23
A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS
St Pancras station soared up above him, its pink granite columns supported on drums carved with shields and figures in late Victorian extravagance. The niches had been designed to hold statues, but the Midland Railway had baulked at the extra expense, so they had remained empty. Here, at the hotel which prefaced the station, Venetian High Gothic met the beginnings of the Aesthetic Movement, the whole edifice looking down on the surrounding area as if in command of it.
Bryant rested himself, remembering how King’s Cross, Euston and Somers Town had looked when he was a child. He vaguely recalled a Christmas party held at Reggiori’s restaurant, a genteelly shabby dining hall with a chipped fountain of turquoise porcelain standing at its centre. A neon amusement arcade now stood upon the site. Further back had been the fragments of Regency terraces that had miraculously survived the wartime bombings; the Rising Sun boxers’ pub; the German eating rooms where they sang ‘Lili Marlene’ as they served boiled sausage; the great gasometers. The peculiar old lighthouse that stood on the roof of the building in the centre of the road had supposedly been built to advertise a long-vanished fish shop. The lighthouse was still there, but had fallen into disrepair. In a way it was a perfect symbol of the area, in such plain view that nobody noticed it.
Bryant turned, trying to conjure the past, but as fast as he dragged one piece from his memory another slipped away. He wondered if the few remaining residents older than he looked down from their windows and saw how it had once been, or whether they could see only what was now before their eyes. Remembering was pointless; but forgetting somehow seemed immoral.
Bryant’s right leg was troubling him, so he used his cane as he walked. Although it had rained earlier, the unseasonably warm day had caused a soft mist to rise from the earth and shroud the low buildings behind the station. Across from St Pancras station was Pancras Road, beneath which the Fleet River ran on its way to Blackfriars. The streets to the rear had been built on the banks of the river valley, and were noticeably cooler.
His path took him behind the frenetic theatre of the station, into the dim backstage area of silent roads and empty pavements. He had reached St Pancras Old Church, its graveyard gardens reaching down to the curving edge of the canal. Between the trees he could see ducks and moorhens nesting, and a single heron standing alone in the reeds. The grave digger was dragging an old-fashioned hand-operated lawn mower across the green, but stopped to watch balefully as Bryant passed.
The church itself suggested a building in repose, weathered by centuries of devout prayer. It was a strange melange of styles: Roman, German and English. Its bell tower was inset with elegant convex clock faces, finished in shiny black lacquer painted with gold numerals. Only these, and the elaborately regilded railings around the graveyard, gave any hint of the structure’s true importance to the city.
Austin Potterton was on top of a Gothic monument doing something unsuitable to a sundial. Above him, leathery crows cawed in the clawlike branches of the trees.
‘Austin, what on earth are you up to?’ asked Bryant, poking him on the boots with his cane.
‘Ah, it’s you, Arthur. You’re early.’ The man who clambered down had straggling shoulder-length hair the colour of tobacco ash, but wore a pin-striped suit with a navy tie and matching handkerchief, like an old hippie going for a job interview. He had a filthy toothbrush behind his ear. When he rubbed his nose and shook Bryant’s hand he left charcoal on his face and on the detective’s sleeve.
‘Tempus Edax Rerum—a bit gloomy, don’t you think? I cleaned it up a bit; somebody has to. The crows have been using it as a toilet for years. Toothbrushes seem to work best. I think this monument was paid for by Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Rather nice mosaic panels. I was just making an impression.’
‘Well, you weren’t making one on me,’ sniffed Bryant, scowling at his sleeve. ‘These tombs and monuments aren’t meant to be climbed over. It’s not an amusement park, you know.’
‘I’m doing some research for the diocese. They’ve hired me to photograph and catalogue everything in the churchyard, because the last time they did it the documents were stored in the undercroft and sustained water damage when it flooded.’ Potterton dusted himself down and replaced his materials in his briefcase. ‘St Pancras Old Church deserves decent treatment—it’s very possibly the oldest Christian site in Europe. And it’s finally getting a bit of a makeover now that the rail link has come here.’
‘Saint Pancras,’ Bryant mused. ‘He was fourteen when he died, wasn’t he? A Christian martyr, decapitated on the orders of the Emperor Diocletian. I read somewhere that his severed head still exists in the reliquary in the Basilica of San Pancrazio.’
‘You’re absolutely right, although Heaven alone knows why you’d want to retain such information. His name was anglicised.’ Puffing out his cheeks, Potterton leaned back and looked at the old building.
‘The place doesn’t look like much, does it?’ said a new voice. A minuscule vicar appeared from behind the fountain. He gave the impression of warily walking on tiptoe, as if checking for broken glass. He clasped Bryant’s hand and gave it a limp shake. ‘The Reverend Charles Barton. Welcome to St Pancras Old Church. This is a very well-connected little parish. We’d be terribly proud of it, if pride wasn’t a sin, ha-ha.’
Bryant refused to laugh. He rarely chose to make friends with clergymen.
‘I’m not, ah, part of the usual ecclesiastical team here. I’m sort of filling in.’ Charles Barton was young and untested, of ineffectual appearance and extremely pale, as if he had been washed clean too many times. There were vicars who fought battles for the souls of their parishioners, and vicars who were more interested in pointing out the stained glass. Barton was of the latter sort.
‘Are you acquainted with some of the illustrious residents in our little churchyard?’ he asked.
‘Do introduce me,’ Bryant suggested, offering up a frightening smile.
‘Well, Sir John Soane, the architect of the Bank of England, has his tomb here. Charles Dickens makes reference to it in A Tale of Two Cities. The shape of the tomb inspired Scott’s design for the traditional red telephone kiosk. And I’m sure you know that Mary Shelley was wooed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in the churchyard. It used to be much bigger, but the Midland Railway cut away a great chunk for its sidings. Mary Shelley used to come here because her mother had been laid to rest in these grounds. The family lived nearby, but then the Midland Railway destroyed their house, too. The couple romanced each other on the gravestones, not my idea of an appropriate venue for a date, but I suppose tastes change. Have you seen the Hardy Tree?’
‘No,’ Bryant lied. In fact he had sat under it when he was a child, before railings had been placed around it. The old ash tree was beset by great grey gravestones, laid end on end against the trunk like a rising tide of stone, so that the wood had grown over them, nature engulfing the remains of man. Hardy was forever linked with Wessex, and it was odd to think of him here in town, fighting with locals over land the railway had usurped.
‘Most of the graves—some eight thousand of them—were relocated to Highgate and Kensal Green,’ Barton told them. ‘The young Thomas Hardy helped to clear them, and spent many hours in this churchyard. I’m just brewing up. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Good idea, Rev, I’m spitting feathers.’
Barton led the way to the vestry, where a brown china teapot stood warming on an electric ring. Potterton joined them unasked and squeezed himself into a wicker chair, ready to be served.
‘Apparently Thomas Hardy was very upset about the lack of respect shown to the graves when they were moved,’ Potterton explained. ‘It sounds like many of the bodies were simply shoved in together.’
‘We found this in the sacristy.’ The vicar clearly did not like Potterton usurping his position as parish historian, but was not the sort to complain, at least within earshot. Barton detached a yellowed scrap of lined paper from the stack of documents on his desk and carefully unfurled it. ‘Hardy wrote a little poem which he called “The Levelled Churchyard.”
‘We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
“I know not which I am!”’
‘Mary Shelley predates Hardy by quite a bit, doesn’t she?’ asked Bryant. ‘When she walked with her lover through the churchyard it would still have been its original size.’
‘Quite so. She often popped in to put flowers on her mother’s grave.’
‘You don’t suppose she first caught a glimmer of the idea that would become Frankenstein here?’
‘No, she wrote that while summering on Lake Geneva,’ Potterton reminded Bryant.
‘But imagine how the churchyard would have looked in those days, wild and overgrown. The bodies weren’t always buried properly, you know. The trees uprooted coffins, thrusting them to the surface. Human remains, bones and skulls would have been found all over the site. The church had a much more cavalier attitude to death in those days. What a ghoulishly picturesque place for inspiration! Of course the story goes that Shelley wrote the story in Switzerland, but ideas take a long time to come bubbling up through the soul, and this was her spiritual home, after all.’
‘Oh, you just like to imagine her sitting under a London plane tree creating monsters.’
‘I suppose so. Austin, you usually know about these things. Is there any history of strange sightings in the area?’
‘Are you being funny?’
‘No, why?’
‘Arthur, I thought you would know more than anyone. The entire area is rife with them. It’s long been associated with pagan hauntings. There’s a pre-Christian barrow around here somewhere.’
The vicar harrumphed childishly at the mention of paganism.
‘I know a little about the hauntings,’ Bryant admitted.
‘This area was also known as the Brill, the site of Caesar’s camp. The Romans had a colony at nearby Horsfall. They supposedly fought Boudicca, the Queen of the Iceni, and her army of Britons right here—their encampment was literally opposite the church—and most died on this spot, which as a result became known as Battle Bridge. The bridge itself used to cross the river Fleet. The spirits of the dead armies were seen here for centuries after.’
‘No, no, no.’ Bryant raised a protesting hand. ‘That story turned out to be a hoax. Queen Victoria transformed Boudicca into a heroine of Albion because she wanted to be seen as sharing the same qualities. Lewis Spence’s book immortalised the legend and wrongly sited Boudicca’s death at Battlebridge. It’s just an urban myth that she was buried under a platform at King’s Cross station.’
‘I know that,’ said Potterton, nettled, ‘but the general public doesn’t. The power of any preacher can only be created by his believers, after all.’
The Reverend Charles Barton appeared discomfited by this turn in the conversation, and went off to annoy the grave digger.
‘This must be one of the most underrated sites of theological importance in the whole of Great Britain,’ Potterton continued. ‘Not only did the Emperor Constantine found the oldest church in London here; it was the last place in the country where Catholic Mass was spoken before the Reformation.’
‘So you have a tangle of paganism, Catholicism and Christianity leaving a trail of spectral figures through the forest, and even though you cut down all the trees and erect factories and office buildings, the ghosts of the past continue to resurface,’ said Bryant, pleased at the thought.
‘Oh, the diocese is very aware of its religious heritage. That’s why the place has been cleaned up. A couple of months ago they employed an archivist to supervise a dig in the vault—Dr Leonid Kareshi, he consults at the Hermitage in St Petersburg and is very highly thought of. Would you like to see what he’s found?’
The church was dark, and smelled of damp and disuse. The greenish light gave it the impression of being underwater, but the calm was spoiled by a wonky recording of a choir singing ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ slightly too loudly from speakers above the pews. At the rear of the building, a stairwell led underneath the floor to a small domed area that was formerly part of the crypt. Bryant followed Potterton, carefully picking his way between dislodged piles of bricks. He arrived at a ragged hole in the end wall, around which a rickety trio of arc lights had been erected. A broad-bodied man was bent over a trestle table, and turned to face them. He looked more like a Russian gangster than an archivist. Leonid Kareshi was not a man you’d pick a fight with.
‘I am happy to make your acquaintance.’ Kareshi made no attempt to shake Bryant’s proffered hand. He had a thick Slavic accent.
‘Mr Bryant knows a lot about London,’ Potterton explained. ‘Perhaps he can help you.’
‘You have good knowledge of this city?’ Kareshi raised a thick eyebrow.
‘Oh, he’s been here since it was founded,’ Potterton joked, but Kareshi did not laugh.
‘I have been trying to discover more about the sacred sites of King’s Cross and Pentonville, but there is very little reliable reading material available on the subject. These names—Brill, Somers Town, Euston, Agar Town, Pentonville, so many names for one tiny area—it is confusing,’ the archivist said.
‘Well, Pentonville was founded in the mid-1770s on the estate of a Member of Parliament called Henry Penton,’ said Bryant. ‘It’s as simple as that.’
‘Not so simple, I think. His name has a meaning, no? Mr Potterton tells me that the Penton was at the—how you say—peak?—of Pentonville Road, but nobody knows exactly what it was.’
‘Actually, I can help you there.’ Bryant was pleased to be able to put his arcane knowledge to use. ‘A penton was a head. I mean, a kind of round hill in the shape of a human head, probably designed to point to the sunrise. At least, that’s the theory.’
‘A sacred stone.’
‘That’s right. Pen is a Celtic word meaning high point. We get the word pinnacle from it, and penny, so named because the coin has a head on it.’
‘Then you should see this,’ said Potterton. ‘Mr Kareshi uncovered it a few days ago, and the diocese is in a bit of a quandary about reporting the find. I think our reverend feels very uncomfortable about the building’s pagan origins. The building is on the heritage register and can’t be disassembled, but there’s clearly something of major historical importance under here. If it predates the Christian site, it’s been buried for more than two thousand years.’ Potterton stepped back from the excavation, allowing the lamplight in.
Bryant peered into the hole. He found himself looking at an elongated chunk of pockmarked grey granite. ‘What is this?’ he asked.
‘I know it’s difficult to see clearly. Let me adjust the lights.’ Kareshi moved the tripods closer. ‘How is that?’
The elderly detective could just make out a pair of eye sockets, an aquiline nose, the partial line of a jaw.
‘There is no more of him. I mean, we have not found it attached to a body,’ said Kareshi.
‘This part was just inside the wall?’
‘Yes, but there is another, from the main chamber. Come and see.’ Kareshi led the way through panels of dusty plastic sheeting, into a wider hole of fractured brickwork. ‘There was a spa here that connected to the well behind the church. Such places were constructed like temples. You can see the remains of a main circular chamber with a domed roof. This is why the crypt was built in the same shape.’
A narrow alley of damp brick had been lined with lamps. It opened out into a circular stone room just over three metres high. On the opposite wall was the faint painted outline of a robed woman in a crown. She was holding chains attached to a pair of dogs.
‘The spa was opened to the public in 1760—we have this from parish records—but the wells had already been popular for more than half a century by then. It is recorded as being a fashionable meeting place, with pump rooms and a House of Entertainment, which means skittles and bowling, the drinking of beers and teas. And there was a garden with—how you say? Exotic animals.’
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ said Potterton, ‘the church being stuck between the Adam and Eve tavern and the pleasure gardens. The spa had royal patronage but eventually fell into disrepute, although it took forty years to do so. Prostitutes and gangsters moved in, and stayed right up until recent times. Nell Gwynne’s house is still clearly marked, you know. There’s a stone inscription set into the wall of number sixty-three, King’s Cross Road.’
Bryant stared at the greenish-brown spa walls and breathed in the wet air, lost in thought. ‘Tell me, Austin, do you believe in evil spirits?’
‘Odd question. No, I suppose not. Why?’
‘The word Pentonville can be interpreted as Hill of the Head. Many Celts believed that the soul resided behind the eyes. That statue of yours hasn’t been broken off from a larger icon. You can just make out the scrollwork on the base. The carving was clearly intended to appear as a severed head.’
‘Why would that be?’ asked Potterton.
‘It’s the sign of a sacrificial site. This was intended as a warning to the curious. What else have they found?’
‘Some small iron symbols, very degraded, but they seem to match up to other markings in the undercroft. A face shaped by tree branches, typically Hellenic in appearance.’
‘The horned king of the hilltop,’ muttered Bryant. ‘The great god Pan is back. Perhaps he never really went away. Of course. I’m beginning to see now.’
‘See what?’ asked Potterton, curious.
‘A connection between gods and mortals,’ replied Bryant mysteriously. ‘Well, I mustn’t detain you any longer; I have work to do. But I’ll be back, Austin.’ He nodded to both, and took his leave.
He wasn’t quite ready to return to the temporary residence of the PCU. Bryant stopped outside, looking up at the back of St Pancras station. He tried to find the statue of Boudicca that supposedly looked down on the street, but misty rain was now falling too heavily to see.
He turned his mind to a piece of history so distant that no fact could be verified, and myths that were considered ancient a millennium ago. Boudicca, the Queen of the Iceni, had inherited the kingdom after the death of her husband, King Prasutagus. But the Romans, under Suitonius Paulinus, had pillaged their own protectorate, slaughtering over 80,000 and defeating the Warrior Queen in battle. Brutalised, defeated, her daughters raped, Boudicca had committed suicide in despair. Some said she had been transformed into a hare, to flee into the thick woodlands surrounding the site of her final battle. But, as Bryant knew, the grimmer historical reality had not survived the burnishing of her legend.
Could such mythologies really maintain their grip on the present? There were those who believed they did. This is the world of London before history, he told himself. It doesn’t matter if such things really happened, only that somebody out there still believes in them.