The Lost Book of the Grail Page 3

  Now Arthur opened the book to the title page and turned the volume sideways so he could examine the frontispiece. He had looked at it a thousand times; every detail of the woodcut was burned into his memory, but on days like this, when the modern world exasperated him at every turn, he loved nothing better than returning to this book and this image. The picture showed King Arthur and his knights seated at the Round Table. Arthur popped up through a circular hole in the center of the table, holding a lance and a sword. He had a large nose and an English mustache—without the extended handlebars. He wore a full suit of plate-mail armor—more Jacobean than Arthurian. On a bench encircling the table and draped with linen sat thirteen of Arthur’s knights, similarly mustachioed and armored. There seemed a general air of camaraderie among the knights. Most chatted with one another; one had his hand on another’s back. Arthur could almost imagine himself as one of the company. The caption for the woodcut listed thirty knights, with no indication of which of them appeared in the image. Every time Arthur looked at the picture he attributed different names to the figures. Today the knight sitting squarely in the center of the image, the only one with his back completely to the viewer, seemed more Lancelot than Kay. Sir Bors and Sir Gawain were certainly chatting in the bottom right corner. The hardest to put a name to was at the top of the picture, his face almost totally obscured by the feather streaming from Arthur’s helmet. Today he was Galahad, achiever of the Grail, sitting in the Siege Perilous.

  Arthur turned the soft, worn pages and inhaled the scent of history. The paper was a pale brownish yellow, but the dark type was still as legible as it had been almost four hundred years ago. He had work to do today, so he just read a short passage from a chapter titled “How sir Galahad and his fellowes were fed with the Sancgreall, and how our Lord appeared to them, and of other matters.”

  Then King Pelles and his sonne departed. And therewith it beseemed them that there came a man and foure Angels from heaven, clothed in the likenesse of bishops, and had a crosse in his hand, and the foure Angels beare him up in a chaire, and set him downe before the table of silver, whereupon the Sancgreall was.

  The Sancgreall—the Holy Grail. Arthur closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene. Malory was not one for detailed descriptions, and he never wrote what the Holy Grail looked like, but to Arthur this meant the Grail could be whatever he needed it to be. Today it was an anchor, a solid link to a past that mattered and that, for Arthur, was as alive as the present—perhaps more alive.

  —

  When Arthur returned home that summer after his grandfather had introduced him to the stories of the Round Table, he had run straight to the library and checked out the only volume about King Arthur he could find—a 1911 book called King Arthur’s Knights: The Tales Retold for Boys and Girls. The title page claimed that the book contained “16 Illustrations in Color by Walter Crane,” but some disrespectful former library patron had removed the color plates. Arthur didn’t care; he was too busy falling in love with the stories.

  King Arthur’s Knights had been the first book Arthur had read late at night under the covers with a torch, long after he was supposed to have been asleep. It was the first book that took him completely out of himself, his room, his home, and his hometown to a place that seemed both mythical and real, a place where magic was ordinary and heroes were plenteous. It was, he supposed, thinking back on it, the first book that showed him what reading was really all about.

  At first Arthur had been drawn to the adventure in the stories—knights battling other knights, the king holding tournaments at Camelot. Then in his teenage years, the love stories began to be favorites—the great Sir Lancelot’s tragic love for Queen Guinevere, Tristram and Isoude drinking a love potion even while he was supposed to be wooing her on behalf of another. But the Grail stories had been a constant source of fascination. In the version of Malory that Arthur read as a boy, the story of the Grail was wonderfully vague, never explicitly stating what the Grail was or why Arthur and his knights were so determined to find it. It was unclear who possessed the Grail or why or what they did with it or even whether it was real or just a vision. Arthur had grown to love the mysterious nature of the Grail, but as a child it had fascinated and frustrated him in equal parts.

  “What is the Grail?” Arthur had asked his grandfather the night after his first visit to the cathedral library as his grandfather read to him from an abridged version of Malory.

  The popular legend of the Grail, his grandfather told him, was simple—the cup from which Christ served the wine at the Last Supper was taken by Joseph of Arimathea to the island of Britain. Arriving near what is now Glastonbury, Joseph pushed his staff into the ground and it flowered into a bush known as the Glastonbury Thorn. Joseph later buried the Grail under a nearby hill—the Glastonbury Tor—and a torrent of clean, fresh water sprang forth and flows from the spot to this very day. Centuries later, knights of King Arthur’s Round Table sought the Grail—a symbol of purity and perfection. In some versions of the tale, the Glastonbury Tor is also the Isle of Avalon, Arthur’s mysterious final resting place. In the late twelfth century, monks of Glastonbury claimed to have found the graves of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, but no one ever found the Grail.

  Arthur might have thought the story of the Grail no more than a mysterious legend of a magical cup with healing powers—as fascinating, and as fictional, as Tolkien’s One Ring. But the first time his grandfather read him the Grail story from Malory, he laid the book aside and looked Arthur in the eyes.

  “King Arthur, and Merlin, and Lancelot, and all the rest—in all likelihood they are only stories. But the Grail, Arthur—the Grail was real. The Grail is real. And I’m going to tell you a secret—a secret you must promise to share with no one.”

  “I promise,” said Arthur breathlessly.

  “I believe that the Grail is right here in Barchester.”

  Arthur loved no one in the world more than his grandfather, and that kindly man rarely spoke as seriously as he did now.

  “I’m getting too old for adventures,” said his grandfather, “but you have your whole life ahead of you. You must be the one to find the Grail. And you must keep it secret.”

  “But why does it have to be a secret?” said Arthur.

  “Do you trust me?” said his grandfather.

  “Yes,” said the boy.

  “Then you must believe. Someday you will understand. You will understand what the Grail is and where it is and why it must be kept a secret, but for now all you have to do is believe in it. Do you, Arthur? Do you believe in the Grail?”

  And Arthur’s response had been absolutely instinctual. Staring into the deep blue of his grandfather’s eyes he had spoken without the slightest shadow of doubt.

  “I do.”

  —

  Arthur opened his eyes and looked back at the page. At the edge of the text block was a bit of marginalia written in browning ink in a seventeenth-century hand.

  Libro huic nullus locus melior praeter Baronum Castrum

  Baronum Castrum was the name of the Roman settlement that had become Barchester. The marginalia translated, “No better place for this book than Barchester.” His grandfather had shown him this mysterious notation on one of their visits to the cathedral library, translating it without comment or explanation. Arthur ran his finger lightly across the inscription, wondering, as he always did when he looked at it, who had written those words and, more importantly, why. Some monk or priest or scholar had thought Barchester the perfect place for a book about King Arthur and had chosen a page about the Holy Grail to note this. How he wished he could see into the past and know the reason.

  After another moment, he turned and slipped the book back into its place, carefully aligning the spine with the adjacent volumes so no one would know it had been removed. As much as he wanted to follow his grandfather’s exhortation and find a way to seek the Holy Grail in Barchester, t
hat would have to wait for another day. He walked back to his usual table and slid into the worn velvet seat of his Gothic chair—a castoff from the chapter house renovations of the nineteenth century. On the table in front of him lay the Barchester Breviary. It was the only medieval manuscript of Barchester not damaged during the emptying of the library in 1941. Its intact survival was owed to its occasional use, even after the Reformation, as a service book. It had originally been kept in the vestry and so had not been part of the chained library. Occupying, as it did, a place of pride in the library, on a lectern near the entrance, it would have been one of the first books removed on the night of the bombing.

  The thirteenth-century manuscript contained the psalms, readings, and prayers for the daily offices—the seven services conducted by monks of the medieval monastery each day. The Barchester Breviary was particularly distinguished for the inclusion of medieval musical settings for several of the psalms and canticles. Many such musical manuscripts had been destroyed at the time of the Civil War by Parliamentarians, who saw chanting as too Roman Catholic. But the breviary had survived and had been an important source for one of the few pieces of scholarship to emerge from the library in the nineteenth century, a book called Harding’s Church Music, by the then precentor of the cathedral, Septimus Harding.

  The breviary also contained prayers and services unique to Barchester. Of these, the one that held the most interest for Arthur was the service for the feast day of St. Ewolda, founder of the monastery that became Barchester Cathedral. He had pored over these four pages of Latin again and again searching for any clue about her life.

  The chief sticking point in Arthur’s attempts to craft a new guide to Barchester Cathedral was the lack of information about Ewolda. Arthur knew she had been martyred—she was included in the Venerable Bede’s Martyrologium. But Bede gave no details about either Ewolda’s life or her death.

  “Our visitors don’t care about some seventh-century saint,” Gwyn had told him when he explained that he couldn’t finish his guide until he knew at least something about Ewolda. “They just want to know when the nave was built, who designed the stained glass windows, and what time the café closes.” But Arthur had persisted in the belief that if he stared at those four pages hard enough, they would reveal something of Ewolda’s story.

  He picked up the manuscript, as he had so many times before, hoping for new insight. The volume had been rebound sometime shortly after the Reformation, and the present binding of brown calf was worn to the softness of suede. There were no markings on the exterior—or at least none that had survived four hundred years of use—but Arthur nonetheless turned the thick volume in his hands, carefully examining the binding before opening it. Handling this book was, to Arthur, like a liturgical rite—there were certain unwritten rubrics he always followed.

  The manuscript was about 11 inches high and just over 7 inches wide and contained 160 vellum leaves, each covered on both sides with closely spaced Latin text. There was no title page or table of contents. The first page, to which Arthur now turned, simply began the service of Matins.

  Vellum, especially eight-hundred-year-old vellum, felt like nothing else. Arthur reveled in the texture of the pages as he slowly turned them over. Each had its own thickness, its own weight, yet each also possessed those peculiar characteristics of vellum—the sheen; the smooth, almost slick surface; the supple flexibility; and that underlying strength. When turning vellum pages, Arthur always took great care, but he also knew he didn’t need to. Unlike paper, vellum was extremely difficult to tear.

  Everything about the manuscript transported Arthur back across the centuries—the faint red lines that had served the scribe as a guide to keeping his lettering straight; the darkening at the bottom corner of every page, where a thousand, or ten thousand, thumbs had turned the leaves; and the vellum itself—that calfskin parchment that was so expensive and difficult to prepare.

  Eventually, Arthur arrived at the order for the service of Vespers for the feast day of St. Ewolda. It differed only slightly from Vespers on other days, and Arthur had never been able to read anything into the particular selection of psalms and Scripture readings. Only the final prayer made any direct reference to Ewolda:

  Harken we beseech thee O Lord Christ to our prayers and deign to bless with thy grace thy servant Ewolda, whose sacrifice in thy name we remember this day and every day. As you made your blessed virgin Ewolda come to heaven through the palm frond of martyrdom, grant that we by following her example may earn the right to approach you.

  As always, the prayer left Arthur with more questions than answers. Ewolda was a virgin and a martyr—both fairly standard for early female saints. But what was her sacrifice? What was the “palm frond of martyrdom”? What was her example that those who prayed this prayer sought to follow?

  In the margin next to the prayer was a crude sketch, presumably of Ewolda—a blue-robed woman who seemed to hover over the page. While her halo conferred saintly status, the marginalia also displayed the bawdy tradition of some such drawings. From the hem of her robes issued a stream of water that trickled to the bottom of the page. Why some medieval artist would choose to depict St. Ewolda urinating in the margins of her prayer Arthur could not imagine. He looked into her vacant eyes for a long minute, but she offered him no insight.

  After reading the prayer one more time without further illumination, Arthur gently closed the manuscript. Perhaps Gwyn was right. Perhaps he should just get on with writing the cathedral guide, pouring into it all the things he did know about the history of Barchester. Perhaps he shouldn’t worry about the things he didn’t know. He pulled out his fountain pen; a few sheets of thick, cream-colored paper; and a leather blotter—to provide a smooth writing surface on the ancient table. In an elegant script that he had learned from a nineteenth-century handwriting manual, he wrote: A Visitor’s Guide to Barchester Cathedral. But what, thought Arthur, comes next?

  He stared at the empty page and could think only one thing. If he really wanted to write the guide properly, it wasn’t the Holy Grail he needed to find but another missing treasure—the lost Book of Ewolda.

  II

  THE NAVE

  With its massive stone columns, barrel-vaulted ceiling, and heavy Norman arches, the nave is one of the oldest parts of the cathedral. On the walls can be found memorials to various De Courcys, Greshams, and Ullathornes, and in the nave aisle lies the tomb of the Second Duke of Omnium. A much older monument can be found in the floor just inside the main west door. A small gray stone, apparently of Saxon origins, bears a single word—Wigbert. Little is known about this simple memorial. It may mark the resting place of one of the abbots of the Saxon monastery, or Norman builders may have moved it to its present location. In any case, it is likely the oldest, and certainly the most mysterious, monument in Barchester.

  A.D. 560, St. Ewolda’s Monastery, Baronum Castrum

  Wigbert’s chamber was nearly dark. The fire in the middle of the room had burned low, and the corner in which the aged abbot reclined was in such deep shadow that his voice seemed to emanate from nothingness. But Martin had keen eyes, and even by the light of the single taper he was able to transcribe what the abbot dictated.

  Although named after Martin of Tours, Martin the scribe had been born in Brittany in 536. As a young man, he had worked as a shepherd, until the day he delivered several of his sheep to a parchment maker. Martin had never heard of parchment, but he returned day after day, watching as the man slaughtered and skinned the sheep, soaked the skin in lime, scraped off the hair, and stretched the thin, translucent material on a frame to dry. Martin had been transfixed, especially when he learned from the man that the parchment would be used by the monks of the nearby monastery of Saint-Brieuc as a writing material.

  “The scribes are making a Gospel book,” said the man, “and want one hundred hides for the pages.”

  Just as he had followed his sheep to the parchm
ent maker, Martin followed the parchment to the monastery, taking the monastic vows and soon becoming an apprentice to one of the scribes. He had a remarkable talent for languages and quickly learned the techniques of the scribe, showing great dexterity with a quill and rarely making mistakes in his straight, even lines of text. His fellow scribes said no one understood the variations of the parchment better than the former shepherd. A good scribe appreciated the differences between the outside of the skin, which still had hair follicles, and the inner side; between the hides of sheep and those of goats or calves.

  Martin’s technique, his work ethic, and his deep familiarity with his materials had him well on his way to becoming chief scribe of Saint-Brieuc when the abbot received a message from an obscure monastery in the kingdom of Barsyt across the water in Britannia. It was a poor house, with no scribes and few brothers who could even read. The services and psalms they committed to memory. The abbot, Wigbert, had sent from his deathbed to Saint-Brieuc for a scribe to record the story of the founding of the monastery. Since Martin was the only scribe who spoke Anglo-Saxon, having learned from a visitor to Saint-Brieuc some years earlier, he had accepted the calling and sailed across rough waters to Britannia, falling on his knees with thanksgiving when the crossing had been safely accomplished. He had traveled on foot to the former Roman settlement of Baronum Castrum and there had found Wigbert, weak in body but strong in mind and ready to tell his story. But it was not Wigbert’s story at all. It was the story of his twin sister, Ewolda.

  Martin had sat many days listening to Wigbert’s tale. Each morning, the old man spent an hour telling Martin a new episode; Martin then questioned him on the details, and in the afternoon the abbot repeated the story slowly, and Martin transcribed his words onto the parchment. But Martin did more than merely transcribe—he embellished, not the facts, but the language—for Wigbert was painfully prosaic. The abbot did not understand the beauty of language, the ways the words themselves could intersect with the story. Wigbert told a tale, but Martin wrote poetry.