Walter felt he was well suited to copy the document. After all, he had worked as a scribe for more then twenty years. He had copied some of the most important books at St. Ewolda’s—including the breviary from which many of the services were taken. The old breviary book had been used for centuries and was so worn it was in danger of becoming illegible. Walter had copied the prayers and services with great care, adding musical notations to some of the psalms and canticles to assist the monks with their chanting. He had even copied a small bit of marginalia that only he understood—for only he could read the language in which it was written. “Here I remember the great treasure of Barsyt,” Walter had written, keeping the words in the Saxon tongue that was foreign to his fellow monks. After such a task as creating the breviary, copying out a document of a few paragraphs would be a simple matter.
And so Walter became the last Guardian to copy the Saxon text of the document. He worked slowly over the next several days to fill the empty pages with his careful script, knowing he must finish his work by midnight on the twelfth of October—the feast day of St. Ewolda. He completed the task early that morning, and after Compline, when the rest of the priory had retired, Walter returned to the high altar. He spoke a long prayer to Ewolda and placed the document in a pottery basin he had borrowed from the kitchen earlier in the day. He held his candle to the edge of the parchment, then watched as the flame licked the document and smoked curled into the darkness.
When the monks assembled at midnight for Matins, only Walter noticed the faint smell of smoke in the air, not knowing that he wasn’t the first monk in St. Ewolda’s history to perform this peculiar rite.
May 8, 2016
FEAST OF DAME JULIAN OF NORWICH
By Saturday afternoon, Arthur had a rough draft of the entire guidebook. In the end, writing ten thousand words wasn’t that difficult, especially with Bethany keeping him on course. Whenever he tried to dive into some digression, she would repeat, “Just tell the story, Arthur.” He found this ironic, since Bethany herself was the master of the conversational digression, but he nonetheless appreciated her guidance. Arthur knew just about all there was to know about Barchester Cathedral—or all that one could know given the surviving sources. Condensing that knowledge into a story had only required the one thing he never had during his solitary years of research—a listener. Of course he had told David and Oscar and Gwyn about various discoveries he had made in his studies of the cathedral’s history, but he hadn’t tried to tell the entire story of the cathedral as just that—a story.
Now, as the sound of the choir rehearsing the psalm one last time before the main Sunday morning service drifted up from below, Arthur sat at his usual table. Gone were the piles of notes and stacks of books with slips of paper marking relevant passages. Gone was his fountain pen and his ream of fresh writing paper. In front of him lay a neat stack of computer-printed pages and a red felt-tip pen—a gift from Bethany.
They had worked through Friday night, and just before Evensong on Saturday Bethany had pushed “print” on her computer. Arthur had agreed not to look at the manuscript until he got a good night’s sleep. Even standing up he had almost dozed off during the Magnificat, an early-seventeenth-century setting by Thomas Weelkes that had soothed him to the edge of sleep until Bethany dug an elbow into his side and brought him back just in time for the Gloria Patri. After the service, he had gone home and slept. It was the first time he had missed Compline in months.
On Sunday, he had attended Morning Prayer at seven and had been tempted to head to the library and begin proofreading right away, but he wasn’t used to missing a night’s sleep, and even after almost twelve hours of slumber, he felt caffeine was required. He had sat and chatted with David over a mug of coffee at the bookshop—mostly listening to the story of how David had failed to seduce a poet who had given a reading at the university the night before. It was exactly the sort of mindless narrative Arthur needed to ease back into reality.
Now, as the bells called the worshippers of Barchester to Sunday morning Eucharist, Arthur sat comfortably in the peace of the library. He picked up Bethany’s printout, leaned back in his chair, and began to read.
The early history of Barchester Cathedral is shrouded in mystery, but we do know there was a religious foundation dedicated to St. Ewolda on this site from at least the early eighth century, making it one of the oldest Christian monasteries in southern Britain. Of the founder, St. Ewolda, little is known.
It wasn’t exactly the opening he had hoped for, but it wasn’t bad. He was just finishing the first page without any cause to reach for the red pen, when he heard feet on the stairs and the slightly breathless voice of Oscar.
“Ah, Arthur, I thought I might find you here. I was on my way to services and I thought I’d drop off those keys you wanted.”
“What keys?” said Arthur.
“Bethany rang last night and said you wanted to take her out to Plumstead Episcopi to see the interior.” He laid down a pair of keys on the table in front of Arthur. “This is the key to the outside door, and this, I think, is to the sacristy, not that there’s anything to see there.”
“I’m sorry, did you say Bethany rang you?”
“Yes. You did want to go out there, didn’t you?”
“Absolutely,” said Arthur. “I just wondered how you have the keys. And for that matter how Bethany knew you had the keys.”
“Oh, she didn’t. She just rang to check on Mother. She’s been in hospital again, you know.” Arthur didn’t know, and he felt both guilty and jealous that Bethany was doing a better job of keeping up with Oscar than he was. “And we were chatting and she mentioned wanting to go to Plumstead and I said I could get you the keys.”
“But I thought the precentor . . .”
“The precentor is the rector, technically. But it’s just an honorary position. The chapel belongs to the cathedral chapter and the keys to all the cathedral properties are kept in the vestry.”
“And you, of course, have access to the vestry.”
“I don’t think anyone will mind your peeking into Plumstead. You might find a few cobwebs; it hasn’t been swept out since last summer’s festival, but hopefully everything is in good order. You’ll let me know if there are any problems?”
“Yes, of course,” said Arthur.
“Well, bells are ringing so I’d best be off. Don’t suppose I can convince you to come along?”
“You know Sunday morning at eleven o’clock is the one time I have no interest in going to church.”
“You don’t have to take Communion.”
“Good-bye, Oscar. Enjoy the sermon.”