“He said he wanted to keep the collection together. It’s all or none.”
“You know,” said Arthur, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we might make the library relevant again, give it a real purpose. I mean, what is our library anyway? Is it just a place to store old books, to try to preserve our history? Is it some old-fashioned forgotten room like the privy in the anteroom of the chapter house? Or can it be something more? Can it be an opportunity for outreach and education and the creation of new knowledge and ideas? And can it be any of that without the manuscripts? I think the library has real potential, but if you rip its heart out, it may never come back to life.”
“It’s not something I want to do,” said Gwyn, “but most of the canons feel that given the choice between a library that is rarely used and the cathedral itself, the path is clear.”
“So that’s it, then,” said Arthur. “They’re going.”
“It’s not decided,” said Gwyn. “He made the offer last night and gave us four days to respond. The chapter is holding a special meeting on Friday morning to make a decision.”
“So, I’ve got until Friday to come up with ten million pounds?”
“Suppose we talk about something else,” said Gwyn, slipping her hand through Arthur’s arm as they approached a muddy section of the path. “Bethany was looking lovely at the funeral, don’t you think?”
“Suppose we talk about something else,” said Arthur.
—
As soon as Arthur could extricate himself from work, he did. With a little help from Miss Stanhope, he managed to send an e-mail to the members of the Advisory Committee for the Library canceling their meeting that afternoon. Whether Bethany was in the cathedral library or not, whether he was shockingly, inappropriately in love with her or not, he wanted to see those covers, and he especially wanted to see the cover of the ciphered manuscript. Maybe it held a clue that would help him break the code. If the lost Book of Ewolda was headed to America, Arthur would at least like to know what it said before it disappeared forever. As he sat on the bus back into town, imagining Jesse Johnson crating up his treasures and hauling them away from Barchester, another horrible thought occurred to him. If Jesse Johnson owned the manuscripts and he owned the company that digitized them, he would only have to lock his door and flick a switch on his computer and not just the manuscripts but the texts within would become inaccessible. Arthur was certainly not prepared to trust an American billionaire who claimed he was going to make the manuscripts available online for free.
If Arthur was afraid that Bethany would want to talk about what had happened at the funeral, if he thought that she could not help but sense how he truly felt for her, he needn’t have worried. She was at her usual post, positioning a manuscript onto her stand for photographing. She wore a pair of glasses with dark blue frames that contrasted perfectly with her blond hair.
“Give me ten seconds, Arthur,” she said. Completely businesslike, he thought, not a hint of intimacy. Good.
On the largest table in the center of the library were four neat stacks of book covers. They were a bit sooty, but other than that seemed no worse for their circuitous route back to the library. Someone had sorted them by size and Arthur picked up a few to examine them. Most still had a metal clasp pressed into the top right corner. It would be an interesting puzzle to match the covers with their manuscripts. He wondered if he would be part of that effort or if the books would be in America by then.
“I guess you heard,” said Bethany, turning to him.
“I didn’t know you wore glasses,” said Arthur.
“Jesus, Arthur, is that the most important thing here?”
“And your language is getting awfully saucy for the daughter of a preacher.”
“You’re avoiding the subject as usual, Arthur.” Here it came, he thought. Here came the conversation he was dreading—here came the talk about how it was very sweet that Arthur thought he was in love with someone fourteen years younger and grossly mismatched, but Bethany would prefer that they just be friends. But that was not the only subject, it turned out, that Arthur was avoiding.
“Listen, I am so sorry about the whole Jesse Johnson thing,” said Bethany. “It never occurred to me he would do anything like that. I just told him the cathedral needed some money for repairs and the next thing I know he’s trying to empty the library. I don’t even know why he wants the manuscripts, to be honest. I mean, I’ve been sending the images to the home office like I’m supposed to, but there’s nothing in here that would really fit in his Bible museum. A couple of old Gospel manuscripts, maybe, but why offer to buy the whole collection? I suppose he thinks he’s being nice.”
“Did you say you’ve been sending all the images to him?” said Arthur.
“Actually I don’t send them. When I save them they go straight to the cloud and then he can look at what’s been digitized.”
“Does that include the coded manuscript?” said Arthur.
“God, I never thought about that,” said Bethany. “I was just thinking of copying the coded pages so we could return the manuscript to the precentor. But everything I photograph is automatically uploaded, so yeah, he could have seen those pages.”
“Maybe that’s why he’s so eager to get his hands on the library.”
“You think he’s deciphered the manuscript? You think it’s something about the Grail?”
“I doubt he’s cracked the code,” said Arthur. “But maybe be believes he can, or that he can hire somebody who can. And he probably thinks that a coded manuscript must be hiding a pretty interesting secret.”
“We all think that, don’t we?” said Bethany.
“Yes,” said Arthur. “We do.”
“Oh, my God, I almost forgot the good news. Gwyn told you about the covers, right?”
“This morning.”
“I thought I’d try to organize them a little bit and see if I could find one that might match the coded manuscript. Of course since we gave the book back to the precentor, it was a little tricky, but once I sorted out the ones that are the right size, it was easy to tell which one it was, and you’re going to love the reason why.”
“Why?”
Bethany crossed to the table with the piles of covers, picked one up, and held it behind her back. She had a bizarre smile on her face that Arthur couldn’t interpret.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Something that’s going to make you forget about Jesse Johnson for at least five minutes.”
“Then let me see.”