The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [91]
Martin says nothing, looking at me steadily. It’s the first time I’ve articulated my dilemma, and I’m grateful he doesn’t offer advice.
‘Anyway,’ I continue, ‘there is this–other reason. Bit of an obsession of mine. My grandfather.’
‘You know, you sound like you’re half in love with Keiller yourself Martin has a dubious expression on his face, after hearing me out. ‘He could’ve had a fling with your grandmother, I suppose, he was free with his favours. Four wives, numerous mistresses, and I’ve always suspected he might’ve swung both ways as well. But you do realize there are no known Keiller offspring, legit or otherwise? Either he really didn’t like kids or he was firing blanks.’
It doesn’t sound promising.
‘And that anonymous letter doesn’t really say much, does it? Any idea who sent it?’
‘There was this woman who was a housemaid at the Manor, died not long ago. I don’t know anything about her, but Frannie practically snarled the only time she mentioned her.’
‘Dead end, then.’ Martin sounds disappointed: another lost interviewee. ‘But the line that implies devil worship at the Manor–Keiller was interested in witchcraft, and there’s an account of at least one bizarre ceremony in the garden, though I doubt he was taking it seriously.’ He leans over to pour more wine into my glass. ‘Ritual magic was one of the growth spiritual industries of the twenties and thirties. James Frazer’s Golden Bough had raised interest in anthropology and magic. There was an idea that Eastern mysticism held the key to knowledge Westerners had lost, and the Ordo Templi Orientalis were invoking Isis and Ishtar and God knows what else in London and Paris. Aleister Crowley–and don’t give me any of that pagan tosh about how he had an unfairly poor press, he was a deliberately bad lad into cocaine and shagging anything on legs, and he loved being called the Great Beast–was supposedly the most accomplished ritual magician of his time. If you ask me, it owed a lot to hypnotism, and Tantric sex technique. But these people genuinely thought they were onto something, tapping into the hidden forces of the universe. Crowley supposedly managed to summon the goat god Pan, but the experience nearly destroyed him. Mind you, we only have Denis Wheatley’s word for it, and you should never trust a novelist, especially one who admired Mussolini and wrote spicy thrillers with titles like The Devil Rides Out!
‘Was Christopher Lee in that one?’
‘Probably. All sounds deeply iffy now, but some of Crowley’s beliefs, like the power of will, are the ancestors of modern fads like cosmic ordering.’
‘You’re saying it was exactly the kind of fashionable hobby Keiller would have thrown himself into?’
Martin lifts up his glass to admire the colour of the wine. ‘Well, yes and no. In some ways they had a lot in common–neither had to work for a living, both were borderline psychopaths who flew into a tantrum if crossed, and blew an inherited fortune on their obsessions. Keiller was certainly interested in magic, from an academic point of view. But he was too much a rationalist to be the Beast of Avebury Though, mind you–’ he puts down the glass, and levers himself to his feet to peer out of the small back window onto the stone circle ‘–I’m not a superstitious bloke, but in a long career of digging up ancient places, this is one of the strangest. It’s something to do with people living inside the henge. Not many stone circles where you can do that, are there? You could take a tent and doss down temporarily inside the Rollrights or Stanton Drew–but there isn’t a village built inside either. Nobody ran a high street through the middle of Stonehenge. People have been going to bed every night inside this circle for a couple of thousand years–leaving layer