‘It is his wish to follow you to his death. That is his desire.’
Etienne lost his balance and Jourdain reached out a hand to steady him. ‘I have dreamt with the Grand Master, yester-eve,’ he told Jourdain. ‘Jacques de Molay is dead soon, I feel it. In the dream he spoke to me that all is not lost, that all shall lay buried for another time like a seed in the earth.’
Jourdain looked at him out of eyes sharp and flecked with snow. ‘You are his last heir, Etienne, you are our Grand Master now, and your men shall follow you to hell if need be.’
Jourdain’s words moved something inside him.They would follow me to hell?
Something was seeking to find its way from his throat to his mouth, something of anguish and sadness and frustration that made his knees tremble and his heart swell up until he found no more room in him for breath.
He saw a vision of death . . . for all of them.
‘It is cold . . .’ he said with a sniff and leant low to enter the aperture. ‘We go in.’
54
DE NOGARET’S MISTRESS
Who can find a virtuous woman, for her price is far above rubies.
Proverbs 31:10
Paris, April 1313
‘What is it?’ said the voice thick with sleep. Guillaume de Nogaret sat upon the edge of the perfumed bed in which lay Mademoiselle de Vigiers, and stared out at the moonless sky over the rooftops.
‘Come to bed . . .’ the creature moaned from the blankets, ‘it is cold.’
‘No, I have to go,’ he said.
‘Where?’
‘Why do you ask every time? I begin to believe that you are a spy.’ He laughed at this thought and gave the form a slap, but his eyes grew into slits in his head.
There was a movement in the blankets and a burnished copper head came out into the black night, casting its light into the gloom.
‘But I am a spy, rounded and comely.’ She bit his shoulder.
‘I have to go,’ he said again, pushing her away and putting on his boots. There were arms around his neck now, and soft peaks touched his back. He sighed, but not from passion.
‘Will you leave me to the cold?’
‘Why not leave you to the cold?’
The arms dropped down over his arms and came to embrace his soft middle; the voice purred, ‘So is it over?’
‘What?’ Nogaret struggled with his laces.
‘Have you finished with the Order of the Temple?’ Those hands were soft and curious.
‘It is finished with . . . there is only one last thread to pull . . . and I am looking forward to it with eagerness.’
‘You know, at night you dream of them and you talk in your sleep.’
He turned his head to her. ‘What do I say?’
He stopped her hands.
They withdrew and the bundle returned to its blankets.
He shook the bundle, annoyed now. ‘What do I say?’
‘You say . . . you say . . . oh . . . I don’t know!’ She stretched beneath the blankets. ‘It is foreign . . . something like . . . ak . . . mak . . . tub . . . I think.’
Nogaret returned to the business of dressing. ‘Maktub ... I know this maktub.’ He was frowning now and wishing to be gone.
‘Paris is alive with talk of your doings!’
He gathered his things and made to go.
‘What? You will say nothing?’ The bundle was now naked on its bed.
He looked at her and made an annoyed grunt. ‘Go to sleep.’
‘Will you be working tonight?’
‘Yes.’ He struggled with his coat. ‘You are an inquisitive one this day!’
‘If you are working tonight then you will need your oil . . .I went to the Eustace quarter and got it myself.’ She curved her body to reach beneath the bed and brought out the bottle, which she gave to him.
‘Good! Alas, my dear! You do have a brain! This day begins with an amazement!’ He gave her a slap on the rump and left her smiling in the dark.
55
NEW COVENANT
We are members one of another
Ephesians 4:25
Three days Julian lay upon the sumptuous bed in one of the many apartments at the fortified personal residence of the Bishop of Paris, taken down with a fever. It was not a fever of the body, the physicians told the bishop. It was a fever of the soul.
For his part the young man dreamt strange dreams. In the shadows he heard the sound of wails and screams and the clatter of battle. He could smell smoke and fire and long blades were put to his throat. Then he was following the legs of tall men through streets that wound around as the world coiled in screams and wails.
He tossed and twisted, covered in perspiration while the doctors around him worked in a ring of activity trying to fathom the new and unusual disease. The bishop sat beside him, praying, but Julian did not see him, his visions turned to burning skulls that fell from the shoulders of bodies stripped bare by flames. To visions of oceans vast and blue, and horses and the smell of animals at the gallop ridden by ghostly figures dressed in white emblazoned with crosses made of blood.
On the third day of this, he woke to the sound of the bells of the great cathedral. The fever in his soul had broken and he sat up, feeling the room turning and his stomach lurching. For a moment he did not know where he was, and then he saw the snoring monk sitting beside his bed. It was the bishop’s assistant.
‘Wake up!’ Julian told him.
His eyes must have had fierceness in them, for the monk, having woken to find himself looking into their depths, crossed himself.
‘What day is it?’ he shouted at him.
‘Why ... why ... it is ...’ The man was disoriented himself.
‘I hear something . . . what do those bells call?’ He got up, swayed and fell upon the monk, grabbing him by his scapular. ‘What happens today?’
‘Today? Today the crowds gather outside the Notre Dame for the sentencing of the Templar Grand Master.’
Julian felt the cold-heat enter into his lungs; the faces of the dead swam in his head. This day is not yet written! he thought.
‘Fetch my clothes!’ he said, and fell back with the world whirling in spirals over him and the smell of angels in his nostrils.
56
VIA CRUCIS
For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?
Revelation 6:17
Paris, 18 March 1314
Anima autem mea exultabit in Domino: et delectabitur super salutare suo ...
Between the stone and God, Jacques surrendered to the vision.
And from his mouth emitted his own voice: ‘Slayed! The white-robed lamb . . . thirteen times after the feast of the carrier of holy oils!’
Jacques de Molay’s eyes rolled from inside his head and with a sudden rush he was knocked back into his chest and took the breath of a drowned man.
He was awake and there was a sound.
He flinched. Tears left his eyes and burned down his cheeks. He had commanded armies, governed provinces! He gathered what strength was left to him and waited for the bolt to move. From behind the door came two guards followed by the provost, Philippe de Voet.
He knew why they had come.
‘Get up!’ said the provost and went about removing the chains, leaving on the heavy iron anklets.
The Grand Master lifted his bony face upward to look into the man’s eyes. ‘You are not a bad man, Provost . . . Please, one last request, may I be allowed to wear a mantle of the Order, and not some dirty cassock? Today, it seems like to be my last.’
The provost’s face was blank but he turned to a lesser guard and ordered that a mantle be found.
Making their way through the dungeons to the outside, Jacques could barely lift his legs, weighted as they were with fetters. The tower steps, narrow and steep, made his progress slow.
Outside, his eyes were assaulted by light and his skin, porous and pale, was awakened by the chilly breeze that entered his nostrils and made him tingle f
rom head to toe. A bird flew overhead and he found himself smiling. There was sky! How long had it been? Seven years? He was held by it, and in it he found a sudden lucidity. He looked around him. Alain de Pareilles stood waiting for him, beside a wagon. Behind it fifty or more soldiers were standing at ease. This man was captain of the King’s soldiers, he attended every execution, and had always accompanied the condemned to sentence. His presence con-firmed the significance of this day.
Jacques de Molay summoned his strength and stood as erect as his withered body would allow. I am going to my judgement, he told himself.
Three men were coming from the tower escorted by guards. He squinted to see. They were emaciated, dirty, white-haired and hunched at the shoulders. Jacques realised with surprise that one of them was the visitor general, another he saw was the Preceptor of Normandy and another the Commander of Aquitaine. He held out his arms and whispered to them,‘Defenders of the Holy Sepulchre!’
The four men embraced.
He gave his attention to his old friend the Preceptor of Normandy, Geoffrey de Charney, who had warned him those many years ago against going to Richerenches. ‘Geoffrey!’ he said, and thought sadly, This man was once a lion-warrior . . . see the scars on that face! Now he is like me, old and wasted and ruined. ‘My brother . . . let us have courage . . . courage.’ He clasped the man by the shoulders. ‘Remember the dignity of the Order. Remember how we have fought for Christ, how He lives in our hearts.’ He looked at the visitor Hugues de Pairaud, whose followers had plotted to have Jacques killed in Cyprus. Now the man made a weak kneel. Jacques shook his white head. ‘Get up, brother!’ He helped him to his feet. ‘Come . . .’ He reached for the Commander of Aquitaine, whose eyes were silent and vacant. ‘Come, brothers, may the spirit we have always sought when we have worked in His name, the spirit who has sacrificed his Godhood for us, for the good of the world, for the freedom and improvement of His children, be with us and the hard duties we are about to perform.’ And for the last time the men formed a circle of faith.
The provost waited for it to be over, then he moved closer and with his face bent over towards the men he said, ‘I shall remove your chains . . .’
Jacques de Molay closed his eyes, and shook his head. ‘But we have no money . . .’
‘I shall remove your chains,’ the man insisted.
Jacques de Molay raised his head and tried to stand tall. ‘Well then, we thank you.’
They climbed upon the cart that would take them to the commission at Notre Dame. Each man lost in contemplation of what future awaited him. Jacques did not look upon the Temple for one last time. He did not gaze like his brothers upon the ramparts and battlements, upon the spires and crenellations. He thought instead of the fifty-four men who had been taken to their deaths in such a cart, and prayed for them. In his heart he told their spirits that what had come to pass had been as inevitable as the passing on of the seasons. That all of it had been ordained but that good would triumph once again.
Geoffrey de Charney turned to him. ‘Will they condemn us?’
The Grand Master drew in a sigh. ‘Remember, he that believeth in Him is not condemned.’
‘I am abused!’ Geoffrey said. ‘And old . . . I have confessed to heinous things!’
He looked at the wasted man with deep compassion. But what to say to him? He too wished that he had remained firm but he had not. He wished that he was less tormented . . . yes, younger! Little now remained of his life, his adventures, his loves and his devotions. Little remained. All that was left to him was a longing to surrender his creations to God as a sacrifice. But what had he created? He had wandered and fought and wounded and cried in the brick dust of foreign lands. He had joined men in massacre and in victory, but what was there to show for it? Outside the Porte du Temple he observed the crowd fall upon the cart and the guards force their way through the citizens of Paris – the very people for whom he had fought and protected the Holy Land. He heard the cries as though they were very far away.
‘Death to the heretics!’
He wondered of whom they could be speaking. He looked at his men. The visitor was mumbling to himself; the Commander of Aquitaine was silent, his eyes glazed and lost; only Geoffrey de Charney seemed to have kept his wits.
‘We must be prepared to die,’ he said to him, firm of eye.
‘Yes, I understand that, Jacques.’
‘Thieves! Heretics!’
He was startled by these words.
‘But to die this way! Why do the people not see our plight?’ Geoffrey asked.
The Grand Master shook his head. ‘They do not know how we have suffered, that we have been tortured, that the commission could not condemn us and that Philip had to resort to corruption that he might burn our men. Two years have passed since our Order was abolished and we have wasted in prisons because we are the leaders and they have not known what to do with us. The people do not know these things – one day they shall. We must lay it all before the Lord now . . .’
They passed the cloister of Saint Merry, so many faces. Children were hoisted up that they might not miss the sight of four old men shivering. In the crowd of faces craftsmen, beggars, thieves, scholars, priests, merchants, all of them gathered, pressing forward to see four old men shivering. He looked up rather than watch their faces. The sky was a delicate new blue, washed clean by the night. There was his destination, he told himself, to soar like a bird, elegant and light of weight! But when he looked down to the crowd he was once again faced with what was held written upon the faces of the men and women who had come to watch his humiliation. He saw in their eyes the sum total of his worth. He knew what they were thinking. There goes the Grand Master of the illustrious Order of the Temple – a ragged old man, a heretic, or perhaps only a weak man who could not endure torture? He saw himself reflected in their eyes – but that was not all he saw. He saw them and knew that they were seeing themselves in him. Men who were unfree, who lived cowering in the shadows of Church and state, disease, death and poverty; men who lived a life of duty not to God but to their desires, fears and hopes. They only truly lived when they faced death. Only by coming close to it did they, for one moment, leap out from their numbness to feel freedom. Freedom from the fearful clutches of destiny, whose gaze had momentarily fallen upon another man.
Did they not sense the soul of the world, merging and separating, entering within and expanding without, dividing the unity into individual parts and unifying the particular into a universal whole? A man was, therefore, not merely the mirror for another man, but was entered into him and became one with him . . . and when two men were entered into one another, how could they not think the same thoughts or breathe together the air in their lungs? How could their hearts not beat in rhythm to experience the same pains and sorrows or move their limbs towards the same goals?
His old friend Christian came before his mind’s eye and he knew what his friend had meant to tell him. The knowing of it gave him an astonishing strength and it rose up through his legs and to the rest of him and stirred his tired, old veins. He would not die in murus strictus! He would not languish in a dungeon surrounded by rats and faeces – he would die with will in the lungs! The old man with the long beard and tattered mantle would then be truly free. Free because this would be his deed – not a deed demanded of him by duty or rule, but one that had welled up from the nature of his own being – to take the evil of the world into himself, to fill himself up with it and to transform it to good through love!
This was a new thing.
The sun came out then, patient and clean, and the streets became his, familiar and jovial. They no longer carried him to his execution; they were the avenues whose direction pointed to the accomplishment of his task. He was not afraid. These people were his brothers and he would fight for them and die for them upon a different battlefield.
‘We need no outward country, my brothers. Jerusalem exists in our souls and we battle there against evil upon the soil of the spirit!’
A weighty silence fell and it made the day seem more brightly coloured: the sky, the sun, the cardinals’ robes, the ermine and velvet, the golden pectoral crosses. All of it blinded Jacques de Molay and he barely heard as Cardinal de Fréauville read out the heads of judgement.
The cardinal spoke with unctuous majesty, pomp and ceremony. But the Grand Master heard only as his name was called.
‘Monsieur de Molay, who under interrogation has confessed and admitted the following . . .’
Seven years of lies, of tortures and indecencies. Seven years! The cardinal appeared almost satisfied as he read that during the reception ceremony brothers were required to deny Christ, that the brothers committed sacrilegious acts upon the cross, that the receptors practised obscene kisses on new entrants, that the priests of the Order did not consecrate the host, that the brothers worshipped a cat, or a head, that the brothers encouraged and permitted the practice of sodomy, that he, the Grand Master, and other officials absolved fellow Templars, that they held their receptions, ceremonies and chapter meetings in secret and at night, that they abused the duties of charity and hospitality and used illegal means to acquire property and increase their wealth...
The Seal Page 34