The Lost Book of the Grail Page 4

  “That is enough for today,” the abbot said after a long pause. “You may put away your pen and leave me.”

  “Reverend abbot,” said Martin. “May I speak to you freely, with no pen in hand?”

  “Indeed, Brother Martin, you may. It soothes me to have company, and though my mind wearies when I reach for the details of times long past, to have your companionship has been a great pleasure in my waning days.”

  “Tell me, Reverend Abbot—the tales you tell of your sister, are they true or do you . . . do you invent stories to inspire the future brothers and sisters of this house?”

  “What is truth?” replied the abbot. “Are the scriptures true?”

  “Of course,” said Martin.

  “Then is our God a god of peace or a god of war?”

  “Surely,” said Martin, “He is a god of peace—for He sent His Son to bring peace to all the nations.”

  “Indeed,” said Wigbert, “yet the book of Exodus tells us He is a god of war. So which is the truth?”

  Martin had not considered this before and found himself vexed by the question. “Truth is not as simple as I supposed,” he said at last.

  “And so it is with the book that you write for me. It is the best truth I can recall—but what is recollection and what is exaggeration that has merged with recollection over the years? What is my own memory, and what do I trust to the memory of others? How accurate is my mind, and how accurate those of so many who have told these stories? These are questions I cannot answer, any more than you can answer whether God is a god of war or peace. But I believe the stories to contain truth.”

  “And you believe your sister to be a saint?”

  “Of that I have no doubt, for however dim my memories of days long past, miracles still occur at her shrine. Just last year, a woman who could hardly walk from palsy came to pray at the tomb where Ewolda’s holy relics lie. The next day she was healed of her infirmities. This I saw with my own eyes and many of my brethren saw it as well. So if the story I tell of my blessed sister’s life and death is not perfect in its details, it nonetheless reflects who she truly was and is.”

  “You are indeed blessed to call such a saint your sister,” said Martin.

  “I am,” said Wigbert softly. “Yet every day I suffer the memory of her death.”

  “And what was . . .” began Martin. “What was the manner of her death . . . her martyrdom?”

  “That, my brother,” replied Wigbert, “is a story for tomorrow.”

  April 6, 2016

  SECOND WEDNESDAY AFTER EASTER

  The next afternoon Arthur had not been able to leave the university in time to work in the cathedral library, so he walked straight from his bus stop to the cathedral quire, arriving in plenty of time for Evensong. He entered at the west door, and when he passed the precentor rushing through the south transept he nodded politely, doing his best not to imagine the reverend’s head as a giant slab of Gorgonzola. In truth he looked more like a freshly caught salmon. His high forehead, made even higher by his receding hairline, glistened with a sheen of sweat and his thin lips hung open in a perfect O. His flustered expression could not completely mask the haughty demeanor etched in his face. It was not fair of Arthur to dislike the precentor, he knew, but the man gave off an air of superiority unbecoming a salmon.

  Arthur slipped into a pew opposite where the choristers would stand. The service would not begin for twenty minutes, and he was the only person in the quire. As the minutes slipped by and he felt himself relaxing into the past, a few others drifted in—one or two regulars, a small clutch of visitors, a shopper or two who had finished errands early and decided to stay in the city center an extra half hour to hear the service. Arthur noticed almost none of this, however. As he waited for Evensong he thought of nothing. He knew that others thought of God or Jesus or architecture or music, but to Arthur the miracle of sitting in a quiet cathedral was that it allowed him to empty his mind. The frustrations of his job at the university, the difficulties of his research, even his irrational dislike of the precentor melted away. By the time the precentor began the service, chanting, “O Lord, open thou our lips,” Arthur heard only the pure tenor voice, and as the choir responded he fell back into the music.

  The beauty of Evensong—the voices of the choir ringing off the ancient stones of the cathedral—did not make Arthur believe in God, but it did make him want to believe. The service had been sung in Barchester regularly for half a millennium, and Arthur found that continuity comforting as he slipped into the same seat he occupied in the quire every afternoon.

  The Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, which were a part of every Evensong, were today sung to especially appropriate music—a Gregorian chant setting taken from the Barchester Breviary. The music, which had been sung in that very space eight hundred years ago, echoed hauntingly through the quire and transported Arthur back to the days before the Reformation, before Evensong, when seven times a day the chants of monks filled this space.

  When the service ended, Arthur left by way of the north quire aisle, hoping to avoid the precentor, but as soon as he emerged into the nave, there stood the salmon greeting the few worshippers, and Arthur had no choice but to smile and offer his hand.

  “Good afternoon, Arthur,” said the precentor. “Always so nice to see you.” That tone of voice, thought Arthur, must be what had inspired the invention of the word disingenuous. The precentor’s hand was cold and damp and Arthur surreptitiously wiped his own hand on his pants as he hurried down the nave.

  The precentor had a way of always being where Arthur wanted to be. At receptions, when Arthur crossed the room to speak to the dean, or the choirmaster, or the organist’s French wife, the precentor arrived on the scene just in front of him, monopolizing the conversation; at the market, he had an unnerving habit of slipping in front of Arthur just as he was about to join a queue and of buying the last of the Cheddar, or the wholemeal, or the raspberry jam. Arthur had even, on several occasions, arrived in the library to find the precentor sitting in what he thought of as his chair at his table. While the precentor certainly had a right to sit anywhere in the library he chose, it annoyed Arthur to be relegated to a more modern table while the precentor sat reading, as often as not, a paperback spy novel in Arthur’s usual, if not rightful, spot.

  So, while Arthur did not exactly seethe at having been delayed, if only for a moment, he was none too pleased as he scurried home to tidy up. He was expecting guests.

  Arthur lived at the edge of the cathedral close in one of three cottages that had been fashioned out of a row of almshouses once called Hiram’s Hospital. The “hospital” had been endowed and built in 1434 by a wealthy businessman named John Hiram as a home for elderly gentlemen of Barchester. By the mid-twentieth century, the endowment had run dry, and the houses had fallen into disrepair until they had been restored for modern living in the 1990s. Arthur had bought his cottage ten years ago when he came to Barchester, a fitting use of the inheritance his grandfather had left him.

  There had been twelve men living in the six almshouses; each of the modern homes was composed of two of those medieval units. Arthur had, on the ground floor, a spacious sitting room, a small kitchen, and a dining area, as well as a small conservatory at the back looking out over the common garden and a bend in the river. Upstairs, in what had once been little more than a garret, were a cozy bedroom, a small bathroom, and Arthur’s study, from which he could just glimpse the tower of the cathedral.

  He could not imagine a more ideal home. The cottage was close to everything Arthur cared about—not just the cathedral but the shops in the city center (particularly Denning’s Bookshop)—and it was blessedly distant from all he loathed, for while Arthur inhabited the world of medieval Barchester, the modern university had been built in a field six miles outside of town. Number Three, Hiram’s Cottages, Barchester, was the perfect address for Arthur Prescott.


  That evening Arthur would host the weekly meeting of the Barchester Bibliophiles. The bibliophiles consisted of Arthur, Oscar Dimsdale, and David Denning—three confirmed bachelors who shared a love of all things bookish.

  Oscar, by trade a maths teacher at the local comprehensive school, lived with his aging mother, and spent much of his time at the cathedral. Not only did he organize the library, he also oversaw the laundering of vestments, stocked supplies in the vestry and sacristy, and helped the vergers in a plethora of ways. He would have liked to be a lay reader—reading the lessons at services—but he was prevented by his peculiar habit of breathing at just the wrong place in a sentence. This impediment made his speech seem both rushed and halting, and while Arthur and David had grown used to it, the precentor had decreed that such a manner of speech disqualified Oscar from reading Scripture. It was the official reason why Oscar, despite his years of service to the cathedral, had never been invited to become a lay canon. Arthur had it on good authority from the dean that the real reason was that the bishop insisted that lay canons be prominent, preferably wealthy, members of the Barchester community, but he would never tell Oscar this. Arthur had always assumed that Oscar was gay, but he fancied himself both too liberal to care and too old-fashioned to ask. Oscar never mentioned his love life.

  The same could not be said for David Denning. Oxford educated, though several years younger than Arthur, David had followed a girl to Barchester after university. The romance had lasted just long enough for David to spend his small inheritance on a failing bookshop off Barchester High Street. Since then his relationships with books had been far more enduring than those with women. He had added an antiquarian section to the shop that had previously sold only new bestsellers, started a popular series of author events, and installed a café. However, he also had a bad habit of seducing his shop assistants—who were invariably beautiful young women. Oscar had suggested that perhaps hiring a middle-aged man might bring a little stability to the establishment. Shop assistants at Denning’s rarely lasted more than a few months. Once David had cast them aside romantically they had little interest in continuing in his employ. Unlike Oscar, David had few qualms about sharing his sexual exploits with his literary friends—so few, in fact, that Arthur and Oscar had made a rule: No discussing private affairs (in the most obvious sense of the word) at meetings of the Barchester Bibliophiles.

  David had wanted to name the group “The Holy Trinity,” but Oscar had objected to this as irreverent; Arthur would have none of “The Three Musketeers,” saying that they should at least honor English, not French, literature; and David had squashed “The Pickwick Club” on the grounds that there had been four Pickwickians, not three. That left them with the Barchester Bibliophiles (or the BBs for short), which eliminated any reference to the group as a trio, thus leaving open the possibility, remote though it was, of another bachelor book enthusiast one day joining their number.

  Arthur would host the bibliophiles in his sitting room, where he carefully displayed his collection of the works of English humorists. He enjoyed sharing this collection with Oscar, David, and anyone else who happened to visit his cottage, but it was not his only collection, or even the collection with which he spent the most time. That collection was shelved upstairs in his study, his sanctum sanctorum, into which neither David, nor Oscar, nor any other visitor had ever been allowed.

  The collection in the downstairs of Arthur’s cottage covered the years from about 1850 to 1950. On one wall of the sitting room hung five antique prints from Vanity Fair magazine—Max Beerbohm, F. C. Burnand, W. S. Gilbert, John Tenniel, and Tom Taylor. Below these a low bookcase ran between the front door and the corner of the room. On the opposite wall, built-in bookcases flanking the fireplace showcased his collection of P. G. Wodehouse.

  Arthur’s grandfather had given him not only a love for Barchester and Grail lore but also for all books. When Arthur had discovered his collection of P. G. Wodehouse, his grandfather had encouraged the boy’s passion, and being able to escape into the world of Jeeves became yet another pleasure associated with those summer visits. Arthur’s grandfather had died two weeks after Arthur began his career as an undergraduate at Lazarus, casting a shadow over his Oxford days. But Arthur also inherited the Wodehouse collection, and, as a way of keeping his grandfather’s memory alive, he began adding to it, haunting the used bookshops of Oxfordshire. By the time he finished university, Arthur had a growing collection that traced Wodehouse’s influences and covered a wide range of English comic writers.

  Now books covered the entire fireplace wall of his sitting room, from floor to ceiling. Many of his grandfather’s Wodehouse books gleamed in their original dust jackets, carefully preserved in glassine wrappers. Surrounding this core of Jeeves and Blandings Castle and Mr. Mulliner, Arthur had shelved everything from old Punch magazines to works by Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Kingsley Amis, and Jerome K. Jerome. In archival boxes he stored comic almanacs illustrated by George Cruikshank and satirical pamphlets by authors as famous as Lewis Carroll and as obscure as Theodore Buckley. He loved the lesser-known humorists, and tonight he would read from a booklet by Buckley.

  A reading from a recent acquisition or a beloved old friend was always part of the BB meetings. The bibliophiles met on Wednesday nights, rotating hosts. David convened the group in a cozy room in the back of his bookshop, furnished with comfy leather furniture and lined with the antiquarian stock that was too valuable to display in the main part of the store; Oscar, so as not to disturb his mother, hosted his evenings in a room just off the cathedral library with a small fireplace and cases that held boxes of ancient documents. Arthur was the only one of the trio who welcomed the others into his home.

  By seven thirty, drinks had been poured—beer for David, white wine for Oscar, and port for Arthur—and Oscar was showing round his latest acquisition. Oscar had begun as a collector of J. R. R. Tolkien. But as prices for Tolkien skyrocketed after the Lord of the Rings movies were released, he changed his focus to Tolkien’s influences, from early English poetry to Icelandic epics. The book he proudly displayed tonight was the 1870 first edition of an English translation of the Völsunga—a Nordic saga that had also been a source for Richard Wagner, and which featured both a magical golden ring and a broken sword reforged. The translation had been done in part by William Morris, the great designer, poet, and printer of Victorian England. The volume was bound in green cloth, with a stunning floral cover design by Morris’s associate Philip Webb.

  “The pages are uncut,” said Oscar, “which always presents something of a problem.” The problem was that a book with uncut pages was considered more valuable—being in its original unread condition—but leaving the pages uncut meant never reading it.

  “Cut them,” said David, slapping the book with his hand. “A book is to read. Don’t tell me you think William Morris wouldn’t cut the pages.”

  “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,” said Arthur, repeating his favorite Morris quote.

  “Exactly,” said David. “No question that book is beautiful, but with uncut pages it’s not very useful.”

  “But I can always read the text somewhere else,” said Oscar meekly. “Maybe online?”

  “Not the same!” bellowed David. “This is your book. You spent hundreds of hours with miniature cretins and long division to earn it. You should damn well be able to sit in your own chair and read it.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Arthur. “Feel the paper, turn the pages. Neither Tolkien nor Morris would abide reading a book any other way.” Arthur passed Oscar a razor-sharp knife that he kept in the drawer of a side table for this very purpose. Oscar took the knife in one hand and gingerly held the book in the other. He laid the book on the coffee table, opened to the first gathering, and slipped the blade between the pages.

  “Do it,” said David. “William Morris wants you to.”

  Cri
nging, Oscar pulled the knife through the paper as the others held their breath. The blade made a muffled hiss. Oscar laid down the knife and opened the now accessible pages to the main body of the text. “This is the same translation Tolkien read as a schoolboy,” said Oscar, his voice trembling. The three men sat in silence for a moment as Oscar looked over the first few pages. “Next week,” he said. “By next week I’ll have cut all the pages and found the perfect passage to read.” He closed the book and smiled.

  “Well,” said Arthur, “I see the glasses are empty, and I think the opening up of pages that haven’t seen the light of day since they were printed a hundred and forty-six years ago deserves something special. Champers?”

  “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” said David. “Hear, hear!”

  When the Champagne had been poured, Arthur picked up a small, slim volume from the mantel. He had found this little book several years ago in a bookstall in London’s Portobello Road but had not read it all the way through until the previous week. Published in 1848, it contained the sort of long-forgotten wit that Arthur enjoyed sharing with the BBs. He settled into his chair and cleared his throat. “A reading from the book of The Natural History of Tuft-Hunters and Toadies,” he said solemnly. David did not attend church, but Oscar would understand the allusion. Arthur began to read:

  Everybody has some natural antipathy. There are a great many persons of good sense and taste that entertain a rooted objection to Trafalgar Square, and its fountains, around which the little boys of the metropolis love to congregate, and into which the maid-servant threatens to dip the refractory brat which crieth for the what’s-his-name at the top of the great column.

  A great many persons dislike Ethiopian Serenaders, the scenery at the Haymarket Theatre, and the farces at the Princess’. Some very good people have a cordial detestation for Joinville ties, halfpenny steam-packets, “gents,” and amateur performances at the Olympic; and there are equally respectable persons who shun railway speculators, Cheap Clothing Marts, and tariff pine apples. We do not affect singularity, but have our antipathies too, and first and foremost of those antipathies, an unmitigated detestation of, and hostility against all Tuft-hunters whatsoever.