“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.