“Oh, my God,” said Arthur.
“And Gwyn didn’t know anything about the cup. Anyway, when she got out of the hospital, her mother took her to visit the owner—Gwyn wouldn’t say where—so she could say thank you, and she got to hold the cup, just for a minute. She said she had never felt such power. That’s the moment she knew she was going to be a priest. They didn’t even have female priests in the Church of England at the time, but she knew she was going to be one.”
Arthur stared at Bethany slack-jawed. Could the legends about the Nanteos Cup be true? It was easy to dismiss tales from the nineteenth century; it was much harder to ignore a story from a trusted friend, even if it was a story Gwyn had never shared. Then again, thought Arthur, he had never asked her what inspired her to become a priest.
“Arthur Prescott,” said Bethany, grinning even wider than usual, “is it possible that I have rendered you speechless?”
“Rather,” said Arthur.
“Well, then tell me about your morning.”
“My morning has done little more than provide proof that as a code breaker my career is likely to be short and fruitless.”
“Nothing?” said Bethany.
“Nothing,” said Arthur.
“Why don’t you take a break and come back tomorrow with fresh eyes,” said Bethany. “That’s what I do with crossword puzzles.”
“You solve crossword puzzles?” said Arthur.
“New York Times, every day on my iPad,” said Bethany. “The Friday and Saturday puzzles are the tough ones. But usually if I get stuck and come back to it the next day I can finish right up. It’s a funny thing.”
“Perhaps I will set it aside for a while. Do you fancy grabbing some lunch?”
“Kind of you to ask, Arthur, but first of all, a full English breakfast is enough to keep me going until dinnertime, and second, I am taking the train up to Wells for the weekend. I just popped up here to tell you about my morning. I’m meeting a fellow digitizer and we’re going to Glastonbury to hike up the Tor and see King Arthur’s tomb and the burial spot of the Holy Grail and before you roll your eyes at me and ask me how there can be two Holy Grails and tell me that King Arthur’s tomb was conveniently ‘discovered’ when the monastery was in need of money, I am going to waltz off to the station. So have a lovely weekend, Arthur, and I will see you on Monday.”
“I’ll probably be sitting here as frustrated as ever,” said Arthur.
“I doubt that,” said Bethany. “You’ll have broken it by then.” And with that she was off, leaving Arthur to return to his attempts at deciphering the manuscript. As he leaned over the pages, a cloud passed in front of the sun and the room dimmed. Appropriate, thought Arthur, and he set to work.
—
Five hours later, with no progress made, he decided to give Bethany’s strategy of walking away from the problem a try. He pushed back his chair and thought of her, in the brightness of that spring afternoon, adding her own sunshine to the ancient sites. Arthur could remember the excitement of his own first pilgrimage to Glastonbury. He had been sixteen, and it had been his first trip away from home by himself. Glastonbury was steeped in Arthurian lore and Arthur had explored every inch of it. He had climbed the great rolling green hill at the edge of town where Joseph of Arimathea was said to have placed his staff in the ground, where it rooted into the Glastonbury Thorn. At the time, a descendant of the original thorn still grew there, but in 2010 some ruffian had cut it down. He had walked the path to the top of the Glastonbury Tor, the strange-looking hill that some claimed was the legendary Isle of Avalon. He had soaked his feet in the frigid waters of Chalice Well, the spring that gushed forth from the spot where the Holy Grail was supposedly buried. And he had stood in the ruins of what had once been one of England’s largest and wealthiest monasteries. Although he moved among other tourists, with whom he presumably shared his fascination with the Grail, Arthur kept to himself, for he had, he believed, a secret. But to all those around him who snapped pictures of the tor and the thorn and the ruins and the marker indicating the supposed gravesite of Arthur and Guinevere, and especially to those who sought the Grail at Chalice Well, he did not speak the words, “It isn’t here; it’s in Barchester.”
—
Sunday proved no more beneficial for Arthur’s future as a code breaker than Saturday had been. He worked away at the manuscript for a few hours in the afternoon but made no headway, and finally gave up and went downstairs to read Wodehouse under the yew tree in the cloister. On such a sunny, blue-sky day with the heights of Barchester Cathedral towering above him and his favorite author in hand, not even clever medieval monks could dampen Arthur’s spirits.
—
“I say, Peabody, do you know much about ciphers?”
It was the first time Arthur had ever been in the maths building at Barchester University and he was impressed that it was even uglier and more sterile than the humanities building. Arthur knew Peabody only from the Advisory Committee for the Library, but on the basis of this meager acquaintance, he thought he might solicit a little help with the coded manuscript.
“Prescott, is it? From the library committee? I quite liked that Jeeves book.”
“Did you?” said Arthur. “I’m pleased to hear it.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Well,” said Arthur, stepping into Peabody’s cluttered office, “I’m trying to decipher a coded passage from a late medieval British manuscript.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” said Peabody. “Anything from that period in Britain is probably a simple substitution cipher—quite easy to decrypt.”
“Yes, well I’ve used frequency analysis and gotten nowhere and I don’t think it’s a polyalphabetic cipher or a transposition cipher.”
“My, my,” said Peabody, pushing back his chair and propping his feet on a mass of papers that obscured his desktop. “You know a little something about ciphers yourself, I see.”
“Only what can be learned in a couple of days,” said Arthur.
“My great-aunt was at Bletchley during the war, you know,” said Peabody. “She never talked about it. Official Secrets Act meant they all had to stay mum for fifty years and she died after forty-six.”
“So you’ve no other suggestions for breaking a medieval cipher?” said Arthur.
“Enigma—that was a cipher,” said Peabody, lost in his thoughts. “In a way, it was a simple polyalphabetic substitution cipher—each letter substituted by another letter. But it was as if the key word and the order of the alphabet changed with every character entered into the machine. Positively brilliant.”