The Last Gospel (42 page)

‘Did you reply?’

‘After my conversation with Jeremy yesterday, I felt it prudent to claim ignorance. But I sensed that this was someone who wouldn’t go away. Somehow they knew there was a connection here, with the Getty Villa. I checked the online ticket reservations for the museum, and someone with the same e-mail address booked a ticket for tomorrow.’

‘Could be a coincidence, as you say,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘I can’t see how they’d have known.’

‘Known what, exactly? Who are you talking about?’ Morgan said.

Jeremy was quiet for a moment, glanced at Jack and then looked back across the table. ‘You were right. I haven’t told you everything. But what I did tell you was true, that we think Everett had something extraordinary to hide, an early Christian manuscript. That’s the key thing. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say, then we’ll fill you in.’

Morgan looked perplexed. ‘I’ve got no reason to be secretive. My scholarship, the collections here are open to all. It’s the founding ethos of the museum.’

‘Unfortunately this has gone way beyond scholarship,’ Jack said. ‘There’s far more at stake here. Let’s hear you out, then we’ll bring you up to speed before we leave this room.’

Morgan pulled a document box towards him on the table. ‘Fair enough. I can start by giving you a potted biography.’

‘Fire away.’

‘The reason I know about Everett is that he tried to correspond with J. Paul Getty, the founder of the museum. The nuns who looked after Everett during his final illness found the Getty headed notepaper among his belongings, and some architectural drawings. They thought the museum might be interested. I stumbled across the box of papers when I was researching the early history of the Getty villa, and thought they might have some bearing on the Getty interest in antiquities.’ He opened up the box and carefully lifted out a handful of yellowed pages covered in words and figures in a precise, minute hand. He spread them out on the table in front of him, including one page with a ruled-out plan of an apsidal structure. ‘Everett was fascinated by mathematical problems, by the game of chess, crosswords. There’s lots of that kind of stuff here, most of it way beyond me. But before he came to America he’d been an architect, and there’s an unfinished manuscript I’ve been annotating for publication. He was interested in early Church architecture, in the earliest archaeological evidence for Christian places of worship.’

‘Fascinating,’ Jack murmured. ‘But why try to contact Getty?’

‘The two men had a surprising amount in common,’ Morgan replied. ‘Getty had studied at Oxford, Everett at Cambridge. Getty was a passionate Anglophile, and he might have been pleased to discover a kindred spirit in California. And both men had rejected their professional careers, Getty to be a millionaire philanthropist, Everett to be a Catholic ascetic. There may seem a world of difference between those two, but Everett’s correspondence shows that he’d liberated himself in much the same way. And there was a more particular reason.’

‘Go on.’

‘It was well known that Getty had been to Pompeii and Herculaneum before the First World War, had visited the site of the Villa of the Papyri, been fascinated by it. Hence the villa we’re in today. Then in the late 1930s Everett heard of an extraordinary new discovery at Herculaneum, and wanted Getty’s opinion. Everett was really intrigued by it, to the point of obsession.’

‘You mean the House of the Bicentenary?’ Jack said.

‘You guessed it.’

Jack turned to Costas. ‘I pointed it out to you on our quick tour of Herculaneum, when we arrived at the site last week.’

‘Another black hole, I’m afraid,’ Costas said ruefully. ‘I think I was still asleep.’

‘Bicentenary refers to the two hundredth anniversary of the discovery of Herculaneum, in 1738,’ Morgan said. ‘The 1930s excavation was one of the few to have taken place on any scale since the eighteenth century. Mussolini was behind it, part of his own obsession with all things Roman, though there seems to have been Church resistance to his more grandiose excavation schemes and the Herculaneum project was almost stillborn.’

‘Why does that not surprise me?’ Costas murmured.

‘They discovered a room which they called the Christian Chapel,’ Morgan continued. ‘They called it that because they found an inset cross shape in plaster above a wooden cabinet, which they thought looked like a prayer stand. In a house nearby they found the name David scratched on a wall. Hebraic names are not unusual in Pompeii and Herculaneum, but they’re usually Latinized. Jesus was thought to be a descendant of King David of the Jews, and some think the name David was a secret way the early Christians referred to him, before they started to use the Greek word for messiah,
Christos
.’ Morgan paused, and looked pensive. ‘These were very controversial finds, and plenty of scholars still don’t accept the interpretation, but it may be the earliest archaeological evidence anywhere for a place of Christian worship.’

‘Only a few hundred yards from the Villa of the Papyri,’ Jack murmured. ‘I wonder if Everett had any inkling, if he had any idea how close he was to the source of what he possessed.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Morgan asked.

‘First, let’s have the rest of your story,’ Jack said. ‘Do you have anything more on him?’

Morgan nodded, and slid a sheet of paper from the box across the table. ‘We don’t know whether Getty himself ever responded to Everett, or even knew about him. The headed notepaper we found was just an acknowledgement note from a secretary. But I like to think that Everett’s interest helped to fuel Getty’s continuing fascination with Herculaneum, in the years leading up to the creation of this villa. After that brief correspondence, Everett slid back into obscurity. This is the only image we have of him, an old photocopy of a picture taken by his daughter. She managed to discover his whereabouts and visit him in 1955, the year before he died. I traced her to a care home in Canada, where she’d emigrated from England, and got hold of this.’

Jack peered at the grainy black-and-white image, the details almost washed out. In the centre was an elderly man, well dressed, hunched over on sticks but standing with as much dignity as he could muster, his face virtually indiscernible. Behind him was a single-storey shack made of corrugated metal, festooned with ivy and surrounded by lush vegetation.

‘This was taken outside the nunnery, in front of the shack where he lived for more than thirty years,’ Morgan continued. ‘The nuns looked after him, cared for him when he became too ill to fend for himself. In return he tended their gardens, did odd jobs. He’d been a choral scholar in his youth, and sang Gregorian music for them. He took in tramps, down-and-outs, fed and clothed them, put them up in his shack, the full Christian charity thing.’

‘Sounds a little messianic to me,’ Costas murmured.

‘I doubt whether he had any delusions about that,’ Morgan said. ‘But California in his day was the world of Steinbeck, of
Cannery Row
and
Tortilla Flat
, a whole subculture on the margins of society. And these were the ones he felt most at home with, outcasts, drifters, people who had forsaken their own background and upbringing, men and women like himself.’ He paused, and then spoke quietly. ‘What do you know about the Pelagians?’

‘We know there was an Everett family connection. His grandfather was a member of the New Pelagians, the Victorian secret society.’

‘Good. That saves a lot of explaining,’ Morgan replied, relaxing visibly. ‘In one of his letters he reveals his Pelagian beliefs, something he clearly wanted to talk about, and it explains a lot about where we’re going this afternoon. It’s as if he was living a double life, a devout ascetic Catholic on the one hand, and privately about the most radical heretic you can imagine.’

‘When was that letter written?’ Jack said.

‘About the end of the Second World War. He was already pretty ill by then, rambling a little, and there was no more correspondence.’

‘That explains it,’ Jack murmured. ‘I don’t think he would have risked revealing himself before then.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Okay. What do you know about his origins?’

‘It’s an amazing story. Born in the centre of the city of London, in Lawrence Lane, where his family had lived for generations. They were Huguenots, and his father was a prominent architect. Went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was a wrangler, achieving first-class Honours in Mathematics, and also studied languages. One of his tutors was the philosopher Bertrand Russell. He was offered a fellowship but turned it down, having promised his father that he’d go into partnership with him. Ten prosperous years as an architect, unexceptional, got married, had three kids, then his father died and he suddenly gave it all up, family, job, and disappeared to America.’

‘Any explanation given?’ Costas asked.

‘He’d converted to Roman Catholicism. His wife’s father was vehemently anti-Catholic. The father gave him an ultimatum, then bought him off. Seemingly as simple as that. The children’s education was paid for by their grandfather on the condition that they had no contact ever again with their father. A sad story, but not unique, given the antipathy that existed between Protestant and Catholic in England, even as late as the Victorian period.’

‘But we know the true reason he left,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘His father’s death, the will, his sudden overwhelming responsibility for the family heirloom. The question is why he came here, and what he did with it.’

‘Why convert to Catholicism?’ Costas said. ‘Was that part of the plan? Hide in the least likely place?’

Morgan paused. ‘It could have been. But it could have been heartfelt. He’d been Anglo-Catholic, and others like him had taken the step. Remember, the followers of Pelagius, those who traced their Christianity back to the earliest British tradition before Constantine the Great, were not necessarily great fans of the Church created by King Henry VIII either. What had discomfited them about the Roman Church, the ascendancy of the Vatican and the Pope, had an uneasy conterpart in the English monarch as head of the Church of England, divinely appointed. It seemed one step from the emperor as god, the grotesque apotheosis that had ruined ancient Rome. Whether pope or king many had a problem with the Church as a political tool.’

‘Yet for some like Everett, the Roman tradition of worship came to have more attraction,’ Jack said.

Morgan nodded. ‘The letters show that he still saw himself as a follower of Pelagius, and some of his theological views would have seemed heretical to Catholic purists. But the Roman liturgy, the rituals, above all the music, seemed to offer him great spiritual comfort.’

‘What Jeremy said in London yesterday about Sir Christopher Wren, missing the beauty of the old rituals,’ Costas murmured. ‘Speaking as a Greek Orthodox, I can understand that.’

‘That was what mattered to Everett. But his fundamental faith remained unchanged.’

‘And the thought police were a long way from a remote valley in Californa,’ Jack murmured.

‘I believe that was part of the plan. He came here to safeguard what he had with him, to a country where religious freedom had provided a haven for all Christian denominations. He still needed to be careful, to pick the time and place to reveal what he had, to find some way of passing on the secret.’

‘So he arrived here in 1912,’ Costas said.

Morgan nodded. ‘He sailed to New York, gained American citizenship, then worked his way west. After what Jeremy told me, I now believe that what he did took huge strength, a decision to preserve an extraordinary treasure not for his own benefit but for humanity, for the future. Once he’d been assured of his children’s upbringing, he made the greatest sacrifice a father can ever make, and walked away assuming he would never see them again.’

‘I only hope it was worth it,’ Costas said.

‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ Jack replied, turning to Morgan. ‘Do you know anything more about his life, anything that might give us clues?’

Morgan paused. ‘August 1914. Europe is torn apart. Britain mobilizes. The First World War begins.’

‘He goes to fight?’ Costas said.

Morgan nodded. ‘In the folly and horror of the First World War, people often forget that many at the time believed it was a just war, a war against impending evil. Everett felt morally compelled to join. Winston Churchill wrote about men like him.’ Morgan leaned back so he could read the inscription below a framed portrait on the wall, showing a young man in uniform. ‘“Coming of his own free will, with no national call or obligation, a stranger from across the ocean, to fight and die in our ranks, he had it in his power to pay tribute to our cause of exceptional value. He conceived that not merely national causes but international causes of the highest importance were involved, and must now be decided by arms.”’ Morgan paused. ‘That’s a friend of Churchill’s, Lieutenant Harvey Butters, Royal Field Artillery, an American killed on the Somme in 1916. J. Paul Getty was a great admirer of these men, Americans who volunteered to fight German imperialism even before the United States joined the war.’

‘So Everett returns to Europe,’ Costas said.

‘He went north to Canada and enlisted in the British Army. By early 1916 he was an officer in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, on the Western Front. In June that year he was gassed and wounded in a terrible battle at Hulluch, near Loos. During his recuperation his mathematical skills were discovered, and he was transferred to British Military Intelligence, the original MI1. He worked in the War Office in London, and then was seconded to Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty down the road, in a top-secret complex known as Room 40. He was a codebreaker.’

‘No kidding.’ Jeremy leaned forward, excited. ‘Cryptography.’

‘They were desperate for people like him,’ Morgan continued. ‘And he was recruited by intelligence just in time. What happened next may well have won the war.’