The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  ‘Far from it,’ Morgan responded. ‘Out here he was really able to indulge his passion, to do something he might never have been able to get away with in Edwardian England. In the 1890s, when he was a student of architecture, people were beginning to realize just how beautiful the country villas of Roman Britain were, places that were first being properly excavated at that time.’

  ‘It took a moment, but then I recognized it,’ Jack said. ‘One of my favourite Roman sites, Chedworth villa in Gloucestershire. Even the setting’s similar, a bit damper there maybe.’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ Morgan said. ‘And the setting was crucial to him. The great houses of Roman Italy were enclosed places, inward-looking, cut off from the natural world. Think the Getty Villa, the Villa of the Papyri. There’s a magnificent view to be had outside, but the peristyle courtyard excludes it, encloses you in its own order. And instead of windows on the outside world, you’ve got those wall paintings showing fanciful scenes of gardens and landscapes, deliberately unreal, mythical. The whole place represents control over nature.’

  ‘Or lack of control,’ Jack said.

  ‘Or denial,’ Costas said. ‘More comforting to paint Vesuvius on your villa wall as some kind of Dionysian reverie than to look out of the window and see a reality you could never hope to control.’

  ‘In Roman Britain, something different was going on,’ Morgan continued. ‘The Britons, the Celtic tribespeople, worshipped in forest glades, and seem to have had no temples. They were attuned to nature, saw themselves as part of it. Nature wasn’t something to control. So when the Celtic elite wanted villas in the Roman fashion, they built them as part of the landscape, not excluded from it. That’s what Everett wanted to do here. Instead of a peristyle courtyard, there’s a single long corridored structure extending along the head of the valley to the south, the nuns’ dormitory, just like the west range at Chedworth. It fits beautifully into the contours and the colours of the landscape, becomes part of it. That was Everett’s vision.’

  ‘He must have relished the challenge,’ Jack said. ‘Getty could call on architects and builders from all over the world for his villa, whereas Everett had only himself. And yet Everett finished this place decades before the Getty Villa was opened.’

  ‘And the Getty Villa was a public spectacle, a benefaction to the world, whereas this place is about as secret as you can get,’ Morgan added. ‘The constitution of the nunnery forbids outsiders from going beyond the entrance vestibule, or from having any direct contact with the nuns. It’s a huge privilege for us to be allowed this far.’

  ‘Can we look inside the vestibule?’ Jack said.

  ‘That’s why I brought you here.’

  Morgan led them on to a patio of irregular flagstones towards a simple, unassuming doorway, surrounded by upright slabs and capped by a lintel in the local yellow-brown sandstone Jack had seen on the terrace. The door was made from chiselled planks of hardwood that looked like walnut, and was slightly ajar, pivoting inwards. Morgan pushed it further in, then stood back and pointed at the floor. ‘First, look at the threshold.’

  They stared down. In front of them was a black-and-white floor mosaic, made of irregular, crudely cut cubes, tesserae, polished smooth. It was about three feet across and filled the entranceway, half in and half out. The black cubes formed a pattern of letters. Jack had seen a threshold like this before, a black-and-white mosaic in a doorway at Pompeii bearing the Latin words CAVE CANEM, BEWARE OF THE DOG. But this one was different. The letters had been arranged in a square, and the message had no obvious meaning. Each line constituted a word:

  ROTAS

  OPERA

  TENET

  AREPO

  SATOR

  Jack stared for a moment, and then it clicked. ‘It’s Latin. “Arepo, the sower, holds the wheels carefully.”’

  ‘Some kind of code?’ Costas said.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Jeremy murmured. He quickly took out a notebook and pencil from his pocket and scribbled down some words, then ripped out the sheet and handed it to Costas. ‘It’s a word square, a puzzle. Rearrange the letters and this is what you get.’ Costas held up the paper so Jack and Morgan could see it too:

  Costas whistled. ‘Clever.’

  ‘But not Everett’s idea,’ Jack said. ‘It’s ancient Roman, found scratched on an amphora sherd in Britain.’

  ‘That sounds familiar,’ Costas said. ‘Ever since the graffiti of St Paul from our shipwreck off Sicily, I’m beginning to look at humble old pots in a whole new light.’ He took a step forward and peered into the vestibule. ‘And speaking of which, that looks familiar too. I think I see a chi-rho symbol.’

  ‘Two of them, in fact,’ Morgan said. ‘One on the floor, one on the wall.’

  They filed inside. The room was simple, austere, in keeping with the exterior of the villa, the plastered walls painted matt red in the Roman fashion. There were no windows, but instead a series of apertures just below the ceiling artfully designed to let shafts of light fall on the middle of the floor and on the wall opposite the entranceway, on the centrepieces of the two decorations in the room. The floor decoration was another mosaic, but this time polychrome. It covered almost the entire width of the room, perhaps eight feet across. The tesserae were each about half an inch square and the palette was limited, no more than half a dozen colours. The mosaic was executed in a bold, linear style with stark images and little subtlety of shading. A series of concentric circles advanced inwards, abstract patterns of tendrils, meanders and scrolls divided by bands of white. In the centre was the image that Costas had seen, a chi-rho monogram inside a medallion about two feet across, surmounted by the head and torso of a human figure. The chi-rho symbol appeared behind the head, as if it were a halo.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ Jack murmured. ‘Hinton St Mary, in Dorset. It’s almost identical to the famous mosaic.’

  ‘Another British villa?’ Costas asked.

  Jack nodded absently, then squatted down, absorbed in the detail. ‘The Hinton St Mary mosaic wasn’t excavated until the 1960s, but the medallion design was probably replicated by the Roman mosaicist and Everett must have known of it from somewhere else. He’s even used the same materials,’ he murmured. ‘Brick for red, limestone for white, sandstone for yellow, shale for grey. He had access to plenty of other colours around here, quartzes, greens and blues, the colours you see in the Getty Villa mosaics, but he stuck to a British palette.’

  ‘I take it that’s Christ?’ Costas said.

  ‘Good question,’ Morgan replied.

  Jack got up. ‘I didn’t think there was any dispute,’ he said. ‘Pretty standard fourth-century representation. Clean shaven, square faced, long hair, wearing something like a Roman toga. It was pure fantasy, of course. Nobody knew what he looked like. This could as easily have been an image of the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great, or one of his successors. In fact, the emperors might not have discouraged the confusion of their images with Christ.’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ Morgan said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, some of the early Christians in Britain seem to have distanced themselves from the Roman Church, to have seen themselves as part of another tradition that drew strength from their own pagan ancestry. You have to ask yourself whether the owner of that villa at Hinton St Mary would have wanted an image of Christ so similar to the image of the emperor on the coins in his purse. And the educated British elite of the late Roman period would have known what people from Judaea looked like. The idea that Jesus should have been clean shaven, almost cherubic, is preposterous. He was a fisherman and carpenter from the sun-scorched Sea of Galilee. But look again. The long hair, those almond eyes, that cloak that might be a toga, might be a gown. Forget about the identification. What does that image say to you?’

  ‘It’s a woman!’ Costas exclaimed.

  Morgan nodded. ‘For the earliest British Christians, then for later followers of Pelagius like Everett, Jesus’ companio
n Mary was a powerful part of the story. Not for the Pelagians were the androgynous images you see in some late Roman art, of Christ seemingly embodying both man and woman. They saw the iconography of Christ in the Roman tradition reduced to a mere decorative motif, as imperial propaganda. For the Pelagians, it was Jesus the man, and Mary the woman. And remember where we are. It’s an appropriate image for a convent of St Mary Magdalene.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Jack murmured.

  ‘And you’ll recognize the painting.’

  Jack looked up from the mosaic to the wall. He saw another chi-rho symbol, painted in black on a light blue background, with the Greek letters alpha and omega on either side. The symbol and the letters were surrounded by a dark blue wreath, and Jack could make out other, smaller Greek letters among vine tendrils swirling decoratively around the flowers and leaves of the wreath. Below the symbol was a small cross with ornate finials in the Armenian tradition, and below that the Latin words Domine Iumius.

  ‘“Lord, we come”,’ Jack translated. ‘Apart from that inscription and the Armenian cross, it’s a version of another famous mosaic, from Lullingstone in Kent,’ he said. ‘Everett really had a thing for Romano-British villas, didn’t he?’

  Morgan nodded. ‘It’s not just these images we’re meant to be looking at, it’s the setting. Everett wanted us to see art like this in its original context, just as Getty did. And whereas Getty was inspired by Herculaneum, Everett was fuelled by the archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century in England, a rediscovery of the Romano-British and early Christianity which had excited him as a young man. He realized that early Christian worship in Britain had taken place in private houses, in villas, probably much as it had done in Herculaneum. Everett called this room the scholarium, the learning place. Not a church, not a chapel, but a learning place. A place where people could gather and read the Gospels. A place which had no pulpit, no special place for preachers or priests.’

  ‘A place where he might have envisaged one day revealing his great secret,’ Costas said.

  Jeremy had been pensive, but now spoke quietly. ‘It shows the absurdity of those centuries of conflict between the different denominations, Rome and the Pelagians, Catholic and Protestant. Here, in this Catholic convent in the California hills, he found a place where he could express his convictions with total freedom, create a place where he could get closer to Jesus and his teachings than anywhere before.’

  Jack looked around, nodding slowly. Over the years he had learned to accept his own instincts about art, to trust his own sensibility and not force himself to find beauty out of obligation. This place felt familiar to him, somehow touched his own past. The relationship with nature, the choice of colours, the use of light and shade, reflected a particular adjustment to the world that seemed to gel with Jack’s own, with the landscapes of his ancestry. But there was more to it than that. Moving from the great monuments of Christianity, from St Peter’s in Rome and St Paul’s in London, to the intimacy of this place, Jack had begun to sense that he was looking at two different versions of truth, of beauty. He looked again at the face in the mosaic, and thought of Jesus the man, Mary the woman. So much Christian tradition had been wrapped up in high art, creating images that were awesome, remote, unattainable. Yet there was another beauty, one crudely fashioned, perhaps, but with a power wrought through intimacy with men and women themselves, not a creation of idealized forms. Being here today had helped Jack to crystallize these feelings, and to navigate a mystery that was becoming more complex and fascinating the more they delved into it.

  Jack snapped out of his reverie, took a deep breath, and looked hard at the mosaic and the painting. ‘Come on,’ he murmured.

  ‘What is it?’ Costas said.

  ‘It’s got to be here somewhere,’ Jack said. ‘If Everett left any kind of clue, it’s got to be embedded in these images.’

  Jeremy walked up to the wall, and peered at the painted wreath that surrounded the chi-rho symbol. ‘Is this an exact copy?’ he asked.

  ‘He did make some changes,’ Morgan said. ‘Those pinnate leaves are walnut and the flowers are orchids, which he loved. He added the Greek letters too. I checked them all after I first came here, tried to match them with every known Christian acrostic, but came up with nothing. I’ve had to conclude they were purely decorative.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like Everett,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘No, it doesn’t, but I’ve tried everything.’

  Jeremy stood back, and looked all round the room. ‘What’s the chronology of this place?’ he said. ‘I mean, do we know when he did these decorations?’

  ‘I was able to speak to the Mother Superior, through an intermediary,’ Morgan said. ‘She’d been a young nun here when Everett was dying, and had nursed him in his shack during his final months. Apparently he’d finished building this part of the convent before the First World War, within two years of arriving in America. He seems to have worked with extraordinary fervour, as if he needed to justify the decision he’d made to leave his family and sacrifice his career.’

  ‘And the decoration?’

  ‘He finished the mosaics then too, including the word square at the entrance. But the wall painting he did when he returned from the war. When the Mother Superior was young, some of the older nuns remembered it. Everett had returned a changed man, withdrawn and troubled. Physically he was weakened, his lungs permanently damaged. He virtually locked himself in this room, for months on end. They had no notion of what he’d gone through. How could they? Southern California was a long way away from the hell of a gas attack. But you can see it in that painting. His version of the chi-rho is stark, jagged, pitch black, as if it’s been blasted by fire. It’s like those black-and-white photographs of towns on the western front, Ypres, Passchendaele, Loos, where he was wounded, utter desolation with only a few shattered fragments standing, like a bleak image of the hill of Golgotha, the empty crosses of the crucifixion blackened and warped by fire.’

  Jeremy walked up to the wall painting, and traced his finger over the wreath. ‘I count twenty-five letters altogether, all Greek,’ he murmured. ‘No obvious order, no rationale. They don’t seem to read anything, forward or backward.’

  ‘I told you I’d tried that route,’ Morgan said. ‘Didn’t get anywhere. The only legible inscription is those words Domine Iumius at the bottom, below the Armenian cross. That doesn’t get us anywhere either.’

  ‘He was a brilliant mathematician,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘He loved puzzles, word games. You can see it in that word square at the door. Then he goes to war, comes back and does this painting, adding these letters to his copy of the Roman original. Why? What had happened to him?’ Jeremy stared at the wall, pressing on it with one hand and tapping his fingers, then suddenly turned and looked at Morgan. ‘Remind me, 1917. You said he came back here. You mean to the convent, where we are now?’

  Morgan nodded. ‘After America had entered the war, after he’d been involved in decrypting the Zimmerman telegram. He and William Montgomery came here to California, to this place.’

  ‘Cryptographers,’ Costas said, his eyes narrowing. ‘Codebreakers.’

  ‘That’s it. I’ve got it.’ Jeremy bounded over to the bag he had left by the door, and pulled out a battered notebook. ‘Remember this, Jack? It’s what I was reading on the plane. I had a hunch it might come in useful.’ He flipped it open, thumbed through it and stopped at a page. ‘When I was at school, I transcribed the entire Zimmerman code,’ he said excitedly. ‘That’s what happened to Everett during the war. He’d been shell-shocked, wounded, but he’d also become a codebreaker. That’s the key. He returns here during the war, and wants to leave a clue, just as Claudius did two thousand years before. He’s immersed in codes, and he’s got the Zimmerman code running though his head. He lets Montgomery in on his secret. It’s the only reason I can imagine he brought Montgomery to this place, in the middle of the war when they must have had precious little time. Maybe they devised a code i
n this very room. Maybe the ancient document, the gospel, was somewhere here, concealed by Everett in this room while he was building it before the war, and maybe they planned a permanent hiding place for it when they were here together.’ He paused, and peered at Morgan. ‘You’re right. These letters don’t fit any ancient acrostic. But I don’t think they’re purely decorative. I think they’re a First World War code.’

  ‘Keep talking,’ Jack said.

  ‘The Zimmerman code was numerical, right?’ Jeremy flipped to another page. ‘The telegram looked like any other except instead of letters there were numbers, arranged in clusters like words. The problem was assigning values to the numbers, equating them to a letter or a syllable or a word. The breakthrough was the secret codebook acquired from a German agent in the Middle East.’

  ‘I think I’m with you,’ Costas murmured. ‘What about giving the Greek letters on the painting a numerical equivalent?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I thought.’ Jeremy rummaged for the pencil in his pocket, opened a fresh page and began copying down the Greek letters in sequence as they appeared on the painting, clockwise from the top where the two arms of the painted wreath nearly joined. He then jotted down the Greek alphabet from alpha to omega with the numbers one to twenty-four alongside, and transferred those numerical values to the sequence of letters from the painting, beginning with the first letter from the painting, delta, and the number 4. ‘Okay. I’ve got it.’ They crowded round, and he held the notebook up in a shaft of light. They could see the Greek letters with their numerical value below:

  Δ P Z T Ε Φ Ψ H Ω Θ H M Δ Θ I Π Ω A Ε N Λ O Π B T

  4 17 6 19 14 21 23 6 24 8 6 12 4 8 9 16 24 1 14 13 11 15 16 2 19

  ‘Okay. It’s pure guesswork, but if I’m right there will be clusters in those numbers identical to clusters in the German codebook, and then we’re in business.’ Jeremy bounded back to his bag, pulled out a palm-sized computer and activated it, squatting down on one knee. ‘When I first became interested in the Zimmerman code, I decided to see how modern computer technology could have aided the decryption,’ he said.