The Lost Book of the Grail Read online

  “I can’t sleep,” said Arthur, “I’m . . . what do you Americans call it? I’m on a roll. But I need to check something.”

  “OK, what book can I bring you?”

  “Not in a book, in the cathedral.”

  “I am not going into the cathedral by myself at three o’clock in the morning,” said Bethany.

  “I know,” said Arthur. “We’re going together.”

  Arthur took a key from the top drawer of Oscar’s desk and led Bethany down the winding library stairs and into the cloister. A pale moon shone overhead, giving just enough light for them to find their way to the south transept door, where Arthur fiddled with the keys in the darkness for a moment before he heard a click in the lock. He pushed and the door creaked open. They peered into blackness, feeling a slight flow of air from the cathedral. The bell tolled three times. When the final hour had died in the night, Bethany took a small step forward.

  “It’s pitch-dark in there,” she said. “I have a flashlight on my phone.”

  “That’s hardly the thing for wandering round a cathedral in the dead of night,” said Arthur. “Luckily the key isn’t the only thing I borrowed from Oscar’s desk.” He withdrew a partially burned altar candle from his pocket along with a packet of matches from the Indian restaurant in the High Street. In a moment a warm yellow light illuminated the doorway.

  “Oscar keeps candles in his desk?”

  “We’ve been known to have a power cut now and then,” said Arthur. They stepped into the transept and Arthur shut the door behind them. The darkness above and around them seemed to suck the light from the candle. After only a few steps they could see neither walls nor ceiling, which made the cathedral feel even more cavernous than it was.

  “This is spooky,” said Bethany, slipping her hand into the crook of Arthur’s arm.

  “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” said Arthur, leading her toward the quire. “I’ve never been in here quite this deep into the night, but it’s . . . mystical.” It was just the word Arthur was searching for. He always felt moved when he entered the cathedral—such a space, with its soaring vaults and ancient arches, could never seem commonplace to him. But he usually felt the history of the building—from the Saxons to the Normans, from one bishop to the next, from the Reformation to the Civil War—the wonder of Barchester Cathedral to Arthur was the way it connected him to a thousand years of the past. Tonight’s feeling was different. Tonight the cathedral felt mysterious and laden with . . . well, Arthur supposed, laden with religion. In his unbelief, he thought much more about the political and artistic history of the cathedral than about the fact that for more than a millennium, people of faith had poured forth that faith on this spot. Tonight, Arthur felt as if he were swimming in a pool of that ancient belief.

  In the quire, the huge stained glass window above the denuded altar screen admitted the merest hint of moonlight. Arthur walked away from the high altar toward the rood screen, stopping just before they passed under the organ to step up into a short pew that faced the altar.

  “What are we looking for?” said Bethany. Around them the candlelight provided glimpses of grotesque carvings—griffins and trees with “green man” faces peeking from the foliage, mermaids and batwinged men.

  Arthur stopped in front of a pair of misericords. These “mercy seats” were ledges carved so that monks, required to stand for hours of services each day, could lean against them for some relief. They were hinged to create regular seats when lowered. Under each ledge was a decorative carving. Arthur held his candle low so they could see the figures. On the left was a woman with flowing, almost Pre-Raphaelite hair that extended out on either side of her head to support the misericord. It was an elaborate carving, especially considering that at the time it was carved, it was intended to stay hidden. By comparison, the image on the right was plain—a simple chalice with no markings.

  “These were carved in the thirteenth century,” said Arthur.

  “Is that the Grail?” said Bethany, leaning to take a closer look at the carving of the chalice.”

  “It’s probably just a Communion vessel,” said Arthur.

  “Wouldn’t a Communion vessel have a cross on it?”

  “Usually.”

  “And this is what you came to see?”

  “No, I needed to copy down the wording on a memorial in the Epiphany Chapel.”

  “Then why did you bring me here?”

  Arthur reached down and lowered each misericord to create two seats. “It seemed like a good place to have a chat.”

  “That’s the precentor’s seat,” said Bethany, pointing to the painted title above the seat that hid the chalice carving.

  “He’s not here to complain, is he? Besides, it’s the perfect seat for you to sit in to tell me your story.”

  “What story is that?” asked Bethany, lowering herself onto the hard wooden seat.

  “The story of you and the Grail,” said Arthur, sitting beside her and placing the candle in a holder in front of them.

  “The story of me and the Holy Grail,” repeated Bethany quietly.

  “Call it penance,” said Arthur. “For stalking me.”

  “Fair enough,” said Bethany. “We’ll decide your penance later on.”

  They sat in silence for a minute or two—a silence that seemed to weigh on Arthur’s shoulders. It was as if all the prayers ever spoken in that holy place were sitting on top of him—prayers he still believed, in his core, had been offered in vain to a God who did not exist. He found the weight both peaceful and horrifying, much the way he found the idea of faith itself. Bethany shifted slightly in her seat, and the very figures carved in the wood above them seemed to lean forward to listen for her words. Softly, she began.

  “My great-aunt gave me the Arthur Rackham book for Christmas when I was nine. It was one of the few books my father would let me read. That and the Bible, of course. He said he liked it because all the characters were Christian and the men were in charge. Dad said that’s the way things were supposed to be. At first I wouldn’t read it—just because Dad said it was OK. I was kind of rebellious. It’s not the easiest thing to have your father be second-in-command at a church of two thousand people, to listen to him practicing sermons that will bring people to tears but that just sound to you like a criticism of everything you do. But eventually I started looking at the pictures. I loved the one of Tristram and Isoude right after they drank the love potion. I knew just enough about sex to find it suggestive and to suspect that there might be some things in this book my father wouldn’t approve of. So I read it.

  “At first I wasn’t that impressed. I was never particularly interested in knights and sword fighting, and frankly the fact that the damsels were always in distress kind of pissed me off. . . . Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot we were in church. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Arthur, “the Bible is full of stories about God getting pissed off. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  “But then I got to the part about the Holy Grail,” said Bethany, “and I was just enthralled. It was the first time I’d ever read anything that I wanted to go right back and read again. And again. Now the damsels weren’t in distress; the women seemed to be in charge of the Grail. I liked that. And I liked that the Grail story mentioned Joseph of Arimathea—this minor little character from the Crucifixion narrative. That made it seem real to me, made it seem like the Grail could really exist. It also sent me back to the Bible and got me thinking—what about all those other people who have one little mention in the scriptures? What did they do then? I guess my father would have been happy, because in the end the Grail story made me think more deeply about the Bible. But it also seemed like a pretty good mystery. And then I was at a sleepover at a friend’s house a year or so later, and we saw the Indiana Jones movie where he finds the Holy Grail, and I loved the thought that maybe it was really out there
.”

  “So you believed in the Grail?” said Arthur.

  “Not quite,” said Bethany. “Not yet. A couple of years later I was visiting my grandmother, my mom’s mother, in Alabama. She lived in this big white house outside of this little two-stoplight town. I always loved going to visit her because her house was full of stuff. Everything—collector plates with pictures of national parks, boxes of scraps for decoupage projects that never happened, jars of buttons and heaps of empty wooden spools, drawers full of rubber bands and paper clips and folded-up bits of wrapping paper. And magazines. Grammy never had any books that I saw, except for a Bible on her nightstand, but she had magazines in heaps all over the house and since I liked to read—”

  “Wait a minute,” said Arthur. “You liked to read? You, the digital evangelist who scoffs at fiction and talks about bookless libraries, liked to read?”

  “Yes, Mr. Smarty-pants, I liked to read. Oh, my God, right now I’m reading an edition of Malory printed in 1634 from the cathedral library. It’s amazing. I mean, can you imagine? 1634.”

  “I know it well,” said Arthur, smiling. “But you were telling a story.”

  “Right, my story. Anyhow, my aunt had been buying magazines for a long time. We’re talking Life, the Saturday Evening Post, but my favorite was Ladies’ Home Journal. On the cover it said ‘The Magazine Women Believe In,’ and since the only thing my family every talked about believing in was God and Jesus and all that, I thought it must be interesting. It had articles about celebrities and fashion and homemaking, but it had other stuff, too. Travel articles and short stories, and one day I found a copy in the basement with an article called ‘My Search for the Holy Grail.’”

  “In a magazine called . . . what did you say it was called?”

  “Ladies’ Home Journal.”

  “There was an article about the Holy Grail?”

  “Yes, Mister Antiquarian-Book, Illuminated-Manuscript Snob—the Ladies’ Home Journal had an article about the Grail. I must have read that article a hundred times. The man who wrote it had heard a story about a priest named Father Wharton, who had been cured of rheumatism when he drank water from this wooden cup. This was in 1958. And he wasn’t the only one. The house where the priest had found the cup had records of lots of cases of healing, going back over a hundred years. So the guy who wrote the article set out to find this cup, this scrap of wood that had healed so many people. Supposedly it was moved from Glastonbury when Henry VIII was about to dissolve the monastery there. The magazine story was written in 1971 and the man who wrote it interviewed the rector of Glastonbury. The rector said he had requested twice that the cup be returned—so he obviously believed there was something to the story.”

  “And Glastonbury is one of the legendary resting places of the Grail,” said Arthur.

  “I know that, of course,” said Bethany. “Anyhow, when the writer got to the house where Father Wharton had found the cup, it was gone. The family who had supposedly guarded the cup for centuries had sold the house and the current guardian, if that’s what you want to call her, had moved to a secret address.”

  Arthur sat quietly listening to Bethany’s story, trying his best not to react in any way, but apparently his efforts were not completely successful.

  “Stop smiling like that, Arthur,” she said. “It’s a true story and he wrote it much better than I’m telling it and if you had been a twelve-year-old obsessed with Grail stories and were sitting up late at night in a creaking old house reading this article . . . well, just stop smiling and let me finish.”

  Arthur stopped smiling, not without effort.

  “So he ends up finding this old lady, who was a servant to the last member of the family to live at the house, and she tells him all about the cup. People would send handkerchiefs to be dipped in the water of the cup and people would come to the house to drink. She said the lady who owned it valued the cup more than her own life. So this ex-servant referred him to another former servant, and he gave directions to the secret home of the cup. So he goes there, and there it is, in the top drawer of a hallway bureau—the Holy Grail. I thought it was so cool that the Grail would just be in a drawer at somebody’s house instead of in some shrine or museum. And I loved how hard it was for him to find and how . . . how insignificant it seemed. It was just a gnarled piece of old wood, hardly in the shape of a cup anymore. That seemed right to me—that the Grail should be something so humble. And whether or not it was the Grail, there were all these stories of miraculous healings associated with it. People believed in the Grail and somehow that made miracles happen. Mrs. Mirylees, the lady who owned it then, said she didn’t want to submit it for scientific analysis and I’ll never forget her reason. She said history would be served but faith would be destroyed. She never had any doubt about which was more important. And that’s when I started believing in the Grail.”

  The candle had burned low, but neither Bethany nor Arthur seemed inclined to move. Arthur had never read the article that had so affected Bethany, but he knew the story of that broken and worn wooden cup. He wondered if Bethany knew the whole truth and he almost hoped she didn’t. He certainly didn’t want to be the one to challenge her faith with history.

  “The Nanteos Cup,” he whispered at last.

  “Yes,” said Bethany. “The Nanteos Cup. The King Arthur stories were so obviously just that—stories. But this was real. This wasn’t some made-up adventure from a thousand years ago; this had just happened.”

  “And you didn’t go straight to the Internet and look it up?”

  “I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe. It was the first time I ever realized that belief is more important than reality.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, Arthur, that maybe it’s more important that you believe in God than that he actually exists. So I didn’t look it up online or read anything else about it for probably five years after I read that article. I didn’t want to know.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I know, Arthur. You don’t have to worry.”

  Arthur, whose work at the cathedral had been so much about discovering the truth of the past, as separate from myth and legend and even faith, sighed with disappointment. Somehow he felt that being in the presence of someone who believed completely not only in the idea of the Grail but in a specific relic would be like standing in the light of a candle in a cathedral of darkness. The Nanteos Cup was a medieval wooden bowl, probably no more than six or seven hundred years old. It was not associated in any way with legends of the Grail until the early twentieth century.

  “But even though I finally read the truth about the cup, I had believed in the Grail for years by then and it’s not as easy to kill faith as Mrs. Mirylees thought.” Bethany leaned forward in her seat. “I still believe in the Grail, Arthur. I still think it’s out there somewhere. So when I got the opportunity to come to England and digitize ancient manuscripts, the first thing I thought was maybe one of those old manuscripts will tell me something about the Grail. And the second thing I thought was maybe they’ll let me go to Barchester and I can meet Arthur Prescott—because yes, I had sort of been stalking you since you bought those notebooks.”

  “So you didn’t come here to find the Holy Grail for your employer and his museum?”

  “I’m sure if Jesse Johnson thought he could get hold of the Holy Grail he would do everything in his considerable power to do so, but I hardly think he’d start looking in Barchester. This place has nothing to do with Grail legend, you know that.”

  “You haven’t asked to hear my story,” said Arthur.

  “It was part of my plan,” said Bethany. “Follow you into a dark cathedral in the dead of night and tell you about an old magazine just so I could get you to spill all your secrets.” She stared into the unwavering flame of the candle for a moment. “But seriously, will you tell me your story?”

  “That was par
t of my plan,” said Arthur. He leaned back into his seat so that the woodwork completely hid Bethany from view. He wasn’t sure how to start.

  “Have you left us again, Arthur?” said Bethany at last. “The candle isn’t going to last forever, you know.”

  Arthur swallowed hard. He had kept his belief in the Grail a secret since childhood; not talking about it would be a hard habit to break, but if he didn’t break it he might lose . . . well, something more important than a childhood connection to his grandfather.

  “This is a big deal for me,” said Arthur.

  “You don’t think that was a big deal for me,” said Bethany. “I’m sitting in an empty cathedral spilling all my darkest Grail secrets.”

  “Fair enough,” said Arthur. “I have some secrets, too.”

  “How old were you?” said Bethany. “I mean, when you first found out about the Grail.”

  “I was nine,” said Arthur, “just like you. My grandfather showed me the Stansby Morte d’Arthur, the copy you’ve been reading. And then he took me home and he read to me from his edition of Malory and then I asked him.”

  “About the Grail?”

  “I didn’t know what that word meant, so I asked and he told me. And he told me what he believed about the Grail and made me promise to keep it a secret.” Arthur sat in silence for a moment, measuring the night with the slow intake and exhaling of breath. Bethany matched his breathing but said nothing.

  “He told me that the Grail was real.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “I did,” said Arthur.

  “But that’s not all he told you,” said Bethany.

  “No,” said Arthur. “He told me three other things. He told me that I could be the person to find the Grail; he told me I had to keep the Grail and everything I learned about it a secret; and he told me that the Grail is here in Barchester.”

  “Wow,” said Bethany. “No wonder you were so worried about me.”

  “When I heard about Jesse Johnson and then I found all those Grail materials in your bag—my thesis and notes about me and everything—I thought he had sent you here to look for the Grail, especially after what happened to the Nanteos Cup.”