The Templar Brotherhood

by James Becker

  “I know that’s only a small change,” she said, “but we’ve got so little to work with that every word needs to be right. Does that help?”

  “Possibly,” Mallory replied cautiously, “if you are certain about it,” he added.

  Robin nodded.

  “That noun clearly needs the definite article,” she confirmed.

  “Then that might be a good lead. The word temple was obviously closely associated with the Knights Templar, both because of their origins, in the way they got their name, and also because it was a monastic order. They were warrior monks, and every Templar establishment had a church or chapel of some sort, though it wasn’t normally referred to as a temple. Lots of them are still standing today, places like the Temple Church in London, and there are quite a few round churches dotted around the country that are Templar in origin. But if we are talking about the British Isles, there’s one location that does fit the bill exactly: Temple, in Midlothian.”

  “I’ve heard something about that place,” Robin said. “Wasn’t it the main Templar stronghold in Scotland?”

  “It was, yes. And it’s worth remembering that the majority of the arrests of the Knights Templar took place in France. The rulers of most other countries were extremely reluctant to move against the order, either because they didn’t believe what the Templars were accused of, or because they were so deep in hock to the order that they didn’t want to rock the boat. As far as I recall, hardly any of the Templars in Scotland were even arrested, far less tortured or burned at the stake. In fact,” he added, “at some point they were given land in Scotland, and they had a really good relationship with the Scottish ruling house.”

  “I see where you’re going with that,” Robin said. “You could quite easily argue that the expression ‘the islands of the north’ could refer to the British Isles, bearing in mind that the Templars’ main stronghold was in France and their normal theater of operations was the Mediterranean. And it’s also possible, from what you’ve said, that the Scottish ruling house could be the people referred to in the parchment as ‘our friends in the north.’ That does all make sense,” she finished.

  Mallory nodded.

  “You could well be right,” he agreed. “It’s also worth bearing in mind that the Scots might have been grateful to the Templars because of their military prowess. It’s never been proven historically, but there is a persistent story about the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. When the English troops were clearly gaining the upper hand, a new force of unknown men, thought to be Templars and all clearly very experienced warriors, appeared on the battlefield and quickly turned the tide in favor of the Scottish forces. The identity—and even the existence—of these troops has never been confirmed, but the Templars had been the most powerful fighting force in Europe until 1307, just seven years earlier, so if a group of them had made it to Scotland, and that country had given them shelter, it’s certainly conceivable that there could be some truth in the story.”

  “But wasn’t there some prohibition against Templars killing Christians?” Robin asked.

  “Yes, and the order was also forbidden from fighting in nationalist wars. But after the way the Templars had been utterly betrayed by both the king of France and the pope, I doubt very much if those prohibitions would have meant anything to them. They would have been fighting for their survival, and my guess is that they’d have bent the rules to suit the situation, or just ignored them altogether.”

  Mallory looked back at the translation Robin had given him.

  “But this doesn’t actually say that the ultimate destination of the Templar treasure was Temple, does it?”

  “No. What it refers to is an underground chamber that I think was a part of an existing cave system. It might have been something that the Templars modified and enlarged, but the basic structure was already in place. That’s how I read it, anyway. The bits I really don’t understand are the two sentences that follow that one. The first one seems to be referring to a place that hadn’t yet been built at the time this parchment was prepared. There’s this enigmatic phrase about a building that would ‘give thanks and honor for those who came before and remind those who would follow.’ And the next one is even more obtuse. That says, ‘From the sacred mound seek beyond the battlefield for the open and closed door,’ and I really have no idea what either of these two mean.”

  “Join the club,” Mallory said. “But what we do know, if that translation’s right, is that this trail or quest or whatever you want to call it ends somewhere near Temple, so at least we more or less know where we have to go next. Scotland’s a long way, so the sooner we get going, the better. Let’s pack our stuff now and get on the road. We’ll find somewhere to stay on the road.”

  Twenty minutes later, Mallory put the last of their bags—as usual, they were traveling light—in the front trunk of the Porsche Cayman and pushed the lid closed.

  He started the engine and programmed the satnav for the middle of the main road in the village of Temple—about seven miles southeast of the center of Edinburgh—glanced across at Robin to make sure she had her seat belt done up, then drove slowly out of the hotel car park.

  44

  Midlothian, Scotland

  Temple, when they reached it the following afternoon, proved to be something of a disappointment, because it had almost vanished and had a tiny population—only just over two hundred people, according to a website Robin had consulted when she was a passenger in the car. Seven hundred years of wear and tear and the usual ravages of time had reduced the once-important Templar stronghold to nothing more than a tiny village, not even marked on some maps.

  They’d been swapping over all the way up to Scotland, each driving for a couple of hours before pulling over for a drink or a toilet stop, and they had spent the previous night in a small pub just off the main A1 trunk road. They’d also stopped a couple of times that day for a snack meal, and Mallory was behind the wheel for the last leg.

  “It doesn’t look like there’s much here,” he said, pulling the car off the road.

  They got out of the vehicle and looked around but saw nothing that appeared to be either helpful or even interesting.

  “The translation didn’t say that this was the location,” Robin reminded him, accessing the Internet on her smartphone, “only that it was somewhere near here.”

  “Good, because it looks to me as if there’s even less to Temple than meets the eye.”

  “And that, my dear, is where you’re wrong. I suppose I should have checked the place out properly before we got here, but I didn’t. In fact, there’s a lot of interesting stuff about Temple, and especially about the Templars. What’s more important is that it seems to confirm what we thought.”

  “Tell me,” Mallory said.

  “Well, starting at the beginning, the Templar order was formed in about 1119 in Jerusalem, and as we know for the first nine years they did almost nothing, because they were believed to be excavating under the Temple Mount. Certainly they weren’t patrolling the roads around Jerusalem and protecting the pilgrims, which is what they were supposed to be doing. And then, suspiciously quickly, the order was recognized by the Catholic Church and then by the pope.”

  “We know all that,” Mallory pointed out.

  “I know. But what I didn’t know was that in 1128, the same year that the order was recognized at the Council of Troyes, it was also recognized by David I of Scotland. Hugues de Payens, the founder of the Knights Templar and the same man who had persuaded King Baldwin II of Jerusalem to accommodate the Templars in the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, met with the Scottish king and also managed to convince him to support the new order. In fact, David didn’t just support and recognize the Templars; he also gave them the ‘Chapelrie’ and Manor of Balantrodach. That’s an old Scottish name that translates as the ‘stead of the warrior,’ and the land includes what is now Temple. In fact, the name Balantroda
ch was still used for the village until the end of the sixteenth century. In 1618 it was formally renamed Temple after the old chapel that was still in use at the time.”

  “I didn’t know that, either,” Mallory said. “Reading between the lines, that is a kind of confirmation that the Templars did find something buried inside the Temple Mount, something that frightened the religious establishment. Otherwise, I doubt if King David would even have agreed to see him. But to both recognize the order and hand over a tract of land to the Templars suggests that whatever Hugues de Payens said to David or maybe showed him must have impressed or concerned the king enough to make him agree to whatever the Templars wanted.”

  “Exactly. Anyway, there was already a settlement here when the Templars moved in, and this became their main headquarters and preceptory for the whole of Scotland. They built high walls around their buildings, a church with the round tower that was typical of Templar religious architecture, a cloister, and a mill, and—now, this is interesting—they also started tunneling works here in Temple. But before you get too excited about that, this particular tunnel was intended to mine coal, not hide treasure.”

  “But that was in the twelfth century, presumably,” Mallory said, “not the early part of the fourteenth. If the mines were no longer in operation by that later date, they could possibly have used the old mine workings as a repository. It’s worth looking at, anyway. Anything else?”

  Robin scanned the screen of her mobile again.

  “There is a church here,” she said, “called the Old Temple Kirk, which gave the village its name. It’s a ruin, with just the walls left standing. According to some sources it dates from the twelfth century, but most people think it’s more likely fourteenth, after the Templars were purged.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a fairly conventional design, with none of the usual Templar architecture, and there’s some late Gothic tracery on one of the window arches, which suggests a later date. On the gable end there’s an inscription that might help date it, though this bit’s extremely tenuous, in my opinion. The inscription reads ‘VAESEC MUHM.’ That’s not a known abbreviation for any standard Latin phrase, as far as I know, but it’s been tentatively translated as Vienne Sacrum Concilium Militibus Johannis Hierosolymitani Melitensbus. And in English that means ‘the Sacred Council of Vienne, to the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem and Malta.’ As I said, really tenuous, bearing in mind that the abbreviation doesn’t even come close to matching the initial letters of the phrase it supposedly represents.

  “But if that deduction and translation are right, and if that inscription was carved when the church was built, rather than added sometime after the event, then the church dates to the period after the Knights Templar were purged. In 1312, because of what had happened in France, the Templar order in Scotland and England was suppressed and all the property handed over to the Sovrano Militare Ordine Ospedaliero di San Giovanni di Gerusalemme di Rodi e di Malta, the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, better known as the Knights of Saint John or just the Hospitallers. There’s also a suggestion that in Scotland the Templars weren’t abolished, but instead merged with the Hospitallers and the joint order simply acquired a new name: the Order of Saint John and the Temple. Bearing in mind the good relationship the Templars had enjoyed with the Scottish crown, that does make sense. That way, the Scots could be seen to be obeying the instruction of the pope to dissolve the order, while actually doing nothing of the sort and letting them continue to exist, just in a slightly different form.”

  Robin hopped onto another website, then glanced again at Mallory.

  “There’s one other thing, though. I’m not sure if it’s either true or relevant. In 2006 a couple of amateur historians, I suppose you could call them, found what looked like a small headstone at Temple, presumably in or near the ruined church. When it was examined, it was found to have a barely visible but unusual design on it. There’s a possibility that it could be a thing called a baculus, a kind of stylized carving of the Templar croix pattée. If so, that could be the symbol of office for a Templar knight. As I say, probably not relevant, because the Templar presence here was well established, but interesting all the same. And that,” she added, “is more or less it as far as Temple is concerned.”

  Mallory nodded and looked up the road to the small main street of the village.

  “Interesting though all that is,” he said, “I don’t think we’re much further forward. I just hope we can do a bit more research on that parchment before we pick a place to start digging. Scotland’s a bloody big place and what we’re looking for is probably quite small.”

  Robin nodded.

  “I’m not too sure that there’s much more direct research we can do. There was little enough text to work with. I think we need to do a bit of lateral thinking.”

  “Like what?”

  “If my interpretation is correct, wherever the Templars stashed their loot was an existing cave system, or a part of one, or maybe an ancient tunnel. Or maybe, as we were talking about earlier, the old coal mine that they started excavating soon after they arrived here. So perhaps we should try and find a geological map of the region and see if there are any underground spaces marked. That might give us a good starting point.”

  “Good thinking,” Mallory said, opening the car door. “We won’t find anything around here, but there are bound to be specialist bookshops in Edinburgh. We’ll find a hotel somewhere in the city, get a room, and then go exploring. How does that sound?”

  “Like a plan,” Robin said, “which is very unlike you. And, oddly enough, it actually sounds sensible and might even work. So let’s go.”

  They booked into a large chain hotel near the junction of the M8 motorway with the City of Edinburgh Bypass, basing their selection more on its location, anonymity, and ease of access to fast roads and the metro system than on the advertised merits of the hotel itself. Finding bookshops was not a problem, once they’d taken the metro from the Edinburgh Park stop into the city center, because they were spoiled for choice, and although what they were looking for was fairly specialized, they returned to the hotel after a couple of hours with three topographical charts that covered most of the area to the south of Edinburgh. More importantly, all three maps included the area immediately around the village of Temple.

  Back in their double room, Mallory opened up his laptop and logged on to the hotel’s Wi-Fi network so that they could check whatever information they gleaned from the maps. Then he spread out the biggest of the three maps on the foot of the bed, and they both bent forward to study the details.

  It was immediately obvious that caverns and cave systems weren’t exactly rare in the region, and a number of different ones were marked on the map, though none, as far as they could see, was very near Temple.

  “That village is only a starting point,” Robin reminded Mallory, “not necessarily the final location. The way I read the text on the parchment, the Templar treasure was loaded onto their fleet of ships at Honfleur. If we assume that Britain was their destination, maybe some of the other details will start to make more sense. The parchment states that the vessels first made landfall on what it calls ‘the island at the wide river mouth,’ which is both specific and general, because we don’t know which river it means. There are probably dozens of rivers and islands that it could refer to. But the next sentence might help clarify it, because that says they sailed ‘from the river to the river.’ I think that means the ships sailed up one main river and then traveled along a tributary.”

  While Robin was talking, Mallory leaned over to the desk and typed a search string into Google. When the results page appeared, he scanned down it, then double-clicked on one particular result. He read the first part of the text and nodded.

  “That could be a reference to Temple,” he said. “According to this website, there’s a persistent legend
that directly relates to the Templar establishment there. There’s a rhyme about the Templar treasure being buried between the oak tree and the elm tree, which is obviously not much help, because I’d be really surprised if either tree could still be standing seven hundred years later. And even if we could somehow work out the precise location of those two trees, that would still only give us a vague idea about where the treasure might have been buried.”

  “I don’t see the link to Temple,” Robin said.

  “That’s this next bit. There’s a prevalent legend in France about the end of the Knights Templar—and we have to at least give this some credence, as the French arm was the most powerful part of the Templar establishment—which claims that the treasure was taken to Britain, and that does link up to what you’ve just been saying. According to this story, the ships of the Templar fleet first landed on the Isle of May.”

  Robin immediately turned her attention to one of the maps, which showed the Firth of Forth, the major estuary that lay to the north of Edinburgh and speared deep into Scotland.

  “I think that counts as a wide river,” she said. “At its widest point, it’s about fifteen miles from north to south, and the Isle of May is a bit north of the centerline of the river at the mouth. So, what does the French legend say happened after that? And do we have to visit the island?”

  “No, we don’t. According to this story from France, the ships sailed on from the Isle of May and along another river to their planned destination. You said the parchment claimed that the fleet sailed ‘from the river to the river.’ If the Templar ships sailed up the estuary from the Isle of May, the first river they would have met on the southern side, and which certainly counts as a river in a river, is the Esk. And the river Esk follows a more or less straight line all the way south from the coast at Musselburgh through Dalkeith and on to Temple itself.”