The Last Gospel (43 page)

‘Go on,’ Jack said.

‘Ever heard of the Zimmerman telegram?’

‘Yes!’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘Of course! It’s what brought America into the First World War.’

‘A coded telegram dispatched in January 1917 by Arthur Zimmerman, German foreign secretary, to the German ambassador in Mexico,’ Morgan continued. ‘It revealed the German intention to begin unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping, and to help Mexico reconquer the southern States. The plan seems ludicrous now, but it was deadly serious then. The British intercepted and decrypted the telegram, then passed it on to the US ambassador to Britain. Sentiment in the United States was already pretty anti-German because of earlier U-boat sinkings that had killed Americans. A month after the telegram was deciphered, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany.’

‘Let me guess,’ Costas said. ‘The decipherment was done in the British Admiralty Room 40.’

‘Correct. The Room 40 codebreakers had a book for an earlier version of the cipher that had been captured from a German agent in the Middle East, but the decryption of the telegram by the London team was still a work of genius.’

‘And Everett was involved.’

‘His name was never released. After the war, the British went to extraordinary lengths to keep the activities of their codebreakers secret, and only ever released enough to tell the essential story. Some of the Room 40 codebreakers of the First World War went on to work at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, and their names will never be known.’

Costas whistled. ‘So Everett really did have a place in history. Bringing America into the First World War.’

‘If you think that’s a place in history, wait for what I’ve got to say next.’

‘Go on,’ Jack said.

‘A lot of the stuff is still classified. But I do know he worked alongside the two men whose names were released and celebrated after the war, the Reverend William Montgomery and Nigel de Grey. Of those two, Montgomery is the one who concerns us most. He was a Presbyterian minister, a civilian recruited by British Military Intelligence. He was a noted authority on St Augustine, and a translator of theological works from German. He was best known for his translation of Albert Schweitzer’s
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
.’

Jack suddenly felt the hairs prick up on the back of his neck. ‘Say that again.’

‘Albert Schweitzer,
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
.’

The historical Jesus
. Jack felt himself tense up with excitement. He thought for a moment, his mind racing, then spoke quietly. ‘So we’ve got two men, both brilliant codebreakers, Everett and Montgomery, both passionate about the life of Christ. One a Catholic convert, the other a Presbyterian minister. Everett is guardian of an extraordinary ancient document, something he’s hidden away. Maybe the horror of that war, his near-death experience on the front, perhaps a soldier’s conviction that he will not survive, gives him an overwhelming need to share the secret, to ensure that the torch is kept alight.’

‘He tells Montgomery,’ Costas said.

‘They devise a code,’ Jeremy murmured.

‘Pure speculation, but if it happened, it probably happened here,’ Morgan said.

Jack looked startled. ‘You mean here? In California?’

‘In Santa Paula. Where Everett spent the rest of his life. A small nunnery in the hills, where Everett had found what he was looking for when he arrived in America before the war. Peace, seclusion, a community whose fold he could enter effortlessly, where he could follow his faith and seek the time and place to pass on his secret.’

‘Just like the emperor Claudius, two thousand years before,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘And just like Claudius, the tide of history seems to have overtaken his plans, the First World War erupting like a latter-day Vesuvius.’

‘Could Everett and Montgomery have been here together during the war?’ Costas said.

‘May 1917,’ Morgan replied. ‘Publication of the Zimmerman telegram had just brought America into the war. The two men were invited to the United States to help set up the fledgling US codebreaking unit. It was all top secret. I can’t prove it, but there was enough time for a fleeting visit to California.’

‘Does the nunnery still exist?’ Jack said.

Morgan looked at Jack, nodded, then pushed back his chair, got up and walked over to the window, his voice tight with emotion. ‘All my professional life I’ve lived and breathed this place. I was here when the museum was inaugurated. There’s a spirit here that’s infused my work. An ancient Roman villa in the California hills. But it also haunts me. This room, where we are now, is unknown, pure guesswork. The Getty Villa’s based on Weber’s eighteenth-century plan of the Villa of the Papyri as he saw it in the tunnels, yet this section of the villa is pure conjecture, a part never excavated. With your discoveries in the villa at Herculaneum it’s as if the past is catching up, and we risk losing all the solidity and assurance we’ve created. I want this room to be a library, a scholar’s room, but it may never even have existed.’ He took a deep breath, walked back over to the desk, picked up a bunch of keys, then sat down again resolutely. ‘I’ll take you to the nunnery now. But before we go, you owe me the rest of your story. I want to hear about what lay at the end of that tunnel. I want to hear about Claudius.’

T
hree hours later, Jack stood on a wooded ridge above a small valley outside Santa Paula, in the Californian hills some twenty miles north-east of the Getty Villa. It was a brilliant afternoon, the sky a deep azure blue and a refreshing breeze wafting up the valley from the Pacific coast to the west, rustling the leaves. He was among a grove of mature black walnut trees, interspersed with the occasional cottonwood and stunted oak. The trees had been deliberately planted, not in regimented rows but artfully arranged along a series of terraces dropping down the slope, giving each tree the space to grow and conforming with the natural features of the landscape. The walnut bark was deeply furrowed, and the trunks forked close to the ground to give the impression of two trees grown together, diverging to create bowery hollows and passageways that temped Jack ever deeper into the grove. It seemed a magical, secretive place, cut off from the world outside, yet revelling in all the light and colour that California had to offer.

Morgan came down the path from where they had left his Jeep, followed by Costas and Jeremy. ‘Everett’s shack was where you’re standing, and his grave is somewhere nearby,’ Morgan said. ‘They’re both lost now, but in a way he’s everywhere here. He planted all these trees, did all the landscaping. But wait until you see what’s round the corner.’ He carried on down the path as it veered left along the line of the terrace, descending through a rustling corridor of walnut leaves. Jack lingered for a moment, then quickly caught up with Costas and Jeremy. They passed over a bubbling stream and suddenly were at the entrance to a building, a long, low-set structure that extended along the terrace on one side, and dropped down into the valley on the other. The walls had been built on a base of irregularly cut stone, and above that were made up of long, thin bricks. A course of darker bricks had been laid in the centre, creating a horizontal line that relieved the appearance of the façade. The roof was sloping and covered with large, flat tiles secured by overlapping semicircular ones, in the Mediterranean fashion. Jack stood back and appraised the structure, racking his brain. It all looked oddly familiar.

‘Welcome to the convent of St Mary Magdalene,’ Morgan said.

‘You been here often?’ Costas asked.

‘I’ve only been allowed access within the last year. It’s still pretty much a revelation for me. Originally this place was a Jesuit retreat, a typical Spanish mission affair, all adobe mud and whitewashed plaster. Then it was completely rebuilt in the early twentieth century. What you see here is one of the unknown architectural gems of California.’ He glanced at Jack. ‘You’ve probably guessed it.’

‘I can see Getty wasn’t the only one re-creating ancient Roman villas,’ Jack murmured.

‘When Everett first came here in 1912, the old mission building was crumbling, almost uninhabitable,’ Morgan said. ‘Apart from the war years, building this was his main occupation for the next three decades. He built the whole thing virtually single-handedly, until his health packed in.’

‘So he didn’t give up his vocation as an architect after all,’ Costas said.

‘Far from it,’ Morgan responded. ‘Out here he was really able to indulge his passion, to do something he might never have been able to get away with in Edwardian England. In the 1890s, when he was a student of architecture, people were beginning to realize just how beautiful the country villas of Roman Britain were, places that were first being properly excavated at that time.’

‘It took a moment, but then I recognized it,’ Jack said. ‘One of my favourite Roman sites, Chedworth villa in Gloucestershire. Even the setting’s similar, a bit damper there maybe.’

‘You’ve got it,’ Morgan said. ‘And the setting was crucial to him. The great houses of Roman Italy were enclosed places, inward-looking, cut off from the natural world. Think the Getty Villa, the Villa of the Papyri. There’s a magnificent view to be had outside, but the peristyle courtyard excludes it, encloses you in its own order. And instead of windows on the outside world, you’ve got those wall paintings showing fanciful scenes of gardens and landscapes, deliberately unreal, mythical. The whole place represents control over nature.’

‘Or lack of control,’ Jack said.

‘Or denial,’ Costas said. ‘More comforting to paint Vesuvius on your villa wall as some kind of Dionysian reverie than to look out of the window and see a reality you could never hope to control.’

‘In Roman Britain, something different was going on,’ Morgan continued. ‘The Britons, the Celtic tribespeople, worshipped in forest glades, and seem to have had no temples. They were attuned to nature, saw themselves as part of it. Nature wasn’t something to control. So when the Celtic elite wanted villas in the Roman fashion, they built them as part of the landscape, not excluded from it. That’s what Everett wanted to do here. Instead of a peristyle courtyard, there’s a single long corridored structure extending along the head of the valley to the south, the nuns’ dormitory, just like the west range at Chedworth. It fits beautifully into the contours and the colours of the landscape, becomes part of it. That was Everett’s vision.’

‘He must have relished the challenge,’ Jack said. ‘Getty could call on architects and builders from all over the world for his villa, whereas Everett had only himself. And yet Everett finished this place decades before the Getty Villa was opened.’

‘And the Getty Villa was a public spectacle, a benefaction to the world, whereas this place is about as secret as you can get,’ Morgan added. ‘The constitution of the nunnery forbids outsiders from going beyond the entrance vestibule, or from having any direct contact with the nuns. It’s a huge privilege for us to be allowed this far.’

‘Can we look inside the vestibule?’ Jack said.

‘That’s why I brought you here.’

Morgan led them on to a patio of irregular flagstones towards a simple, unassuming doorway, surrounded by upright slabs and capped by a lintel in the local yellow-brown sandstone Jack had seen on the terrace. The door was made from chiselled planks of hardwood that looked like walnut, and was slightly ajar, pivoting inwards. Morgan pushed it further in, then stood back and pointed at the floor. ‘First, look at the threshold.’

They stared down. In front of them was a black-and-white floor mosaic, made of irregular, crudely cut cubes, tesserae, polished smooth. It was about three feet across and filled the entranceway, half in and half out. The black cubes formed a pattern of letters. Jack had seen a threshold like this before, a black-and-white mosaic in a doorway at Pompeii bearing the Latin words
CAVE CANEM
, BEWARE OF THE DOG. But this one was different. The letters had been arranged in a square, and the message had no obvious meaning. Each line constituted a word:

Jack stared for a moment, and then it clicked. ‘It’s Latin. “Arepo, the sower, holds the wheels carefully.”’

‘Some kind of code?’ Costas said.

‘Not exactly,’ Jeremy murmured. He quickly took out a notebook and pencil from his pocket and scribbled down some words, then ripped out the sheet and handed it to Costas. ‘It’s a word square, a puzzle. Rearrange the letters and this is what you get.’ Costas held up the paper so Jack and Morgan could see it too: