by Glenn Cooper
The next morning he hid behind a tree and kept watch over the path to the secret chapel. The sea was spraying, and the briny air braced him. Then, at dawn, he saw the desiccated, old nun, Sister Sabeline, dragging the sobbing young girl inside the wooden building. He fought with himself for several minutes before taking the step that would forever change the path of his life.
He entered the chapel.
What he saw was an empty room with a bluestone floor, adorned only with a simple gilded wooden cross on one wall. There was a heavy oak door. When he pushed it open he could see a tight spiral of stone stairs plunging into the earth. Hesitantly, he descended torchlit stones until he reached the bottom, a small, cool chamber where an ancient door with a large key in its iron lock stood ajar. The door swung heavily on its hinges, and he was inside the Hall of the Writers.
It took Luke a few seconds for his eyes to accommodate to the sparse candlelight of the hall. He had no comprehension of what he saw: dozens of pale-skinned, ginger-haired men and boys, seated shoulder by shoulder at rows of long tables, each one grasping a quill, dipping into inkpots, and writing furiously on sheets of parchment. Some were old, some were mere boys, but despite their ages, they all looked remarkably similar to one another. Every face was as blank as the next. Their only animation came from their green eyes, which seemed to drill into their sheets of white parchment with intensity.
The chamber had a domed ceiling that was plastered and whitewashed, the better to reflect the candlelight. There were up to ten writers at each of fifteen tables stretching to the rear of the chamber. The circumference of the chamber was lined with cotlike beds, some of which were occupied by sleeping ginger-haired men.
The writers paid Luke no attention; he felt he had entered a magical realm where, perhaps, he was invisible. But before he had time to try to make sense of the sights before him, he heard a plaintive cry, the voice of Elizabeth.
The cries were coming from his right, from a void at the side of the chamber. Protectively, he ran toward the black archway and promptly smelled the suffocating odors of death. He was in a catacomb. He fumbled in the dark through one room, brushing against yellow skeletons with rotting flesh, which piled like cords of wood in the recesses of the walls.
Her cries grew louder and in a second room he saw Sister Sabeline holding a candle. He crept closer. The candle illuminated the colorless skin of one of the ginger-haired men. He was naked, and Luke could see the caved-in cheeks of his emaciated buttocks, his spindly arms hanging limp by his side. Sabeline was goading him, calling in frustration, “I have brought this girl for you!” When nothing happened, the nun demanded, “Touch her!”
Then he spotted Elizabeth, cowering on the floor, covering her eyes, bracing herself for the touch of a living skeleton.
Luke acted automatically, without the fear of consequences. He leapt forward and grabbed the man by the bony shoulders and threw him to the ground. It was easy to do, like tossing a child. He heard Sister Sabeline shrieking, “What are you doing here? What are you doing?” He ignored her and reached out for Elizabeth, who seemed to recognize she was being touched not by evil but by the hand of deliverance. She opened her eyes and stared gratefully at his face. The pale man was on the ground, trying to pick himself up from the spot where Luke had roughly shoved him. “Brother Luke, leave us!” Sabeline screamed. “You have violated a sacred place!”
Luke screamed back. “I will not leave without this girl. How can this be sacred? All I see is evil.”
He took Elizabeth by the hand and pulled her up.
Sabeline shrieked at him. “You do not understand!”
From the chamber, Luke began to hear sounds of chaos and turmoil-crashing, thuds, thrashing, and wet, flopping noises like large fish being hauled onto a ship’s deck, writhing and suffocating.
The naked ginger-haired man turned away and walked toward the noise.
“What is happening?” Luke asked.
Sabeline took her candle and rushed toward the hall, leaving them alone in the dark.
“Are you safe?” Luke asked her.
“You came for me,” she whispered.
He helped her find her way from the darkness into the light and into the hall.
The memory of what he saw must have been seared onto the back of his eyes because every time he shut them, every day of his long life, he could still see Sister Sabeline, walking numbly through that terrible place muttering, “My God, My God, My God,” over and over, as if she were chanting.
He did not want Elizabeth to suffer what he saw and begged her to close her eyes and let him guide her. As they threaded their way toward the door, he suddenly had an uncontrollable urge to snatch up one of the parchments that lay on the wooden desks, and he chose one that was not soaked in blood.
They ran up the steep, spiral stairs, through the chapel, and out into the mist and rain. He made her keep running until they were far from the abbey gate. The cathedral bells were pealing in alarm. They had to make their way to the shore. He had to get her off the island.
“Tell me why you came back to Vectis?” Felix asked.
“I have been troubled the whole of my life by what I saw that day, and I did not want to go to my grave without seeking understanding. I have long thought of coming back. I was finally able.”
“It is a shame you left the Church. I remember your great piety and generosity of spirit.”
“All gone,” Luke said bitterly. “Taken.”
“I am saddened, my son. You surely have the opinion that Vectis Abbey was a place of sin and evil, but it is not so. Our great enterprise had a holy and sacred purpose.”
“And what was that purpose, Father?”
“We were serving the needs of God by serving the needs of these frail, mute scribes. Through divine intervention, their labors spanned centuries. They were making a record, Luke, a record of the arrivals and passings of all God’s children, then and into the future.”
“How was this possible?”
Felix shrugged. “From the hand of God to the hands of these men. They had a strange, singular purpose. Otherwise, they were like children, completely dependent on us for their care.”
Luke spat out, “Not only that.”
“Yes, they had a need to reproduce. Their task was enormous. It required thousands of them laboring for hundreds of years. We had to give them the means.”
“I am sorry, Father, but that is an abomination. You forced your sisters into whoredom.”
“Not whoredom!” Felix cried. His emotion raised the pressure inside his head and made his eye throb ferociously. “It was service! Service toward a higher purpose! It was beyond outsiders to understand!” He clutched the side of his head in pain.
Luke worried that the old man would die in front of him, so he eased off. “What became of their labors?”
“There was a vast Library, Luke, surely the largest in all of Christendom. You were close to it that day but never saw it. After you fled, Abbot Baldwin, blessed be his memory, had the Library sealed and the chapel razed by fire. It is my belief the Library was consumed.”
“Why was that done, Father?”
“Baldwin believed that man was not ready for the revelations of the Library. And I daresay he feared you, Luke.”
“Me?”
“He feared you would reveal the secrets, that others would come, that outsiders would hold us in judgment, that evil men would exploit the Library for dark purposes. He made a decision, and I carried it out. I lit the fires myself.”
Luke saw his parchment on the abbot’s table, rolled back in its ribbon. “The parchment I took that day, pray tell me its meaning, Father. It has vexed me.”
“Luke, my son, I will tell you all I know. I will be dead soon. I feel a great burden upon me, as I am the last man alive who knows about the Library. I have written an account of my knowledge. Please allow me to unburden myself by giving you that account and also pressing something else upon you.”
He went to his ches
t and retrieved the massive book. Luke rushed over to take it from him, as it appeared too heavy for him to manage.
“It is the only surviving one,” Felix said. “You and I have another connection, Luke. You knew not why you took that parchment that day, and I know not why I saved one book from the fire. Perhaps, we were both guided by an unseen hand. Will you take back your parchment and also take this book, which has within it a letter I have written? Will you allow this old man to pass the burden to you?”
“When I was young, you were kind to me and took me in, Father. I will.”
“Thank you.”
“What am I to do with them?”
Felix lifted his eyes toward the ceiling of his fine room. “That is for God to decide.”
Chapter 16
1334
London
Baron Cantwell of Wroxall woke up scratching and thinking about boots. He inspected his arms and abdomen and found small raised bumps, the telltale signs he had shared his mattress with bedbugs. Really! It was a privilege, to be sure, to be at Court, a guest at the Palace at Westminster, but surely the king would not wish his nobles to be eaten alive while they slept. He would have a stern word with the steward.
His room was small but otherwise comfortable. A bed, a chair, a chest, a commode, candles, and a rug to take the chill off the floor. It was lacking a hearth, so he would not have wanted to spend a midwinter night there, but in the pleasant blush of spring, it was satisfactory. In his youth, before he had curried royal favor, when Charles would visit London, he would stay at inns, where even at the more salubrious ones, he would have to share a bed with a stranger. Still, in those days, he would rarely retire in a state more conscious than blind drunk, so it hardly mattered. He was older now, with higher rank, and he assiduously favored his creature comforts.
He relieved himself in the chamber pot and inspected his member for sores, a precaution he always took after a night of whoring. Relieved, he had a long look out of one of the leaded windows. Through the greenish panes, he could see to the north the magnificent sweep of the River Thames. A high-sided cogge was passing by, setting its sails and making way for the estuary, heavy with goods. Beneath the royal apartments, at water’s edge, a marsh harrier swooped for mice, and upstream, a rag and bones man was tipping a rubbish cart into the river, impudently close to Westminster Hall, where the Royal Council would meet in a day. Momentarily distracted by the sights of the great city, his thoughts drifted back to his feet, which looked particularly coarse and raw. Today he would get his new boots.
He smoothed out his pointy beard, flowing moustache, and shoulder-length hair with his tortoiseshell comb, then dressed quickly, slipping on breeches and linen shirt and selecting his best green woolen hose, which he stretched to his thighs and tied to his breech belt. His jacket was a gift from a French cousin, a style they called a cotehardie, tight-fitting, tufted, and blue, with ivory buttons. Despite being over forty years old, his body was still fit and manly, and he did not hesitate to accentuate it. Because he was at Court, he completed his outfitting with a particularly nice kirtle, a rakishly thigh-length cloak made of a fine brocade. Then, with disdain, he pulled on his old boots wincing at their shabbiness and lack of shape.
Charles had attained his station through a combination of good breeding and good sense. The Cantwells could reliably trace their bloodlines back to the time of King John, and they had played a minor role in negotiations with the Crown on the Magna Carta. However, the family languished as marginal nobility until fortune smiled on them with the ascension of Edward III.
Charles’s father, Edmund, had fought besides Edward II in the English king’s ill-conceived campaign against Robert the Bruce in Scotland and was wounded in the disastrous battle at Bannockburn. Had the battle gone better for the English, the Cantwells might have prospered in the years that followed, but Edmund had certainly not discredited the family in the eyes of the Crown.
Edward II was, by no means, a popular monarch, and his subjects, for all intents and purposes, permitted him to be deposed by Edward’s French wife and her traitorous consort, Roger Mortimer. The king’s son, Edward, was only fourteen at the time of the coup. Though crowned Edward III, he became a puppet of the Regent, Mortimer, who wanted the old king to be more than imprisoned-he wanted him dead. Edward’s murder at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire was a foul affair. He was accosted in his bed by Mortimer’s assassins, who pressed a heavy mattress against him to hold him down, then shoved a copper tube up his rectum and thrust a red-hot iron poker through it to burn his intestines without leaving a mark. Thus, murder could not be proven, and the death would be ascribed to natural causes. But more slyly, Mortimer was delivering fitting punishment since the king was said to be a buggerer.
As Edward approached his eighteenth birthday, cognizant of his father’s ghastly demise, he plotted a son’s revenge. The word was spread by his father’s loyalists that the young king was in need of conspirators. Charles Cantwell was contacted by agents and readily agreed to an intrigue because he was a Royalist, but also because, as an adventurer plagued by unsuccessful business dealings, he had few good prospects. In October of 1330, he joined a small brave party who audaciously snuck through a secret entrance into Mortimer’s own fortress at Nottingham Castle, arrested the toad in his bedchamber, and in the name of the king, spirited him away to the Tower of London to meet his own grim fate.
Edward III, in gratitude, made Charles a baron and granted him a fat royal stipend and further tracts of land at Wroxall, where Charles immediately began improving his estate by building a fine timber house grand enough for the name, Cantwell Hall.
The stable master had Charles’s horse ready and saddled. He set off at a trot, following the northern bank of the river, enjoying the fair breezes as long as he could before he had to turn his horse and plunge into the fetid, narrow lanes of the industrial city. In half an hour or so, he was on Thames Street, a comparatively broad and open thoroughfare, hard by the river, to the west of St. Paul’s, where he easily maneuvered his beast through a gaggle of pushcarts, horse-and-riders, and pedestrians.
At the foot of Garrick Hill, he spurred the horse’s belly to coax it north, into a snaking, claustrophobic lane, whereupon he promptly felt the need to press his nose into a cloth. Open sewer ditches ran along both sides of Cordwainers Street, but the human effluent was not the greatest offense to Charles’s senses. Unlike the cobblers who made cheap shoes from used leather and eked out a living doing repairs, their more esteemed brethren, the cordwainers, needed fresh leather for new boots. So these city environs were also home to slaughterhouses and tanneries, the enterprises causing the greatest stench with their rank, boiling pots of leather, wool, and sheepskin.
All the good cheer of the morning had drained from him by the time he dismounted at his destination, a small shop marked with a hanging sign of black iron in the shape of a boot. He tied his horse to a post and sloshed his way through a mud puddle at the front of the two-story workshop, which was crammed cheek by jowl against other similar structures forming a long row of guild buildings.
Immediately, he suspected a problem. While the cobblers and other cordwainers on both sides of the street had their doors and windows open amidst signs of thriving commerce, this shop was shuttered tight. He muttered under his breath and banged upon the door with the heel of his hand. When there was no response, he banged again, even louder and was about to kick the bloody thing when the door slowly opened, and a woman stuck out her kerchiefed head.
“Why are you shut?” Charles demanded.
The woman was thin as a child but haggard and elderly. Charles had seen her at the shop before, and though aged, he had thought she must have been a great beauty in her youth. That impression was faded now, washed away by strong measures of worry and toil.
“My husband is ill, sir.”
“’Tis a pity, I am sure, madam, but I am here to collect my new boots.”
She looked at him blankly and said nothing.
>
“Did you not hear me, woman. I’m here for my boots!”
“There are no boots, sir.”
“Whatever do you mean! Do you know who I am?”
Her lip was trembling. “You are the Baron Wroxall, sir.”
“Fine. Then you know I was here six weeks ago. Your husband, Luke the Cordwainer, made wooden lasts of my feet. I made half payment, woman!”
“He has been ill.”
“Let me inside!” Charles pushed his way through the front door and looked around the small room. It served as a workshop, a kitchen, and a living space. On one side, a cooking hearth with utensils, a table, and chairs, the other side a craftsman’s bench, laden with tools and a paltry collection of cured sheepskins. A rack above the bench had dozens of wooden molds. Charles fixed his gaze on a mold that was inscribed “Wroxal” and exclaimed: “Those are my feet! Now where are my boots!”
From the higher floor a weak voice called out, “Elizabeth? Who is there?”
“He never began them, sir,” she insisted. “He became ill.”
“He’s upstairs?” Charles asked, alarmed. “There’s no plague in this house, is there madam?”
“Oh no, sir. He has the consumption.”
“Then I will go and speak to the man.”
“Please, no, sir. He is too frail. It might kill him.”
In recent years, Charles had become wholly unused to not getting his way. Barons were treated like-barons, and serfs and gentry alike acceded to their every whim. He stood there with his fists thrust truculently into his waist, his jaw jutting. “No boots,” he finally said.
“No, sir.” She was trying not to cry.
“I paid you a Half Noble in advance,” he said icily. “Give me my money back. With interest. I will take four shillings.”
