“I will, but first—yes, I wear glasses. I usually wear contacts, but of course you would only know that if you had ever gazed deep into my eyes.” Arthur felt a cold sweat breaking out on his neck. “And yes, Daddy would not approve of some of my language, or of my going to a foreign country, hanging out in an Anglican cathedral—which sounds much too Roman Catholic for his taste—drinking wine, or basically being an independent woman. So my colorful language is the least of the ways in which I have disappointed my father.”
“Will you please show me what’s behind your back?”
“You brought these subjects up, Arthur. Now here’s what I have to offer to the conversation. I believe the coded manuscript is the lost Book of Ewolda, I believe it has something in it about the Holy Grail, and I believe this is the front cover.” She passed to Arthur the front board of a book, covered in vellum. It looked unremarkable to him. Yes, it was about the right size to fit the coded manuscript, but aside from some late medieval or perhaps Renaissance grime, it bore no markings.
“Turn it over,” said Bethany, walking around the table to stand at his side.
Arthur flipped over the cover and stopped breathing. Ever since his grandfather had told him about the Holy Grail and its connection to Barchester he had dreamed of finding something like this. He only wished the old man were still alive to share this moment.
“Incredible, isn’t it?”
Arthur felt his legs turn to jelly and he slid into a chair and laid the cover gently on the table. “No words,” he said. “I have no words.”
On the inside front cover of the coded manuscript was a sketch taking up nearly the entire height of the parchment on which it had been drawn. It was not an illumination—there were no colors, no gilding—and the ink had faded over the centuries so that one had to look closely to make out the details, but several things were immediately obvious without the use of the magnifying glass Bethany handed to Arthur.
The sketch showed a robed woman, standing beside a stream of water. She held two roses in her hand, and a halo hovered over her head. Underneath her feet, in simple lettering, was the word EWOLDA. This would have been enough to convince Arthur that the manuscript was in fact the lost Book of Ewolda, that he had found the missing chapters of Barchester’s history, but what stood on a table next to the martyred founder made uncovering the story of an obscure Saxon saint pale into insignificance. To the right of Ewolda on a small table was a cup, and not just any cup but a chalice nearly identical to the one that appeared in both the 1888 portrait of Bishop Gladwyn by John Collier and the 1917 illustration by Arthur Rackham in The Romance of King Arthur.
“That’s the damn Holy Grail,” said Bethany, tapping her finger on the image.
“This is what Gladwyn was talking about,” said Arthur excitedly.
“Gladwyn? When?”
“In those notebooks you tried to buy.”
“Were they his Grail notes?”
“Mostly, no. Most of them were just notes on chapter meetings and ideas for renovations. But there is a page of notes on having his portrait made by Collier and he writes, ‘copy image of Grail from MS.’ I looked and looked and couldn’t find any such image, but here it is.”
“And Gladwyn says it’s the Grail, too!” said Bethany. “Now we just have to decipher that code and find out where the hell it is.”
Arthur felt a surge of love for Bethany that was as powerful as it was unexpected. He wanted to jump up and embrace her and never let go, except perhaps for meals and to crack a centuries-old code and find the Holy Grail. But he restrained himself, and said, in as calm a voice as he could manage, “I have an idea about the code.”
“Not yet,” said Bethany. “We should all be here.”
Thirty minutes later, David and Oscar had joined them, and stood staring at the drawing of Ewolda.
“Are you telling me,” said David, “that this manuscript has something to do with the Holy Grail?”
There was no way for Arthur to keep this particular secret any longer, with a medieval sketch of the Grail lying on the table, but, for now, he did not say anything about his grandfather’s charge to him or his long-standing search for connections between Barchester and the Grail.
“Yes,” said Arthur. “Bethany and I think there is some sort of connection between . . .” He did not want to state his belief in the reality of the Grail too directly. “Between the story of Ewolda and the legends of the Grail.”
“Too bad we can’t crack the code,” said Oscar.
“Arthur had an idea about that,” said Bethany.
“I was talking to a maths lecturer about ciphers,” said Arthur, “and he said something about Enigma that got me thinking. He said it was like a polyalphabetic substitution cipher in which the key word and the order of the alphabet changed with every character. So I thought, what if it is a substitution cipher, but the reason we can’t crack it with frequency analysis is because the key word keeps changing. But then why would the same three letters—U, Q, and D—continue to be the most frequent throughout the document?”
“That’s the puzzle, isn’t it?” said Oscar.
“That and, if you’re right, finding a constantly changing stream of key words,” said David.
“Unless,” said Arthur, “you could solve both those problems with one solution.”
“What do you mean?” said Bethany. She alone seemed excited about Arthur’s little presentation; the others had distinctly skeptical tones in their voices.
“It hit me after Evensong when I was looking at the service bulletin,” said Arthur, “and I saw that we had heard Psalm Twenty-three.”
“The Lord is my shepherd,” said Bethany.
“Exactly. Except in the bulletin, they give the psalm, and all the Bible verses, in Roman numerals. So it didn’t say Psalm Twenty-three, it said Psalm X, X, I, I, I. So what if U, Q, and D aren’t letters at all. What if they are numbers and each number gives the location of the next key word?”
“But how do you know what numbers they represent?” said David.
“Unus, quinque, decem,” said Oscar.
“One, five, ten,” said Arthur. “The first three Roman numerals. Those three letters are scattered throughout the cipher text, but if you look closely, you’ll see that about every four to eight ‘words,’ if that’s what we can call those groupings of nine letters, there appears a grouping in which those three letters dominate—between two and six letters of the nine are either U, Q, or D.”
“So each could be a number between one and thirty-nine rendered in Roman numerals, since forty introduces the letter L to the mix,” said Oscar.
“Except I think each is a pair of numbers. So this string of letters,” Arthur pointed to a string about halfway down the first page of cipher text reading ACHDKUQMI, “can be read as ten and four. The D is X and the UQ is IV. If every string that hides numbers hides a pair of numbers in Roman numeral format, then the longest any one number can be is five digits, because there are never more than six of U, Q, D in a single string. That eliminates four of the numbers between one and thirty-nine. Looking at the rest, and knowing that no combination of numbers can exceed six digits, there are . . .”
“Five hundred eighty-three,” said Oscar.
“Damn, you are good at maths,” said Arthur. “There are five hundred and eighty-three possible combinations of numbers.”
“Meaning, presumably,” said David, “that there are five hundred and eighty-three possible key words.”