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Arthur sat in his office hoping that no one would take advantage of his presence during posted “consultation hours” to actually consult with him. On his desk lay the first book his grandfather had ever given him—a thick blue volume called The Romance of King Arthur. He could still remember unwrapping that book on Christmas morning when he was ten, peeling back the gaudy paper to reveal the luxurious blue cloth stamped in gold with the image of a feather-capped herald astride a richly adorned steed. The book was published in 1917, and Arthur couldn’t believe he could actually own such an old volume. Unlike King Arthur’s Knights, this volume was not missing its illustrations, and what entrancing images they were—lush plates with swirls of color and chapter headings in the style of medieval woodcuts, all created by the remarkable Arthur Rackham.
“I thought it was high time you had a copy of your own,” his grandfather had said. “And not only does this have all the stories about King Arthur, but it has pictures by a man named Arthur as well, so it’s doubly appropriate for you.”
Before he even read this slightly more grown-up version of the stories, Arthur flipped through the book, stopping at every illustration. His favorite image had been the one he found most mysterious: a color plate of a woman in a white robe standing in profile on a cushion of fire. Her robe and hair glowed orange with flames and in her hands she held an ornate golden cup similarly engulfed, from which radiated beams of light. Her head was bowed as if in prayer and the room in which she stood was far plainer than the background of Rackham’s other pictures—a row of crosshatched windows above brown paneling and a brown tiled floor. The artist clearly wanted Arthur’s eye to be drawn to the cup and now, thirty years after he had first gazed upon this illustration, it still was. On the tissue guard in front of the glossy color plate was the caption, printed in red ink: “How at the Castle of Corbin a maiden bare in the Sangreal and foretold the achievements of Galahad.” Arthur wondered what Bethany would think if she saw the picture. Surely she would notice Rackham’s Holy Grail was exactly the same as the cup held by Bishop Gladwyn in the portrait by John Collier.
Collier’s portrait, Arthur had discovered, had been displayed in London at the Royal Academy exhibit of 1888, when a young Arthur Rackham was just beginning art school. Rackham must have seen the portrait and tracked it down in Barchester decades later to copy the cup when he was working on his Arthurian illustrations. Arthur wondered what it was about Gladwyn’s cup that made Rackham want to copy it.
It was a question that had intrigued him since he had first seen Gladwyn’s portrait. He had read about the painting in Gladwyn’s guide to the cathedral—the first book he had read before beginning work on his own guide and the same guide that had led Bethany to the chapter house. It had taken him a month to track down the painting—no one at the cathedral knew where it had gone, but when he finally found it in the former bishop’s palace he immediately recognized the Grail and suddenly flashed back to that Christmas Day when he first looked at Rackham’s illustration. Did his grandfather know about the painting? In giving him that thick blue book was he leading Arthur to discover the connection between Gladwyn’s portrait and Rackham’s picture?
Ever since childhood, remembering what his grandfather had told him, Arthur had worked to ferret out connections between Barchester and the Grail. At university he studied as much about the Arthurian legends as he could, secretly searching for anything that would connect the stories to Barchester. When the time came to choose a topic for his master’s thesis, he decided to make a comparative inventory of all the pre-1500 manuscripts of King Arthur and Grail stories. His work took him to libraries across Europe, and allowed him to hold books like the Winchester Manuscript—the only medieval manuscript version of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. The fifteenth-century manuscript had been discovered in 1934, sitting on the library shelves at Winchester College. No one knew how long it had been there or where it had come from, but even the library of a boys’ boarding school had done what libraries were supposed to do—it had preserved the volume until such time as its importance was recognized. Although his census did not require extensive examination of the Winchester manuscript, Arthur had spent days in the British Library poring over the text. He loved the fact that nearly every proper noun had been rendered in red ink—ink that had, in over five hundred years, not faded at all. And when he reached the section about the Grail, he stared for several minutes at a spot near the middle of the page where the word Sangreall was written in that same red ink. The Holy Grail, written in blood, thought Arthur.
Arthur’s thesis had given him the opportunity to examine a wide variety of medieval manuscripts in person, but it had not uncovered any clues that might connect the Arthur stories, or the Grail, to Barchester. After university, he had spent several years going from one teaching job to another, always hoping to return to Barchester. When the chance came to teach at the University of Barchester, Arthur seized it. No matter how uninspiring the campus, it was in the city that he loved. Arthur had put his quest aside during his peripatetic years, but when he saw the Grail image from his childhood in Collier’s portrait, his passion was reawakened and he became an active Grail seeker once more. He began to add to his small collection of books on King Arthur and the Grail, and he began to scour the cathedral library for clues. He wasn’t even surprised when he found one.