“If it’s a wall that’s not really attached to anything,” said David, “why don’t we just shove it over?”
“Because,” said Bethany, “we don’t want the sacred spring filled up with rubble any more than the medieval monks did.”
“Let me see that bread knife,” said Oscar.
“The bread knife you made fun of?” said David.
“Oh, don’t be a baby,” said Oscar. “The mortar may be as damp as the plaster was, especially if the wall was never really made properly. A nice long bread knife might be just the thing to completely detach one of the stones.”
Twenty minutes later, Oscar and Arthur had loosened or removed the mortar from three stones at the top of the wall, but the spaces between the stones were still too narrow to allow them to be pulled forward.
“How are we going to get these things out of here?” said Oscar.
“The frustrating thing is,” said Arthur, “that once we get the first stone out, we’ll be able to reach through and drag the rest forward without much trouble.”
“So,” said David, stepping forward and making a show of rolling up his shirtsleeves, “we don’t push the whole wall over, but we do push one block through to the other side. There’s not much chance a single stone, especially if you pick a small one, will damage your alleged spring.”
“What do you reckon?” said Oscar to Arthur.
“Do it,” said Bethany.
“We could come back down with an archaeological crew,” said Oscar.
“The chapter is voting at nine a.m.,” said Bethany. “Are there a lot of archaeologists in Barchester who work nights, do you think? Do it!” She shouted these last two words not with anger but with excitement and as they still echoed in the gloomy chamber, David gave a strong shove to the smallest of the stones on which Oscar and Arthur had been working. It slid backward an inch or more.
“Again,” said Bethany, stepping forward until she stood right at David’s shoulder.
He shoved again and the stone moved another couple of inches.
“Again,” said Oscar, Arthur, and Bethany in chorus.
David gave the stone a final shove and it slid from its place into the darkness beyond. The floor shook as the stone thudded to the ground on the other side of the wall. For a moment they all stood in silence, until Arthur realized it wasn’t silence.
“Do you hear that?” he whispered.
They held their collective breath and the sound was quite clear, tinkling in the dark chamber beyond the wall.
“Water,” said Bethany. “Running water.”
“Running water,” said Arthur. “The sacred spring.”
“Holy mother of God,” said David. “I thought this whole thing was just . . .”
“It’s real,” whispered Bethany reverently, once again slipping her hand into Arthur’s.
“It sounds real, anyway,” said Arthur. “But we still have a lot of stones to move before we can get in there and take a look.”
Removing stones, even poorly mortared stones, from a wall in which they had sat for half a millennium was not as easy as they had hoped, and it was nearly two hours later when, filthy and wet, their hands scraped and bleeding, they finally stood in front of a hole big enough to climb through. The sound of running water now echoed clearly throughout the crypt, but their efforts to peer into the blackness on the other side of the wall had revealed little.
“You go first,” said Oscar to Arthur, handing him the torch. “This is your quest most of all.”
“OK,” said Arthur, “but not with this.” He handed the torch back to Oscar and picked up his candle from the floor. It had blown out soon after they started working on the wall, but Arthur withdrew the matches from his pocket and relit it. “If no one has been in there since 1539, I think candlelight is appropriate.”
Bethany held the candle for Arthur as he climbed through the hole they had opened in the wall, then handed it through to him. “Be careful,” she whispered.
Arthur turned and looked into the darkness. He took a step. And then another. Still he could see nothing ahead but blackness. He was not in a wide continuation of the main east-west arm of the crypt, he realized, as he stopped and held the candle first to one side and then the other, but in a passage about eight feet across with a roof slightly lower than the one in the main crypt. Yet the sound of water became louder as he slowly moved east, and after a few more tentative steps he felt the air suddenly change. It felt purer, and he took a deep breath. Moving the candle around, he saw he had emerged into a large chamber. The ceiling was no longer visible by the light of his candle, nor were the walls. The antepassage, he realized, was the reason they couldn’t see anything by peering through the wall.
He shuffled slowly ahead, until his toe caught the edge of something solid. Stooping to investigate, he saw, in the flickering light of the candle, a circular stone wall about two feet high and four feet across. When he leaned over the edge, he felt a refreshing coolness, nothing like the stale dank of the rest of the crypt. He lowered his candle farther, and looked into a pool of water so clear and still he could see every smudge of dirt on his face where it reflected on the surface. From the sound of running water, he knew that this was a spring and not a well, that water was draining away somewhere, but the surface remained like glass. Arthur suddenly realized he was both filthy and thirsty, yet he felt this water was not for satisfying ordinary needs. This, he knew as he sat on the wall surrounding it, was the sacred spring of Ewolda. Even if the story of its bursting forth on the site of her martyrdom was no more than a myth, it was the most ancient part of Barchester’s history. And whether or not Arthur believed in its healing powers, according to the manuscript many over the centuries had, and their faith was not to be taken lightly.
Arthur sat staring into the water’s depths for several minutes. He thought of the faith of Ewolda, of those who had come to her spring, and those who had used such ingenuity to protect it. He thought about what Bethany had said to him earlier that evening, what seemed like days ago. Was it really that simple? Could he just decide to believe in God?
He might have remained there all night, pondering faith, watching as the candlelight flickered in the glassy water. He didn’t know how long he had sat mesmerized by that sight when he felt a hand on his shoulder.