“I’ll probably be sitting here as frustrated as ever,” said Arthur.
“I doubt that,” said Bethany. “You’ll have broken it by then.” And with that she was off, leaving Arthur to return to his attempts at deciphering the manuscript. As he leaned over the pages, a cloud passed in front of the sun and the room dimmed. Appropriate, thought Arthur, and he set to work.
—
Five hours later, with no progress made, he decided to give Bethany’s strategy of walking away from the problem a try. He pushed back his chair and thought of her, in the brightness of that spring afternoon, adding her own sunshine to the ancient sites. Arthur could remember the excitement of his own first pilgrimage to Glastonbury. He had been sixteen, and it had been his first trip away from home by himself. Glastonbury was steeped in Arthurian lore and Arthur had explored every inch of it. He had climbed the great rolling green hill at the edge of town where Joseph of Arimathea was said to have placed his staff in the ground, where it rooted into the Glastonbury Thorn. At the time, a descendant of the original thorn still grew there, but in 2010 some ruffian had cut it down. He had walked the path to the top of the Glastonbury Tor, the strange-looking hill that some claimed was the legendary Isle of Avalon. He had soaked his feet in the frigid waters of Chalice Well, the spring that gushed forth from the spot where the Holy Grail was supposedly buried. And he had stood in the ruins of what had once been one of England’s largest and wealthiest monasteries. Although he moved among other tourists, with whom he presumably shared his fascination with the Grail, Arthur kept to himself, for he had, he believed, a secret. But to all those around him who snapped pictures of the tor and the thorn and the ruins and the marker indicating the supposed gravesite of Arthur and Guinevere, and especially to those who sought the Grail at Chalice Well, he did not speak the words, “It isn’t here; it’s in Barchester.”
—
Sunday proved no more beneficial for Arthur’s future as a code breaker than Saturday had been. He worked away at the manuscript for a few hours in the afternoon but made no headway, and finally gave up and went downstairs to read Wodehouse under the yew tree in the cloister. On such a sunny, blue-sky day with the heights of Barchester Cathedral towering above him and his favorite author in hand, not even clever medieval monks could dampen Arthur’s spirits.
—
“I say, Peabody, do you know much about ciphers?”
It was the first time Arthur had ever been in the maths building at Barchester University and he was impressed that it was even uglier and more sterile than the humanities building. Arthur knew Peabody only from the Advisory Committee for the Library, but on the basis of this meager acquaintance, he thought he might solicit a little help with the coded manuscript.
“Prescott, is it? From the library committee? I quite liked that Jeeves book.”
“Did you?” said Arthur. “I’m pleased to hear it.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Well,” said Arthur, stepping into Peabody’s cluttered office, “I’m trying to decipher a coded passage from a late medieval British manuscript.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” said Peabody. “Anything from that period in Britain is probably a simple substitution cipher—quite easy to decrypt.”
“Yes, well I’ve used frequency analysis and gotten nowhere and I don’t think it’s a polyalphabetic cipher or a transposition cipher.”
“My, my,” said Peabody, pushing back his chair and propping his feet on a mass of papers that obscured his desktop. “You know a little something about ciphers yourself, I see.”
“Only what can be learned in a couple of days,” said Arthur.
“My great-aunt was at Bletchley during the war, you know,” said Peabody. “She never talked about it. Official Secrets Act meant they all had to stay mum for fifty years and she died after forty-six.”
“So you’ve no other suggestions for breaking a medieval cipher?” said Arthur.
“Enigma—that was a cipher,” said Peabody, lost in his thoughts. “In a way, it was a simple polyalphabetic substitution cipher—each letter substituted by another letter. But it was as if the key word and the order of the alphabet changed with every character entered into the machine. Positively brilliant.”
“Indeed,” said Arthur. “But back to the subject of medieval ciphers.”
“I’m afraid if you’ve tried frequency analysis and checked for transposition you’ve reached the end of my knowledge. But I’m sure it’s got to be either simple substitution or transposition. Unless you’ve got the date wrong. It could be polyalphabetic, but even a late medieval version of that is fairly easy to break. I could take a look at it, but I doubt I’ll see anything you haven’t.”
“If it keeps giving me trouble, perhaps I’ll bring it by,” said Arthur, but he was already worried that consulting Peabody had been a bad idea. The last thing he wanted was for word to spread around town that he was trying to break a medieval cipher. The precentor knew everyone in Barchester, it seemed, and Arthur had no wish to arouse the salmon’s suspicion. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this confidential,” he said.
“I’ll have forgotten all about it by the time you’re halfway down the hall,” said Peabody, and Arthur suspected this was true.
—
Arthur sat in his usual pew waiting for Evensong to begin, still troubled by the cipher. Bethany’s attendance at Evensong had been fairly regular over the past few weeks, and he missed her presence beside him. He supposed she had spent an extra day in Wells. He never spoke to her before the service, but afterward they always sat together listening to the organ postlude. Sometimes she rushed off without so much as a “See you later, Arthur,” but often they sat for a few minutes after the quire had emptied and talked about the music or the weather or nothing in particular. But today he sat alone and almost didn’t notice the service, so cluttered was his mind with alphabets and substitutions and transpositions. He stood for the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis only because his body was programmed to do so.
Something Peabody had said kept running through his head—that Enigma was like a substitution cipher in which the key word and the order of the alphabet changed with every character. Arthur understood just enough about substitution ciphers to know what he meant. In the case of a simple substitution cipher, all one needed to decode a passage was the key word. But what if the key word was constantly changing? Then frequency analysis wouldn’t work, because every time the key word changed, the frequency of each letter would change. But if Arthur couldn’t figure out one key word, how could he figure out scores or even hundreds of them?
He had no idea how long he had been sitting in the pew after the postlude, trying to think what he was missing. The slamming of a door in the north transept finally brought him back to reality, and when he stood to go, the service bulletin fluttered to the floor. Arthur stooped to pick it up and read, at the bottom of the page, the words “Psalms XXII–XXIII.” He was sorry he hadn’t paid attention—he had always liked the Twenty-third psalm. “The Lord is my shepherd,” he repeated softly, “therefore can I lack nothing.”
And he solved it.
—
Arthur took the steps to the library two at a time and arrived breathless on the landing to see the door ajar. Bethany stood at the far end of the library. She was not busily moving books from the real world into the digital world; she was simply standing.
“Good weekend?” Arthur called out when he had caught his breath, but she only stood there, arms slack at her side, a cell phone cradled in one palm. Only when Arthur had covered more than half the distance between them did he realize she was sobbing. Not gently tearing up like someone who has read a particularly moving passage of Dickens or watched an advertisement for greeting cards, but honest to God, eyes red, cheeks wet, nose dripping, shoulders shaking sobbing, like someone who had lost a spouse.
“Be
thany, what is it?” said Arthur. He knew almost nothing of her home life, he suddenly realized, but he couldn’t imagine anything less than the death of her mother could bring on such a reaction.
“I was just talking to her yesterday,” said Bethany in between gasps for air. “She was fine. She was home. Oh, Arthur,” and without warning she ran to him and threw her arms around him and began sobbing even harder, if such a thing was possible, on his shoulder. Arthur hadn’t the slightest idea how to react. He tried patting her on the back, but she only squeezed him tighter, so finally he put his arms around her and squeezed back. They stood that way for what seemed an awkward eternity to Arthur. He felt his foot go numb, but thought it impolite to shift his weight—as if this might betray his impatience—so he stood as still as he could until at last he felt Bethany’s shaking abate and her sobs turn to sniffles. Only then did she slacken her grip and slowly step back from the embrace. In the space of a few seconds she looked at him with agony, then puzzlement, then sympathy.
“Oh, Arthur, you haven’t heard, have you?”
“Heard what?” he said. Was it Gwyn? Had something happened to Gwyn?
“Evelyn.”
“Evelyn?” Arthur racked his mind for any mutual acquaintance named Evelyn.
“Oscar’s mother, Mrs. Dimsdale, Evelyn. She . . . she died.”
“Oscar’s mother died?” Arthur’s first reaction was a spasm of guilt—he had promised to go visit Mrs. Dimsdale and he hadn’t done it, and now it was too late. And of course he was sorry for Oscar. But Mrs. Dimsdale had been in her eighties and Bethany could hardly have known her well. Arthur couldn’t imagine the reason for such an emotional outburst.
“I didn’t see her today. I could have gone to see her but she was out of the hospital and Oscar said she was doing fine, so I said I’d stop by tomorrow afternoon. I never thought . . .”
“What . . . what happened?” said Arthur.
“Heart attack maybe,” said Bethany. “My train was late and I was going to sneak in for the end of Evensong and then Oscar called and said . . . said she took a nap this afternoon and just didn’t . . . didn’t wake up.”
“How’s Oscar?” said Arthur.
“Oh, you know Oscar,” said Bethany. And Arthur suddenly realized that he didn’t. He knew Oscar’s taste in books and what Oscar did for the cathedral, but he had no idea how Oscar would react to his mother’s death.
“He’s putting on a brave face,” Bethany continued. “But he’s crushed. He lived with her almost his whole life. I just hate to think—”
“We’d better go . . . I don’t know, go be with him,” said Arthur. What did one do for a friend whose mother had died, he wondered. Some sort of action was required, but what? He had no idea, but he felt certain Bethany would know.
“Right,” said Bethany, drawing a sleeve over her eyes and taking in a deep breath. “I suppose you boys will all put on a British stiff upper lip or whatever, so I’ll do my best, too, for Oscar’s sake. He’ll need help with . . . well, probably with everything. You’re right, the first thing is just to go be with him.”
—
The next few days passed in a blur as David, Arthur, and Bethany, along with Gwyn when she could spare the time, helped Oscar deal with everything from solicitors to funeral arrangements. Bethany was right, Oscar was both stoic and devastated. His mother, Arthur discovered he was the last to know, had been a lover of church music, just like Arthur. She had been mostly a Sunday morning churchgoer in her later years, which was why Arthur had so rarely seen her at the cathedral, but she had a huge collection of LPs of choral and organ music. It was an interest Arthur could have shared if he had bothered to get to know her. Now he could only help transport boxes of records and the turntable that would play them to the choir room at the cathedral. Evelyn had made arrangements long ago with the precentor and the choirmaster to donate her collection to the music program.
She had also left instructions for her funeral that kept both the precentor and the choirmaster busy. She wanted a full Funeral Mass, with the settings for the service music taken from John Rutter’s Requiem. The precentor, who liked nothing more than services full of high ceremony and beautiful music, was in his element and, Arthur noticed, wonderfully solicitous of Oscar. He didn’t seem fishy at all.
On Saturday afternoon, Arthur marveled to see the cavernous nave of the cathedral nearly half full of mourners. If he had not really known Evelyn Dimsdale, hundreds of people in Barchester apparently had. The altar used for Sunday morning worship had been set up in the crossing, and the instrumentalists were already seated on either side when Arthur and Bethany walked with Oscar down the aisle and slipped into the front, reserved pew. David was waiting for them there. Oscar had no siblings, and though two of his cousins sat in the pew behind them, he was adamant that he wanted his closest Barchester friends sitting with him. Apparently, thought Arthur in amazement, that included Bethany.
The choir filed in quietly and took their place behind the altar. The soft sounds of the congregation, the whispers and the shuffling of service bulletins, faded to naught and for a moment Arthur experienced the almost mystical feeling of being a part of a group of five hundred people sitting in absolute silence. And then the “Requiem Aeternam” began, its low, growling opening notes building to the soft, birdlike lux perpetua and then fading away into almost nothing before blooming into the beautifully melodic theme of the composition. Arthur had heard this piece scores of times, both in concert and in recordings, but it had never held such power, such reality, as it did now. This was more than just music, he thought, this was the full realization of the composition: This was a requiem. And, he thought, if this is what it sounds like to be welcomed into heaven, it might be a rather nice place.
When the time came, late in the service, to take Communion, Arthur was torn. He did not think it right, as a nonbeliever, to partake of the elements, but he did not wish to offend Oscar by sitting alone in the pew while the others made the walk up to the altar rail. He knew he could go to the rail and simply receive a blessing—and that wouldn’t be so bad, he supposed. So he stood and made his way to the altar, with Oscar in front of him and Bethany and David behind him. As he knelt next to his friend, Arthur felt a surge of sympathy. He rarely talked to his own parents—they had finally divorced when he was at university and each was remarried to someone whom Arthur quietly despised. The rift between himself and his parents had been gradual, but it seemed, as he crossed his hands over his chest, that he would never kneel at an altar rail in silent grief for either of them. He realized, as the precentor stopped in front of him and whispered a blessing, that his sympathy for Oscar’s loss was tinged with jealousy for what his friend had had. As they walked back toward their pew, Arthur laid a hand on Oscar’s shoulder. Oscar turned to him and wrapped him in a tight embrace that lasted several seconds. Other members of the congregation waited politely in the aisle as Oscar clung to Arthur and Arthur wondered if he was simply the closest person to a grieving man, or if Oscar felt something . . . something for him that he did not feel for anyone else. Finally Oscar let go, giving Arthur one last squeeze on the shoulder and a grim smile that seemed to say, “Life has ended, and life goes on.”
As soon as Oscar was seated in the pew, the choir began the “Pie Jesu.” It was Arthur’s favorite piece in the Requiem, sung for the most part by a single soprano choirboy—a pure and innocent tone that put Arthur in mind of Wordsworth’s idea that children should be seen as fresh from the hands of God. The music shifted from major to minor for a few bars and then back to major as the soprano struck and held a high A-flat, a note of such soaring splendor it did not seem human. Arthur couldn’t help but smile, and he turned to look at Bethany and saw that she was crying—not with grief, he thought from the look on her face, but from the sheer beauty of the music.
He held out his hand toward her, not sure what he should do to comfort her—certainly not a p
at on the knee, perhaps a squeeze on the arm. As his hand wavered in the space between them she grasped it with a grip of iron and turned toward him for just an instant. She looked into his eyes, her own rimmed with tears, and then turned back toward the music, not relaxing the grip on his hand the slightest bit—and in that instant Arthur had a stunning revelation. He loved Bethany, was in love with Bethany. Arthur Prescott was fully, neck deep in the mulligatawny in love with Bethany Davis—with much too young for him, much too American for him, much too digital and combative and beautiful and good for him Bethany Davis. As the choir gently underscored the soloist, he realized there were only two possible paths stretching before him—that he would spend the rest of his life listening to her maddening conversational digressions and arguing with her over everything, or that he would spend the rest of his life without her. Both seemed unbearable.
He felt in that moment that he would do anything she asked. If she leaned over and said, “Arthur, we’re going to find the Holy Grail,” then by God he would go and find the damn thing. And if she said they needed to digitize it to render the original superfluous, he would hold it still while she did the deed.
The soprano sang the final high A with an exquisiteness that seemed impossible, and the note hung in the air long after the choirmaster had given his cutoff. Bethany wasn’t crying anymore. But she was smiling, and she was still holding his hand. I, thought Arthur, am in serious trouble.
The Lost Book of the Grail Page 26
