by James Becker
Robin traced the path of the river on the map in front of her with her fingertip, and then nodded agreement. When she looked up at Mallory, her eyes were shining with excitement.
“Things really are starting to fall into place,” she said. “The stories about the treasure being buried at Temple, and the French legend tying up so well with the information we’ve got from that piece of parchment—I think we’re onto something here. I mean really onto something.”
Mallory nodded.
“I hope we are. I wonder if the river Esk is navigable all the way up to Temple. I mean, if it is, then maybe the Templars built rafts or something to haul the treasure chests upriver. Obviously they’d be going against the flow, but that might have been easier than off-loading them and taking everything overland.”
“I don’t think they did that,” Robin said, “because here’s a sentence about the resident members of the order meeting the fleet somewhere—the location isn’t specified—and supervising the transfer of the chests to a large number of wagons drawn by horses and oxen. They then provided an escort for the caravan to the end of the journey. Anyway, it looks as if the treasure arrived in Scotland in August or September 1307, and if these various stories and legends are correct, and what they say is borne out by the text on the parchment, it was stored in a stronghold in Temple or somewhere nearby while this cave or tunnel was being prepared to receive it. So, that means, logically, that it definitely has to be somewhere fairly close by. Otherwise a different storage area would have been chosen, somewhere much closer to the treasure’s final destination.”
“That’s a lot of assumptions,” Mallory said, “and lots of guesses. But that’s all we have, so let’s make the best of it.”
45
Midlothian, Scotland
“I didn’t expect to see you here, Silvio,” Marco Toscanelli said, shaking hands with Vitale as he walked into the arrivals hall at Edinburgh Airport.
“You’ve screwed up so often, Toscanelli, that I decided the only way to ensure this mission would end the way it should was to come here and supervise it myself. Have there been any other developments?”
Toscanelli shook his head as he led Vitale out to the hire car on the road outside the building, the engine idling and with another member of the team behind the wheel. As soon as they approached the vehicle, the driver climbed out nimbly. Vitale had only brought a carry-on bag, and he gave it to the driver—Mario—to put in the trunk, then climbed into the backseat, being joined a moment later by Toscanelli.
“Nothing else has happened since I last called you,” Toscanelli said. “The hidden text carved into the stone of the crypt at Templecombe was encrypted, obviously, but it was only a very simple Atbash cipher, and we deciphered it ourselves even before our experts in Rome sent us their decryption.”
“And then you came up here.” Vitale was stating the obvious.
“Yes. The reference to Temple seemed unambiguous, and we assumed this would be where Mallory and Jessop were heading.”
“At least you got that right,” Vitale said. “Through our contacts here I can confirm that Mallory’s car was detected on a number of traffic cameras as he drove north. Jessop was confirmed as being in the car with him. The first sighting was in a town called Warminster, which is where we presume they were staying when they visited Templecombe, and then we had another dozen or so sightings. When it was clear that they were probably heading for the same place you were, I decided to fly over here as well. I’m waiting for confirmation of further sightings now that they’re presumably in this area.”
“What are your orders regarding them?”
“The kill order is rescinded for the moment. You were far too precipitous at Templecombe. I agree that the carved inscription was probably the last clue, but it’s fairly nonspecific. It gets us as far as Temple, but it doesn’t tell us exactly where the heretics concealed the treasure. I’ve told you before that those two are a quantum leap ahead of you when it comes to deduction and logical thinking, Toscanelli, and for the moment they’re more valuable to us alive.”
Toscanelli glanced forward and saw Mario smirking in the rearview mirror.
“So, what do you want us to do?”
“As soon as we get confirmation of where they are, we must follow them. Once they have led us to the hidden vault used by the Templars, they will become expendable.”
“You don’t think we can find it from the translation of the carved text?”
“I doubt it. There’s not enough information to go on. I know you had a man watching what they did in the churchyard at Templecombe, but I still think there might have been something concealed inside the carved-stone skull, something that Mallory or Jessop removed and which might provide the final piece of information they—and we—need to locate the vault. I saw the photographs Mario took of the base of the skull, and that cavity was an obvious place to hide something.”
“Mario saw nothing to suggest either of them removed anything.”
Vitale snorted dismissively.
“Mario,” he said, “you’ve been listening to what we’ve been saying. Can you swear they didn’t take anything out of the skull?”
“No, of course not. I was watching as carefully as I could, but they were moving around and sometimes I found myself looking at their backs. They could have done something like that, and I wouldn’t have seen it. That was what I reported.”
“Exactly. So, first we find them. Then we follow them, and we only kill them when this mission has ended to my entire satisfaction.”
46
Midlothian, Scotland
“I’ve been thinking,” Mallory said after a light lunch the following day.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Robin replied.
They were lying fully clothed on the large double bed in their hotel room, their heads on the pillows as they stared up at the ceiling. Robin was tucked comfortably into Mallory’s left armpit, the maps discarded on the floor at the foot of the bed. In fact, they’d both been thinking, but largely lost in their own thoughts, which had inevitably been centered on the one question to which neither of them had an answer: Where had the Templar hoard been hidden?
Robin’s idea about using topographical maps had seemed like a good idea, but there were just so many possible locations—natural caverns, man-made tunnels, mine shafts, and the like in the area—that it was impossible to decide where to even start looking.
“We’re missing something, obviously,” Mallory said, “and by that I don’t mean that we don’t know where to go next. I think it’s a bit more basic than that. I’ve been thinking about that line in the decrypted text about a building that wasn’t even constructed when the text was written but would somehow ‘give thanks and honor for those who came before and remind those who would follow.’ And I’m just wondering if that’s a kind of oblique reference to what’s perhaps the most famous building ever to be associated with the Knights Templar, despite having been built almost a century and a half after the order ceased to exist.”
“Rosslyn,” Robin said immediately. “That is where you mean, isn’t it? Funnily enough, I was thinking about that as well, but I didn’t say anything because I’ve always thought it’s a bit of a cliché. And, as you just said, the Templars ceased to exist in 1312, and they didn’t start building Rosslyn until 1456. Even I know that.”
“Cliché or not,” Mallory said, rolling over slightly so that he could look at Robin, “that does seem to fit the bill, and explain the expression we found on the parchment. The imagery inside the chapel is bizarre and in some parts inexplicable, including carvings of things that look remarkably like corn on the cob, but which were unknown in Europe at the time. Plus, there are a couple of images definitely associated with the Templars, like the Agnus Dei, the ‘Lamb of God,’ which was used as a Templar seal and symbol, especially in southern France, and even what’s been interpreted a
s a stylized sculpture of the classic Templar image of two knights riding on a single horse. The chapel is owned by the St. Clair family, and at the center of the St. Clairs’ engrailed cross symbol is what looks very much like a Templar croix pattée. There’s clear evidence that the chapel was designed using sacred geometry, and it’s also been claimed that it was modeled on the layout of the Temple of Solomon, another clear link to the Templars. The obvious problem with that is that nobody knows for sure exactly what the Temple of Solomon looked like, far less what its detailed layout was, so that’s a claim that can’t be either proven or disproven.”
“But if your damned shaky deduction is right, then that’s pretty much it as far as this quest is concerned, because unless the Rosslyn trustees have changed their minds in the last few weeks there’s no possibility of us doing any excavation there. They don’t let anyone excavate anywhere near the building.”
Mallory nodded.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” he agreed. “And if the Templars dug a hole and buried their treasure and then the St. Clairs built Rosslyn Chapel on top of it, then I would absolutely agree with you.”
“But,” Robin said.
“But what?”
“There was definitely a ‘but’ coming at the end of that last sentence.”
“Oh, yes. Right. All I was going to say was that there’s another way of looking at it. If we’ve got this right, the Templars buried their assets somewhere in this area in 1307, getting everything they could carry out of France before Philip’s men started hammering on the doors of their preceptories and commanderies on Friday, the thirteenth of October. Even if it took them two or three months to get their vault finished, they would probably have had the chests stowed away safely by the end of that year. And because of what had happened in France, they would have known that the Templars were finished, at least in the short term. But I’m also certain they hoped that at some time in the future the order would rise again, like the mythical phoenix, from the quite literal ashes of the bodies of the knights burned at the stake, and so they would have wanted to keep their assets safe.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m just thinking out loud, I suppose. But there is that other phrase we decrypted—the ‘friends in the north’—and I’m wondering if that could possibly be the missing link. If we assume that our guess is right, and that Rosslyn Chapel is the building that was constructed later to honor the Templars, then it would make sense that the St. Clair family might well qualify as being these anonymous ‘friends.’ In fact, it’s difficult to come to any other conclusion. The chapel is clearly linked with the Templar order, because of what you can see inside the place today, and only a family or group friendly to the order would erect such a building, especially a century and a half after the Templars were purged. So the St. Clairs must not only have been linked to the Templars, but were also very probably entrusted with keeping the secret of the treasure safe. Possibly they even used Templar funds to erect Rosslyn. Some of the gravestones there are carved with what look very much like Templar effigies.”
“Okay.” Robin nodded. “Do you know much about the family?”
“Not a lot, no. So let’s ask the oracle—Google—what he knows.”
“She,” Robin said.
“What?”
“Google is obviously female, because she knows everything.”
“Yeah, right,” Mallory said.
Fifteen minutes later, using their two laptops, they’d both seen more or less everything publicly available about the St. Clair family. Rosslyn Chapel was the brainchild of Sir William St. Clair, at that time probably the richest and most powerful nobleman in Scotland, though he never lived to see the building finished. There was apparently even some doubt about exactly where his wealth came from, which might be a kind of confirmation that the St. Clairs were entrusted with the Templar treasure and were able to use at least some of it for their own purposes.
“I don’t know if you can read anything into this,” Robin said, looking at one particular website, “but Sir William St. Clair was known to disapprove of the use of torture on prisoners, at a time in history when that was the norm. Do you think that could have been just his personal feeling about it, or was he influenced by his knowledge of what the Knights Templar had suffered in the torture chambers of the Dominicans?”
Mallory looked interested.
“It might be an indication that we’re on the right track,” he said, “but it obviously doesn’t prove anything. Now, this is the basic information about the chapel. Work began on it in 1456, and originally it was intended to be just one part of a much larger, cross-shaped building containing a central tower. The chapel took almost forty years to construct, but Sir William died in 1483, before it was completed. His son, Sir Oliver St. Clair, completed the chapel, but for whatever reason the remainder of the structure was never built.”
“Sir William intended the chapel to be the final resting place of all the St. Clairs,” Robin said, picking up the story, “and to start the ball rolling, so to speak, he exhumed and transferred the corpses of many of his illustrious ancestors from their tombs to the chapel to be buried in a large vault under the floor. That vault—or maybe those vaults, because it’s not clear if it’s just a single chamber or several different ones—is supposed to extend the whole length of the chapel. These reburials included his grandfather Prince Henry St. Clair of Orkney, widely known as the Navigator, who was reputed to have led an expedition across the Atlantic to America about a century before Columbus set out to find a westerly route to the Spice Islands and found the Caribbean instead. Columbus, of course, never even saw the North American continent. If Prince Henry did make that voyage, then that would at least help explain the carvings of corncobs found in Rosslyn Chapel, because he could have seen the plant growing in America and might even have brought some back with him.”
“This is something else that’s interesting,” Mallory said, pointing at an image of a male figure on the screen of his laptop. “This character was another of Sir William’s ancestors who had their last rest disturbed when their bodies were hauled over to Rosslyn for reburial in the vault. He’s Sir Henry St. Clair, Baron of Rosslyn, who was killed fighting for the Scots at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, that same conflict that a force of Knights Templar was supposed to have been involved in, on the side of the Scottish army. According to this, the vault holds some twenty bodies, most of them buried wearing full armor, and it’s supposed to be so dry down there that a report from 1663 states that even after being interred there for eighty-odd years, the corpses appeared as fresh as if they’d just died.”
“Slightly creepy,” Robin remarked, “and weird if it’s true.”
He and Robin read on further.
“You know that Freemasons often claim that they are the lineal—or at least the spiritual—descendants of the Templars?” Mallory asked.
“Tell me about it. My father was a Master Mason, but I’ve never been convinced that there’s any link between the two apart from wishful thinking.”
“You may be wrong there. Look at this, because I don’t think it’s a coincidence. We’ve worked out that it’s more than possible the St. Clairs were the ‘friends in the north’ of the Knights Templar and ended up as the guardians of their treasure, because they were so deeply involved with the order. But the same family, the St. Clairs, were also the hereditary Grand Masters of Scottish Freemasonry since at least 1600. However you look at it, that does seem to me to establish a probable spiritual link between the Templars and Masons. Not that it’s important as far as we’re concerned, but it is interesting.”
Robin nodded and looked back at her laptop.
“The chapel’s suffered a lot through the years,” she said. “Look at this list. The interior was smashed up and vandalized during the Reformation. Then it was used as a stable for Cromwell’s forces in
1650, and ransacked again by a mob in 1688. It wasn’t until the early part of the eighteenth century that anyone got around to protecting it and started a restoration project, and not until 1862 that it was rededicated as a place of worship. And then the Victorians got their hands on it and did a lot of work inside the chapel, putting in stained-glass windows and making other improvements. I think the real trick would be finding which bits of it are original and how much resulted from the later restorations.”
“Then I think it’s lucky we don’t need to. I think what’s important is the position of the chapel, rather than what’s inside it. If the St. Clair family members were the Templars’ ‘friends in the north,’ then it would make sense for them to construct the chapel that would honor the order fairly close to where the treasure was concealed.”
“Are you sure about that?” Robin asked doubtfully.
“No, but at least it’s a starting point. I’m going to take another look at those topographical maps and see if there are any natural caverns or anything marked near Rosslyn Chapel.”
“There’s certainly one,” Robin said, a few minutes later, still using her laptop, “but it’s of no help to us. There was an echo-sounding survey using ground-penetrating radar, that kind of thing, carried out around the chapel a few years ago, and apparently that showed a large chamber lying to the north of the building, beyond its boundary walls. Nobody has any idea what that might be, though I suppose the obvious conclusion might be that it’s a part of the St. Clair family burial vaults. But to get inside it, you’d either have to dig straight down into it, which the trustees would never allow, or try and find a way into it from within the chapel itself, and that wouldn’t work for exactly the same reason. Have you found anything?”
“Frankly, no, but I have got an idea. You remember that other phrase that seemed to make no sense to us, the one about the sacred mound?”
“Er, yes,” Robin replied, opening up a folder on her laptop. “The translation I came up with was ‘from the sacred mound seek beyond the battlefield for the open and closed door,’ and I still have no clue what that’s supposed to mean.”