“Look at that,” said Oscar.
“Be my strong rock, a castle to keep me safe,” said Arthur quietly, looking at the unfinished verse.
“Your Latin is impressive,” said Bethany.
“It’s from Compline,” said Arthur. “We sing that verse every night.”
“I think we found your coded manuscript,” said Bethany.
“Damn,” said David again, in an entirely different tone. “I thought this was all just a lark, but . . .”
“But the precentor really was hiding something,” said Oscar.
“We should return it,” said Bethany.
“Are you crazy?” said Arthur, pulling the manuscript back from her and staring at the mysterious groups of letters. His pulse rate soared as he considered what this might be—no one would take the trouble to encode psalms. A code meant a secret and a secret meant something worth keeping secret. Something like the Holy Grail. “There is no way in hell we’re giving this back.”
“If it’s as important as you want it to be,” said Bethany, “then it won’t take the precentor long to discover it’s missing, no matter how good a job we did tonight.”
“So before we even have a go at cracking the code we just hand it back?” said Arthur.
“Of course not, you nincompoop,” said Bethany, swatting Arthur on the back of the head. “This is the twenty-first century, Arthur. There are”—Bethany flipped through the manuscript until the nonsense syllables returned to the Latin of the Psalms—“thirty-two pages of coded manuscript. I can have those photographed in an hour with a little help. The party will still be going on. I only need ten seconds in the study this time, because I know where the manuscript belongs. Oscar will come with me—you two can’t go back without looking suspicious. Now, Oscar, give me a hand and we can knock out these images in no time.”
Bethany picked up the manuscript and headed across the room to her equipment.
“Was this part of the original plan?” said Arthur to David.
“No idea,” said David, shedding his coat and sliding into Oscar’s desk chair. “But the girl’s got pluck.”
“It wasn’t part of the plan, Arthur,” said Bethany, who was busy flicking switches and focusing lenses, “because we didn’t know the thing was only thirty-two pages. And by the way, just because you’re across the room doesn’t mean I can’t hear you.”
“You see,” said David, propping his feet up on Oscar’s desk. “Pluck!”
XI
THE WEST FAÇADE
The eighty-nine niches on the façade of the cathedral facing the broad green once held statues of saints, including the apostles, St. Mary, and many early martyrs. The number eighty-nine is not a coincidence—this is the number of chapters in the four canonical Gospels. The saints’ statues were pulled down and destroyed at the Reformation, but in the twentieth century, four new statues were erected commemorating martyrs of Barchester: Ewolda, the Saxon founder; Robert Ward, the last prior of St. Ewolda’s Priory; Bishop Babbington; and a fourth figure representing the unnamed clergy who lost their lives during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
November 25, 1558, Barchester Cathedral
Edmund Lufton knew that many of his fellow clergymen criticized him for his failure to take a stand. Edmund, they said, didn’t believe in anything. Edmund simply blew with the wind. But the wind had been blowing in many directions of late, and Edmund had greater worries than the opinions of his colleagues. Immediately upon completing his degree at Oxford he had come to Barsetshire as curate of Puddingdale and risen quickly through the ranks to become a canon of Barchester Cathedral. He had welcomed a new group of clergy into the cathedral when the nearby monastery of St. Ewolda’s had been dissolved and had watched as the king’s commissioners had desecrated Barchester—pulling down statues and destroying Ewolda’s shrine. But Edmund had managed to hold on to his job, and when Edward VI had risen to the throne a few years later, Edmund, like many of his fellow clergymen, had embraced Protestantism. They had seen it coming, and most of those who could not abide it had long ago left for France.
One of those who left, a priest named Thomas Piers, had, before his departure, entrusted Edmund with a great responsibility. It was this burden, and not his lack of any loyalty, that had kept him at Barchester in the years since. For Edward VI had died in 1553, and his Catholic sister Mary had risen to the throne. Mary had reinstated the Catholic Church and it was the Protestants who feared for their lives. Edmund had quietly returned to practicing the Catholic rites, but many had fled Barchester, and Bishop Babbington, who had refused to either leave or recant his Protestant beliefs, had been burned at the stake on the green in front of the cathedral’s west end. It had been a horrible sight—Edmund had known the bishop, had celebrated the Eucharist with him, had even dined with him on occasion. He and the rest of the newly Catholic clergy had been forced to watch the bishop’s grisly death—as a warning, he supposed, to those who might still harbor secret Protestant tendencies.
But Edmund guarded a secret that outweighed the particulars of how he worshipped his God. As long as he could remain at the cathedral, and remain alive, he could do the job God and Father Piers had chosen him to do. And now, only three years after Parliament had made Protestantism a capital crime, Mary was dead and her sister, Elizabeth, queen. The wind seemed to be blowing again, for Elizabeth gave every indication of being a Protestant, and Edmund imagined he would soon be reading once again from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer rather than from the Catholic missal.
He sat in his bedroom in the canons’ lodgings long after and considered all that had happened since he had become Guardian—changes of monarch, changes of worship, and purges of anyone who disagreed with those in power. It had been a dangerous time, and he doubted the danger was past. He had seen fellow canons flee in the night or be pulled from their rooms and murdered in cold blood, all because of the book from which they chose to read their evening prayers. He had seen Catholics burn books deemed “too Protestant” and Protestants burn books deemed “too Catholic.” He counted himself lucky that he had navigated the treacherous waters of the past few years, but what if a future Guardian did not have such fortune? What if a Guardian were to be killed, or even to die of a sudden illness, before passing on the secret of Barchester and its priceless treasure? He knew other Guardians had had the same concern, for one of them had placed a mark on the treasure itself—not giving away its true nature, but providing a hint.
Only the manuscript could tell the whole story, and as it stood, the manuscript could not be completely decoded, even by one who knew the secret of its enciphering. Edmund knew its contents, for Father Piers had taught him, and he would teach them to the next Guardian—if he had the time. But after the turmoil of the past few years, Edmund feared that some Guardian would not have the time. The manuscript, like the treasure, needed to bear a sign, some hint as to its contents and importance. He could not tell the secret outright, but he could leave a clue.
At university, Edmund had landed himself in trouble for defacing the books in the Lazarus College library—not the illuminated manuscripts in the Bodleian or even the illustrated books on natural history or medicine in the college collection; those books he loved just as they were. Edmund’s mind thought in pictures more than in words, so he gravitated toward illustrated volumes. But far too often his studies led him to books with no pictures—theological treatises, histories, and biographical studies. These he often could not resist illustrating himself, and so, when the master of Lazarus discovered in the blank space at the end of each section of an edition of Livy’s History of Rome, miniature portraits that Edmund had foolishly signed, he called him into his study for a severe reprimand. Edmund had promised not to deface any books in the future, but the time had come, he thought, to break that promise.
He trimmed the wick on his candle, opened the manuscript, and began to draw.
May
21, 2016
EVE OF PENTECOST
Arthur went straight to the library after Morning Prayer the following day. While he ought to be spending his weekend reading student essays, he much preferred the prospect of cracking a centuries-old code and reading the secrets contained in the manuscript that now nestled securely back in the precentor’s study. Both the photography and the return of the book had gone off without a hitch, and Bethany had promised a high-resolution printout of the coded pages would be waiting on Arthur’s table Saturday morning.
This turned out not to be the case, for Oscar was studying the printout at his desk, as he had been, he told Arthur, since dawn.
“Well, you’re the maths teacher,” said Arthur. “Have you cracked it yet?”
“When do we reckon this was written?” asked Oscar, pushing his chair back and taking off his reading glasses.
“Judging from the script in the Psalter I would have said early sixteenth century—almost certainly at the time of the Reformation. For a medieval manuscript, it’s young.”
“But for a complex cipher, it’s old,” said Oscar. “Most medieval ciphers are what’s called simple alphabetic substitutions. Each letter of the alphabet is substituted by another letter of the alphabet—so A becomes X, for example, or B becomes W. On the surface, that’s what this looks like, so it should be pretty easy to crack.”
“How do you do it?” said Arthur, settling into a chair across from Oscar.
“Frequency analysis,” said Oscar. “You look for the most frequently recurring letters and try substituting the most common letters in the language that’s been enciphered. In English that would be E, T, A, and O. On the other end, you look for rarely occurring characters and those are likely to represent Q, X, and Z. I’m assuming this text is Latin, but I can’t get anywhere with frequency analysis.”
“Could it be something older than Latin? Saxon?”
“Possibly,” said Oscar, “but that would present a whole different set of cryptographic challenges—this is written in the Roman alphabet; I’m not sure how you would encrypt the Saxon alphabet into Roman. For that you’d need a linguist; I just do maths. But if it’s fifteenth or sixteenth century, it’s almost certainly Latin. Nobody was reading and writing Saxon by then.”
“True,” said Arthur.
“Well,” said Oscar, pushing the pages across the desk to Arthur, “I leave you to it. I have a student to tutor at ten and then it’s back to the hospital to see Mum. There’s a chance they might let her go home later today.”
“I’m afraid I’ll be rubbish at this,” said Arthur. “Maths was never my strong suit.”
“Take this,” said Oscar, handing Arthur a slim paperback. “This isn’t the Enigma code. Anything encoded in the fifteenth century we should be able to break, even if it turns out to be polyalphabetic—but that seems unlikely for Britain.”
“Polyalphabetic?” said Arthur, feeling more confused by the moment.
“It’s all in the book,” said Oscar. “It’s a basic guide to simple ciphers and cryptanalysis. You’ll be an expert by this afternoon.”
“I doubt that,” said Arthur, picking up the book.
“Bonam fortunam!” said Oscar, and he was off.
—
Three hours later Arthur was bleary-eyed with confusion. He had read all about simple substitution ciphers without learning much more than Oscar had already told him. He had pored over the section on polyalphabetic substitution—which worked the same way as simple substitution but used multiple alphabets. This did not come into use in Europe until the sixteenth century, shortly before the time Arthur believed the Barchester manuscript was encoded. He had tried to understand transposition ciphers, which had to do with shifting the positions of the letters according to some regular pattern; none of the patterns suggested by the book yielded any results when applied to the pages of the manuscript. Annoyingly, in the description of each of these types of ciphers, Arthur found phrases such as “quite easy to crack” or “trivial to break.” Arthur was not fond of feeling stupid. He had before him the instructions for decrypting virtually any medieval cipher, and though he was no skilled mathematician, he could certainly follow instructions. But these instructions had produced a total of precisely nil. Once in a while a group of letters would transform itself into a word, but if he tried to apply the rule that had led to that metamorphosis to another group, it yielded gibberish. He had been excited at first by the idea of frequency analysis, because the letters U, Q, and D appeared much more often than any others, but no matter what substitutions he made, the results were always nonsense. Besides, most of the rest of the alphabet seemed pretty evenly distributed, except that letters at the end of the alphabet appeared quite rarely. But this whisper of a pattern didn’t lead him to any results.
He had just slammed the book on ciphers down on the table—not for the first time—when Bethany swept into the room. She wore a bright floral print dress that seemed to waft sunshine into the library.
“Good morning, my fellow conspirator,” she said. “That was an adventure last night, wasn’t it?”
“More of an adventure than I’m used to,” said Arthur. It had taken him hours to get to sleep—he assumed because adrenaline was still coursing through him.
“It’s good for you, old man,” said Bethany. “So how was your morning? Because my morning was amazing. First of all, I decided I’m going to have to start getting more exercise than one gets in manuscript heists if I’m going to eat any more full English breakfasts, and I have to say, I’m a fan. So I took a long walk this morning. Did you know that if you go straight up St. George Street out of town you get to the top of this hill in a mile or so with an amazing view of the whole city? The cathedral looks like a little toy church and the river was a ribbon of sunshine cutting through the meadows. Have you ever been up there?”
“I thought you wanted to know how my morning was,” said Arthur.
“I do,” said Bethany, “but we’re doing mine first.”
“In that case, yes, I’ve been there often. It’s lovely.”
“What are those ruins up the river outside of town?”
“That’s the Priory of St. Ewolda,” said Arthur.
“Of course,” said Bethany.
“I’ll take you there sometime,” said Arthur, pushing the manuscript away and turning his chair around to face Bethany, who had ceased puttering around the room and was now seated. How was it that she could smile like that? he wondered. He hadn’t thought about it before, but she almost always smiled. And it was the sort of smile one couldn’t ignore. He had seen it with the old man in the rest home, and with Oscar and David—Bethany had a way of making other people happy just by her presence. It was remarkable that, with a centuries-old mystery on the table and thousands of rare books and manuscripts surrounding him, what he wanted to do more than anything else at this moment was listen to Bethany natter on about the meaningless minutiae of her morning.
“Anyway, that view was just the first cool thing to happen this morning. I had breakfast with Gwyn, and guess what? She has actually seen the Nanteos Cup.”
Arthur sat up in his seat. “You’re kidding. I can’t believe she never told me, knowing how much I like . . . old things.”
“She didn’t tell you because she knew you wouldn’t believe,” said Bethany. “Remember the story of Mrs. Mirylees, who owned the cup? She didn’t want to have it scientifically tested because she thought people’s belief in the cup was more important that anything tests would prove. The Grail is about faith, Arthur. Anyway, Gwyn grew up in Wales and when she was eight she was riding her bicycle through the village and was hit by a car. She was in a coma for two weeks and apparently her mother knew the woman who owned the cup and she asked if she could have some water from the cup for her daughter. Ten minutes after the water touched Gwyn’s lips, she woke up.”
“Oh, my God,
” said Arthur.
“And Gwyn didn’t know anything about the cup. Anyway, when she got out of the hospital, her mother took her to visit the owner—Gwyn wouldn’t say where—so she could say thank you, and she got to hold the cup, just for a minute. She said she had never felt such power. That’s the moment she knew she was going to be a priest. They didn’t even have female priests in the Church of England at the time, but she knew she was going to be one.”
Arthur stared at Bethany slack-jawed. Could the legends about the Nanteos Cup be true? It was easy to dismiss tales from the nineteenth century; it was much harder to ignore a story from a trusted friend, even if it was a story Gwyn had never shared. Then again, thought Arthur, he had never asked her what inspired her to become a priest.
“Arthur Prescott,” said Bethany, grinning even wider than usual, “is it possible that I have rendered you speechless?”
“Rather,” said Arthur.
“Well, then tell me about your morning.”
“My morning has done little more than provide proof that as a code breaker my career is likely to be short and fruitless.”
“Nothing?” said Bethany.
“Nothing,” said Arthur.
“Why don’t you take a break and come back tomorrow with fresh eyes,” said Bethany. “That’s what I do with crossword puzzles.”
“You solve crossword puzzles?” said Arthur.
“New York Times, every day on my iPad,” said Bethany. “The Friday and Saturday puzzles are the tough ones. But usually if I get stuck and come back to it the next day I can finish right up. It’s a funny thing.”
“Perhaps I will set it aside for a while. Do you fancy grabbing some lunch?”
“Kind of you to ask, Arthur, but first of all, a full English breakfast is enough to keep me going until dinnertime, and second, I am taking the train up to Wells for the weekend. I just popped up here to tell you about my morning. I’m meeting a fellow digitizer and we’re going to Glastonbury to hike up the Tor and see King Arthur’s tomb and the burial spot of the Holy Grail and before you roll your eyes at me and ask me how there can be two Holy Grails and tell me that King Arthur’s tomb was conveniently ‘discovered’ when the monastery was in need of money, I am going to waltz off to the station. So have a lovely weekend, Arthur, and I will see you on Monday.”
The Lost Book of the Grail Page 25
