The Awful Secret (20 page)

Evelyn raised her face to look into his face. ‘Are you suggesting that our faith needs such protection from doubts?’

At the gate, he turned and looked back. The few villagers from the congregation were talking to the priest at the church door and no one was within earshot. ‘Yes, it has been so protected for many years. Rome is a jealous and powerful guardian, which suffers no competition. A thousand years ago, St Paul took Christianity away from its origins and transplanted it into that city. But there were other branches of Christianity, in Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere, gnostics who would not accept the rigid doctrines of Rome.’

This was bewildering to Evelyn, who had known nothing other than conforming to the unyielding despotism of the Church and was almost unaware that any other view could exist. ‘Are you speaking of heretics?’ she asked, almost in a whisper.

Gilbert took her arm and they walked on slowly, the young girl trailing behind them, more interested in the spring flowers by the wayside, than the unintelligible conversation of her elders. ‘Heretics? That’s a wide and varied description. You had your own heresy here in these isles, centuries ago, when Pelagius claimed free will and free thinking for all men. And now, especially in southern France, there are the Cathars, the Albigensians who desire to pursue their faith in their own way – a way that I fear will soon bring down the wrath of Rome upon them, with disastrous results.’

Evelyn felt a flutter of alarm in her breast and, like Thomas de Peyne, an irrational desire to cross herself. Was this man, with his hand upon her arm, a dangerous heretic, an anti-Christ?

But she had a strong will and decided to take the bull by the horns. ‘What has that to do with the Templars – and with you coming so far away to Devon, after leaving the Order? I thought that being a Templar was for life.’

‘It should be, Evelyn. But I and few others have seen traces and fragments of a different truth that we were not supposed even to suspect. When the Order was founded early in this century, something had been discovered in Jerusalem that had to be suppressed at all costs. I am not privy to the whole story, which is known only to the Grand Master and to a few cardinals in Rome. It is not clear whether the first Templars actually found this secret or whether they were rapidly established by the Order of Sion to investigate further and then conceal something that had already been discovered.’

Evelyn was bewildered. ‘Are you saying that you are now a fugitive because you came into possession of forbidden knowledge, even within your own community?’

‘Exactly that – and they fear that I and those with me will divulge this intelligence to the world.’ A gleam came into his eye and his voice quivered a little – so she thought he might be a little crazy.

‘How did the early Templars come by this secret? And what is it, anyway?’ she asked, almost fearful that the answer would provoke a thunderbolt from the skies.

His face twisted into a grimace of pain, as mortification and indecision racked him. ‘I am torn between my vows of obedience and the right of all men to have a free mind, untrammelled by blind faith. Part of me is seized in the grip of the rigid dictates drummed into me since childhood, yet increasingly I see the merits of the gnostic way of thought – as do many other Templars in France, who are sympathetic to the Cathars. I should have the courage to tell the world the truth – and yet I am afraid.’

Evelyn began to feel that his responses to her questions took her further away from any real understanding. ‘But what did they find, these first Templars?’ she persisted.

‘They were given part of the palace built over the ruins of the Temple of Solomon, destroyed by the Romans when they dispersed the Jews. The first few spent several years excavating further in the underground passages that were said to have been Herod’s stables – and what they found there they transported back to southern France, in conditions of the greatest secrecy. Nine years after their foundation, the original nine Templars returned to France for good.’

Again he had managed to answer her without imparting any relevant information, so she tried again. ‘Southern France seems to feature greatly in all this, sir,’ she observed. ‘That is where these Cathars you speak of live – and where this Templar friend you are awaiting has his estates. I once heard from an indiscreet monk that there was even a theory that Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalen visited the area after the death of our Saviour, as it was a haven for many Jews fleeing from the Holy Land.’

De Ridefort gave a dry laugh. ‘Visited? She did more than that! She came to live there, bearing the Grail within her! The Languedoc is the new Holy Land, which makes it all the more tragic that nemesis will before long fall upon thousands of those who live there.’

She still failed to follow his leap-frogging replies, but as they neared the entrance to the manor-house bailey, Evelyn made one last effort. ‘But how could something taken from the foundations of a temple possibly rock the foundations of our Holy Church?’ she asked in trepidation.

De Ridefort took his hand from her arm to point backwards towards the little church. ‘What did we just do during the Mass?’ he asked sternly. ‘We partook of the body and blood of the resurrected Christ, the ceremony that is the core, the very heart of the Holy Roman Church. If that most sacred belief is shattered, then the thousand years since Paul made Rome the centre of the Christian universe crumbles into dust.’

They turned into the gateway and Evelyn, uneasy almost to the point of being frightened by this strange, enigmatic man, slipped away to report to her mother.

Next morning, Thursday the seventeenth day of March, was cold and blustery. Yesterday’s promise of spring had been a mockery, typical of the western parts of the Isles of Britain.

Odin was having his hoofs checked in the farrier’s forge, so after an early bowl of hot broth with bread, de Wolfe went up to the castle on foot. A gusting west wind whipped at his worn cloak and threw occasional spots of rain at his face as he loped up to Rougemont. The covers over the street stalls rattled against their frames, the pedlars and tradesmen huddling inside their mantles and capes as they waited for their customers to brave the elements.

As he walked, he welcomed the absence of complaint from his leg, which now seemed virtually back to normal, both in strength and lack of the nagging ache that had been there for so many weeks. He ruminated on the previous evening, when he had spent a dull, but uncontroversial few hours with his wife, in front of their hearth. For once, she had no religious devotions to attend and they ate their supper in relative peace. He had no desire to go down to the Bush as he knew that Nesta was attending some meeting of Exeter inn-keepers at the Guildhall, to discuss the rising cost of barley and its effect on their ale prices. Since the poor harvest of the previous year, and the huge demand for grain made by the king to supply his army in France, the price of many staple foods was increasing. This added to the disgruntlement of the already overtaxed population, which de Wolfe feared might encourage Prince John to start plotting again against his absentee royal brother.

The rising cost of living was one of the topics of a rather stilted conversation between Matilda and himself, as they sat in front of the fire after their meal. He opened a jar of wine and, under its influence, they relaxed a little – lately, Matilda had seemed increasingly partial to a few drinks. The talk inevitably turned to Gilbert de Ridefort and John had told his wife of the discoveries of Thomas about Abbot Cosimo and the arrival of the three Templars the previous day. She appeared genuinely concerned for the knight’s safety and had admitted grudgingly that de Wolfe had been right in hiding him away down in Stoke-in-Teignhead. Not only that, but she added some information of her own, gleaned that day from the inquisitive parishioners of St Olave’s, which was within a few hundred paces of the priory of St Nicholas.

‘You say that one of the knights was Brian de Falaise,’ she said, ‘and I was told that the others are called Godfrey Capra and Roland de Ver.’

John had never heard of this last knight, but he had a slight recollection of Godfrey Capra, who had been at the big meeting in Gisors. This was the so-called ‘Splitting of the Elm’, which seemed to have had some profound effect on the organisation of the Templars and at which Gilbert de Ridefort had also been present, something John could not now believe was a mere coincidence.

Now, as he walked up the last few yards to the gatehouse of Rougemont, de Wolfe sighed as he failed to put all these diverse bits of information into some sort of pattern. It was clear that he would have to make a frontal attack on these Templars, to try to discover what had really brought them to Exeter. He turned into the guardroom, but instead of tempting fate with another assault on the winding staircase, he put his head into the lower entrance and yelled up to attract Gwyn’s attention. There was an answering bellow from above and his officer came clumping down, followed by Thomas de Peyne.

‘We have to attend this week’s mutilations at the eighth hour,’ he told them. ‘Thomas, did the sheriff’s clerk give you a list?’

The bent little clerk scrabbled in his shapeless satchel and pulled out a scrap of parchment, which he consulted. ‘There are three, Crowner, and you have to take a confession from one.’

De Wolfe frowned. ‘A confession? Why?’

‘It seems he also wants to turn approver, to save his neck, if not his right hand.’ An approver was a criminal who wished to save his life by informing on his accomplices, when he might be allowed to avoid the death sentence, perhaps abjure the realm or even be set free altogether.

The coroner grunted and led the way across the inner ward towards the basement of the keep, which was half below ground. This dark, damp undercroft was part-prison, part-storehouse and part-torture-chamber, ruled by Stigand, a grotesquely fat gaoler with the intelligence of a woodlouse. Half the crypt was divided off by a stone wall, in which a rusted iron gate led into a passage lined with filthy cells. The rest was open space, dimly lit by the light from the small doorway and a few rush-lights on the walls. It was floored by wet earth and in one corner, Stigand lived in an alcove, sleeping on a straw mattress. Outside this was a fire-pit, which served both for his primitive cooking and for heating branding irons and other instruments of torture. At the moment, an iron pot of wood-tar, obtained from charcoal-burning, was bubbling ominously on the logs.

As the coroner’s trio came down the few steps from the level of the inner bailey, a dismal procession emerged from the iron gate of the gaol. Led by Gabriel and a man-at-arms, three prisoners, dressed in rags and wearing heavy wrist and ankle fetters, stumbled across the uneven floor, prodded along by two more soldiers. Stigand locked the gate behind them, then waddled across to his fire, where a low bench held a selection of implements. Already in the centre of the cellar stood a small group of observers, including a priest from the garrison chapel of St Mary, in case one of the prisoners should die during the proceedings. The others were Ralph Morin, the castle constable, Henry Rifford, one of Exeter’s two portreeves, and Sheriff Richard de Revelle, with one of his clerks from the County Court, which had convicted the miscreants.

The soldiers pushed and dragged the three men into a line facing the officials, so that the clerk, a portly man with over-inflated ideas of his own importance, could begin reading out the details of the sentences.

‘Firstly, Robert Thebaud, butcher from this city, you are convicted of repeatedly and perversely giving short weight and of having manifestly tampered with your weighing scales to your own advantage.’ He turned over a leaf of parchment and referred to some earlier record. ‘You were fined ten marks by the burgess court of this city on the eighth day of June last year. And you were warned then that a second offence would lead to hanging or mutilation.’

The sheriff, resplendent in a short cloak in his favourite green thrown carelessly over one shoulder, waved a glove at the clerk. ‘Is anything else known about this villain?’

Rifford, a paunchy, middle-aged man with a short neck and prominent eyes, was the portreeve representing the burgesses and guilds. He pointed an accusing finger at the wretched Robert, a burly man with a normally florid face that was now pale with fear. ‘He was warned by the Butchers’ Guild last year that if he transgressed again he would be ejected and no longer able to continue his trade in this city. That will happen now, though in any case, he’ll be in no condition to fell cattle and chop meat with one hand!’

Thebaud fell to his knees and began to blubber for mercy, but no one took any notice of him: they were too familiar with such supplications from the condemned.

The clerk moved on to the second case, a sullen young Saxon with yellow hair hanging down his back. ‘Britric of Totnes, you were apprehended in the Serge Market trying to pass off clipped short-cross pennies. In your lodgings, the city bailiff found a bag of clippings and iron shears for trimming the coins.’

The irregular silver pennies were of many types as some had been in circulation for a century or more from different mints around the country. Clipping the edges and melting down the silver for its value was a common but serious crime. Most coins had a cross on one side, and in later mintings, the arms of the cross were made longer, reaching to the edge in an effort to make clipping more obvious. Counterfeiting money was a hanging offence, but passing clipped coins was almost as heinous.

Britric seemed unmoved by this accusation and the clerk moved on to the last culprit, a shifty-looking youth with crooked, projecting teeth. ‘William Pagnell, you were convicted of associating with known thieves who haunted the fair of St Jude two weeks ago. Three other men made off with goods to at least the value of five marks from various booths, but you were the only one caught. As the stolen goods, a candlestick found on your person, was of the value of only ninepence, you have avoided hanging on that charge.’