“Then you must believe. Someday you will understand. You will understand what the Grail is and where it is and why it must be kept a secret, but for now all you have to do is believe in it. Do you, Arthur? Do you believe in the Grail?”
And Arthur’s response had been absolutely instinctual. Staring into the deep blue of his grandfather’s eyes he had spoken without the slightest shadow of doubt.
“I do.”
—
Arthur opened his eyes and looked back at the page. At the edge of the text block was a bit of marginalia written in browning ink in a seventeenth-century hand.
Libro huic nullus locus melior praeter Baronum Castrum
Baronum Castrum was the name of the Roman settlement that had become Barchester. The marginalia translated, “No better place for this book than Barchester.” His grandfather had shown him this mysterious notation on one of their visits to the cathedral library, translating it without comment or explanation. Arthur ran his finger lightly across the inscription, wondering, as he always did when he looked at it, who had written those words and, more importantly, why. Some monk or priest or scholar had thought Barchester the perfect place for a book about King Arthur and had chosen a page about the Holy Grail to note this. How he wished he could see into the past and know the reason.
After another moment, he turned and slipped the book back into its place, carefully aligning the spine with the adjacent volumes so no one would know it had been removed. As much as he wanted to follow his grandfather’s exhortation and find a way to seek the Holy Grail in Barchester, that would have to wait for another day. He walked back to his usual table and slid into the worn velvet seat of his Gothic chair—a castoff from the chapter house renovations of the nineteenth century. On the table in front of him lay the Barchester Breviary. It was the only medieval manuscript of Barchester not damaged during the emptying of the library in 1941. Its intact survival was owed to its occasional use, even after the Reformation, as a service book. It had originally been kept in the vestry and so had not been part of the chained library. Occupying, as it did, a place of pride in the library, on a lectern near the entrance, it would have been one of the first books removed on the night of the bombing.
The thirteenth-century manuscript contained the psalms, readings, and prayers for the daily offices—the seven services conducted by monks of the medieval monastery each day. The Barchester Breviary was particularly distinguished for the inclusion of medieval musical settings for several of the psalms and canticles. Many such musical manuscripts had been destroyed at the time of the Civil War by Parliamentarians, who saw chanting as too Roman Catholic. But the breviary had survived and had been an important source for one of the few pieces of scholarship to emerge from the library in the nineteenth century, a book called Harding’s Church Music, by the then precentor of the cathedral, Septimus Harding.
The breviary also contained prayers and services unique to Barchester. Of these, the one that held the most interest for Arthur was the service for the feast day of St. Ewolda, founder of the monastery that became Barchester Cathedral. He had pored over these four pages of Latin again and again searching for any clue about her life.
The chief sticking point in Arthur’s attempts to craft a new guide to Barchester Cathedral was the lack of information about Ewolda. Arthur knew she had been martyred—she was included in the Venerable Bede’s Martyrologium. But Bede gave no details about either Ewolda’s life or her death.
“Our visitors don’t care about some seventh-century saint,” Gwyn had told him when he explained that he couldn’t finish his guide until he knew at least something about Ewolda. “They just want to know when the nave was built, who designed the stained glass windows, and what time the café closes.” But Arthur had persisted in the belief that if he stared at those four pages hard enough, they would reveal something of Ewolda’s story.
He picked up the manuscript, as he had so many times before, hoping for new insight. The volume had been rebound sometime shortly after the Reformation, and the present binding of brown calf was worn to the softness of suede. There were no markings on the exterior—or at least none that had survived four hundred years of use—but Arthur nonetheless turned the thick volume in his hands, carefully examining the binding before opening it. Handling this book was, to Arthur, like a liturgical rite—there were certain unwritten rubrics he always followed.
The manuscript was about 11 inches high and just over 7 inches wide and contained 160 vellum leaves, each covered on both sides with closely spaced Latin text. There was no title page or table of contents. The first page, to which Arthur now turned, simply began the service of Matins.
Vellum, especially eight-hundred-year-old vellum, felt like nothing else. Arthur reveled in the texture of the pages as he slowly turned them over. Each had its own thickness, its own weight, yet each also possessed those peculiar characteristics of vellum—the sheen; the smooth, almost slick surface; the supple flexibility; and that underlying strength. When turning vellum pages, Arthur always took great care, but he also knew he didn’t need to. Unlike paper, vellum was extremely difficult to tear.
Everything about the manuscript transported Arthur back across the centuries—the faint red lines that had served the scribe as a guide to keeping his lettering straight; the darkening at the bottom corner of every page, where a thousand, or ten thousand, thumbs had turned the leaves; and the vellum itself—that calfskin parchment that was so expensive and difficult to prepare.
Eventually, Arthur arrived at the order for the service of Vespers for the feast day of St. Ewolda. It differed only slightly from Vespers on other days, and Arthur had never been able to read anything into the particular selection of psalms and Scripture readings. Only the final prayer made any direct reference to Ewolda:
Harken we beseech thee O Lord Christ to our prayers and deign to bless with thy grace thy servant Ewolda, whose sacrifice in thy name we remember this day and every day. As you made your blessed virgin Ewolda come to heaven through the palm frond of martyrdom, grant that we by following her example may earn the right to approach you.
As always, the prayer left Arthur with more questions than answers. Ewolda was a virgin and a martyr—both fairly standard for early female saints. But what was her sacrifice? What was the “palm frond of martyrdom”? What was her example that those who prayed this prayer sought to follow?