by Unknown
“What treasure is this?”
“A spiritual one, John, worth more than all the silver and gold in the realm. One day I hope to tell you. Perhaps we will go on the quest together. For now, I have a letter I would have you send to Waynflete, bishop of Winchester. It is most sensitive in nature. Show it to no one. Do they search you when you leave me?”
“They do.”
“Do they make you strip off your garments?”
Aleyn shook his head. “If they did, they would have to hold their noses.”
“Good. I will fold it well. Place it behind your man sack.”
Aleyn snorted. “Twin sentries.”
“Do not take it from here to Winchester directly. I would not have you followed and Waynflete brought into this affair. I know it is circuitous but return to Newbold Revel first and sally forth from there at night. If something prevents you from delivering it, burn it or hide it somewhere safe, as it must not fall into Buckingham’s hands. Do you understand my instructions?”
Aleyn took the folded letter and tucked it into his trousers. “I do, my lord. Have faith in me as I have faith in you.”
The two men hugged.
Aleyn noticed a small stack of parchments on Malory’s writing desk.
“You have been writing something, my lord.”
“Indeed I have, John. I feel that God intended me to be freed for a time from my household and parliamentary duties so I could accomplish something more important. I have started a book, a grand book I am calling Le Morte Darthur, my own telling of the life and death of Arthur, the greatest king this land has ever known.”
16
Arthur and Claire spent the entire day poring over the Domesday Book. They broke for meals in the restaurant and walks in the garden until another day had passed and they were punch-drunk with mind-numbing statistics.
Claire went into the bathroom to brush her teeth.
“Can you stay longer?” he asked through the door.
“It’s difficult,” she said. “I have to go back to work soon.”
“I think we’re making progress.”
“Yes, maybe; we’ll see how we do tomorrow.”
She emerged in her nightgown and got into her bed, turning to face him in his.
“The past two days have been surreal,” he said, lying on his side, his head propped in his hand.
“Yes, not ordinary days, for sure.”
“Hiding in a hotel, working on a five-hundred-year-old puzzle.”
“I have to say, it appeals to me intellectually. It’s very different from my usual work. It’s quite romantic.”
“I’ve been feeling guilty.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“That’s very sweet. But I feel very comfortable with you. Very safe.”
She switched off her bedside light. He thought about going to her but resisted. The last thing he wanted was to tip the scales and drive her away. So he turned his pillow to the cool side and went to sleep.
In the morning Arthur awoke first and had a sly look at Claire’s bed. She was partly under the sheets with a long bare leg showing.
As quietly as he could, he loaded grounds into the room’s coffeemaker and sat watching the carafe slowly fill with steamy liquid, drip by drip.
At once he was struck by a glimmer of clarity that had eluded him during the long preceding day.
Claire awoke to see him rapidly paging through the Domesday text.
“You’re already at it,” she said.
Arthur looked up, excited. “It came to me, Claire. Your principle of simplicity. Malory was a Warwickshire man. He specifically mentions Warwickshire in the letter. I think we can filter out over ninety percent of the book. We only have to concentrate on one county. So we should keep going along the lines of yesterday, looking for mentions of the numbers twenty or twenty-three.”
She caught his excitement and sat up in bed. “Didn’t he use the word acre with Warwickshire?” she asked, recalling it now. “The green acres of Warwickshire? Maybe we need to find the village with either twenty or twenty-three acres of land.”
They poured themselves coffee and she joined him on his rumpled bed so they could read the text together. If he weren’t so focused on the book, the sight of her bare legs and arms might have derailed him. He opened the book to the first page in the Warwickshire section and both furiously began to scan the dense text. It was like a race. Arthur could tell from her laserlike squint and coiled posture that she was competitive—and she confirmed his suspicion by triumphantly calling out, “Here! This place has twenty acres!” She was pointing at the village of Harborough, where, it was written, There are 4 ½ hides. There is land for as many ploughs. There are 4 villans and 4 bordars with 1 plough. There are 20 acres of meadow. “This could be the hiding place. Do you have a map?”
“Hold on,” Arthur said. “Here’s another one with twenty acres of meadow.”
On the very next page were three more villages that fit the bill: Leamington Hastings, Mollington, and Binton; and in time they had added Newnham Paddox, Wolverton, Oxhill, Weddington, Hodnell, Nuneaton, and Stoneleigh to the list—a total of eleven towns and villages in Warwickshire with twenty acres of meadowland. Yet there was only a single village with twenty-three acres of meadows: Stretton-on-Fosse.
“So it’s quite clear,” Claire said. “If our hypothesis is valid, then Thomas Malory must be pointing with the number twenty-three to Stretton-on-Fosse. It’s a very clean result, unlike the twenties.”
Arthur went online to get a Warwickshire map and frowned at Stretton-on-Fosse. “I don’t know. It’s quite a bit south of Malory’s home in Newbold Revel.” After a quick online search on the village he added, “And it’s never had a significant manor house or castle, so he wouldn’t have had a noble connection to the area.”
“It’s speculation, no? How can you be sure of that?”
“I can’t.” He studied the list of places and picked up the parchment again. “You know, I think we’re missing something just keying in on twenty or twenty-three acres. There’s another phrase here that’s peculiar, maybe intentionally so. Remember, he writes that the sword can be found within the preface, and I quote, in companionship with the tale itself provided one is as mindful as priests who mind the Sacraments of the green acres of Warwickshire. As mindful as priests. Why is he saying that? It’s an unnecessary embellishment. What is it about priests?”
She grabbed the book from his lap, brushing his crotch with an apologetic giggle. “Yes! Remember this? In Leamington Hastings, in addition to the twenty acres of meadows it’s written there are fifteen slaves, thirty-three villans and a priest! So we have to see if this is the only one which satisfies both conditions.”
She reread the twelve flagged locations out loud, raising her voice for emphasis on Stretton-on-Fosse again, as there was also a priest in that village; then nothing until the last village, Stoneleigh—where again she raised her voice. “This one had two priests.”
Arthur mapped out Leamington Hastings and Stoneleigh while Claire insisted that all signs pointed to Stretton-on-Fosse. “Leamington’s also not very close to Malory’s home but at least it’s on the way to London,” he observed, “and we know he was a member of Parliament so it might have been on a familiar route. Stoneleigh is closer, just south of Coventry, more his stomping grounds.” He did another search and declared, “There was a significant Cistercian Abbey there in the fifteenth century, which is interesting.”
Claire rose to stretch her legs. “Look, we could be completely wrong with the entire premise but if we’re on the correct path, there are three possibilities: Stoneleigh, Leamington Hastings, and Stretton-on-Fosse, which is my favorite. How do we narrow the search? I mean, even if we knew that one of these was the place Malory meant, where would we look? These are entire villages!”
They took a stroll before breakfast. It was cloudy and when they were at the farthest point on the grounds the skies open
ed with remarkable ferocity, soaking them as effectively as if someone had sprayed them with a garden hose at arm’s length. Laughing like schoolkids, they ran back to their room and, dripping wet, shucked their coats and kicked off their shoes.
“I’ve got to change,” she said, working the top button of her blouse and moving toward the closet.
He followed her, unbuttoning his shirt and she suddenly turned to face him. He kissed her—tentatively at first, to see how she would react, then harder when he could tell she was willing. They moved in lockstep onto her unmade bed and in a succession of unbuttonings, undrapings, and unclaspings they were naked.
Everything seemed right about her—her smell, her taste, her small murmurs, her beautiful body; and when they were done, gasping at the unexpectedness of it all, she seemed as happy as he was.
He had no idea why the thought came to him just then but with a hurried apology he reached for his laptop and one of the parchments. She didn’t seem at all upset by his postcoital manners and pulled back the covers so both of them could get under the sheets.
“That was amazing, by the way,” he said, “but we missed this. I missed it.” He pointed to a section in the parchment. “It’s this part: the sword can be found in companionship with the tale itself. That’s got to be the other critical part to finding the sword.”
She put her hand on his chest, as casually as if they had been lovers for some time. “I’m sorry, I don’t see.”
“As he lay dying, King Arthur orders Sir Girflet to return Excalibur to the enchanted lake from which it came. Girflet reluctantly complies and a lady’s arm emerges from the lake to catch it and carry it under the water. This has to be what Malory means—in companionship with the tale itself. He must have tossed the sword into a lake. That’s where he hid it. All we need to do is find out which of the three villages has a lake.”
“It’s quite brilliant.”
He kissed her. “For a chemist?”
It only took a couple of minutes on Google Earth to get the answer and it was a crushingly disappointing one. Leamington Hastings, Stretton-on-Fosse, Stoneleigh—none of them had lakes or even ponds. The River Avon ran through Stoneleigh but that hardly counted. He shut his laptop with a frustrating slap.
“Now what?” she asked.
He shrugged and turned to face her. “There’s only one thing to do,” he said, sliding onto her again.
#
Arthur and Claire arrived early at the Mortimer Arms Pub on Tottenham Court Road but Tony Ferro was already there polishing off his first pint. He was chatting with a man whom Arthur presumed was Jim Mawby, the UCL geologist Tony had mentioned over the phone earlier in the day.
Tony waved them over to their table and again made a fuss over Claire before introducing them to Mawby. Arthur had called Tony to bring him inside the tent on the new developments and it was Tony who suggested Mawby. “Can a lake disappear in five centuries?” Tony had repeated Arthur’s question. “Damned if I know but there’s a chap at UCL who’ll be able to tell us.” Tony bought a round and sat back down, resuming his fawning over Claire.
Mawby had dry, sun-wrinkled cheeks from years of geological fieldwork in Africa. He quietly took in the banter while making a dent in his second pint. Finally, he seized on an opening and said, “I read about you and your Suffolk treasure hoard, Malory. You’re an interesting bloke. Do you mind telling me why you want to know about vanishing lakes?”
Arthur was uncomfortable being evasive but Tony jumped to the rescue. “We could tell you, Jim, but then you’d have to disappear for a very long time. Would that be all right with your missus?”
Mawby laughed. “I expect she would be forever in your service. Okay, understood. Need to know and all that. I won’t pry. Keep feeding me pints of best bitter and I’ll behave. Want me to dive in, if you’ll excuse the pun?”
“Please do,” Arthur said.
“Lakes disappear for a host of reasons. Sometimes it can happen in the blink of an eye, sometimes over eons. The most common scenario is when sediments get deposited and the lake gradually turns into a swamp or a marsh. Then peat forms and the zone becomes a fen. In the last stages trees start growing, turning the wetland into a forest.”
“This can happen in five hundred years?” Arthur asked.
“That would certainly be on the quick side. More like thousands of years. Now some lakes disappear seasonably but these so-called ephemeral lakes usually are in very dry places like Death Valley so they’re not relevant here. Very rarely a lake can disappear in a matter of minutes. This happened only recently in 2005 in Russia when Lake Beloye vanished like magic. We think there was a seismic shift in the soil underneath the lake, allowing it to drain through channels leading to the Oka River.”
“So that’s a possibility here?” Claire asked.
“Possible but not very likely. There’s no historical record of something like this happening in Warwickshire over the last five hundred years and no cartographic indication I could find that there were ever lakes in Leamington Hastings, Stretton-on-Fosse, or Stoneleigh. Just to be complete there’s also the phenomenon of so-called murdered lakes where feeding rivers are diverted by man for irrigation and the lakes are starved of water. But this also isn’t relevant to Europe.”
“So we’re left with nothing?” Tony asked. “Good beer money down the drain?”
“My alimentary canal is hardly the drain,” Mawby huffed. “But one other thought. Must your elusive body of water be a lake? Could it not be a river?”
Arthur shook his head. “The historical document we’re chasing up clearly states a lake.”
“Sometimes rivers can bulge out quite dramatically and these sections can appear very much like lakes. The wider the bulge the harder it is to appreciate the current.”
Arthur pushed out his lower lip. “Stoneleigh has the River Avon running through it but we didn’t see any bulging bits on the maps. It looks like an ordinary not-so-wide country river.”
“Ah,” Mawby said, pausing to gulp some more bitter. “I may be earning my beer after all. Look here.” He pulled a satellite map from his bag and pointed to a stretch of the Avon where the river forked around an island. “This land mass in the center of these diverging and converging branches of the river near the old Stoneleigh Abbey: it’s called a river island. I won’t bore you with the hydraulics behind it but suffice it to say that channel geometry, fluid mechanics, sediment transport all play a role. I think that this river island could well have formed in the span of hundreds of years. No problem with that. Now for a moment, imagine it wasn’t there. The bulge would be a good one hundred meters wide and five hundred meters long at this point. It would appear very much like a small lake. Well, anyway, that’s the best I can do for you. Hope it helps.” He looked at his watch. “I’m not lecturing for another hour and a half. Fetch me another pint, would you, Tony?”
When the four of them left the pub a man was watching from a nearby bus kiosk. Griggs pulled his cap over his eyes and stubbed out a cigarette. He had to decide which pair to follow when they parted company and in the end he took a few discrete photos of Ferro and Mawby with his mobile phone and set off after Arthur and Claire.
“Well?” Claire asked, placing her hand into Arthur’s.
“Can you stay another day?”
“Okay,” she said after a pause lasting only a second but seemed much longer. “Yes.”
“What do you say we visit Stoneleigh?” He squeezed her hand. “A relative of mine may have left something there for me.”
17
England, 1471
Thomas Malory was old and broken. The years of cold and damp had ground him down. When he awoke, shivering under his blanket, his knees and hips were as stiff as planks and rising from his bed to use the chamber pot was achingly slow and painful. As simple an act as grasping a cup was difficult until the morning stiffness ebbed and his joints regained a tolerable fluidity.
Twenty years in and out of prison! Twenty years o
f the exultations of being granted bail or release and the despairs of rearrest and remandment.
Marshalsea Prison, Colchester Gaol, the Tower of London, Ludgate, Newgate—Malory, abandoned and without further resource, was resigned to serving at His Majesty’s pleasure in his worst hellholes, all the while dreaming of his comfortable life at Newbold Revel, lost.
Where was the justice?
A knight of the realm had been cast into a sea of iniquity like a piece of flotsam—over false accusations. Common theft? Rape? The idea that a man who had served his king on the field of battle as a knight, a man who immersed himself in the chivalric virtues, who was a descendant of Arthur, King of the Britons—that this man would have committed these ignoble acts beggared belief. Yet the charges, kept alive by powerful enemies who stirred the pot of a corrupt judicial system, were enough to keep Malory in captivity when most men of his age and station were whiling away their time drinking by the fire with hunting dogs dozing at their feet.
During his first decade of captivity Malory had at least kept up hope that his plight would end soon when King Henry came to his rescue. But Henry had other matters weighing heavily on him. His ambitions to end England’s interminable war with France had produced a schism among his lords and created a formidable rival out of the powerful duke of York. When the king slipped into a catatonic melancholia after being cuckolded by his pretty French wife, York rushed into the void and seized the reins of power from the House of Lancaster. Though the king eventually would regain his senses, two decades of teeter-tottering clashes between the House of Lancaster and House of York wreaked havoc on the land, occupying the full attention of the crown and marginalizing the travails of one poor imprisoned knight.
All the while Malory pickled in his juices, shuttling from court to court and prison to prison, some bleak, some like Marshalsea, at least hospitable. Sometimes months would pass, sometimes a year or more before Buckingham would make an appearance. His offer was always the same.