“Maybe that’s why he’s so eager to get his hands on the library.”
“You think he’s deciphered the manuscript? You think it’s something about the Grail?”
“I doubt he’s cracked the code,” said Arthur. “But maybe be believes he can, or that he can hire somebody who can. And he probably thinks that a coded manuscript must be hiding a pretty interesting secret.”
“We all think that, don’t we?” said Bethany.
“Yes,” said Arthur. “We do.”
“Oh, my God, I almost forgot the good news. Gwyn told you about the covers, right?”
“This morning.”
“I thought I’d try to organize them a little bit and see if I could find one that might match the coded manuscript. Of course since we gave the book back to the precentor, it was a little tricky, but once I sorted out the ones that are the right size, it was easy to tell which one it was, and you’re going to love the reason why.”
“Why?”
Bethany crossed to the table with the piles of covers, picked one up, and held it behind her back. She had a bizarre smile on her face that Arthur couldn’t interpret.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Something that’s going to make you forget about Jesse Johnson for at least five minutes.”
“Then let me see.”
“I will, but first—yes, I wear glasses. I usually wear contacts, but of course you would only know that if you had ever gazed deep into my eyes.” Arthur felt a cold sweat breaking out on his neck. “And yes, Daddy would not approve of some of my language, or of my going to a foreign country, hanging out in an Anglican cathedral—which sounds much too Roman Catholic for his taste—drinking wine, or basically being an independent woman. So my colorful language is the least of the ways in which I have disappointed my father.”
“Will you please show me what’s behind your back?”
“You brought these subjects up, Arthur. Now here’s what I have to offer to the conversation. I believe the coded manuscript is the lost Book of Ewolda, I believe it has something in it about the Holy Grail, and I believe this is the front cover.” She passed to Arthur the front board of a book, covered in vellum. It looked unremarkable to him. Yes, it was about the right size to fit the coded manuscript, but aside from some late medieval or perhaps Renaissance grime, it bore no markings.
“Turn it over,” said Bethany, walking around the table to stand at his side.
Arthur flipped over the cover and stopped breathing. Ever since his grandfather had told him about the Holy Grail and its connection to Barchester he had dreamed of finding something like this. He only wished the old man were still alive to share this moment.
“Incredible, isn’t it?”
Arthur felt his legs turn to jelly and he slid into a chair and laid the cover gently on the table. “No words,” he said. “I have no words.”
On the inside front cover of the coded manuscript was a sketch taking up nearly the entire height of the parchment on which it had been drawn. It was not an illumination—there were no colors, no gilding—and the ink had faded over the centuries so that one had to look closely to make out the details, but several things were immediately obvious without the use of the magnifying glass Bethany handed to Arthur.
The sketch showed a robed woman, standing beside a stream of water. She held two roses in her hand, and a halo hovered over her head. Underneath her feet, in simple lettering, was the word EWOLDA. This would have been enough to convince Arthur that the manuscript was in fact the lost Book of Ewolda, that he had found the missing chapters of Barchester’s history, but what stood on a table next to the martyred founder made uncovering the story of an obscure Saxon saint pale into insignificance. To the right of Ewolda on a small table was a cup, and not just any cup but a chalice nearly identical to the one that appeared in both the 1888 portrait of Bishop Gladwyn by John Collier and the 1917 illustration by Arthur Rackham in The Romance of King Arthur.
“That’s the damn Holy Grail,” said Bethany, tapping her finger on the image.
“This is what Gladwyn was talking about,” said Arthur excitedly.
“Gladwyn? When?”
“In those notebooks you tried to buy.”
“Were they his Grail notes?”
“Mostly, no. Most of them were just notes on chapter meetings and ideas for renovations. But there is a page of notes on having his portrait made by Collier and he writes, ‘copy image of Grail from MS.’ I looked and looked and couldn’t find any such image, but here it is.”
“And Gladwyn says it’s the Grail, too!” said Bethany. “Now we just have to decipher that code and find out where the hell it is.”
Arthur felt a surge of love for Bethany that was as powerful as it was unexpected. He wanted to jump up and embrace her and never let go, except perhaps for meals and to crack a centuries-old code and find the Holy Grail. But he restrained himself, and said, in as calm a voice as he could manage, “I have an idea about the code.”
“Not yet,” said Bethany. “We should all be here.”
Thirty minutes later, David and Oscar had joined them, and stood staring at the drawing of Ewolda.
“Are you telling me,” said David, “that this manuscript has something to do with the Holy Grail?”
There was no way for Arthur to keep this particular secret any longer, with a medieval sketch of the Grail lying on the table, but, for now, he did not say anything about his grandfather’s charge to him or his long-standing search for connections between Barchester and the Grail.
“Yes,” said Arthur. “Bethany and I think there is some sort of connection between . . .” He did not want to state his belief in the reality of the Grail too directly. “Between the story of Ewolda and the legends of the Grail.”
“Too bad we can’t crack the code,” said Oscar.
“Arthur had an idea about that,” said Bethany.
“I was talking to a maths lecturer about ciphers,” said Arthur, “and he said something about Enigma that got me thinking. He said it was like a polyalphabetic substitution cipher in which the key word and the order of the alphabet changed with every character. So I thought, what if it is a substitution cipher, but the reason we can’t crack it with frequency analysis is because the key word keeps changing. But then why would the same three letters—U, Q, and D—continue to be the most frequent throughout the document?”
“That’s the puzzle, isn’t it?” said Oscar.
“That and, if you’re right, finding a constantly changing stream of key words,” said David.
“Unless,” said Arthur, “you could solve both those problems with one solution.”
“What do you mean?” said Bethany. She alone seemed excited about Arthur’s little presentation; the others had distinctly skeptical tones in their voices.
“It hit me after Evensong when I was looking at the service bulletin,” said Arthur, “and I saw that we had heard Psalm Twenty-three.”
“The Lord is my shepherd,” said Bethany.
“Exactly. Except in the bulletin, they give the psalm, and all the Bible verses, in Roman numerals. So it didn’t say Psalm Twenty-three, it said Psalm X, X, I, I, I. So what if U, Q, and D aren’t letters at all. What if they are numbers and each number gives the location of the next key word?”
“But how do you know what numbers they represent?” said David.
“Unus, quinque, decem,” said Oscar.
“One, five, ten,” said Arthur. “The first three Roman numerals. Those three letters are scattered throughout the cipher text, but if you look closely, you’ll see that about every four to eight ‘words,’ if that’s what we can call those groupings of nine letters, there appears a grouping in which those three letters dominate—between two and six letters of the nine are either U, Q, or D.”
“So each could be a number between one and t
hirty-nine rendered in Roman numerals, since forty introduces the letter L to the mix,” said Oscar.
“Except I think each is a pair of numbers. So this string of letters,” Arthur pointed to a string about halfway down the first page of cipher text reading ACHDKUQMI, “can be read as ten and four. The D is X and the UQ is IV. If every string that hides numbers hides a pair of numbers in Roman numeral format, then the longest any one number can be is five digits, because there are never more than six of U, Q, D in a single string. That eliminates four of the numbers between one and thirty-nine. Looking at the rest, and knowing that no combination of numbers can exceed six digits, there are . . .”
“Five hundred eighty-three,” said Oscar.
“Damn, you are good at maths,” said Arthur. “There are five hundred and eighty-three possible combinations of numbers.”
“Meaning, presumably,” said David, “that there are five hundred and eighty-three possible key words.”
“But what are they?” asked Bethany.
“You solved that problem,” said Arthur, winking at her, “when you found that sixteenth-century inventory of the manuscripts. A key word is usually taken from another document. The combinations of numbers probably indicate a location in another manuscript—it could be a page number and line number; or a line number and word number . . .”
“Or a manuscript number and leaf number,” said Bethany. “We know from the right-hand set of numbers on the inventory that whoever prepared it liked to use leaf numbers instead of page numbers.”
“You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?” said Arthur.
“I don’t get it,” said David. “What am I missing?”
“This manuscript was almost certainly made at the time of the Reformation, to protect whatever secrets are encoded here from the king’s commissioners. A couple of weeks ago, Bethany found another document that was made at the same time.”
“An inventory of all the manuscripts in St. Ewolda’s library,” said Bethany. “It’s dated October 28, 1539.”
“Tell them the best part,” said Arthur.
“Each item is numbered with Roman numerals,” said Bethany.
“The numbers are out of sequence,” said Arthur, picturing the left-hand column of numbers on the inventory that Bethany had not understood. “And written in a different hand than the inventory. I think one person prepared the list and then whoever encrypted the manuscript added the numbers.”
“Of course,” said Bethany excitedly. “The inventory is the key to the code. It’s perfect—there are thirty-five manuscripts and for Roman numerals written in five digits or fewer and not including L, there are thirty-five possible numbers.”
“So you think the number pairs in the cipher text refer to the manuscripts?” said David.
“Exactly,” said Arthur. “Probably the first number is the manuscript number and the second is the leaf number, with the key word being the first word at the beginning of the leaf. Or it could be the last word. I haven’t actually tried it yet, but it all makes sense and it explains all those pesky combinations of U, Q, and D.”
“Do we still have all the manuscripts from this 1539 inventory?” said Oscar.
“Aye, there’s the rub,” said Arthur. “Bethany checked it against the library and we’re missing sixteen of the thirty-five titles—they were probably stolen by the king’s commissioners during the Reformation.”
“Still,” said Oscar, “if you could decipher over half the text, that would be better than nothing.”
“So let’s get to it,” said David.
—
For the first hour or so they worked as a team. David and Bethany looked up possible key words in the relevant manuscripts—copying out the first and last words on every leaf up to thirty-nine. Arthur and Oscar worked on decoding the Roman numerals. Over each string of letters that contained combinations of U, Q, and D, they wrote the corresponding number pair. Within an hour they had amassed enough key words and extracted enough number pairs to start to work. While Bethany and David continued to record key words, Oscar and Arthur began to apply the rules of a simple substitution alphabet cipher to the word strings for which they had corresponding key words. Arthur had been sure his idea had been right. It made such perfect sense, but as he and Oscar worked their way through key word after key word, they still came up with nothing but gibberish. Occasionally a word or two would leap out at them, but that might have been simple statistics—a monkeys-typing-Hamlet sort of thing. Bethany and David eventually exhausted the manuscripts in the library that corresponded with the ones on the inventory. Bethany, paranoid about working on her own computer because she feared Jesse Johnson was watching every keystroke, borrowed David’s laptop and delved into some sort of research. At seven, David went off to a dinner date.
“It’s not working,” said Oscar after David had left. “We’ve tried almost fifty key words. There must be some other trick to it.”
“The chapter has to decide whether to accept Jesse Johnson’s offer in less than”—Arthur looked at his watch—“seventy-two hours. I think there is something in here that will make that offer superfluous, and I’m not giving up until I find it.”
“You know, Arthur,” said Bethany, closing the laptop and looking across at the two men, “Einstein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
“Einstein never said that,” said Arthur.
“Well, I just did,” she said. “Oscar, would you like to go get some dinner?”
“You’re just going to give up?” said Arthur.
“No,” said Oscar. “We’re going to eat food. And if either one of us thinks of a new approach, we’ll be back to try it.”
“I can’t eat,” said Arthur, staring at the meaningless letters swimming on the page in front of him.
“You can,” said Bethany. “You choose not to.”
“You go on,” said Arthur. “I just . . . I have to keep trying.”
“Don’t drive yourself crazy, old man,” said Bethany, and she gave him a quick peck on the cheek. Arthur felt a surge of excitement as her lips brushed his skin, but he immediately suppressed it. This is no time for love, he thought—especially hopeless love. If he was going to engage in something hopeless, it was going to be code breaking. He deciphered the next Roman numeral, found the corresponding key word, and set to work turning one group of meaningless letters into another.
—
Wednesday had been a lost day of deciphering, since Arthur, Oscar, David, and Bethany had all had a full day of work. Arthur had returned to the library after the special Evensong for the feast of the Venerable Bede and spent a few frustrating hours attacking the coded manuscript. Now he stood in the early morning light listening to approaching footsteps on the stairs.
“Did you stay up all night again?” said Bethany, stepping into the library.
“Actually, I fell asleep on the sofa in the anteroom. It just seems like I’m . . . I mean, we’re so close. I keep getting words here and there, but never enough to string together a sentence.”
“You need to get out of here for a little while,” said Bethany.
“Did I miss Morning Prayer?”
“It’s five a.m.”
“Good Lord, I had no idea it was so early. What are you doing here?”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d take a walk. Come with me. Show me where this whole thing started.”
“It all started right here,” said Arthur. “The cathedral is built on the site of the original monastery, you know that.”
“Yes, but we think the manuscript was written at St. Ewolda’s Priory. You said you would show me the ruins.”
“A walk by the river at five in the morning?”
“It’s light,” said Bethany. “What’s the matter, are you too old for a four-mile hike at dawn?”
; “Leaving aside the question of what I am too old for,” said Arthur, for whom the question of his age cut a little close to the bone, given his recent revelations about being in love with a twenty-six-year-old, “I very much like the idea of tromping out to the old monastic ruins.”
The sunrise had set the sky ablaze with color and though the morning air still bore a chill, Arthur found it bracing. To be not thinking of code breaking, not thinking of anything really, was a tremendous relief. They had walked on the riverside path nearly half the distance to the ruins when Bethany slipped on a patch of damp grass and grabbed Arthur’s arm for support. As soon as he felt her hand, his empty mind flooded. Love, he thought, was a most inconvenient emotion.
“I haven’t asked in some time,” said Arthur, “but how are you getting on with the digitizing? Getting near the end, I should imagine.”
“Are you that eager to see me go?”
Arthur could not respond that he both wanted her to leave as soon as possible and to stay forever. “Just curious. Just making conversation on a lovely morning.”
“As it happens, I am getting near the end,” said Bethany. “To be honest, I hate to think of leaving here. As much as I wanted to meet you, I never thought I’d end up on a real Grail quest. I thought I would spend my time here holed up in the library alone and maybe going off on weekends to see tourist sites by myself—but I’ve made so many friends. David and Oscar and Gwyn, and even dear Edward at the nursing home. I visit him twice a week, you know. I’m sure he’s sitting in his window now, looking out at this glorious morning.”
“And those are all your friends in Barchester?”
“Yes, Arthur,” said Bethany in a teasing voice. “You’re just someone that I enjoy working with and arguing with and solving mysteries with and drinking tea with and going to Evensong with—but that hardly makes us friends.”
They walked on in silence for a few minutes, Bethany with her hand still slipped through Arthur’s arm, until they rounded a bend and saw the ruins laid out before them in a closely mown field.
The Lost Book of the Grail Page 28