poor copy of what the Templars had worshipped. For that matter, the image in Templecombe with its bearded man bore some resemblance to …

No, no, no. It couldn't be. Max had not admitted the connection before now, but the image that kept appearing on the wall of St. Edwold's Church, despite repeated whitewashings, bore a strong resemblance to the …

No. Max shook his head. It could not be. It was the stuff of legends, distorted by retelling after retelling through the ages. The stuff that amateur historians and nincompoops like Frank Cuthbert wrote about, embroidering the few facts into fanciful fiction presented as history. No one took any of Frank's nonsense seriously. No one.

Besides, Max thought, somewhat irrelevantly: the face on the wall at St. Edwold's realistically depicted a bearded man with his eyes closed. The amateurish Templecombe painting was of a man with his eyes open.

What connection could there possibly be?

Maybe, thought Max, it was time to join the others in the treasure hunt. And the church seemed the best place to start.

 

Chapter 32

SPIRAL

Look always for the miracle in small things.

—The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy

Light filtered by stained glass threw abstract rainbow stripes down the crisp linen of the altar cloth before fanning out across the pitted stone floor. Max was reminded of his own St. Edwold's where the scene, on a doll's-house scale, would be similar at this time of day. Radiant, like a rare jewel, “like jasper, clear as crystal” with the glory of God.

The church cat, Luther, oblivious to all the glory, would be napping on the altar right about now, a habit of which no amount of scolding could cure him.

Max glanced at his watch. The St. Edwold's choir would be assembling soon for tryouts for the fall services. He decided now to just let anyone who wanted to, participate. What earthly difference did it make? Maybe they'd all improve with practice.

This coming Sunday, when please God he would be back standing in the pulpit in his church, little Tom Hooser would perch on the pew back until his sister Tildy Ann yanked him back into his seat. Their mother, Mrs. Hooser, would remain oblivious. Max often wondered what went on behind the bland mask she presented to the world. Judging by the results of her housekeeping efforts at the vicarage, she might be entertaining scenes of plunder and destruction, but more likely she was wondering if she'd left the Fairy washing-up liquid in the refrigerator again. Max was always finding misfiled oddments like that around the place. It made him wonder how Mrs. Hooser got through the day-to-day, how the children were being brought up, although thus far they were showing an amazing resilience, probably in response to their mother's vagueness.

Max slumped down in one of the pews, studying the play of light on cloth and stone as it shifted with the passing clouds outside and wondering: what was there here that had drawn Lord Lislelivet? The church was beautiful, a model of construction for its time and age, but nothing here of financial value was transportable. Still Max clung to the notion that Lord Lislelivet's interest in the place was financial. No heaven-sent flash of insight, no conversion for such as Lord Lislelivet.

Max dredged his memory for the Bible passages surrounding Paul's stunning conversion on the road to Damascus. At last he took a copy of the Book of Common Prayer from the back of the pew before him and flipped through until he found the story in Acts 9:9: “And he was three dayes without sight, and neither did eate, nor drinke.”

A fine and compelling conversion story it was, particularly as it came from a former professional persecutor of Christians. But it had nothing to do with this case. It was interesting, though, how many references to light there had been here in the place of women who had devoted their lives to emulating Lucy, the patron saint of the blind. Max read on to the part of the story where Paul had been cured of his blindness by a man named Ananias: “And immediatly there fell from his eyes as it had bene scales, and he receiued sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.”

And that was Paul's story, debated to this day. He had heard the voice of Jesus and had literally been blinded by the light until Ananias had cured him. The scales had fallen from his eyes. Had Paul had a seizure, some sort of psychotic breakdown? Was he simply exhausted and delusional? Or had he been blessed by a miracle?