Paradise Walk

by Mary Malloy

  “It is about the right age,” Alison answered.

  “Did your father ever say anything that would make you think he was part of something like this?”

  “He spoke frequently about Becket,” Alison said, “which never occurred to me as strange until now, and I was constantly inculcated with the important role our family played in maintaining Catholicism through the whole of the Reformation and the generations of persecution that followed.” She was thoughtful as she tried to remember other details.

  “Is it possible he was preparing to bring you into this club?” Lizzie asked.

  Alison looked at her sadly. “And then lost his mind to Alzheimer’s?” Her eyes welled with tears.

  Lizzie returned to the list. “Clearly, men in your family have been involved in this enterprise, whatever it is, since the beginning.” She read the first three names aloud: “William Kent, Thomas Bokland, Dunstan Hockwold. The first is obviously your ancestor, and the last is probably an ancestor of Hockwald Bruce. Whoever Bokland was, his descendents at some point changed the spelling of their name to Buckland and the last one was killed when a bomb hit London during the War.”

  “Perhaps he had no heir and my father consequently brought his friend Frederick Wickersham into the group.”

  “You said that the Wickershams were also Catholics?”

  “Yes, with a history similar to ours.”

  “How did your father know him?”

  Alison explained that they were friends at Oxford. “I think I told you that they were both avid amateur astronomers.”

  “Ah,” Lizzie said. “That makes the sun pointer a particularly nice way for him to memorialize Buckland and Hockwald.”

  The two women spoke for some time about whether any of this new information was relevant to their project on the Weaver’s pilgrimage and decided that it was not.

  “We can’t really be sure the list actually relates to Becket,” Lizzie said, “though it certainly feels like it does. In any case it is much later than the Weaver’s time.”

  “Is there anything you’d like me to do with it while you are in Newcastle?” Alison asked as Lizzie began to pack up her computer.

  “I don’t want to take you away from the work at hand,” Lizzie answered, “but it would be interesting to find out what the connection was between the Weaver and that first William Kent on the list. It’s possible your father traced that in one of those family trees we found.”

  “George is going to take me back to my house tomorrow to pick up some things I need. There are other genealogies there that I will bring back with me. I’ll see if I can’t answer your question.”

  “I’m surprised that George is letting you go back to your house.”

  “If you can believe it, a local policeman is actually meeting us there! It seems a ridiculous precaution to me, but I’m putting up with it to make George happy.”

  Lizzie stooped down to kiss Alison on the cheek. “I’m glad you’re able to get out for the day and I’m glad George is taking you.”

  Alison reached for Lizzie’s hand. “When I first told you about George and me, and how our fathers forced us apart by clinging so fiercely to their religions. . . .” She swallowed several times.

  Lizzie pulled her chair over and sat next to Alison.

  “I don’t know what I’m trying to say,” Alison continued, her voice soft and filled with emotion. “Only that for years I buried the pain of that separation and fought the feeling that I should hate all of them, George and my father foremost. I lived with my father, I took care of him, I listened to his rantings—or mostly listened…” Her voice faltered. “Is it possible that he was trying to tell me something and I didn’t listen because I was poisoned by that experience? That I didn’t want to hear anything he had to say about the Catholic Church? ”

  Lizzie squeezed her friend’s hand. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “But if it would help you to solve this mystery that concerned him, then let us do it. And George is in your life again and that can only be good.”

  There was a sound at the door to the library and the two women looked up to see George standing there. None among the three acknowledged that he might have heard some portion of the conversation that concerned him, and Lizzie soon after made her preparations to drive early the next morning to Newcastle.

  “Are you sure you don’t want an escort, Lizzie,” George asked earnestly. “Edmund and I are both concerned about you traveling by yourself.

  “No one even knows I’m going except the three of us, Edmund and Martin,” Lizzie assured him. “If there is someone threatening me, he won’t know where I am for the next few days.”

  Lizzie had planned to take Alison’s car, knowing that Martin would enjoy driving it, but George insisted it drew too much attention and arranged for the rental of a much more pedestrian vehicle. She left at dawn the next day with a thermos of coffee and a lunch packed by Helen Jeffries, and drove the whole day, arriving in Newcastle in time to meet Martin for dinner at his hotel.

  “Tell me everything that has happened! ” they said, almost simultaneously; they began to answer simultaneously as well, falling easily into their long habit of conversation.

  Martin demanded information on the case regarding the death of Dante Zettler, wanting to be reassured that his wife was safe. They had already spoken about this several times on the phone and Lizzie’s certainty that it had nothing to do with her almost convinced her husband.

  She then wanted to know everything about the mural. He was obviously pleased with the results and took her to see it long after darkness had fallen.

  “We will put a cover over it tomorrow morning,” he said, “so that the mayor can unveil it in the afternoon, but there is still some paint drying tonight.” He pulled a large flashlight from his backpack. “You will get the full effect tomorrow afternoon when it is unveiled,” he said, “but I want to show you some of the details that turned out particularly well.”

  Even in the dim light of street lamps and nearby buildings, Lizzie could see the arc of the big bridge that was familiar to her from the sketch Martin had made in his studio back home; she had driven across that bridge a few hours before. He ran the beam of light along the structure of the bridge, reproduced on the cement wall of the building in front of her.

  “Look at this,” he said, laughing softly. “There is graffiti on the bridge and the same guys who put it there reproduced it here. I love it!”

  All of the details he showed her were the work of local artists, things that had not been in his original sketch. “Here,” he said, illuminating a group of teenagers standing on a street corner. “This was done by a 13-year-old girl. So much talent. Look at the attitude in their postures, she just gets it.”

  They spent almost two hours, arm in arm, studying small aspects of the larger work. He described the experience of being in the city, of how warmly he had been received, and how impressed he was with the local artists with whom he had worked. “I have to do more projects like this,” he said. “It is just so much more fun than doing a mural for a bank lobby.”

  A young man approached them. “Mr. Sanchez,” he said.

  “Ian,” Martin said, extending his hand, “come see how our work turned out.” He introduced Lizzie. “Ian has real talent,” he said, “which I hope he will develop.”

  The boy was clearly pleased with the compliment and told Martin how much he had enjoyed working with him and how much he had learned. He asked if he could introduce him to his mother the next day and Martin said he hoped that he would.

  “I’m so proud of you,” Lizzie said when they were alone again.

  He kissed her.

  “And where am I?” she asked. Her husband always put her someplace in every mural.

  “You know I’m not going to tell you. It would ruin the surprise.” He put an arm around her waist. “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow when you see it in the light.”

  The next day was filled with fest
ivities. After a breakfast with town officials and a lunch with more than a dozen artists who had worked with Martin on the painting, the party on the street began at which the mural was unveiled. When the mayor pulled the string that brought down the light fabric that covered the wall there was enthusiastic applause. Martin spent the next several hours being feted by the neighborhood.

  Lizzie studied the finished mural from a seat in front of a pub across the street, a pint of cider on the table in front of her. The young man she had met the night before stopped to greet her and to introduce her to his mother.

  “Have you met Martin yet?” she asked the woman. When she said that she hadn’t, Lizzie pointed out to the two of them where her husband was. “Go there now,” she said. “He is looking forward to meeting you.”

  The finished work was impressive. The colors were bold and the lines of the bridge moved across the wall, linking the various components together. There were a number of visual puns, and a fair amount of material that Lizzie hadn’t seen before, either in the sketch at home or in the details the night before. Her eyes moved across and around the painting, admiring the artistry. There was a small church in the lower center of the wall and through the open door another mural was visible, a fresco on the wall of pilgrims on foot and on horseback. Lizzie smiled. They were characters from Canterbury Tales. She walked back across the street to look more closely. Martin had put her on horseback, with a broad-brimmed hat and scarlet socks. She was the Wife of Bath, and there was even a tiny monogram worked into the corner of her shawl: AW.

  She felt his arm slip around her waist and turned. “I absolutely love it!” she said.

  “I hoped you would,” he said. “I wanted to tie our two projects together, and the Catholic church in this neighborhood is St. Thomas Becket.”

  “Though I’ll bet they don’t have such a fabulous fresco!”

  “No, but I checked it out with the priest before I included it and have arranged for some of the local talent to paint one for him if it turns out to be popular.”

  The next minute he was called away again, but Lizzie continued to stand and look into the interior of the miniature church and to reflect on her relationship with the Weaver.

  Chapter 31

  Unlike Wells, Salisbury, and Winchester Cathedrals, which were all fronted by vast lawns, Westminster Abbey had very little open space from which to be viewed. It sat right in downtown London and traffic whizzed by, curving around the front and one of the sides, and separating the church from the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben across from its top end.

  Lizzie was unwilling to go through London without visiting it and she convinced Martin that there could not be any potential danger if no one knew they were there.

  “They must have cleaned the stone,” Martin said as they walked across the street to the west entrance. “If I remember correctly, the last time we were here the building looked almost black.”

  “They do appear to have cleaned off the grime of the ages,” Lizzie responded as she looked at Westminster Abbey gleaming white in the sunshine.

  She explained that their primary goal for the day was the central tomb, the shrine of Edward the Confessor, King of England and son of Queen Emma and King Ethelred the Unready. That would have been the objective of the Weaver as well. Edward built Westminster Abbey and, as far as he was concerned, completed it in 1065. When he died in 1066 he received the burial place of honor at the high altar. That year also saw the ascendance to the throne of his cousin, William the Conqueror, who came over from Normandy in 1066 and was crowned in the newly completed edifice. Since that time, every coronation of an English monarch had taken place there.

  The first translation of the body of Edward the Confessor into a new tomb was in 1163, when Henry II and the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, moved the body themselves. Edward had been canonized two years earlier, and his body was said to be wholly undecayed and intact. His clothes weren’t even deteriorated—the ultimate evidence of saintliness.

  A more elaborate shrine was built by Henry III, who also largely rebuilt the east end of the church during his thirteenth-century reign, in order to give Edward the Confessor a more stately and impressive resting place. A number of subsequent monarchs did their best to get themselves placed in close proximity to the tomb of the saint/king and to the holy relics which had been liberally strewed around his shrine, including a stone thought to have a footprint of Jesus Christ imprinted in it at the moment he ascended into Heaven, and a vial of his blood.

  “This is the only shrine of a saint or a king,” Lizzie said, “that escaped the destruction of Henry VIII’s gang of marauders, though they did steal the gold and precious stones from it. It was rebuilt by his daughter, Mary Tudor, when she brought Catholicism back to England. It is the only place along the Weaver’s pilgrimage path that still holds the bones that were venerated at that time.”

  “Do you think he was really saintly?” Martin asked. “Or was he just a king? Would he have become a saint if he were a humble poor man? There surely must have been a lot of people through the ages who were just as holy but never even became candidates for sainthood.”

  Lizzie didn’t know. “Was it that he was a good king, a good Christian, or a good person?” she mused.

  “I’m not convinced he had to be good at all,” Martin answered. “He built this church. That might have been the first step to sanctification.”

  It cost an extra few pounds to come into the part of the Abbey where the royal tombs were, and Lizzie commented that the parade of monarchs, with all their good and bad qualities, contributed to the great appeal and fascination of Westminster Abbey. She looked around to see the effigies of royalty staring, pupil-less, into the canopies above them.

  They ambled down the north aisle and Martin pointed out some of the extraordinary monuments along the way. He especially loved one of a couple looking remarkably relaxed in the effigies on their tomb. The wife looked like she had just fallen asleep, one hand resting lightly on her chest, the other on a book. Her husband lay beside her, resting up on one elbow and holding his coat of arms.

  “I’m sure they must often have lain in bed this way,” Martin said to Lizzie, “she reading, he in full armor admiring the family crest.”

  “Look at their poor children,” Lizzie said. A son and two daughters were each represented in stone, kneeling on a cushion in front of their parents, each holding his or her own skull. She could hear Martin softly humming “dem bones, dem bones.”

  They went to the “Poets’ Corner” to visit the grave of Geoffrey Chaucer, and Martin put his toe on the corner of the stone.

  “Here is your old friend,” he said. “Though I recall a conversation not so long ago when you said he was a creep. Do you still think so after the work you’ve done?”

  “I hardly know what to think of him anymore, except that his work has inspired me to think, and I love how his words roll around in my mouth.”

  “Do you believe Alison’s original contention that the Wife of Bath character is based on the Weaver?”

  “Absolutely,” Lizzie said without hesitation. “There are just too many commonalities to be coincidence.”

  “And was she as big a slut as he made her out to be?”

  “No way!” she said, rising to the defense of the Weaver. “Though of course she would never have defined herself that way.”

  “So did Chaucer hate women or was he simply a man of his time?”

  “The latter, I’m sure,” Lizzie said. “And I think he can have had no idea that we would be standing here talking about him and his book six hundred years later.”

  They walked back out into the sunshine. “Is there anything else we need to do while we are in London?” Martin asked Lizzie.

  “Let’s go across the river to Southwark and see the spot where the opening of Canterbury Tales was set.”

  She suggested that they walk to London Bridge and cross there onto the High Street of Southwark, where the Tabard In
n had stood. They stopped in the middle of the bridge to look up and down the Thames.

  “This was the center of the universe in Chaucer’s day,” Lizzie said, “and Thomas Becket’s too. Both were Londoners by birth, both must often have crossed the River here. Becket was Chancellor, and consequently intimately involved in the commerce of the nation; Chaucer served as the Controller of Customs for the Port of London.”

  As they ambled across London Bridge, Martin asked Lizzie if she could recite to him that part of Canterbury Tales that was set there and she found that she had, in multiple readings, committed it to memory.

  Bifel that, in that seson on a day,

  In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay

  Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage

  To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,

  At night was come into that hostelrye

  Wel nyne and twenty in a companye,

  Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle

  In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,

  That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

  “Nine and twenty in the company?”

  “And Chaucer’s original idea was that each would tell two stories going there and two stories on the way back.”

  “But they never got there?”

  “Nope. He never finished the book.”

  “Too bad,” Martin said. “Just think of the fart jokes that were left untold!”

  He asked her about the company of pilgrims. “If the Wife of Bath is based on the Weaver, then do you think the other characters are also based on real people?”

  “One is certainly based on the host at the Tabard Inn, Harry Bailey, and one character is Chaucer himself. Their companions are generally thought to have mostly been born in the brain of Chaucer, but the people described are of types who must have been circulating around Southwark at the time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other characters based on people he knew.”

  “I remember the miller, the prioress, the friar, the Wife of Bath, of course, and it seems like a very mixed bag of clergy and commoners.”