“The Black Mass is, essentially, magic,” she began. “One might, of course, make the same accusation of the Church's own ritual Mass, depending on how seriously one interprets the idea of Transubstantiation and the transformation of the communicants who partake of Christ's body.” A pimpled boy at the oars ten feet away dropped his jaw at this statement, staring at Professor Ledger until the shouts of his passengers drew his attention to the upcoming collision. She went blithely on.
“No doubt, a high percentage of communicants over the centuries have taken the symbol as actual, and indeed, the Church itself encourages the belief that the Host is literally transformed from wheat flour into the body of Christ, and that when we take of His flesh, we are ourselves transformed into His flesh. Cannibals the world around would instantly agree, that eating a person imbues one with his essence. Speaking of which, did my granddaughter pack along those little meat pies I asked her for? Ah yes, there they are. Would you like one?”
I permitted the punt pole to drift behind us in the water, steering but not propelling, while I accepted one of the professor's diminutive game pies. I took a bite.
“Grouse?” I asked.
“One of my grandsons takes a house in Scotland for the Twelfth every year,” she said.
“Very nice.” Also very small. I took the glass I had propped among the boards at my feet, washed the pie down with champagne, and resumed the pole.
Professor Ledger jammed a clean handkerchief into the neck of the bottle and tied a piece of string around it, then dropped it over the side to keep it cool but unsullied in the river water-a very practiced move, indeed. She then held up a morsel of the pie in her gnarled fingers, eyeing it with scientific detachment. “One must wonder, if one partakes of the essence of grouse, how does it manifest? Does one explode into violent flight, or begin to make odd noises, or start to reproduce spectacularly?” This time a courting couple on the bank overheard her; as we drifted past, they craned after us so far, I expected to hear two large splashes.
“In any event, if one insists on a magical element to religion, one cannot then be surprised when magic is taken seriously. The Black Mass developed originally from the Feast of Fools, when idiots ruled the day and strong drink and carnality flowed unchecked. Harmless parody helps relieve pressure, and by keeping it under the auspices of the Church, one might say that licentiousness was kept licensed.
“However, with a work of magic at its core, the Mass was vulnerable to the most crass of interpretations: that the Host itself was where the power lay. If it all comes down to the Host, then equally it all flows back from that same place, so that, by using that scrap of unleavened bread as the point of the wedge, the authority of the Mass, and of the Church, and of God himself, could be turned on its head.
“The Black Mass was originally intended to profane the Host so as to turn its power to profane uses. From that beginning, the Black Mass grew like lichen on a rock, until one finds, say, the mass performed by Étienne Guibourg in the Seventeenth Century, in which the mistress of Louis Quatorze was stretched out on the altar with the chalice between her bare breasts”-a bespectacled undergraduate walking the path along Christchurch meadow dropped his book of poetry, bent to pick it up while looking over his shoulder at us, and fell on his face-“while the priest chanted his Latin to the devil.
“Sexuality, of course, is the central element in many of these Black celebrations, doubtless because the Church has aligned itself so definitively against free sexual expression. You've read the Marquis de Sade?”
“Er,” I replied. I felt a bit like the bespectacled undergraduate.
“Well, then you'll remember how often his corrupt sexuality contains reference to elements of the Church-the Host, the Mass, monks, priests.”
“What about blood?” I asked, a bit desperately.
Professor Ledger's bright eyes came to rest on my face. “My dear, why don't you tell me what you're after? Is this academic? Or one of your little investigations?”
I took the boat to the side opposite the footpath and worked the pole into the muck below, trapping us against the tree-lined bank. Once secure, I stepped over to the centre and settled onto cushions, retrieving the champagne and topping up our glasses.
“It's a case,” I answered, and told her about it, my voice just loud enough for her aged ears. I did not tell her all: not Holmes' personal stake in it, nor the identity of the dead woman found ten miles from my home. I think she guessed that I was leaving out a large part of it, but she did not comment.
“So,” I concluded some quarter hour later, “when there were objects that resemble quill trimmings at the murder sites, stained by what appears to be dried blood, and bits of black candle-wax as well, we had to wonder.”
“Necromancy,” she pronounced, her old voice quivering with distaste. “From nekros and manteid: ‘dead divination.’ Blood spells and invocations. Sealing a covenant. The darkest of the dark arts. And to use fresh blood, in situ…” She shook her head. “You must stop this person, Mary.”
I forbore to make reference to her deprecating “little investigations” comment, but dug the rucksack I had brought from London out from under half a dozen rugs, and handed her the Adlers' copy of Testimony. “It might help, if you were to look at this and tell me what you see.”
“Of course,” she said, although her hand hesitated, just a moment, before closing on the book's cover.
“I have to take it back to London with me,” I said in apology.
She patted her pockets until she found a pair of reading glasses, and opened the book.
I extricated the pole from the sucking mud without swamping the boat, and continued idly downstream to the Isis proper, then looped back up the Cherwell. We passed under Magdalen Bridge and were nearly to Mesopotamia when the aged academic closed the book and removed her spectacles.
I continued to punt in silence, though my muscles burned and my back ached.
“He writes as if in conversation with himself,” she mused. “No explanation, no attempt at a reasoned argument, no discursus at all, except to enjoy the sound of his own voice. And yes, it is a he, most definitely.”
“Yet this is not a journal, it is a printed book, of which there are at least two in existence,” I said.
“If there are two, there will be more. This is an esoteric document to be presented only to True Believers. I should imagine he may have another, either in existence or in preparation, to set his beliefs before the outer world.”
“The Text of Lights,” I said. “That was what one of his disciples called it.”
“Light indeed seems to be the basis of his cosmology-or rather, as you say, lights of various sorts: sun, moon, comets. Which reminds me, which comet do you imagine he was born under?”
“We think that of September 1882. There were no meteors then, as far as I can find, but he seems more than a little flexible when it comes to chronology. And to astronomy and geography, for that matter.”
“Hare-brained thinking at its best,” she said in disapproval.
“Madness being no excuse for sloppy ratiocination?” I asked, half joking.
She was not amused. “When one encounters a mystical system based upon the physical universe, it is generally manifested by a tight, even obsessive internal logic.”
“However,” I replied, “internal logic is not the same as rationality. ‘The desperation to support an untenable position to which one is nonetheless committed has caused centuries of extreme mental gymnastics.’”
The statement was a direct quote, levelled at me some years before during the defence of a paper by none other than Professor Clarissa Ledger.