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  “Well, he certainly had a colorful life.”

  Arthur agreed. “So there’s a whole other branch of the family tree which I’ve been ignorant of.” He rose to kiss her cheek. “Hello cousin.”

  She loved the gesture and despite her age blushed like an ingénue.

  “I never married,” she said, “so I’m afraid my line dies with me. But you are another story. May I ask if you’re married?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, you’re young. There’s plenty of time for that. More tea?”

  He held his cup while she poured. Her arm had a fine tremor, which she volunteered was early Parkinson’s disease. “The local quack wants me to take tablets but I don’t believe in that. Once you start with these medicines it tends to be a self-fulfilling prophesy, doesn’t it?” She sat back down in her chair. “It is really lovely to meet you, Arthur. From what I read in the newspapers I suspected you were a fine young man and now I’ve confirmed it with my own eyes.”

  “Thank you. It’s really lovely meeting a relation, particularly from a branch of the family I didn’t know existed.” He didn’t feel at all impatient but he asked, “Can you tell me how you and Professor Holmes came to meet? Did you contact him or was it the other way around?”

  She had a letter on Oxford stationery and showed it to him.

  Dear Ms. Malory,

  By way of introduction I am the Professor of Medieval History at Cambridge. I am endeavoring to contact as many possible descendants as I can of Sir Thomas Malory, the fifteenth-century knight who wrote the seminal English account of King Arthur, Le Morte D’Arthur. I realize it is very much a shot in the dark but if you are a descendant and if you are aware of any documents or manuscripts in your family possession pertaining to Sir Thomas which may not have previously come to light, I would be most grateful to hear from you. I am writing a book on Malory and any new material and original insights would be manna from Heaven.

  Yours truly,

  Prof. Andrew Holmes

  #

  Arthur put it down, eyes moist.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m fine. I don’t know if you saw it on the news but Professor Holmes was killed last month.”

  “My God,” she said. “How ghastly. What happened?”

  “It was a home invasion. Terrible business, I’m afraid. Anyway, I’m trying to piece together the last bits of his research. I feel I owe it to him to complete his last work in progress.”

  “Yes, of course. He was such a lovely man.”

  “So you replied to his letter, I take it.”

  “I did. I rang him straight away.”

  “You possessed relevant documents?”

  “I did. In a trunk in the attic. Shall I tell you about them?”

  As a girl she had been fascinated by the old trunk. Had the attic not frightened her so, with its wasps and mouse droppings, dust and spooky shadows, she might have played with its contents more. There were, she told him, silver candlesticks and plates and desiccated articles of clothing, an old bible or two and a short stack of papers tied with a ribbon. Her father had always said that the chest had been passed down from generation to generation, from Malory to Malory, and contained remnants of the family’s illustrious past. She hadn’t examined it for many years. In fact, she could no longer navigate the attic’s steeply pitched pull-down ladder. The only time she had ever untied the ribbon to inspect the papers was a half century ago, after her father died and she was making a survey of her inheritance. She had trouble deciphering most of the documents, as they were written in Middle English in dense curlicue scripts. She suspected her father too had been unable to read them; but as far as she could tell they seemed to be a collection of deeds, legal documents, and letters. One letter in particular had stayed in her mind because it was clearly signed by Thomas Maleoré, knight, the same way he spelled his name in his notations within Le Morte D’Arthur. And she recalled two words she could make out in the body of the letter that she now whispered to Arthur with genuine excitement: Excalibur and Graal.

  Thomas Malory’s signature on a document was rare though not extraordinary—but as far Arthur knew, there were no known letters written in his hand. Add to that a mention of the Grail! He wished Andrew Holmes was at his side.

  “I have no heirs, Arthur. I plan to donate my house and all its possessions to St. Edith’s Church. The vicar is from Uganda of all places but he’s such a lovely man and he and his wife have been so very good to me. But I’d like to give you the chest. All you need to do is carry it down from the attic and it’s yours to take today.”

  He was more than eager to accept her bequest and rush headlong upstairs but he respected her pacing. First they had to finish their tea. Then she had to carry the tray back to the kitchen and refresh the firewood. Again she vigorously refused any help. He watched her slow, deliberate attendance to chores with admiration and hoped he’d be as capable at her age.

  When she was done she led him up the stairs and down a chilly hallway past three bedrooms, all neat with made beds. At the end of the hall a rope with a polished wooden handle hung from the ceiling. She had him tug on it and at once he understood her difficulty. The hatch yielded only with a fair amount of force. After several tries it finally swung open, exposing a folded ladder that he grabbed and extended.

  “There’s a light at the top,” she offered, and he climbed up into the dark, cramped space. “You’ll see the chest halfway down on your left, by the wall.”

  The attic was just as described, with thick dust everywhere and countless carcasses of wasps and flies mixed with rodent droppings. The roofline was steep and he could stand upright only down the center. When he spotted the chest, tucked into the angle of the roof amid a jumble of furniture, he stooped then crab-walked until he could touch it.

  It was filthy but despite thick layers of cobwebs and dust its antiquity was obvious. Yet something else caught his attention first: clear footprints leading up to the chest and handprints on its top and sides. They appeared recent. The prints were large, certainly not Elizabeth’s. Holmes’ shoe prints, like ghostly apparitions. It was so very sad.

  The chest was walnut, about four feet long, roughly made with iron strapping and hinges, a sturdy and utilitarian medieval storage chest. He slid it away from the wall and lifted it. It was manageable. The only difficulty sliding the chest down the ladder was the cloud of dust that fouled his throat and made him cough.

  “Sorry for the mess,” he said, back in the hallway. “Shall we clean it off here?”

  “No, just bring it down to the lounge. I’ll get some tea towels to set it down.”

  Elizabeth insisted on wheeling out her Hoover to clean the heavy stuff off the chest again, refusing to allow Arthur to lift a finger to help. When she was done she did let him run some paper towels over the surface to finish the job. He tossed the towels into the fire as she sat down in her chair to watch him lift the lid.

  The clothes were on top. He carefully extracted each of the items, laying them out on the floor. There was a pair of old leather boots, flat as pancakes, impossibly dry and cracked. A folded and unidentifiable leather garment—leggings, perhaps, and a ratty velvet vest of some sort, possibly a doublet. Some folded pieces of linen, yellow as tobacco-stained teeth. Then the two bibles, fat with fairly good bindings. A quick glance at their frontispieces revealed them to be sixteenth and seventeenth century, respectively. Underneath the bibles were the silver pieces. The candlesticks were generous in size, primitive in design, and lacking in ornamental flourishes. The plates, however, were a different story and their engraved decoration sent Arthur’s juices flowing: the Malory coat of arms, a chevron against a ground of ermine tails.

  Arthur tapped the center of one of the plates and said, “We’re getting closer to our man.”

  From her chair Elizabeth asked, “Can you see the papers?”

  The packet was near the bottom of the chest, a collection of creamy parchment p
ages tied with a faded and brittle-looking ribbon the color of a robin’s egg. He carefully lifted them out.

  “Shall I have a look at them here?”

  “I wish you would,” she said. “See if you can find the one I told you about and make some sense of it.”

  He thought the ribbon might disintegrate in his fingers but it stayed intact with careful untying. The stack of parchment felt dry and crinkly. He crouched beside Elizabeth’s chair so she could follow along with him. His time as a Grail Loon well prepared him for the obscurities of the medieval hand. As he scanned the pages, he found most of the scripts florid but generally decipherable, though some tightly packed words flummoxed him. The archaic Middle English characters were far from second nature and dramatically slowed his comprehension. Most of the pages appeared to be deeds, bills of sale, and feoffments signed by men other than Thomas Malory. But halfway through the stack he uncovered what looked to be the letter and said softly, “I think this is it.”

  She glanced over and said, “Oh yes, that’s the one I let him photograph.”

  It was undated, written in a loose, flowing manner with an ink turned coppery with age. The large confident signature at the bottom of the page was just as she had described: Thomas Maleoré knight. As marvelous as it was to set eyes on this rare holograph, it was the recipient of the letter who attracted Arthur’s attention. It began, My Dere Waynflete.

  Could this be William Waynflete, the bishop of Winchester? Arthur, a student of all things Thomas Malory, remembered that Waynflete was said to have been a confidant of the knight. And it was historical fact that the only known copy of Le Morte in Malory’s own hand was found—by a scavenging academic in 1934—within a locked cupboard in the bedroom of the High Master of Winchester College.

  He told Elizabeth who this Waynflete might be, then continued to glide through the letter as quickly as he could. And there it was: a reference to a sojourn to Winchester and time spent with the bishop. After some additional pleasantries, however, the letter took a dark turn with mention of a great danger. A scroll delivered to him in Normandy at a place he called Maleoré Sur Seine, which Arthur imagined might be the modern La Mailleraye-sur-Seine. Evil men in pursuit—Qem, he called them—and a treacherous journey to a cave; a sword. Excalibur!

  This was the letter Holmes had planned to show him, which perished in the fire.

  Arthur must have looked quite peculiar because Elizabeth at once put her hand on his shoulder and asked if he was ill.

  “I can’t believe it,” he uttered, with the off-kilter look of a man beset with sudden vertigo. “Let me read this to you and try to modernize the language on the fly, if I can. Malory writes, ‘It gladdened my heart to see you, dear Bishop, and share the astonishing truth that my blood derives from the blood of King Arthur. He too was a proud Maleoré of Norman stock. He too had the noble thirteenth rib. To honor the great king I do swear to you that I will write of his noble deeds and his glorious death in a book I will call Le Morte Darthur. Moreover, dear Bishop, you know I have found the great sword of Arthur and with it the heavenly prize is within reach, the holiest of all things known to man, namely the Sangreal of our Christ. Now with your help I better understand the meaning of the sword and I will endeavor most ardently to find the Graal, though I pray I will not be thwarted in my task. To stop all enemies from learning the secret I have heeded your advice and hidden the sword anew. For without Excalibur the Graal cannot be discovered. If I am defeated in my quest, I will endeavor to leave a trail for a Maleoré who descends from me. May that man possess virtue and be worthy of the prize. Pray dear bishop that my quest is successful and pray that I may deliver unto the church of Rome the Holy Graal.”

  Elizabeth saw that Arthur was rubbing the tender left side of his chest.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “It’s just my extra rib,” he said. “All the Malory men have one.”

  Elizabeth smiled. “My father had one as well.”

  Arthur rose from his crouch and absently began putting the contents of the chest back together as though in a trance. “And so did King Arthur,” he said. “Imagine that, Elizabeth. We’re descended from Arthur, the once and future king!”

  10

  Normandy, 1450

  Twenty years was a long time, for many a lifetime in this war-and plague-ravished world in which he lived. Twenty years earlier he had been a soldier in his prime, his battle sword light in his hand, his armor no more than a nuisance. Twenty years ago he had been a captain in the army of King Henry V, racking up victory after victory against the French at Caen, Cosne-sur-Loire, and Meaux where his beloved king had died of pleurisy at the tragic young age of thirty-five.

  Now Thomas Malory was fifty, a far greater age than he imagined he would ever reach, and his battle gear felt weighty, like the yoke on an ox. He rode slumped in his saddle, desiring only to dismount and have a night’s rest somewhere safe from the Comte de Clermont’s archers.

  The days of the English as lords and masters of Normandy were nearing an end. He knew it and so be it, he had come to believe. For reasons beyond his ken it seemed God’s will. As a young soldier he had helped achieve the prize of Normandy heralded by the stunning victory against the French at Agincourt on that bright Saint Crispin’s Day.

  Now, as a knight of the realm, he was a reluctant witness to the unraveling of it all. It had been only a week since their humiliating defeat at Formigny, where five thousand Englishmen met five thousand French. Malory had commanded a large company of men that day and owing to bad luck, bad geography, and a sudden rush of Breton reinforcements the English were scattered and their commander killed. With ignominious defeat weighing heavily upon Malory, he and a few able-bodied soldiers led a party of wounded men, oozing blood and pus through their bandages, on to the sanctuary of Calais. If they could survive the northward march, then it would be back across the channel and home for them. Little more was to be done in this land. Caen and Cherbourg would certainly fall, their English defenders, sacrificial lambs. Once Calais was gone, so too all of Normandy.

  Malory would not have returned to France had it not been for the entreaties of Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick, who, though only twenty-three, was Malory’s good lord to whom he owed fealty. When the young king, Henry VI, had asked Neville to field a fresh force to hold off the insurgent French in Normandy, the earl pressed Malory into service, plucking him from his comfortable and prosperous life as a knight and member of Parliament and sending him back to the realm of powder, blood, and death.

  Malory’s page, a once healthy teenager, now sallow with chronic dysentery, pointed at the darkening sky. “Look, my lord, chimney smoke.”

  Malory straightened in his saddle. He still cut a fine figure: tall, well-muscled, the body of a fighting man with the composure and intellect of a gentleman. His face was lined with fatigue and worry and his beard and hair had lost its youthful color, but it was a kind face, not a bellicose one.

  “We should be there by dark,” Malory said. He turned and called back to the column of men behind. “Do any of you know which village is ahead?”

  One answered, “Maleoré. I’ve been there. There’s water. It’s on the river.”

  Malory grunted and held his tongue. His father and uncles had always said that Maleoré was the ancestral home of the Malorys. He had long chosen not to reveal to his men the inconvenient fact that he had Norman blood. After four centuries in Warwickshire, the Malorys were as English as the next but there was no reason to sow doubt over his allegiance. Despite the king’s claims to Normandy this land felt like foreign soil. He was an Englishman.

  Malory’s path to this day had begun with a privileged childhood in Newbold Revel, a veritable nursery of chivalry, where as soon as he could walk he was placed on a pony and taught to ride with one hand on the reins and the other on a tiny wooden sword. Growing up, he was tutored in Latin and Greek in the morning and hunting and martial arts in the afternoon. The household chaplain took o
n the task of teaching him religious observance. His mother and aunts taught him manners and to respect and admire women. His father and uncles schooled him on the principles of a chivalric life. By the time he was ready to become a page he had been imbued with these notions: he must care for his lands and his tenants, defend women at all cost, be just and merciful in his dealings, counter wickedness by guarding ordinary people against oppression, protect his faith and his church, and above all else support his lord in battle with courage and unfailing devotion.

  Young Thomas matured quickly. By age twelve he was legally responsible for his actions. At fourteen he was eligible to be called upon as a man of arms and that is what occurred. In 1414, shortly after this milestone birthday, he was consigned to the Normandy invasion force of King Henry V and found himself battling for Calais as an esquire and lancer in the retinue of Henry Beauchamp, the previous earl of Warwick, at campaign after campaign that year and into the next. He learned what it felt like to kill a man and to see comrades fall in violence. But he also had time during interminable sieges to follow gentler pursuits and during these years he learned to read French.

  In October 1415, he was at Agincourt where, against a superior French force, the English longbow won the day. And two years later he was at the siege of Caen, one of the last of the great Normandy strongholds to fall to the English before the victory was sealed by the Treaty of Troyes. It was at Caen that he heard about a noble’s library containing fine volumes being crated for the English king’s pleasure. The king, by way of reward for his good service, bade Malory to take his pick of the volumes and it was here that Thomas had his first long drink of King Arthur when he claimed a fine illustrated copy of de Troyes’ Perceval, le Conte du Graal.

  The war over, Malory was released from service. He returned to Newbold Revel to help his father with the management of their holdings but country life was short-lived. A treaty, Malory learned, was only a piece of paper and fighting erupted in Normandy anew. Once again he donned his plate armor and joined the fray on French soil. This time, again in the direct service of Beauchamp, he was a captain commanding a company of lancers, archers, and axmen. He was at Cosne-sur-Loire when the king died and he remained in charge of the garrison town of Gisors while Beauchamp returned to London to take up the guardianship of the new infant king, Henry VI. And Malory was at Rouen on Christmas Eve, 1430, when the young peasant warrior, Joan of Arc, was delivered to the English, sold for 10,000 livres tournois by the Burgundians, who had seized her in battle.