Scarlet Day

By Caroline Galwey

Cambridge University in the 1980s keeps to time-honoured traditions, but the chill winds of austerity are blowing. So when his department gets a huge endowment from an American corporation, Graham Dowland, a secretive historian who never returns his library books, hopes for some funding for his research into lost manuscripts. Graham needs a break. His colleagues think his work is pointless, his mother has Alzheimer’s, and his best student wants to drop her course and become a pop singer. As if that were not enough, his department’s infighting over its new money ends in an unexplained death: the ‘scarlet’ worn at a degree ceremony takes on a whole new meaning.
Graham wants above all to follow the trail of a priceless Irish gospel book that disappeared in Bohemia in the seventeenth century. Investigating a murder seems a dangerous distraction. Yet once he finds out the secret of an eccentric refugee, and penetrates the alleyways of cold-war Prague, it starts to look as if murder and manuscript are part of the same plot.
Back in Cambridge, the Fenland floodwaters are rising. As his carefully controlled academic routine descends into mayhem, Graham learns to trust his real friends, and finds that only a fully lived life can give the study of history its meaning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caroline Galwey
• Release date: Jan 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311505125

Caroline Galwey

Caroline Galwey is a historian and a stickler for accuracy. She needs to write fiction to use up the ideas that are too outrageous, speculative or romantic to put into her academic work – which is mostly about early medieval Brittany.She lives just outside the M25 with her husband, children (when they’re there) and two goldfish, and loves choral singing, cooking, Cornwall, and central Europe.Scarlet Day is her first free-standing novel. Anyone who has ever sat in a hushed, tranquil library and wondered whether there might be sinister goings-on behind the ‘Staff Only’ doors will know where this story comes from.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

‘The theft of cultural property carries a mandatory prison sentence,’ said the policeman heavily. ‘But if you will simply answer our question …’

He broke off and flung himself sideways with a yell. Long splinters of glass tinkled onto his desk and shattered and skidded on the floor. Behind him, in the blank darkness of the plate-glass window, crazed fissures had appeared, as in melting polar ice. There was a crash, and with a cosmic inevitability, the whole floe of the window toppled forward, angular and lethal, into the room.

‘Graham! Jump!’ a voice roared. Framed by the jagged edges of the window I saw gloved hands brandishing a yellow steering lock, and then the bearded face of Vince Murphy: half walrus rearing from the Arctic ocean, half berserker ramming a sinking ship.

I had perhaps half a second before the official recovered his wits and grabbed me, two seconds at most before the guards came rushing into the room. I scrambled on to the low window sill, kicked out a triangle of glass that was still jutting from the frame, and jumped.

My trouser leg got caught for a moment and ripped, making me fall the three feet awkwardly: I landed on hands and knees on tarmac, rebounded and took off at a run. Vince was beside me, sprinting.

‘This way!’ he shouted. We wove past a red-and-white traffic barrier before the officers manning it could leave their places and reach us. Beyond was a line of waiting vehicles on a downward-sloping road.

I heard sharp cries, a shout of ‘Halt!’, then a siren began to pulse, and a flood of light made the cars, road and bare trees leap out into harsh light and black shadows. I didn’t see that we had a hope of escaping. Would they shoot? My shoulder blades prickled and I ran, my lungs bursting, braced for that sound, that elastic crack that I had become all too familiar with during my weeks of practice with Professor Wakefield’s pistol. There was little point in listening, though. Bullets would reach us before we heard the report.

How had it come to this? ‘The trouble with you, Dowland, is that you never take a risk,’ my supervisor had said. ‘Dr Dowland’s argument proceeds one timid step at a time,’ wrote Pádraig Ua Flaithbheartaigh; ‘his work is a monument to pedantry.’ And another colleague, not meaning it as a compliment, claimed that I would cross Europe to check a footnote. Well, here I was, half way across Europe and on the wrong side. And it had all started with a footnote. But this was not the sort of thing he, or I, had had in mind.

Hindsight is the historian’s privilege – or curse. With hindsight, perhaps, there had been ominous signs enough in that first research trip, in the beguiling Austrian summer. But I had pressed ahead regardless and sure enough, now I was caught in the inescapable weave of what I had started myself.

CHAPTER 1

It had been a warm, close summer evening when I travelled from Vienna to the Forest Quarter. The train crept through fir-woods in the gathering darkness, with an occasional deer bounding up the embankment and vanishing between the gloomy, fronded trees; then out again it wound into wheatfields and maize fields, tractor tracks pushing their way in among the high stalks and breaking off short like writing in the sand when the tide is coming in. Great square farmhouses loomed like forts in the distance. With every mile the locals who got on seemed more leathery and toothless, their dialect more incomprehensible. I had no accommodation booked, and it started to worry me: would the concept of a hotel even exist in this kind of place? It was the end of the line, a corner of Europe on the way to nowhere; had a foreigner ever shown his face before? Would I have to do as a medieval vagabond scholar would have done, crawl into a haystack and sleep under the stars?

Tired, I lurched off the train at Gmünd and hauled my bag up a short street to the main square. Suddenly, graciousness was all around. A fountain played discreetly. The leaves of lime trees showed green where the lamps shone on them, and a wrought-iron sign said ‘Pension’. With a swiftness that seemed eerie, like the stories in which a knight arrives at a remote castle and finds himself instantly attended by every luxury, the plump lady at the desk ushered me into a small bright room, in which the down pillows on the bed were so fat that their corners stood up in points like pairs of ears. Later I dined on liver dumpling soup and grilled trout. I went out, strolled around the square, looked at the stars and heard the faint sounds of brass band music from a beer garden round the corner. You would think that the calamities of the twentieth century had never been near this place. I slept dreamlessly.

In the bright morning, I walked up a suburban side street that seemed to belong to a different world again: neither rural and archaic, nor old-world gracious, but blandly modern. Every house was new, substantial, and had a dark wooden balcony bearing shattered galaxies of geraniums. The look was Swiss chalet, even in this part of Austria which is nowhere near the Alps but almost on the Central European plain. Were these houses built in defiance, or just in denial of the fact that the Iron Curtain was only a few miles away? And likewise, I wondered, was it nostalgia or truculence that made Tomas Fiser live so close to the border of his former homeland? Was it wise of him?

He lived on the upper storey of an ordinary family house; there were two doorbells with two illuminated labels next to them, ‘Dietzing’ and ‘Fischer’. At the chime I heard feet come bounding noisily down uncarpeted wooden stairs, the door was flung open and, before I had seen more than a foot and a forearm of its owner, an ebullient voice cried, ‘Herein! Come in! How good to see you, Professor Dowland, how good to see you!’

I was neither a professor nor his long-lost brother, but I still liked the reception. He shook my hand strongly and gathered me towards the stairs. He was a white-haired gnome of a man with artless enthusiasm beaming out of a delicate, dark-skinned face. His skin, as well as being dark, looked tough, elastic and rather youthful, a thing I have noticed in one or two other Eastern European people.

He suddenly half turned towards an inner door and put his finger to his lips. ‘Ach! I always forget. The Hausfrau, she is sleeping, having her afternoon nap. I am sorry. We must go up quietly.’

As if on cue, a reproachful, heavy-busted sigh and a creak of sofa springs were heard from behind the door.

He drove me up the stairs, which smelled of pinewood and oddly of snow, and let me in through a door on the landing. We found ourselves in a tiny two-roomed flat. I moved forward hesitantly: there was barely room to put one’s feet down. There was an extraordinary contrast between the show-home anonymity of the house as seen from outside, and the flat, which was half lumber-room, half museum. It contained a table with a red-checked oilcloth, straight chairs, a divan with a brocaded bedspread over it, an old-fashioned dresser full of china, a solid fuel cooker, a sink, and a small wardrobe. Threadbare curtains were looped heavily over a French window that gave onto the balcony. The door into the next room was open, and it, as far as I could see, contained little but an enormous number of books. A sharp smell of old books combined in the air with a dusty smell of old furniture.

‘Sit down, please, sit down,’ said Tomas Fiser. I edged into a chair; he sat on the divan, which was too high and tried to slide him off; he braced his arms on the table, clasped his hands and twiddled his fingers.

‘It’s very good of you to give up your time, Dr Fiser,’ I said. ‘Dr Hartmut at the Vienna medieval conference recommended your work very highly, and I thought, as I was already in Austria …’

‘Too kind. Too kind. The pleasure is mine,’ he replied, and went on in fluent but quaintly formal English. ‘After you telephoned I tried to find some of my books and notes, but, you know, all is disorder. But, I think, if someone from Cambridge is now working on the Irish in Europe, all will be well at last. Now chaos ends, and order fair prevails.’ He smiled deprecatingly. ‘Tell me, from what direction do you approach?’

‘Well, from the Irish end really…’

‘Wonderful! I did my thesis on the Schottenklöster, the Irish religious communities in Europe. With Professor Schneider. Would you like to see?’

He bounced off the sofa and hurried into the other room. I followed him resignedly. To show off to a fellow scholar was probably meat to the starving for him, and this would mean that we were in for an unco-ordinated afternoon.

He had his thesis all ready on a table draped with green velvet in the centre of the room, and was already opening it as I came in, so I had no time to glance over the shelves of books and files that made the room feel as if it was closing in on us. I looked. Old-fashioned carbon-copied typescript, maps on tracing paper carefully mounted, with the names beautifully written in brown copper-plate. The binding was real leather, embossed. The thesis was in German; as I tried to read the introduction Tomas Fiser hung over my shoulder, fizzing with excitement.

He believed that Christianity as far east as Prague had Celtic origins. He had some weird arguments about related names to show that Irish saints had founded a number of churches in Bohemia that I had never heard of, as well as in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. This seemed to him to be a potential basis for European unity that no one had given its due weight, and he had been saying so for a long time. Now that at last European unity was talked about everywhere, was it not a vindication of his once unfashionable efforts? He talked very fast, letting it all out at once. I glanced at the end of the introduction and saw a purple passage about ‘the gentle, life-affirming presence of the Irish men of God recalling us to a true sense of values’. I stiffened a bit in what I thought was boredom but was in fact anger. I am annoyed by people who imagine that the answer to contemporary problems ever lies in the past. If something works, then do it. If not, then don’t – but why bring the dead into it? Besides, I am sure the Irish monks’ presence was anything but gentle. Yet Tomas Fiser was far from being your standard Celtic bore. I looked up at him with new interest getting the better of my annoyance, and wondered what the particular dynamics were which might drive a Central European academic exile to seek enlightenment in a Celtic past.

‘What do you understand by Celtic Christianity?’ I asked casually. Some quiet fun can often be had getting such people to reveal the depth of their confusion by asking them to define their terms. They never realise it themselves, of course.

‘A sense of oneness with nature,’ he said, briefly and very definitely, surprising me.

‘But surely, historically, it must have contained a great many different facets ...’

‘Oh yes,’ he said impishly. ‘All are interesting. But there is little time and I thought it best to concentrate on what it has that we do not, do you not agree?’

‘To draw from the past what one cannot find in the present,’ I elaborated sardonically, and he nodded with enthusiasm.

‘And you, Professor Dowland? You are English, are you not? What brings you to study the monks of Ireland?’

I was disconcerted by him starting to interrogate me when I hadn’t been in the room five minutes. The more so, as I didn’t really have an answer to his question, and didn’t think there needed to be an answer. I had ended up in the field more or less by accident. There was plenty of work to be done and plenty of nonsense that needed flushing out. But he was a nice old buffer, and this answer seemed too abrupt; I tried to elaborate on it a little, which was more than I would have done for any colleague at home.

‘Well ... I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘One thing leads to another, that’s all. I can’t say I was terribly interested in the Irish Church, to begin with, but I was interested in Dark Age politics, especially in Ireland. Without a State, or anything like it, without a legacy from the Roman Empire ... how did things work? Did they work at all? That was what I wanted to know.’

I had been told that he had left Czechoslovakia in a hurry in 1968, when the Russians moved in. He had never had a proper academic job since, and was regarded as a disappointed and eccentric man. To talk of failed states might be to touch on a sore point, but at the same time, he would know what I was talking about: and an emphatic nod encouraged me to go on.

‘And then, very quickly, comes the question of how we know anything about it. The learned tradition in Ireland was so unchanging, the very last generation of professional scholars in the seventeenth century were still working on the same subjects, the same texts, as in the seventh. Which means that the surviving manuscripts stand at the end point of a long process of copying, editing, expanding, tinkering, but with a core of very ancient material buried in them. How do we identify that core? We have to know, in order to make the most of the evidence.’

‘Yes,’ murmured Fiser as I paused for breath. He had put on a pair of reading spectacles, got up quietly and gone to a bookcase; he now crouched down, and began pulling out the corners of a large pile of folders, topmost first, and turning them back with one finger to see what was inside. He looked up at me to show that he was still paying attention, and I looked down at him.

‘So that is where the Irish communities on the Continent come in,’ I said. ‘All through the Middle Ages, it is in Switzerland and Germany and Italy that Irish manuscripts from the early Middle Ages are preserved, if they are preserved at all. And then the end point: in the seventeenth century, while the English were conquering Ireland, the Franciscan friars launched an operation from bases on the Continent to rescue early Irish literature. They went to Ireland, collected manuscripts, then they retired to safety and made copies of the texts, which are now often the only copies of them that survive. Louvain was their main base, but some went to Czechoslovakia – Bohemia – there's one man in particular whose track leads off there. Have you found something?’

He had taken a folder out, opened it, and begun murmuring to himself: ‘Ah yes ... Brno ... 1937 ... Don't mind me, Professor Dowland. It’s not your thing, what I’ve found, but it may as well stay out anyway, there were some dedications I discovered then which I have quite forgotten ... please go on.’ He placed the folder on the corner of the table and resumed his search.

I said rather impatiently:

‘Well, I was studying the Irish friars’ letters, and I stumbled on a couple from someone called Thomas Dalkey. He had gone to join the Franciscans at Prague. There is a reference in one of the letters that seems to imply that he had at least one very ancient Irish manuscript there with him, and was working on transcribing it. But then he just ... disappears.’

Two big box files had joined the folder on the corner of the table by this time, and I was growing worried for its balance, as it was only a frail structure designed for playing cards. Tomas Fiser was burrowing into one of the files like a dog at a mole-hill, and the sharp smell of dead papers was intensifying and getting up my nose.

‘Can I show you?’ I said.

‘Yes, yes, please do,’ he said, and got up in a distracted manner as I fished in my briefcase for Bollmann’s edition of the correspondence of the Irish Franciscans. The book belonged to Cambridge University Library, it was overdue, and readers were not allowed to take library books out of the United Kingdom. But I felt no library could possibly value this book as I did. I found the right passage and held the book for Fiser to see.

‘He wrote: It is glorious to be in this country, a land of milk and honey, where the piety of the people is shown everywhere in fine churches and statues of the saints … – he means Austria. And then: I have found a scholarly cornucopia also, a rich source of unguessed knowledge about the saints of our island, especially St Ciaran, and much else besides, but I may not tell you more until you come to join us. And then, in the footnote, the editor just says, The manuscript to which Dalkey refers here remains unidentified. What could it have been, I wonder?’

‘Thomas Dalkey, Thomas Dalkey,’ he muttered. ‘The name is familiar, definitely. But I have come across it only in passing – where could it have been? Ah! Klausen!’

He drew out a bundle of papers with a flourish, and to be honest I jumped with excitement. He scanned the first pages, ancient foolscap with lines ruled in ink:

‘Fascinating. Fascinating. I'd forgotten I had this. That confraternity book - that should go into the argument about the different patterns of liturgical commemoration…’

I suppressed my impatience.

‘Sorry, Professor Dowland,’ he said, looking up and pushing back his glasses. ‘I am looking for my notes on Thomas Dalkey, but everything is in disorder here, and I must let things come as they will. What happened to the Franciscans at Prague? If you tell me that it may jog my memory.’

‘Their house was destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War,’ I said, ‘when the Protestant forces took the city. The friars fled, and at least one of them was killed by some peasants, Protestant sympathisers; there’s a letter about it. They re-founded the college the following year, and it lasted until the late 1700s. But Thomas Dalkey is never heard of again. Or his manuscript, as far as I can tell.’

He had heaved yet another file out of the bookcase and was absorbed in it. The bookcase would be getting top-heavy; I didn't fancy being there if it collapsed; there were quite enough books in it to fill the room to the ceiling.

‘Of course that may be all there is to it,’ I said. ‘The manuscript got burnt, he got killed – it may just be a red herring.’

‘Catalogue,’ he said suddenly, swinging round and pushing a document under my nose. ‘Catalogue of the library of Fürst Drslavic-Cernavy.’ I could see the name in the heading. ‘There was the manuscript by Thomas Dalkey. In Irish Tomas Dalgatach, no?’

With a feeling that needed firm control in my windpipe and upper ribcage, I scanned the paper – a very formally written fair copy, but all in Czech. Stupidly, I had not foreseen this problem.

‘I did a German version too,’ said Fiser, taking the catalogue out of my hands and turning a few pages. ‘There. It belonged to the owner of Cernava Castle. In his private library. His family supported the Nazis in the war; afterwards they lost all their property. I don't know what happened to the library; sold off, I suppose, or destroyed. I catalogued it for him in ... 1935 ... it was what Professor Schneider liked to get his students to do, introduce them to the nobility ...’ His voice grew far-away. Meanwhile, with a tingling in my hands and feet, I had spotted the entry on Thomas Dalkey at the bottom of the second page.

‘17. Bethada Naoimh Muman, von Tomas Dalgatach 1632 kopiert.’ I skipped the physical description of the manuscript, and went on to where Tomas Fiser had quoted the colophon, the scribe’s signing-off note on the last page. In Early Modern Irish, it said, ‘A prayer from the reader for me Tomas Dalgatach, unworthy friar, guest in the castle of Cernova, who finished copying this book, in danger and trepidation, Monday, the fourth day of May, the year of our Lord 1632. A curse on him who removes it, a blessing on him who preserves it.’

It took me a minute or three to get the drift of the text, stereotyped though it was. Irish is not an easy language. However, it had been written out in a neat pseudo-Irish script, with no mistakes, which made things easier.

I was exultant. But of course it immediately wasn't enough. What was this text Bethada Naoimh Muman? Lives of the Saints of Munster? Not a collection I otherwise knew. What had been in it? I asked Tomas Fiser.

He said, rather downcast: ‘I don't know. You see, I didn’t know any Irish then.’

Of course not. Who would have taught him, over there? God, this language problem!

‘Yet you copied out the colophon perfectly.’

‘Yes, well that was easy to find, in a space all alone on the last page. I could see that it was a colophon, that it had the name and date in it.’

‘This is wonderful,’ I said belatedly. ‘This is exactly the sort of thing I hoped to find. May I make a note of it?’

He made an expansive gesture. ‘Take it with you, the whole catalogue,’ he said. ‘It’s little use to me now. I should be honoured if you would have it.’

‘Well, thank you, Dr Fiser,’ I said, and meant it. I got up and looked around for my briefcase.

‘Let's have some tea,’ he said. ‘Drink to your discovery. What will it tell you?’ he added as he bustled out to the kitchen.

‘Well, for one thing, that Thomas Dalkey did indeed survive and stay in Bohemia after the Prague house was ruined. Some months after. That he was given shelter by this nobleman, at Cernova, I suppose an ancestor of your library owner. And that he was copying an incredibly obscure Irish historical text at the time, and that his copy of it was still there in 1935 ... And ‘danger and trepidation’. What about? It gives me a lot to work on ... but so many more questions ... I don’t suppose you ever came across the name again?’

‘I don't think so,’ he said, standing a kettle on a single electric ring. ‘But there is much I have forgotten. I will look. I will look and if I find anything, I will write and tell you. Is that all right?’

‘More than all right. I really am tremendously grateful.’

He demurred, and unlocked the old dresser to get out the antique porcelain. The cups were almost conical, white, scarlet and gold, with nymphs and shepherds dancing on them. He laid them out on the checked oilcloth.

I said: ‘What I’m thinking is ... I am certain to have to get involved in looking at Czech and East German libraries now, which I have never done before. Could you answer a very basic question for me? Do most of the manuscript-collections in Czechoslovakia have up-to-date catalogues, or has there been a lot of change since the war that hasn't been accounted for?’

‘As you saw with that Cernova catalogue,’ he said readily. ‘The big public collections mostly survived undamaged. The catalogues are old, but still accurate. But at the time of the Nazi invasion there were many ancient manuscripts in small private collections. What happened to these, in many cases, no one knows. Many had not been properly catalogued before the war, so no one even knows what is lost. I looked at many but I had narrow interests at the time, so my notes would not benefit you. Still I will look.’

He seemed to think he had to look there and then. He made his way out into the dark, green-draped study again. I watched the kettle, which took long minutes even to begin to wheeze faintly, and out of the corner of my eye saw him bending over the table, leafing slowly and carefully through papers, yet more papers, and other papers still, sighing, murmuring to himself, rubbing his nose.

As the kettle boiled he came back with a great sheaf of them. ‘All this may be of interest,’ he said.

‘I can't possibly take all those.’

‘Why not? I am an old man, it is not probable that I will ever do much with them now. Take them, you can always send them back.’

I started looking through them, aimlessly, finding myself as interested in the remoteness of the time and setting in which they had been written, a few decades ago in a European country, as in any information to my purpose they might contain. Tomas Fiser made the tea.

‘Here's to the Irish, then,’ he said, raising his cup.

‘To the Irish,’ I said, smiling.

We sat and drank, both looking at papers. The inner room was by this time all draped in sagging piles of yellowish-white over its green, and the kitchen was beginning to look the same. It was just as well that there was plenty of distraction, since the tea tasted of woodworm-killer.

There was a slow deliberate creaking on the stairs, followed by a knock on the door. Before Tomas said anything, the door opened and an elderly woman appeared.

‘I must water the flowers, Herr Fischer,’ she said breathlessly in German. He nodded and she lumbered in. She spoke as if words were too much trouble, and her expression said that everything was too much trouble, visited on her unjustly. She probably had a heart condition. Her cheeks sagged; her forehead, under immaculately braided grey hair, wore a tight little frown.

‘Haven’t the honour,’ she wheezed, eyeing me.

‘Professor Graham Dowland, from England, telephoned this morning. Professor Dowland, Frau Dietzing, my landlady.’

I underwent an extremely limp handshake and a grey stare.

‘Let it be to your taste,’ she said, referring to our tea, and went through to the balcony, coming back with a watering can which she filled at the sink.

‘What's with all those papers in the other room?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘You are going to clear them away, aren't you, Herr Fischer?’

‘Yes, at once, Frau Dietzing, when the professor’s gone,’ said Tomas Fiser banteringly, but, I thought, a little nervously.

The woman mooched around the flat for some time, having a good look round, it seemed. I thought indignation on Tomas Fiser's behalf was in order. I had heard of the fussiness of German housewives, but this seemed extreme. When she finally closed the door, with one last suspicious glance, he found it necessary to make excuses:

‘She's very good, cleans every day, and so of course I must try to leave things tidy for her. But I often tell her she needn’t come up to water the flowers. She is not in good health, and I could easily do it myself...’

I wondered whether he really had to put up with the old harridan. Most likely, I thought, his putting up with her was part of his general indifference to his surroundings; he probably forgot about her as soon as she left the room.

I was just getting up to leave myself some twenty minutes later, when Tomas Fiser unexpectedly said, ‘Ah! I have just remembered: there is another manuscript of Thomas Dalkey very near here.’

I had the impression that, rather than the idea suddenly occurring to him, he had been trying to decide whether to mention it for some time.

‘It is at the Cistercian monastery,’ he went on, ‘at Zwiegl. Only a few miles away. It is not an Irish manuscript, not written by Thomas Dalkey himself. It is a pamphlet of religious controversy. He only wrote some notes in the margins and signed his name. But if you are interested in Dalkey ...’

‘Yes, absolutely,’ I answered. ‘I should look at it. Thank you very much for telling me.’ This, again, was something that previous editors had missed. ‘Does it have a catalogue number or a title?’

‘It was called something like The True Doctrine of Brother John Hus,’ said Tomas Fiser, ‘but it has no catalogue number. The manuscripts at Zwiegl have never been properly described. Unusually for Austria. I looked at them when I first came here; I offered to prepare a proper catalogue for the monks, but after that they became much less friendly ...’ He sighed. ‘Perhaps you had better not mention my name. Just call in and say that you come from Cambridge University.’

‘I most certainly shall. Thank you again.’

It was a long time since I had made so much progress in a single morning. Elated, I asked Tomas Fiser if he would like to come out and have some lunch with me, before I organised my onward travel to Zwiegl; he refused, however. Not out of unfriendliness or scruple, I felt, but more because my visit had stimulated his thinking, and he wanted to be left alone with his books. With one last crushing handshake and beatific smile, he closed the door. As I walked away I imagined him sinking back down on to the floor amid his chaotic files, turning pages, wafting gently from one aspect to another of his life's work and losing himself in it.

Why did this fate not seem dreadful to him? I had tried to persuade myself that I ought to feel scorn when he spoke of Celtic Christianity as being a question of oneness with nature; what link with nature did he have, crouched all his life over papers in dusty rooms? Yet the criticism was absurd; you only had to look at him to see the answer. His nature was to be a scholar. He might not even be a particularly good one, but that was what he was: as easy and bright-eyed about his monks and manuscripts as a blackbird catching worms.

And here I was, excited for the moment because the Dalkey trail seemed to be leading somewhere, but already prepared for the deflation that was almost sure to come when the progress proved illusory; and feeling resentful because – I suddenly realized – I thought I was a much better scholar, but couldn't fool myself I was a natural scholar. I was always wanting something else. But what?

CHAPTER 2

The bus that took me to Zwiegl was a yellow one with a stylised horn on the side. The road that ran by the wall of the monastery was lined with trees laden with yellow cherries, which seemed to be there for the taking. The monastery buildings were yellow ochre, with classical mouldings picked out in white. The main courtyard was a blinding square of white gravel with a sundial in the middle giving an emphatic reading. This courtyard was open for casual visitors to stroll around, but at the entrance of the next range of buildings hung a bell with a rope for guests to toll to announce their arrival. The bell gave a Central European clank; the shadow of the bell and the shadow of the rope wavered about on the gold wall as I waited in the Breughel-harvest-time heat.

The porter who shuffled into the archway might have posed for a Breughel painting too. He made a vague sound which I could not construe as any kind of speech, held a broad, flat face out towards me and awaited developments with sullen patience. Had his vows of silence caused him to forget how to talk? Or did the monks deliberately place their most off-putting inmate front of house to deter frivolous visitors? My German is limited, but I stuck out a business card, which I keep strictly for use in foreign parts as no self-respecting Cambridge don would be seen dead with one, and tried to be polite, yet confident, about my desire to see the manuscripts.

He conducted me silently into what I believe is called a parlour, and left, sandals flapping. I sat there in one of three chairs opposite a print of Zwiegl in 1717 and a crucifix, and screwed my neck round to peep out of a pointed window at the white courtyard and the sundial. When the sunshine was so bright, why did it immediately seem so dim in here? When the road outside was full of the scent of the ripe cherries, why did this room have to smell of cabbage cooking?

Ten minutes later a double flapping announced the approach of porter and, as it proved, the Librarian. I stood up as they came into the room, feeling somewhat outnumbered. They both wore long, stiff, unbleached white robes with wide sleeves, into which their hands were tucked. They had ropes round their waists, and hoods hung down their backs. Their hair was shaved to a dark stubble. They looked precisely like the pictures of monks in all the medieval manuscripts I had seen: yet here they were in the flesh, the stuff of comic opera or TV sketches, and at the same time, somewhat sinister. I supposed I should be intrigued to encounter such an example of history in the flesh, but just because one is a historian, one does not necessarily have a taste for time travel.

‘Professor ... Dowland?’ said the newcomer. I nodded and smiled encouragingly. ‘Grüss Gott’, he said. This was the usual word for ‘hello’ in that part of the world, but I felt that despite its godliness it was, for the monk, a substitute for a more monastic greeting, and he was ill at ease with it. ‘I am the Librarian ...’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said.

‘I am sorry for the delay.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

‘Did you want to look at ... the manuscripts?’

‘Well, yes ... but only if it is convenient.’

A silence fell and lengthened. I had a distinct impression that it was very inconvenient, but that the need to be charitable to strangers overrode the monk’s ability to say so. Or, perhaps, that I was such a stranger – a layman, a foreigner, almost certainly a non-Catholic and quite possibly even an atheist – that he was at a loss as to how to address me.

I tried to help things along. ‘There is just one particular manuscript that I am interested in,’ I explained. ‘It is a controversial tract about John Hus ... seventeenth century. I apologise for not warning you I was coming in advance, but I have only just found out about this manuscript.’

The porter stared disapprovingly. The Librarian looked pained. It seemed to be his natural expression. He had pale sharp features scarred with acne, jug ears, and huge black-rimmed glasses. He might have been about forty, but looked as if he had somehow become stuck at the time when he was the best scholar in the Jesuits' leaving class.

‘Shall I write down the details?’ He did not reply immediately, but just as I fished in my pocket for a notepad and pen, he made a sudden movement.

‘Hmph ... please will you come this way?’ he said.

He led me along a corridor with patches of light from the arched windows dotting the wall. He stepped into an office full of faded files and papers and came out with a dog-eared typewritten catalogue.

‘Perhaps it is one of these?’ he asked. ‘They are kept in here.’

He unlocked a little room on the corner of the courtyard, a sort of disused gallery, with glass cases round the walls and down the centre. It was darkened by Venetian blinds, but the Librarian opened one of them, and took heavy black drapes off a couple of the cases. There were manuscripts inside: some charters, originals with seals, a couple of big illuminated Bibles and some music books of the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. I guessed it was a museum that would be opened to the public on special occasions, containing the monastery’s most historically interesting manuscripts. It was a dead certainty that a seventeenth-century Protestant propaganda pamphlet would not have found its way in. Out of politeness, I ran my eye down the front page of the sheaf he gave me, and glanced into the first case. But it was clear that I was being stalled. It was a pity that I had not been able to provide myself with chapter and verse about the Zwiegl collection before I arrived.

‘These are all the manuscripts we have,’ said the librarian defensively, shuffling at the door.

‘It is a fine collection. I imagine these are the manuscripts that you keep on public view?’ I probed gently.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, and launched into a prepared spiel. ‘In the centre, here, we have the Book of Founders, the oldest record of the monastery’s property, dating from ...’

I let him go on for half a minute or so, but then interrupted. ‘Yes, but, excuse me, what about the other manuscripts, the less famous ones? Is it possible for a visiting scholar to inspect them?’

He looked positively winded, as if this was the first time that it had really come home to him what my request was about.

‘This Hussite tract … is it not still here?’ I prompted.

‘But those manuscripts are locked away ... kein Zugang,’ he said, astonished that anyone should even ask. ‘There's nothing to see on them anyway. No illumination.’

‘I'm not interested in illumination,’ I said. ‘I am a scholar from the University of Cambridge and I should like to spend some time studying this particular manuscript. I should like to know whether that is possible or not.’

‘I’m afraid ... I can’t say,’ he stammered, looking deeply shocked. ‘I ... excuse me, I will have to ask the Prior. We don’t often ...’

‘Do you not often have requests to use the library?’ I said in exaggerated surprise, going on the offensive.

‘Not without notice,’ he said resentfully.

He made as if to leave the room, then looked in a nonplussed way from me to the porter, who was still hanging about, as if afraid to turn his back on this layman who was loose in his domain. The porter said something incomprehensible in local dialect.

‘I’m sorry ... you will have to return to the parlour while I enquire,’ said the Librarian.

‘That is quite all right,’ I hastened to say. I did not want to get any deeper into this place unless someone more trustworthy-looking appeared.

The long and the short of it was that I waited an hour for the librarian to find the prior, and the prior to refer him to the secretary. I wanted to look at Fiser’s papers, which were temptingly to hand in my briefcase, but thought they might look incriminating, so I pretended to peruse Bollmann’s Letters, which I already knew by heart. I wondered very much what was going on here, convinced that there was something I was not being told. If their manuscripts were supposed to be accessible to scholars, why couldn’t they show them to me without all this bother? Or if they were not normally accessible, why couldn’t they just tell me so? Had they actually lost their manuscripts, or sold them, or burned them in a cold winter, and didn’t want anyone to find out? Perhaps they thought I was a government inspector? I recalled the story of how Leland visited the Oxford Greyfriars in 1535, and found manuscripts piled in a locker covered in dust, cobwebs and cockroaches.

At last I saw the Librarian and two other men in the courtyard outside the window, engaged in earnest conversation. A small, sleek-headed man clutched a large ledger to his chest; all three talked, pointed to one another and nodded by turns. Then one of them made off across the courtyard while the small man and the Librarian came into the parlour and accosted me. The small man introduced himself in English as the Secretary. He opened the ledger with a flourish, ran his finger down a column of entries and said, ‘I am very sorry – numbers fifty to eighty-nine have gone to Vienna to be microfilmed’.

Microfilming! So ordinary a blight of the modern information-mad world; so common a hitch, that can at any time strike the librarygoer in his most familiar haunts. It was likely enough, yet I felt deeply suspicious. There had to be more than that to all this palaver. But how could I express my doubts? The manuscripts were theirs, after all. I said, for the sake of saying something, ‘How long is it before you expect them back?’

‘They should be back in about six weeks.’

‘May I put in a request for a loan of the microfilm or an additional copy?’ I asked, to more purpose.

‘You will have to write to the Institute of History and Textual Research,’ and he gave me an address.

‘And can you supply catalogues of your manuscripts? Historians would be most interested to know what else you have here.’

He looked as if that was the last thing he wanted. ‘On that question,’ he said, ‘I should have to consult with the chapter.’

It was scandalous, I felt, that in the late twentieth century this antiquated institution was allowed to block legitimate enquiry by keeping historic manuscripts hidden away, not even properly catalogued. I was surprised it was even legal. Two steps forward, one step back: what a contrast between the ready help I had had from poor eccentric Fiser, and the inertia of these Christian monks. But there was nothing I could do. The Librarian shuffled awkwardly, the Secretary smiled smoothly and the porter swung the gate open for me to leave. As I passed the sundial in the outer courtyard, I glanced back and saw that they were just putting their heads together again. I imagined them expressing some satisfaction at having seen off the strange Englishman.

So that was it. The afternoon wasted, my research stymied, and nothing more to do in this corner of Austria. I might as well go to Paris at once. Back at the Pension, I telephoned Fiser and let him know I had drawn a blank; I rather regretted this, because he sounded so subdued about it. Hoping to capitalize on our meeting nonetheless, I also asked him for names and addresses of any colleagues of his in Czechoslovakia or elsewhere who might also have worked on the Irish friars. I have long since found out that asking the right person the right question can save you weeks of catalogues and bibliographies. This question, however, left Fiser even more subdued. He said that none of his former academic colleagues had posts any more, and he had lost touch with most of them. He gave me to understand that even now few in Czechoslovakia would think themselves lucky to be written to by a foreigner. (Can you believe it? How can civilisation be carried on under such conditions?) He cited one chap living in Germany whom I recalled to be the man I had spoken to at the conference, who had put me in touch with Fiser in the first place. Then he mumbled one or two other names and said that he would write to them himself. I couldn’t press him further, and hung up in the end with soothing words. It was a meagre harvest compared to what I had reaped in the morning.

It was always possible that Fiser had forgotten all his colleagues out of sheer vagueness, and was embarrassed to say so. I settled on this as the likeliest explanation, but not before I had received a disturbing mental picture of an alternative academic world. In Britain, personal odium among colleagues can destroy research and block off fields of study for decades, but still there are history books on the shelves from every decade since the Reformation, each building a little on the one before; none of the great names has been rubbed out, and praising them carries no risk. The prospect seemed delightfully tranquil compared to that conveyed by Fiser. People in Eastern Europe barred from using, even knowing, their predecessors’ work; gaps in the shelves, in the catalogues, in the registers, and a strong disincentive even to find out what had been in them. How was one supposed to work with a collective mind so lobotomized? And what was the matter with the people in charge of the country, that they couldn’t let historians get on with their harmless, decorative pursuits in peace? For so I thought our pursuits, to be honest.

I next put a call through to Paris, and found that there was a strike at the Bibliothèque Nationale and that no manuscripts were being fetched to readers for at least the next fortnight. Now this really was beginning to look like a plot. I am sometimes prey to a mild persecution complex, and there was evidence building up that some power – terrestrial or divine – some spirit of Europe, maybe – did not want me to get on with my research. The Czech communists drove out their scholars, the Parisian socialists’ first line of attack was to lock away their manuscripts. Meanwhile at Zwiegl, the Catholic monks did what they had always done: hoarded their occult knowledge for themselves. I had received a distinct impression there that my failure to see any manuscripts was due to more than accident and vagueness. There was hostility, too. They had something to hide. Here I was in the town square of Zwiegl, with its fountain and its lime trees and its beer garden all prosperous in the sunshine, and yet I suddenly felt the ancient feuds of Europe coiled like a spring under the surface. All these picturesque towns and cities had heard gunfire, much more recently