Codex (24 page)

“I know.” She crossed her arms exasperatedly and slouched down in the seat, putting one knee up against the glove compartment and staring at it.

“So what if we're right? Why don't you write something about it? An article or something? Isn't that what you people do?”

She laughed at this, exactly once: “Ha. I'd be laughed out of the profession.”

“Well, we'll clear everything up tonight, if it's there.”

She nodded.

“If it's there.”

They were on a narrow two-lane highway now, loosely following the Hudson River north into Washington Irving country —pine-infested towns with names like Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow perched on the steep sides of the Hudson Valley. Neighborhoods of rich old colonial homes alternated with tiny prefabricated houses in bad pastel colors, with gazing balls in the garden and Camaros on the lawn wrapped in blue tarps.

Edward cleared his throat.

“You said one of the bookshelves was missing,” he prompted. “In the library.”

Margaret didn't answer immediately. After her brief spell of talkativeness she'd lapsed back into her usual melancholy affect. She toyed unconsciously with a strand of seed pearls around her neck, the only jewelry she wore.

“Sir Urre,” she said, after a while. “That's what the shelf was labeled. The missing one.”

“Urre? What kind of name is that?”

“Hungarian. He was a very minor knight. He didn't even make the Round Table until late in the game, which makes his inclusion in the cataloging scheme a little strange.”

“I didn't even know Hungarians could be knights,” said Edward. “If he wasn't a knight of the Round Table, who was he? Some kind of freelancer? A minor leaguer?”

“Malory wrote about him. Sir Thomas Malory was a very strange man, a knight who wrote mostly from prison, where he landed for looting and raping and pillaging, but he was also one of the greatest natural prose stylists who ever lived. It was Malory who stitched together the various French Grail legends into a single English masterpiece, the
Morte D'Arthur.

“As a knight, Sir Urre only had one moment of glory, and even that wasn't very glorious. He was cursed—he'd received some wounds in a duel, seven of them, and the curse (as administered by his opponent's mother) stated that the wounds wouldn't heal until they'd been touched by the best knight in the world.”

“And that was—?”

“Well, that's the question, isn't it? Sir Urre came to visit Arthur's court. There was a contest to see who could heal him. It was all for Sir Urre's benefit, in theory, but of course the knights just saw it as a convenient way of figuring out who the best knight in the world was. Anyway, he was carried out on a kind of portable pavilion with bees on the curtains—that was his coat of arms, a golden bee—so that all the different knights could take their shot at healing him. Everybody expected Sir Lancelot to win, because he was the local hero, but only Lancelot knew that he couldn't win, because he was a sinner—he'd slept with a woman named Elaine, and he was sleeping with Arthur's wife, Guinevere, and he was probably prideful on top of that.

“So all the knights lined up to try, and they all failed, and finally it was Lancelot's turn. Lancelot knew he would fail, too, and his sinfulness would be revealed, but he had no choice. He had to try anyway.”

It was getting hot inside the car, and Edward rolled up the windows and groped around on the dashboard for the AC. Margaret reached over and punched it for him.

“Now here's the twist,” she said. “When Sir Lancelot laid hands on Sir Urre, the wounds did heal. God had forgiven Lancelot and allowed him to perform his miracle. Nobody else was surprised, but of course Lancelot knew what had happened, he knew that God had spared him when He could have humiliated him. He could never be the best knight in the world, but God had allowed him to pretend, just for a minute, that he was. It was too much for him, and he started to cry. ‘And ever Sir Lancelot wept,' says Malory, ‘as he had been a child that had been beaten.'”

Edward swerved the Contour around a dead branch lying in the road.

“It worked out pretty well for Sir Urre, anyway,” he said. “What do you think it means that they named the bookshelf after him?”

“Who knows?” Margaret smiled a tight, private little smile. “It makes a good story. Not everything means something, you know.”

With that she closed her eyes, squared her slender shoulders, and promptly and efficiently fell asleep.

It had been a long time since Edward ventured out of the city—weeks, months, he couldn't even remember the last time—and the green fermented smell of grass and fields and hay and sap was like a warm bath. His eyes watered, and he enjoyed a satisfying sneeze. Everything looked more vivid in the natural sunlight, unobstructed by skyscrapers and power lines: finer, clearer, with exciting textures and superior cinematography. In the distance the rock cliffs on the far side of the Hudson were a rich, old, wrinkled red. The sky was cloudless except for one decorative feathered wisp. They whipped past corn shacks, rural churches, general stores, a dilapidated warehouse with a sandy front lot half full of rusting old plow blades, abandoned by their snowplows.

Edward looked over at Margaret. Her pale, sleeping profile was perfectly silhouetted against the green blur of the landscape: her long, swooping nose, her downturned mouth, her elegant neck, pale with one tiny brown mole. She was wearing her customary T-shirt-and-cardigan uniform, even in the summer heat. A tender, protective feeling came over him. He would watch over her while she slept.

Eventually he turned off Route 87 onto 116, crossing the river on a high iron bridge that arched up over the blue water. He pulled up at a red light, and Margaret sensed they'd stopped and opened her eyes. She pushed her glasses up onto her forehead and covered her face with her hands.

“I'm sorry,” she said through her fingers. “I must have fallen asleep.”

“That's good,” said Edward. “You'll need it for tonight.”

“Yes.”

When they were moving again Margaret rummaged in her bag and took out another book. She began turning pages at an impossibly rapid rate.

“So you really think it could be there?” Edward said, playing the kid brother who wouldn't shut up. “What would you say the odds are?”

“Who knows?” She flipped another page irritably. “We'll find out soon enough.”

“Well, right. But—”

“You really want to know? No, I don't think it's there. And I'll tell you why.” She snapped the book shut on her finger. She seemed to need to get something off her chest. “Because it's just too modern. People in the Middle Ages didn't use books for the same things we do. We read books for fun, to escape from the world around us, but back then books were serious business. In Gervase's time literature was for worship and instruction, for moral improvement. Books were vessels of the Truth. A book like the
Viage,
a fictional narrative written to be read alone in your room, for pure enjoyment, would have been considered immoral and unhealthy, if not positively satanic.

“Off in France they were busy formulating a sinister invention called the romance. Pure escapism: knights in armor, quests, adventures, all of it. That kind of thing was fine for the French, but it hadn't caught on in England yet. For the English the idea of fiction, of using a book to escape into another world, was new. It was wild, illicit, even narcotic. You can see it in Chaucer. There's a scene from
The Book of the Duchess
where the narrator is reading in bed, reading a story about a queen whose husband dies. He gets so caught up in it that he confuses what's real and what's on the page:

 

That trewly I, that made this book,
Had such pittee and such rowthe
To rede hir sorwe that, by my trowthe,
I ferde the worse al the morwe
Aftir to thenken on hir sorwe.

 

“Fiction was hot stuff, wild and new and dangerous, and the lines between what was made up and what was real were all tangled up. Edward III had a real Round Table in his castle, to be like King Arthur. Mortimer, Edward III's stepfather, told people that he was
descended
from King Arthur. And God knows, if there was ever a time to escape from reality, the fourteenth century in England was it. War, bubonic plague, anthrax, famine, relentless rain, civil unrest—it was probably the worst time and the worst place to be alive in the last two thousand years. A little escapism would have been perfectly understandable.

“But I know Gervase. He wasn't the type to get mixed up with a book like this.”

It was almost three o'clock, and by now Edward had turned off the highway onto a back road lined with pine trees on both sides, and occasionally a gas station or a farm stand offering unshucked summer corn in cardboard boxes. With Margaret giving directions they wound their way toward the center of Old Forge. It turned out to be a double row of antique shops and restaurants, some quaint and some just tawdry, with a single traffic light at the halfway point and a movie theater showing the big blockbuster from two months ago, slightly misspelled on the marquee.

Eventually a motel appeared up ahead on the right, a neat one-story building with a row of shrubs along the front growing in a moat of wood chips. It was called the White Pine Inn. Edward hauled the wheel over and pulled into a fresh black asphalt parking lot. Theirs was the only car in it. When he shut off the engine it was strangely silent. They took their bags inside and checked in.

Back outside in the parking lot, it was three in the afternoon, and the sun was still high in the sky. It was weird to see Margaret standing there on the hot asphalt dusted with green pine needles, drenched in sunlight, holding her bookbag. She looked a long way from her native element, hushed stacks and chilled air. The air was rich with biological stuff, pollen and insects and fluffy motes, and Margaret sneezed quaintly. She squinted pallidly in the pale light like a little girl just waking up from a nap.

“What now?” Edward said.

She looked him up and down critically.

“Don't you have anything to carry? A bag, or a notebook?”

“No. Why would I?”

“It would add some verisimilitude. You're supposed to be a visiting scholar.”

She gave him a pencil and a spiral notebook from her bag, then led him down the motel driveway and out onto the sandy shoulder. They picked their way along it. Fragments of glass glittered in the gravel, and a massive tractor-trailer hauling logs almost killed them as it roared past. It honked deafeningly and threw billows of fine road dust in their faces. A sheet-metal guard rail ran along the other side of the road, and the sun flashed blindingly off the unpainted steel. Margaret took mincing steps in her good leather shoes. Edward was about to ask her if she was sure she really knew where they were going when they pushed past a colossal tuft of ragweed and he saw for himself.

He hadn't realized how close they were to the Hudson River. It was the first thing he saw, a broad flat expanse like a lake sparkling far below them down in the valley. They were standing at the foot of a long, curving gravel driveway that ran between two parallel rows of trees. Beyond them he could see spacious grounds, manicured lawns dotted with modern sculptures in iron girders and polished marble that looked like giant alien punctuation marks. In the middle distance stood a pink granite building, a two-story modernist oblong with large tinted windows. He could have mistaken it for a software company or a high-priced rehab clinic.

“This is it,” Margaret said.

She set off up the driveway, her feet making soft crunching noises in the quiet.

“Damn,” said Edward under his breath. He hurried to catch up with her. “There's a lot of money in this place.”

She nodded. “Yes, the Chenoweth is very wealthy.”

“Wealthy enough to build an extra room for the Went collection?”

“Wealthy enough. Too stingy.”

They walked side by side. The landscaper had left several natural-looking stands of pine and birch trees in place. A bird sang three sweet solo notes, then repeated them.

“You're sure this is going to work?” Edward asked.

“Of course. Security here is virtually nonexistent.”

“But you're sure—”

“They know me. They'll let me into the vault, no questions asked. There's a side door. Meet me there twenty minutes before closing and I'll let you in. If they ask you what you're looking for, tell them you're interested in Longfellow. They'll show you some letters. Have you read ‘The Song of Hiawatha'?”

“No.”

“
Grapes of Wrath
?”

“In high school.”

“Well, say Steinbeck then. The curators will love you. They have his journals here. They were very expensive, and no one ever asks for them.”

There was a sweeping view of the river valley below them. Edward turned to look downstream, where a bridge supported by two stone towers crossed between the two steep banks, silhouetted against the bright silvery water. Tiny cars zipped across it at irregular intervals. An icy shock of recognition ran through him. All of a sudden he knew where he was, but it was somewhere he couldn't be, because it was somewhere that wasn't real. He stood stock-still.

“My God,” he said, half to himself. “My God. This is part of the game.”

Margaret looked at him suspiciously over her shoulder.

“Just keep walking.”

E
DWARD SAT ON A HARD
plastic chair at a computer terminal. His eyes refused to focus on the monitor in front of him. He couldn't type, for the simple reason that he was so nervous that he couldn't feel his hands. This was all happening much too fast. He pressed the keyboard with all ten of his frozen carrot fingers—fjj;dk safskl—and hit return.
THAT COMMAND WAS NOT RECOGNIZED.