Arthur felt exhausted and emotionally wrung out as he climbed the stairs back to the cathedral, yet he knew he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep if he went home. His candle was almost too short to hold without burning his fingers on hot wax, so he walked briskly to the Epiphany Chapel, where he found Bethany, kneeling in prayer. She had lit the candles on the altar, and Arthur stood silently watching her for several minutes until she eased herself back onto the pew and looked up at him.
“How about a drink?” said Bethany.
“I’m not sure I can face a pub at this hour,” said Arthur.
“Oscar has an open bottle of wine in the library anteroom,” said Bethany. “Left over from his last BBs meeting.”
“That sounds nice,” said Arthur, taking her hand as she rose.
“Besides, I know the library is where you want to be right now,” said Bethany, blowing out the candles and turning on the light on her phone. She took his hand and they walked quietly back through the cathedral, into the cloister, stopping at the lavatory to wash off the grime of the crypt, and then climbing the stairs to the library. There was so much to say that Arthur found it easier to say nothing. Once Bethany had poured them each a generous glass of wine, she respected Arthur’s need to simply sit in silence, absorbing the reality of what had happened. Well, she respected it for about ten minutes, but then she couldn’t contain herself.
“A pretty amazing evening,” said Bethany, “even if there was no Grail.” They sat on opposite sides of Oscar’s desk. Arthur withdrew the ciphered text and its translation from the desk drawer and set the papers between them.
“I still wonder why she’s shown with the Grail in that picture,” said Arthur.
“It seems like all the rest of the Grail lore.”
“How do you mean?”
“Almost every literary reference to the Grail dates from centuries after the stories are alleged to have happened. Here we have a manuscript with no mention of the Grail and a drawing, from almost a thousand years after Ewolda’s story, that shows the Grail. Maybe it was wishful thinking on some late medieval monk’s part.”
“My grandfather believed in the Grail,” said Arthur. “And I thought you were the one who said you can decide to believe.”
“You can,” said Bethany. “I’m not saying I don’t believe in the Grail; I’m just saying we might not find it in Barchester.”
“What is the Grail, for you?” said Arthur.
“I suppose it’s a physical connection to the story of my faith,” said Bethany. “I don’t need it to support that faith, I can believe in Christ without the Grail. I’m not sure that’s true for everyone. Some people are just wired to need proof. Maybe you’re that way, Arthur. I suspect Jesse Johnson, my boss, is that way. I think if you got him drunk he would tell you that the reason he is spending millions of dollars searching for biblical artifacts is that he can’t quite believe without them.”
“Sad, in a way.”
“Well, it’s—” began Bethany when she was interrupted by a blip from her phone. “Hold on a sec. That’s it, these are the last of the key words from Chicago. I got the Edinburgh ones earlier this evening.”
“Might as well finish up that last section,” said Arthur. “I think the chances of my getting sleep tonight are minimal.” He pulled out the page of the ciphered manuscript that included the end of Ewolda’s story. The last few lines were as yet undeciphered, as their key words all came from the manuscripts that Bethany had tracked down that evening. Bethany quickly looked up the key words, and within a half hour they had, together, decoded the passage into Latin.
“What does it say?” said Bethany. “Does that last word mean what I think it means?”
Arthur found it hard to breathe. He knew he needed to read the passage in English to Bethany, but his lips did not seem to work. Coming to the end of a journey, he thought, was a funny thing. You never knew when the end might come or how it might affect you. He thought the journey had ended at Ewolda’s tomb, but there had been another bend in the road, leading to an even more astonishing ending. He realized that, like Bethany, he didn’t need every question answered. Nonetheless, the answers that lay before him—answers that would make Barchester a place of pilgrimage for millions and secure the future of the cathedral—took his breath away.
“Arthur?” said Bethany. “Are you there, Arthur, it’s me, Bethany.”
“Sorry,” said Arthur, finding his voice at last. “It’s just . . . well, let me read it to you.” He picked up the Latin transcription and scanned it once more, wanting to make his English translation as accurate as possible. Then he read.
Some years after Ewolda’s death, an old man in a dark cloak came to that place where she had fallen and with him he carried an ancient and holy cup, which he called a grael. He begged of Wigbert, who was by then the abbot of that place, permission to drink from the holy waters and he dipped the cup into the spring. When he had drunk he threw off his cloak and his skin glowed dazzling gold and he revealed himself as that same man who had brought the Gospel to Ewolda. And the man’s name was Arthur.
“King Arthur?” said Bethany. “King Arthur converted Ewolda to Christianity?”
“And King Arthur drank from Ewolda’s spring with a holy cup.”
“The Holy Grail.”
“Do you know what this means?” said Arthur. “This is a completely unknown reference to King Arthur and the Holy Grail. And even if this manuscript is from the sixteenth century, the story it tells predates every other record of Arthur.” Arthur felt almost disconnected from his own body as he read the words over and over. His grandfather had been right. There was a connection between Barchester and the Grail, and they had found it.
“It seems so . . . so real.”
“The skin glowing gold is a bit much.”
“Compared to ladies in lakes handing out swords it’s pretty tame,” said Bethany.
“It’s not a medieval romance.”
“No,” said Bethany.
“It’s a Saxon . . . well, something between a myth and a historical account.”
“But closer to the latter. After all, we know the spring and the tomb are there. Name one other Arthurian story that has that kind of physical evidence.”
“We’ve done more than save the library,” said Arthur. “We’ve made Barchester a major pilgrimage site. Even if the true Grail is only a myth, even if it’s real but it only visited Barchester briefly fifteen hundred years ago, the cup on the manuscript cover is meant to be the Holy Grail. And so is the cup in the medieval roof carving in the cloister.”
“And the cup in Bishop Gladwyn’s painting. I guess the chapter will want to get that back from the hotel.”
“People will come to see the Barchester Grail images,” said Arthur. “And they will come to read this paragraph, even if it is in code.”
“You’re going to need to rewrite the guidebook,” said Bethany with a smile.
“With pleasure.”
“And do it fast.”
“I’m sure the dean will want that,” said Arthur.
“I want it,” said Bethany.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m finished,” said Bethany. “I’m done with the job. The manuscripts are digitized and I’m going back to America.”
Arthur felt as if the breath had been knocked out of him. “When?”
“In a few days,” said Bethany. “I’m starting a new job.”
“In a few days? When were you going to tell me this?”
“You knew this day was coming, Arthur. Now, do you want to hear about my job?”
No, I don’t, thought Arthur, but he smiled weakly and said, “Of course.”
“I’m going to be curator of digital assets at the library of Ridgefield University.”
“Never heard of it,” said Arthur sourly.
&
nbsp; “I’m surprised you haven’t. They have a great collection of rare books. Some nice medieval manuscripts, too.”
“Do I even want to know what digital assets are?” said Arthur. “I don’t, actually. I really don’t. I don’t even want to know that you’re going. I mean, fine, I never expected that this . . . this relationship would go anywhere, and I didn’t think you would stay here forever, but only a few more days? I mean, we only just . . . you know. And then there’s the manuscript and the tomb and the spring and King Arthur and the Holy Grail. The excitement is only just starting. How can you walk away from all that?”
“Jesus, Arthur, you sound like me. No wonder I drive you crazy. I know the manuscript and the tomb and all the rest of it will be in good hands. And this . . . us . . . it doesn’t have to end with me walking away.”
“What do you mean?” asked Arthur. The reality of her departure, which had hit him like a punch to the gut at first, now settled weightily on his shoulders and the exhaustion that adrenaline had kept at bay for the past several hours seemed to overwhelm him.
“Here,” said Bethany, handing him an envelope.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a job offer from Ridgefield. They want an Englishman in their English department, and I convinced them that the man who found the lost Book of Ewolda would be just the fellow. I’m sure the King Arthur bit will only make them that much more excited.”
“You got me a job?”
“A job offer.”
“In America?”
“All you have to do is believe, Arthur,” she said, bending over and kissing him on the cheek.
XVI
THE EPIPHANY CHAPEL
With its High Victorian décor, the Epiphany Chapel is one of the most beautiful spots in the cathedral. In the floor in front of the altar is the simple tomb of Bishop Gladwyn, who restored parts of the cathedral in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The stained glass window by Edward Burne-Jones depicts the moment that the Magi recognize Christ as divine—bestowing gifts upon him. Gladwyn thought this a perfect metaphor for his vision for the cathedral, and often prayed alone in this chapel.
September 3, 1888, Barchester Cathedral Library
Bishop Gladwyn sat in the library of Barchester Cathedral. When he had become bishop the shelves surrounding him had been perhaps two-thirds full, and he had made it one of his goals to fill them during his tenure. There was, thought Gladwyn, more reason than ever for the cathedral to maintain a wide collection of books on all subjects. Since the reforms at Oxford and Cambridge in the last century, university students no longer limited their studies to divinity, mathematics, and classics. Now young men—and if some people had their way, God forbid, young women—studied every topic under the sun, and the bishop felt that while the primary purpose of the cathedral library was to preserve the foundation’s history and support the needs of its clergy, it should also be open to anyone in Barchester seeking knowledge. He had made great progress in building up the collection, and planned to leave most of his own books to the cathedral—completing the resurrection of the Bishop Atwater Library—a library that, as he well knew, held not just books but secrets.
In front of him lay an open volume containing a drawing that seemed to depict St. Ewolda and the Holy Grail. He knew that, as Guardian, it was his duty to protect and hide this manuscript, not call attention to it. But the idea of hiding anything in Barchester seemed ridiculous. Nobody came to Barchester, least of all treasure seekers. Besides, he wasn’t really sure if what he was guarding was even a treasure. Did it make any sense to feel completely bound by a promise made to a dying old man who claimed the tradition of the guardianship had been handed down for centuries? What if he had been hallucinating or in the throes of dementia? Gladwyn believed Barchester was connected to a treasure, but he believed the treasure’s story had been corrupted over the years, leaving him guarding a worthless artifact and leaving Barchester’s connection to that greatest of relics, the Holy Grail, obscured in the fog of history.
Gladwyn had suspected a connection between Barchester and the Grail long before he became bishop, even before he took on the mantle of guardianship from the dean, Mr. Arabin. He had just read Morte d’Arthur when he decided one day to climb the cathedral tower, and he discovered a pair of stone lions. He knew those lions from Malory, and knew also that no other cathedral in Britain boasted such a pair. When, as a young man, he had been called upon, as an enthusiast of the cathedral’s history, to give a tour to the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he had shared his excitement about the Grail with the author. Tennyson, after all, had written Idylls of the King. The poet had expressed especial fascination with the yew tree in the cloisters and the carvings in St. Dunstan’s Chapel, and Gladwyn had not been entirely surprised to see these details in Tennyson’s poem about the Holy Grail, published several months later. And then, after becoming a canon, Gladwyn had been called to the deathbed of the dean and entrusted with a strange responsibility and a vague secret, and his guardianship had led him to this manuscript and its ancient drawing that just might be the Holy Grail.
Since his elevation to bishop of Barchester in 1872, Gladwyn had pursued a single goal—the return of Barchester to its medieval glory. He pursued this goal in spite of not being absolutely sure there had been a medieval glory. There were few records in the library from before the Reformation—much of the archive having been lost during the Commonwealth. But Gladwyn had found hints in a number of documents that Barchester had enjoyed a modest pilgrim trade around the shrine of St. Ewolda. If any detailed records of the shrine’s appearance had survived, he would have considered rebuilding it. Gladwyn was, after all, among the highest of churchmen. As an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1840s he had heard John Henry Newman preach, and had been immediately attracted to the ritual forms of worship espoused by the Oxford Movement. Now he wanted to transform a Barchester Cathedral made stark and barren by reformers and puritans into the thing of glory he hoped it once was.
With a major bequest from his friend Mrs. Martha Thorne, heiress to the Ointment of Lebanon fortune, he had employed a host of artists and architects to assist in this transformation. Edward Burne-Jones designed a stained glass window and William Morris, a tapestry reredos for the Epiphany Chapel—and this modest space in the north transept immediately became the bishop’s favorite spot in the cathedral. George Gilbert Scott brought his Victorian Gothic sensibilities to the job of rebuilding the precincts. He restored the medieval layout of St. Martin’s Close. Beautiful Gothic cottages sprang up on either side for the canons, and at the far end, Scott erected an imposing Gothic deanery built with three colors of brick, a pair of circular towers, and a forest of finials.
When Gladwyn had become bishop, it had been the custom of the chapter to hold their meetings in the dining room of the bishop’s palace, as the medieval chapter house was considered too uncomfortable to be practical. Gladwyn would have none of this, however, and insisted that the meetings be moved to their proper place. At first the chapter resisted, but once the bishop was able to install a dean who was as much of a medievalist as he was, the chapter returned to the thirteenth-century octagonal room off the cloister. By way of a peace offering, the bishop paid for Gilbert Scott to design a set of Gothic chairs—the backs of which reproduced the design in the tracery of the windows in the chapter house itself. With the addition of embroidered cushions, these proved substantially more comfortable than the original stone seats set into the walls, and so the members of the chapter were placated.
Bishop Gladwyn felt that the chapter house lacked only some decoration above the seat that was reserved for his own eminence. A lover of art, he had first seen the works of the Pre-Raphaelites at exhibits at the Royal Academy in London in the 1850s. Now he looked to one of their followers, known in particular for his medieval-style portraits, to paint him into posterity. After all, he had done so much to restore the cathedral and its pr
ecincts that he deserved some lasting memorial, and who knew where the canons, many of whom still resented that he was both High Church and high-handed, would choose to stash him when he had the misfortune to pass from the world. If he were destined for a simple tomb in the cloister, rather than the elaborate memorial in the retrochoir he deserved, he would at least hang his portrait in the chapter house to remind those who came after of what he had done.
“My Lord,” came a breathless voice from behind Gladwyn, “I do hope you do not plan to pose for me here in this library. The light is rather murky.”
“Ah, Mr. Collier,” said Gladwyn, crossing to greet the painter. “So good to see you again. I trust your wife is well.”
“Quite well, sir.”
“No, you may paint me in the chapter house, where the portrait will hang. I think you’ll find the light excellent.”
“Very well, My Lord,” said Collier, “but why then send for me to scale the steps to this dim-lit place?”
“For this,” said the bishop, turning the chained Ewolda manuscript so that Collier could see the illustration.
“What’s this, then,” said Collier. “The Holy Grail?”
“Perhaps,” said the bishop. “Whatever it is, it has been a part of Barchester’s history for centuries. Do you suppose you could paint me holding this cup?”
“Absolutely,” said Collier. “I see the image forming before me. It could be magnificent.”
“It must be magnificent,” said the bishop. He pulled out a key that hung on a chain around his neck and unfastened a lock at one end of the bookshelf to which the Ewolda manuscript was chained. He drew back the iron rod and removed the chain, freeing the manuscript from the bookcase. Sliding the rod back into place, he refastened the lock and handed the book to Collier.
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