“We were calling you,” said Bethany gently. “We got worried.”
“It’s real,” he said, not raising his eyes to her, but relaxing at the soft touch of her hand. The sound of Oscar and David emerging into the chamber barely registered on Arthur’s consciousness. It was incredible, this sense of peace he was drawing from seemingly ordinary water. Perhaps he was tired, perhaps he was relieved, but he wasn’t sitting here thinking of saving manuscripts or rewriting history books, or even of finding the Grail; he was thinking only of faith and love, of God and Ewolda, of his grandfather and the joy he would have felt in this spot, and of Bethany—until he felt another hand on his other shoulder, this one shaking him hard enough to bring the world of four trespassers in an ancient chamber back into focus.
“Uhm, Arthur,” said David, “can I rouse you from your meditation long enough to point out that a fifteen-hundred-year-old sacred spring is not the only thing down here that is going to loosen those Heritage Lottery purse strings. Travel a little farther east, my good man.”
Bethany took his hand and helped him stand, for Arthur’s legs felt not quite of this world. They took a few steps past the spring to where Oscar and David now stood at either end of a stone sarcophagus. It bore no decoration, no fine jewels that would identify it as a saintly shrine. The tomb was not crafted from alabaster or Purbeck marble but from slabs of plain Barsetshire limestone. Arthur passed David and stood at the west side of the tomb as if at an altar. He noticed, as he ran his hand across the rough surface of the stone, that the spring chamber, as he now thought of it, did not have the dank and filth of the outer crypt. Perhaps because the water in here moved, it seemed to keep the air fresh and the stones, but for a layer of dust, clean. Arthur, still holding his candle, leaned over the tomb and gently blew the dust from its surface. There, incised into the stone in large, simple letters, was a single word—EVOLDA.
XV
THE CLOSE
In the fifteenth century, Barchester Cathedral close was said to be one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the kingdom. The Civil War, however, wrought havoc. Trees were cut down for firewood, houses destroyed, windows used for target practice. Many of the homes and other buildings in the close were razed after the Restoration, and over the next two centuries a hodgepodge of domestic buildings grew up in the close. In the nineteenth century, Bishop Gladwyn undertook a major rebuilding effort, restoring the medieval layout of St. Martin’s Close with a set of buildings designed by George Gilbert Scott.
July 14, 1660, Barchester
Gregory Wickart once again found himself as Canon Wickart. After sixteen years of Cromwell’s protectorate, during which Anglican clergy had been hounded from their cathedrals, the Stuarts had returned to power, the monarchy had returned to England, the Church of England had returned to the land, and Canon Wickart had returned to Barchester. The memories of those dark days when the Parliamentarians had invaded the cathedral still haunted him. The clergy had been turned out of all the cathedrals in the realm, but Cromwell had been especially harsh in places like Barchester, which had gladly adopted Archbishop Laud’s High Church ways of worship. Though the archbishop was already in prison awaiting execution when Barchester fell, Cromwell was ruthless in tearing the cathedral clergy from their homes, destroying their belongings, including books and vestments, and stripping the cathedral of anything that hinted at ritualism.
Gregory had waited a few weeks after the Restoration, not wanting to take a chance that the new status quo would be temporary, but with a month and a half passed since King Charles’s coronation in May, it now felt safe to return. What he saw in the close as he passed through the gates grieved him greatly. The two rows of medieval houses that had faced each other across St. Martin’s Close, houses reserved for the use of the vicars choral and the canons, lay mostly in ruins. Inside the cathedral, windows had been smashed, the altar overturned, and much of the woodwork from the quire stalls and altar rail had been carted off as firewood. There had been, Gregory heard, a plan to pull down the cathedral altogether, and only the objections of the mayor and burgesses had convinced Cromwell that this was an unwise course of action.
The library, Gregory discovered on mounting the steps to that magnificent room, was in disarray. It had been used to house troops—men who had thought nothing of burning books for warmth or putting their pages to even more unsavory purposes. When the troops had left, the room had been abandoned. Broken windows had let in wind and rain and many of the remaining books were damaged beyond repair. The collection of nearly four thousand printed books, largely built by Bishop Atwater, had been reduced to a few hundred. Thankfully, the manuscripts that had been chained in place by Bishop Atwater, being far from any broken windows, remained more or less unscathed. The archival records of the cathedral had been sent to a central registry in London, but Gregory understood they would soon be returned to Barchester. He hoped they would return intact.
Slowly, over the next few years, the cathedral came back to life. The new bishop was a man of independent wealth, and he personally paid for many of the repairs. Gregory oversaw the restoration of the library. He carefully removed all the books, disposing of those that were damaged beyond use and storing the rest in the Lady Chapel while the library was cleaned and the windows replaced. The treasure with which he had been entrusted so many years ago remained hidden for now outside the cathedral precincts, and the coded manuscript he had taken into his care he placed in the Lady Chapel with the other books. It seemed as safe a place as any.
When the time came to return the books to the library, Gregory mourned the wide empty spaces on the shelves. But this library had been built before and it could be built again. As it had before, it would depend on the donations of bishops, clergy, and benefactors, but Gregory knew that eventually the shelves would be filled.
—