September 3, 1888, Barchester Cathedral Library
Bishop Gladwyn sat in the library of Barchester Cathedral. When he had become bishop the shelves surrounding him had been perhaps two-thirds full, and he had made it one of his goals to fill them during his tenure. There was, thought Gladwyn, more reason than ever for the cathedral to maintain a wide collection of books on all subjects. Since the reforms at Oxford and Cambridge in the last century, university students no longer limited their studies to divinity, mathematics, and classics. Now young men—and if some people had their way, God forbid, young women—studied every topic under the sun, and the bishop felt that while the primary purpose of the cathedral library was to preserve the foundation’s history and support the needs of its clergy, it should also be open to anyone in Barchester seeking knowledge. He had made great progress in building up the collection, and planned to leave most of his own books to the cathedral—completing the resurrection of the Bishop Atwater Library—a library that, as he well knew, held not just books but secrets.
In front of him lay an open volume containing a drawing that seemed to depict St. Ewolda and the Holy Grail. He knew that, as Guardian, it was his duty to protect and hide this manuscript, not call attention to it. But the idea of hiding anything in Barchester seemed ridiculous. Nobody came to Barchester, least of all treasure seekers. Besides, he wasn’t really sure if what he was guarding was even a treasure. Did it make any sense to feel completely bound by a promise made to a dying old man who claimed the tradition of the guardianship had been handed down for centuries? What if he had been hallucinating or in the throes of dementia? Gladwyn believed Barchester was connected to a treasure, but he believed the treasure’s story had been corrupted over the years, leaving him guarding a worthless artifact and leaving Barchester’s connection to that greatest of relics, the Holy Grail, obscured in the fog of history.
Gladwyn had suspected a connection between Barchester and the Grail long before he became bishop, even before he took on the mantle of guardianship from the dean, Mr. Arabin. He had just read Morte d’Arthur when he decided one day to climb the cathedral tower, and he discovered a pair of stone lions. He knew those lions from Malory, and knew also that no other cathedral in Britain boasted such a pair. When, as a young man, he had been called upon, as an enthusiast of the cathedral’s history, to give a tour to the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he had shared his excitement about the Grail with the author. Tennyson, after all, had written Idylls of the King. The poet had expressed especial fascination with the yew tree in the cloisters and the carvings in St. Dunstan’s Chapel, and Gladwyn had not been entirely surprised to see these details in Tennyson’s poem about the Holy Grail, published several months later. And then, after becoming a canon, Gladwyn had been called to the deathbed of the dean and entrusted with a strange responsibility and a vague secret, and his guardianship had led him to this manuscript and its ancient drawing that just might be the Holy Grail.
Since his elevation to bishop of Barchester in 1872, Gladwyn had pursued a single goal—the return of Barchester to its medieval glory. He pursued this goal in spite of not being absolutely sure there had been a medieval glory. There were few records in the library from before the Reformation—much of the archive having been lost during the Commonwealth. But Gladwyn had found hints in a number of documents that Barchester had enjoyed a modest pilgrim trade around the shrine of St. Ewolda. If any detailed records of the shrine’s appearance had survived, he would have considered rebuilding it. Gladwyn was, after all, among the highest of churchmen. As an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1840s he had heard John Henry Newman preach, and had been immediately attracted to the ritual forms of worship espoused by the Oxford Movement. Now he wanted to transform a Barchester Cathedral made stark and barren by reformers and puritans into the thing of glory he hoped it once was.
With a major bequest from his friend Mrs. Martha Thorne, heiress to the Ointment of Lebanon fortune, he had employed a host of artists and architects to assist in this transformation. Edward Burne-Jones designed a stained glass window and William Morris, a tapestry reredos for the Epiphany Chapel—and this modest space in the north transept immediately became the bishop’s favorite spot in the cathedral. George Gilbert Scott brought his Victorian Gothic sensibilities to the job of rebuilding the precincts. He restored the medieval layout of St. Martin’s Close. Beautiful Gothic cottages sprang up on either side for the canons, and at the far end, Scott erected an imposing Gothic deanery built with three colors of brick, a pair of circular towers, and a forest of finials.
When Gladwyn had become bishop, it had been the custom of the chapter to hold their meetings in the dining room of the bishop’s palace, as the medieval chapter house was considered too uncomfortable to be practical. Gladwyn would have none of this, however, and insisted that the meetings be moved to their proper place. At first the chapter resisted, but once the bishop was able to install a dean who was as much of a medievalist as he was, the chapter returned to the thirteenth-century octagonal room off the cloister. By way of a peace offering, the bishop paid for Gilbert Scott to design a set of Gothic chairs—the backs of which reproduced the design in the tracery of the windows in the chapter house itself. With the addition of embroidered cushions, these proved substantially more comfortable than the original stone seats set into the walls, and so the members of the chapter were placated.
Bishop Gladwyn felt that the chapter house lacked only some decoration above the seat that was reserved for his own eminence. A lover of art, he had first seen the works of the Pre-Raphaelites at exhibits at the Royal Academy in London in the 1850s. Now he looked to one of their followers, known in particular for his medieval-style portraits, to paint him into posterity. After all, he had done so much to restore the cathedral and its precincts that he deserved some lasting memorial, and who knew where the canons, many of whom still resented that he was both High Church and high-handed, would choose to stash him when he had the misfortune to pass from the world. If he were destined for a simple tomb in the cloister, rather than the elaborate memorial in the retrochoir he deserved, he would at least hang his portrait in the chapter house to remind those who came after of what he had done.
“My Lord,” came a breathless voice from behind Gladwyn, “I do hope you do not plan to pose for me here in this library. The light is rather murky.”
“Ah, Mr. Collier,” said Gladwyn, crossing to greet the painter. “So good to see you again. I trust your wife is well.”