by D C Macey
‘It must be four or five years since we’ve had a winter as snowy as this,’ said Elaine from a seat in the rear.
Francis nodded. ‘That’s right. The children love it but give me mild and dry every time.’
The minibus suddenly jolted, rocking everyone inside as it bumped out of a pothole. ‘Sorry! I missed that one.’ Francis returned his attention to the road.
Ten minutes later, he cautiously nudged the minibus along the little road that led to Rosslyn Chapel. The chapel was partly obscured by the visitor centre that cast a protective shield around it from the roadside, ensuring access was properly controlled. The car park was empty. Having eyed its pristine covering of snow, Francis had decided to stick to the road and drove on to the visitor centre entrance. He stopped and put his church’s blue disabled parking permit on the dashboard in front of the steering wheel. He turned and winked at Helen. ‘Can’t have Xavier walking across that snowy car park - it’s not safe. Here we are everyone; let’s go.’
They entered the visitor centre, and as the automatic doors closed, a middle-aged woman stepped forwards to greet them with a warm smile.
‘Hello, everyone, I’m Silvia, the visitor centre manager. Welcome, I’m not psychic, but on a morning like this, it’s a fair bet you are the group Reverend McEwan asked me to help.’ She beamed another smile. ‘Now, he mentioned Elaine. Did I get that right?’
Elaine stepped forwards. ‘Aye, I spoke with him yesterday. Thank you for sparing the time for us. I think it’s Sam who should explain what we’re looking for though.’ She pointed to Sam and fell silent.
The visitor centre manager turned her attention to him, reaching out a hand, which he shook. He introduced the rest of the party. It was clear that Silvia had been briefed by the Reverend McEwan, and she had as many questions to ask Helen as Sam had for her. She tried to contain herself, with only limited success.
‘Helen, yes, I was told it was you from St Bernard’s. Such an awful business at your church last year. I followed it on the news. Very frightening, I’m sure I wouldn’t have coped at all. I’ll be happy to help today; just let me say first how much I feel for you, all of you. It was an awful business.
‘Now what I’ve got in mind for today is to hand you over to our chief guide, Oliver; he knows everything there is to know, and when you’ve seen what you want, he’ll bring you back for a hot drink and a bun on me. How does that sound?’
It had been springtime when Helen last visited Rosslyn Chapel. The courtyard had been filled with warm air and welcoming sunlight, birds swooping and chirping. Individual tourists had strolled leisurely around while various tour groups were hustled into order by their respective guides.
Today was very different. A low, grey sky, cold wind and flurries of snow combined to add to the visitors’ discomfort. A black tarmac track had been cleared and salted between visitor centre and chapel entrance. Off to their left, a member of the catering staff had cleared snow from a small patch of the courtyard behind the centre’s kitchen door. The clearing had been scattered with crumbs and scraps for the birds who had now gathered to eat, busily hopping this way and that, the pecking order changing with each arriving bird.
Ahead of them, fiercely protective gargoyles overlooked the chapel door. It cracked open, and an elderly man appeared, dressed in warm and sensibly thick corduroys and a roll-neck sweater. ‘Welcome. I’m Oliver.’ He ushered the group in and pushed the door shut behind Angelo who had brought up the rear.
Oliver’s local accent was soft, though still discernible. ‘Silvia has said you are to be given every assistance. She mentioned Elaine, I think. He looked around and caught Elaine’s eye as she stepped forwards.
‘Hello, Oliver,’ said Elaine.
‘Have we met?’ said Oliver, shaking her hand.
‘I’ve been out here for several ecumenical events and exchange meetings, that sort of thing.’
‘Yes, yes, you do look familiar now you mention it. Sorry for not picking that up at once.’ He raised his hands and glanced about the chapel. ‘We have so many visitors.’ Oliver remembered Elaine now - few words, retiring, but ultimately the one who knew how best to address a church problem or unpick an issue. And of course, he had heard and read about Helen Johnson and St Bernard’s.
‘So what can I do for you today?’
Elaine nodded towards Sam.
Sam stepped forwards. ‘I’m afraid we are pressed for time. Could we focus on some specifics please?’
‘Of course. What exactly?’
‘We’re interested in the Lady Chapel mostly.’
Oliver nodded then waved a hand towards the altar and to the open space behind. ‘This way then. The Lady Chapel is set behind the altar. Its stonework is, of course, excellent, but it’s mostly an empty space.’ He started to walk along the side aisle leading the group towards the altar. After only a few steps, he paused and pointed up towards one especially distinctive carving.
‘I recognise your accent’s American,’ he said to Helen. ‘This is one for you; what do you think that is?’
Helen looked up at the image engraved into the stone. ‘A plant?’ she said, with a shrug.
‘Yes, a plant, but we have a little bit of a debate running over it at present.’
‘How so?’
‘Look at it closely. You see the plant’s leaves? What plant do you think it is?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Some think it’s a palm. On the other hand, some are quite convinced it’s a tobacco leaf.’
‘And?’
‘This church was built in the 1450s and Columbus didn’t discover the Americas until 1492, nearly fifty years later.’
‘So, it must be a palm leaf then,’ said Helen.
‘Perhaps,’ said Oliver as he walked past the altar and led them towards the eastern end of the church. ‘Certainly, if that were the only mystery here there would be no debate. As I said, the chapel was built fifty years before Columbus reached the New World. I’ll show you another unusual stone engraving in a little while and that one will really get you thinking.’
Stopping at a neat arch formed between two pillars, he spread his hands out to left and right. ‘The Lady Chapel. You can see it’s not much more than a man’s length, six or seven feet, but it spreads almost the width of the church.’
Oliver paused in his explanation as Francis, Xavier and Angelo all stepped through the arch and stopped to issue a silent prayer. Helen joined them, and Sam hung back slightly, staring up at the arch before wandering away along the width of the Lady Chapel. Other than the solid stone of the eastern wall, the small chapel had no internal walls. It was divided into sections that were defined by a series of thick pillars and elaborately decorated arches. Looking between the serried pillars, it was possible to see through all sections at once, across the whole width of the chapel.
However, Sam was not focusing on the beauty of the whole. Only one thing had grabbed his attention, and he could not look away. Francis had been right about the Lady Chapel. There were stone cusps everywhere - it was like walking into an orchard laden with fruit! Set opposite each other, at the base of the first arch was a facing pair of cusps. Further facing pairs sprouted like fruit from beneath the archway as it rose to meet at the apex. Sam looked through the arches that separated the sections of the chapel. Along its whole length, each archway was adorned with paired cusps, the successive pairs coming closer together as their arch closed towards its apex.
Sam wandered under the arches studying them all. Stopping in one section, he smiled to himself. One of the cusps was missing. Broken off by some accident in antiquity. He did not dare to think what punishment would have been meted out to the clumsy curate who had broken it. He thought of Francis’ suggestion that Helen had looted her cusp from Rosslyn and smiled again.
Eyes only on the array of cusps, it seemed to Sam there were hundreds sprouting from beneath the arches. Each one was a neat cuboid whose volume - just like the one Helen had found out at Templ
e - would equal no more than a cricket ball. Each cusp had five decorated sides and one side plain save for a protruding stem that linked the cusp back to the arch stone from which it had been carved. The scale of the work made him pause. It would have taken years, perhaps decades, to carve all the cusps in the Lady Chapel. He continued on his way through the sections. For size and shape, any one of the cusps could have been switched for Helen’s trench stone.
Sam’s brow creased slightly as he studied the carved patterns on the face of the cusps. Some were of clearly recognisable biblical scenes, others seemed less godly, and yet more were so obscure as to defy recognition. He kept moving from section to section, studying all the cusps but not finding any that matched the symmetrical swirl design on Helen’s boxes.
‘Ah, you’re interested in the cusps,’ said Oliver, catching up with Sam.
‘Yes, I’m searching for a pattern.’
‘Oh, why’s that?’
‘Just some research, a theory, that’s all.’
‘Well, you’ve got plenty to search through. Some of the cusps have meanings that we’ve deciphered; others remain a bit of a mystery. Just call out if there’s anything I can help you with.’
‘Thanks, I will,’ said Sam.
Oliver glanced towards Helen. ‘If you follow me, I’ve something else to show you.’
‘Okay, what is it?’ she said.
‘This way,’ said Oliver, walking past Sam into the final section of the Lady Chapel. ‘See, here’s the famous Apprentice Pillar. It makes up one outer corner of the Lady Chapel. Look through this last arch at the south wall.’ He pointed through the arch towards the outer wall. ‘There, do you see it?’
‘What am I looking at?’
‘Look at the stone around the window, the carving. It’s heads of maize, your corn. Again, carved and set into the church’s design fifty years before any Europeans were meant to have reached the Americas. It’s a puzzle.’
‘Wow, you’re not kidding. How is that possible?’
‘No idea. The image shouldn’t be there, can’t be there, but there it is. If you accept this, and very few argue against it now, it moves the tobacco leaf or palm leaf debate into a different context.’
Linking her arm through Oliver’s, she tilted her head, gaining a different perspective on the carving. ‘Oliver, I can see it, corn. That is a puzzle.’
‘Yes, it is.’
Helen glanced back to Sam who was oblivious to her conversation, his head, also tilted up, methodically working through the series of arches all laden with their outcropping pairs of cusps.
Oliver turned too and immediately tensed. ‘I’m sorry, Sam, you’ll have to stop that,’ he said. ‘The Chapel rules are inviolate. No photographs inside the building.’
‘Sorry, what did you say?’ said Sam switching his attention away from the decorative arches.
‘No photographs, please.’
For just a moment, Sam appeared confused. Then he glanced at the phone in his hand. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m not taking pictures. I’m comparing my photograph from elsewhere with your cusps. I’d thought there would be a match but you have so many, it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack.’
‘Can I see?’ said Oliver, crossing to see Sam’s phone. He looked at the picture of Helen’s trench stone. ‘Where did you take this?’
‘Just away on a dig elsewhere. Helen found it. I’d thought there might be some linkage with yours, but it seems not.’
Oliver looked up from the phone screen and smiled at Helen. ‘I didn’t realise you were interested in archaeology too.’
Helen laughed. ‘It was all a bit of an accident really.’
‘And coming here was a long shot,’ said Sam. ‘I’m sorry; it seems we may have been taking up your time unnecessarily.’
Oliver looked back at the screen. ‘Well, perhaps, perhaps not. I really would like to know where you found your cusp.’
‘On some land I inherited on the other side of the river Esk,’ said Helen.
Oliver nodded. ‘That was a lucky thing. How far off?’ He returned his attention to the phone, flicking the screen, changing the displayed pictures so he could see the other faces of Helen’s cusp. Oliver moved two or three steps away and didn’t wait for Helen to answer. ‘I’ve been here a long time. And I’ve studied every stone in the place.’ Now he was looking up at the ceiling arches. Muttering to himself, his eyes scanned the ceiling area, searching for something.
‘There we are,’ he said triumphantly, pointing at an arch that spurred out and away from the side of the Apprentice Pillar. ‘I knew I had seen your picture before. It looks very similar to some of the cusps on this arch. What do you think?’
Sam joined Oliver, looked up, and his face immediately broke into a smile. Oliver was right. The pairs of cusps on this arch seemed very similar to the photograph, in fact pretty much identical. ‘It looks like a match.’
‘Yes, it looks like a good match to me too,’ said Oliver. ‘You were on the right track. If you’d kept going another few minutes, you’d have spotted it without me.’ He waved his arm back through the arches beneath which they had already come. ‘You started your search from the wrong end of the Lady Chapel, that’s all. If you’d begun from this end, the search would have been over almost before it had begun.’
Sam studied the series of cusps set into the archway rising above his head. He looked about, comparing this arch with all the other arches’ cusp pairings. As each arch rose towards its apex, successive pairs of sprouting cusps were necessarily closer together than the pairs beneath. In almost every instance, an arch’s highest cusp pairing emerged around a foot below the arch’s apex allowing some distance between the facing cusps so their engravings could be admired.
He fell silent for a little while evaluating what he saw.
‘Our arch is different,’ he said.
‘Yes, the cusps of each arch have different sets of images.’
‘No … well, yes to that. But no. You see the cusps in all the other arches have a generally consistent spacing and positioning.’ Sam’s hands rose up to describe an archway. ‘But look at our arch; see the difference.’
‘I see it,’ said Helen. ‘On all the other arches, there is a clear gap between the top pair of cusps—’
‘That’s right, two stone cusps jutting out from either side of the rising archway can’t occupy the same place in space, so the highest pair emerge a little below the peak of the arch, leaving a clear space between the facing cusps.’
‘But not on this arch,’ said Helen, pointing up.
‘Right, the cusps on this arch emerge differently. On this arch, the top two cusps emerge closer to the apex or peak, and their leading faces are almost touching one another.’
‘You’re right,’ said Oliver. ‘I’d always wondered about that. Assumed some mason in antiquity must have got his angles wrong.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Sam. ‘If it’s as I think, those boys didn’t make mistakes.’
Francis and Xavier joined them with Grace and Angelo following behind. Everybody compared the photo with the cusps on the archway and unanimously agreed the patterns were the same.
‘Do you see how the front faces on each successive pair of cusps changes? As though each successive pair has been rotated,’ said Francis. ‘Like a series of dice throws, each time turning to present a different face.’
‘I do, why would that be?’ said Helen.
‘No idea. This arch contains a sequence of cusp images that we have not yet made much progress in interpreting,’ said Oliver.
‘Perhaps, because they are not to be interpreted,’ said Sam. Helen could see the look come across his face that showed he’d made a breakthrough.
‘What is it, Sam?’
Sam gave her a little smile and turned his attention to Oliver. ‘Oliver, I know you said no photographs, but I really need to take pictures of each of the cusps on this arch. Just this arch, that’s all.’
Oliver sho
ok his head. ‘Sorry, Sam, it’s out of the question. If I let you take pictures, I’d be frogmarched off the premises in no time.’
‘Come on, Oliver, there must be a way, an exception?’
‘Sorry, nothing I can do at all. But look, speak with Silvia. She’s your lady. The office has photographs of everything, all the stonework. She’ll have good quality pictures. They are available to researchers and for press and PR. Speak to her. I’m certain she will sort out what you need.’
Content with what they had found, Sam was impatient to speak with Silvia and headed off. The rest of the group hung back to admire the Apprentice Pillar, before moving on to follow Helen’s instruction and wonder at the line of engraved corncobs that decorated the stone window frame. A little way off, just beyond the altar, another early-bird tourist had braved the weather to make a visit. Still wrapped up against the elements, the man had taken a seat and was offering a prayer as Sam hurried for the exit.
Between the Reverend McEwan’s exhortations, Elaine’s occasional church connection with the chapel and Sam’s own academic reputation, Silvia had been happy to allow him access to the photograph archive. She had expressed surprise at the specificity of his request and commented on his interest being unusual. Nobody had ever asked for the pictures he wanted, but she quickly transferred them to a memory stick and passed it over before guiding Sam to her office door.
‘I’m afraid something unexpected has come up. I’ve got to attend to it now. But please still stop for a coffee. It will warm you before heading back to Edinburgh. The coffees are on me, remember.’
Sam looked across the visitor centre to the café where Helen and the others had gathered. Joining them, Sam waved the memory stick. ‘Exactly what we want; Silvia really delivered the goods.’
