“Fine.”
Negotiations having been concluded ahead of schedule, there didn’t seem to be anything more to say. He said good-bye and hung up.
SHE WAS ALREADY THERE when he arrived, sitting in one of the rear corners of the room, her long legs crossed underneath a tiny marble-topped table. Café Lilas was a long, bright, pleasant establishment fronted by tall picture windows divided into little squares. It was full of mismatched white wire tables and chairs jumbled together at odd angles in twos and threes. White ceiling fans spun slowly overhead in sync, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of an expatriate bar at a tropical hotel.
Margaret Napier was all business. She wasn’t interested in preliminaries, and that was fine with Edward. As they talked he realized he’d misjudged her. He’d mistaken her coldness and lack of affect for arrogance or just plain nerdiness, but he was wrong. It was more like a profound lack of interest. He had never met anyone so completely consumed by her work. She rarely made eye contact, and her voice always kept that low, almost mechanical tone he’d noticed when he first met her, as if she couldn’t spare the extra energy to endow it with any real inflection. She spoke clearly, in long, elaborate sentences that she always took the trouble to complete, conscientiously redeeming any dangling clauses and firmly closing all parentheses, but it was all devoid of emotional investment. The effect was of somebody reluctantly reading a prepared statement off a teleprompter, a statement prepared by somebody against whom she had a bitter and long-standing grudge. He considered the possibility that she might be clinically depressed.
“Gervase Hinton, later Gervase of Langford,” she began, “was born in London in the late 1330s. It was still the Middle Ages, but it was the Later Middle Ages. The Hundred Years War with France was just starting. Edward III had just become king of England by killing his mother’s lover, Mortimer, who had become king by killing Edward III’s father, Edward II, by sodomizing him with a red-hot poker.
“It’s important to understand how different life was in the fourteenth century. London, the greatest city in England, had a population of about forty thousand, and those forty thousand had a hundred churches between them. The English thought of London as New Troy, a city founded by the descendants of Aeneas after the Trojan War. The average man was five foot three inches tall. People ate capons and suckling pigs at feasts and believed in goblins and fairies. The men wore stockings with different-colored legs. The population was made up of noblemen, knights, merchants, servants, and peasants, in that order. All of them lived in the Christian belief that the world was in a process of slow but steady decline, which would ultimately lead to the Day of Judgment and the end of time.”
“Right,” said Edward. “King Arthur and all that.”
“No. King Arthur lived in the seventh century, if he existed at all. That was seven hundred years before Gervase of Langford was born. King Arthur was as far in the past from Gervase as Gervase is from us. In the fourteenth century King Arthur was already part of a legendary and sentimentalized version of English history. Think of The Canterbury Tales. Gervase was a close contemporary of Chaucer.”
A waiter brought them two glasses of white wine. Margaret sent hers back and asked for iced coffee.
“We don’t know of anything unusual in Gervase’s childhood. His family were dyers, and they seem to have made some money from it. His father and his uncle were prominent in the London dyers’ guild. They owned property in the city and in Gloucester.
“When Gervase was around ten he witnessed the first outbreak of the plague that we call the Black Death, but which was then known simply as the Death. The plague killed somewhere between a third and a half of the population of Europe and created spectacles of unprecedented devastation. Whole villages were emptied. Ghost ships drifted on the open ocean, their crews dead. Cities were so depopulated that wolves came out of the forests and attacked the survivors. In Avignon the pope kept bonfires burning on either side of his throne to keep away evil vapors.
“Gervase was lucky. He survived the Death, and an uncle named Thomas survived as well, and when the plague receded in 1349 they inherited a fair amount of money and property from family members who died. Thomas became one of the more prominent merchants in London.
“Most of what we know about Gervase’s life comes from official records and fragments of paper that have survived purely by chance. Family records were sometimes used as scrap paper to make bookbindings, and they can occasionally be recovered from inside old books. A psalter from Langford that was disbound for repairs gave us a receipt from the household of the Earl of Langford for pants and boots for a ‘Gyrvas Hyntoun,’ and from this we assume that Thomas Hinton sent the young Gervase north to serve as a page there. We can guess that Gervase probably took part in the siege of Paris in 1360, because the Earl of Langford and his retinue were there. We don’t know anything more until 1362, when Gervase reappears as a law student at the Inns of Court in London.
“All this was perfectly ordinary for the ambitious son of a well-to-do merchant. But what followed was not. A young man in Gervase’s position could have expected to become an esquire or a vallettus in the service of the king and eventually rise to a position of considerable consequence, as Chaucer did. But Chaucer was a go-getter, a company man, who knew how the game was played and played it well. Gervase was something else, something different. He gave up his position at court and went back north, back to the service of the Earl of Langford, where he became a kind of family associate and pet scholar. He helped manage the estate, he ran important errands for the earl, and in his spare time he wrote his books. Langford was not a prominent family, and Gervase was probably a painful disappointment to his uncle.”
Margaret stopped there. She seemed to lose her train of thought, staring vacantly out through the front window. A noisy crowd of college students was getting settled around a big table in the corner of the café. Edward waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.
“Is that it?” Edward asked. “But why did he go back to Langford, if he could have done better in London?”
“Nobody knows,” said Margaret. “I think he left London under a cloud, some kind of political disgrace. No one knows exactly what. It must have been fairly severe to send him to the provinces—look at Chaucer, who was tried for rape and went on to become head of customs for all of London. Something different happened to Gervase, something worse, and it cast a shadow over his career from which he never recovered.
“Gervase accompanied one diplomatic mission, to Venice. I’ve even heard it suggested that he was involved in espionage, and that his undistinguished career was just a cover identity, but again, there’s really no evidence to back it up. Maybe Gervase thought a less prominent position would give him more time to write, although from what I can tell the earl worked him like a dog. It’s useless to speculate, there’s no way we can know.”
Edward nodded. “Poor bastard.”
He sipped his wine and studied Margaret’s curiously pale oval face. The sun gleamed off her dark, straight hair. She met his eyes with her own unreadable stare.
“Well,” he said. “So much for his life. What about his books?”
“By our standards, Gervase didn’t write very much.” He sensed that Margaret was bored, but her speech remained as concise and composed as a prepared lecture. “There are a dozen or so minor poems attributed to him, occasional verses which he may or may not actually have written. We know for certain that he wrote a book of animal fables, Les Contes merveilleux, which are witty in places but otherwise very conventional. His masterpiece, such as it is, is the Chronicum Anglicanum, an account of what was then England’s recent history, the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He completed it in 1362. In those days Gervase was probably considered pretty unfashionable for his interest in the recent past—that kind of scholarship went out of style with the Venerable Bede.”
Edward had ordered a piece of dense flourless chocolate cake. He shaved off a thin slice with the edge of his fork.
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“Have you read it?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Is it as dull as it sounds?”
She didn’t take the bait. “It’s an important document. It’s a very scholarly piece of research in a period when serious scholarship was out of fashion. Is there something more specific I can tell you about it?”
“No. Sorry, go on. So he stayed at Langford for the rest of his life?”
She nodded.
“As usual, history only records the bad parts. He was robbed once, on the road from Langford to Hull. His losses were never recovered. He married a woman named Elizabeth who was very young even for that time. It seems to have been a marriage of convenience; she was a handmaiden to the countess. She died two years later, and there were no children. Gervase received the usual petty awards and annuities from his noble masters, but they were never sufficient to make him well-off. He engaged in the usual legal squabbles. Around 1370 he suffered some kind of serious injury on the castle grounds; possibly he fell from one of the walls. Some have called it a failed suicide. After that he kept to his bed.
“He died in 1374, in his mid-thirties. It’s not unusual. People didn’t live as long back then. It was a plague year, and that may be what finally killed him, but again, we don’t know for sure. After all, he survived it the first time.”
So far, not a lot he could use. A waiter cleared away the dishes at the next table with a clatter. Margaret finally tasted her coffee.
“It seems like a shame,” he said.
“What does?”
“I don’t know. That there wasn’t more to his life.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” He frowned. “Something more dramatic?”
Margaret shrugged unsympathetically. “Most people had it worse than he did. A lot of them lived on leftover peas and radishes they picked up from between the ruts in some lord’s field after the harvest. By any reasonable standard Gervase was extremely privileged.”
“I doubt that ever stopped anybody from being unhappy.”
She shrugged again, a tiny movement of one thin shoulder, obviously uninterested in this line of speculation.
The café was now bathed in yellow sunlight pouring in through the front windows, glinting off marble tabletops and discarded spoons. A large leafy tropical plant stood in one corner, half green, half dead.
“So Gervase wrote two books, and maybe a few poems,” Edward said, “and he had a lousy job working for a minor nobleman. Why is he so important?”
Margaret arched her thin, dark eyebrows quizzically.
“What makes you think he’s important?”
Edward hesitated, puzzled.
“I guess I just assumed—you’re saying he’s not important?”
Edward caught a faint flash of something in her eyes.
“He’s a significant minor figure,” she said, calmly enough, and took another sip of coffee.
All right, he thought. We’ll come back to that. He wanted another glass of wine, and he signaled the waiter and tapped his glass.
“And this other book, the one I’m looking for? Where does the Viage fit in?” He tried to imitate her pronunciation.
“The Viage is another matter entirely,” she said. “If, for the sake of argument, we take seriously the possibility that it is genuine—and I suppose that doing so is one of the conditions of my employment—it would of course have real importance. There were only three really important writers in late medieval England: Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl Poet. Together they essentially invented English literature. A fictional narrative of significant length from that period, written in English and not Latin or French, by a scholar of Gervase’s general sophistication...its value would be inestimable. And of course,” she added pragmatically, “the book itself could have some monetary value, as an artifact.”
“How much?”
“Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions.”
“Wow.” Edward was grudgingly impressed.
“All right.” He could see her visibly remind herself that she was getting paid for this. “The Viage purports to be the remains of a lost medieval narrative, a romance consisting of five fragments. It begins as a Grail legend. The quest for the Holy Grail involved many knights, hundreds, not just Lancelot and Galahad and the ones you’ve heard of, and they all had their own separate adventures along the way. Some successful, some less so. The Viage begins in the Grail genre, telling the story of a previously unknown knight, but it rapidly deviates into something else.
“The knight is a nobleman, never named, who leaves behind his wife and child in the dead of winter. After some preliminary wandering he stays for a while at the castle of a friendly lord who feasts him handsomely, with much boasting and swapping of stories in front of the roaring fire, while the ice-covered branches rattle outside. One night, from out of the darkness, a strange knight enters the hall. He has the body of an enormous muscular man, but his head is the head of a stag with a great branching rack of silver antlers. On the antlers is impaled the corpse of a footman who had been standing guard outside. His blood streams down over the strange knight’s face.
“As you might imagine, everybody falls silent. The strange knight bows his horned head, dumping the footman’s body unceremoniously onto the carpet, then straightens up and draws a long, slender sword. He speaks to them. He describes a strange chapel with stained glass walls, the place, he says, where St. Maura Troyes wept her miraculous tears. He calls it the Rose Chapel. Between here and there are great perils, he says, but it is a holy place of great power. In short, he charges them to seek it out or forfeit their knightly honor. The stag knight speaks in a high, lisping voice, apparently one of the side effects of having the head of a deer.
“When he’s finished the stag knight changes shape. Instead of a knight with the head of a stag, he becomes a stag with the head of a bearded man. He winks at the company, defecates on the lord’s good red carpet, drags his hoof through it a few times, and bounds away into the winter night.
“No one sleeps in the castle that night. They forget all about the Grail and unanimously swear to take up the stag knight’s challenge—in part for the sake of their honor, in part to avenge the footman, who turns out to have been somebody or other’s nephew. The servants are rousted out of bed and put to work packing food and strapping on armor and shoeing horses, and the knights put in some time praying for holy guidance. There’s a lot of very technical discussion of the merits and demerits of various bits of armor and a fairly technical disquisition on hunting techniques—fewmets and prickers and things like that—but the gist is that they’re all off and away into the forest the next morning, hounds baying, hoarfrost on steel, the bloody orb of the sun winking between the snowy trees, pennants of breath streaming from the horses’ mouths. In a way, it’s the high point of the story. It’s certainly the happiest.
“They pick up the stag knight’s scent quickly, but he turns out to be a past master at this game, and he leads them on an epic chase, in and out of streams and rivers, up and down mountains, doubling back on his tracks, laying false trails. Every time they think they have him he mysteriously vanishes, and every time they’re about to give up hope he pops up again, posing cheekily on some distant promontory, and the chase is rejoined.
“At first everyone seems to be having a good time, singing round the campfire and handling little subquests on the side as they come up, slaying giants and righting local wrongs. But over time the knights start to feel run down. The chase has gone on for months now, and the strain is beginning to tell. It’s worst at night. Asleep in their silken pavilions, the knights have troubled dreams. Glowing women drift out of the trees and tempt them to break their knightly vows. Grumpy hermits pop up wearing smelly hair shirts, demanding alms and posing thorny theological questions and telling them they’re all going to hell. Then something truly terrible happens.”
“What?” Edward asked. He caught himself listening raptly, with his mouth open.
“One morning, early, the lord and his men pick up the stag knight’s trail.” Margaret took another sip of coffee. “It’s fresh, and for once they actually seem to have a chance to catch it. They decide to herd it toward a blind canyon in the foothills of some mountains. They see the stag enter the canyon. The knights move in behind it to guard the entrance and settle in to wait. They sit there for several hours, till the sun is up and they’re baking in their armor. The wind dies. Insects stop chirping. In spite of the bright sun the entrance to the canyon is dark and shadowy. In fact, it’s black as midnight. For an instant the forest is still.
“Then the brush crackles, and the stag comes flying out of the dark canyon at enormous speed. Its eyes are rolling wildly in its human head. ‘Gyve over!’ it shouts back over its shoulder. ‘Gyve over! For God’s sake leave this place, if you value your lives!’ There’s something in the canyon that even the stag knight is terrified of. It runs straight at the crescent of armored knights, and the lord gives it a deep slash on the shoulder as it passes, but it breaks through and disappears back into the forest.
“This is the kind of situation knights live for. With typically short attention spans they forget all about the magic stag and the Rose Chapel and swear another mighty oath to brave the adventure of the blind canyon. They dismount and march shoulder-to-shoulder into the darkness.
“The next page of the book is entirely covered with black ink.”
7
EDWARD BLOTTED HIS forehead with his wrist. It was hot in the café, though Margaret didn’t seem to feel it. She looked very cool and very still. She continued in her professional lecturing voice.
“No words, no pictures, just a solid page of blackness. It’s an unusual device, very literary, even innovative—it’s been written about quite often. Sterne probably borrowed the idea for the black pages in Tristram Shandy, though I don’t think anybody’s ever proved conclusively that he read the Viage himself. No one knows what it means, if it means anything, and there aren’t many clues: That’s where the first fragment ends.