“Quite well, sir.”
“No, you may paint me in the chapter house, where the portrait will hang. I think you’ll find the light excellent.”
“Very well, My Lord,” said Collier, “but why then send for me to scale the steps to this dim-lit place?”
“For this,” said the bishop, turning the chained Ewolda manuscript so that Collier could see the illustration.
“What’s this, then,” said Collier. “The Holy Grail?”
“Perhaps,” said the bishop. “Whatever it is, it has been a part of Barchester’s history for centuries. Do you suppose you could paint me holding this cup?”
“Absolutely,” said Collier. “I see the image forming before me. It could be magnificent.”
“It must be magnificent,” said the bishop. He pulled out a key that hung on a chain around his neck and unfastened a lock at one end of the bookshelf to which the Ewolda manuscript was chained. He drew back the iron rod and removed the chain, freeing the manuscript from the bookcase. Sliding the rod back into place, he refastened the lock and handed the book to Collier.
“It feels ancient,” said Collier.
“Not as ancient as some,” said the bishop. “The volume dates, I believe, from around the time of the Reformation, though I suspect the story it contains is far older.”
“And may I read the story?” asked Collier. “Like yourself I am fascinated with the medieval period.”
“I’m afraid you won’t have much luck reading this manuscript,” said the bishop, laughing. “Now, this must never leave the cathedral precincts and each day when you are finished painting, I will lock it back into its place.”
“Very well, My Lord. Will you show me to the chapter house?”
“Indeed,” said Gladwyn.
A month later, the painting was complete, Collier paid, and the manuscript locked back in place. Bishop Gladwyn had barely waited for the paint to dry before having the portrait mounted in an elaborately carved oak frame and hung on the east wall of the chapter house, above the largest of the stone seats. For the next ten years, he rarely missed a chapter meeting and a chance to sit under the portrait of himself holding the Holy Grail.
May 27, 2016
FIRST FRIDAY AFTER TRINITY
At four, Arthur finally gave up trying to sleep, dressed, and returned to the library. After walking Bethany back to her lodgings, he had lain awake trying to process her offer, but another thought kept intruding on his mental arguments about the disadvantages of moving to America. As much as he wanted to focus on Bethany, he couldn’t get those extra characters in the cipher out of his mind. Each cipher string contained nine characters, but the strings that contained the hidden numbers never had more than six characters defining those numbers. That left a minimum of three extra characters in each of those strings—many hundreds of characters throughout the manuscript. He had assumed these were so-called garbage letters, not related to the cipher in any way. They certainly did not translate using the key words. But Arthur had started to believe things lately, and he believed that the cipher was perfect, that no character was wasted. So what purpose did those garbage characters serve?
The sky was just beginning to lighten as Arthur made his way toward the cathedral. He wondered if the dawn about to break would begin a day that would be marked in the history of Barchester. How soon would the spring and the tomb become public knowledge? And would this be the day he changed the course of his own life, or would he come to his senses, drive Bethany to Heathrow, and kiss her good-bye?
Back in the library, Arthur settled in at his favorite table. He needed the intimacy of that smaller space, not the wide trestle table on which the group had deciphered the manuscript. He carefully copied out all of the “garbage characters,” half convinced that the spirit of Ewolda would allow him to see some pattern in them once they had been extracted from the rest of the manuscript. What further secret could this manuscript possibly possess? And what did he know about the manuscript, the key words, and the inventory that he had not used in deciphering the story of Ewolda?
He read over the Latin version of the story again, but it seemed nothing more than the remarkable account they had all taken it to be. He picked up the inventory that Bethany had discovered, and examined it closely under the light of his reading lamp. Sometimes, with parchment documents, one could detect where writing had been scraped off the surface, but this document seemed unusually neat and clean. The only thing that marred it slightly was a small crease down the left side, where it had been pressed into the gutter of the mathematical manuscript in which Bethany had discovered it. Arthur gave a start.
“Mother of God, Fibonacci,” he said aloud. That had to be it. Bethany had found the inventory in a section of the manuscript by Fibonacci—and there were no coincidences. The code must somehow be based on the Fibonacci sequence. He spent nearly an hour trying to apply the sequence to the key words they had collected, but to no avail. He was just beginning to think this was another dead end when, almost on a whim, he decided to count the number of words in the Latin transcription of Ewolda’s biography. There were exactly 1,597.
The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers created by adding the two previous numbers in the sequence. Thus the sequence begins 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. The seventeenth number in the sequence is 1597. What if the key words for the garbage characters were within the deciphered manuscript itself? What if all Arthur had to do was circle the words in the manuscript that corresponded to the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence—the first word, second word, third word, fifth word, and so on—and simply rotate through the key words, using a new word for each string of garbage characters? It couldn’t possibly be that simple. But it was. And the beauty of the code was that, unless one knew the inventory had been stored in a manuscript by Fibonacci, it would be virtually impossible to break.
The morning sun flooded the room by the time Arthur had decoded the message hidden in the extra characters. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was after eight. At nine the chapter would be meeting.
He carefully took all his papers off the table. He didn’t think he would ever be able to work in this spot again. He pulled his chair back and looked at this unassuming bit of furniture with fresh eyes. The greatest treasure, he thought, had been under his nose the whole time. He gently ran his fingers across those words carved in the wood by some long-forgotten monk—Mensa Christi. The Table of Christ.