by Unknown
#
Arthur was on his computer working through a Singapore supply-chain problem when Pam knocked.
“Martin would like to see you.”
“Topic?”
“He didn’t say.”
If he wanted to chat about something Ash usually grabbed him as they passed in the hall or cornered him after a meeting. Their important sit-downs were always prescheduled affairs, so Arthur ran through scenarios on his way to Ash’s office. Maybe there was a problem with his budget, or perhaps Martin had gotten some client feedback he wanted to pass along.
Ash was normally gregarious so Arthur could tell by the assiduous avoidance of eye contact that trouble was afoot.
“What’s up, Martin?” he asked, settling into the subordinate spot—the love seat. Before Ash could answer there was a light tap and Susan Brent came in.
“I’m sorry to be late,” she said, taking a chair, also avoiding Arthur’s gaze.
Arthur scowled. “An unscheduled meeting involving my boss and HR. This can’t be good.”
Ash heaved his chest dramatically, a gesture that came off as practiced. “I’ll just say it. There’s been a reorganization. It affects you.”
Arthur steeled himself. “All right …”
“The board wants to streamline things, achieve some rationalization, trim costs, et cetera. Next year could be challenging.”
“My forecast says otherwise, Martin. You signed off on my numbers.”
Ash had the appearance of a patient awaiting his turn for hemorrhoid surgery. “It’s not necessarily as challenging for your department. It’s a companywide issue. In any event, the decision’s been taken to merge your department with Stu Gelfand’s. Stu’s come out on top.”
The flush of anger scorched Arthur’s neck. “Stu’s group is half the size in revenue and half the size in headcount! And I’ve been here longer. That’s absurd, Martin!”
“I hear you, Arthur. I assure you I argued against it but the decision was taken at higher levels.”
“Who else is being let go?”
Ash turned away and looked through his window. “For the moment, only you.”
“You know what this is about, Martin,” Arthur seethed. “I understand you may not wish to acknowledge it but this is blatant retribution for what became a public contretemps with Dr. Harp over the treasure. I never had any intention of embarrassing him and I took pains to avoid media attention. I made a decision dictated by my conscience. He did what he thought was best for himself and I have no problem with that. But this is wrong, Martin. It’s wrong.”
Susan stepped into Ash’s silence. She seemed uncomfortable, laboring to sound professional. “Whenever companies endeavor to control expenditures there are human costs but I can assure you that this decision had nothing to do with anything but financial and strategic objectives.”
“Susan’s right, Arthur,” Ash said. “I don’t have any evidence this is coming from Dr. Harp. He’s always been a supporter of yours. Did you know how you got hired here in the first place?”
“You saw something I wrote at university.”
“Dr. Harp was the one who saw it and passed it to me. He said he could spot talent and he was right.”
Leaning forward, Arthur said, “I wasn’t aware of that but it doesn’t change anything. This is blatant retribution for making him look bad.”
Susan started in with more boiler-plate babble and Arthur stopped her.
“For God’s sake don’t patronize me with that kind of nonsense. Look, Martin, I’ve always respected you. I’m sorry you’ve lost your mettle. This is an open and shut case of unfair dismissal and I shall be taking it to an employment tribunal.”
Susan placed an envelope before him and with a pasted-on smile said, “I’m sure you’re disappointed, Arthur, and I’m sure you’re angry. That’s perfectly understandable. The company wishes to address your termination amicably and avoid any legal actions which would only serve to distract both parties from productively moving forward.”
“Spit it out, Susan,” Arthur snapped. “And spare me the HR-speak. What are you offering me?”
The terms emerged fluidly. A lump sum equal to eighteen months of salary and bonus with appropriate pension contributions and the maintenance of his company car lease for six months—plus a good reference. In return, Arthur’s agreement not to take any legal action against Harp or publicly disparage the company.
Arthur shook his head, laughing. It was rich. No one at Harp got that kind of severance package. They wanted him gone and they wanted him quietly forgotten. After endless tribunal hearings he’d be lucky to get half. He picked up the envelope.
“You’ll accept?” Susan pressed.
“I’ll take it but the both of you should be ashamed of yourselves. When is this effective?”
“Immediately,” Susan said. She looked like she wanted this over as quickly as possible. “You’ll find security waiting in your office to supervise the removal of your personal effects.”
“Great. Why don’t you take a photo of me packing up for the newsletter?” At the door he said, “Good-bye, Martin. Sorry it had to end like this.”
Ash looked at the carpet and mumbled, “I’m sorry too, Arthur. I really am.”
9
Arthur went into his garden to soak up the sun carrying a mug of tea and a pad of paper. He had woken, newly unemployed, with Sandy Marina’s exhortation playing in his head: What we need is a knight to get on his horse and really and truly pursue the Grail—a modern Galahad.
He now had the time to get on with it. The carnival sideshow of the treasure was behind him. His departmental budget wasn’t a concern anymore. His personal finances were cushioned by a severance. And his nerves were fraying waiting for the man with a gun to reappear.
The Grail was going to get his full attention.
He made two notations on his pad: 12 March and Montserrat.
He had to find out where Holmes had gone on the twelfth. He’d already had a word with the Loons to see if Holmes had mentioned anything to any one of them about his destination that day—a library, museum, an archive—and had come up empty. It occurred to him that Holmes might have said something to an Oxford faculty member or one of the fellows at Corpus Christi. There was a list of names to compile. Then there were Anne’s friends. Who knows, maybe she even accompanied him that day and told one of them about it.
Then there was Montserrat. It was a lower priority but it would be easy enough to send a letter to the abbot of Montserrat informing him of Holmes’ untimely death and requesting permission to reexamine the twelfth-century letter in their archive.
He began making calls. Holmes’ secretary agreed to e-mail him contact numbers from Oxford. The director of Anne’s microbiology lab at the medical school helpfully put him through to Anne’s best friend at work, and after a heart-wrenching chat, which shed no light on 12 March, he obtained a list of Anne’s other friends who may or may not have heard something.
After a couple of hours of further unproductive calls, he decamped from the garden, rinsed out his mug, and went upstairs to change into running gear for some exercise to clear his head.
Few cars were on the road to foul the spring air. A quick glance up and down his street convinced him the paparazzi had subsided for the time being.
He started jogging, periodically looking over his shoulder for the odd photographer or someone more sinister. Along the way, mothers pushing prams checked out his bare legs and gave him sly smiles. In twenty minutes he had gone a good way down the London Road on his way toward a giant circuit around the town, the steady exertion settling him into a contemplative state.
He breathed rhythmically, smoothly rolling from heel to toe, trying to ignore the bother of his sore ribcage. Arthur’s thinking drifted to Holmes. It was still impossible to believe that the eccentric dear man was gone.
Once again he found himself painfully reliving that night. Arriving at their home, giving Anne her present, hearing he�
�d have to wait until after dinner to learn about Holmes’ big discovery, driving to the restaurant, turning around abruptly and heading back, the intruder, the mayhem. The night played in a loop, repeating itself with every mile he ran. And on the third replay, legging down Murdoch Road with the circuit almost done, his mind stuck on the car ride to the restaurant and Anne’s snide remarks about the Holmes’ GPS.
The GPS!
Holmes couldn’t find his way around his own patch without sat-nav. If he drove somewhere on the twelfth, the address was bound to be on the TomTom.
He sprinted the last half mile and when he got back home he kicked off his trainers and gulped a glass of tap water.
Breathing hard, Arthur rang up Holmes’ secretary and asked if she knew what had happened to the professor’s car.
“I was wondering about that myself,” she said. “No one’s called down here asking about it. A week after the fire I went there with one of the girls from the department, you know, just to have a remembrance and drop off a bouquet, and we saw the prof’s car at the curb, a bit battered. We wondered whether the fire service dragged it out of the drive that night.”
“Did he keep a spare set of keys at the office?”
“He did. He was forgetful, not about his work but about things like keys, so I made sure he had extras about.”
“Do you think I could pick them up? I may have left something important inside the car that night.”
#
Arthur never wanted to return to Holmes’ house but it wasn’t nearly as traumatic as imagined. It had been leveled as a safety caution and all the detritus carted away. It was harder to assign emotions to a blackened lot and a garden rutted by heavy machinery.
The car was indeed out front, askew to the curb with its passenger side bashed in courtesy of the fire department. Arthur looked around for neighbors and seeing none, unlocked the driver’s side door.
The TomTom was suction-cupped in place and it powered up with the ignition key. The list of saved locations was long, presumably in chronological order, but there was no way of knowing which, if any, had been visited on 12 March. He pulled out a pocket notebook and began writing down the full list of Holmes’ destinations from the device’s memory.
#
Back at his house Arthur settled onto his sofa with his laptop. The addresses were mostly in Oxfordshire and London with a smattering of others in Cumbria, Warwickshire, Scotland, Wales, and Devon. He found a website for reverse-address lookups and got to work.
Straight off he had to chuckle. Some of the destinations were places that Holmes had frequented for decades, including his own office and his favorite pubs. Anne had been right: he had been well and truly scatterbrained when it came to a sense of direction. The London addresses were mostly restaurants and parking garages. One turned out to be Holmes’ solicitor, whose assistant checked for Arthur and told him that the professor had not visited on the twelfth. Another, in NW1, was for a Christopher Westley, a name he didn’t recognize but who turned out to be Holmes’ nephew, a young man who kept him on the line for a while reminiscing.
The Devon and Cumbria numbers were for a small hotel and a bed and breakfast. With considerable persuasion as to the importance of the matter Arthur was able to learn that Holmes had not visited them in the recent past.
The Warwickshire address was 6 Miller’s Lane, Monks Kirby. The name that popped into the reverse-lookup box made him catch his breath.
Elizabeth Malory.
A Malory. From Warwickshire. The ancestral shire of Sir Thomas Malory.
Leaping up, Arthur bounded the stairs to the closet in the spare room where he kept boxes of his father’s belongings. In a few minutes he was leafing through his father’s old address book, filled with Malorys. But there was no Elizabeth Malory and no Malory in Monks Kirby.
Downstairs he dialed the listed number and waited as the ring tones droned on. He was about to give up when a small elderly voice answered by repeating the number, a quaint custom he remembered from his youth.
“Oh, hello,” Arthur said. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you. Is this Elizabeth Malory?”
“Yes it is.”
“My name is Arthur Malory, spelled the same way but that isn’t why I’m calling.”
“Are you the young man I read about in the papers? The one who donated a treasure to the British Museum?”
“Yes, actually, I am.”
“Well, I though that was marvelous. I wondered if we might be related but I hadn’t gotten around to checking the genealogy. I really should.”
“I know this is an odd question, but would you happen to know a Professor Andrew Holmes from Oxford University?”
“Why yes, I do. He recently came to visit me. Let me check my calendar. Yes, here it is. He came to Monks Kirby on the twelfth of March.”
Out of office. GQ.
Arthur pictured Holmes making the notation on his calendar and smiled. GQ. Grail Quest.
#
Monks Kirby was a pretty little village in Warwickshire, a dot on the map with a population under five hundred. Arthur had been near the village before, he was sure, though he’d never been through it. Newbold Revel was close by. No self-respecting descendant of Sir Thomas Malory could possibly have eschewed a tour of Newbold Revel, the knight’s ancestral home, though it was now the HM Prison Service College.
During his visit some years earlier, Arthur had talked his way into an audience with the director of the Prison Services Museum located on the grounds of the college. Once he declared his historical connection to Thomas Malory the director rolled out the red carpet and took him on a private tour of the manor house. The mansion bore no external clues of the fifteenth-century house that Thomas Malory had known. It was remade time and time again, particularly in the Victorian era where heavy cornices and balustrades were added.
Winding through the college’s reception halls and classroom wings, the museum director showed Arthur the secret house within, the original medieval footprint of thicker walls and ancient hearths laid out in a symmetrical H. He couldn’t help but to point out the irony that the boyhood home of the knight who spent so many years imprisoned by the king, writing Le Morte D’Arthur in captivity, should now be a crown jewel of the modern prison system.
Elizabeth Malory lived in an isolated property off Miller’s Lane not far from St. Edith’s Church. Arthur climbed from his Land Rover and stretched while admiring the ample Tudor thatched cottage, its plaster painted petal pink, its exposed timbers dark, almost black with age. Aromatic wood smoke rose from the chimney and mingled perfectly with the bouquet of the country air. The garden shed had an overhang protecting a large stack of split firewood. Neatly pruned rosebushes were laid out like sentries along the path to the front door, with more of them surrounding the house. Arthur regretted not having come in the summer; surely then the garden at peak would be awash in brilliant color.
The woman who appeared at the door perfectly matched the voice on the phone—frail, elderly, formal. She was dressed in a floral-pattern dress and thin sweater done up with misaligned buttoning, off by one. (Throughout his visit, Arthur wrestled with the idea of pointing this out, but in the end he kept it to himself.)
The cottage lacked central heating but Elizabeth Malory seemed tough and resilient as she fed the fire and organized tea and biscuits in the sitting room.
“I’m eighty-three years old,” she told him over tea. “Guess how long I’ve lived in this house?”
He politely gave a try.
“No, a bit longer than that,” she said. “It’s eighty-three years! I was born in the dining room. Right over there. Why my poor mother wasn’t allowed to deliver me in her bed I don’t know; I suspect it was too cold upstairs.
“I did my research, or I should say, my father did the bulk of the research years ago,” she announced. “And I’m pleased to tell you that we are, indeed, related and we are both assuredly descended from Sir Thomas Malory.”
She launched into a
lucid explanation. The missed buttonhole was a red herring. She was sharp; all her faculties. According to her recitation, Thomas Malory married a woman named Elizabeth, perhaps Elizabeth Walsh from Wanlip, in the 1440s, around the time he was knighted. They had two sons, Thomas and Robert, but the bloodline ran through Robert, as Thomas died in childhood. Robert Malory married another Elizabeth, who bore Nicholas, who in turn married Katherine Kyngston.
“Now Nicholas was the Lord of Newbold Revel, Winwick, and Swinford,” she said. “As you may know, the official genealogy has it that Nicholas sired two daughters only and that the Sir Thomas Malory bloodline ran out before the sixteenth century.”
“But that’s not correct, is it?” Arthur said.
“No. Otherwise you and I wouldn’t be enjoying our tea together, would we?” A smile creased her face. “Birth records were kept by the church, of course, and there was a fire at the parish church at Winwick in the early 1600s which destroyed the records.”
Arthur nodded. “But in the 1930s a researcher from Leeds found some marriage records in Coventry which indicated that Nicholas fathered a boy too,” he said. “John Malory.”
“That’s your lineage,” she said. Then she added gleefully, “My lineage comes from another son, Thomas. You see, Arthur, my father was something of a genealogist himself and he dug and dug until he discovered Thomas’s existence as well. He always suspected we had the blood of knights flowing through our veins and I’m proud to say he proved it. I must add, however, that he was always cross about assertions made by certain scholars over the years that Sir Thomas Malory was more of a brigand than a knight. Some say he was a thief and even a rapist. He did spend many years in prison. What do you think?”
“I don’t accept that he was a common criminal,” Arthur said flatly. “This would have flown in the face of all his chivalric principles. I think there are alternative views. He had enemies, especially the Duke of Buckingham. These enemies may have had reasons to put him behind bars.”