“With notes as necessary,” Polly Cradle says, and Cecily Foalbury shoots her an approving glance, and replies that she will condense, but that a breath of context would be just as well.
Harticle’s, Cecily Foalbury says by way of caution, is like an old Victorian gas lamp in a dark street: a flickering light atop a wrought-iron post, surrounded by greenish smog. Close to the centre, everything is clear. The history of the wristwatch, the rise and fall of the clockwork toy, the enduring charm of the gramophone—all these are stories well known and simple. Further out, things become bizarre, like Mad Ludwig’s clockwork carriage, complete with iron horses driven by a flyweight, which probably never existed save in the mind of an Austrian confidence man.
Finally there are stories which make no sense or cannot be quite right: rumours of half-truths and reports of whispers. The fall of the Order of John the Maker—also known as the Ruskinites—is one of them.
The Ruskinites were a society of craftsmen who believed in the power of art to raise the human soul, to enlighten and uplift. They were so good that, when the British government found itself short of resources and in desperate need, they drew as many of them as were in England to their cause and set them to work with a genius to create machines of war.
The genius was a woman, come to England for refuge. By all accounts she was temperamental and infuriating, as such people often are.
The nature of the collaboration being what it was, the products of this endeavour were unusual, even eccentric. And yet, they were effective for all that. They made machines and vehicles and uncovered scientific secrets which were of use, and they rivalled Bletchley Park for their ability to solve insoluble riddles and deceive the enemy. They were so effective that they continued long after the war was over, shoring up Britain’s defences against the Soviets, and never discussed even with the Americans, who had by that time defaulted (Cecily Foalbury snorts) on the deal to share nuclear information with their wartime allies.
And then, sometime around the end of the sixties or the beginning of the seventies, there was a tragedy. Something went wrong with the greatest project of the collaboration, and a village on the coast was wiped out. It was rumoured the experiment itself was not to blame for the physical destruction, that that was done afterwards to conceal the consequences. The genius behind the thing fled, died, who knew? It was over, and the Ruskinites were cut loose to fend for themselves after thirty years in the warm breadbasket of government. They lost their way.
“Soot and sorrow,” murmurs Joshua Joseph Spork.
“Exactly, darling,” Cecily Foalbury replies. “Exactly.” She draws a phlegmy breath—tears unshed or a winter cold, he isn’t sure—and looks up at him with suffering eyes. “You’ll want to know that bit, won’t you? And there’s no one better to tell you, because I was there the night it all began; the night they chose Brother Sheamus.”
And then she settles to tell it, mouth turned down and damp eyes staring into history.
What the Ruskinites wanted—had always wanted—was to be part of any project in the secular world which might, by its presence and execution, reveal the divine in man. Indeed, the bravest of them whispered, was it not likely that the eye of God was drawn to the most profound, most perfect artefacts of human effort? And were these not in any case the ones which touched closely upon the divine within?
Cecily sighs. “But they were fighting a losing battle, weren’t they, Joe?”
“I suppose.”
“Oh, yes. Of course they were. That time was gone. After the war, there was no room for craft. If it couldn’t be machine made, mass-produced, almost no one could afford it. So there was a new doctrine: uniqueness was elitist, mass-produced art was good. Perfection should be made available to all, just small enough to put in a cloth bag and carry home.
“They soldiered on, but by 1980 they couldn’t pretend any more. All those shoulder pads and the beginnings of consumer gizmos. Walkmen instead of music boxes. VHS instead of charades. A nation plugged into the industrial machine. Everything had to be mega. Megabucks. Megastar. Megadeath. It means ‘million,’ you know. Well. If you’re a Ruskinite, a million is too many. A million days is more than thirty human lifetimes. A million miles is four times the distance to the moon. But the eighties were all about millions.
“It tore them up. If God was in the detailing, then God was dead.”
The Order of John the Maker began to wither, which would have been sad, but fitting. Artisanal movements do that; they go a certain distance, and then they stop. But then, as a new, inexperienced Keeper named Theodore Sholt cast around for a remedy for the secular world itself, he found himself beset by a rival. A false prophet.
“I was there,” Cecily says dully, as if speaking of a public hanging. “A friend of Foalbury’s called us and said there was a wonderful man. A strange, compelling man who was going to save the Ruskinites. Well, we went, of course. Wouldn’t you? But when we got there it was something awful. He wasn’t rescuing anything. He was taking it away and making it his own, and none of them could see.”
Bob Foalbury puts an arm around her, and—when Cecily seems unable to continue the story—he takes it up.
“He called himself Brother Sheamus, and he was… he was perfect. He looked like Professor bloody Moriarty. You just wanted Basil Rathbone to come in and stop him. Or I did. And he was no more Irish than a Scotch egg.”
Sheamus went to the heart. He came as a prodigal son, a bird returning to the nest at dusk. He came to Sharrow House on foot, through wrought-iron gates and past the old rails of the artillery store from the war, down the yew alley and past the moat some Victorian fellow had felt the need for, and over the drawbridge. He stood with them on the grand balcony, looking at London’s rooftops and hearing the traffic and the clock tower, lamented the housing blocks which obscured the view of the river. He let them know he loved it all, the garden, the view, the house which was the soul of the Order of John the Maker. He loved them. He understood their pain and their fear. He was a man of God.
His English was expensive, and foreign. Rumour had it that he’d trained in Jerusalem with the Armenian Orthodox Church. It was whispered he’d been to Eton and served in the SAS, that he had worked with Wilhelm Reich. He said he’d taken the cowl in Burma with a monk who’d died of malaria, then gone to Rome in the sixties to study with the Jesuits. Before he even arrived, he was a sort of myth.
The world was changing too fast, Sheamus said, and in the wrong way, so he had come to make a stand. In the grand hall at the heart of Sharrow House, beneath stone arches cut by hand, ceilings painted and sculpted so that each column and nook was a statement of identity and uniqueness, Brother Sheamus wove a trap in words.
“He was a matinée idol, Joe. He told them he loved them when everyone else thought they were hopelessly obsolete. He swept them off their feet. And he was surrounded by people, all the time, photographers and journalists writing everything down. Even a television camera. You have to remember how rare that was then, Joe. We only had three channels until eighty-two. But they watched everything he did, and we knew he was important. There’s nothing so impressive as someone everyone wants to be with, who says he only wants to be with you.
“I sat at the back,” Cecily Foalbury growls, “and I hated him. I hated him with everything I had because I knew he was a liar and he would leave them with nothing. He stood in the pulpit and looked down at them and he broke them, and they thought he was making it all better.
“‘Artisanship,’” he said, “‘is a means to an end for us. Is it not? Did we become artists because we love art, or because we love God?’ And Joe, you have to understand, they hadn’t been addressed like that in a sermon before. They weren’t Charismatics, they didn’t feel the Holy Spirit in them, and they didn’t ask one another to testify. They were Ruskinites. They were makers, and very sensible. Very calm.