The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  ‘Only a few hundred yards from the Villa of the Papyri,’ Jack murmured. ‘I wonder if Everett had any inkling, if he had any idea how close he was to the source of what he possessed.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Morgan asked.

  ‘First, let’s have the rest of your story,’ Jack said. ‘Do you have anything more on him?’

  Morgan nodded, and slid a sheet of paper from the box across the table. ‘We don’t know whether Getty himself ever responded to Everett, or even knew about him. The headed notepaper we found was just an acknowledgement note from a secretary. But I like to think that Everett’s interest helped to fuel Getty’s continuing fascination with Herculaneum, in the years leading up to the creation of this villa. After that brief correspondence, Everett slid back into obscurity. This is the only image we have of him, an old photocopy of a picture taken by his daughter. She managed to discover his whereabouts and visit him in 1955, the year before he died. I traced her to a care home in Canada, where she’d emigrated from England, and got hold of this.’

  Jack peered at the grainy black-and-white image, the details almost washed out. In the centre was an elderly man, well dressed, hunched over on sticks but standing with as much dignity as he could muster, his face virtually indiscernible. Behind him was a single-storey shack made of corrugated metal, festooned with ivy and surrounded by lush vegetation.

  ‘This was taken outside the nunnery, in front of the shack where he lived for more than thirty years,’ Morgan continued. ‘The nuns looked after him, cared for him when he became too ill to fend for himself. In return he tended their gardens, did odd jobs. He’d been a choral scholar in his youth, and sang Gregorian music for them. He took in tramps, down-and-outs, fed and clothed them, put them up in his shack, the full Christian charity thing.’

  ‘Sounds a little messianic to me,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘I doubt whether he had any delusions about that,’ Morgan said. ‘But California in his day was the world of Steinbeck, of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, a whole subculture on the margins of society. And these were the ones he felt most at home with, outcasts, drifters, people who had forsaken their own background and upbringing, men and women like himself.’ He paused, and then spoke quietly. ‘What do you know about the Pelagians?’

  ‘We know there was an Everett family connection. His grandfather was a member of the New Pelagians, the Victorian secret society.’

  ‘Good. That saves a lot of explaining,’ Morgan replied, relaxing visibly. ‘In one of his letters he reveals his Pelagian beliefs, something he clearly wanted to talk about, and it explains a lot about where we’re going this afternoon. It’s as if he was living a double life, a devout ascetic Catholic on the one hand, and privately about the most radical heretic you can imagine.’

  ‘When was that letter written?’ Jack said.

  ‘About the end of the Second World War. He was already pretty ill by then, rambling a little, and there was no more correspondence.’

  ‘That explains it,’ Jack murmured. ‘I don’t think he would have risked revealing himself before then.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Okay. What do you know about his origins?’

  ‘It’s an amazing story. Born in the centre of the city of London, in Lawrence Lane, where his family had lived for generations. They were Huguenots, and his father was a prominent architect. Went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was a wrangler, achieving first-class Honours in Mathematics, and also studied languages. One of his tutors was the philosopher Bertrand Russell. He was offered a fellowship but turned it down, having promised his father that he’d go into partnership with him. Ten prosperous years as an architect, unexceptional, got married, had three kids, then his father died and he suddenly gave it all up, family, job, and disappeared to America.’

  ‘Any explanation given?’ Costas asked.

  ‘He’d converted to Roman Catholicism. His wife’s father was vehemently anti-Catholic. The father gave him an ultimatum, then bought him off. Seemingly as simple as that. The children’s education was paid for by their grandfather on the condition that they had no contact ever again with their father. A sad story, but not unique, given the antipathy that existed between Protestant and Catholic in England, even as late as the Victorian period.’

  ‘But we know the true reason he left,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘His father’s death, the will, his sudden overwhelming responsibility for the family heirloom. The question is why he came here, and what he did with it.’

  ‘Why convert to Catholicism?’ Costas said. ‘Was that part of the plan? Hide in the least likely place?’

  Morgan paused. ‘It could have been. But it could have been heartfelt. He’d been Anglo-Catholic, and others like him had taken the step. Remember, the followers of Pelagius, those who traced their Christianity back to the earliest British tradition before Constantine the Great, were not necessarily great fans of the Church created by King Henry VIII either. What had discomfited them about the Roman Church, the ascendancy of the Vatican and the Pope, had an uneasy conterpart in the English monarch as head of the Church of England, divinely appointed. It seemed one step from the emperor as god, the grotesque apotheosis that had ruined ancient Rome. Whether pope or king many had a problem with the Church as a political tool.’

  ‘Yet for some like Everett, the Roman tradition of worship came to have more attraction,’ Jack said.

  Morgan nodded. ‘The letters show that he still saw himself as a follower of Pelagius, and some of his theological views would have seemed heretical to Catholic purists. But the Roman liturgy, the rituals, above all the music, seemed to offer him great spiritual comfort.’

  ‘What Jeremy said in London yesterday about Sir Christopher Wren, missing the beauty of the old rituals,’ Costas murmured. ‘Speaking as a Greek Orthodox, I can understand that.’

  ‘That was what mattered to Everett. But his fundamental faith remained unchanged.’

  ‘And the thought police were a long way from a remote valley in Californa,’ Jack murmured.

  ‘I believe that was part of the plan. He came here to safeguard what he had with him, to a country where religious freedom had provided a haven for all Christian denominations. He still needed to be careful, to pick the time and place to reveal what he had, to find some way of passing on the secret.’

  ‘So he arrived here in 1912,’ Costas said.

  Morgan nodded. ‘He sailed to New York, gained American citizenship, then worked his way west. After what Jeremy told me, I now believe that what he did took huge strength, a decision to preserve an extraordinary treasure not for his own benefit but for humanity, for the future. Once he’d been assured of his children’s upbringing, he made the greatest sacrifice a father can ever make, and walked away assuming he would never see them again.’

  ‘I only hope it was worth it,’ Costas said.

  ‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ Jack replied, turning to Morgan. ‘Do you know anything more about his life, anything that might give us clues?’

  Morgan paused. ‘August 1914. Europe is torn apart. Britain mobilizes. The First World War begins.’

  ‘He goes to fight?’ Costas said.

  Morgan nodded. ‘In the folly and horror of the First World War, people often forget that many at the time believed it was a just war, a war against impending evil. Everett felt morally compelled to join. Winston Churchill wrote about men like him.’ Morgan leaned back so he could read the inscription below a framed portrait on the wall, showing a young man in uniform. ‘“Coming of his own free will, with no national call or obligation, a stranger from across the ocean, to fight and die in our ranks, he had it in his power to pay tribute to our cause of exceptional value. He conceived that not merely national causes but international causes of the highest importance were involved, and must now be decided by arms.”’ Morgan paused. ‘That’s a friend of Churchill’s, Lieutenant Harvey Butters, Royal Field Artillery, an American killed on the Somme in 1916. J. Paul Getty was a great admirer
of these men, Americans who volunteered to fight German imperialism even before the United States joined the war.’

  ‘So Everett returns to Europe,’ Costas said.

  ‘He went north to Canada and enlisted in the British Army. By early 1916 he was an officer in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, on the Western Front. In June that year he was gassed and wounded in a terrible battle at Hulluch, near Loos. During his recuperation his mathematical skills were discovered, and he was transferred to British Military Intelligence, the original MI1. He worked in the War Office in London, and then was seconded to Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty down the road, in a top-secret complex known as Room 40. He was a codebreaker.’

  ‘No kidding.’ Jeremy leaned forward, excited. ‘Cryptography.’

  ‘They were desperate for people like him,’ Morgan continued. ‘And he was recruited by intelligence just in time. What happened next may well have won the war.’

  ‘Go on,’ Jack said.

  ‘Ever heard of the Zimmerman telegram?’

  ‘Yes!’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘Of course! It’s what brought America into the First World War.’

  ‘A coded telegram dispatched in January 1917 by Arthur Zimmerman, German foreign secretary, to the German ambassador in Mexico,’ Morgan continued. ‘It revealed the German intention to begin unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping, and to help Mexico reconquer the southern States. The plan seems ludicrous now, but it was deadly serious then. The British intercepted and decrypted the telegram, then passed it on to the US ambassador to Britain. Sentiment in the United States was already pretty anti-German because of earlier U-boat sinkings that had killed Americans. A month after the telegram was deciphered, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Costas said. ‘The decipherment was done in the British Admiralty Room 40.’

  ‘Correct. The Room 40 codebreakers had a book for an earlier version of the cipher that had been captured from a German agent in the Middle East, but the decryption of the telegram by the London team was still a work of genius.’

  ‘And Everett was involved.’

  ‘His name was never released. After the war, the British went to extraordinary lengths to keep the activities of their codebreakers secret, and only ever released enough to tell the essential story. Some of the Room 40 codebreakers of the First World War went on to work at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, and their names will never be known.’

  Costas whistled. ‘So Everett really did have a place in history. Bringing America into the First World War.’

  ‘If you think that’s a place in history, wait for what I’ve got to say next.’

  ‘Go on,’ Jack said.

  ‘A lot of the stuff is still classified. But I do know he worked alongside the two men whose names were released and celebrated after the war, the Reverend William Montgomery and Nigel de Grey. Of those two, Montgomery is the one who concerns us most. He was a Presbyterian minister, a civilian recruited by British Military Intelligence. He was a noted authority on St Augustine, and a translator of theological works from German. He was best known for his translation of Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus.’

  Jack suddenly felt the hairs prick up on the back of his neck. ‘Say that again.’

  ‘Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus.’

  The historical Jesus. Jack felt himself tense up with excitement. He thought for a moment, his mind racing, then spoke quietly. ‘So we’ve got two men, both brilliant codebreakers, Everett and Montgomery, both passionate about the life of Christ. One a Catholic convert, the other a Presbyterian minister. Everett is guardian of an extraordinary ancient document, something he’s hidden away. Maybe the horror of that war, his near-death experience on the front, perhaps a soldier’s conviction that he will not survive, gives him an overwhelming need to share the secret, to ensure that the torch is kept alight.’

  ‘He tells Montgomery,’ Costas said.

  ‘They devise a code,’ Jeremy murmured.

  ‘Pure speculation, but if it happened, it probably happened here,’ Morgan said.

  Jack looked startled. ‘You mean here? In California?’

  ‘In Santa Paula. Where Everett spent the rest of his life. A small nunnery in the hills, where Everett had found what he was looking for when he arrived in America before the war. Peace, seclusion, a community whose fold he could enter effortlessly, where he could follow his faith and seek the time and place to pass on his secret.’

  ‘Just like the emperor Claudius, two thousand years before,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘And just like Claudius, the tide of history seems to have overtaken his plans, the First World War erupting like a latter-day Vesuvius.’

  ‘Could Everett and Montgomery have been here together during the war?’ Costas said.

  ‘May 1917,’ Morgan replied. ‘Publication of the Zimmerman telegram had just brought America into the war. The two men were invited to the United States to help set up the fledgling US codebreaking unit. It was all top secret. I can’t prove it, but there was enough time for a fleeting visit to California.’

  ‘Does the nunnery still exist?’ Jack said.

  Morgan looked at Jack, nodded, then pushed back his chair, got up and walked over to the window, his voice tight with emotion. ‘All my professional life I’ve lived and breathed this place. I was here when the museum was inaugurated. There’s a spirit here that’s infused my work. An ancient Roman villa in the California hills. But it also haunts me. This room, where we are now, is unknown, pure guesswork. The Getty Villa’s based on Weber’s eighteenth-century plan of the Villa of the Papyri as he saw it in the tunnels, yet this section of the villa is pure conjecture, a part never excavated. With your discoveries in the villa at Herculaneum it’s as if the past is catching up, and we risk losing all the solidity and assurance we’ve created. I want this room to be a library, a scholar’s room, but it may never even have existed.’ He took a deep breath, walked back over to the desk, picked up a bunch of keys, then sat down again resolutely. ‘I’ll take you to the nunnery now. But before we go, you owe me the rest of your story. I want to hear about what lay at the end of that tunnel. I want to hear about Claudius.’

  21

  Three hours later, Jack stood on a wooded ridge above a small valley outside Santa Paula, in the Californian hills some twenty miles north-east of the Getty Villa. It was a brilliant afternoon, the sky a deep azure blue and a refreshing breeze wafting up the valley from the Pacific coast to the west, rustling the leaves. He was among a grove of mature black walnut trees, interspersed with the occasional cottonwood and stunted oak. The trees had been deliberately planted, not in regimented rows but artfully arranged along a series of terraces dropping down the slope, giving each tree the space to grow and conforming with the natural features of the landscape. The walnut bark was deeply furrowed, and the trunks forked close to the ground to give the impression of two trees grown together, diverging to create bowery hollows and passageways that temped Jack ever deeper into the grove. It seemed a magical, secretive place, cut off from the world outside, yet revelling in all the light and colour that California had to offer.

  Morgan came down the path from where they had left his Jeep, followed by Costas and Jeremy. ‘Everett’s shack was where you’re standing, and his grave is somewhere nearby,’ Morgan said. ‘They’re both lost now, but in a way he’s everywhere here. He planted all these trees, did all the landscaping. But wait until you see what’s round the corner.’ He carried on down the path as it veered left along the line of the terrace, descending through a rustling corridor of walnut leaves. Jack lingered for a moment, then quickly caught up with Costas and Jeremy. They passed over a bubbling stream and suddenly were at the entrance to a building, a long, low-set structure that extended along the terrace on one side, and dropped down into the valley on the other. The walls had been built on a base of irregularly cut stone, and above that were made up of long, thin bricks
. A course of darker bricks had been laid in the centre, creating a horizontal line that relieved the appearance of the façade. The roof was sloping and covered with large, flat tiles secured by overlapping semicircular ones, in the Mediterranean fashion. Jack stood back and appraised the structure, racking his brain. It all looked oddly familiar.

  ‘Welcome to the convent of St Mary Magdalene,’ Morgan said.

  ‘You been here often?’ Costas asked.

  ‘I’ve only been allowed access within the last year. It’s still pretty much a revelation for me. Originally this place was a Jesuit retreat, a typical Spanish mission affair, all adobe mud and whitewashed plaster. Then it was completely rebuilt in the early twentieth century. What you see here is one of the unknown architectural gems of California.’ He glanced at Jack. ‘You’ve probably guessed it.’

  ‘I can see Getty wasn’t the only one re-creating ancient Roman villas,’ Jack murmured.

  ‘When Everett first came here in 1912, the old mission building was crumbling, almost uninhabitable,’ Morgan said. ‘Apart from the war years, building this was his main occupation for the next three decades. He built the whole thing virtually single-handedly, until his health packed in.’

  ‘So he didn’t give up his vocation as an architect after all,’ Costas said.