The Lost Book of the Grail Read online

  “But what is this great treasure? And who wrote this document?”

  “The document was written by a monk of Glastonbury more than a century ago and has been handed down from one Guardian to the next beginning with holy Cyneburga. The treasure I shall take you to see now. Then you must move with all haste to find a new hiding place. It is dangerous for more than one man to know where such a treasure rests. Mark well how thoroughly our recent visitor searched the monastery, and choose carefully. Now come. The moon is near full, and we shall need no tapers.”

  Cenhelm led Leofwine into the night and beyond the border of the monastery to the hiding place of the great treasure. He himself had not seen the holy relic since a similar night, more than twenty years ago, shortly after he became Guardian. Then his fear had been attack by Vikings, so he had placed the treasure outside the monastery’s precincts. That way, if the heathens came and burned St. Ewolda’s to the ground, the treasure would still be safe. Leofwine would have to choose his own hiding place, safe from the new threat of Glastonbury.

  The barn was pitch-dark, but Cenhelm had no trouble again uncovering the hidden cavity. This time he removed the box and carried it into the moonlight. He spoke a prayer, and then, with trembling hands, opened the box to reveal the most spectacular treasure in the land.

  “I confess,” said Leofwine, “I am somewhat disappointed. I expected gold and jewels sparkling in the moonlight.”

  “There is a saying of Cyneburga that is well known to this day at St. Ewolda’s,” said Cenhelm. “You have passed but a few months among us, so perhaps you have not yet heard it spoken.”

  “What is this saying?” said Leofwine.

  “The gifts of God are rarely what we expect.”

  April 19, 2016

  FEAST OF ST. ALPHEGE, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY

  “Bethany Davis has gotten her things moved into the library,” said the dean with a smile as she hurled a tennis ball across the meadow and watched Mag and Nunc explode after it.

  “You know she’s doing the devil’s work.”

  “Oh, Arthur, don’t be such an old poop. The cathedral is receiving a very tidy sum for allowing the manuscripts to be added to this American database. The chapter thinks we should use the money for technical upgrades: an updated cathedral Web site, a Wi-Fi system. Who knows, maybe we could get you a shiny new computer for the library.”

  “Why not put the money toward the new Lady Chapel?”

  “It’s a nice sum, but not that nice a sum,” said Gwyn.

  “I don’t know how I am expected to work in the library with that young woman snapping her camera all day long.”

  “It will do you some good, Arthur, to be exposed to a member of the general public.”

  “She’s an American.”

  “A member of the very general public.”

  “And she doesn’t breathe when she talks. She just goes on and on and on.”

  “Then she’ll certainly do you some good,” said Gwyn. “Someone who can give you a run for your money, conversationally speaking.”

  “Miss Davis thinks our library isn’t fulfilling its purpose because we don’t have many users.” He had been thinking about what Miss Davis had said and considering how it might be addressed.

  “Do we have any users other than you, Arthur?”

  “A few,” said Arthur, “though, I admit, a very few. We don’t really have the staff to open the library to the general public.”

  “The library is an underused resource, certainly.”

  “I’m not sure computers are the answer, though,” said Arthur. “As much as I like spending time alone in the library, I agree that Miss Davis has a point—it shouldn’t be just for me. But what makes the library so special is that it’s not . . . I don’t know, not connected to the modern world. It might be worth thinking about how . . . how other people can experience the same sense of wonder and . . . and sheer joy that I feel when I’m up there. The connection one feels to the past is palpable in that room. If we could help people understand that, we might find ourselves with more of what Miss Davis calls constituents.”

  “If anyone can figure out a way to do that, Arthur,” said the dean, “it’s you.”

  —

  “Might I have a word, Prescott?” said the chairman, poking his head into Arthur’s office the next morning.

  “I suppose you might,” said Arthur, pushing back his chair. Grim as the prospect of a word with Slopes might be, it was still a relief to set aside the grisly essay he had been reading, “Titus Andronicus—Why Shakespeare Condoned Cannibalism.”

  “You do understand, Prescott, that committee work is one of the requirements of every faculty member.”

  “Was there a meeting this morning?” asked Arthur. “I assure you I didn’t get the memo or the e-mail or whatever other disgusting means of communication is used to summon us to these torture sessions.”

  “No, there was not a meeting this morning, Prescott, and if you’ll calm down, I have a proposal I think you might like.”

  “You intend to use me for a pilot scheme to see what happens if lecturers are not required to sit on committees?”

  “Not precisely. I intend to take you off the Curriculum Expansion Committee.”

  “Slopes, I could kiss you,” said Arthur, leaping up. “May I kiss you?”

  “No, you may not,” said the chairman, with a stern look. “That is not all I have come to say. I am taking you off the Curriculum Expansion Committee so that I may place you on a committee for which I feel you are eminently more suited.”

  “The Committee to Eliminate Committees Committee?” said Arthur.

  “The Advisory Committee for the Media Center.”

  “For the what?”

  “You like books and libraries and that sort of thing, am I right?”

  “I would classify myself as a bibliophile, if that’s what you mean,” said Arthur. “But what does that have to do with the media center? What is the media center?”

  “It’s what we used to call the library, you throwback.”

  “And why do we no longer call it a library?”

  “Because we call it a bloody media center!” said the chairman. “Now, do you want to switch committee assignments, or will I see you at the Curriculum Expansion Committee meeting?”

  “Is the media center some sort of bookless library?” said Arthur. Was it possible that Miss Davis’s vision had already filtered to the silty bottom of the academic world that was Barchester University?

  “I see you’re already familiar with some of the terminology,” said the chairman. “Clearly you’ll be a perfect fit. Next meeting is Tuesday at four in Conference Room D.”

  Slopes turned and marched out of the office, leaving Arthur speechless for a moment, until he thought to shout out, “Where in blazes is Conference Room D?”

  “In the media center,” came the voice of the chairman from down the hall.

  Arthur closed his eyes for a moment, picturing the dark paneling and rows of leather-bound folios in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. That was a university library, and for over four hundred years it had preserved printed and manuscript materials, making it an invaluable resource to serious scholars. Arthur cringed to think what Thomas Bodley, who founded the library in 1602, would think if that venerable institution became a “media center.” The Bodleian, of course, never had to face the question that had been troubling Arthur since his conversation with Miss Davis. Unlike the cathedral library at Barchester, the Bodleian had a built-in constituency—the students and faculty of one of the great universities of the world. Arthur supposed that when the Barchester collection had begun in the early Middle Ages, those books, though not yet called a library, had a built-in constituency as well. Barchester had been a Benedictine foundation and the Benedictine rule required the monks to spend part of their day reading. Now n
o such rule existed, and Barchester’s readership had dwindled—but was that a true measure of its importance? The wretched media center had a built-in audience, and no one could argue that that was a more useful institution than the cathedral library. Could they?

  —

  The rest of Arthur’s day had a distinctly downward trajectory.

  “I was thinking for my project I could explore how the epistolary novels of the eighteenth century would have looked as tweets.” Miss Stanhope had taken rare advantage of Arthur’s office hours to consult about her midterm paper—which everyone now insisted on calling a project, as if, instead of actually writing, they could hand in a sculpture of Charles Dickens made of ice-lolly sticks.

  “I’m sorry, you want to do what?”

  “Well, tweets today are like letters.”

  “What in God’s name is a tweet?”

  “You know, like on Twitter? A tweet.”

  “Miss Stanhope, this is not an ornithology class.”

  Twenty minutes later, Miss Stanhope had finally explained that a Web site called Twitter allowed people to exchange messages of up to 140 characters (though why this particular number Miss Stanhope could not say) and that she thought this was the modern equivalent of civilized correspondence. The only satisfaction Arthur had in the conversation was in his own adamant refusal to allow her to rewrite Fanny Burney’s Evelina as a series of these tweets. He worried, though, what brave new balderdash Miss Stanhope would try next.

  —

  As he walked through the cool shadows of the cloister on the way to the library that afternoon, hoping for an hour of peace before Evensong, Arthur could feel the stress and anger of the day seeping away—almost as if the walls of the cathedral could draw the forces of evil from him. Much as he wanted to get to the library, he walked the circuit of the cloister twice, allowing its peace to permeate his mood.

  He stopped on the south side and stepped through a stone arch into the open center of the cloister. He stood in the edge of the shadows cast by an ancient yew tree, which spread its gnarled branches over most of that side of the cloister garden. Arthur remembered sitting under that tree as a boy. It had been his favorite place to read in the summer, and it had been the place where he made his own first discovery about Barchester and the Holy Grail. It was the summer after his grandfather had introduced him to Malory, and having spent the year since reading and rereading King Arthur’s Knights, he had moved on to Tennyson’s 1869 collection The Holy Grail and Other Poems, borrowed from the Barchester Library. Arthur recalled, as if it had happened last week, reading that book in the cool shadow of the Barchester yew on a warm and hazy summer’s day. He remembered the bright green of the textured cloth binding and the sensation of the bumps of words pressed into paper as he ran his fingers across each line. The poem began with Sir Percival, retired to a monastery, recounting his history to a fellow monk. On the second page, Arthur had stopped short at the third line from the top of the page. How funny, he thought, that he could still picture exactly where that line fell on the page.

  Beneath a world-old yew-tree, darkening half

  The cloisters, on a gustful April morn

  Had he been reading those lines anywhere else in Barchester, he might not have thought twice about them, but he read them sitting beneath a “world-old yew-tree, darkening half the cloisters.” He had spent months after that day searching through photographs of English cathedrals, looking for a yew tree in a cloister. When he was old enough to travel, he eventually visited every medieval cathedral in England—not one had a yew tree in the cloister. But even before he confirmed that only Barchester matched Tennyson’s description, even before he had read another line of poetry on that summer’s day, he knew. Sprawled beneath that world-old yew tree he knew that this was no coincidence. His grandfather was right—somehow Barchester and the Grail were inexorably linked. When he showed the passage to his grandfather that evening and told him what he thought it meant, the old man only smiled mysteriously.

  Arthur turned from that familiar spot back into the shelter of the cloister walk. By the time he reached the library there was a spring in his step—a spring that immediately fell flat when he saw the morass of wires, computers, tripods, and cameras that took up the entire far end of the room. The cathedral library had found a new constituent, thought Arthur, and he wasn’t at all convinced that was a good thing.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Prescott. Nice day at work?” Bethany had her hair pulled back and was wearing a worn pair of jeans and a crisp new T-shirt bearing the crest, such as it was, of Barchester University. The ponytail did little to restrain the wisps of hair around her forehead. “Took me all morning to finish setting up, but I’m really getting down to it now.”

  Arthur sighed wearily. Not only would he not have the peaceful dimness of the library to himself, he would be subjected to the clicking of Bethany’s camera as an incessant reminder that the world of the book was being eroded in his very presence.

  “How long are you going to be here?” he said with an audible sigh.

  “Wow, way to sound welcoming.”

  “I’m not trying to be unwelcoming; I’m just seeking a piece of information.”

  “Judging from the number of pages I’ve gotten done this afternoon, because like I said I spent the whole morning setting up and then went to the refectory—is that what you call it, or is it just the café? Anyway, I had this ploughman’s lunch thing with, I have to tell you, the best cheese I have ever put in my mouth. And my grandmother lives in Wisconsin.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Arthur, interrupting when she seemed about to take a breath, “but does this have anything to do with my question?”

  “How long am I going to be here, right. I think I can probably digitize an average of about two manuscripts per day, and there are eighty-two manuscripts so I guess that’s forty-one days.”

  “There are eighty-three manuscripts,” said Arthur firmly.

  “No, there are eighty-two manuscripts. The first thing I did when I got here was count them.”

  “I have been working at Barchester Cathedral Library since before you were born,” said Arthur harshly, exaggerating his point. “I have examined the collection in detail and I keep a copy of Bishop Gladwyn’s inventory of 1894 in my desk at home. There are eighty-three manuscripts.”

  “You want to count them?” said Bethany, as if she were challenging him to arm-wrestle. “I have the Barchester Breviary on the stand in front of my camera, and eighty-one volumes were in the chained library.”

  “Fine,” said Arthur, dropping his satchel on one of the few tables not cluttered with coils of wire and empty canvas equipment bags. He crossed to the manuscript case, where the chains that had once attached to the books still hung from the underside of each shelf. His mood completely ruined and all hope of either work or relaxation before Evensong lost, he began to count.

  “No,” said Bethany, who had somehow moved directly behind him without his noticing. “Aloud, so I know you’re not cheating.”

  “Why on earth would I be cheating?” said Arthur.

  “Because you like to win arguments,” said Bethany.

  Arthur could not, in good conscience, dispute this assertion, so he started over. It was unnerving to stand here counting aloud like a schoolboy while she hovered over him. She seemed taller than when they had met and he could feel her breath on the back of his neck.

  “Is it necessary that you stand quite so close?” said Arthur.

  “I need to see what you’re doing, don’t I?” said Bethany. “You were at the end of the first shelf and you had reached twenty-eight.”

  Arthur shifted his weight so that he was an inch or two farther away from Bethany, but it did no good. Now she was breathing on the side of his head—practically right into his ear. It was all he could do to remember what number came after twenty-eight.

  “Shall I
help you?” said Bethany, giving Arthur a gentle shove, which was all it took for him to stumble to the side and allow her to step forward. “I believe the number you’re looking for is twenty-nine.” She continued to count the manuscripts, slowly and distinctly, as if she were teaching numbers to a toddler. Arthur would have liked to leave her there—simply walk out with his bag and head home, where he might do a little work in peace—but he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. In his mind, this was now a battle for control of the library, so he stayed where he was, growing more exasperated with each crisply enunciated number.

  “I have peripheral vision, you know,” said Bethany. “Just because I am accurately counting eighty-two manuscripts, doesn’t mean I didn’t see you roll your eyes just then.”

  “You were on number sixty-five,” said Arthur, crossing his arms against his chest.

  “Plus the Breviary means sixteen to go,” said Bethany cheerfully.

  “Seventeen to go.”

  But she was right. When the total reached eighty-two and there were no more manuscripts left to count, Arthur dropped his arms from his chest in puzzlement. He wasn’t even bothered by the smug look on her face, the almost taunting sparkle in her eyes. This was no longer a contest; this was a mystery.

  “There’s one missing,” said Arthur softly.

  “I didn’t take it.”

  “No,” said Arthur, “I know you didn’t. It’s just . . . it’s odd. I’m sure Bishop Gladwyn listed eighty-three. I have a copy of his inventory at home. I’ll bring it in tomorrow.”

  “If you had a digital image of it on your phone, we wouldn’t have to wait until tomorrow,” said Bethany.