“And you believe your sister to be a saint?”
“Of that I have no doubt, for however dim my memories of days long past, miracles still occur at her shrine. Just last year, a woman who could hardly walk from palsy came to pray at the tomb where Ewolda’s holy relics lie. The next day she was healed of her infirmities. This I saw with my own eyes and many of my brethren saw it as well. So if the story I tell of my blessed sister’s life and death is not perfect in its details, it nonetheless reflects who she truly was and is.”
“You are indeed blessed to call such a saint your sister,” said Martin.
“I am,” said Wigbert softly. “Yet every day I suffer the memory of her death.”
“And what was . . .” began Martin. “What was the manner of her death . . . her martyrdom?”
“That, my brother,” replied Wigbert, “is a story for tomorrow.”
April 6, 2016
SECOND WEDNESDAY AFTER EASTER
The next afternoon Arthur had not been able to leave the university in time to work in the cathedral library, so he walked straight from his bus stop to the cathedral quire, arriving in plenty of time for Evensong. He entered at the west door, and when he passed the precentor rushing through the south transept he nodded politely, doing his best not to imagine the reverend’s head as a giant slab of Gorgonzola. In truth he looked more like a freshly caught salmon. His high forehead, made even higher by his receding hairline, glistened with a sheen of sweat and his thin lips hung open in a perfect O. His flustered expression could not completely mask the haughty demeanor etched in his face. It was not fair of Arthur to dislike the precentor, he knew, but the man gave off an air of superiority unbecoming a salmon.
Arthur slipped into a pew opposite where the choristers would stand. The service would not begin for twenty minutes, and he was the only person in the quire. As the minutes slipped by and he felt himself relaxing into the past, a few others drifted in—one or two regulars, a small clutch of visitors, a shopper or two who had finished errands early and decided to stay in the city center an extra half hour to hear the service. Arthur noticed almost none of this, however. As he waited for Evensong he thought of nothing. He knew that others thought of God or Jesus or architecture or music, but to Arthur the miracle of sitting in a quiet cathedral was that it allowed him to empty his mind. The frustrations of his job at the university, the difficulties of his research, even his irrational dislike of the precentor melted away. By the time the precentor began the service, chanting, “O Lord, open thou our lips,” Arthur heard only the pure tenor voice, and as the choir responded he fell back into the music.
The beauty of Evensong—the voices of the choir ringing off the ancient stones of the cathedral—did not make Arthur believe in God, but it did make him want to believe. The service had been sung in Barchester regularly for half a millennium, and Arthur found that continuity comforting as he slipped into the same seat he occupied in the quire every afternoon.
The Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, which were a part of every Evensong, were today sung to especially appropriate music—a Gregorian chant setting taken from the Barchester Breviary. The music, which had been sung in that very space eight hundred years ago, echoed hauntingly through the quire and transported Arthur back to the days before the Reformation, before Evensong, when seven times a day the chants of monks filled this space.
When the service ended, Arthur left by way of the north quire aisle, hoping to avoid the precentor, but as soon as he emerged into the nave, there stood the salmon greeting the few worshippers, and Arthur had no choice but to smile and offer his hand.
“Good afternoon, Arthur,” said the precentor. “Always so nice to see you.” That tone of voice, thought Arthur, must be what had inspired the invention of the word disingenuous. The precentor’s hand was cold and damp and Arthur surreptitiously wiped his own hand on his pants as he hurried down the nave.
The precentor had a way of always being where Arthur wanted to be. At receptions, when Arthur crossed the room to speak to the dean, or the choirmaster, or the organist’s French wife, the precentor arrived on the scene just in front of him, monopolizing the conversation; at the market, he had an unnerving habit of slipping in front of Arthur just as he was about to join a queue and of buying the last of the Cheddar, or the wholemeal, or the raspberry jam. Arthur had even, on several occasions, arrived in the library to find the precentor sitting in what he thought of as his chair at his table. While the precentor certainly had a right to sit anywhere in the library he chose, it annoyed Arthur to be relegated to a more modern table while the precentor sat reading, as often as not, a paperback spy novel in Arthur’s usual, if not rightful, spot.
So, while Arthur did not exactly seethe at having been delayed, if only for a moment, he was none too pleased as he scurried home to tidy up. He was expecting guests.
Arthur lived at the edge of the cathedral close in one of three cottages that had been fashioned out of a row of almshouses once called Hiram’s Hospital. The “hospital” had been endowed and built in 1434 by a wealthy businessman named John Hiram as a home for elderly gentlemen of Barchester. By the mid-twentieth century, the endowment had run dry, and the houses had fallen into disrepair until they had been restored for modern living in the 1990s. Arthur had bought his cottage ten years ago when he came to Barchester, a fitting use of the inheritance his grandfather had left him.
There had been twelve men living in the six almshouses; each of the modern homes was composed of two of those medieval units. Arthur had, on the ground floor, a spacious sitting room, a small kitchen, and a dining area, as well as a small conservatory at the back looking out over the common garden and a bend in the river. Upstairs, in what had once been little more than a garret, were a cozy bedroom, a small bathroom, and Arthur’s study, from which he could just glimpse the tower of the cathedral.
He could not imagine a more ideal home. The cottage was close to everything Arthur cared about—not just the cathedral but the shops in the city center (particularly Denning’s Bookshop)—and it was blessedly distant from all he loathed, for while Arthur inhabited the world of medieval Barchester, the modern university had been built in a field six miles outside of town. Number Three, Hiram’s Cottages, Barchester, was the perfect address for Arthur Prescott.