Everyone in Chartres knows the story of the eccentric Englishman.
Thirty years ago, he came to the village southwest of Paris to see the wonderful cathedral. All the tourists came in their season. The giant continental tour buses pulled through the narrow market streets and clogged the curbing near the cathedral, and all the tourists went to the great church with their cameras and green and red Guides Michelin. All summer, the tourists mingled with the students and the pilgrims and took photographs of the cathedral and dropped coins in the box for the restoration of the cathedral. They could buy postcards depicting the church and little stickers for their car windows that showed they had come to Chartres.
The Englishman did none of these things. All that summer he would go quietly alone to the cathedral with a notebook and pencil. He made sketches and paced off distances in the church and wrote long passages about all he saw and felt and thought.
He studied the cathedral because it was a beautiful thing.
When it was autumn, the mistral began to blow down through France and touched the Côte d’Azur and colored the leaves on trees along the Seine and Loire and sent the tourists fleeing to their warm homes. Autumn cut down the farm fields around Chartres and autumn rain turned the bare earth black. And the Englishman stayed on past the season for visiting Englishmen.
Each afternoon, during the quiet time, he sat beneath the great rose windows of the cathedral entrance and contemplated the arching lines of the buttresses and the narrow, vaulted ceiling that soared so far above his head. Some said he studied the church so hard that he began to see the act of faith actually frozen in stone raised eight hundred years before, in an age when the earth was low and naked and even kings were often cold and hungry in their castles.
The Englishman knew the naked history of the place. How the old church in Chartres burned for a fourth time eight centuries ago, and how the people of the village found a blessed relic of the mother of God in the ashes and saw this as a sign to build the new, great church on the same holy ground. The bishop and the abbot approved this interpretation of the sign and the workers of Chartres began the work of a century, to lift a cathedral by cunning labor over the low, flat fields.
In time, the people of Chartres realized the Englishman would not leave the cathedral and they accepted him as part of it.
He stayed in the season and beyond it. Autumn gave way to the holy days of November, when death and the triumph of souls are honored in masses and benedictions. The light shifted in the coming winter sky and the days were gray and brief. The light that came through the immense windows of the cathedral changed every day and made the shadows in the church reveal more of itself. The Englishman would sit and stare at the altars and the statues of the saints and the great nave and the chancel and the red lamp in the sanctuary and see everything past that had come to this moment of beauty.
After a time of silence and study, the Englishman began to speak of the cathedral. He would gather a few students or pilgrims or even tourists around him and he would let his hands soar to point out the glory of the flying buttresses that lifted the walls to the sky. It was wonderful to hear him speak of the cathedral and how it was made.
He is still there. In the afternoons, he speaks in the church with his light, English voice filled with affection and humor. He describes the past as if it were an old friend, and he reveals the secrets of the cathedral with his lifted hand. The listeners are always different and what they hear they hear for the first time. The Englishman has written several little books about the cathedral and they are sold in all the shops; he spends his days as a student and pilgrim and an explainer of beauty. It is a simple life, everyone agrees. When he speaks of the church, it is as though he describes his beloved.
* * *
The Englishman lifted his hand.
He pointed to the rose windows in the great stone wall above the entrance of the church. The gesture carried dignity, like the finger of Adam reaching toward the finger of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The day was full of autumn clouds and sudden rains. The light fell delicately through the stained glass.
Hanley stared at the Englishman and held his green guidebook in his left hand. He had been waiting for twenty minutes and he had attached himself to the small group of travelers gathered around the Englishman. He felt annoyed because his overcoat was heavy and wet and because someone had kept him waiting.
Then he saw him at the side door.
The second man moved from the brief opening of daylight to the shadows to the half-light of the candles on the side altar. The candles were lit as prayers. They illuminated the ashen face of the second man, and Hanley turned away from the group and crossed the center aisle of the church.
The second man stared at him. Hanley gestured back toward the group on the other side of the church. “He’s been here thirty years,” he said. “Studying the church, talking about it. Thirty years. It’s hard to believe a man would give up thirty years for this.”
“Did you learn anything?” Devereaux said. There was an edge of sarcasm that made Hanley frown.
“Nothing that I couldn’t have read about in a book,” Hanley said. “The English are strange. They’re always producing someone like him.”
“Why are we here?” Devereaux said. He and Hanley turned away from the center of the church and stared at the marble of the side altar. The candles made their harsh winter faces seem softer. Hanley put down the green guidebook on the metal poor box. When he spoke again, he scarcely moved his lips at all.
“I was wrapped in French security in Paris,” Hanley said. “Then I received a signal and there’s a matter, a simple matter really, that we have to act upon right away.”
“So you dragged the reluctant pilgrim to Chartres,” Devereaux said. His voice was low and flat and bleak as November fields.
“I gave security the slip, went out the back way of the hotel—”
“Hidden in a laundry basket?”
“Sarcasm,” Hanley said. He had been pleased with himself for slipping the French security agents assigned to “observe” him while he met in Paris with the other members of the Western Anti-Terror Committee. It had been as enjoyable as a game in childhood and now Devereaux was trying to spoil his satisfaction.
