Paradise Walk

by Mary Malloy

  Alison returned with a tray as Lizzie steeled herself for the prospect of leaving the comfort of this house and spending a month on the road. She pulled several of the maps out of the way as Alison set the tray down and poured her a cup of coffee.

  “Oh good,” Alison said, handing Lizzie the cup. “I see you’re looking at the first map. I thought we should just go over the route of your pilgrimage before we head to Oxford, and then we will be able to talk about it while we’re in the car.” She had made an appointment for one thirty with the librarian at St. Hugh’s College and it was only a bit more than an hour to drive there.

  Lizzie agreed. She took the larger map of England and looked at the route Alison had drawn out in red, and then figured out how much of it was covered by each of the survey maps.

  “Can I write on this?” she asked, gesturing at the map.

  “Of course,” Alison replied. “That is your copy, I put that route on for you and you’re free to add anything you like to it.

  “I assume this route is based on descriptions in the text?”

  Alison took a bite of toast and nodded.

  Lizzie took the typescript out and leafed through it. “Can I write on this too?” she asked, holding the book up to Alison.

  Permission was immediately granted.

  Page by page she began to look at descriptions of towns and compare them to names on the map. Bath, Wells, Glastonbury, Castle Cary, and Shaftesbury were the main stopping points in the first part of the trip. Then came Salisbury and Winchester, great cathedral towns that would have been important stops for any pilgrim. Guildford was on the way to London and Southwark, where the opening to Canterbury Tales was set. From there the path was familiar from Chaucer’s text: Rochester, Sittingbourne, Boughton-under-Bleen and Canterbury, with overnight stops at Dartford and Ospringe. Back and forth from text to map, Lizzie marked the places where the Weaver had traveled more than six hundred years earlier.

  “It is wonderful that the names are still recognizable,” she said. “When I was in Boston I downloaded several maps of this region from different time periods, and the persistence of names was one of the most remarkable things I noticed.”

  Alison asked about these other maps and Lizzie opened her laptop and quickly showed her a dozen, from a manuscript of 1250 through the Industrial Age, when new features like bridges and mills began to appear, to early twentieth-century road maps, from before the modern system of motorways was built.

  Their appointment with the librarian at St. Hugh’s was the only thing that could have dragged them away from their interesting discussion. Lizzie was expecting to drive them to Oxford in her rental car and was surprised when Alison walked past it to the garage and pulled open the doors to reveal a sports car, a classic MG from the 1960s.

  “I’ve had it since I was in college,” Alison explained. “I suppose I should give it up with my bad hip, but it feels like surrendering to old age.”

  It was clearly an effort for the old woman to climb into the low-slung car, and Lizzie felt all the exposure of sitting on the left side of the car with no steering wheel in front of her. Her immediate fear that her host would drive like a maniac was put to rest as Alison brought the car carefully out of the drive and onto the main road. She quickly and comfortably brought the conversation back to their earlier subject, making a comment about her pleasure in finding that Lizzie was a map lover.

  “It’s more than that,” Lizzie explained. “I consider maps to be one of the most important tools I use as a historian. In them you see how humans understand the world around them and how they have altered the landscape for their own benefit.” She talked a bit about how different kinds of maps showed not only changes in political boundaries, but changes in land use as well. “We can tell from maps when forests were cut for fields, how rivers were diverted to run mills or for irrigation, and how the human population shifted from rural places to expanding cities—and that’s just the most obvious stuff.”

  “Here be dragons!” Alison said, referring to those places on medieval maps, as yet unknown to Europeans, where mysterious dangers were thought to lurk.

  “Exactly!” Lizzie responded enthusiastically. “Those little extras on maps sometimes give us the greatest insight into how the people who made them understood their world.” She held up the modern road map of Britain, which she had been using to follow their route. “I’m sorry that this is becoming such a relic. With our reliance now on electronic navigating systems, I find that many of my students don’t even know how to read a map; they never use them. Except in my classes,” she added. “They may understand them as historical texts, but I’m not sure they could find their way from Bath to Oxford.”

  With little mid-morning traffic, they made good time and arrived in central Oxford around 11:30. “I thought we could have lunch at the Randolph,” Alison said, negotiating through the crowded streets to the front of the elegant hotel. On the opposite side of the street was the Ashmolean Museum, which Lizzie had visited several times in the past.

  The crests of the individual colleges that made up Oxford University were mounted high on the wall of the dining room and Alison pointed out the blue crest of St. Hugh’s.

  “Was it the first college at Oxford to accept women?” Lizzie asked.

  Alison answered that the first was Lady Margaret Hall. “It opened around 1880, I think, and the first Principal was Margaret Wordsworth, the niece of the poet. Within ten years she decided to found a new college for women, particularly to make an Oxford education available to poor women, and my grandmother was in one of the first classes.”

  “I imagine the Romantic poets were prominent in the curriculum,” Lizzie said.

  “Of course,” Alison said. “That’s where I came to love them. It steered me into my life’s work.” She spoke a bit about her own time at St. Hugh’s College and the advantages she had always felt from being educated there.

  When Lizzie was in Boston, Jackie had given her copies of all of Alison’s articles on the Romantic poets, and the book she had written on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Lizzie was happy to find that she liked Alison’s interpretations of the literature; she grounded the works of the Romantics in the context of British expansion and the Industrial Revolution. As they sat at lunch in Oxford, Lizzie told Alison that she had read her book on Coleridge.

  “You did? My God, it’s almost as ancient as the mariner himself. I didn’t know you could even buy it anymore, but I’m impressed you checked me out so thoroughly.”

  “You know that no good researcher would take on a job like this without checking out her collaborator.” She looked up at Alison, who gave a nod of agreement.

  “But I would have found your book interesting even without knowing you,” Lizzie continued. “The influences of Captain Cook’s voyage narratives on the development of that poem were very convincing.”

  “It was an interesting time,” Alison said. “And of course Coleridge and Wordsworth were particular friends.”

  Lizzie told Alison that she had memorized a Wordsworth poem in high school, and proceeded to recite it in a dramatic voice, gesturing with her hand into the air in front of her. “Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray,” she intoned, “And when I crossed the wild, I chanced to see at break of day, the solitary child.” She paused and looked at Alison, whose patient expression seemed to indicate that she had heard similar interpretations hundreds of times before.

  “I certainly hope it isn’t all you’ve read of Wordsworth.”

  Lizzie smiled while she wracked her brain for anything else she might remember of the famous poet, but found nothing. “Lucy Gray has an appealing creepiness,” she said, hoping Alison wasn’t too disappointed in her. “Those little footprints in the snow disappearing on the bridge.”

  The waiter arrived with lunch just in time to save Lizzie from showing her true ignorance of the Romantic poets.

  Chapter 9

  St. Hugh’s College was several miles north of
the center of Oxford, and as they walked between the twin gatehouses, Alison pointed out features of the architecture to Lizzie. It was substantially newer than the majority of Oxford colleges, but its design was reminiscent of the medieval campuses, with a central green space surrounded by residential and academic buildings.

  As an active alumna and generous benefactor of the college, Alison was well known to the gatekeeper and he greeted her warmly. “Mr. Moberly is expecting you at half past one,” he said, “and will meet you in the reception area of the Main Hall.”

  It was only a few steps from the gatehouse to the door of the building that housed the dining hall, chapel and a conference center. “The library was originally in this building,” Alison told Lizzie, “but a new library building had already been built before I came here.”

  When the Kent family made a gift of the tapestry to St. Hugh’s, it had been their intention that it would hang in the library, but the new building had too much natural light for the fragile textile, which had already faded somewhat at the time of its restoration. It now hung in a reception room in the interior of the main building.

  They arrived fifteen minutes before their appointment and Alison took Lizzie directly to where the tapestry was hanging. The room had wood paneling up to waist height, and then a dark red wall stretching up to a high ceiling. The most prominent colors of the tapestry were the greens and blues that ran up and down the edges of the panels in an exuberant burst of foliage. The red dye was more faded, but the color of the wall picked up what was left, and the rust-colored faces of deer could be seen peeking out of forests.

  “Oh my God!” Lizzie exclaimed enthusiastically when she saw it. “You didn’t tell me it was a map!”

  “It only appears to be a map at first,” Alison explained, “because there are named towns on it, but when you look closely, you’ll see that there is no sense to the geography.”

  Lizzie scanned her eyes up and down each of the four panels, and back and forth across their combined width. It was a very large piece, sixteen feet across and some ten feet high. In the top left corner was a wonderful depiction of a town on the top of a steep hill, labeled “Shaftesbury.” The bottom right corner showed a medieval London, with walls and bridges and a prominent Thames River. Vignettes along the panels had key features that identified the individual properties of towns with castles and cathedrals. Rivers snaked through many, and a path in faded gold linked them up and down each panel.

  “It’s a strip map,” Lizzie said breathlessly. “And it has been put together in the wrong order.”

  Alison stepped up close to her. “Do you mean the Weaver put them together in the wrong order?”

  “No,” Lizzie said softly. She pulled the folder from her bag and pulled out the typescript journal. “No, what she did is completely marvelous.” She turned and looked at Alison. “It was the conservators who erred.”

  Michael Moberly, the college librarian, joined them at that moment and overheard the end of their conversation. After the necessary introductions, he asked Lizzie to explain what she meant.

  “This is a strip map of a pilgrimage from Bath to Canterbury,” she said.

  Like Alison, he began to explain that the Flemish artists who wove the tapestry had had no conception of English geography, and had put the various places on it in an almost random order. “Even Englishmen had only a very sketchy idea of what our island looked like at that time.” He smiled condescendingly at Lizzie, and made a remark about how charming those old Flemings were in their idiocy. He pointed out various towns that were at different latitudes, implying that she was not unlike those charming old Flemings in her knowledge of English geography. He had a very satisfied smirk on his face as he finished and turned to wink at Alison.

  Lizzie savored the moment. She gave a slight condescending laugh and her own self-satisfied smirk.

  “Alison,” she said, preferring to address her friend first. “You may remember that among those maps I showed you this morning was a very early manuscript strip map. It was made by Matthew Paris in 1250.” She turned to Michael Moberly. “I’m sure you know his famous manuscript at the British Library.” He indicated that he did.

  “One of the problems modern people have with looking at old maps is our bias that north should always be up,” Lizzie said. “That isn’t the case here, so latitude doesn’t matter. This is a map that shows the road from Bath to Canterbury and only places along the road are shown. Since the path proceeds in more or less a straight line, the orientation is constantly changing.”

  She pointed at the top of the second panel. “There’s Bath,” she said, “and from there one would proceed along a path that would take you through Wells and Glastonbury,” two places that were linked by the golden line. “Shaftesbury should come next.” She pointed to the top of the first panel and proceeded down it, “then Salisbury and Winchester. The last panel in this configuration shows Guildford and London, but the one that begins in Southwark and proceeds down the road through Rochester to Canterbury should be presented on the far right.”

  The expressions on the faces of her two companions showed when each of them realized the logic of her argument.

  “It is her pilgrimage,” Alison said, her voice filled with awe.

  “It is indeed,” Lizzie said. “This is the illustration of her journal.”

  This was the first time that Michael Moberley had heard about either pilgrimage or journal, and inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness were barely disguised in his voice as he asked for more details. Would the library be able to obtain a copy of the journal if it was associated with the tapestry? He didn’t quite ask for the journal outright, but Lizzie could see that it wouldn’t be long in coming. Alison very quickly told him that she and Lizzie were still working on the research for a project that might link the two items and instructed him to keep the information confidential until she knew more about it.

  “Will we be sending the tapestry back to the restorers to be correctly mounted?” he asked.

  Alison told him that she would pay to have the correction done, but not until her current research was completed.

  “May I at least describe this new information about the map in the newsletter of the college?” he asked.

  When he received another negative response, he reminded Alison that there would be a Chaucer conference at Oxford at the beginning of the next month. “People there might be interested in a map and journal of a medieval pilgrimage to Canterbury, and I could arrange for you to make a preliminary announcement about your project.”

  This seemed like a great opportunity to Lizzie. She regretted that she had given Moberley so much information without thinking, simply to put a snotty twit in his place. He now knew that the tapestry was a map of a pilgrimage and that there was a journal that documented it; Dante Zettler knew that Alison had a Chaucer-era journal kept by a woman from Bath on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. If Alison was to control the way this information was delivered to her colleagues and the public, she needed to present some part of it soon. A preliminary announcement at a Chaucer conference was the perfect opportunity.

  She looked at Alison and tried to read in her expression whether the same thoughts were working their way through her brain. The lines on her face seemed deeper as she pondered and her eyes moved from Moberley to the tapestry and then to Lizzie, where they settled.

  “Will we be ready to make an announcement in just a few weeks?”

  Lizzie nodded. She didn’t want to discuss any details in front of the librarian, and it was clear from Alison’s behavior that she didn’t want to give anything more away either. The possibility that their Weaver had been the model for Chaucer’s Wife of Bath was a claim neither would make without more research.

  Alison turned her gaze back to Michael Moberley. “That is an excellent suggestion,” she said briskly. “Sign us up to present an announcement on a medieval pilgrimage, documented in a text and a tapestry.”

  “Should it say any more than that?”
he asked. “Do you want to include dates or the name of the pilgrim?”

  “Not in the title,” she answered. “We’ll figure out the details in the next few weeks.” She asked him if he had prepared the pictures she ordered, and he produced an envelope.

  Lizzie had been wondering why Alison had made an appointment with Moberley and this now explained it. Though he was involved in the world of Chaucer scholarship, Alison clearly did not want to confide in him about the Weaver’s journal.

  As he handed Alison the envelope, he explained what was inside. “There is one of each of the vignettes, one of each panel, and one of the tapestry as a whole, though now we know it is not quite as it should be.” He turned to Lizzie and gave her a deferential nod of the head as he said this, like some gentleman in a Jane Austen novel abiding by rules of behavior demanded by good breeding rather than personal inclination.

  Alison was rather good at that game too, and after she thanked him properly she dismissed him with a polite wave with the back of her hand. She was already pulling the photographs from the envelope.

  Lizzie extended her hand. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Moberley,” she said, adding that she looked forward to seeing him again at the conference.

  Alison clearly did not want to speak any more about the subject with him and looked with concentration at the photos as he moved away.

  “I have been meaning for some time to get copies of the photographs that were taken when the tapestry was restored,” Alison said, handing a small stack of pictures from the envelope to Lizzie. “Digital images don’t allow enough close detail. With these, we can get right down to the stitches if we want.”

  They compared the pictures to the tapestry and talked their way along the route of the map.

  “Now that you have pointed out how this strip map works, I can’t believe I never saw it before,” Alison said, complimenting Lizzie. “I told you in December that I was hoping to find someone who could look at things in a different way and you have already more than earned your salary with this!”