Paradise Walk

by Mary Malloy

  “A truly remarkable documentation of a medieval pilgrimage,” Lizzie said, “and a great book in the making.”

  Alison tried to thank her for all the work she had done, but Lizzie held up her hand and moved to the next row.

  “This trail of evidence is related in some way, but as yet we don’t know quite how.”

  She began with the Becket reliquary, removing the two lenses from the box. “One of these is marked ‘StM 12/29,’” she said, “clearly referring to St. Martha’s church on December 29, not coincidentally, I think, the date on which Becket was murdered. The other is marked ‘CC 7/7,’ which I think we can presume refers to Canterbury Cathedral on July 7, the date of the translation of Becket’s remains.”

  The pages with the astronomical calculations came next. “These are worksheets for determining where to place a sun pointer in the wall of St. Martha’s church, and also, again presumably, in Canterbury Cathedral. In each case the pointer illuminates a clue to something.” She pointed out the Weaver’s mark on both the page of calculations and the window. “Your father made the link between these two tracks of evidence by linking whatever he was working on to the Weaver’s pilgrimage,” she said to Alison.

  She picked up the photograph she had printed of the memorial stone to Osbert Giffard and passed it to Alison. “This may be the most intriguing thing of all,” she said, pointing to the dates on the inscription. “This clearly meant something to your father, Alison. Do you know what?”

  “Sorry, my dear, but I don’t,” Alison answered.

  “Two more things,” Lizzie said, picking up the list of names and passing a picture of the window in St. Martha’s church to Alison. “This list may be as old as four hundred fifty to five hundred years,” she said. “There are three names on each line, and the penultimate line has the names William Kent, Stephen Buckland and John Hockwold, whose names are all on the window your father donated to St. Martha’s church.”

  “Buckland and Hockwold died in the war,” George said, as Alison handed him the picture of the window.

  “The last line on the list has the names William Kent, Hockwold Bruce and Frederick Wickersham.”

  Edmund interrupted. “That reminds me,” he said. “I heard from my solicitor friend that the youngest of the Frederick Wickershams was picked up for questioning by the Oxford Police last night, but he was out of town the night of the dinner and isn’t a suspect.”

  “I’d still like to speak to him,” Lizzie said.

  “The Oxford Police might have something to say about that,” Edmund said.

  “Well I’d like to speak to him too,” Alison said. “I knew his father. I wonder if he would come here if I asked?”

  “Before that, I need to go to Canterbury,” Lizzie said.

  Edmund looked at them incredulously. “Absolutely not!” he said. “To both suggestions. You neither of you seem to be giving enough credence to the danger you are in.”

  “The potential danger,” Lizzie said, stressing the word. “How long can we just sit here without finishing our project?”

  “I’d say until they catch Dante Zettler’s killer and figure out what this is all about,” Edmund said, clearly surprised that there was any question.

  George backed up his son. “With what you’ve just described to us, Lizzie, surely there is plenty of work for you to do here for several days at least.”

  “But I don’t have much time. In two days I am going to Newcastle for the unveiling of Martin’s mural and then we leave five days after that.”

  She could not, however, deny George’s point when she looked at the table strewn with papers. “Admittedly, there is an awful lot to do here.” She turned to Alison and asked her how she would like to proceed.

  “All that is really left of the pilgrimage is London and the road to Canterbury, and it can wait until we have processed this,” Alison answered. “Even to some point in the future when you can come back, if necessary. You have already found so much more than I ever expected.”

  With that, Edmund left to return to Bristol, and George to some other part of the house. Lizzie and Alison began once again to go page by page through the Weaver’s journal, identifying every time she mentioned making a gift to a church and then matching the artifacts to the locales. This was the first chance they had to look closely at images of the chalice that Jackie had identified at the Ashmolean Museum, and Lizzie opened the Museum’s webpage to see the highest resolution photographs. The now-familiar floral design had been hammered into the silver of the chalice and a number of oval carnelian stones were set into it. The AW monogram of the Weaver was worked into a chain that wrapped around the base. The catalog information gave the date as “circa 1400,” and a long list of owners going back to “probably Shaftesbury Abbey at the time of its dissolution.”

  “I can’t believe how many times I have been in that museum and never had any idea this chalice was there,” Alison said.

  “Now that you know about it, we should make another visit to Oxford to see it.”

  “I have already been thinking that when our book comes out, we should try to get all these objects together at the college with the tapestry and the journal.”

  “It would make a wonderful exhibit,” Lizzie said. “And there still may be more to add to it. Glastonbury is, unfortunately, probably a dead end on artifacts, so the next place on our list is Westminster Abbey in London.”

  “I have a colleague who can help us with that. He has done a lot of research on the writers buried there and is well connected at the Abbey.”

  “Excellent,” Lizzie said. “And even without going to Canterbury Cathedral we might be able to start some research on their collection online.” She told Alison Martin’s theory that the Weaver’s last gift might be an extraordinary example of her own work, rather than another commissioned piece. “So I think that we are likely looking for a textile there.”

  “She may have documented it at the end of the journal!” Alison said excitedly. “Hand me the manuscript!” She made a furious gesture with her hand, as if she could scoop the papers to her if she got enough air moving.

  Lizzie gave her the journal and Alison turned immediately to the end. There was a series of pages with crosshatched patterns. Lizzie had never spent enough time with the original manuscript to study these and even now she didn’t know how they were meaningful.

  “This is a weaver’s pattern,” Alison said. “My grandmother showed me how to read one when I was just a girl. This shows how to set up the warp of the loom and the treadles to get the design you want. Here along the sides the Weaver has made notations about threads: scarlet and two different golds—I think one is actually a thin gold wire that was sometimes used in Medieval textiles.”

  “Is it the same floral pattern that appears on the tapestry and elsewhere?” Lizzie asked.

  Alison looked up at her and smiled. “No,” she said. “It is an all-over pattern of bishop’s mitres alternating with her monogram, in gold on a red background.”

  “Like the fabric that wraps Becket’s bones in that picture of the shrine?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did she make a piece of fabric specifically to wrap Becket’s bones?” Lizzie looked in wonder at the image of the shrine, with its vibrant red and gold representation of that bit of fabric. “I wonder if it ever got used for that purpose?”

  “I don’t see how we could ever know. The bones were destroyed with the shrine in the sixteenth century. I’m sure if there was some textile in the grave it would have been destroyed as well.”

  Lizzie went to sleep that night still thinking about it. In two days she would take Alison’s car and drive to Newcastle to meet Martin for the dedication of his mural. After that they were scheduled to return home within a few days. There was no time to go to Canterbury to search the archives. She returned to the library and sent an email to Jackie: “In the records of the Dissolute Shrine Destroyers, is there any mention of a textile in the grave of Thomas Becket a
t Canterbury?”

  When the message was sent she thought of Tyler Brown, whom she had met at the Chaucer conference, and who worked at an historical society in Canterbury. He might be able to advise her on the best places to look for information. His business card was still on the table where she had left it for Alison: Tyler Brown, Archivist, Canterbury Catholic History Society. She composed another email. Without making any overture that might make him think that she was offering him the option of publishing the finished work, Lizzie asked if she could call him the next day to talk about resources available for research in Canterbury.

  The next morning she received an enthusiastic response encouraging her to call him as soon as possible. There was also a message from Jackie with the subject heading: “Becket Bones Conspiracy,” which she decided to wait to read until after she had spoken to Tyler Brown. Lizzie stepped out onto the terrace to make her phone call. It was a beautiful late-spring morning with all the features of the English landscape that inspired ballads and poems. In the foreground were buds and birds and fresh green leaves, down the hill toward the Bristol Channel were fluffy sheep, the occasional cow and cottages that looked idyllic from a distance. Beyond it all, a few ships plowed through the placid waters.

  “Mr. Brown,” she said, when the phone was answered.

  “Is this Professor Manning?” was the reply.

  “Please, call me Lizzie,” she said.

  After he had insisted that she call him Tyler, and laid on some pretty thick compliments about her presentation in Oxford, Lizzie got down to the reason for the call.

  “As you know, Professor Kent is laid up with a broken hip and I am running out of time to get everything done that needs to be done for our project.”

  “How can I help?”

  “Mostly with information, thanks. I’m looking for a good contact at Canterbury Cathedral, or sources of information on what happened to things that were stolen from the Cathedral at the time of the destruction of Becket’s shrine.”

  “That is a special interest of my organization,” he said.

  Lizzie silently thanked her stars.

  “Is there something special you are looking for?” Tyler asked.

  “Something given to the Cathedral at the time of her pilgrimage by Alison the Weaver—the woman whose journal I described at the Oxford Chaucer Conference.” She briefly described the items that had been given to the other churches along the path and the monogram by which they had been recognized.

  “You didn’t describe these things in your talk,” Tyler said with interest.

  “Believe it or not, most of them were only discovered in the last few weeks.”

  “And do you have a specific thing in mind that she might have given to Canterbury?”

  “She described a textile design in the last pages of her journal, a pattern that alternates a bishop’s mitre with her monogram, in gold on a red background. I think the gift might have been a piece of that fabric.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out about it,” he said. “Is there anything else?”

  In the momentary silence that followed Lizzie felt he anticipated another scrap of information, but when she answered that there was nothing else he did not question further or express any sense of disappointment. She ended the conversation with a feeling of satisfaction. Tyler Brown had been a bit of a pest at the conference, but he sounded smart and reliable on the phone and, as Alison had said, he seemed to have his finger on the pulse of Canterbury. He would be a good collaborator.

  She turned to Jackie’s email. “Hi Liz,” it read. “In looking at lots of different sources about Thomas Becket, I keep finding references to a rumor that his bones were not, in fact, destroyed with the shrine. The story is that the monks at Canterbury, knowing full well what the intentions were of the Commissioners for the Destruction of Shrines, replaced Becket’s bones in the shrine with bones dug up from their own churchyard. Every now and then they find a mysterious skeleton at Canterbury Cathedral and have an argument about whether or not it might be Becket. I’ve found some other things that I think might be interesting to you, and I’ve written a little narrative to put it all together, which I will paste in below. Let me know what you think of all this.

  Cheerio, etc., Jackie.”

  When Henry VIII went on his rampage to destroy the Catholic Church in England, the shrine of Becket was a particular target, because Becket had challenged the authority of his predecessor, Henry II. Three hundred sixty-eight years after the death of the archbishop, Henry VIII actually instituted posthumous legal proceedings against Becket and condemned him. Thereafter he was not to be venerated, called a saint, depicted in images, or described in books. As you already know, in 1538, at Henry’s command, Becket’s shrine was destroyed, and his relics reportedly burned and scattered in the wind.

  In January 1888, archaeologists working on a survey project in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral discovered an old skeleton. This, in itself, was not a surprise since church crypts are usually full of skeletons, but this one was unusual for three reasons: it was buried in the place where Becket had lain for the fifty years before being translated to the shrine; it had obviously been buried very quickly; and it had been buried not as a corpse, but as a pile of bones. Could Becket’s relics have survived the destruction of the shrine? Could the monks of Canterbury, knowing that Thomas Cromwell and the Royal Commissioners for the Destruction of Shrines were on their way, have replaced Becket’s bones with the bones of an ordinary mortal and moved the saint’s bones to a safer spot? Could the Commissioners have balked at the thought of actually destroying the relics and collaborated with the monks to hide them?

  A local surgeon, W. Pugin Thornton, laid out the bones and inspected them. A local dentist examined the teeth. The skeleton was that of a very tall man who had died at about the age of fifty a long, long time in the past. So far, much like Becket. Thornton was also a practitioner of phrenology, a popular pseudo-science of the period, and so he was also able to discern from the size and shape of the skull that the man who used it had been of ‘large perceptive qualities, much intellect, indomitable energy, the power of arrangement and management, but unworthy of trust.’ Still like Becket, if read from the Church of England perspective, and if you buy into the quackery of phrenology.

  Thornton published a little booklet called Becket’s Bones, which includes photographs of the remains. There is the skeleton, all laid out. There is the skull with a whopping big wound in it, as if made by a sword blade. Hmm, rather Becket-like. And there are the arm bones, connected to the hand bones, connected to the finger bones; and the thigh bones connected to the shin bones, connected to the ankle bones, connected to the foot bones. In fact, there are just too many dry bones to be Becket if one believes that many of his parts had to have been distributed during the great age of relics in medieval times. How could he still have two arms if his other three arms were in Italy and Portugal? (Okay, there was a papal bull about the spontaneous regenerative power of relics, but that was just bull.)

  One source contemporaneous with the translation says that Archbishop Langton kept some of the small bones out at that time. That would be perfectly consistent with church practice at the time, especially since these were relics of unquestionable authenticity. There doesn’t seem to be anything that would have prevented subsequent archbishops from opening the shrine either. Some sources say the bones were in a locked iron box inside the shrine, but there must have been a key to it. With all those kings from here and there visiting, who’s to say that they didn’t get their souvenir bone before they exited the church.

  And even though the wound in the 1888 skull was whopping, the skull was all there. It’s pretty clear from the testimony of eyewitnesses to the murder that the cap of Becket’s skull was severed right off; and clear from the testimony of pilgrims, including Erasmus, that at least two parts of the skull were not in the shrine anyway, but were mounted in reliquaries for separate veneration.

  But a lot of folk
s clearly wanted those bones to be Becket’s. And if not those bones, then maybe some others buried elsewhere in the Cathedral. There are a few mysterious graves in the church, some of unknown origin, some of dubious provenance. Another skeleton, also buried in the crypt, was secretly exhumed and examined in the 1940s. This skeleton had no hand, which sounds more likely for a saint whose relics were scattered around, but there are still more questions than answers.

  Asked about this recently, the dean of Canterbury Cathedral has said that ‘the weight of evidence is that Becket’s bones are not in the cathedral. The weight of evidence is that they were destroyed at the Reformation.’

  The weight of evidence, the burden of proof, the ancient faith, the power of the thing. Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

  “One last thing. There is an interesting book by John Butler called The Quest for Becket’s Bones. He says that if Becket’s bones were moved, the knowledge of their whereabouts has been kept through the years by a secret triumvirate—three men who pass on the information from generation to generation, bringing in a new member only at the death of one of the previous members. The information is only to be revealed when Catholicism is restored to its rightful place in England.

  Look again at that list of names!”

  Chapter 30

  When we talked about this list the first time, Alison, you said that the last line was missing, and you speculated that it might possibly include you, Hockwold Bruce, and Frederick Wickersham, Jr.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Lizzie. There are actually two lines missing; we need another generation to bring us to the present.”

  Lizzie nodded. She had turned the list toward Alison and now she slid it back along the table to study it again. “Do you think it is possible that this list goes back to the time of the destruction of the shrine?” she asked, “and that these men kept the secret of where Becket’s bones are hidden?”