by Glenn Cooper
8 JANUARY 1297
ISLE OF WIGHT, ENGLAND
Baldwin, Abbot of Vectis, knelt in troubled prayer at the foot of the holiest tomb in the abbey.
Between the pillars separating the nave from the aisles, the memorial slab was set into the stone floor. The smooth flat stones were freezing cold, and through his vestments, Baldwin's knees were going numb. Still, he stayed down, concentrating on his plaintive prayers he offered over the corpus of St. Josephus, patron saint of Vectis Abbey.
The tomb of Josephus was a favorite place of prayer and meditation inside Vectis Cathedral, the splendid high-spired edifice that had been erected on the site of the old abbey church. The slab of blue stone that marked his tomb was simply inscribed with the deeply chiseled: Saint Josephus, Anno Domini 800.
In the five hundred years since the death of Josephus, Vectis Abbey had undergone profound changes. The boundaries of the abbey were vastly expanded by the annexation of surrounding fields and meadows. A high stone wall and portcullis now surrounded the site as protection against the French pirates who preyed on the island and the Wessex coast. The cathedral, one of the finest in Britain, pierced the sky with its tapering, graceful tower. Over thirty substantial stone buildings, including dormitories, Chapter House, kitchens, refectory, cellerage, buttery, infirmary, Hospicium, Scriptorium, warming rooms, brewery, abbot house, and stables, were connected to one another with covered walkways and internal passages. The cloisters, yards, and vegetable gardens were ample and well-proportioned. There was a large cemetery. A farm with a grain mill and piggery occupied a far parcel. All told, the abbey supported almost six hundred inhabitants, in essence making it the second largest town on the island. It was a prosperous beacon of Christendom, rivaling Westminster, Canterbury, and Salisbury in prominence.
The island itself had also grown in population and prospered. Following the conquest of Britain by William, Duke of Normandy, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the island came under Norman control and fully slipped its pagan Scandinavian bonds. The archaic Roman name, Vectis, was abandoned, and the Normans began to call it the Isle of Wight. William gifted the island to his friend William fitz Osbern, who became the first Lord of the Isle of Wight. Under the protection of William the Conqueror and future British monarchs, the island became a rich, well-fortified bastion against the French. From the squat, strong Carisbrooke Castle at the center, a succession of Lords of the Isle of Wight exercised feudal rule and forged an ecclesiastical alliance with the monks of Vectis Abbey, their spiritual neighbors.
The last Lord of the Isle of Wight was, in actuality, not a lord but a lady, Countess Isabella de Fortibus, who acquired the lordship when her brother died in 1262. From her land holdings and the maritime taxes she collected, the sour, homely Isabella became the wealthiest woman in Britain. Because she was lonely, rich, and pious, Edgar, the previous Abbot of Vectis-and later, Baldwin, the present abbot-unctuously courted her and bestowed on her their most solicitous prayers and finest illuminated manuscripts. In return, Isabella donated generously to the abbey and became its principal patron.
In 1293, Baldwin was personally summoned to her death bed in Carisbrooke, where in her drafty bedchamber she weakly informed him that she had sold the isle to King Edward for six thousand marks, thus transferring control to the Crown. He would have to seek patronage elsewhere, she told him dismissively. As she took her last breath, he grudgingly blessed her.
The four years since Isabella's death had been challenging for Baldwin. Decades of dependence on the woman had left the abbey unprepared for the future. The population at Vectis had grown so large that it was no longer self-sufficient and external funds were constantly required. Baldwin was forced to frequently travel off the island, like a beggar, courting earls and lords, bishops and cardinals. He was not a political creature like Edgar, his predecessor, a man with easy approachability, beloved by his ministers, children, even dogs! Baldwin was fishlike, cool and slippery, an efficient administrator with a passion for ledgers as great as his love for God, but with correspondingly little love of his fellow man. His idea of bliss was a peaceful afternoon alone in his rooms with his books. However, happiness and peace were abstract concepts of late.
There was trouble brewing.
Deep underground.
Baldwin said a special prayer to Josephus and arose to seek out his prior for urgent consultation.
Luke, son of Archibald, a boot maker from London, was the youngest monk at Vectis. He was a strapping twenty-year-old with the physique of a soldier more than of a servant of God. His father was mystified and disappointed that his eldest son would choose religion over a brick oven, but he could no sooner stop his strong-willed boy than he could stop bread from rising. Young Luke, when an urchin, had fallen under the kindly sphere of his parish priest and since then never wanted more from life than to devote himself to Christ.
The total immersion of monastic life appealed to him especially. He had long heard tales from the priests of the isolated beauty of Vectis Abbey, and at age seventeen made his way south to the Isle of Wight, using his last coppers to buy a ferryboat passage. During the crossing, he watched the steep, concave cliffs of the island looming large and stared in awe at the cathedral spire on the horizon, a stone finger pointing to Heaven, he reckoned. He prayed with all his might that this would be a journey without return.
Following a long hike through the rich countryside, Luke presented himself at the portcullis and humbly begged admittance. Prior Felix, a burly Breton, as dark as Luke was fair, recognized his earnestness and took him in. After four years of toil as an oblate and then a lay brother, Luke was ordained a minister of God, and every day since then his heart brimmed with jubilation. His perpetually broad smile made his fellow brothers and sisters mirthful, and some would go out of their way to walk past him just for a glimpse of his sweet face.
Within days of Luke's arrival at Vectis, he began to hear whispered rumors about the crypts from the longer-serving novices. There was a subterranean world at the abbey, it was said. There were strange beings underground and strange doings. Rituals. Perversions. A secret society, the Order of the Names.
This was rubbish, Luke had thought, a rite of initiation for young men with fanciful imaginations. He would concentrate on his duties and his education and not allow himself to be drawn into such nonsense.
Yet there was no denying that a complex of buildings was out of bounds to him and his fellows. In a far corner of the abbey beyond the monk's cemetery there was a simple unadorned timber building the size of a small chapel, which was connected to a long low building some referred to as the outer kitchen. Out of curiosity, Luke had periodically wandered close enough to sneak peeks of comings and goings. He had witnessed grain, vegetable, meat, and milk deliveries. He had seen the same group of brothers regularly entering and leaving, and on more than one occasion, young women escorted into the chapel-sized building.
He was young and inexperienced and satisfied that there were things in this world he was not expected or entitled to understand. He would not allow himself to be distracted from his intimacy with God, which was growing stronger every day he spent within the walls of the monastery.
Luke's perfectly balanced and harmonious existence came to an end on a late October day. The morning had begun unseasonably warm and sunny but turned cool and rainy as the edge of a storm brushed the isle. He was taking a meditative walk on the abbey grounds, and as the wind whipped up and the rain started pelting down, he hugged the perimeter wall to shield himself. His path took him to the far side of the sisters' dormitory, where he could see young women hurrying outside to collect the wash.
A particularly strong gust plucked a child's shirt from a hemp line and launched it into the air, where the wind played with it awhile before depositing the cloth on the grass a short distance from Luke. As he sprinted for it he saw a girl break from her colleagues and run across the field to retrieve it too. Her veil pulled away as she ran, revealing long flowing hair the
color of bee's honey.
She is not a sister, Luke thought, for her hair would be shorn. She was lithe with the grace of a young deer and just as skittish when she realized she was about to make contact with him. Stopping short, she let Luke reach the shirt as she held back. He snatched it up and waved it in the rain, his smile as huge as ever. "I have it for you!" he called out.
He had never seen a face as beautiful as hers, a perfect chin, high cheeks, green-blue eyes, moist lips, and skin the luminescence of a pearl he once saw on the hand of a fine lady in London.
Elizabeth was no more than sixteen, a vision of youth and purity. She was from Newport, sold by her father into indentured servitude at age nine to serve in the household of Countess Isabella at Carisbrooke. Isabella, in turn, bequeathed her two years later to Vectis as a gift to the abbey. Sister Sabeline had personally chosen Elizabeth from a group of girls on the offer. She'd held the girl's chin between her thumb and forefinger and declared that this one would be suitable for the monastery.
"Thank you," Elizabeth told Luke as he approached her, her voice sounding to him like a small bell, light and high.
"I am sorry it has become soaked." He gave the shirt to her. Even though their hands did not touch, he felt an energy pass between them. He made sure no one was looking before asking, "What is your name?"
"Elizabeth."
"I am Brother Luke."
"I know. I have seen you."
"You have?"
She looked down. "I must get back," she said, and she ran off.
He watched her glide away from him, and from that moment on she began competing in Luke's thoughts with Jesus Christ, his Lord and Savior.
He made a practice of passing behind the sisters' dormitory during his constitutionals, and somehow she always seemed to appear, if only to slap a garment on the washing stone or empty a bucket. When he caught sight of her, his smile would broaden and she would nod back and let the corners of her mouth curl toward her ears. They would never speak, but this did not diminish the pleasure of these encounters, and as soon as one would end he started to think about the next.
Surely, this behavior was wrong, he thought, and surely his musings were impure. But he had never felt this way about another person and was utterly powerless to block her from his mind. He repented and repented repeatedly, but kept ruminating on an insane urge to touch her silky skin with his palms, a preoccupation that was strongest when he lay alone in his bed, struggling to quiet the ache in his loins.
Luke began to hate himself, and his self-loathing wiped the perpetual smile from his face. His soul was tortured and he became another somber-faced monk moving slowly through the monastery.
He knew exactly what he deserved-to be punished, if not in this world then in the next.
As Abbot Baldwin was completing his prayers at the shrine of Josephus, Luke was strolling past the sisters' dormitory, wishing to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth. It was a cold crystalline morning and the discomfort of the blistering wind against his exposed skin stoked his masochism. The yard behind the dormitory was empty, and he could only hope his movements were being followed from one of the small windows that lined the steep-roofed building.
He was not disappointed. As he came closer, a door opened and she emerged wrapped in a long brown cloak. He had been holding his breath; when he saw her, he let out a puff of air that condensed and formed an ephemeral cloud. He thought she looked so lovely, he would slow down to prolong the moment, perhaps allowing himself to drift a bit nearer than usual, near enough to see the flutter of her eyelashes.
Then something quite extraordinary happened.
She walked straight toward him, stopping him dead in his tracks. She kept coming until she was only an arm's length away. He wondered whether this was a dream, but when he saw that she was crying and felt the warm air of her sobs pulsing against his neck, he knew it was real. He was too shocked to check for spies. "Elizabeth! What is the matter?"
"Sister Sabeline told me I am to be next," she said, choking and sputtering.
"Next? Next for what?"
"For the crypts. I am to be taken to the crypts! Please help me, Luke!"
He wanted to reach out to comfort her but knew that would be unpardonable. "I do not know what you speak of. What is to happen in the crypts?"
"You do not know?" she asked.
"No! Tell me!"
"Not here. Not now!" she sobbed. "Can we meet tonight? After you have done Vespers?"
"Where?"
"I don't know!" she cried. "Not here! Quickly! Sister Sabeline will find me!"
He thought quick, panicky thoughts. "All right. The stables. After Vespers. Meet me there if you are able."
"I will. I must flee. God bless you, Luke."
Baldwin paced nervously around his prior, Felix, who was seated on a chair with a horsehair cushion. Ordinarily this would have been a comfortable setting-the abbot's private receiving room, a nice radiating fire, a chalice of wine on a soft chair-but Felix was certainly not comfortable. Baldwin was flitting about like a fly in a hot room, and his anxiety was contagious. He was a man of wholly ordinary looks and proportions, without any physical manifestations of his holy position such as outward serenity or a wise countenance. Had he not worn the ermine-festooned robe and ornate crucifix of abbot, he would be mistaken for any village tradesman or merchant.
"I have prayed for answers, yet I have none," Baldwin pouted. "Can you not shed light on this dark matter?"
"I cannot, Father," Felix said in his thick-tongued Breton accent.
"Then we must have a meeting of the council."
The Council of the Order of the Names had not been convened for many years. Felix struggled to remember the last time-it was nearly twenty years earlier, he believed, when decisions had to be made concerning the last great Library expansion. He was a young man then, a scholar and bookbinder who had sought out Vectis because of its famous Scriptorium. Because of his intelligence, skills, and probity, Baldwin, who was prior in those days, inducted him into the Order.
Baldwin led the None Office inside the cathedral, the mellow song of his congregation filling the Sanctuary. He followed the prescribed order of service by rote and allowed his mind to drift to the crypts during the droning chants. None began with the Deus in Adjutorium, followed by the None hymn, Psalms 125, 126, and 127, a versicle, the Kyrie, the Pater, the Oratorio, and the concluding seventeenth prayer of St. Benedict. When it was done, he exited the Sanctuary first and listened for the select footsteps of members of the Order following him to the adjoining Chapter House, a polygonal building with a sharply peaked roof.
At the table sat Felix; Brother Bartholomew, the grizzled old monk who led the Scriptorium; Brother Gabriel, the sharp-tongued astronomer; Brother Edward, the surgeon, who presided over the infirmary; Brother Thomas, the fat drowsy keeper of the Cellarium and the Buttery; and Sister Sabeline, Mother Superior of all the sisters, a proud middle-aged woman of aristocratic blood.
"Who can tell me the current state of affairs within the Library?" Baldwin demanded, referring to the monks who labored there.
They had all visited recently, driven by uneasy curiosity, but no one had more intimate knowledge than Bartholomew, who spent much of his life underground and even assumed the physical characteristics of a vole. He had a pointy face, an aversion to light, and made small quick movements with his scrawny arms to emphasize his speech. "Something is troubling them," he began. "I have watched them for many years." He sighed. "Many years, indeed, and this is the closest I have ever seen to emotion."
Gabriel chimed in. "I agree with our brother. These are not typical displays of emotions that any one of us might experience-joy, anger, tiredness, hunger-but an unsettling sense of something being out of order."
"What specifically are they doing that is different from their usual practices?" Baldwin asked thoughtfully.
Felix leaned forward. "I would say their sense of purpose seems somehow diminished."
"Yes!" Barthol
omew agreed.
"Over the years, we have always marveled at their infallible industry," Felix continued. "Their toil is unimaginable. They work until they collapse and when they awake after brief respite, they are rejuvenated and begin anew. Their pauses for food, drink, and nature are fleeting. But now…"
"Now they are getting lazy, like me!" Brother Thomas guffawed.
"Hardly lazy," the surgeon interjected. Brother Edward had a long thin beard, which he stroked obsessively. "I would say they have grown somewhat apathetic. The pace of their work is slower, more measured, their hands move sluggishly, their sleep periods are longer. They linger at their food."
"It is an apathy," Bartholomew agreed. "They are as they have always been, but you are correct, there is a certain apathy."
"Is there anything else?" Baldwin asked.
Sister Sabeline fingered the edge of her veil. "Last week one of them did not rise to the occasion."
"Astonishing!" Thomas exclaimed.
"Has this occurred again?" Gabriel asked.
She shook her head. "There has not been an opportune time. However, tomorrow I am bringing a pretty girl called Elizabeth. I will inform you of the outcome."
"Do so," the abbot said. "And keep me informed about this-apathy."
Bartholomew carefully made his way down the steep spiraling stairs leading from the small chapel-sized building to the crypts. There were torches set at intervals along the stairwell that were bright enough for most, but his eyes were failing after a lifetime of reading manuscripts by candles. He felt for the edge of each stair with his right sandal before dropping his left foot onto the next.
The winding of the stairs was so tight, and he turned so many times on himself, that he was dizzy by the time he reached the bottom. Every time he descended these stairs and entered the crypts, he marveled at the engineering and building skills of his predecessors who had burrowed so deeply into the earth in the eleventh century.
He unlocked the enormous door with the heavy black iron key he kept on his belt. Since he was small and light he had to lean into it with all his strength. It swung on its hinges and he entered the Hall of the Writers.