The eighty-nine niches on the fa?ade of the cathedral facing the broad green once held statues of saints, including the apostles, St. Mary, and many early martyrs. The number eighty-nine is not a coincidence—this is the number of chapters in the four canonical Gospels. The saints’ statues were pulled down and destroyed at the Reformation, but in the twentieth century, four new statues were erected commemorating martyrs of Barchester: Ewolda, the Saxon founder; Robert Ward, the last prior of St. Ewolda’s Priory; Bishop Babbington; and a fourth figure representing the unnamed clergy who lost their lives during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
November 25, 1558, Barchester Cathedral
Edmund Lufton knew that many of his fellow clergymen criticized him for his failure to take a stand. Edmund, they said, didn’t believe in anything. Edmund simply blew with the wind. But the wind had been blowing in many directions of late, and Edmund had greater worries than the opinions of his colleagues. Immediately upon completing his degree at Oxford he had come to Barsetshire as curate of Puddingdale and risen quickly through the ranks to become a canon of Barchester Cathedral. He had welcomed a new group of clergy into the cathedral when the nearby monastery of St. Ewolda’s had been dissolved and had watched as the king’s commissioners had desecrated Barchester—pulling down statues and destroying Ewolda’s shrine. But Edmund had managed to hold on to his job, and when Edward VI had risen to the throne a few years later, Edmund, like many of his fellow clergymen, had embraced Protestantism. They had seen it coming, and most of those who could not abide it had long ago left for France.
One of those who left, a priest named Thomas Piers, had, before his departure, entrusted Edmund with a great responsibility. It was this burden, and not his lack of any loyalty, that had kept him at Barchester in the years since. For Edward VI had died in 1553, and his Catholic sister Mary had risen to the throne. Mary had reinstated the Catholic Church and it was the Protestants who feared for their lives. Edmund had quietly returned to practicing the Catholic rites, but many had fled Barchester, and Bishop Babbington, who had refused to either leave or recant his Protestant beliefs, had been burned at the stake on the green in front of the cathedral’s west end. It had been a horrible sight—Edmund had known the bishop, had celebrated the Eucharist with him, had even dined with him on occasion. He and the rest of the newly Catholic clergy had been forced to watch the bishop’s grisly death—as a warning, he supposed, to those who might still harbor secret Protestant tendencies.
But Edmund guarded a secret that outweighed the particulars of how he worshipped his God. As long as he could remain at the cathedral, and remain alive, he could do the job God and Father Piers had chosen him to do. And now, only three years after Parliament had made Protestantism a capital crime, Mary was dead and her sister, Elizabeth, queen. The wind seemed to be blowing again, for Elizabeth gave every indication of being a Protestant, and Edmund imagined he would soon be reading once again from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer rather than from the Catholic missal.
He sat in his bedroom in the canons’ lodgings long after and considered all that had happened since he had become Guardian—changes of monarch, changes of worship, and purges of anyone who disagreed with those in power. It had been a dangerous time, and he doubted the danger was past. He had seen fellow canons flee in the night or be pulled from their rooms and murdered in cold blood, all because of the book from which they chose to read their evening prayers. He had seen Catholics burn books deemed “too Protestant” and Protestants burn books deemed “too Catholic.” He counted himself lucky that he had navigated the treacherous waters of the past few years, but what if a future Guardian did not have such fortune? What if a Guardian were to be killed, or even to die of a sudden illness, before passing on the secret of Barchester and its priceless treasure? He knew other Guardians had had the same concern, for one of them had placed a mark on the treasure itself—not giving away its true nature, but providing a hint.
Only the manuscript could tell the whole story, and as it stood, the manuscript could not be completely decoded, even by one who knew the secret of its enciphering. Edmund knew its contents, for Father Piers had taught him, and he would teach them to the next Guardian—if he had the time. But after the turmoil of the past few years, Edmund feared that some Guardian would not have the time. The manuscript, like the treasure, needed to bear a sign, some hint as to its contents and importance. He could not tell the secret outright, but he could leave a clue.
At university, Edmund had landed himself in trouble for defacing the books in the Lazarus College library—not the illuminated manuscripts in the Bodleian or even the illustrated books on natural history or medicine in the college collection; those books he loved just as they were. Edmund’s mind thought in pictures more than in words, so he gravitated toward illustrated volumes. But far too often his studies led him to books with no pictures—theological treatises, histories, and biographical studies. These he often could not resist illustrating himself, and so, when the master of Lazarus discovered in the blank space at the end of each section of an edition of Livy’s History of Rome, miniature portraits that Edmund had foolishly signed, he called him into his study for a severe reprimand. Edmund had promised not to deface any books in the future, but the time had come, he thought, to break that promise.
He trimmed the wick on his candle, opened the manuscript, and began to draw.
May 21, 2016
EVE OF PENTECOST
Arthur went straight to the library after Morning Prayer the following day. While he ought to be spending his weekend reading student essays, he much preferred the prospect of cracking a centuries-old code and reading the secrets contained in the manuscript that now nestled securely back in the precentor’s study. Both the photography and the return of the book had gone off without a hitch, and Bethany had promised a high-resolution printout of the coded pages would be waiting on Arthur’s table Saturday morning.
This turned out not to be the case, for Oscar was studying the printout at his desk, as he had been, he told Arthur, since dawn.
“Well, you’re the maths teacher,” said Arthur. “Have you cracked it yet?”
“When do we reckon this was written?” asked Oscar, pushing his chair back and taking off his reading glasses.