The Lost Book of the Grail

by Charlie Lovett

  “It feels ancient,” said Collier.

  “Not as ancient as some,” said the bishop. “The volume dates, I believe, from around the time of the Reformation, though I suspect the story it contains is far older.”

  “And may I read the story?” asked Collier. “Like yourself I am fascinated with the medieval period.”

  “I’m afraid you won’t have much luck reading this manuscript,” said the bishop, laughing. “Now, this must never leave the cathedral precincts and each day when you are finished painting, I will lock it back into its place.”

  “Very well, My Lord. Will you show me to the chapter house?”

  “Indeed,” said Gladwyn.

  A month later, the painting was complete, Collier paid, and the manuscript locked back in place. Bishop Gladwyn had barely waited for the paint to dry before having the portrait mounted in an elaborately carved oak frame and hung on the east wall of the chapter house, above the largest of the stone seats. For the next ten years, he rarely missed a chapter meeting and a chance to sit under the portrait of himself holding the Holy Grail.

  May 27, 2016

  FIRST FRIDAY AFTER TRINITY

  At four, Arthur finally gave up trying to sleep, dressed, and returned to the library. After walking Bethany back to her lodgings, he had lain awake trying to process her offer, but another thought kept intruding on his mental arguments about the disadvantages of moving to America. As much as he wanted to focus on Bethany, he couldn’t get those extra characters in the cipher out of his mind. Each cipher string contained nine characters, but the strings that contained the hidden numbers never had more than six characters defining those numbers. That left a minimum of three extra characters in each of those strings—many hundreds of characters throughout the manuscript. He had assumed these were so-called garbage letters, not related to the cipher in any way. They certainly did not translate using the key words. But Arthur had started to believe things lately, and he believed that the cipher was perfect, that no character was wasted. So what purpose did those garbage characters serve?

  The sky was just beginning to lighten as Arthur made his way toward the cathedral. He wondered if the dawn about to break would begin a day that would be marked in the history of Barchester. How soon would the spring and the tomb become public knowledge? And would this be the day he changed the course of his own life, or would he come to his senses, drive Bethany to Heathrow, and kiss her good-bye?

  Back in the library, Arthur settled in at his favorite table. He needed the intimacy of that smaller space, not the wide trestle table on which the group had deciphered the manuscript. He carefully copied out all of the “garbage characters,” half convinced that the spirit of Ewolda would allow him to see some pattern in them once they had been extracted from the rest of the manuscript. What further secret could this manuscript possibly possess? And what did he know about the manuscript, the key words, and the inventory that he had not used in deciphering the story of Ewolda?

  He read over the Latin version of the story again, but it seemed nothing more than the remarkable account they had all taken it to be. He picked up the inventory that Bethany had discovered, and examined it closely under the light of his reading lamp. Sometimes, with parchment documents, one could detect where writing had been scraped off the surface, but this document seemed unusually neat and clean. The only thing that marred it slightly was a small crease down the left side, where it had been pressed into the gutter of the mathematical manuscript in which Bethany had discovered it. Arthur gave a start.

  “Mother of God, Fibonacci,” he said aloud. That had to be it. Bethany had found the inventory in a section of the manuscript by Fibonacci—and there were no coincidences. The code must somehow be based on the Fibonacci sequence. He spent nearly an hour trying to apply the sequence to the key words they had collected, but to no avail. He was just beginning to think this was another dead end when, almost on a whim, he decided to count the number of words in the Latin transcription of Ewolda’s biography. There were exactly 1,597.

  The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers created by adding the two previous numbers in the sequence. Thus the sequence begins 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. The seventeenth number in the sequence is 1597. What if the key words for the garbage characters were within the deciphered manuscript itself? What if all Arthur had to do was circle the words in the manuscript that corresponded to the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence—the first word, second word, third word, fifth word, and so on—and simply rotate through the key words, using a new word for each string of garbage characters? It couldn’t possibly be that simple. But it was. And the beauty of the code was that, unless one knew the inventory had been stored in a manuscript by Fibonacci, it would be virtually impossible to break.

  The morning sun flooded the room by the time Arthur had decoded the message hidden in the extra characters. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was after eight. At nine the chapter would be meeting.

  He carefully took all his papers off the table. He didn’t think he would ever be able to work in this spot again. He pulled his chair back and looked at this unassuming bit of furniture with fresh eyes. The greatest treasure, he thought, had been under his nose the whole time. He gently ran his fingers across those words carved in the wood by some long-forgotten monk—Mensa Christi. The Table of Christ.

  He stepped away, picked up his translation of the Latin, and read again the unbelievable words.

  Here written in the first month of the archbishopric of Ethelhard is a true and real account of that most sacred of relics, the Mensa Christi. In his youth at Nazareth, our Lord, with his father Joseph, did fashion this table, for he was raised as a carpenter and would build the kingdom of God on earth. Those who knew Christ and that disciple who loved him brought the table from Nazareth to Jerusalem and here it rested in the upper room of a home near the city. On this table did our Lord bless the bread and wine on the night he was betrayed. After the Crucifixion of our Savior, Joseph of Arimathea did take the Mensa and the cup upon it—our Lord’s cup. It came to pass that Joseph gave the Mensa and the cup to Aristobulus, who had been charged by Jesus to take the Gospel to the island of the Britons. Aristobulus, arriving in Briton, became the bishop of that land and built a church near the hill of Glastonbury, making the Mensa his altar. This same church, the Vetusta Ecclesia, did Paulinus protect and here the Mensa remained, its secret protected by the holy brothers. Those who knew the true nature of the Mensa did call it in secret the Grael or Platter of our Lord. Now we hear of brutal attacks by savages from the north, and the Mensa and its secret are to be borne to a remote and undistinguished house at a place called Barchester.

  To this account, which is a true transcription of the history brought to us by the monks of Glastonbury in the year of our Lord 793, I, James, of the Priory of St. Ewolda, do add the following honest history of the Mensa—that it did come to Barchester and there remained until the foundation of St. Ewolda was moved from that place. The Mensa then removed to the new foundation, always under the protection of a Guardian, each in his own generation the sole protector of the Mensa’s secret. From generation to generation was the mantle passed. Now the king’s commissioners approach. The Mensa will once again be moved to Barchester, and I prepare this account in cipher and pray to our Savior that as I pass the secrets to the next Guardian they may be kept safe from the evil that is to befall us. Written this twelfth day of October in the year of our Lord 1539.

  “You can’t tell her,” said a voice from behind him. Arthur turned and saw the precentor standing just inside the doorway. “You probably shouldn’t even tell me.”

  “You?” said Arthur.

  “Until a few minutes ago, I was the Guardian,” said the precentor. “But I never knew what the manuscript said or what the Mensa really was. I only knew it was my duty to guard them.”

  “But how do you know . . .”

  “Of course I knew that you a
nd your friends borrowed the manuscript. I was the Guardian, after all. You don’t really think you could take the manuscript right out from under my nose without my knowing about it. But I thought, what’s the harm. It was only when I realized that the images had been sent to that American billionaire that I began to worry. I could imagine your keeping a secret, but I couldn’t imagine his doing it. And then this morning Gwyn rang to tell me the news. She even read me your translation and, thank God, there was nothing there about the Mensa. So I knew the real secret was safe. But judging from the way you were looking at the table, and the expression on your face as you were reading just now, I’d guess you somehow figured out the secret of the Mensa and why it needs guarding.”

  “What do you mean, up until a few minutes ago you were the Guardian?” said Arthur.

  “You decoded the manuscript, Arthur. Only you know what the Mensa really means. That makes you the Guardian. And if that’s not enough, there’s the fact that I’ve been doing this for thirty-five years, and I’d like to retire to Majorca. So I’m making you the Guardian.”

  “But this is . . .”

  “Don’t tell me,” said the precentor. “It’s your secret now, and the only person you should ever tell is whomever you choose to be the next Guardian.”

  “You were the Guardian for thirty-five years, and you didn’t know what you were guarding?”

  “Some things we do on faith, Arthur. No matter what it says in that manuscript, the Mensa may be nothing more than an old table, but for over a thousand years the Guardians have had faith, and so have I.”

  Arthur thought about this unbroken chain of faith. He realized, looking at the Mensa, that he was not like Jesse Johnson; he did not need evidence to believe, but being a part of a guardianship that reached through the faith of more than a millennium might just allow him to make the leap.

  “Is that why you were always . . .”

  “An ass? Yes, that’s part of it, I suppose. I always had my eye on you. After all, Arthur, it was your grandfather who passed the guardianship to me. He was a good man and a good friend, and when he made me Guardian, I promised to at least consider you as my successor.

  “My grandfather was Guardian of the Mensa?” said Arthur.

  “And of the manuscript,” said the precentor. Of course it made perfect sense. When he read his grandson the Arthur stories, when he swore him to secrecy on the subject of the Holy Grail, Arthur’s grandfather had been preparing him to be the Guardian and testing his worthiness. Even though his grandfather, and probably every Guardian since the Reformation, couldn’t read the manuscript, he’d had his suspicions, and he had, without betraying the secrets of the Guardian, nudged Arthur toward the discovery he had finally made.

  “From the day you arrived at the cathedral library and chose the Mensa as your favorite spot,” said the precentor, “I knew you would either be trouble or you would be the next Guardian—possibly both.”

  “And what does it mean, exactly,” said Arthur, “being the Guardian?”

  “It means whatever secrets you know, you protect. It means that keeping the Mensa and the manuscript safe until you can pass them on to the next generation is your first priority. It means no foreign travel or long absences from Barchester.”

  “And what about . . .” Arthur couldn’t believe what he was about to ask, but the precentor seemed one step ahead of him.

  “Love?” he said. “I was in love once, and I had to choose. It’s hard to be married when you’re handcuffed to a cathedral and you can’t tell your wife why. So I chose to sacrifice myself for what I truly believed was a higher calling. I think about her sometimes and wonder if I chose well, but I’ve lived with my choice, and that’s enough.”

  “So you’re asking me to give up on . . . on life and on happiness.”

  “Not at all,” said the precentor. “There are advantages, too. You are now a part of a chain of Guardians that reaches back to the earliest days of Christianity on this island. You will spend untold hours in this most glorious room in the kingdom, surrounded by the wisdom of the ages. You will possess knowledge that no one else on earth will possess, and that knowledge will change you and strengthen you and connect you to so much that is past and is yet to come. And unlike me, you know the full secret of the Mensa. I can only guess that your life as Guardian will be richer even than mine.”

  Arthur could picture it, and in many ways the vision the precentor painted was the fulfillment of his lifelong dream. To be Guardian of the Grail, even if the grail was not exactly what he had expected, to keep secrets that had been hidden for over a thousand years, and to pass those secrets on to the next Guardian when the time came—the little boy who had learned of the Grail at his grandfather’s knee could imagine nothing better.

  “But why should the true nature of the Mensa have to be a secret?” said Arthur. “Maybe the time is right for the world to know.”

  “The cathedral is in desperate need of money and there is a billionaire American buying up Christian artifacts for a museum. The time has never been less right.”

  “And if I am the Guardian, it will be part of my duty to appoint a successor?”

  “Exactly,” said the precentor. “You may, for all I know, be the first layperson to guard the Mensa. Your grandfather told me the names of several previous Guardians. One of them moved that portrait of Bishop Gladwyn out of the chapter house.”

  “Because it showed the Holy Grail?”

  “Gladwyn was a Guardian,” said the precentor, “but he wanted to glorify medieval Barchester. I suspect he’s the one that had legs put onto the Mensa and installed it in the library. And he certainly used the drawing of the Grail from the manuscript in his portrait—a drawing I never knew of until today, by the way. A little dangerous, if you ask me. That painting doesn’t just show the Grail, you know, it shows the Mensa. Malory called it a silver table. Collier copied that from the drawing as well. I imagine that’s the real reason the portrait got banished. You never know what choices you will be called upon to make as Guardian.”

  “And what if I say no?”

  “If you say no, then you go on with your life. You chase after the girl; you live happily ever after.”

  “And the Mensa?” said Arthur.

  “For the first time in over a thousand years, the Mensa will be moved from Barchester. I will need to hide it from you and I will find another protector.”

  “So you’re saying that a hiding place that survived Vikings, and Normans, and reformers, and civil war, and Nazi bombs might not survive me?”

  “Dangers come from unexpected places, Arthur.”

  “Can I ask you one more question? Do you believe in the Holy Grail?”

  “It’s no longer about what I believe,” he said. “What do you believe?”

  Arthur wasn’t quite ready to answer that question, but he looked back at the Mensa and felt an almost physical pull toward it and its history.

  “Well,” said the precentor, “I’ve got a chapter meeting in a few minutes, and then I have to tell the dean of my intention to retire.” He took a few steps toward Arthur and held out his hand. “By the way, you can call me Edmund.”

  “Thank you, Edmund,” said Arthur, shaking his hand firmly, and for the first time that he could remember, the precentor smiled at him.

  XVII

  THE LADY CHAPEL

  Dedicated in 2020, the Lady Chapel is the first significant new construction in the cathedral since the Reformation. The award-winning design merges the ancient and modern, giving the visitor a true connection with the cathedral’s deep roots in Saxon history and its grand reach into the future. At the dedication service for the chapel, the archbishop of Canterbury called it “unique among worship spaces in Britain.”

  October 12, 2020

  FEAST DAY OF ST. EWOLDA

  Arthur knelt at the altar rail and accepted the Communion waf
er from Gwyn. He hoped that even in her unwavering focus while celebrating the Eucharist, she would be able to enjoy the triumph of this moment. Behind her stood the archbishop of Canterbury, the first to visit Barchester in three hundred and fifty years, here for this dedication of the new Lady Chapel. Because the chapel held only about fifty people, the bulk of the service, attended by hundreds, had taken place in the nave, but the congregation streamed through the new chapel to take Communion.

  The building of the Lady Chapel was just part of a larger works project at Barchester that had included a major archaeological dig around the tomb and spring of St. Ewolda, repairs to the north transept, the restoration of the cathedral’s collection of manuscripts, and the hiring of a librarian, all financed by a grant from Heritage Lottery.

  Arthur’s favorite room in the world was rarely as peaceful as it had been in years past, but he had no complaints. The previous day in the library, Oscar had brought a school group on a visit to look at the musical notation in the Barchester Breviary, a lecturer from the university had met with his class on medieval history, the new full-time librarian had checked out books to a dozen readers, and Arthur himself had delivered a lunchtime talk on the history of the collection. He was pleased to see Edward Alford, the onetime choirboy who was now a frequent visitor to the library, in the audience. That same day, and every day, hundreds of visitors climbed the stairs to see not just the beauty of the room and its books, but the new glass-fronted display that had drawn tens of thousands of people to Barchester since its installation.

  The case included a coded manuscript, the only surviving record of the earliest reference to a possibly real, possibly mythical figure named King Arthur and a cup called the Holy Grail. Next to the mysterious manuscript were an English translation and the detached cover of the ancient volume, illustrated with a picture of the Grail. As Arthur had predicted, people flooded to Barchester to see the now famous Grail images. But they also came to see Ewolda’s tomb and spring. It had taken her nearly fifteen hundred years, but she had finally succeeded in making Barchester a significant place of pilgrimage.