The Keepers of the Library

by Glenn Cooper

  In the final days of her journey to Yorkshire, upon entering the wild terrain of the dales, her heart had been stirred by a landscape she had thought she would never see again.

  A single lamentable road led into the heart of the dales, but it petered out well short of her farm. Only sheep tracks penetrated deeper into the hills, and sometimes even these faded away and were lost. Clarissa and Adam had persisted, and, with the help of shepherds, they finally found their way to Pinn and the very threshold of Clarissa’s farm.

  Her father had been the first to see her climbing from the back of the cart, ripe with child. He had called for his wife and daughters, and soon, Clarissa was surrounded by joyful, crying women.

  Her flinty father had looked as disgusted as she had ever remembered. “Is this th’ father?” he had asked, pointing disapprovingly at Adam.

  “Heavens no!” Clarissa had cried.

  “Who then?” he had demanded.

  Clarissa had sobbed and delivered the half-true story she had rehearsed in her mind. “It was a monk who done it. He took me by force. I had t’ run away.”

  Adam was supped and his horse fed and watered. He loaded his cart with hay for the return journey and hugged his charge. “You take care of yourself and that baby,” Adam had told her. “He’s had a rough start to life, but that don’t mean he won’t be a big, important man once he’s growed.”

  No sooner had Adam departed than Clarissa’s father began complaining. Now there was one more and in time, two new mouths to feed! And she wouldn’t be able-bodied for a spell. Her return was a pox on the Lightburns!

  When he got so red in the face she feared he might do something terrible, she unrolled her blanket and presented him with the abbot’s silver plate, its rim set with clusters of fine gemstones.

  Her father grasped it, his eyes widening in amazement, and his knees buckled under his own weight. Kneeling, he sobbed, “It’s me purse o’ silver! I don’t know how ya came t’ have this, and I won’t never ask. All I know is that th’ Lightburns are now among the richest families in Cumberland. I welcome ya home, dear daughter, you and your bairn.”

  With a rush of blood and straw-colored fluid, the baby’s head, then its shoulders, cleared her birth canal.

  Her mother held it up for inspection and milked the cord before tying it with a strip of sheep hide.

  Clarissa’s sisters whispered to one another. The baby was curiously placid and noncrying. It had a striking shock of ginger hair and green eyes.

  “It’s a boy, all right,” her mother declared. “Here, take him.”

  Clarissa clutched the slimy infant to her sweaty breast and said, “I knew he was a boy. His name’ll be Adam.”

  Adam grew like a weed and at the age of seven he was tall for his age though spindly. But while his body grew, his mind lagged behind. Two of Clarissa’s sisters were married and producing children at a rapid clip. Adam’s cousins were animated, talkative little brawlers who delighted in taunting the mute boy and shoving him to the ground in an attempt to provoke a response. None was ever forthcoming. No amount of goading could crack the boy’s impenetrable facade. He was branded a dullard, but Clarissa bristled at any slights. “He’s a special boy,” she would say. “You’ll see. He’s my precious, special boy.” But even under her lavish attentions, he remained mute as a stone, never smiling or reciprocating a hug. And while the boys his age began helping with chores around the farm, Adam seemed incapable of even gathering twigs for kindling.

  One day, Clarissa was in the farmhouse roasting a lamb in the hearth, when her mother came to her. “There’s a man t’ see you!” she said breathlessly. “An old man on a mule. He wears th’ monk’s clothes.”

  The news made Clarissa light-headed with fear. Her first instinct was to grab Adam and run to the fells, but she calmed herself, and asked, “Just one monk you say? No others?”

  “Only one tired and hungry old man. He calls himself Bartholomew.”

  Clarissa wiped her hands on her apron and told her mother to tend to the lamb spit. She checked on Adam, who was in his favorite and darkest corner of the room silently playing with his omnipresent stick, then went outdoors to see this monk.

  Bartholomew was standing by his mule feeding it hay by hand. She didn’t recognize him from her time at Vectis, and by the strained expression on his face, she could tell that he didn’t recognize her either.

  “Are you Clarissa?” he asked.

  “Aye.”

  “I am Father Bartholomew,” he said.

  She asked the question, then steadied herself for the answer. “Have you come from Vectis?”

  “I have, child.”

  “Why are ya here?” she asked in dismay and anger.

  The monk fed the last of the straw to his mule and patted its head. “I am not here to harm you or judge you,” he said wearily. “I only wish to speak to you. This has been a long journey for an old man. Three months it took me with Petal, my lovely little mule, as my only companion. There were black and rainy nights when I thought we would not survive, but with God’s help, we are here.”

  “You’ve nowt come t’ take me boy?” she asked.

  Bartholomew closed his eyes and moved his lips in prayer. When he opened them, his old face had softened in relief. “He survived. God be praised. No, I do not want to take your son. What do you call him?”

  “His name’s Adam,” she said, limp with thanks.

  The monk smiled at that. “Ah. The name of the brother of the ferryman—the cart man who bore you here. He is the one who told me where you dwelled, but he did so only after I promised I would bring you no harm. But Adam is a good name for another reason.” He wagged his finger as if imparting a lesson. “God’s first-created man.”

  “Would ya like some food and drink?” Clarissa asked.

  “God bless you, I would.”

  Bartholomew begged to wash off the filth of the road before entering the house. She watched him dip a cloth in the horse trough and scour his frail body, his joints appearing gnarly and swollen.

  At the threshold of the farmhouse Bartholomew stopped and peered in. He seemed instinctively to turn his face toward the far corner, where Adam sat shrouded in darkness. Clarissa told her mother she could return to her chores outside, then set Bartholomew by the hearth and ladled day-old stew into a wooden bowl.

  Though he appeared tempted by the smell of the food, the old monk put down the bowl and kept staring into the corner.

  “May I see him?” he asked.

  She nodded and called out for the boy to come. There was a sound of scraping from the corner but no movement.

  “He’s not a disobedient boy,” she said. “It’s just—he’s different. Let me fetch ’im.”

  “No,” the monk said. “I will go to him.”

  Bartholomew rose and shuffled slowly toward the corner.

  The scratching noises stopped.

  “Will you bring me a candle?” the monk asked.

  Clarissa obliged and gave him one.

  He held it out and bathed the boy in dancing yellow light. Clarissa heard the monk catch his breath and hold it for a while. His exhalation sounded like a long sigh.

  “I see Titus in him,” Bartholomew said softly. “The redness of his hair, the length of his chin, the small ears, the most beautifully long fingers. It is as if Titus were reborn.”

  “Th’ old scribe,” Clarissa said. “Th’ one who took me.”

  “He chose you that day. For decades he stood for no woman, but on that day he chose you.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It is not for me to say, but in a way, you were blessed.”

  “At that moment in th’ crypt I didn’t feel th’ blessing of God. But I loved ’im from the first time I seen ’im, and I still do even though he’s a strange child.”

  “Hello, boy,” Bartholomew said, staring at him in wonder.

  Adam seemed to take no notice of the visitor.

  “What’s that in his hand?” the
monk asked.

  “It’s his stick. He only lets go of it when he sleeps. The other children on the farm play with wooden toys or smooth stones from the river, but this boy wants only his stick.”

  “And what does he do with it?”

  “Nowt that I can tell.”

  “Is that so?” Bartholomew lowered himself to the dirt floor grimacing from the pain in his knees. He pushed the candle forward until it brightly lit the earth where two walls joined. “Look! Do you see?”

  Clarissa bent forward. “See what?”

  “There! There! In the dirt. Letters and numbers! Your son is writing!”

  The old monk made his case over supper: he wanted nothing more than a barn roof over his head, clean hay for his bedding and food and drink for himself and his mule. In exchange for these necessities Bartholomew offered Clarissa and her family something they did not have and until then did not know they were lacking: the personal services of a priest. And beyond that, he hinted of more. Adam, he told them, that special boy, held a key to a holy realm where the Lightburns would be God’s knights. They would become anointed ones on earth and worthy of a seat at Christ’s table in Heaven. And he would teach them how to use that key to unlock the door to a hallowed and blessed kingdom.

  Clarissa’s father chewed the gristle at the end of a lamb rib and listened intently to the monk. Clarissa’s silver plate had transformed the fortunes of the family. He had extracted the jewels and melted the silver into small fat discs. With this currency he had begun to improve himself. He purchased a great number of sheep and a team of fine workhorses and soon found himself livestock rich and land poor. He dearly coveted two butts of land adjoining his farm held in serfdom by his neighbor, Thomas Gobarn. Like Gobarn, he was an unfree serf, paying tenure for his farm to Robert de Boynton, the king’s knight for the shire. A few choice jewels to his lord had secured an elevation in his standing, and Lightburn became a vassal, eligible to hold a deed to his land. Robert de Boynton did honor him by coming to his farm and seisined him of the fief by handing over a ceremonial sod of land. Furthermore, a purse of silver coins persuaded de Boynton to deed him Thomas Gobarn’s land as well. With the seal of his lord in hand, Lightburn triumphantly pushed down the stone wall that separated the two holdings to allow his sheep to graze on new pastures, and he began charging rent to Gobarn to farm a measly parcel.

  Now, Lightburn considered what the priest was offering. As a vassal, he had an obligation of frankalmoign, a duty to pray for his lord’s soul. In truth, he paid lip service to this duty, but with a priest living in his barn, he could do real service! If Robert de Boynton could see Charles Lightburn honoring him by retaining his own priest to pray for the lord’s eternal soul, then he might be further elevated, becoming a man of the lord.

  And what of this business of Adam, the dullard grandson being more—much more—than met the eye? Well, he was prepared to listen to the old priest. And why not? All Bartholomew was asking was to live in his horse barn and be fed.

  Intrigued at the prospect that his future could be even brighter, Charles Lightburn told the monk that he was welcome to live, pray, and teach at Lightburn Farm.

  In the coming days, Clarissa washed Brother Bartholomew’s habit, mended the rips, and patched it where it was threadbare. The monk ate heartily to regain his strength and saw to his unruly beard with his newly honed belt knife. While declaring himself able-bodied, to Clarissa he still looked like a walking corpse, so thin and dried-out, but at least his eyes had gone from cloudy to bright.

  Bartholomew assembled the Lightburn clan around their supper table to tell them his tale. The men and women of the extended family sat attentively while the monk stood and gesticulated in front of the hearth. The children played on and around their beds, and Adam kept to himself, scratching away with his stick.

  Bartholomew told them the oral history of Vectis, which had been passed for centuries from the mouths of monks to the ears of monks. He told them how in the year 777, on the seventh day of the seventh month, in the presence of a fiery comet, a boy was born on Vectis, the seventh son of a seventh son, and that this boy, Octavus, came to live in the abbey. He told them that the boy looked much like their Adam, mute and pale with ginger hair and green eyes. And he told them that the child Octavus was found to have a marvelous God-given ability to write though he had never been taught, but more than that, to write the names of all men with their dates of birth and their dates of death, demonstrating to the amazed monks of Vectis that verily, God did determine the fate of men.

  And those ancient monks did establish the holy Order of the Names to allow Octavus to perform his labors without interruption. And they provided the boy with quill and parchment and bound the pages of his labors into holy books. And he told them that when Octavus was older he seized a young novice girl and did impregnate her with his seed and the issuance of that union was another pale, mute ginger-haired boy with the selfsame abilities.

  The Lightburns listened with rapt attention to Brother Bartholomew as he described an uninterrupted chain of mute scribes stretching from the olden days until Clarissa’s last day on Vectis. He told them they lived their entire lives in an underground cavern dug into the bedrock of the Isle of Vectis, where they diligently recorded names of those who would be born—Natus—and those who would die—Mors—for centuries into the future, names entered in English, Frankish, Moorish, Hebrew, Chinese, and all manner of foreign characters. The scribes worked as if they were of one mind and one hand. They never duplicated the work of another, but all their efforts proved to be a seamless stream, centuries of labor that had yielded a vast library of books encompassing the years 777 through the ninth day of February 2027. And Bartholomew told them that he himself had lived his own life in service, mostly underground, as the monk charged with the operation of the holy scriptorium.

  He told them that Clarissa was also one in a long line of special servants to the Order of the Names, healthy and pious girls who were selected to bear the next generation of scribes.

  “But you were a unique girl, were you not?” Bartholomew said. His words carried no venom, and Clarissa was relieved she was not to be castigated. “Perhaps your fiery nature was the reason that Titus the Venerable rose to the occasion. You would become the only girl who ever fled before delivering your issuance. And your action, dear girl, alas proved to be the end of the Library.”

  He told them of the horrific events of that ninth of January in the year 1297, when all at once the scribes to a man and boy seized their quills and thrust them into their eyes, deeply into their brains, effecting a most-horrible death on the tables and floor of their scriptorium. And he told them how he had gone from desk to desk collecting the last pages each one had writ and upon each finding the same words: Finis Dierum, End of Days. They were all working on names for the ninth of February 2027, a day far, far in the future.

  “Is that th’ day th’ world’ll end, Father?” Charles Lightburn asked.

  “That was the opinion of myself and my learned colleagues. Until we learned that Clarissa had fled with her baby. That cast doubt. Baldwin, our abbot, did not alter his belief that they had borne witness to the day of destruction, but our Prior Felix and I wondered otherwise. Perhaps they were not notating the End of Days of mankind but that the end of their days, as the chain of scribes born to Vectis had been broken by Clarissa’s actions.”

  Clarissa began to sob in heartfelt lamentation. “No, my sweet girl, do not cry,” Bartholomew urged her. “You could not know. And if we have learned only one thing in the Order of the Names, it is that everything happens because God wishes it so.”

  “What happened next?” Clarissa’s father asked.

  “Baldwin ordered Felix to destroy the Library by fire because he expressed the opinion that mankind was not prepared to know its secrets. But Felix was not of the same mind. He razed the chapel that stood above the underground chambers but took care not to set torch to the books themselves. My personal belief is that the Libr
ary has survived though I cannot be sure. In the months and years that followed the calamity, the spirit of Vectis Abbey weakened, and some monks and sisters left the isle for other monasteries. I, for one, harbored a notion that grew inside me like the baby that grew inside of you, Clarissa. I am old, very old, and have little enough time left, but I had to know. I had to know! Did you survive? Did your baby survive? Did the Library carry on? Before I was too weak to hope to mount a journey such as the one I have accomplished, I resolved to leave my island sanctuary, my dear Vectis Abbey, and follow your route to your home to see if you and your son were alive. And here I am. In the warm bosom of your family, knowing that God had guided me here with a purpose.”

  “What purpose?” Clarissa asked.

  “To honor the will of God, good people,” Bartholomew said with tears in his eyes. “To plead with you to help me to continue God’s work. To perpetuate the Order of the Names. To let the Library continue!”

  Bartholomew lived for two more years. During his days in Pinn, he taught the Lightburns many things.

  He taught them how to make ink from lamp black mixed with gum. He taught them how to fashion quills from goose feathers. He taught them the art of making parchment by liming and stretching sheepskin. He taught them how to bind a book. And he taught them how to quarry away at the limestone below their dwelling to make a secret chamber to house a scriptorium.

  And before he died in Clarissa’s arms, gasping and hot with pneumonia, Bartholomew witnessed the completion of Adam’s first thick book, spanning the ninth of February 2027 to the tenth of February 2027, filled with strange-sounding and often indecipherable names of people who would not come to be born or die for over seven hundred years.

  Chapter 15

  Haven and Cacia leaned against a limestone wall, watching Will and Phillip. The boy had just awoken and was hungry. He scarfed down his breakfast but Will had no appetite. It had been tough watching Phillip sleep through the night. He’d nodded off after their meal before Will could extract any info from him. But he let him rest. He figured he’d get the facts soon enough, and that time had come.