He was not disappointed. As he came closer, a door opened and she emerged wrapped in a long brown cloak. He had been holding his breath; when he saw her, he let out a puff of air that condensed and formed an ephemeral cloud. He thought she looked so lovely, he would slow down to prolong the moment, perhaps allowing himself to drift a bit nearer than usual, near enough to see the flutter of her eyelashes.
Then something quite extraordinary happened.
She walked straight toward him, stopping him dead in his tracks. She kept coming until she was only an arm’s length away. He wondered whether this was a dream, but when he saw that she was crying and felt the warm air of her sobs pulsing against his neck, he knew it was real. He was too shocked to check for spies. “Elizabeth! What is the matter?”
“Sister Sabeline told me I am to be next,” she said, choking and sputtering.
“Next? Next for what?”
“For the crypts. I am to be taken to the crypts! Please help me, Luke!”
He wanted to reach out to comfort her but knew that would be unpardonable. “I do not know what you speak of. What is to happen in the crypts?”
“You do not know?” she asked.
“No! Tell me!”
“Not here. Not now!” she sobbed. “Can we meet tonight? After you have done Vespers?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know!” she cried. “Not here! Quickly! Sister Sabeline will find me!”
He thought quick, panicky thoughts. “All right. The stables. After Vespers. Meet me there if you are able.”
“I will. I must flee. God bless you, Luke.”
Baldwin paced nervously around his prior, Felix, who was seated on a chair with a horsehair cushion. Ordinarily this would have been a comfortable setting-the abbot’s private receiving room, a nice radiating fire, a chalice of wine on a soft chair-but Felix was certainly not comfortable. Baldwin was flitting about like a fly in a hot room, and his anxiety was contagious. He was a man of wholly ordinary looks and proportions, without any physical manifestations of his holy position such as outward serenity or a wise countenance. Had he not worn the ermine-festooned robe and ornate crucifix of abbot, he would be mistaken for any village tradesman or merchant.
“I have prayed for answers, yet I have none,” Baldwin pouted. “Can you not shed light on this dark matter?”
“I cannot, Father,” Felix said in his thick-tongued Breton accent.
“Then we must have a meeting of the council.”
The Council of the Order of the Names had not been convened for many years. Felix struggled to remember the last time-it was nearly twenty years earlier, he believed, when decisions had to be made concerning the last great Library expansion. He was a young man then, a scholar and bookbinder who had sought out Vectis because of its famous Scriptorium. Because of his intelligence, skills, and probity, Baldwin, who was prior in those days, inducted him into the Order.
Baldwin led the None Office inside the cathedral, the mellow song of his congregation filling the Sanctuary. He followed the prescribed order of service by rote and allowed his mind to drift to the crypts during the droning chants. None began with the Deus in Adjutorium, followed by the None hymn, Psalms 125, 126, and 127, a versicle, the Kyrie, the Pater, the Oratorio, and the concluding seventeenth prayer of St. Benedict. When it was done, he exited the Sanctuary first and listened for the select footsteps of members of the Order following him to the adjoining Chapter House, a polygonal building with a sharply peaked roof.
At the table sat Felix; Brother Bartholomew, the grizzled old monk who led the Scriptorium; Brother Gabriel, the sharp-tongued astronomer; Brother Edward, the surgeon, who presided over the infirmary; Brother Thomas, the fat drowsy keeper of the Cellarium and the Buttery; and Sister Sabeline, Mother Superior of all the sisters, a proud middle-aged woman of aristocratic blood.
“Who can tell me the current state of affairs within the Library?” Baldwin demanded, referring to the monks who labored there.
They had all visited recently, driven by uneasy curiosity, but no one had more intimate knowledge than Bartholomew, who spent much of his life underground and even assumed the physical characteristics of a vole. He had a pointy face, an aversion to light, and made small quick movements with his scrawny arms to emphasize his speech. “Something is troubling them,” he began. “I have watched them for many years.” He sighed. “Many years, indeed, and this is the closest I have ever seen to emotion.”
Gabriel chimed in. “I agree with our brother. These are not typical displays of emotions that any one of us might experience-joy, anger, tiredness, hunger-but an unsettling sense of something being out of order.”
“What specifically are they doing that is different from their usual practices?” Baldwin asked thoughtfully.
Felix leaned forward. “I would say their sense of purpose seems somehow diminished.”
“Yes!” Bartholomew agreed.
“Over the years, we have always marveled at their infallible industry,” Felix continued. “Their toil is unimaginable. They work until they collapse and when they awake after brief respite, they are rejuvenated and begin anew. Their pauses for food, drink, and nature are fleeting. But now…”
“Now they are getting lazy, like me!” Brother Thomas guffawed.
“Hardly lazy,” the surgeon interjected. Brother Edward had a long thin beard, which he stroked obsessively. “I would say they have grown somewhat apathetic. The pace of their work is slower, more measured, their hands move sluggishly, their sleep periods are longer. They linger at their food.”
“It is an apathy,” Bartholomew agreed. “They are as they have always been, but you are correct, there is a certain apathy.”
“Is there anything else?” Baldwin asked.
Sister Sabeline fingered the edge of her veil. “Last week one of them did not rise to the occasion.”
“Astonishing!” Thomas exclaimed.
“Has this occurred again?” Gabriel asked.
She shook her head. “There has not been an opportune time. However, tomorrow I am bringing a pretty girl called Elizabeth. I will inform you of the outcome.”
“Do so,” the abbot said. “And keep me informed about this-apathy.”
Bartholomew carefully made his way down the steep spiraling stairs leading from the small chapel-sized building to the crypts. There were torches set at intervals along the stairwell that were bright enough for most, but his eyes were failing after a lifetime of reading manuscripts by candles. He felt for the edge of each stair with his right sandal before dropping his left foot onto the next.
The winding of the stairs was so tight, and he turned so many times on himself, that he was dizzy by the time he reached the bottom. Every time he descended these stairs and entered the crypts, he marveled at the engineering and building skills of his predecessors who had burrowed so deeply into the earth in the eleventh century.
He unlocked the enormous door with the heavy black iron key he kept on his belt. Since he was small and light he had to lean into it with all his strength. It swung on its hinges and he entered the Hall of the Writers.
Though he had entered the hall thousands of times since he was first initiated into the Order of the Names as a young abbey scholar with a quizzical nature, he never ceased to pause in amazement and wonder at the sight of it.
Now, Bartholomew looked out on a crop of pale-skinned, ginger-haired men and boys, each one grasping a quill, dipping and writing, dipping and writing, producing a din of scratching as if hundreds of rats were trying to claw into barrels of grain. Some were old men, some young boys, but despite their ages, they all looked uncannily similar to one another. Every face was as blank as the next, green eyes boring into sheets of white parchment.
The writers faced the front of the cavern, seated shoulder by shoulder at their long tables. The chamber had a domed ceiling that was plastered and whitewashed. The dome was specially designed by the eleventh century architect, Brother Bertram, to reflect the candles and increase their luminosity, and every few decades the plaster was whitewashed anew to counter the soot.