The Lost Book of the Grail Page 12

  The devil, said Arthur to himself. The devil is tempting you away from your work with a pretty girl. But even as he formed the thought he knew he could not believe it any more than he could believe that the teacher Jesus was the son of a divine being. Bethany was not evil; she was just doing her job. And was her job really that horrible? Arthur had a sudden vision of a student in some remote western part of the United States, sitting at a computer, examining the pages of the Barchester Breviary, learning about medieval music from a book that few people would ever have the thrill of holding in their hands. Arthur decided to try a new approach with Bethany. He decided to try being exactly what she had called him—a friend.

  “So,” said Bethany when they had settled in the café with a pot of tea for two, “how are we going to start searching for the missing manuscript?”

  “Are we going to start searching for the missing manuscript?” said Arthur. “It seems we both have more important work to do.” Arthur instantly realized this had sounded sharp, that he was already failing in his vow to be friendly. And if she really wanted to look for this manuscript, why not? What better way to be a friend than to help her have a little adventure? “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be short. It’s been . . .” Again he hesitated to tell her about the plan to sell the manuscripts. “It’s been a stressful day.”

  “What’s this,” said Bethany, “a kinder, gentler Arthur? I’m not sure I like that, but we’ll see. Now, the first question we have to answer is when did the manuscript disappear. Gladwyn made his list in, what, 1894? That’s more than a hundred years ago. Kind of hard to know when the theft took place—like in those crime dramas when they’re always so focused on time of death. We need to figure out the time of death.”

  “I know,” said Arthur, wanting to respond to Bethany’s monologue with as few syllables as possible.

  “You know? How could you possibly know?” said Bethany. “It’s been a hundred and twenty years.”

  “In 1894, just after he prepared the inventory, Bishop Gladwyn designated one of the canons as canon librarian, and that post remained until the 1930s. For all that time, the only person with a key to the library was that canon. Since the war, the manuscripts have been equally secure, though there wasn’t an appointed librarian.”

  “But how do you know that one of those librarians didn’t—”

  “They didn’t,” said Arthur. “They were trustworthy men. I can tell you all their names and all about them. They cared for the manuscripts with a passion. And remember, before the war the manuscripts were still chained to the shelves. It would have been extremely difficult to remove one without anyone knowing.”

  “So when did it happen?”

  “On the one night when it would have been extremely easy to remove a manuscript without anyone knowing. February 7, 1941.”

  “That’s quite specific.”

  “It’s the night the Nazis bombed Barchester. The Lady Chapel was destroyed and for a few hours it looked as if the entire cathedral might burn. So volunteers took all the valuables out and moved them away for safekeeping for the remainder of the war.”

  “All the valuables? Including the manuscripts?”

  “Including the manuscripts.”

  “Well,” said Bethany, “we need to find out more about that night.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” said Arthur. “We could go next Thursday to the county archives. They’re only open one day a week, but they have a file of all the area newspapers and . . . are you even listening to what I’m saying?”

  Bethany had pulled out her phone and was tapping away on it. “Of course I’m listening, Arthur,” she said as her fingers moved in a blur. “I just don’t feel like waiting until next Thursday. Here we are.” She handed the phone to Arthur.

  “What’s this?”

  “The British Newspaper Archive—fully digitized and searchable. I’m surprised you haven’t used it.”

  Arthur pulled on his reading glasses and squinted at the phone. “What am I looking at exactly?”

  “The Barsetshire Chronicle for February 8, 1941, old man,” said Bethany.

  “You mean you just typed in . . .” Arthur was amazed. True, what he was looking at was not the original paper, only an image on a screen. But still, she had found in seconds what it would have taken him nearly a week to find. And what else might she find in an archive of . . . “How big is the archive?”

  “Over ten million pages,” said Bethany.

  “And you can search it?”

  “Sure. Just type in what you want to know, and every newspaper article for two hundred years shows up.”

  “The print is awfully small,” said Arthur.

  “So you zoom in,” said Bethany. “But why don’t I just read it to you.” She took the phone back and read, in the same soft voice that had lulled Arthur on the previous evening.

  An unexpected and barbaric raid took place on the city of Barchester last night. Although Nazi bombs fell for only a short time, the incendiaries led to many fires and indiscriminate destruction. More than forty people are believed dead. Barchester’s medieval cathedral narrowly escaped a direct hit, but the Lady Chapel at the building’s east end was completely destroyed. While firemen doused the flames, bravely preserving the rest of the much-loved structure, others raced to remove treasures from the cathedral in preparation for the worst. Even choirboys were enlisted to help empty the cathedral library of more than eighty medieval manuscripts and nearly three thousand books, which were transported to safety. The dean this morning said he feared that efforts to extinguish the fire in the Lady Chapel would lead to the flooding of the main cathedral, but this did not come to pass. The people of Barchester have borne their ordeal with bravery, and this morning cathedral services went on as usual even while the remains of the Lady Chapel smoldered.

  “It’s not much to go on,” said Arthur. “Papers were pretty slim during the war.”

  “But at least it gives us a lead,” said Bethany.

  “It does?”

  “Arthur, for a researcher you’re not very observant. ‘Even choirboys were enlisted to help empty the cathedral library.’ Maybe some of those choirboys are still alive.”

  —

  Bethany went up to London for the weekend and Arthur spent Saturday afternoon digging through the cathedral records trying to find lists of choirboys, but without success. His schedule at the university the following week was so hectic that he did not make it back to the library until Thursday afternoon. That morning Gwyn had informed him that the manuscripts had received a temporary stay of execution in the latest chapter meeting.

  “One of the canons pointed out that the manuscripts are worth considerably less with their covers ripped off,” said Gwyn. “So Canon Dale suggested that we have the covers repaired and I said that nobody knows where the covers are, and we ended up tabling the whole issue. Do we know where the covers are?”

  “I certainly don’t,” said Arthur. “And Oscar has no idea. If it keeps the manuscripts here, I say the covers can stay lost forever.”

  He had been looking forward all day to some time in the library, and he was surprised to find as he mounted the stairs that he had really been looking forward to seeing Bethany. Since she had found the newspaper story so easily he thought she might have an idea about how to track down old choirboys. But when he arrived in the library the atmosphere seemed lifeless. Bethany’s equipment stood silent at the far end of the room, and she was nowhere to be seen.

  Arthur sat at his usual table, feeling somewhat deflated, and had just been about to try, for the hundredth time, to write a section in his cathedral guide about the central tower when he heard a voice behind him.

  “Arthur,” said Oscar, “escaped the Barchester prison, I see.”

  “An insufferably busy week,” said Arthur, pushing back his chair. “I think the chairman
invents committees to infuriate me.”

  “Well, good to see you here. I was just catching up on some library correspondence. Don’t want to disturb you.”

  “I say, Oscar, is Beth . . . I mean, is Miss Davis working today?”

  “Gone out for tea, I think,” said Oscar. “Apparently she’s a regular down in the café these days. Did you need her for something?”

  “No,” said Arthur. “Just wondered how long I’ll be able to work in peace.” Oscar suppressed a smile as he took a seat at his desk by the door. Arthur chose not to notice and turned back to his work. He had read his first and only sentence over about ten times, until the words swirled before him as meaningless strings of characters, when he thought to ask Oscar something else. “Do you know where the records of choir membership are kept?”

  “Moved them to the choral office a few years ago,” said Oscar, “along with some other music-related materials. The choir rolls are in a bound book and the choirmaster got tired of coming up here every year to make the new entries.”

  Ten minutes later, Arthur was in the music office, copying out the names of the sixteen 1941 choirboys onto the back of an old service bulletin. He was about to rush back upstairs when he remembered what else was kept in that office.

  “Do you have the original copy of Harding’s Church Music?” he asked the choirmaster.

  “Certainly, I keep it in this cabinet,” said the choirmaster, pulling a small key out of his pocket. In a moment the two men were poring over a sumptuous vellum volume produced in the mid-nineteenth century by Barchester’s own Septimus Harding. Harding had done much of his research for this book about early church music in Britain in the cathedral library, and made frequent reference to the Barchester Breviary, reproducing many of the musical settings from that book. As they turned the broad pages and admired the fine printing, Arthur thought that this book came from a time when the library was a much busier place, when it sent its knowledge and treasures out into the world not as electronic impulses but as new works of scholarship. The trade edition of Harding’s Church Music was still occasionally reprinted and was a standard reference for choir directors and music teachers around the world. If the Barchester Cathedral Library could produce something that beautiful and useful, perhaps it still had more to contribute. Maybe the library could once again be part of a network of scholars and researchers who wrote new works to share with the world.

  “He produced a beautiful book,” said the choirmaster.

  “He certainly did,” said Arthur.

  —

  “Where’ve you been all my life, Arthur Prescott?” said Bethany as Arthur entered the library. Oscar had left, and Bethany was just pulling a manuscript off shelf C. Arthur found himself hoping that she was not scanning the volumes in order, that she had not already made so much progress.

  “You’re the one who went traipsing off to London,” said Arthur. “I was here all day on Saturday. And I’ve been working on our little mystery while you’ve been out guzzling tea.”

  “You can’t blame me for the tea, Arthur. That’s your culture. Help me with this, will you?” The manuscript she was struggling to remove from the case was an unusually thick and heavy one, and the rending of its cover had left a loose bit of linen tape hanging from the spine. This had gotten caught under the adjacent volume. Arthur helped Bethany extract the book. When they had placed the manuscript on Bethany’s stand, she said, “There, now you’ve done at least one useful thing today.”

  “I’ve done two useful things,” said Arthur. “I’ve got a list of the choirboys from 1941.”

  “You don’t!”

  “I do. Why else would I have said so?”

  “It’s a figure of speech, Arthur,” said Bethany. “So, are any of them alive and well and living in Barchester?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Arthur, “I only just . . .”

  “I thought you said you’d done something useful,” said Bethany. “You’re not too bad at coming up with primary source material, Arthur, but you’re rubbish at interpreting it.”

  “I’m rubbish?”

  “See, I’m picking up the English idiom. Another couple of weeks and I’ll be just like you. Now show me your list.”

  Arthur handed her the bulletin on which he had scrawled the names of the choirboys and she immediately disappeared behind her laptop.

  “Not much to go on, I realize,” said Arthur. “But I can ask some of the vergers if any of the names are familiar. Some of those men have been around for fifty years or more. They might remember . . .”

  “This one’s dead,” said Bethany. “Herbert Foster died in 1982.”

  “How do you . . .”

  “The Internet is a wonderful thing, Arthur, if only you know how to use it. It’s good for a lot more than buying old books and looking at dirty pictures.”

  “I beg your pardon, but I have never—”

  “And James Lindsay—he’s dead as well. He was a schoolteacher.” Within thirty minutes, Bethany had found evidence that seven of the sixteen choirboys had died. “Some of these names are pretty common,” she said, “so I’m only counting the ones that seem to have some sort of connection to Barchester.” She showed Arthur how she was searching not just the local newspaper in the British Newspaper Archive, but various genealogy sites and even social media. Before Evensong, she had tracked down two survivors of the 1941 choir—one living in London and one still in Barchester at the River View Elder Care home.

  “Are you a believer yet, Arthur?” said Bethany.

  “Not yet,” said Arthur, “but I’m going to Evensong nonetheless. It’s the Tallis Mag and Nunc tonight.”

  “Not that sort of believer,” said Bethany. “I mean are you a believer in the wonders of the digital world?”

  “I can see how such wonders might be useful under certain circumstances,” said Arthur. “But I still prefer paper and ink.”

  “The Internet will have to use you as a celebrity spokesman with a ringing endorsement like that. Wait up, I just need to get my purse.”

  “Wait up?” said Arthur.

  “I’m coming with you. To Evensong. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “I thought you didn’t like going to church.”

  “People can change, Arthur—you should try it sometime. So I’m coming to Evensong and I’m asking if I can sit next to you.”

  “Yes,” said Arthur softly, “that would be lovely.”

  VI

  THE REGIMENTAL CHAPEL

  Located in the south transept, this chapel pays tribute to all those of the Royal Barsetshire Regiment who have lost their lives in wars of the last two centuries. Of special interest is a monument, installed by Bishop Gladwyn, to the fallen of those parishes in the gift of the cathedral chapter—St. Cuthbert’s and Plumstead Episcopi. This beautiful tile memorial was designed and built by the ceramicist William De Morgan, and includes images of these churches.

  1068, near Barcaster

  Brother Harold looked out across the green fields and tried to imagine what would flourish there. Not crops or livestock but prayers and praise. He stood two miles upstream from St. Ewolda’s, or what had been St. Ewolda’s until the arrival of the Normans two years ago. They were a strange sort of invader. They shed no blood at the monastery or in the small town of Barcaster that had grown up around its gates. They brought with them wealth and learning and the ability to raise buildings beyond Harold’s imagination. It was, one of the brothers had said, as if the Romans had returned. But they were not altruistic. They did not kill, but they took what they desired. In the case of Barcaster, what they desired was the small rise of land above the River Esk. Situated on a sweeping bend of the river and in the lee of a larger hill, this spot provided views for nearly a mile up and downstream. It was, said the Norman commander who arrived at the gate of St. Ewolda’s one morning, of strategic importance. Already
a stone castle was under construction at one end of this rise. At the other end stood the soon-to-be-abandoned monastery of St. Ewolda’s. For more than four hundred years, the monks of St. Ewolda’s had worshipped peacefully on the spot where their founder was martyred. But now they were to move to a new home, in fields that the monastery owned upstream.

  “We come in the name of Christ” had been the first words of the commander to Harold. And in His name the Normans had been busy. Even before the castle construction began, they had started making plans for a grand cathedral on the site of St. Ewolda’s—the seat of a newly formed diocese of Barsytshire.

  “The doors alone will dwarf any building you have ever seen,” said one of the builders to Harold. “The arches will soar overhead, and the very ceiling will be lost in darkness on all but the brightest days, so far toward heaven will it be.” And Harold could stay and watch it happen, for the new cathedral would be a monastic foundation. But the bishop and the abbot would be French-speaking Normans. The bishop had visited once already, to view the plans for the cathedral, and he had told Harold that the monks of St. Ewolda’s could be absorbed into the new foundation, which he thought of dedicating to St. Martin of Tours.

  But St. Ewolda’s was a Saxon foundation in honor of a Saxon saint, and Harold had no desire for Norman grandness. He wanted simply to live out his days in the peace that St. Ewolda’s had always known.

  And then there was the matter of his guardianship. As Guardian, he could not allow the relic to fall into the hands of the Normans. And so he had asked the bishop to approve a different plan.

  “What if, My Lord, we were to reestablish the foundation of St. Ewolda’s on a plot of land already owned by the monastery, some two miles hence. With us we would take our few belongings—a small collection of books and furnishings, and of course the relics of our blessed St. Ewolda, who lies entombed below the altar of our church. You could then build your cathedral on this spot, which has been blessed with worship for four centuries.”