invited him along to Hereford to give him a break, and to share in the unique experience. Since his arrival from America she had encouraged him to travel widely to visit early monastic libraries, yet he still had the infectious enthusiasm of a tourist touching history for the first time. She smiled in spite of herself as she and the cleric picked their way across the debris and pulled down the dust masks from their helmets.
“It’s your career on the line,” she said. “Anything less than an Augustinian Bible and you’ll be doing the seminar single-handed.”
“It’s better than that. Far better.” As they approached she could see his face was streaked with sweat despite the chill of the room. He heaved one of the blocks aside and withdrew out of sight into the wall. “Follow me.”
Moments later Maria was squeezed in beside him, her wavy brown hair and leather jacket covered with dust. Any irritation she may have felt instantly evaporated when she saw what lay before them. The workmen had broken through into a three-foot-wide space within the massive exterior wall of the cathedral. From Maria’s hunched position she could see they were squatting above a ruined spiral staircase, a relic of some previous building phase, which had long ago been blocked off. Three steps below them the well of the staircase was clogged with debris, jumbled chunks that looked like eroded sandstone covered with a pall of red dust. With her body bent double Maria sidled down for a closer look, the spotlight angled directly behind her head.
“Es estupendo.” The words of her native Spanish came out involuntarily as she stared open-mouthed in disbelief.
“See what I mean?” Jeremy slid down eagerly beside her. “It’s like Aladdin’s cave.”
The debris was not discarded masonry, as she’d assumed, but a great mass of brown and yellowed parchment, some compacted like papier-mache but much of it well preserved with letters still plainly visible.
“It looks like a clean-out of the library,” Jeremy said. “Torn fragments, books damaged beyond repair. It’s all handwritten manuscript, and none of it looks later than the thirteenth century. The architectural historian reckons this staircase became redundant and was sealed up some time before the completion of the north transept in the fourteenth century.”
Maria shifted sideways and pointed to the spot where her head had obscured the centre in shadow. She was suddenly trembling with excitement.
“Look,” she exclaimed. “It isn’t all fragments. There’s an intact folio volume.”
Jeremy reached over with his longer arms and carefully extracted the leather-bound book from its bedding of parchment fragments. While he held it Maria gently blew off the dust and opened the hoary brown cover.
“Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum.”
She read out the words slowly, her mind reeling in astonishment. “The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. And in Latin, which means one of the original copies. Ninth, maybe eighth century.”
Jeremy peeled off a sheaf of parchment that had become stuck to the back of the volume. With the musty leaves balanced on his hands he began humming quietly to himself, his eyes darting to and fro across the writing. Maria watched bemusedly as he suddenly became silent.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Incredible,” he whispered. “A twelfth-century continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It mentions King Henry II and King John. It must be the latest document anywhere in Old English, the language the Normans tried so hard to suppress. It clinches my thesis once and for all, that the Anglo-Saxon tradition was kept alive in the secret scriptoria of the cathedrals well into the medieval period. If this doesn’t get me my doctorate, nothing will.”
Maria surveyed the scene in front of them, noting several more intact volumes poking out where they had removed the Bede.
“This was more than just a clean-out,” she asserted quietly. “It’s always been a mystery why these two seminal works of Anglo-Saxon history were missing from the Hereford library, in a collection with liturgical manuscripts going back to the eighth century. It may have been an overzealous librarian keeping up with the times, making space for more recent works. But it may have been more than that, a deliberate culling of works of Anglo- Saxon history from the library, an attempt to conceal anything the Norman aristocracy saw as subversive.”
She carefully closed the book and cradled it in her arms, at the same time looking with concern at the fragments of parchment which had broken off and crumbled where Jeremy had extracted the volume from its resting place.
“We’ll take the Bede and those pages of the Chronicle,” she instructed. “But everything else must remain in situ and the entrance resealed until we can assemble a full conservation team. We can’t afford to expose any more parchment to air.” She peered again at Jeremy, who was cleaning his glasses with a serious look on his face. “And I forgive you.” She grinned. “You may just have stumbled on the greatest treasure trove of early English history ever discovered.”
As they swivelled round to go, Jeremy caught sight of an anomalous shape protruding from the sea of parchment fragments. It was one end of a wound scroll, something that might be even older than the bound manuscript volumes. Unable to restrain himself, he leaned back to extract it just as Maria was beginning to crawl out.
He cleared his throat suggestively and Maria looked back towards the bright tungsten light. She saw his guilty expression and then the metre-long scroll perched on top of the Chronicle pages.
“We must leave it,” she said sharply.
“Not if you still want to do that seminar this evening.”
Maria’s curiosity was piqued and she crawled back towards him. Jeremy had unravelled about ten centimetres of the scroll and was holding it so she could see. The radius of a large inscribed circle was visible, and within it she could make out faint forms that looked like outline drawings and tightly written inscriptions.
She knew what she was looking at even before she reached him. In her own doctoral thesis a decade earlier she had argued that the Hereford Mappa Mundi was a copy, the work of a remarkable artist but not a scholar. It was the only way to account for its most glaring error, the word AFFRICA written across Europe and EUROPA across Africa. The Bishop of Hereford had commissioned the map from Richard of Holdingham, who had prepared a blueprint in his home cathedral of Lincoln, but the final version had been completed in his absence by an artisan at Hereford skilled in calligraphy and illumination but not very literate or accurate. His ignorance was revealed in the finer detail, from small licences he had taken for aesthetic purposes at the expense of credibility to peculiarities in the spelling and geography.
Now to her astonishment she knew she was looking at the sketch prepared by Richard himself, the cartographer and monk whose vision of the world had fascinated her since her student days. She stared with reverence at the precise, confident hand which had created captions all over the map. Just below Jeremy’s left hand were the faded letters EUROPA, correctly placed over France and Italy. Beside his right hand where he had pulled the scroll open was the elongated form of the British Isles, with Hereford and Lincoln prominently displayed.
As Jeremy moved the fingers of his right hand to the edge of the parchment she noticed something odd.
“My God,” she breathed. “The exergue. It’s missing.”
The elaborate decoration which filled the space between the orb of the world and the square edges of the parchment on the finished Mappa Mundi had clearly been the creation of the artisan alone, a place for decorative features of less interest to Richard, embellishments which could have been tailored to the whim of the cathedral authorities. It explained the bizarre parade of images, from huntsmen and clerics to references to the Roman emperors, which the artisan must have drawn together haphazardly from other maps and manuscripts he had seen.
In the corner Maria saw that the dedication she had so painstakingly cleaned on the Mappa Mundi was also missing, so it too must have been the work of the artisan rather than the master himself. Richard must have visited the cathedral to discuss the commission but had clearly not been present at the dedication. It solved the mystery of how the misnamed continents had been allowed to remain, mistakes Richard would surely never have countenanced. She felt a pang of disappointment as she looked at the blank space, a sense that Richard was no longer so securely in her grasp, that he had stepped back into the shadowlands of the past.
As Jeremy shifted slightly, she realised that the mottled brown and yellow of the parchment where the dedication should have been held a defined shape.
“Angle it towards the light,” she said. “There’s something here.”
