The Lost Book of the Grail Read online

  Before he even read this slightly more grown-up version of the stories, Arthur flipped through the book, stopping at every illustration. His favorite image had been the one he found most mysterious: a color plate of a woman in a white robe standing in profile on a cushion of fire. Her robe and hair glowed orange with flames and in her hands she held an ornate golden cup similarly engulfed, from which radiated beams of light. Her head was bowed as if in prayer and the room in which she stood was far plainer than the background of Rackham’s other pictures—a row of crosshatched windows above brown paneling and a brown tiled floor. The artist clearly wanted Arthur’s eye to be drawn to the cup and now, thirty years after he had first gazed upon this illustration, it still was. On the tissue guard in front of the glossy color plate was the caption, printed in red ink: “How at the Castle of Corbin a maiden bare in the Sangreal and foretold the achievements of Galahad.” Arthur wondered what Bethany would think if she saw the picture. Surely she would notice Rackham’s Holy Grail was exactly the same as the cup held by Bishop Gladwyn in the portrait by John Collier.

  Collier’s portrait, Arthur had discovered, had been displayed in London at the Royal Academy exhibit of 1888, when a young Arthur Rackham was just beginning art school. Rackham must have seen the portrait and tracked it down in Barchester decades later to copy the cup when he was working on his Arthurian illustrations. Arthur wondered what it was about Gladwyn’s cup that made Rackham want to copy it.

  It was a question that had intrigued him since he had first seen Gladwyn’s portrait. He had read about the painting in Gladwyn’s guide to the cathedral—the first book he had read before beginning work on his own guide and the same guide that had led Bethany to the chapter house. It had taken him a month to track down the painting—no one at the cathedral knew where it had gone, but when he finally found it in the former bishop’s palace he immediately recognized the Grail and suddenly flashed back to that Christmas Day when he first looked at Rackham’s illustration. Did his grandfather know about the painting? In giving him that thick blue book was he leading Arthur to discover the connection between Gladwyn’s portrait and Rackham’s picture?

  Ever since childhood, remembering what his grandfather had told him, Arthur had worked to ferret out connections between Barchester and the Grail. At university he studied as much about the Arthurian legends as he could, secretly searching for anything that would connect the stories to Barchester. When the time came to choose a topic for his master’s thesis, he decided to make a comparative inventory of all the pre-1500 manuscripts of King Arthur and Grail stories. His work took him to libraries across Europe, and allowed him to hold books like the Winchester Manuscript—the only medieval manuscript version of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. The fifteenth-century manuscript had been discovered in 1934, sitting on the library shelves at Winchester College. No one knew how long it had been there or where it had come from, but even the library of a boys’ boarding school had done what libraries were supposed to do—it had preserved the volume until such time as its importance was recognized. Although his census did not require extensive examination of the Winchester manuscript, Arthur had spent days in the British Library poring over the text. He loved the fact that nearly every proper noun had been rendered in red ink—ink that had, in over five hundred years, not faded at all. And when he reached the section about the Grail, he stared for several minutes at a spot near the middle of the page where the word Sangreall was written in that same red ink. The Holy Grail, written in blood, thought Arthur.

  Arthur’s thesis had given him the opportunity to examine a wide variety of medieval manuscripts in person, but it had not uncovered any clues that might connect the Arthur stories, or the Grail, to Barchester. After university, he had spent several years going from one teaching job to another, always hoping to return to Barchester. When the chance came to teach at the University of Barchester, Arthur seized it. No matter how uninspiring the campus, it was in the city that he loved. Arthur had put his quest aside during his peripatetic years, but when he saw the Grail image from his childhood in Collier’s portrait, his passion was reawakened and he became an active Grail seeker once more. He began to add to his small collection of books on King Arthur and the Grail, and he began to scour the cathedral library for clues. He wasn’t even surprised when he found one.

  In the Barchester Breviary, Arthur discovered a curious notation in the margins next to the Prayer of Consecration—the prayer during which, according to the medieval Roman Catholic beliefs of Barchester, the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The note was in Old English, not Latin, and read, as Arthur had translated: “Here I remember the great treasure of Barsyt.” The word for “treasure” in the note was “déorwyrðnes,” which indicated something worthy of veneration.

  But Barchester didn’t have a great treasure. It was one of the reasons the cathedral had always been relatively poor. There had been a small cult of Ewolda, a few miracles attributed to her relics, and a trickle of pilgrims hoping to be healed. But even in legend, Barchester had never housed a fragment of the True Cross or the bones of some great king or archbishop. True, the lost Book of Ewolda was rumored to have been covered in jewels, but it was in no way connected to the Prayer of Consecration. But what if, Arthur wondered, the treasure was a secret? And what if Bishop Gladwyn, the great historian of Barchester, had discovered that secret and left a hint about it in his portrait? If Barchester really was the resting place of the Holy Grail, what better place in the service to remember the Cup of Christ than during the prayer that commemorates his first passing that cup to his disciples?

  Arthur kept a notebook of all his findings, carefully detailing all the evidence that Barchester was connected to the Holy Grail and legends of King Arthur from the curious marginalia in the breviary and in Stansby’s edition of Morte d’Arthur to the yew tree in the cloisters. He also recorded his memory of one of the last days he ever spent with his grandfather. They had, with permission, climbed to the top of the central tower of the cathedral, emerging onto a tiny parapet just below the spire. It was a crisp, clear, early summer day and the views in every direction were magnificent. Arthur’s grandfather pointed out villages fifteen and twenty miles away, identifiable by their church towers. Just before they headed back down, Arthur noticed a pair of sculptures, worn by centuries of rain, sitting just behind the parapet, where they could never be seen from below—two lions looking west toward the cathedral’s main door. Arthur instantly recalled a passage in The Romance of King Arthur, describing the castle in which Launcelot saw the Holy Grail: “There was a postern opened toward the sea, and was open without any keeping, save two lions kept the entry.” He excitedly recited the passage to his grandfather, pointing out the lion statues, but his grandfather only smiled, winked, and ducked back through the low doorway that led into the darkness inside the tower.

  Arthur meticulously recorded all this evidence, without a thought of sharing his findings. He had promised his grandfather to keep the Grail and his search for it a secret. To Arthur, the mystery was deeply private, and deeply connected to his memories of those happy summer days with his grandfather.

  Now, looking back over his notes about Collier and Rackham, Arthur added a sentence about the Grail table, which Bethany had noticed—the table on which the lost Book of Ewolda lay. What he hadn’t considered before was that two treasures featured prominently in Gladwyn’s portrait—the Holy Grail and the lost Book of Ewolda—and that the silver table connected the two. If something in the Book of Ewolda allowed Arthur to prove conclusively that Barchester was associated with the Grail, it might be time to break his promise to his grandfather and share the secret. That sort of discovery could mean grants and lottery funding and museums and a national outcry against selling off the manuscripts of the great Barchester Cathedral Library.

  With an hour remaining in his consultation period, Arthur decided to call it a day. If he left now he could be back at
the cathedral by three o’clock and have time to compare Bishop Gladwyn’s inventory to the eighty-two manuscripts on the library shelves.

  As he was locking his office door he heard footsteps behind him. “Arthur, I’m glad I caught you,” said Miss Stanhope. “Don’t your office hours last until three thirty?”

  “Miss Stanhope,” said Arthur, “what a delight.” It was anything but.

  “I just wanted to discuss the last section of Mansfield Park for a few minutes.” Miss Stanhope waved not a book but a flat silver tablet in the air.

  “And how are we to discuss Mansfield Park,” said Arthur, “if you have not brought Mansfield Park with you?”

  “Oh, don’t be such an old grouch,” said Miss Stanhope. “I downloaded the text file from Project Gutenberg and I’m reading it on my iPad.”

  Students didn’t even read books anymore, thought Arthur. They dispensed with design and layout and cover art and illustrations and reduced reading to nothing but a stream of text in whatever font and size they chose. Reading without books, thought Arthur, was like playing cricket without dressing in white. It could be done, but why?

  “Miss Stanhope,” said Arthur, “may I ask you a question?”

  “Sure, Arthur.”

  “Do you ever go to the media center?”

  “Sure, I go there all the time.”

  “And what do you do when you are there?”

  “Well, they have very comfortable chairs, and the coffee is good, and the Wi-Fi is superfast.”

  Was that it? wondered Arthur. Were libraries now just places with good coffee and fast Internet connections? Was there no way to get students to actually interact with books even in a building once devoted to those very objects? Arthur wasn’t sure he yet understood what the media center’s purpose was in this digital age, but he hoped he might find a way to make it more than the provision of hot beverages and comfy chairs.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Stanhope,” said Arthur, shoving his keys in his pocket. “I won’t be able to meet with you this afternoon. Family emergency.”

  He scurried off down the hall before Miss Stanhope could reply.

  —

  Thirty minutes later, Arthur was walking across the close on a stunningly bright spring day. The spire of the cathedral was silhouetted against a deep blue sky lightly dusted with wisps of cloud. He stood for a moment, gazing up at the spire—that remarkable structure that had towered over Barchester for six centuries. It had no doubt been a beacon to those few pilgrims who sought out the shrine of Ewolda; sadly it had also been a beacon to Nazi bombers. But the spire had survived, and the survival of such a fragile structure gave Arthur hope that the rest of the cathedral, and the treasures it contained, would survive as well.

  Arthur crept into the library, hoping perhaps Bethany would not notice him, but he needn’t have bothered. She was nowhere to be seen. He carefully withdrew from his bag his photocopy of Bishop Gladwyn’s inventory, pulled a pencil from his pocket, and stood in front of the shelves of medieval manuscripts.

  Arthur loved the ancient feel of that case, with its iron chains, though no longer attached to the manuscripts, still hanging above each shelf. But he also loved that, as old as the chained library felt, for some of these manuscripts it had been a new form of storage. The oldest book in the library was the tenth-century Gospel of John, transcribed at least six centuries before this case had been built. It, and other manuscripts, would originally have been stored flat on their sides. As the collection grew and books were piled on top of each other, access became difficult. No records existed of where the books were kept in the following centuries, but Arthur suspected that some, at least, were stacked in wide niches in the wall in the cloisters, close to where the scribes worked. Eventually they may have been placed in wooden chests with iron locks for protection, but not until this chained case had been built, in about 1600, were any of these books ever stored upright. Even then, the manuscripts were kept with their spines inward, to leave room for the chains that were attached to the outer edge of the front covers. This was why most had titles written on their fore edges. But because the front covers had been torn off when the library was reassembled after the war, the manuscripts had been shelved spine out, in the modern fashion, hiding the titles. There had been talk in the 1970s, Arthur had heard, about putting new covers on the manuscripts, but the debate between those who said this would be historically inappropriate and those who claimed it would help protect the books’ contents had been settled by a distinct lack of money.

  Arthur was now confronted with three shelves of blank spines. To inventory the manuscripts, he would have to take each volume off the shelf. Most had shelf numbers penciled in the top right corner of the first page—not surprisingly in the handwriting of Bishop Gladwyn—so Arthur could fairly quickly go through Gladwyn’s list, which was arranged by shelf number, to determine what was missing. He had made his way through most of the first shelf and was beginning to think he could succeed in completing this task in peace when Bethany bounded through the door.

  “Arthur! Hi,” she said. “Oh, I just photographed the most beautiful Gospel. I could have looked at every page for hours. Had to pop to the washroom after. I wash my hands freshly every ten pages or so. Are you checking Gladwyn’s inventory? That was fun last night. It was sweet of Oscar to invite me.”

  For an instant, Arthur thought about ignoring her, but he couldn’t. He shelved manuscript A-22 and turned to see her standing a few feet away, that ever-present wisp of hair dangling in front of her eyes and a warm smile on her face.

  “Oscar is the kindest man I know,” said Arthur.

  “You were awfully quiet,” said Bethany.

  “Lost in thought, I’m afraid,” said Arthur. He was on the verge of adding a comment about the irony of a digital warrior in the encampment of bibliophiles, but something about Bethany’s smile made him want to keep their conversation civil. Then again, Gwyn had told him that morning that Bethany’s project had convinced at least one canon to vote to sell off the cathedral manuscripts. Perhaps that smile was the grin of a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.

  “You know there’s an easier way to do that,” said Bethany, peering over his shoulder at Gladwyn’s inventory.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The manuscripts are still arranged by their original shelf numbers. A-1, A-2, and so on. One letter for each shelf. All you have to do is—”

  “Is count the number of volumes on each shelf . . .”

  “And see which total doesn’t match the highest number on Gladwyn’s list. It’s shelf B, by the way.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “A head for numbers, believe it or not. Ever since I first counted the manuscripts I can tell you exactly how many are on each shelf, and there are twenty-seven on shelf B.”

  Arthur looked at Gladwyn’s list and saw that there was an entry for B-28.

  “I’ll bet it’s the last one that’s missing,” said Bethany. “If there was one missing in sequence you would have noticed.”

  “But if B-28 is missing,” said Arthur excitedly as he pulled out the volume at the far right of the shelf, “I would have assumed there were only twenty-seven volumes on shelf B.” He turned to the first page of the manuscript and saw Bishop Gladwyn’s light pencil marking on the upper corner: B-27.

  “So what was B-28?” said Bethany.

  Arthur looked back down at the inventory. “Looks rather dull, I’m afraid. It just says ‘Psalter, no illuminations, early sixteenth century.’ Looks like the missing manuscript is utterly ordinary.”

  “You really have no imagination, do you, Arthur?” said Bethany. “We’re a strange pair, you and I. I’m obsessed with technology and the modern world, yet to me every book in this library, every stone in this cathedral is pulsing with mystery and intrigue. You live in the past, in a world of manuscripts and illuminati
ons, but to you a five-hundred-year-old Psalter can be ‘utterly ordinary.’”

  “You’re really intrigued by the library?” said Arthur, feeling a new respect for Bethany.

  “For God’s sake, Arthur, look around you. Who wouldn’t be? You may take all this for granted, because you have the privilege of coming up here all the time, but to most people being in a room like this would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s a shame so few people get to see it. But just because I’m somewhat mesmerized by all this . . . this history, doesn’t mean I take things at face value. I don’t believe for a minute that the one manuscript that’s gone missing is the most boring one in the collection.”

  Arthur thought about telling her that any intrigue involving the Barchester manuscripts might soon be put to an end, as they might all be heading to the auction block, and that her presence in the library was not exactly helping their cause, but when he looked up and saw the excitement in her eyes he couldn’t bear to squelch it. “So you think that B-28 is something more than an unillustrated Psalter?”

  “Wouldn’t it make a better mystery if it were?” she said.

  Arthur wanted to believe she was right. He wanted to believe that B-28 was the lost Book of Ewolda, that it would answer all his questions about the cathedral’s founder, even that it would finally cement the connection between Barchester and the Holy Grail. But he found the same part of him that precluded his belief in God kept him from sharing her excitement. Arthur believed what he saw, and what he saw was an entry that said “Psalter, no illuminations, early sixteenth century.”

  “It would make a better mystery,” said Arthur. “But perhaps it’s not a mystery, after all.”

  “Oh, Arthur, you’re no fun. What do you say we have a cup of tea?”

  “I really ought to get some work done,” said Arthur.

  “Yes, but it’s three thirty. Isn’t that teatime? Plus, my back is killing me from leaning over manuscripts. I could use a few laps around the cloister with a friend.”