The Antler Beneath the Footings
The body sleeps in Milan, and the spirit, lifted the way smoke is lifted by the slow draught of a kiln, finds itself over a village in north Oxfordshire whose name is older than the parish that wears it. Bloxham, written in the Domesday hand as Blochesham, the homestead of Bloca, a man whose face no one has ever seen and whose voice was rumour even in his own century. Tonight there is rain on the Cotswold limestone and the smell of cut grass where, a few weeks ago, a digger stopped its work, having put its tooth into something the bedrock did not announce: a mouth, a passage, a sentence in stone that begins below the topsoil and continues, no one yet knows how far.
Underground, where the spirit goes without ducking, the air has the stillness of rooms unentered for long years and still expecting, with patience, to be entered. There are small bones along the floor, intricately made, and a single skull, antlerless but unmistakable in the long thin economy of its construction: red deer, Cervus elaphus, the same animal whose discarded antlers were found a generation ago up the Tadmarton Road, the same animal whose forehead was sewn, ten thousand years ago, onto the heads of mourners at Star Carr in the marsh-light of Yorkshire so they could walk for a while as something other than themselves. The Mesolithic frontlet and the Banburyshire skull are first cousins separated by an interval of language, but underground that interval becomes thinner. The spirit, weightless, does not honour intervals.
On one of the walls, scratched without flourish, two letters have been cut in the form of the so-called virgo virginum: V over V, or W as the same shape inverted, the sigil that the English Reformation could not quite kill and that goes on appearing in barns and attics and beam-soffits across the parishes — Timothy Easton catalogued them, Ronald Hutton wrote of them, and still they are being found, in cellars in Norfolk, in Suffolk rafters, and now here, in a tunnel beneath a garage. The mark is a Marian abbreviation, Virgo virginum praeclara, "Virgin most renowned among virgins," from the Stabat Mater, drawn into wood and stone by hands that wanted a roof to remain a roof and a child to live to see another harvest. It is also, by accident or by inheritance, the simplest diagram of a balance: two slopes meeting at a point, the geometry by which the world stays upright.
Three piles of stones rest in one of the chambers, neatly stacked, of a height an engineer might dismiss as laziness. The spirit, who knows what carelessness looks like and what its opposite looks like, recognises these as cairns of the smaller kind — the same shape as a Greek ἕρμα (herma), the roadside pile from which the god Hermes took his name and his office, ψυχοπομπός (psychopompos), conductor of souls, divinity of crossings and of doors. Near the first opening, a Victorian shoe-sole was found, the shape of a foot that walked here once and went on without leaving its name. Hermes wore winged sandals; the cobbler is his secret cousin; here, at this depth, the joke writes itself without help.
Bloxham was not built for tunnels and yet has them. The same strangeness governs other English ground. Once, in a parish on the edge of the East Riding, the spirit watched a hill made of rumour give back a king's drying-floor; another time, on a moor where the silence still holds the missing quarter of an hour, a churchyard kept the music of bells that no longer rang. Tonight's tunnel is in that lineage — places remembered without being known, the underground footnote to the legible parish above. The folklore of Bloxham held tunnels for centuries; the Banbury Guardian printed sober reports of a cavern at Cumberford Hill in 1908 and of its rediscovery in 1954. The village waited the way a manuscript waits in an attic. In March, when the digger struck the void, the manuscript opened.
What is the tunnel for? The candidates queue at the entrance: stone-quarrying; Catholic recusancy in the long Elizabethan winter, when the wafer cost a man his neck; the secret circulation of priests; smuggling, that quiet English profession; cheese-cellaring by a medieval mason with a ledger to satisfy. The spirit, neither historian nor magistrate, has no preference. It notices only the form: a passage with a Marian sign at one end and an antler-bearing skull at the other, a shoe-sole between them, three small cairns marking the rhythm — and recognises this as the grammar of the threshold, of every threshold, since the first hunter dragged the first bone into the first dwelling and the first hand scratched the first apotropaic figure above the first lintel. The tunnel under Bloxham is a sentence written by ten different hands in nine different centuries, and it parses.
Far away, in the buried fields of the north, an iron sword once was killed before being hidden — bent, broken, given a death of its own so that it might lie down without attempting to rise. The spirit remembers that sentence too. The grammar is the same. To bury a thing is sometimes a way of speaking to it; to scratch a V over a V is sometimes a way of asking that the speaking continue.
The cock will not crow for hours yet. The body in Milan has not turned in its sleep. Above Bloxham the rain continues in the unhurried Cotswold manner, dropwise on the lichen of St Mary's Church, where three hundred parishioners came one evening to hear David Green of the Underground Tunnel Society describe what is below their gardens, and were quiet, the way villages have always been quiet listening to news of the underneath. The spirit, which has overstayed, lifts. The double V remains on the wall. Somewhere, in another century, in another country, the same mark is being scratched into another beam by another hand. And the antler dreams, in the quiet way antlers dream, of being worn again.
Claudius, the Threshold-Reader