The Lost Book of the Grail Page 2

  Yes, Arthur would have been happier in an earlier generation. It was a cruel trick of fate that had landed him in a century when universities had “core modules” and taught courses on “anagnorisis” to students who couldn’t be bothered to read books they hadn’t already read in childhood. The irony was, thought Arthur as he squeezed into his cubicle of an office, that he liked the Harry Potter books. He had read them last summer. But he didn’t think they belonged in a university curriculum.

  The day that had begun with so little promise continued in that vein for Arthur through two lectures and a tutorial—populated by three students whom he insisted on calling Mr. Crawley, Miss Stanhope, and Miss Robarts, in spite of the fact that they called him “Arthur.” The tutorial was part of the dreaded core module and so Arthur had anticipated with pleasure an introductory discussion of Jane Austen. Instead he had to endure a diatribe from Miss Stanhope—meekly supported by Mr. Crawley, who was clearly trying to ingratiate himself with her in the hope of future sexual favors—in which Austen was taken to task for not being “enough of a feminist.” Arthur listened for a half hour, doing his best to focus his mind on a P. G. Wodehouse story he had read on the bus that morning, but eventually he could take no more.

  “Jane Austen never married,” he said in frustration. “She entered the male-dominated field of novel writing and her female heroines are strong, independent characters. Just what do you imagine a feminist in a rural English village in the late eighteenth century looks like?”

  “Oh, Arthur,” said Miss Stanhope with an exasperated sigh, “you are such a man.”

  —

  “You can’t deny the accusation,” said Gwyn as she and Arthur took their regular twice-weekly walk around the water meadows the next morning.

  “Yes, but she said it with such disdain,” said Arthur, stooping to pick up a drool-covered tennis ball that one of the dean’s chocolate-colored spaniels had deposited at his feet. Arthur could never tell the two dogs, Mag and Nunc, apart, but he flung the ball as far as he could and they both bounded off after it. He loved these early morning walks with Gwyn. They meant his Tuesdays and Thursdays, at least, could start off on a civilized note.

  Gwyneth Bowen had been dean of Barchester Cathedral for almost six years. Arthur had shaken hands with her after Evensong shortly after she was installed, but the two cannot be said to have genuinely met until a few weeks later, when they happened to fall in together while walking in the water meadows outside the cathedral close one foggy morning. They had had a long and heated debate about the nature of faith; Arthur had liked her immediately.

  The argument that had engrossed them on their first meeting had gone something like this: The dean did not understand how Arthur could come to services at the cathedral nearly every day yet profess he didn’t actually believe in the doctrines of the Christian church. Arthur argued that the dean should be pleased to have nonbelievers in her pews—what better place for nonbelievers? Arthur guessed her argument stemmed not so much from the apparent inconsistency of his beliefs and his actions as from her assumption that a nonbeliever in the pews was a rare bird. But Arthur suspected it was not nearly as rare as Gwyn thought, or perhaps wished. He imagined that any number of regular attendees, especially at the main Sunday morning service, if put to the test about their reasons for darkening the doors of the cathedral on a regular basis, might say all sorts of things about music and preaching and architecture and fellowship, but would very carefully skirt around the issue of faith.

  Since that first day, they had met twice a week during term time, more often during holidays, immediately after seven o’clock Morning Prayer, for an hour-long walk across the broad expanse of the water meadows, along the riverside path, and back to the cathedral close, where the gardens came down to the river just across from Arthur’s cottage. Whatever the weather, when they made the turn at the far end of the meadow, and emerged from a row of trees to catch sight of the cathedral, Arthur always felt as if he were in a Constable painting. On some days they continued the debate that had begun that first morning; more often they engaged on different topics—some found them in agreement; others led to spirited jousting, which Arthur quite enjoyed.

  When Gwyn’s husband had died a year ago, the walks had continued for a time in a more somber vein, but they had never missed a Tuesday or Thursday that entire term. “I need this,” Gwyn had said when Arthur had suggested a hiatus. “I may not be the first woman dean in the Anglican Church, but I believe I am the first who is the single mother of two small children, grieving for her husband, and trying to manage the finances of Britain’s poorest cathedral. Sometimes I think our walk is my only hour of sanity in the day.” So Arthur listened to her troubles and she listened to his and by the time they reached the river they were more often than not deep into an argument that took them each away from their work on the other side of the water meadows.

  “And I don’t see why the students have to call the faculty by their first names,” said Arthur, continuing his complaint about the previous afternoon’s tutorial. “We aren’t their mates; we’re their instructors. Would it be so awful to be shown a little respect?”

  “Come now, Arthur. You don’t call me the Very Reverend Bowen.”

  “That’s because we are peers—practically.”

  “We’re nothing of the sort. I’m a dean and you’re a layman.”

  They walked in unusual silence for a few minutes, Arthur again throwing the tennis ball when Mag (or perhaps Nunc) dropped it at his feet. “Something’s bothering you,” he said at last.

  “Some bad news this morning, I’m afraid,” said Gwyn.

  “Has Daniel been sent down from nursery school?” said Arthur. Daniel was Gwyn’s energetic three-year-old.

  “No,” said Gwyn with a laugh, “but it wouldn’t surprise me. He’s become overly fond of kissing girls, apparently.”

  “Ah, to be three and in love!”

  “We heard from the Heritage Lottery Fund this morning. Our application was rejected.”

  “Astounding,” said Arthur, shaking his head. “I suppose they think it’s more important to build a museum of thread bobbins or a center for the study of Cornish pasties.”

  “I thought perhaps I could leave a mark as dean,” said Gwyn.

  “You leave a mark every day,” said Arthur.

  “But not like this would have been.”

  For years, Gwyneth had been seeking funding to rebuild the Lady Chapel, destroyed by German bombs in 1941. Under her direction, the chapter and a local firm of architects had spent three years preparing a plan for a chapel that was modern in design—built of local oak, steel, and huge glass panels extending from floor to ceiling on three sides and looking out onto a surrounding garden. Gwyn and the architects had visited several cathedrals as they searched for inspiration, and she had been especially struck by the juxtaposition of the modern cathedral at Coventry with the bombed-out ruins of the medieval building.

  “I suppose it’s just as well,” she said. “Half the community loved the design and the other half hated it.”

  “I despise modern architecture,” said Arthur. “You know with what a searing passion I loathe the so-called campus of my current employer. But I love your chapel. It will be what contemporary architecture ought to be and so seldom is.”

  “The precentor said it looked like a cheap conservatory on a seaside holiday cottage.”

  “Yes, well the precentor is a slab of Gorgonzola.”

  “Thank you, P. G. Wodehouse.”

  “A pleasure,” said Arthur.

  “I thought you liked the precentor.”

  “I never said I liked the man. I just like the style of worship he brings to the cathedral.”

  “I find all the incense and chanting so . . .” Gwyn trailed off.

  “You were going to say Roman, weren’t you?” said Arthur.

  “Actually
I was going to say ancient,” said the dean.

  “What better place to keep alive ancient practices than Barchester, where Christianity has been practiced for twelve hundred years.”

  “Has it?” said the dean. “I wouldn’t know. You see, the man who is working on the cathedral guidebook has missed his deadline again.”

  “In a cathedral with twelve centuries of history, what difference could a few months make?”

  “How long have you been working on that guide, Arthur? Because it does seem like something approaching a millennium.”

  “I thought we were talking about the Gorgonzola,” said Arthur with disdain.

  “Don’t you care for Gorgonzola, Mr. Prescott?” said the dean, and they spent the rest of their walk debating the relative merits of English, French, and Italian cheeses.

  “I’m truly sorry about the chapel, Gwyn,” said Arthur as they stood once again in the close outside the deanery, Mag and Nunc circling round them. “Is there no other way to raise the money?”

  “If we do it properly, and follow all the rules about the restoration of ancient monuments—do a full archaeological dig and that sort of thing—we’ll need something like two and a half million pounds. So far the generous community of Barchester and our paltry stream of tourists have mustered about a hundred thousand.”

  “Did they say why the application was refused?”

  “They said they would have preferred an application for an educational or multipurpose building. They don’t want to fund what they call ‘superfluous worship space’ in a cathedral that can’t fill the pews it has.”

  “Superfluous!” said Arthur. “Let them come to Compline on a moonlit night in your glass chapel and then talk about ‘superfluous.’”

  “What would I do without you?” said Gwyn, smiling and squeezing Arthur’s hand.

  “First of all you might have a new cathedral guide by now,” said Arthur. “And second, you might go on naïvely believing that Brie or Romano or chèvre are superior to a good old English Cheddar.”

  —

  That afternoon, Arthur had a blessed opportunity to leave work early, as the two o’clock meeting of the Campus Sustainability Committee was canceled owing to the fact that all the committee members (excepting Arthur) were going to Manchester for the Conference on Green Technology and Construction. He took the number 42 bus to the city center and walked the short distance to the cathedral, bypassing the path that led to his own cottage for the pleasures of his favorite room in the world.

  Arthur had worked in the Bodleian and in most of the Oxford college libraries as an undergraduate. One year he had spent his Easter holidays ensconced in a reading room at the British Library. He had toured the libraries of stately homes and visited fellow book collectors in their own private havens. But nothing compared, in his mind, to what awaited him at the top of the winding stone staircase off the cloister of Barchester Cathedral. The few tourists who strayed far enough from London to visit Barchester rarely noticed the narrow wooden door just past the much larger entry to the chapter house and never suspected what treasures that door hid. Now Arthur turned his key in the lock and stepped inside. He flicked the light on, pulled the door shut, and began to climb.

  Slightly breathless from the steep steps, he emerged at the top of the stairs into a long, high-ceilinged room that ran almost the entire length of the east side of the cloister. He stood, by perpetual invitation of the dean, in the library of Barchester Cathedral. The library was overseen by Oscar Dimsdale, a local schoolteacher who volunteered in a variety of capacities around the cathedral. Arthur and Oscar had met in Barchester the summer Arthur was twelve, and had been best friends ever since. Oscar worked odd hours, coming to the library whenever he had the time. He had no training as a librarian, but he kept the books dusted and made arrangements to allow access to any members of the community who wanted to use the collection. Few did. When Arthur had begun working on his guide to Barchester Cathedral some years ago, Oscar, with the permission of the dean, had given him his own key. That Arthur had leave to come to this room whenever he liked seemed a privilege of unparalleled fortune.

  Save for a small collection of modern reference books on the shelf behind Oscar’s desk, nothing in the room was less than a century old, and many of the books, manuscripts, and furnishings surrounding him were much older. The interior woodwork, from the bookcases to the thick beams overhead, was seventeenth century, having been installed by one of Barchester’s only bibliophile bishops, Bishop Atwater, who had also donated a substantial collection of books to the cathedral.

  The wall to Arthur’s left was covered with oak bookcases, reaching high overhead. Most of these still had their original decorated finials above each section—though those at the far end of the room were badly charred from the wartime fire. On the right wall, several narrow windows looked into the cloister, and paneling bore the scratched initials of long-ago readers. In the center of this wall was a case decorated with elaborate carvings and containing the cathedral’s collection of some eighty medieval manuscripts, all, thanks to the events of 1941, lacking their covers.

  Down the center of the room was a row of long, wooden trestle tables. One held a few stacks of books Oscar was working with, but most stood empty. In the days when Barchester had been a monastic foundation, long before this space had been constructed, monks would have consulted the cathedral’s books for guidance on everything from agriculture to engineering to medicine. For centuries, clergy of the cathedral used the library often, having no place else to look for historical and theological writing. Even into the nineteenth century, young men of Barchester studying for ordination at Oxford or Cambridge made frequent use of the collection when home for the long vacation. In 1890, parts of the collection were opened as a circulating library for the people of the city—an innovation that lasted until the establishment of a public library in Barchester a few years later. Today, however, Barchester was far from the British centers of scholarship, its library held few items that scholars couldn’t examine much more easily in Oxford or Cambridge or London, and little on the shelves that surrounded Arthur was of interest to the local population. None of this bothered Arthur; it meant he often had this wonderful space to himself.

  He stood a moment with his eyes closed and inhaled the smell of antiquity. He could catch a hint of charred wood and a dash of dried mildew. The library smelled substantial; it smelled of both life and death. The air was stale and still and Arthur felt the atmosphere of the place envelop him. He was home.

  Despite the ample space on the tables in the center of the room, Arthur preferred to work at a small table under one of the cloister windows. Though the legs had been made in the nineteenth century, the table top was, according to tradition, the oldest piece of furniture in the cathedral—though no one knew exactly how old. It may have once been a piece of an altar, as the words Mensa Christi, or “Table of Christ,” were carved into its front edge in Gothic letters. Its surface was uneven and worn, pitted and gouged. It was much too small for spreading out research papers and entirely unsuitable for writing. Arthur loved it.

  He started toward his favorite spot, then paused for a moment, listening. Save for the occasional creaking of beams overhead, all was silent—no turning of the door handle far below, no steps upon the staircase. Arthur walked softly to a case at the far end of the room, stood on tiptoe, and removed a plain-looking, squat volume. Its leather binding was badly worn at the joints and corners, and nearly two inches of the lower spine was lacking. It bore no markings, no indications to a casual observer that it was Arthur’s favorite book in the library. He loved to take it down from its shelf, to caress its covers, to lose himself in the artwork of the frontispiece, and to read from its pages.

  The book was the 1634 William Stansby edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, or, as the title page called it, The Most Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince Arthur King of Brit
aine. Malory’s was the first collection in English of many of the King Arthur tales, some of which had begun as medieval French romances. This wasn’t the original printing of Malory—that had been published by England’s first printer, William Caxton, in 1485 and survived in only two copies. Four more editions, nearly as rare as the Caxton, followed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Stansby 1634 edition was the earliest Arthur was ever likely to hold in his own hands. It was also the first to be updated into what Arthur thought of as Shakespearean English, and the text upon which many future editions were based.

  —

  He had first held this book when he was nine years old, the first time his grandfather had brought him to the cathedral library. Even then, before he had any understanding of bibliography or publishing history, before he knew the difference between paper and vellum or calf and morocco, he had felt the history of this place—a deep sense of almost electric connection to the past. Looking back on it, he supposed his first steps into the room, breathless from following his lanky, loping grandfather up the stairs, had been a spiritual experience. He didn’t feel God in the library, but he felt something beyond himself.

  But his grandfather had not brought him to the library to overwhelm him with history, rather to show him a specific book—the Stansby Morte d’Arthur.

  “This is a book about your namesake,” said his grandfather.

  “My namesake?”

  “The person you were named after. I suggested the name myself—the name Arthur—because of this book. And since I was to be your godfather, your parents agreed. This book is about a king named Arthur.”

  “What does he do?” asked Arthur.

  “He has adventures,” said his grandfather, with a twinkle in his eye.

  “Can we check it out and read it?” asked Arthur.

  “Not this copy,” said his grandfather with a chuckle, as he took the book from the boy. “But I have another edition at home we can read.”

  —