by Mary Malloy
“That last bit about the hair should have been enough to make people suspicious,” Alison said. “But the fact that the lead cross could not subsequently be located was another clue to the charade. Surely such a treasure would have been preserved at least for a few years.”
“I saw a picture of it, though,” Lizzie said, pawing through the pile of books until she found the one she sought. “In 1607 a man named William Camden published a sketch of the cross, which he said he saw.” She turned the page toward Alison and read the translation of the inscription: “Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon.”
“Well Mr. Camden wanted to sell books too!”
Lizzie picked up another book. “This guy, Geoffrey Ashe, says that as he reads the cross as drawn by Camden, the lettering is too clumsy to have been made in the twelfth century, and the Latin is an old style.”
“In this case you don’t have to go back to the twelfth century. Camden might have made it up in the seventeenth century. And that book you’re holding is a particularly silly one.”
Turning it over to look at the back cover, Lizzie noted that the author had written eight books on King Arthur, which didn’t make him any less silly in Alison’s eyes.
“It’s rather unfortunate too,” Alison said. “Because much of the book is a competent exploration of various invasions of Romans, Saxons and Normans into Britain, and he has a good discussion of the early sources of the Arthur legend. But then he goes too far and argues that the literature was, in fact, based on an actual person, a local leader known as Riothamus.”
“But you don’t buy it?”
“No I do not. And I am sorry to see so much time devoted to trying to peg Arthur to one or another of the ancient kings— nothing resembling the Arthur we know exists in the earliest texts that describe the history of England.” Alison gave Lizzie a synopsis of the most important sources. “A monk named Gil-das wrote a flaming condemnation of kings in the sixth century called The Ruin of Britain, and there is no Arthur there. The venerable Bede doesn’t mention him in the eighth century, nor does another monk, Nenius, who wrote a history of Britain in the ninth century. Most importantly, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle goes back to the year 1, and you will not find any hint there of the man we now know as Arthur.” She sighed loudly. “Of course you could take any of the names from around the right time period and say this is the one that was Arthur, and certainly that’s what Ashe and others have done. But it doesn’t matter if there was an early king named Arthur or Riothamus, because the stories we know don’t describe his life.” “
Lizzie turned to the appendix of the book. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “Here is an attempt to create a direct lineage from Arthur/Riothamus to your current heir to the throne, Prince William!” As she read it she narrated the plot to Alison: If Arthur was Riothamus, and if he had a wife before Guinevere, and if they had a child, then it might have been Cerdic who, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle arrived from the Continent in 495. “Geoffrey of Monmouth would have been proud of this,” Lizzie said. “The unknown wife, the fact that the Anglo Saxon Chronicle gives Cerdic a different father, and many other details are rationalized and explained away. And to top it off, Camden believes the tomb at Glastonbury was real, even though he says that Riothamus died on the continent.”
She snapped the book shut. “I am reminded of a wonderfully goofy headline I once saw in a supermarket tabloid after Richard Burton died. It said ‘Liz Can Still Have Burton’s Baby!’—even though he was dead and Elizabeth Taylor was past menopause.”
“Did they explain how that might be done?” Alison asked curiously.
“I believe they thought that if an egg could be harvested from Elizabeth Taylor and fertilized with a sperm bank donation that Burton might possibly have left behind, then a surrogate mother just might be able to bring the baby to term.”
The two women simultaneously rolled their eyes and laughed.
“It’s late,” Alison said. “Almost midnight.”
“I guess we’ve given Arthur his due this evening,” Lizzie said, gathering the books together to return them to their shelf. “Perhaps the most intriguing thing to me is the intensity with which people desire a story like this to be true. It is not simply a willingness to believe, but a wish to believe. I wonder if the Weaver thought that Arthur and Guinevere were buried in that tomb.”
“Luckily she does nothing more than mention seeing it in her journal, so we won’t have to deal in this much depth in our remarks.”
“Yes, but if we want to make the Chaucer connection, we will need to acknowledge that the Wife of Bath’s tale begins with a knight in King Arthur’s court who rapes a girl and is sent on a quest as punishment.”
That reminded Alison of the Chaucer conference, which was now only a little more than a week away.
“Have you thought about what we should say there?” Lizzie asked.
Alison lifted her shoulders. “I think just the bare facts: there is a journal, there is a tapestry, and together they document a weaver’s pilgrimage from Bath to Canterbury in the late fourteenth century.”
“That seems good to me. It establishes you as the author of the project—and that much information alone will knock their socks off!”
“People will ask, of course, if we think our Weaver is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.”
“Of course. Let us be sly in answering! It will give them something to look for in the work to come.” Lizzie turned to go to her room, but Alison put a hand on her arm to hold her back.
“Lizzie,” she said. “I am uncomfortable after all you’ve done in continuing to think of this as my project. It is clearly our work and I think you should refer to it in that way from now on.”
Lizzie smiled broadly and could not resist putting her arms around Alison and squeezing. “Thank you for that, dear Alison,” she said. “I do think of it as our project—ours and the Weaver’s!”
Chapter 15
In her journal, the Weaver described several towns through which she passed that were only minimally indicated on the tapestry or weren’t there at all. As Alison drove Lizzie to one of them, Castle Cary, they talked about what the criteria might have been for making the distinction.
Lizzie had the typescript of the journal in her lap and read from it as they sped around curves at high speed. She was glad she was not walking along this road when Alison was at the wheel.
“This was apparently a textile center in the Weaver’s day,” Lizzie said as they entered the town. “She writes that she spoke here with spinners and dyers about specialty wools that she would pick up on her return trip.”
“I’m afraid you’ll find that there is not much to see here that is as old as her time.”
“I assume from the name of the town that there must have been a castle here.”
Alison pointed up a steep hill behind the town. “There are only a few stones from the fortifications left,” she said. “You’ll see them when you walk up there.”
Lizzie looked up the hill. It was steeper than any she had climbed yet, but she felt much less reluctance at tackling it than she had the Mendips. After the first day of soreness she was convincing herself that she was getting stronger, and the expectation of what she might find at the top inspired her. It was clear from the Weaver’s description in her journal that she had walked along the top of that ridge.
They parked the car in front of the Horse Pond Inn, where Alison said they might have an early lunch before Lizzie went on her way, but there was time to amble around the town for an hour before that. Across the street was the town marketplace, a beautiful old building of warm yellow stone. Along one side, columns supported the building and provided a covered space for vendors to display their wares, protected from rain and sun. Lizzie was surprised that it was as new as the mid-nineteenth century. There was a museum in the building, but it wasn’t open yet and the women agreed to return to it.
“I was here years ago,” Alison said. “There is an o
ddity in this town, a wonderful old jail, though it is not old enough to have been seen by our Weaver.”
A short walk took them to a round medieval lockup that was so small it looked like it could only hold one person. There were four stone stairs up to a solid nail-studded wooden door. There was no way to look inside and they continued up a small hill to the local church. In the yard that surrounded it was a tombstone that caught Lizzie’s attention. It marked the grave of a long-dead 16-year-old girl, “Taken away from evil to come.”
“That seems to me a very strange notion,” Lizzie said to Alison.
“Aye, and to me too.”
“Not having children I can’t speak from experience, but it seems that of all the ways that one might justify the loss of a child—‘it was God’s will,’ ‘she’s in a better place,’ etc.—this would be the last one to memorialize forever on a tombstone.”
They walked around the church, and then back down the hill to the main street of town. “Perhaps that girl had already exhibited some bad behavior,” Alison said as they crossed the street to walk again around the tiny jail. There was not much traffic and they were deep in a conversation about the different expectations for girls and their behavior, both in comparison to boys and over time. They moved around the corner and back to the market building. Neither of them noticed the car that came toward them, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. There was a small plaza in front of the market, paved with stone, and set off from the street by black metal stanchions, and the car careened from the street, smashing over one of the stanchions. Lizzie looked up at the noise and saw the car barreling at them at top speed. She grabbed Alison by the arm and leapt and fell into the open area behind one of the columns as the car crashed full speed into its old stones.
The sound of smashing glass and metal was deafening, and there was a crack of stone as the column took the full impact of the car. Lizzie put her arms under Alison’s shoulders and pulled her to the far end of the building, fearing that the column might break and bring the building down above them.
“Are you all right?” she asked with concern.
Alison nodded, but Lizzie could see that she was in pain.
A middle-aged woman rushed to them, dropping her shopping bags on the pavement, and knelt beside Alison. Several other Samaritans came to offer their assistance.
“That were a close one,” an old gent said. “That car were aimed right for yer.”
Lizzie acknowledged the truth of the statement. As Alison seemed in good hands, and as an ambulance had been called, she went to see the condition of the driver of the car. He was an elderly man, his white hair soaked with blood. There was a spider-web crack in the windshield in front of him where it had taken the impact of his head.
The front of the car was so smashed in the impact that it was impossible to open the driver’s door, but his window was open and several people were trying to speak to him at once, asking him to describe his condition. His lips moved almost imperceptibly and Lizzie found herself at the side of the car, trying to understand what he was saying. For a moment he opened his eyes and looked at her. Blood dripped down his face from the wound on his head and he seemed to want to speak. Lizzie leaned her head in the window and heard him say one word, “Becket.”
As police and firefighters moved in, Lizzie was pushed away from the car and she returned to Alison. A medic was with her, a young woman with a gentle and competent manner. Alison reached her hand out to Lizzie, who took it and crouched beside her.
“This nice girl thinks I may have broken my hip,” Alison said.
Lizzie looked from her to the medic. “I’m sorry, I probably didn’t help that by dragging you,” she said apologetically.
Alison squeezed her hand. “Nonsense! You saved my life.”
The square was rapidly filling with emergency vehicles. Several fire trucks and police cars were on the scene, and when an ambulance arrived for Alison, the police moved everyone out from under the covered area of the market until they could have an engineer assess the damage to the column and the building structure above it. The building was evacuated and there were soon several dozen people milling about. As Lizzie got into the ambulance with Alison, she saw firefighters working with hydraulic cutters to remove the door from the smashed up car. The driver was now covered with a sheet, but she couldn’t tell if that was because he was dead, or to protect him from glass or metal fragments that might drop in the process of extracting him.
There was no hospital in Castle Cary, and as the ambulance drove the short distance to the next town, Lizzie called Edmund on her cell phone to tell him what had happened.
“Is she seriously injured?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so,” Lizzie said carefully. Alison was clearly in terrible pain and she didn’t want to express in her hearing how worried she was about her.
“Is she conscious?”
“Yes.”
“Well that’s always a good sign. Where are you headed?”
Lizzie asked the medic and repeated the information to Edmund. “Wincanton Community Hospital. Do you know it?”
Edmund answered that he did. “If I leave right now I can be there in an hour.”
‘Thank you, Edmund,” she said with relief. She had hoped he would come, but had not wanted to ask, and was pleased he could arrange to leave his own practice so quickly.
When they arrived at the small hospital, Alison was wheeled away to an examination room and Lizzie sat in the hallway and called George to tell him what had happened. He also said he would leave immediately to join them, though it would take somewhat longer for him to arrive from Hengemont than for Edmund coming from Bristol.
As she turned off her phone, Lizzie leaned her head against the dull green wall of the hospital; it was a color that could induce sickness in the well. Feeling slightly dizzy, she leaned forward again and with her elbows on her knees held her head in her hands.
The doors of the ambulance bay opened and another stretcher was rolled in. The body on it was covered entirely with a sheet, one end of which was bloody from where the driver’s skull had smashed against the windshield of his car. The young men who brought the corpse in wheeled the gurney into the hallway and left it opposite Lizzie.
Synthesized music played in the background, a circular non-melody that meandered around but never landed on a real tune; the automated rhythm track was unvarying. The combination of the music, the sickening green walls, and the corpse under the bloody sheet made Lizzie feel like she was in some weird drug-induced dream. Had that body, in its last minutes of life, actually said “Becket”? A policeman came in as she contemplated it.
A conversation between the policeman and the medics followed, and Lizzie saw herself being pointed to as a witness to the accident.
“You were at the marketplace in Castle Cary?” the officer asked. He was a young man, with close-cropped hair. When Lizzie answered that she had been there, he pulled a pen and a small tablet from the pocket of his uniform and began to ask her questions, beginning with her name.
“You’re an American?” he asked.
She explained her relationship with Alison and described the accident, giving him details as he asked.
“Did you speak to the driver of the car?”
“I don’t remember,” she answered. “But he spoke to me.”
“What did he say?”
“Just one word, ‘Becket.’”
“Becket?” he asked, spelling the name out as he wrote it down.
When he looked up, she nodded.
“Do you think he was intoxicated?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t smell alcohol on him, and he had a terrible head injury.”
“Do you know what this ‘Becket’ means?”
Lizzie shrugged. “I may have misunderstood him, but I assumed it was St. Thomas Becket.” She added that the saint was on her mind though, as she was following a pilgrimage to Canterbury. It didn’t sound at all logical that a dying man would mak
e a one-word reference to something she was already thinking about and she knew it.
“He’s from Canterbury,” the policeman said, nodding at the corpse, “so maybe there is something to it.”
“Who was he?”
The policeman flipped back a few pages in his notes. “Bruce Hockwold was his name and he was ninety years old—which is too old to be driving, in my opinion.” He lamented that it often wasn’t possible to get the licenses away from elderly drivers before they became a danger on the road. “Since there was no other vehicle involved, it looks like he lost control of his car.” He told Lizzie that he was sorry her friend had been hurt, and handed her a business card in case Alison needed a copy of the report.
When the door closed behind him, Lizzie was left alone with the body of Bruce Hockwold. She couldn’t resist walking across the hallway and lifting the sheet to look again at his face. His eyes were open and she looked into them. Dead. The word was meaningful as she looked for something in the depths; there was nothing there of the man he had been just hours earlier. She wondered if she should close them, but he was sticky with blood and she wasn’t sure that the eyelids would not already be stiffening from rigor mortis.
She heard a sound behind her and turned to find the medics returning with a nurse to claim the corpse. Lizzie dropped the sheet back into place and stepped away, embarrassed at the awkwardness of the situation.
She was saved from having to explain her morbid curiosity by the arrival of Edmund, who came bounding through the door at that moment and pulled her into a warm embrace.