The Lesson
There was, at first, a cramped, dead-end kind of feel, as they edged out of the Volvo. Merrily had had to squeeze it onto a rough verge, one wheel partly overhanging a ditch. Might be somebody’s parking place, but there was nobody about in the hamlet of Whiteleafed Oak to ask. A few bungalows, cottages, and nowhere to park because the lane was so narrow.
But it was wooded, sun-dappled, intimate. It didn’t have the wide-viewed isolation of Wychehill. Locking the Volvo, Merrily could hear a radio from an open window, and there was a small trampoline and a yellow bike in one of the sloping front gardens. Whiteleafed Oak was lived-in.
The sun was burning low in a sky like tarnished brass, the air was heavy and humid, and the only sacred sound was placid evening birdsong.
Merrily looked around. There were no directional signs, no indication of where to find whatever was to be found.
Lol opened out the OS map on the bonnet of the Volvo. There were several pencil lines drawn on it, one of them, lengthways, more defined than the others.
‘This is what Jane found. A north-south line along the spine of the range, touching all these hills – Midsummer Hill, Hangman’s Hill, Pinnacle Hill, Perseverance Hill, North Hill – on, or at least close to, their summits. Cutting along the side of Herefordshire Beacon and passing through Wychehill Church.’
‘You can’t fault the alignment,’ Merrily admitted. ‘Not without a bigger map, anyway.’
‘And if we extend the line south…’ Lol continued it with a thumb ‘… we can see that it begins at…’
Whiteleafed Oak.
‘Obvious when you know,’ Lol said.
‘Is this a ley line?’
‘I don’t know. Most of these are natural features. But they were probably all ritual sites.’
‘Or part of one huge ritual site,’ Merrily said. ‘ Moel Bryn. The sacred Malverns.’
She was quite glad to see Whiteleafed Oak marked on the map. Didn’t even recall seeing any road signs pointing to it. Although it was only a few miles out of Ledbury, past the Eastnor Castle estate and into a twisting single-track lane, this was a place you would never find by accident. Nor particularly search out. Nearby villages like Eastnor and Eastwood were picturesque in the traditional sense, Whiteleafed Oak was not.
Lol folded up the map.
‘Better find this place before it gets any darker.’
Still be light enough to find your way. Park where you can and go through the five-bar gate and keep walking.
‘Which five-barred gate?’ Merrily opening out her hands. ‘Over there? Along there?’
‘It’s apparently the hamlet itself which marks the point at which the three counties merge.’
‘Nothing obvious here. Not even a church.’
‘Only a possible Druidic processional way.’
This was what Athena White had told Lol although she hadn’t been here in many years.
The fact that they’d been directed here by Athena White was why Merrily was wearing, under her thin sweatshirt, her pectoral cross. Why she’d slipped a pocket Bible into her jeans and taped to the Volvo’s dash the text, as if she could ever forget it, of St Patrick’s Breastplate.
Merrily said, ‘What on earth happened here?’
Thinking, And why didn’t I know about it?
With the hamlet of Whiteleafed Oak out of sight, nearly half a mile behind them, she was standing on what might have been – might still be – a processional way.
Looking around in the calm of the evening. Finding that the place was instantly familiar and perceptibly strange. Familiar because of well-known landmarks, like the stone obelisk projecting like a stubby pencil from Eastnor Park in Herefordshire. And May Hill, in western Gloucestershire, identifiable from the Black Mountains to the Cotswolds by the stand of pines on its summit.
At the tail of the Malverns, three counties were drawn together by landmarks and legend. The closer countryside was scabbed with odd mounds before it scrolled out into low hills, woods and copses and isolated clumps of conifers, all of it textured like velvet in the softening light.
And it was strange because none of this seemed random. It was as though each feature of the landscape had a special significance, a role to play in some eternally unfolding drama. And if they carried on walking into the arena – and it did feel like an arena – they’d be given their own parts to play.
Perhaps this was the great lesson to be learned about all of nature, although there were only certain spots where you could receive it with any intensity. Places of – oh God, wake me up before I turn into Jane – palpably sentient scenery.
They were alone in the landscape but, as they followed a vague path over a shallow rise, the sunset turning flat fields into sandbanks, she couldn’t lose the feeling that something knew they were coming.
You won’t miss it, Winnie Sparke had said. Nobody could.
She was right.
Merrily saw that Lol had stopped about twenty paces away, as though he was wondering how best to approach it, if he should take off his shoes.
‘Nobody said it was still here.’ His voice quite hoarse.
‘Nobody said it was still in use,’ Merrily said.
OK, it probably wasn’t the original one, after which the place was named, but it had to be many centuries old. Even without white leaves, it had grown into the heart of an earlier belief system which conspicuously lived on.
There were several other oak trees nearby, young satellite churches around this ancient, ruinous cathedral.
‘Venerated,’ Merrily said. ‘Still. On a serious scale.’
There was enough veneration to cover several Christmas trees, but the great oak, with its enormous swollen bole, had easily absorbed it all.
Offerings. Ribbons tied to twigs, fragments of coloured cloth, foil, labels with handwritten messages, flowers, balls of wool. Tiny intimate, symbolic items stuffed into folds and crevices, snagged in clawed branches. Hundreds of them, some fresh, some decaying, some fusing with fungi on the blistered bark.
Small sacrifices. People were still coming here – now – to make small sacrifices. Immense in the muddied light, the oak represented an everyday, naked paganism.
‘You uncomfortable with this, Merrily?’
Lol walking softly all around the oak – considered steps as if he was moonwalking or something.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just… It’s very… human. All these people making their pilgrimages, leaving their small offerings in… what? A celebration of survival?’ She dared to touch the tree with one hand. ‘What about you?’
‘To be quite honest, it kind of excites the hell out of me.’
‘Mmm, thought it might.’
‘Like, you read about ancient theories on music, and it seems so remote and… theoretical. But when you actually find a link with a bit of landscape only an hour or so from where you live. And then you come, for the first time, and it’s…’
‘It’s a tree, Lol.’
‘Merrily, it is so palpably not… just… a… tree.’
‘Well, it… it’s certainly the oak in the big picture over Tim Loste’s fireplace. I’m sure of that.’
It was all rolling at her like the ball lightning that Spicer had talked about, connections forming: all the saplings in the pots outside Loste’s house and the one planted in his garden… had they been grown from acorns picked up here, descendants of the Whiteleafed Oak?
It was as well to keep reminding yourself that the central reason you were here was finally to get to meet Tim Loste, without whom…
Lol stepped back, as if the atmosphere was too charged so close to the massive tree. You brought a blocked musician to what was alleged to be the most powerful source of musical energy within his ambit, you had to expect a certain… fascination.
‘If a few white leaves appeared on your oak tree, it was taken as a sign of major change.’
‘Athena?’
‘So if there was a tree here that was full of white leaves, maybe it was seen as a place where you could find transformation.’
‘That figures. Winnie’s blueprint for Tim Loste seems to be all about transformation. Like The Dream of Gerontius. The processing of the soul.’
‘You mentioned there were some other pictures on Loste’s walls,’ Lol said.
‘Mostly, they were places I didn’t recognize. Hills. Churches. But some were well known.’
‘Stonehenge?’ he said. ‘Glastonbury?’
She stared at him.
‘What the hell else did that woman tell you?’
Lol sat down in the grass, outside the growing shadow of the oak.
‘I didn’t want to confuse you with the bigger picture before you rang Winnie. The Three Choirs is only the local part of the story.’
‘I’m not sure I can handle this.’
Merrily sat next to him and he told her, his face shining in the blush of evening, about the big picture: twelve of them. A dozen perpetual choirs in south-west Britain, on the perimeter of a vast circle – supposedly. Their locations including Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Llantwit Major in South Wales, site of an ancient monastic college.
Not exactly recorded history. Poetic history. It could be valid, but scepticism, Merrily thought, might be safer at this stage.
‘If you plot the big circle,’ Lol said, ‘you find Whiteleafed Oak is the centre – equidistant from Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Llantwit. The pivot.’
‘But these – Stonehenge, Glastonbury, et cetera – were the only known sites?’
‘The only ones actually named in early Welsh literature. The others have been identified in places like Meifod, near Welshpool, Llandovery in west Wales and Goring-on-Thames – the word Goring comes from Cor, which means choir.’
‘So we’re… sitting at the centre of…’
‘… Arguably the most important focus of musical energy in Britain’s oldest established culture. A culture in which music was not one of the arts, part of entertainment… but a crucial element in the structure of life. An element in religion but also part of science and mathematics. And all the more spiritual for that.’
‘So all these offerings…’
‘Oh… I should’ve mentioned that some people visiting the presumed sites of perpetual choirs have said that they can still be heard. As a kind of droning, like distant bees. But then… people are impressionable.’
‘Erm…?’
‘Just the birds,’ Lol said.
‘Thank God for that. So, we’re assuming that Elgar knew this place.’
‘Elgar said there wasn’t a single lane in Worcestershire that he hadn’t been down. Would’ve been an easy walk from Birchwood. Where he was living when he composed Caractacus. Is this his sacred oak? Look.’
Lol stood up and walked down below the tree where, guarded by younger oaks, there was a depression in the ground, a hollow. Merrily looked down at a charcoal stain near its centre. Fires were still being lit here. Worn bits of branches were lying around in the shallow pit like discarded bones. So much here suggestive of bone. A knobbly outgrowth at the base of the great oak itself was like a big bovine skull with one jagged eye socket.
‘Everything has its dark side,’ Lol said.
The last segment of sun went into the ground like a household fire collapsing in a shower of bright red sparks.
‘So this,’ Merrily said, ‘is where New Age paganism meets High Catholicism.’
‘This very spot.’
‘The Three Counties, though… I mean, the Three Choirs Festival is this posh, prestigious… the sort of thing that Sophie attends. Are we really looking at something distantly descended from some folk memory of pagan chanting?’
‘The official version is that it was set up as a clerical charity about three hundred years ago. Religious music performed – Handel and Purcell. But who knows? Be interesting to hear what Loste has to say.’
‘Except they’re not here.’ Merrily stepping away from the edge of the pit, looking all around. ‘She said an hour.’
‘Or they might be waiting for darkness,’ Lol said. ‘According to Dan, the choirs start at nine. Until three in the morning. Would they really be here, rather than with one of the choirs?’
‘Maybe Loste standing under that tree, remotely conducting his three choirs from the centre of the circle?’
‘Maybe we’ll get to see.’
‘Don’t build up your hopes. Between us and him there’s Sparke.’
The western sky was like dull copper and the air was heavy with stored heat. Merrily noticed that she and Lol were almost whispering, as if the oak might be absorbing it all, to be replayed to future generations.
Lol said, ‘You want to go back to Wychehill, see if she’s around?’
‘What if they come here while we’re gone? They won’t necessarily come the same way we did. Loste knows the hidden paths.’
‘I’ll stay, if you like.’
‘On your own? Here? ’
He shrugged. Merrily tried to make out his expression, but it was too dim now, veils of mauve and sepia.
‘It’s less than ten minutes away,’ Lol said, ‘and we’ve both got mobiles. I’ll walk with you back to the car and when you’re on your way back you call me, so I can be waiting for you. If they turn up, I’ll call you straight away.’
‘OK. Just… you know…’
‘Don’t do pagan things? Merrily, I’m not Jane. I don’t even know any pagan things.’
They walked back, hand in hand, towards the hamlet of Whiteleafed Oak. The night was warm and the air smelled like a wholefood shop. Only a few weeks to the first hay harvest and that rich caramel scent which Merrily would always associate now with the Frome Valley and the first night she’d spent with Lol.
Some things were not worth risking.
‘They’ll come back,’ she told him.
‘Loste and Winnie?’
‘The songs. Your songs. They’ll come back. You know they will.’
She looked back at the oak, a fat old open-air preacher. Or maybe a conductor, the branches like a blurring of arms, summoning and gathering in three hundred and sixty degrees of sacred sound.
The trees are singing my music… or am I singing theirs?
Jesus.
Merrily was quite glad to be leaving. But not glad that Lol was staying.