More and more people crowded the room, and soon a line had formed from the shelves down the stairs and into the cloister. Edward found himself at the top of the stairs, passing volume after volume to a pair of hands that reached out from the shadows. At first the books were like the manuscript he had taken to the cloister—their front covers torn off. Soon the manuscripts were replaced with leather-bound books of every size, boxes of letters and papers, and stacks of documents, some bearing huge wax seals. Edward’s arms began to ache as he passed everything that came his way to those mysterious hands. Every few minutes another window broke from the heat of the fire. Edward could feel the room growing hotter.
After more than an hour, he heard Mr. Grantly’s voice shouting, “Get out! Get out! The fire’s here.” Edward looked up to see flames shooting through the windows and licking the tops of the now empty bookcases that lined the far wall. In another second, he felt himself pressed along by the line of people and almost carried down the stairs. He followed the line across the cloister toward the cathedral close.
The mound of books Mr. Grantly had begun in the cloister had been moved far from harm’s way by people who had flocked from all over the city to save the cathedral’s treasures. Edward stood for a minute gulping in the cool night air. As Mr. Grantly and several others carried the last of the books from the cloister and farther away from the fire, Edward suddenly remembered the manuscript. He ran to the corner of the cloister where he had secreted it, but a man in a strange gray clerical robe was lifting the book from its hiding place. He had seen this man in the library helping to remove a few of the smaller furnishings. Now the man glanced around and, apparently not seeing the choirboy, disappeared around a corner. Edward followed him out of the cloister and beheld a scene of chaos.
Some who had helped empty the library were now passing buckets of water from the river to the fire. Others were busy loading the books and manuscripts, along with other valuables, into a variety of transport. Wagons and carts full of books disappeared into the darkness. In the shadows, Edward saw the man in gray slipping through the crowd toward St. Martin’s Lane. He was just about to chase after him, to ask why he had taken the manuscript, when he felt a hand clap on his shoulder.
“A good night’s work, Edward,” said Mr. Grantly. “But we’d better get you home. Your parents are sure to be worried.”
“Won’t they need help unloading?”
Mr. Grantly laughed. “You’ve done enough. We’ll unload the wagons in the morning and find safe places for all the books until this”—he waved his hand at the sky in disgust—“until all this is over.”
They turned toward Edward’s home, and as they walked away from the crowd, the boy glanced back toward the arch that led into St. Martin’s Lane, but the strange figure was gone.
The next morning, Edward learned that his father and older brother had helped extinguish the fire, while his mother had worked with the other women of the Flower Guild to remove the plate from the cathedral. Save for some smoke damage, the main body of the cathedral was unharmed. The Lady Chapel had been completely destroyed, and the row of buildings on the east side of the cloister, including the library, had suffered significant damage. Edward read in the newspaper that over eighty medieval manuscripts and almost three thousand books had been saved from the library. Assisting in that rescue was the only part he ever played in the war, but for the rest of his life he was proud of what he had done that night.
April 4, 2016
SECOND MONDAY AFTER EASTER
Arthur Prescott sometimes thought he was born in the wrong generation. It’s not that he thought he should be a Knight of the Round Table, but he should at least be living in the 1920s with Jeeves pulling on his morning coat for him, or better yet in the 1880s, discussing the relative merits of Gladstone and Disraeli in a first-class railway carriage. These daydreams generally came to an abrupt end as soon as he thought about things like public sanitation and penicillin. Still, if he was not living in the wrong time, he was at least teaching at the wrong institution—one must grant him that. Arthur was not born for the concrete and glass confines of the modern University of Barchester. Arthur was molded for the ancient stonework of Oxford. Arthur, by all rights, should be climbing a creaking staircase to his top-floor rooms in the great quadrangle of Lazarus College. He should be reading The Daily Jupiter in the paneled Senior Common Room and taking his meals in the cavernous hall hung with portraits of scholars past. Instead, he taught at a plate-glass university, which, in a recent ranking of the top fifty universities in the U.K., did not rate a mention, honorable or otherwise.
But Arthur had come to Barchester willingly, not because of the university but in spite of it. For as much as he hated those breeze-block walls that imprisoned him each day, he loved Barchester itself, with its narrow streets, its meandering river, and its ancient cathedral towering over the compact city center. Arthur had taken the job at the university so he could live in his favorite place in the world, the only place he had known happiness as a child. During Arthur’s childhood, his father had hopped from job to job and his parents had fought and broken up and gotten back together in an unending cycle. But every summer, Arthur had spent two glorious weeks with his maternal grandfather in Barchester. They had swum in the river and taken long walks in the countryside; they had played chess on rainy days; they had even climbed the tower of the cathedral. Arthur’s grandfather was a retired clergyman, and seemed to know every churchman for miles around, from the bishop of Barchester to the verger who kept the keys to every secret part of the cathedral. Arthur’s love for his grandfather had expanded into a love for Barchester. He loved how every stone of the old city had a story, how every wall and corner and rooftop dripped with history, and he loved that his grandfather knew all those stories and all that history and shared it all with him. Arthur was eight when he first visited and by the time he was a teenager he had promised himself he would live in Barchester someday. Unfortunately, keeping that promise meant that every morning he rode to the third floor of the humanities building in a lift that somehow managed to seem simultaneously sterile and unsanitary.
The doors opened jerkily to reveal the scowling face of Frederick Slopes, head of the Department of Literature in which Arthur toiled away as a junior lecturer.
“Late again, Prescott,” said Slopes.
“And good morning to you, sir,” said Arthur.
“You do realize that we had a meeting of the Curriculum Expansion Committee at eight.”
“This may be a radical notion, sir, but do you think perhaps the Curriculum Expansion Committee ought to be populated by members of the faculty who actually favor curriculum expansion?”
“Your personal tastes are entirely irrelevant to your committee work, Prescott.”
“Now, if you had asked me to serve on the Curriculum Contraction Committee, I would have been here at seven.” Arthur turned to walk down the hall, but heard Slopes’s steps close behind.
“Prescott, I cannot allow your continued absence from the work of this department to go unpunished.”
“Do you know, sir,” said Arthur, turning on his heels and facing his tormentor, “that we teach a seminar in this department called ‘Anagnorisis in the Existential Hogwarts,’ but we do not teach a seminar on Shakespeare?”