“But something did, didn’t it?”
Her insight was annoying, but Arthur saw no reason not to be honest. “When I was a child,” he said, “I went to the library every Saturday morning. It was the highlight of my week. Our local city library was in this beautiful nineteenth-century building that used to be the Mechanics Institute. I would push through those oak doors every Saturday and head straight for the card catalog. I loved those little drawers so full of mystery and potential. Most weeks I would just pick a drawer at random and flip through the cards, maybe looking for one that was brand-new or one that had been thumbed ten thousand times. And I always found something amazing. Bookish kids who don’t enjoy football or video games don’t have a lot of friends, but I always thought of that card catalog as my best friend. Then one Saturday, when I was a teenager, I walked into the central room, with its beamed ceiling and its huge stone fireplace at one end, and the card catalog was gone. There was this great empty space and a little table with two computers on it. They took away my best friend, and the library never felt the same after that. The computer made it easy to find what you were looking for, but I never knew what I was looking for. The card catalog had given me serendipity.” Arthur paused for a moment, almost misty-eyed as he remembered that awful day. “I suppose that’s one thing I like about the cathedral library and its lack of wires. We still have a card catalog.”
“Wow,” said Bethany. “OK, I understand. That must have sucked.” She sat quietly for a moment, her hand next to his on the table. “Can I ask you a question that has nothing to do with books or computers?”
“I suppose.”
“This isn’t even a proper pub; just a hotel bar. And we passed at least three nice-looking pubs on the way here. The Green Man, right outside the cathedral—which should be perfect given that I saw a green man carving in the cloister; then there was the George and Vulture, which sounds royal and you seem like a royalist to me, being old-fashioned about everything; and then the Swan, next to the river.”
“I’m sorry, was there a question buried somewhere in that geography lesson?”
“Yeah. Why did you bring me here? Why the Mitre?”
“And so at last we come full circle. The Mitre is so named because, from about 1570 until after the last war, it was the bishop’s palace. The chapter sold it in the 1950s to raise money to repair some of the damage done by German bombers in 1941.”
“So this is part of your unpublished guidebook?”
“It might be. But more important, it is the answer to your question.”
“Which question?”
“The first one. When I first saw you standing in the chapter house . . .” Arthur paused for a moment. He had been about to say, with your hair glowing in the sun like a halo, but he checked himself. “When I first saw you, you asked me about the portrait of Bishop Gladwyn.”
“The one with him holding the Holy Grail.”
“The one with him holding a Communion chalice,” said Arthur slowly and distinctly. This girl was interesting to debate with, but he didn’t want her getting any ideas about the Grail’s being connected to Barchester. “After the bishop died, a member of the chapter thought it an inappropriate adornment for the chapter house.”
“Because of pagan connections to the Grail?”
“It’s not the Grail,” he said, trying to temper his anger. “It was moved because of the artist, John Collier, and his second wife.”
“Oh, this is sounding better all the time. Do tell.”
“You see, in 1879 Collier married Marian Huxley—whose father had argued on the side of science in the great evolution debate with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860.”
“And the canons didn’t want that Darwinian bloodline in their chapter house.”
“No, it wasn’t that. Two years after Marian’s death in 1887, Collier decided to marry her younger sister Ethel. Because both the church and English law forbade such a union, the couple married in Norway.”
“Wait, why would there be a law against . . . what was the law against?”
“Against marrying your wife’s sister. It was considered incest until . . . I would have to check, but I think the law was changed in 1907.”
“So the second marriage was . . .”
“In the eyes of the law, it was incestuous.”
“Oh, my.”
“Apparently one of the Barchester canons didn’t care for the scandal, and before Gladwyn was cold in his tomb in the Epiphany Chapel, the portrait was removed from the cathedral precincts.”
“How delicious. But what does all that have to do with my question?”
“When they took the portrait out of the chapter house, they hung it at the top of the main stairwell in the bishop’s palace.”
“And it’s still there, isn’t it?”
“Would you like to see it?”
“You bet I would.”
Arthur pushed back his chair and called out to the barman. “Robert, I’m going to take this young lady to visit Bishop Gladwyn, if you don’t mind.”
—
The interior of the bishop’s palace had been completely renovated in the eighteenth century, and the main staircase was an elegant affair. Wide steps rose to a spacious landing from which two shorter staircases led to the two wings of the building. On the paneled wall of the landing hung a life-size portrait with a small gold plaque at the bottom of the frame reading “Robert Gladwyn, Bishop of Barchester, 1872–1905.”
Arthur led Bethany into the front hallway and then told her to look up. She gasped as she saw the bishop gazing down on them.
“Let’s take a closer look, shall we?” said Arthur. “There is a lot to see.” He and Bethany mounted the stairs and stopped in front of the portrait. Arthur stood silent for several minutes, letting Bethany take in the richness of the painting’s color and its fine details, so that her first impression might not be clouded by his comments.
In front of an altar, a gray-haired clergyman with piercing blue eyes stood holding a golden cup in the air with both hands. Rays of light seemed to emanate from the cup and intersect with other rays streaming in from the stained glass window above. The draping of his vestments was painted in great detail, as were the decorative tiles of the floor. On the altar stood an elaborate gold cross and two flickering candles in gold candlesticks. To the right of the altar, on a small silver table, lay a jewel-encrusted book.
“What do you think?” Arthur asked at last.
“It’s beautiful,” said Bethany. “The details in the vestments remind me of the tapestry in Waterhouse’s painting The Lady of Shalott. I’ve always loved the Pre-Raphaelites—partly because they were so fascinated by the Grail but also for the richness of detail. But I’ve mostly just seen reproductions in books, not the originals. This is so alive. I guess you like that I appreciate the difference.”