Secret of the Seventh Son

JANUARY 30, 1947

R eggie Saunders was having a roll in the hay, as he called it, with Laurel Barnes, the buxom wife of Wing Commander Julian Barnes, in the middle of the wing commander’s four-poster bed. He was enjoying himself a great deal. It was a grand country house with a grand master bedroom, a nice little fire to take the chill off, and an appreciative Mrs. Barnes, who had grown accustomed to faring for herself during her husband’s war hiatus.

Reggie was a florid, burly fellow with a manly beer belly. A childish smile and impossibly large shoulders were the one-two punch that matted all sorts of women, the present one included. Concealed by his impishness and gabby affability was a moral compass that was broken. The arrow pointed in one direction only, toward Reggie Saunders. He always felt the world owed him for his existence, and his successful navigation of the World War with eyes, limbs, and genitals intact was a sign to him that a grateful nation should continue to provide for his needs be they financial or sensual. Laws of the Crown and societal mores were approximate guide posts in his world, things to consider perhaps, then ignore.

His army war service started nasty and inconvenient as a staff sergeant in Montgomery’s Eighth Army trying to dislodge Rommel from Tobruk. After too long in the desert, he wheedled a transfer in 1944 from North Africa to liberated France to a regiment tasked with recovering and cataloguing Nazi art loot.

His boss was the nicest gentleman he had ever met, a Cambridge don whose idea of commanding men was to ask them politely whether they might be able to help him with this or that. Incredibly, the army had gotten it right with Major Geoffrey Atwood, finding a job for the Professor of Archaeology and Antiquities that actually suited his skills rather than dangerously and ineffectively sticking him somewhere with a map, field glasses, and large guns.

Saunders’s job mainly consisted of ordering a squad of lads to shift heavy wooden crates out of basements and transport them to other basements. He never shared a sense of moral outrage at the Germans’ takings. He found their thievery quite understandable under the circumstances. In fact, under his watch a knickknack or two made it through his hands in exchange for a few quid, and why not? Postwar, he wandered from job to job, doing a bit of construction here and there, absconding when necessary from romantic entanglements. When Atwood rang to see if he’d be interested in a little adventure on the Isle of Wight, he was in between engagements and replied, “Blow in my ear, boss, and I’ll follow you anywhere.”

Now, Reggie was pounding away, pleasantly lost in a sea of pink flesh that smelled of talc and lavender. The lady of the house was making little cooing sounds that sent him drifting to the aviary at Kew Gardens where he was brought as a young boy for a bit of natural culture. He soon reeled his mind back to the moment. The vinegar stroke was coming, and a job worth doing was a job worth doing well, his granddad had always said. Then he heard something mechanical, a throaty rumble.

Years of night patrol in the Libyan and Moroccan deserts had trained his ears, a survival skill he was drawing on one more time.

“Don’t stop, Reggie!” Mrs. Barnes moaned.

“Hang on a sec, petal. Ya hear that?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“The motor.” It wasn’t a servant’s car, not this one. He could tell it was a thoroughbred. “You sure hubby’s not due?”

“I told you. He’s in London.” She grabbed his buttocks and tried to get him going again.

“Someone’s coming, luv, and it’s not the bloody postman.”

He left the bed naked and parted the nearest curtains. A pair of headlights pierced the darkness.

Rolling up to the front, crunching the gravel drive, was a cherry Invicta, a rare beauty so distinctive, he recognized it as soon as the entryway lanterns hit it.

“Who d’ya know drives a red Invicta?” he asked.

He might as well have asked, Did you hear that Satan was at the front door?

She leapt out of bed, grabbing at her underthings, making high-pitched sounds of fear and alarm.

“That would be the wing commander’s vehicle,” Reggie said fatalistically, shrugging his big shoulders. “I’ll be off now, luv. Ta-ta.”

He hopped into his trousers and gathered his other clothes to his chest as he flew down the rear stairs into the kitchen. He was through the servants’ back door just as the wing commander was entering the reception hall, merrily calling out to his wife, “Hi ho! Guess who’s home a day early!”

Reggie finished dressing in the garden and started to shiver straightaway. While the previous week had been unseasonably warm, a mass of cold air from the north was hammering the thermometer. He had met up with the missus outside the pub and she had driven them to the house. Now he was stranded at least six miles from the camp and there was no flippin’ way, he thought, he was going to hoof it.

He tiptoed around to the front. The 1930 Invicta was radiating heat. Its cabin was deep, like a bathtub with fluted red-leather seats. The keys were dangling in the ignition. His analytical process was uncomplicated: I’m cold, the automobile is warm, I’ll just borrow it to nip down the road. He hopped in and turned the key. The 140-horsepower Lagonda engine roared to life, too loud. A second later he panicked. Where the hell was the gear lever? He moved his hands all over, feeling for it. The front door of the house flew open.

Then he remembered: it was a bleeding automatic transmission, the first one in Britain! He pushed the accelerator and the transmission performed smoothly. The car sped forward, spraying gravel. In the rearview mirror he caught sight of an angry middle-aged man pumping his balled-up fists into the air. The engine drowned out whatever he was shouting.

“Same to you, mate,” Reggie called out. “Thanks for your motor and thanks for your missus.”

He ditched the Invicta at the pub in Fishbourne and fast-walked the final mile, whistling in the dark and rubbing his hands for warmth. A log fire supercharged with paraffin was blazing at the camp and it helped him find his way. A dense cloud cover diffused the moonlight, turning the night sky the color of gray flannel. The vapors from the fire hurtled upward thick and black like depraved harpies, and Reginald followed their ascendancy until he lost them against the looming spire of the cathedral of Vectis Abbey.

A door to one of the dilapidated caravans opened as Reggie was nearing the fire to warm himself. A lanky young man called out, “Gawd! Will you look who’s come back! Reg’s been booted!”

“I left of my own bloody accord, mate,” Reggie replied curtly. “Any food about?”

“Tin of beans I should think.”

“Well, toss one out then, I’m famished after me shag.”

The young man guffawed but the word had a magical quality because every one of the four caravan doors opened and their inhabitants spilled out to hear more. Even Geoffrey Atwood emerged from the boss’s caravan, wearing a heavy woolen turtleneck, thoughtfully puffing on a pipe. “Did someone say shag?”

“You lot aren’t expecting me to kiss and tell?”

“Yes please,” the lanky young man, Dennis Spencer, said salaciously. He was a pimply first-year at Cambridge, young enough to have skirted national service.

There were four others, three men and a woman, all of them from Atwood’s department. Martin Bancroft and Timothy Brown, like Spencer, were undergraduates, albeit mature students who had returned from the war to complete their tolled degrees. Martin had never left England. He had been stationed in London as an intelligence officer. Timothy had been a radar man on a naval frigate operating mainly in the Baltic. Both of them were giddy to be back at Cambridge and over-the-moon at the prospect of a bit of fieldwork.

Ernest Murray was older, in his thirties, currently wrapping up his D. Phil. in Antiquities, which he hurriedly abandoned when the Germans invaded Poland. He had seen heavy action in Indochina, which left him painfully diffident. Somehow, Anglo-Saxon archaeology didn’t seem as relevant to him anymore, and he couldn’t fathom what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

The only woman in the party was Beatrice Slade, a lecturer in Medieval History and Atwood’s academic confidante who had pretty much run his department during the war. She was a tough wisecracking fireplug of a lady, openly lesbian, famously so. She and Reggie were essentially incompatible human beings. When her back was turned he crudely mocked her sexuality, and when his was turned she did the same to him.

“Ah, we’re all up and about,” Atwood said, blinking at the stinging fire. “Shall we have a coffee while Reg tells us his tale?”

“I’ll brew a pot, Prof,” Timothy offered.

“So what happened then, Reg?” Martin asked. “Figured you’d be kippin’ in a feather bed tonight, not back here in the rust bucket.”

“Had a spot of bother, mate,” he replied. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.” He rolled a cigarette and licked the paper.

“Nothing you couldn’t handle?” Beatrice asked mockingly. “Stymied because she wanted to go again?” At that she swung her hips like a burlesque queen and all of them, even Atwood, began to howl at his expense.

“Very funny, very amusing,” Reggie said. “Her husband came home on the early side and I had to remove my person from the premises forthwith to avoid an unpleasant encounter.”

“I say, Mr. Saunders,” Dennis said with mock respect to his elder, “was your arse clothed or unclothed during this removal?”

They erupted again. Atwood took a few puffs of his pipe and said pensively, “That’s a rather unpleasant mental image.”

The morning was wintry with a few flakes of snow; the ground looked like it had been lightly salted. Ernest was an excellent caterer and managed to do a full-cooked breakfast for seven on two gas rings. They sat around the fire on milk crates, bundled in layers of wool, fortifying themselves with steaming mugs of sweet tea. Crunching into a triangle of fired bread dipped into yolk, Atwood looked across the frigid field at the icy sea and remarked, “Who’s idea was it to excavate in January?”

It would have been better if it were a warm summer morning or a crisp autumn one, but it was utterly fantastic to all of them to be here in any season, in any conditions. Only yesterday, it seemed, they were in the thick of war, dreaming about how blissful it would be to do a bit of archaeology on a peaceful island. So the instant Atwood received a?300 grant from the British Museum to resume his excavations at Vectis, he hastily organized a dig, winter be damned.

Reggie was the pit boss. He checked his watch, stood up, and with his best sergeant major voice shouted, “All right, lads, let’s get a move on! We’ve got a lot of dirt to shift today.”

Timothy pointed at Beatrice in an exaggerated way and mouthed the question, Lads?

“You’re right,” Reggie said, gathering his gear, “I apologize. She’s too bloody old for me to be calling her a lad.”

“Sod off, you pathetic wanker,” she said.

Atwood’s dig was in a corner of the abbey grounds far from the main complex of buildings. The lord abbot, Dom William Scott Lawlor, a soft-spoken cleric with a passion for history, was kind enough to let the Cambridge party camp within the complex. In return, Atwood invited him to stroll by for progress reports, and on the previous Saturday, Lawlor had even appeared in blue jeans and anorak to spend an hour scraping a square meter with a trowel.

The diggers marched across the field from the campground while the cathedral bells chimed for 9:00 A.M. mass and Terce. Seagulls swooped and complained overhead, and in the distance the steel-blue waves of the Solent churned. To the east the cathedral spire looked magnificent against the bright sky. Across the fields, tiny figures, monks in dark robes, filed from their dorms to the church. Atwood watched them, squinting into the sunshine, marveling at their timelessness. If he had been standing on the same spot a thousand years earlier, would the scene have looked much different?

The excavation site was neatly laid out with pegs and twine. It covered an area of forty by thirty meters, rich brown earth with grass and topsoil peeled away. From a distance it was clear that the entire site was in a depression, about a meter lower than the surrounding field. It was this hollow that attracted Atwood’s interest before the war when he surveyed the abbey grounds. Surely there had been an activity of some sort on this spot. But why so remote from the main abbey complex?

In two brief excavations in 1938 and 1939, Atwood had dug test trenches and found evidence of a stone foundation and bits of twelfth but mainly thirteenth century pottery. As the war raged on his thoughts often returned to Vectis. Why the blazes had a thirteenth century structure been built there, isolated as it was from the heart of the abbey? Was its purpose clerical or secular? The abbey library had no mention of the building in its archives. He was resigned to the fact that Hitler had to be defeated before he could tackle the mystery.

On the south side of the site, facing seaward, Atwood was digging his main trench, a cutting thirty meters long, four wide, and now three meters deep. Reggie, a good man with heavy machinery, had started the trench with a mechanical digger, and now the whole team was down in the deep cutting doing spade and bucket work. They were following what was left of the southern wall of the structure down to the foundation to see if they could find an occupation level.

Atwood and Ernest Murray were in the southwest corner of the cutting, cleaning the wall with trowels to take photographs of the section.

“This level here,” Atwood said, pointing to an irregular band of black soil running across the section, “see how it follows the top of the wall? There was a fire.”

“Accidental or deliberate?” Ernest asked.

Atwood sucked on his pipe. “Always difficult to say. It’s possible it was set deliberately as part of a ritual.”

Ernest furrowed his brow. “For what purpose? This wasn’t exactly a pagan site. It was contemporaneous with the abbey within the abbey perimeter!”

“Excellent point, Ernest. Are you sure you don’t want to pursue a career in archaeology after all?”

The younger man shrugged. “I dunno.”

“Well, while you’re pondering your fate, let’s snap these pictures and begin excavating down another half meter or so. We can’t be far off the floor.”

Atwood assigned the three undergraduates to the southwest corner to take the trench deeper. Beatrice sat at a portable table near the cutting, cataloguing pottery shards, and Atwood took Ernest and Reggie to the northwest corner of the site to start a small trench in an attempt to find the other end of the foundation wall. As the morning progressed it became noticeably warmer and the diggers started peeling off layers until they were down to their shirts.

At lunchtime Atwood wandered over to the deep trench and remarked, “What’s this? Is that another wall there?”

“I think so,” Dennis said eagerly. “We were going to fetch you.”

They had exposed the top of a thinner stone wall running parallel and about two meters from the main foundation.

“See? There’s a gap in it, Professor,” Timothy offered. “Could a door have been there?”

“Well, perhaps. Possibly so,” Atwood said, climbing down a ladder. “I wonder, could you take this area down a bit,” he said, pointing to some dirt. “If the interior wall extends to the outer wall in a perpendicular fashion, I would say we’ve got a small room. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

The three young men got on their knees to start troweling. Dennis worked near the outer wall, Martin near the interior wall, Timothy in the middle. Within a few minutes they had all made clinking contact with stone.

“You were right, Professor!” Martin said.

“Well, I have been at this for a few years. You get a feel for this type of thing.” He was pleased with himself and lit his pipe in celebration. “After lunch let’s dig down to the level of the floor and see if we can find what this little room was for?”

The young men rushed their lunch, eager to find the floor. They wolfed down cheese sandwiches and lemon squash and hopped back into the pit.

“You’re not impressing anyone, ya bloody brown-nosers!” Reggie shouted after them as he reclined on a mound of dirt and lit a roll-up.

“Shut your gob, Reg,” Beatrice said. “Leave ’em be. And roll us a fag too.”

An hour later the young men called to the others. The three undergrads were standing around the boundaries of the small room, looking impressed with themselves.

“We’ve found the floor, everyone!” Dennis exclaimed.

Exposed for view was a surface of smooth dark stones, expertly shaped to join to one another in a continuous surface. But Atwood’s eye was drawn to another feature. “What’s this?” he asked, and climbed down to take a closer look.

In the southwest corner of the small room was a larger stone, which appeared to be out of place. The floor stones were bluestone. This larger one was a large limestone block, about two meters by a meter and a half and quite thick. It protruded almost a foot higher than the level of the floor and had irregular edges.

“Any thoughts?” Atwood asked his people as he scraped around its edges with his trowel.

“Doesn’t look like it belongs, does it?” Beatrice said.

Ernest took some pictures. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to haul that in.”

“We should try to shift it,” Atwood said. “Reg, who would you say has the strongest back?”

“That would be Beatrice,” Reggie replied.

“Fuck off, Reg,” the woman said. “Let’s see some of that famous muscle power.”

Reggie got a crowbar and tried to get an edge under a lip of limestone. He used a rock as a fulcrum but the block still wouldn’t budge. Sweating, he declared, “Right! I’m getting the bloody digger.”

It took an hour for Reggie to use the mechanical digger to make its own ramp to get down low enough to safely reach the block.

When he was in position, close enough to reach the rock with the bucket and far enough from the edge of the cutting to avoid a cave-in, he called out from the cab to say he was ready. Over the sputter of the diesel engine, the bells were pealing for the None service.

Reggie nudged the teeth of the bucket against an edge of limestone and caught hold on his first pass. He curled the bucket toward its arm and the stone block lifted.

“Hang on!” Atwood shouted. Reggie froze the action. “Get a crowbar in there!”

Martin jumped in and slid the iron bar into the gap between the limestone and the flooring stones. He leaned into the bar but couldn’t lever it an inch. “Too heavy!” he shouted.

With Martin applying steady pressure, Reggie moved the bucket again and the stone slid a foot, then another. Martin guided it with the crowbar and when it shifted enough to be stable waved his arms like a crazy man. “Stop! Stop! Come here! Come here!”

Reggie killed the engine and all of them scrambled into the pit.

Dennis saw it first. “Bloody hell!”

Timothy shook his head. “Would you look at that!”

While the rest of them stared, agog, Reggie relit a dog end he had saved in his shirt pocket and took a deep drag of tobacco. “Fuck me. Is that supposed to be there, Prof?”

Atwood stroked his thinning head of hair in wonder and simply said, “We’re going to need some light.”

They were staring into a deep black hole, and the oblique rays of the afternoon sun were revealing what appeared to be stone stairs descending into the earth.

Dennis ran back to the camp to retrieve every battery-powered flashlight he could find. He returned, red-faced and huffing, and passed them around.

Reggie was feeling protective of his old boss so he insisted on going first. He’d cleared a few of Rommel’s underground bunkers in his day and knew his way around a tight space. The rest of them followed the big man in single file, with Beatrice, stripped of her usual bravado, timidly taking up the rear.

When they had all successfully navigated the tightly spiraled stairway that plunged, by Atwood’s estimate, an incredible forty to fifty feet straight into the earth, they found themselves huddled in a room not much larger than two London taxicabs. The air was stagnant, and Martin, who was prone to claustrophobia, immediately felt desperate. “It’s a bit close down here,” he whimpered.

They were all moving their flashlights around and the beams intersected like searchlights during the blitz.

Reggie was the first to realize there was a door. “Hallo! What’re you doing here?” He studied the worm-holed surface with his flashlight. A huge iron key protruded from a gaping key hole.

Atwood set his light on it and said, “In for a penny, in for a pound. You game?”

Young Dennis crept up close. “Absolutely!”

“All right then,” Atwood said. “Your honor, Reggie.”

From her squashed position in the rear, Beatrice couldn’t see what was happening. “What? What are we doing?” Her voice was strained.

“We’re opening a ruddy big door,” Timothy explained.

“Well, hurry up,” Martin insisted, “or I’m going back up. I can’t breathe.”

Reggie turned the key and they heard the clunk of a mechanism. He pressed his palm against the cool wooden surface but the door wouldn’t move. It resisted his efforts until he put the full weight of his shoulder into it.

It slowly creaked open.

They shuffled through as if they were on a chain gang, and all of them started sweeping the new space with their beams.

This room was larger than the first, much larger.

Their minds assembled the scrambled stroboscopic images into something cohesive, but seeing wasn’t tantamount to believing, at least at first.

No one dared to speak.

They were in a high-domed chamber the size of a conference hall or a small theater. The air was cool, dry and stale. The floor and walls were fashioned from large blocks of stones. Atwood took note of these structural features, but it was a long wooden table and bench that jolted him. He moved his light over it from left to right and estimated that the table was over twenty feet long. He moved closer until his thighs touched it. He shone his light on its surface. There was an earthenware pot, the size of a teacup, with a black residue. Further down the bench there was a second pot, a third, a fourth.

Could it be?

It occurred to Atwood to cast his beam beyond the table.

There was another table. And behind it another. And another. And another.

His mind reeled. “I believe I know what this is.”

“I’m all ears, Prof,” Reggie said in a low voice. “What the bloody hell is it?”

“It’s a scriptorium. An underground scriptorium. Simply amazing.”

“If I knew what that meant,” Reggie said, sounding irritated, “I’d know what this is, wouldn’t I.”

Beatrice explained with awe, “It’s where monks copied manuscripts. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the first subterranean one ever discovered.”

“You are not mistaken,” Atwood said.

Dennis was reaching for an ink pot but Atwood stopped him. “Don’t touch. Everything must be photographed in situ, exactly as we find it.”

“Sorry,” Dennis said. “Do you think we’ll find any manuscripts down here?”

“Wouldn’t that be marvelous,” Atwood said, his voice trailing off. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”

They decided to split into two parties to explore the boundaries of the chamber. Ernest took the three undergraduates to the right, and Atwood led Reggie and Beatrice to the left. “Careful as you go,” Atwood warned.

He counted each row of tables as he passed, and when he’d counted fifteen, saw that Reggie was casting his light on another large door at the rear of the room. “Fancy going through there?” Reggie asked.

“Why not?” Atwood answered. “However, nothing can top this.”

“It’s probably the bloody water closet,” Beatrice joked nervously.

They were practically pressing against Reggie as he lifted the weighty latch and pulled the door open.

All at once they shone their flashlights in.

Atwood gasped.

He felt faint and literally had to sit down on the stone floor. His eyes began to well up.

Reggie and Beatrice held onto each other for support, two opposites attracting for the first time.

From a distant corner they heard the others urgently shouting, “Professor, come here. We’ve found a catacombs!”

“There’s hundreds of skeletons, maybe thousands!”

“Goes on forever!”

Atwood couldn’t answer. Reggie took a few steps back to make sure his boss was all right. He leaned over, helped the older man to his feet and boomed out in his loudest military baritone, “Sod the skeletons, you lot! You’d all better come over here ’cause you’re not going to believe what we’ve got ourselves into.”

Atwood’s first thought was that he was dead, that he had inhaled some toxic vapors and died. He wasn’t a religious man but this had to be some sort of otherworldly experience.

No, this was real. If the first chamber was the size of a theater, the second was the size of an airline hangar. To his left, a mere ten feet from the door, was a vast wooden case, filled with enormous leather-bound volumes. To his right was an identical stack, and in between the two was a corridor just wide enough for a man to pass. Atwood recovered his senses and traced one stack with his flashlight to understand its dimensions. It was about fifty feet long, some thirty feet high, and consisted of twenty shelves. He did a rapid count of the number of books on just one shelf: about 150.

All of his nerve endings tingled as he wandered into the central corridor. To both sides were huge bookcases, identical to the first pair, and they seemed to go on and on into the darkness.

“Shitload of books in here,” Reggie said.

Somehow, Atwood had hoped that the first words spoken on the occasion of one of the great discoveries in the history of archaeology might have been more profound. Had Carter, at the mouth of Tutankhamen’s tomb heard, “Shitload of stuff in here, mate?” Nevertheless, he had to agree.

“I should say so.”

He violated his own no-touch rule and put his pointer finger softly against the spine of one book on an eye-level shelf at the end of the third stack. The leather was firm and in excellent preservation. He carefully wiggled it out.

It was heavy, at least the heft of a five-pound bag of flour, about eighteen inches long, twelve inches wide, five inches thick. The leather was cool, shiny, unadorned by any markings on the covers but in the spine he saw a large, clear number deeply tooled into the leather: 833. The parchments were rough-cut, slightly uneven. There had to be two thousand pages.

Reggie and Beatrice were by his side. Both aimed their lights on the book he cradled in the crook of his arm. He gently opened it to a random page.

It was a list. Names, by the look of the three columns across a page, some sixty names per column. In front of each name was a date, all of them 231833. Following each name was the word Mors or Natus. “It’s some kind of registry,” Atwood whispered. He turned the page-more of the same. An endless list. “Have you any thoughts on this, Bea?” he asked.

“Looks like it’s a record of births and deaths, like any medieval parish church might keep,” she replied.

“Rather a lot of them, wouldn’t you say?” Atwood said, sending his beam down the long central corridor.

The others had caught up and were murmuring at the library entrance. Atwood called back to them to stay put for the moment. He failed to notice that Reggie had started down the corridor, deeper into the chamber.

“How old would you say this vault is?” Atwood asked Beatrice.

“Well, judging from the stone work, the door construction, and the lock hardware, I’d have to say eleventh, maybe twelfth century. I’d hazard a guess we’re the first living souls to breathe this air in about eight hundred years.”

From a hundred feet away Reggie’s voice echoed out to them. “If bossy-boots is so bloody smart then how come I’ve got a book here what got dates in it for the sixth of May 1467?”

They needed a generator. Despite their fevered excitement, Atwood decided it was too hazardous to do further exploration in the dark. They retraced their steps and emerged into the late afternoon glare, then hurriedly covered the opening to the spiral stairs with planks and a tarp, then an inch of dirt so the casual observer like Abbot Lawlor would notice nothing. Atwood admonished them. “No one is to speak a word of this to anyone. Anyone!”

They returned to their camp and Reggie took a couple of the lads to find a generator somewhere on the island. Atwood holed up in his caravan to furiously make an entry into his notebook, and the rest of them talked among themselves in hushed tones over a simmering lamb stew.

After sundown, the van returned. They had found a builder in Newport who hired them a portable generator. They also procured several hundred feet of electrical line and a crate of lightbulbs.

Reggie opened up the back of the van for the professor’s inspection. “Reginald delivereth,” he declared proudly.

“He always seems to,” Atwood said, patting the big man on the back.

“This is big, isn’t it, boss?”

Atwood was subdued; the experience of writing his diary left him nervously deflated. “You always dream of finding something very important. Something that changes the landscape, as it were. Well, old man, I fear this might be too big.”

“How d’ya mean?”

“I don’t know, Reg. I must tell you, I have a bad feeling.”

They spent the entire next morning firing up the generator and stringing the underground structures with incandescent lights. Atwood decided that photography was the first order of business, so he deployed Timothy and Martin to shoot the scriptorium chamber, Ernest and Dennis to shoot the catacombs, and he and Beatrice photographed the library. Flashbulbs popped incessantly, and their ozone smell permeated the musty air. Reggie acted as roving electrician, laying wire, tinkering with misbehaving bulbs, and tending the generator, which chugged away aboveground.

By mid-afternoon they had discovered that the vast library was only the first of two. At the rear of the first chamber was a second one, presumably built, they reckoned, at a later date when space was exhausted. The second vault was as enormous as the first, 150 feet square, at least thirty feet in height. There were sixty pairs of long, tall bookcases in each chamber, each pair separated by a narrow central passage. Most of the stacks were crammed with thick tomes, except for a few cases at the back of the second room, which were empty.

After they had done a cursory exploration of the boundaries of the vaults, Atwood did a rough calculation in his notebook and showed the numbers to Beatrice. “Bloody hell!” she said. “Are these right?”

“I’m not a mathematician, but I believe they are.”

The library contained nearly 700,000 volumes.

“That would make this one of the ten largest libraries in Britain,” Beatrice said.

“And I daresay, the most interesting. So, shall we make a stab at why medieval monks-if that’s who they were-were rather compulsively writing down names and dates from the future?” He clapped his notebook shut and the sound of it echoed for a couple of beats.

“I didn’t get much sleep thinking about that,” Beatrice admitted.

“Nor I. Follow me.”

He led her into the second room. They hadn’t strung wire very far into this chamber, and Beatrice stayed close to him, both of them following the sickly yellow light cast from his flashlight. They plunged deeply into the dark stacks, where he stopped and tapped on a spine: 1806.

He moved to another row. “Ah, getting closer, 1870.” He kept going, glancing at the dates on the spines until finally, “Here we go, 1895, a very good year.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Year I was born. Let’s see. Move that light closer, would you? No, need to go a bit earlier, this one starts in September.”

He put the book back and tried a few adjacent ones till he exclaimed, “Aha! January, 1895. It was my birthday a fortnight ago, you know. Here we go, January fourteenth, lots of names. Gosh! This thing has every language under the sun! There’s Chinese, Arabic, English, of course, Spanish…Is that Finnish?-I believe that’s Swahili, if I’m not mistaken.” His finger moved an inch over the columns until it stopped. “By God, Beatrice! Look here! ‘Geoffrey Phillip Atwood 14 1 1895 Natus.’ There I am! There I bloody am! How in Hades did they know that Geoffrey Phillip Atwood was going to be born on January 14, 1895?”

Her voice was frigid. “There is no rational explanation for this, Geoffrey.”

“Other than they were awfully clever buggers, wouldn’t you say? I’ll venture they’re the ones in the catacombs. Special treatment for clever buggers. Not going to bury their special lads up in the regular cemetery. Come on, let’s find something more recent, shall we?”

They hunted for a while in the second chamber. Suddenly, Atwood stopped so abruptly that Beatrice bumped him from behind. He let out a low whistle. “Look at this, Beatrice!”

He shined the flashlight beam on a heap of cloth on the ground near the end of a row, a mass of brown and black material, like a load of laundry. They cautiously drew closer until they were looking down on it, shocked by the sight of a fully clothed skeleton lying on its back.

The large straw-colored skull had traces of leathery flesh and some strands of dark hair where the scalp had been. A flat black cap lay next to it. The occipital bone was caved in with a deeply depressed skull fracture, and the stones underneath were rust-stained with ancient blood. The clothing was male: a black, padded, high-collared doublet; brown knee breeches; black hose loose on long bones; leather boots. The body lay on top of a long black cloak, trimmed at the collar with ratty fur.

“This fellow is clearly not medieval,” Atwood mumbled.

Beatrice was already kneeling, taking a closer look. “Elizabethan, I’d say.”

“Are you sure?”

There was a purple silk pouch hanging from the skeleton’s belt, embroidered with the letters J.C. She poked at it with her index finger then gently forced the dry purse strings open, tipping silver coins onto her palm. They were shillings and threepence. Atwood moved his beam closer. The rather masculine profile of Elizabeth I was on the obverse. Beatrice flipped the coin over, and above the coat of arms was crisply stamped: 1581.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” she whispered. “What do you suppose he’s doing here, Geoffrey?”

“I rather think that today’s going to produce more questions than answers,” he responded pensively. His eyes wandered to the stacks above the body. “Look! The nearest books are dated 1581! Surely, no coincidence. We’ll come back to our friend later with the camera gear but let’s finish our quest first.”

They carefully skirted the skeleton and carried on through the stacks until Atwood found what he was looking for.

Fortunately, the 1947 volumes were within arm’s reach, since they had no ladder.

He swept the cases with his beam and exclaimed, “I’ve found it! Here’s where 1947 starts.” He excitedly pulled down volumes until he triumphantly declared, “Today! January thirty-first!”

They sat together on the cold floor, squeezed between the racks, and let the heavy book straddle their laps so that one-half was resting on one of her thighs and one half on his. They scanned page after page of densely-packed names. Natus, Mors, Mors, Natus.

Atwood lost count of the number of pages turned, fifty, sixty, seventy.

Then he saw it, moments before she did: Reginald William Saunders Mors.

The diggers had made the Cunning Man in Fishbourne their local. They could walk to the inn from the excavation site, the beer cheap, and the landlord let them pay a penny per head to use the bathtub in the guest wing. The pub sign, a leering man crouching over a stream catching a trout with his bare hands, never failed to elicit a smile, but not this evening. The diggers sat alone at a long table in the smoky public bar, moodily avoiding the locals.

Reggie checked his timepiece and tried to make light of the matter. “This round’s on me if I can borrow a couple of quid. Pay you back tomorrow, Beatrice.”

She reached into her purse and tossed him a few bills. “Here you go, you big gorilla. You’ll be here to pay me back.”

He snatched the bank notes. “What do you think, Prof? Is it curtains for old Reg?”

“I’ll be the first to admit it, I’m foxed by all of this,” Atwood said, rapidly downing the remaining quarter pint of his beer. He was on his third, which was more than his usual, and his head was swimming. All of them were drinking at a clip and their words were getting slushy.

“Well, if this is my last night on earth, I’m going out with a gut full of best bitter,” Reggie said. “Same again for everyone?”

He gathered the empty pint mugs by their handles and carried them to the bar. When he was out of earshot Dennis leaned in and whispered to the group, “No one actually believes this rubbish, do they?”

Martin shook his head. “If it’s rubbish, how come the prof’s birth date was in one of the books?”

“Yeah, how come?” Timothy chimed in.

“There has to be a scientific explanation,” Beatrice said.

“Does there?” Atwood asked. “Why does everything have to fit into a neat scientific package?”

“Geoffrey!” she exclaimed. “Coming from you? Dr. Empiricism? When was the last time you went to church?”

“Can’t remember. Excavated quite a few old ones.” He had the dazed look of a newly minted drunk. “Where’s my beer gone?” He looked up and saw Reggie at the bar. “Oh, there he is. Good man. Survived Rommel. Hope he survives Vectis.”

Ernest was thoughtful. He wasn’t as tipsy as the rest. “We need to do some tests,” he said. “We need to look up more people we know or perhaps historical figures to verify their dates.”

“Just the approach,” Atwood said, hammering a beer mat with his hand. “Using the scientific method to prove that science is rubbish.”

“And if all the dates are right?” Dennis asked. “Then what?”

“Then we turn this over to scary little blokes who do scary little things in scary little offices in Whitehall,” Atwood replied.

“Ministry of Defense,” Ernest said quietly.

“Why them?” Beatrice asked.

“Who else?” Atwood asked. “The press? The Pope?” Reggie was waiting for the publican to pull the last of the pints. “We’re dying of thirst here!” Atwood called to him.

“Just coming, boss,” Reggie said.

Julian Barnes came through the door, his great coat open and flapping. No one was more surprised than the local men, who knew who he was but had never seen him in a pub, let alone this one. He had an unpleasant kind of bearing, a snotty blend of entitlement and pomposity. His hair was slicked back, his moustache perfectly carved. He was small and ferretlike.

One of the locals, a union man who despised his lot, said sarcastically, “The wing commander’s got us confused with the Conservative party offices. Down the road on the left, Squire!”

Barnes ignored him. “Tell me where I can find Reginald Saunders!” he boomed out in a round oratorical tone.

The archaeologists snapped their heads in attention.

Reggie was still at the bar, about to deliver the poured pints. He was a dart’s toss from the pompous little man. “Who wants to know?” he asked, straightening himself to his full, intimidating height.

“Are you Reginald Saunders?” Barnes demanded officiously.

“Who the hell are you, mate?”

“I repeat my question, are you Saunders?”

“Yeah, I’m Saunders. Have you got business with me?”

The small man swallowed hard. “I believe you know my wife.”

“I also know your motor, guv. Toss-up which I prefer.”

With that, the wing commander pulled a silver pistol from his pocket and shot Reggie through his forehead before anyone could say or do anything.

Following his audience with Winston Churchill, Geoffrey Atwood was driven back to Hampshire in a covered army transit lorry. Beside him on the wooden bench was an impassive young captain, who only spoke when spoken to. The destination was a wartime base where the army still maintained a large barracks and training ground, and where Atwood and his group had been detained.

At the onset of the journey Atwood had asked him, “Why can’t I be released here in London?”

“My instructions are to return you to Aldershot.”

“Why is that, if I may ask?”

“Those are my instructions.”

Atwood had been in the army long enough to know an immovable object when he saw one, so he saved his breath. He supposed solicitors were drawing up secrecy agreements and that all would be well.

As the van squeaked and bucked on its worn suspension, he tried to think pleasant thoughts about his wife and his children, who would be overjoyed at his return. He thought about a good meal, a hot bath, and resuming his reassuringly pedestrian academic duties. Vectis would by necessity disappear down a deep well, his notes and photographs confiscated, his memories expunged, practically speaking. He imagined he might have furtive chats with Beatrice over a glass of sherry in his rooms at the museum, but their heavy-handed confinement had achieved its desired effect: he was scared. Far more scared than ever during the war.

When he returned to the locked barracks, it was nighttime and his comrades surrounded him like photographers swarming a film star. A pale, dispirited lot, they had lost weight and were irritable, fed up, and ill with worry. Beatrice was housed separately from the men but was allowed to stay with them during the day in a common room where their minders brought them colorless army grub. Martin, Timothy, and Dennis played hand after dreary hand of gin rummy, Beatrice fumed and swore at the guards, and Ernest sat in the corner stroking his hands in an agitated, depressive state.

They had all pinned their hopes on Atwood’s foray to London, and now that he was back, demanded to know every detail. They listened, rapt, as he recounted his conversation with Major General Stuart and applauded and wept when he told them their release was imminent. It was only a matter of working through government secrecy agreements for signature. Even Ernest perked up and pulled his chair closer, the tension in his jaw slackening.

“You know what I’m going to do when I get back to Cambridge?” Dennis asked.

“We’re not interested, Dennis,” Martin said, shutting him up.

“I’m going to take a bath, put on clean clothes, go to the jazz club and introduce myself to loose women.”

“He said we’re not interested,” Timothy said.

They spent the next morning waiting impatiently for news of their release. At lunchtime an army private entered with a tray and laid it on a communal table. He was a dull humorless lad whom Beatrice loved to torture. “Here, you dimwitted wanker,” she said. “Get us a couple of bottles of wine. We’re going home today.”

“I’ll have to check, miss.”

“You do that, sonny. And check to see if your brains have spilled out your ears.”

Major General Stuart picked up his ringing phone at his office in Aldershot. It was a call from London. The muscles of his hard face, fixed with disdain, didn’t move. The exchange was short, to the point. There was no need for exposition or clarification. He signed off with a “Yes, sir,” and pushed his chair away from his desk to carry out his orders.

The lunch was unappetizing but they were hungry and eager. Over stale rolls and glutinous spaghetti, Atwood, a man of great descriptive powers, told them everything he could recall about Churchill’s famed underground bunker. Midway through their meal the private returned with two uncorked bottles of wine.

“As I live and breathe!” Beatrice exclaimed. “Private Wanker came through for us!” The lad put the bottles down and left without a word.

Atwood did the honors, pouring the wine into tumblers. “I would like to propose a toast,” he said, turning serious. “Alas, we will never be able to speak again of what we found at Vectis, but our experience has forged among us an eternal bond that cannot be torn asunder. To our dear friend, Reggie Saunders, and to our bloody freedom!”

They clinked glasses and gulped the wine.

Beatrice made a face. “Not from the officers’ mess, I shouldn’t think.”

Dennis started seizing first, perhaps because he was the smallest and lightest. Then Beatrice and Atwood. In seconds all of them had slumped off their chairs and were convulsing and gurgling on the floor, bloody tongues clamped between teeth, eyes rolling, fists clenched.

Major General Stuart came in when it was over and wearily surveyed the sorry landscape. He was bone-tired of death but there was no more obedient soldier in His Majesty’s Army.

He sighed. There was heavy lifting to do and it would be a long day.

The general led a small contingent of trusted men back to the Isle of Wight. Atwood’s excavation site had been cordoned off and the cutting covered by a large field headquarters tent, shielding it from view.

Abbot Lawlor had been told by a military man that Atwood’s party had discovered some unexploded ordnance in their trench and were evacuated to the mainland for safety. In the intervening twelve days, a steady flow of army transit lorries were ferried to the island by Royal Navy barges, and one by one the heavy vehicles rumbled up to the tent. Squaddies who had no idea of the significance of what they were handling did the backbreaking work around the clock of hauling wooden crates out of the ground.

The general entered the library vaults, the clop of his boots reverberating sharply. The rooms were stripped bare, row after row of towering empty bookcases. He stepped over the Elizabethan skeleton with complete disinterest. Another man might have tried to imagine what transpired there, tried to understand how it was possible, tried to wrestle with the philosophical vastness of it all. Stuart was not that man, which perhaps made him ideal for the job. He only wanted to return to London in time to get to his club for a scotch whiskey and a rare beefsteak.

When his walk-through was done, he would pay a visit to the abbot and commiserate about the terrible mistake the army had made: that they’d believed they had cleared all the ordnance before allowing Atwood’s group to return. Unfortunately, it seems they missed a German five-hundred-pounder.

Perhaps a mass in their honor would be appropriate, they would somberly agree.

Stuart had the area cleared and let his demo man finish the wiring. When the percussion bombs went off, the ground shook seismically and tons of medieval stones collapsed in on their own weight.

Deep within the pancaked catacombs, the remains of Geoffrey Atwood, Beatrice Slade, Ernest Murray, Dennis Spencer, Martin Bancroft, and Timothy Brown would lie for eternity beside the bones of generations of ginger-haired scribes whose ancient books were packed into a convoy of olive-green lorries streaming toward a U.S. Air Force base in Lakenheath, Suffolk, for immediate transport to Washington.