by Unknown
“Christ, Tony, I’m just not going to worry about all that now. I’m going to run with this. I’m going to run like hell before the murderer shows up again.”
“I’m worried about your safety,” Tony confessed. “Strange things afoot. Awful about your house.”
“I’m trying to be careful.”
“The police aren’t being helpful?”
“It’s worse than that. I can’t prove it but I think they’re in on it. I’ve broken off contact.”
Tony shook his head gravely. “Not good … at all. If you need a place to stay—”
“Thanks but no.”
“Have you made any sense out of Malory’s clues? The Morte preface? The Domesday Book?”
“Not yet. Early days. I need a copy of the Domesday Book. Got one handy?”
Tony had a couple and lent Arthur a fat paperback the weight of a brick.
“Well, use me as a sounding board. And the other Loons,” Tony offered. “Consider us your brain trust.”
“I will. Can you believe it, Tony? A real-life Grail quest.”
“It is unbelievable but it’s true, isn’t it? Holmes was right, Arthur. It’s your quest. Can I run off a copy of the letters so I can study them some more? I’ll keep them close to the vest.”
The three walked to the empty copy room down the hall.
“What do you make of these Qem that Malory mentions?” Tony asked, gently flattening the first parchment against the copier glass.
“Never heard of the term. You?”
Tony retrieved the first copy. “After you mentioned the word yesterday I did a quick search of related homonyms, Q-E-M, Q-U-E-M, K-E-M, K-H-E-M and C-H-E-M. Khem is Egyptian for black, that’s all I came up with. There’s no record of anyone or anything by that name in my medieval history databases. Intriguing, though, in light of Malory’s legal woes. I mean, the man certainly had enemies.”
“So what’s your role in all this going to be?” Tony asked Claire.
“My role? Well, I don’t know. I have to go back to France.”
“Pity,” Tony said.
Outside in the sunshine, Arthur and Claire started walking toward St. Pancras.
He’d been waiting for this moment, thinking about what he was going to say all morning and it came out in a hurried rush. “I know it’s a lot to ask but I’d like you to stay. For a little while. I could use your help, someone to bounce ideas off.”
“Arthur, I—”
He wouldn’t let her finish the sentence. “Claire, we hardly know each other. But I don’t want to let you go so easily.”
She inhaled sharply, and looked down, her cheeks flushing.
He kept pressing. “This feels awkward. It’s not exactly like asking someone out on a date. I’m asking you out on an adventure. Will you stay a couple of days? If there’s even a hint of danger again I’ll send you packing.”
“But I don’t even have any clothes.”
“That makes two of us,” he said.
She looked up. Her answer was yes.
The simple word lifted his heart and posed a small, happy quandary. Should he shake her hand? Touch her shoulder? Kiss her? None seemed quite right so after a mumbled “terrific” he immediately changed the subject to shopping.
In the Marks and Spencer at Covent Garden, Arthur quickly assembled a serviceable wardrobe and trappings for himself and looked for Claire in the women’s wear department. He hung back, as men do, as she shopped for intimates then drew closer when she turned to other clothes, shoes and outerwear. She chose things breezily, making swift decisions, playfully holding items up to see if he approved. He did, every time, signaling his assent with a nod and a smile, a thumbs-up.
He enjoyed the interlude, as carefree an hour as he’d spent in a long while, watching her slap like a pinball between the racks.
At the cashier he insisted he pay for her items and she reluctantly agreed. As an afterthought, they stopped in the luggage department and bought a couple of roller bags for easier carriage.
They wheeled the bags to the car park in Bloomsbury and drove back to the hotel, Arthur nervously checking his mirrors for suspicious vehicles. Claire sent an e-mail to her boss at Modane requesting some vacation days. At Cantley House she changed into a new top. When she exited the bathroom he picked up a whiff of spicy perfume. He hadn’t seen her purchase any so he assumed she had a bottle in her handbag all along and was delighted she had decided to break out the arsenal.
He ordered sandwiches from room service and they got down to it, Arthur retrieving the key documents from the chest and both of them taking their positions on the freshly made beds. He read aloud again what he considered to be the most important section of the most important parchment:
To find the Graal that man must first find the sword of Arthur which I have well hid to keep it thus from evil hands. The finder of the Sangreal must be keen of intellect virtuous and pure of heart. The sword can be found within the preface to Le Morte Darthur in companionship with the tale itself provided one is as mindful as priests who mind the Sacraments of the green acres of Warwickshire which were chronicled in the Domesday Book as written during the realm of King William I.
“So, are you keen of intellect, virtuous, and pure of heart?” she asked.
“Maybe two out of three.”
She smiled. “Which are you lacking?”
“You’ll have to be the judge. What do you know about the Domesday Book?”
“I’ve heard of it but I have to say it wasn’t included in the French curriculum.”
He picked up Tony’s copy. “Catch.”
With a grunt she caught the heavy book cleanly, opened it to a random page and read for a few moments. “My God, is it all like this? This is surely the most boring book ever written.”
“It’s pretty dry, like reading a company’s accounts.”
“Except these are the accounts for an entire country, no?”
“An eleventh-century country where you could reasonably tote up all the pigs, cows, and plows.”
Arthur reclaimed Tony’s book, hardly knowing where to begin. It was 1,500 densely packed pages in a font that strained even his young eyes. Claire used his laptop to find an online version.
The book was the brainchild of William the Conqueror, who in 1085 decided he ought to know the precise wealth of his kingdom. To accomplish the task he sent his royal commissioners and clerks throughout England to record how much land was held in each shire, how much land and livestock the king himself owned, and what annual dues were rightly his. It was a meticulous process done quickly and efficiently and collated and transcribed into two great parchment volumes, Great Domesday and Little Domesday, by a single scribe in Winchester who wrote in a stylized and abbreviated clerical Latin. The survey was said to be so thorough that not even a single ox or one cow or one pig escaped notice of the king’s auditors.
The manuscripts were taken with utmost seriousness by the king and before long they began to be called Domesday Books, a reference to the awesome Final Judgment Day when Christians learn their fate. Then, as now, death and taxes were certain. Indeed King William learned that his was a prosperous country with vast land holdings and that his barons and archbishops owed him a large income every year.
Arthur absently opened to a page and settled his eyes on the entry for the village of Malden in Surrey. He read it to Claire then said, “Gripping stuff, this.”
Robert de Watteville holds of Richard OLD MALDEN. Hearding held it of King Edward. It was then assessed at 8 hides, now at 4. There is land for 5 ploughs. In demesne is 1 plough; and 14 villans and 2 bordars with 4 ploughs. There is a chapel and 3 slaves, and a mill rendering 12s and 4 acres of meadow. From the herbage, 1 pig out of 7 pigs. Of these hides a knight holds 1 hide and 1 virgate, and there he has 1 plough and 1 villan and 1 bordar and 1 acre of meadow. The whole TRE was worth £7; now £6 12s.
After some glossary work he deciphered the entry to mean that Robert de Watteville, the Saxon holder
in 1086, worked the land in Malden in an undertenancy of Richard Hearding, the tenant in chief who held it under Edward the Confessor, the king until the Norman invasion of 1066. The Malden holdings previously had been assessed at 8 hides of land (about 120 acres) but were now only 4 hides. Watteville owned his own single plow and the labors of 14 peasants. Two small-holders possessed some land themselves and had their own plows and pigs, one of which was owed to Watteville annually. Malden had a chapel and 3 landless villagers. There was a mill that paid Watteville 12 shillings a year in rent and 4 acres of grazing land. An unnamed knight controlled a little more than a hide of land and had some laborers. The value of the holdings in Malden had been £7 in 1066. It was assessed in 1086 at £6 12s.
Arthur paged through the book reading village by village entries and soon was snowed by the blizzard of dry facts and figures. How were they to make sense of it? Why had Thomas Malory decided to use this book as a vehicle for concealment? And how had he gained access to it? After a generation or two within the treasury at Winchester, the Domesday Book, housed in an iron-studded chest, had been transported to Westminster Palace by King Henry II and for the next 600 years there it lay. So Malory would have had to have been granted permission to view it from a high official in the court of King Henry VI.
Claire put down the laptop and asked for the parchment. She read it to herself, her eyes narrowing thoughtfully then said, “Look, this guy, Thomas Malory, I’m sure he was quite intelligent to write a beautiful book like Le Morte D’Arthur but as far as we know he wasn’t a mathematician or anything like that.”
“Your point?”
“My point is that I’m sure his puzzle or his code or whatever it’s best to call it isn’t so amazingly complicated. There are only two elements, the preface and the Domesday Book. The most important thing is to know that both are required. This letter, which is basically addressed to you across time, says this.”
“Okay,” Arthur said, “but where to start? The preface or the Domesday Book?”
“That I don’t know.”
Arthur and Claire remained planted for the rest of the day and well into the night reading the Domesday Book and Le Morte D’Arthur and rereading the parchments. Arthur filled up his spiral copybook with notes and both of them tried to form connections but all their work led to dead ends. Fatigue finally overtook them. They returned to the hotel restaurant for dinner then worked for a few more hours until they were numb from it all.
While Claire was in the bathroom getting ready for the night Arthur undressed and got into his bed. He pretended not to look at her when she emerged, dressed in a plain, short nightgown, very schoolgirlish. She gave him a quick, almost embarrassed smile and slid between her sheets. With the lights out, he thought about her lying there close to him but soon he drifted away into a maze of dreams, a weird amalgam of Arthur’s Camelot, William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book and his own burning house.
13
England, 1451
Thomas Malory parted the curtains in his bedroom and let the sunshine flood in. His wife, Elizabeth, was still asleep but she stirred at the brightness and pulled the fur bedclothes over her eyes.
“Is it fair or foul?” her small muffled voice called out.
“Most fair,” Malory said. “Shall I call your ladies to attend you?”
“In a moment. There is no need for haste. I did not sleep well.”
“I did. Most deeply.”
Her head appeared slowly, much like a badger tentatively emerging from its sett. “In any event I do not wish to see the boys too soon. They are so taxing before they have been dressed and fed.”
Her long black hair was stuffed into an unattractive sleeping bonnet, which made her look too matronly for his liking. Malory had a mind to fling it off and ravish her but with more pressing matters on his mind he began to sweep out of the room to summon his dresser.
“Must you leave today?”
“I must.”
He had made the transition from a military to a country life many times, as there seemed no end to conflicts between England and her neighbors. Yet never had he found himself as weary of war as he was now. True, nothing could equal the thrill and emotional release of a battlefield victory, but such pleasure was brief, akin to the crescendo of a carnal union. At his age he much preferred gentler pursuits as a prosperous knight in Warwickshire over the dreary slogs and periodic bloodfests of a Norman campaign. Today, he would embark on a journey that would straddle both worlds. He did not expect bloodshed but he hoped for exhilaration.
Dressed in his short doublet, breeches, a cloak, and soft leather boots, Malory bounded from his private chambers to the public rooms of his manor. The floors of the grand house were flagged with plaited rushes that had been dampened by the servants to refresh them. They gave out a scent of newly scythed hay, a smell he had dreamt about in France amidst the stench of his siege camps.
Malory could not pass through the public rooms of his manor without attracting the attention of members of his household. His estate accommodated over a hundred outdoor and indoor servants, agricultural laborers, yeoman, husbandmen, and various tenants as well as two gentlemen and their extended families. His groom wanted a word about the readiness of his horses, his brewer offered to have him sample a new barrel, and his chaplain wanted instructions concerning his departure mass.
Malory dealt with them in haste and made his way to his tapestry-draped library where two of his retainers awaited him. Robert Malory was one of them, a distant cousin from Radclyffe-on-the-Wreake, one of the gentlemen who resided at Newbold Revel. The other was John Aleyn, a loyal soldier who had campaigned with him in Normandy and was now a handy man of arms in his domestic service.
Malory greeted them cheerfully and bade them sit with him at the table nearest the hearth. An attentive servant quickly appeared with a tray of carved pork and cold roasted potatoes. The men set into their breakfast with their belt daggers and washed down the food with weak ale. Robert was his usual talkative self, launching into a drawn-out and largely boring story about his previous day’s boar hunt in the forest near Coombe Abbey. He was younger than his knight cousin, a fleshy fellow with a thick waist and a limp from a Norman arrow taken to the hip years earlier. A more eager soldier might have shaken off the injury and returned to battle when he had healed but Robert mustered out of his company and returned to a comfortable life of wenching, hunting, and drinking.
John Aleyn was a different sort. He was a hard man, all lean and gristle, who lived for service. He led an acetic existence in a tiny one-room cottage—really more of a hut—on the edge of the estate. Malory could not remember ever seeing him either in the company of women or drinking to the point where his fighting skills were compromised. He was, in short, the perfect man for certain jobs.
“Are you ready for our journey?” Malory asked, spearing the last potato.
“The packs are ready. Say the word and I’ll dress the horses,” Aleyn replied.
Robert Malory gulped messily from his flagon and wiped ale from his chin. “My hip’s sore as a whore’s cunny from the hunt but if you say it’s time to ride, I’m ready enough, coz.”
“Yes, it is time. The priest will send us on our way with a mass. We’ll depart immediately thereafter,” Malory told him. “Bristol is a five-day ride. From there, perhaps another five days to our destination.” He smiled at the word; he might just as easily have said destiny. “From the day I returned from Normandy six months ago I have had little time for this journey but have kept it foremost in my mind. Today, thoughts turn to action.”
When Malory returned to Newbold Revel from his recent foray into Normandy the affairs of his estate were badly in need of attention and he found himself drawn into a number of compelling obligations. It was a time of turmoil. Malory and other loyalists had long suspected that the death of his first lord, Warwick, Henry Beauchamp, had been unnatural, and in their minds a trail of poison led directly to the loathsome earl of Buckingham. Beauchamp’s
death had hit Malory hard. Though the young man was Malory’s lord and retainee, Malory was his mentor. He had taught the idealistic youth swordplay and archery and had regaled him with tales of his own exploits in France and Turkey and Arthurian tales of romance and adventure.
Beauchamp had absorbed the lessons learned at Malory’s knee and applied them in his own role as the principal mentor of the child king, Henry VI. The king had rewarded Beauchamp’s attentiveness by naming him as the first earl of England with precedence over all other earls. Beauchamp’s allies well imagined that his influence with the king was a problem for one man and one man only:Buckingham, who saw his primacy diminished by the royal dependence on Warwick.
Before Beauchamp’s death, the two powerful earls had clashed in Parliament over matters of state, and Buckingham had irritated Beauchamp no end by acquiring Maxstoke Castle in Beauchamp’s own shire. The proximity of Maxstoke to Beauchamp’s Warwick Castle put the retinues of both earls, Malory included, in frequent contact and conflict, further stoking the fires of feud.
Following Beauchamp’s untimely death, Malory was now in service to the new earl of Warwick, Sir Richard Neville. Fortunately for Malory, Neville was an extraordinary man, every bit as fine in character and intellect as Beauchamp. Buckingham did not share the admiration. To him Neville was merely another Warwick to despise and crush.
Since the death of Beauchamp, Buckingham had consolidated his power at court, seeking to shape the attitudes and policies of the impressionable young king to serve his own rapacious goals. Those who opposed Buckingham whispered that he practiced the dark art of alchemy. Some claimed he sought and others that he already had obtained the Philosopher’s Stone, the legendary alchemical substance that could turn base metals into gold.
Clearer thinkers dismissed the notion that his wealth was a result of the mysteries of alchemy. The enormous inheritance gained at the death of his mother, the dowager countess of Stafford, explained his bulging accounts easily enough. There was not, however, a mote of dispute about Buckingham’s character. All agreed he was an unimaginative and unlikeable man with a harsh and vindictive streak who, at a moment’s notice, could veer into the most abject cruelty. One London wag who wrote anonymously of Buckingham that he was fat and full of grease found himself hauled off to the Tower when his identity became known. Malory had only been back from France for a month when he came into conflict with Buckingham in the Coombe Abbey woods on land bordering Newbold Revel. John Aleyn had gotten wind of a raiding party of Buckingham’s men intent on causing mischief or worse, Malory being a softer target than Warwick, principle object of Buckingham’s ire.