The Lost Book of the Grail Read online

  “We are friends,” said Arthur, a bit more stiffly than he had intended. “That’s all.”

  “I’m glad she makes you happy,” said Gwyn.

  Arthur didn’t want to argue this point further, so he proceeded to a question that had been bothering him lately. “What would you think about opening the library to tourists?”

  “Are you serious? Arthur Prescott wants to descend from his ivory tower and share his books with the sullied masses?”

  “Something Bethany said the other day made me think of it,” said Arthur. “And I do think the library has been far too empty for far too long.”

  “It’s a nice idea,” said Gwyn, “but we haven’t anyone to staff it or any funds for security and who knows what it would mean for insurance. But I do need to ask you a favor.”

  “You want me to adopt your dogs?”

  “Worse, I’m afraid. I need you to show the cathedral’s manuscript collection to a gentleman from Sotheby’s who’s coming down from London to assess the possibility of a sale.”

  “You do realize that what I wrote was only the story of Barchester Cathedral’s history. Those manuscripts are the history. They are as important a part of this church as the south transept or the cloister. But I suppose those will be up for sale soon.”

  “You’re not far from the truth, Arthur. Our annual visit from the structural engineer turned up some weaknesses in the north transept. We’ll try a fund-raising campaign of course—‘Save the Cathedral’ and all that. But if we don’t get some funding, and quickly, we could very well be looking at major damage to the cathedral.”

  “God, Gwyn, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. How much will you have to raise?”

  “Ideally the chapter would like about ten million,” said Gwyn. “That would pay for the repairs with enough left over for the Lady Chapel. I hate to be in this position, but if I have to choose between the collapse of the north transept and the sale of the manuscript collection, I have to choose the building.”

  “Of course you do,” said Arthur. “And of course I will assist the devil in his prowling around the library seeking something to devour.”

  “And there’s one more thing, Arthur.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We just have to find those missing covers—the ones that were ripped off the manuscripts the night of the bombing. I’ve asked Oscar to look into it, but if you have any ideas—”

  “Because if you find the covers you’re much more likely to be able to sell the manuscripts.”

  “Sotheby’s have offered to pay the cost of repairs if we sell through them.”

  “My dear Gwyn, nothing would pain me more than to be the one who smoothed the way to the dissolution of the Barchester Cathedral Library, but as you are my dear Gwyn, if I do have any ideas about the covers, you will be the first to know.” The fact of the matter was that Arthur had no clue where to look for the missing covers. Gwyn had been right to ask Oscar—he was the one who knew where things were kept in the cathedral.

  “Thank you, Arthur,” said Gwyn, lifting her head and giving him a quick, dry kiss on the cheek. “I know it’s difficult for you. I just don’t see any other way.”

  On the bus to work later that morning, Arthur pondered Gwyn’s words: “I just don’t see any other way.” For her, Arthur would help the appraiser from Sotheby’s, but perhaps, somehow, he might also work to find just what she had said—another way.

  —

  For the first time in his life Arthur found himself, later that day, looking forward to a committee meeting. True, his first foray into the Advisory Committee for the Media Center had been as dull as every other committee meeting he had ever attended—and, he felt, rife with misunderstanding about the purpose of a university library. Several of the members of the committee seemed to think the media center existed primarily to provide the students with DVDs of movies to watch in their spare time. But finishing his guidebook had emboldened Arthur, and after his conversation with his department head, Mr. Slopes, that morning, he had been counting the seconds until four o’clock. Now he looked around the table of Conference Room D at the faces of the Advisory Committee for the Media Center and smiled. This would be a bloody good meeting.

  “I believe we’re all here,” said Arthur, “so I’d like to call the meeting to order. If you checked your e-mail today you will have seen that I have accepted Mr. Slopes’s invitation to chair this committee following the nervous breakdown of Mr. Radclyffe.”

  “It wasn’t a nervous breakdown,” said Slopes. “He merely requested—”

  “The chairman has the floor,” said Arthur. “And he intends to run this committee with order and decorum, so there can be no interruptions.”

  Slopes stared wide-eyed at this and was apparently so shocked by Arthur’s assertion of authority that he found himself unable to defend poor Radclyffe.

  “First of all,” said Arthur, “I would like to thank Miss Stanhope for joining us on such short notice. Mr. Slopes informed me this morning that the university has adopted the policy, idiotic though it is, of placing students who spend only a short time in our midst on committees that decide our distant future. I was pleased, Miss Stanhope, that you were able to accept my last-minute invitation. Inappropriate though your presence may be, we welcome you.”

  No one tried to interrupt him this time, not even Miss Stanhope, and Arthur thought his little speech was going rather well.

  “Now,” he said, “it has recently come to my attention that the main reasons students come to the media center are threefold: it has a nice coffee shop, it has comfortable chairs, and it has speedy Internet connections. Now, to be sure, these are laudable achievements, but I feel we are missing an opportunity to have our charges interact with knowledge in a more meaningful way. There are, if you look hard enough for them, books in this building, though our students could be forgiven for not knowing that. A student crossing our threshold encounters no evidence that knowledge has ever been bound in covers, but only a blank wall. Passing by this empty expanse, our student might spend hours in the media center without ever encountering such a thing as a book—for to see one of that breed requires the determination to go past upholstery and caffeine and into that long-forgotten area known as the stacks. Now, I believe that those neglected books represent the heart and soul of this institution, and I put it to you that, as things stand, our beloved media center is rather deep in the anti-intellectual mulligatawny. We are the metaphorical ship without a rudder; we are Hansel and Gretel sans bread crumbs; in short, we are without direction and we require both rudder and bag of crumbs, and I fancy I know just where we can get both of those and a packet of crisps.”

  “And where is that?” said Slopes, who had apparently recovered himself enough to insert this short query into the proceedings.

  “Ah, I am glad you asked that, Mr. Slopes. The question that prods me on with my oration is precisely the sort of contribution I expect from you on this committee, and you have done your job well. What this committee needs, what this media center needs, is a good dose of Jeeves.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mr. Peabody, a mathematics lecturer who hunched at the far end of the table taking the minutes. “How do you spell that?”

  “Is it possible,” said Arthur, raising both his shoulders and his voice, “that we are working in a university where lecturers are not aware of the identity of one Reginald Jeeves, the gentleman’s personal gentleman and the personal gentleman’s gentleman? What has happened to cultural literacy, my fellow members of the Advisory Committee for the Media Center? This sort of ignorance is exactly what needs addressing. What I mean, Mr. Peabody, when I say that we need a dose of Jeeves, is that we need quiet and reasoned wisdom that leads to prompt and directed action.”

  “And do I gather that you are to be the source of this wisdom?” asked Mr. Slopes.

  “Well done, again, Mr. Slopes,”
said Arthur. “You have sussed out the essence of this meeting. Keep this up and we may make you chairman one day. Now, I should like to put before this committee four proposals for immediate approval. First, that, in order to impress upon our community the importance of the books that are cared for on its premises, the name of the building in which we now meet be changed from the “Media Center” to the “Library.” I would suggest the Francis Slopes Memorial Library, but Mr. Slopes’s mortal coil is as yet unshuffled, so for now the word Library will suffice solo. Second, is the matter of that empty wall that greets our eager students when they enter this sacred space. Certainly the symbolism is clear—like the minds of those who approach it, the wall is a perfect and absolute blank. But symbolism, in my opinion, is overrated. So I propose we cover that wall with bookcases and that we fill those bookcases with books—actual printed-on-paper and bound-in-covers books of the type that were once so popular on university campuses. These books should be drawn from every field, and I would suggest that we appoint Mr. Peabody to choose those mathematical treatises that will grace this wall of knowledge. In the center of that wall, I propose we erect a glass display case to be filled with the sorts of books that may open new avenues of thought to our constituents—a display of rare materials loaned from local collectors, perhaps even from the cathedral library, which, like our own media center, is a much underused resource. Third, that we invite the American expert on digital media, Miss Bethany Davis, to serve this committee in an advisory capacity. While I believe that the primary purpose of a library should be to house and disseminate books, I am prepared to concede to other members of this committee the point that digital media has its place, and I believe this committee, and in particular its chair, could benefit from Miss Davis’s counsel. And finally, that the library provide, posthaste, a copy of The Code of the Woosters to Mr. Peabody for his personal edification. Now, I have a bus to catch, so I suggest that we dispense with discussion and proceed directly to a vote.”

  “But,” said Mr. Slopes.

  “Ah, you have not quite mastered it, Mr. Slopes,” said Arthur. “That was not the time for an interruption. All in favor of my proposals?” Arthur was quite pleased, if a little surprised, to see five hands rise. “Now, five of you plus me makes six out of eight, so that’s a majority. Motions are approved and this meeting of the Advisory Committee for the Library stands adjourned.” Before Slopes or anyone else whose hand was not raised could react, Arthur swept up his bag and marched out of the room, breaking into a run as soon as he was in the hall. He felt jubilant.

  He had no idea if Bethany would agree to consult with him on university matters, or if what she would say would be of any use, but he had seen the looks on the faces of the committee members when he had proposed input from a digital media expert—they thought that Arthur was not stuck in the Dark Ages and they thought he knew what he was talking about. And as a result he had, in the course of a ten-minute meeting, done some real good for the university. And for Mr. Peabody.

  IX

  THE LIBRARY

  Above the rooms on the east side of the cloister is the cathedral library. The collections here comprise over eighty medieval manuscripts, more than three thousand books, and a wide variety of documents relating to the cathedral’s history. The earliest pieces in the collection are pre-Norman manuscripts that came to Barchester when the cathedral’s collections were merged with those of the nearby Priory of St. Ewolda at the time of the Reformation.

  October 28, 1539, Priory of St. Ewolda

  It was the tradition of the monks of St. Ewolda’s to observe silence between the hours of Prime and Sext, save for words spoken or chanted at the service of Terce—one of the seven services held in the abbey church each day. In this silence, Brother Thomas was working in the scriptorium in the cloister, carefully copying the words of Psalm LIX onto a sheet of parchment that would eventually be bound with other such sheets to serve as a Psalter for a nearby parish church. The sunlight streaming into the cloister from the garden illuminated his work but would do so for only a few hours that day, now that Michaelmas was nearly a month past. He had just dipped his swan-feather quill into the inkwell in order to copy the second verse, “Libera me ab operariis iniquitatis et a viris sanguinum salva me,” when the door from the south transept was flung open and a voice rent the peace.

  “They are coming. The king’s commissioners are coming. The day we feared is at hand.”

  “Brother James, calm yourself. We are not to speak until Sext.”

  “You do not understand, Brother. They will be here by nightfall. They bear an indictment for the prior for treason and will no doubt plunder what few treasures we have before the day is out.”

  Thomas could not confess himself surprised. King Henry had been dissolving the monasteries for years now; only a few remained. Just last month news had come of the fall of Glastonbury, and that should have been enough to reveal the truth to Robert Ward, the stubborn prior of St. Ewolda’s. But Ward had clung to his belief that the king’s plan was to leave a few uncorrupt monasteries standing. He had posited to Thomas just a few days ago that St. Ewolda’s was neither so poor as to have been dissolved when the smaller houses were swept away nor so wealthy as to attract the greedy eyes of the king and his regent Thomas Cromwell, with whom the prior had refused to negotiate. But now the commissioners would soon be at the door.

  “What are we to do?” said Thomas. “If we secret the plate and other treasures we will be tried for treason.”

  “The plate is lost, there can be no doubt, but I come to speak to you of the books.”

  “Surely they will be plundered, too,” said Thomas, who had heard stories of manuscripts from other monasteries being toted away to Oxford or Cambridge or even to the private collections of the commissioners and their friends.

  “Perhaps,” said James. “But we may be able to save some of them.”

  “But to what end?” asked Thomas. “The monastery will be torn apart, if we are to believe the reports from other houses.”

  “But the cathedral will remain,” said James. “True, the shrine of St. Ewolda will be plundered, but some, at least, of our books might remain safe. I come to ask your aid. How quickly could you prepare an inventory of those manuscripts kept in the book chest in the treasury?”

  “They number fewer than fifty,” said Thomas. “It would be the work of an hour or two if done with haste.”

  “You must undertake the work at once,” said James.

  “But I have no parchment prepared for such a list,” said Thomas.

  “What is that you write?” asked James, nodding toward the uncompleted psalm on Thomas’s desk.

  “The Psalter for St. Savior’s. This sheet begins Psalm Fifty-nine.”

  “And have you written on both sides?”

  “All I have inscribed is what you see,” said Thomas.

  “Then you must use this very parchment.”

  “But to write such a list on a Psalter page would be a sacrilege,” said Thomas.

  “My brother, before this day is out we shall see acts of sacrilege such as St. Ewolda’s has never known. Now let me explain exactly how you are to prepare the inventory, and then you must make haste, for our time is short.”

  —

  James shuddered to think of the responsibility that had now befallen him as Guardian. He had served in that post for almost forty years, since the day when a brother named Peter had passed the title to him. Peter had spoken of threats, but James knew he had never imagined the disastrous fate that now faced England’s monasteries. The greatest threat Peter had faced had been a curious knight, Sir Thomas Malory, who was thinking of writing a book.

  “He came here early in my guardianship,” Peter had told James, “claiming to have heard rumors of an ancient treasure at Barchester. How such rumors are started one never knows.” James suspected that Peter himself had started the rumor—the old man h
ad a penchant for drink, and his lips could be dangerously loose when he was under its influence.

  “He pestered me for two days to tell him stories, to show him treasures. When I refused, he partook of our wine and our bread and read to the brothers from a book of history by someone called William of Monmouth—a book about the ancient kings of England and about one king who particularly interested him. Though this visitor had the credentials of a knight, the curiosity of a scholar, and the language of a poet, he seemed more like a rogue than anything else to me. I feared he would uncover the relic of which you are about to become Guardian,” Peter had said to James. “But in the end he departed. Many years later, I saw his book. We could not afford such things as printed volumes here in those days, but another visitor showed me a copy. Although the visiting knight had told me his proposed title, King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table, William Caxton, the publisher, called it simply Le Morte d’Arthur. I looked through the book for evidence of our secret and was relieved to find none.”

  A single visitor curious about an old secret who drank wine and told stories—if only the present threat to the priory’s treasures were so petty.

  —

  Two miles away, at Barchester Cathedral, two monks stood blinking in the sunlight. Brother Humphrey and Brother Samuel had just emerged from the darkness where they had been working to secure the secrets of the monastic foundation before the arrival of the king’s commissioners. The abbot of Barchester had been far less recalcitrant than the prior of St. Ewolda’s, having reached an agreement already with Thomas Cromwell that while the monastery would be dissolved, the cathedral would remain and most of the monks would continue on as members of the chapter. Humphrey and his brothers were not so foolish, however, as to believe that the commissioners would not despoil Barchester of its visible treasures. Certainly they would pull down the shrine of St. Ewolda—which had become a modest source of income over the years as word of its healing power spread throughout the region and pilgrims came to seek miracles and leave offerings. But, with the abbot and Cromwell on speaking, if not friendly, terms, Barchester might avoid such excesses as had been seen in Glastonbury, where the abbot had been drawn and quartered atop the Glastonbury Tor.