Cabal of The Westford Knight: Templars at the Newport Tower (Book #1 in the Templars in America Series)

by David S. Brody

  “Didn’t the early settlers consider the natives savages?”

  “They did. That’s why Sewall’s position was so controversial. He thought the Indians were the lost tribe of Israel and they were key to any New Jerusalem.”

  She looked skeptical. “But he was a Puritan. And a fairly nasty one at that, based on what I’ve read about the witch trials. How could he be involved?”

  “Later in life he had an epiphany and actually issued a public apology for his role in the trials.” He lowered his voice. “And this is weird but his diary is full of comments and observations about his wife’s menstrual cycles and her nipples and breast-feeding. He was obsessed with that stuff.”

  She crinkled her nose. “Are you thinking Sacred Feminine worship?”

  Cam shrugged. “It always struck me as a really bizarre fascination for a Puritan judge, sort of like Bernard de Clairvaux lactating at the Virgin Mary’s breast. Maybe there’s some kind of connection.” He turned in his seat. “Anyway, we need a place to hole up for a few days and I figured we could blend in pretty well with all the tourists in Salem.”

  “I trust you’re not implying I have witch-like tendencies.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned her head on his shoulder while he phoned Uncle Peter. After confirming Brandon was okay, Cam convinced Peter to close the office for a week, fly to North Carolina with Aunt Peggy and take a long drive into the countryside with Cam’s parents. “And no credit cards.”

  He hung up and phoned Brandon. Lieutenant Poulos answered. “I came to make sure Brandon is okay.” He lowered his voice. “I’m sorry our guy didn’t do the job.”

  “One guy doesn’t have much of a chance against a team of paramilitary operatives.”

  “Well, we’ve got more than one guy here now. You going to bring these maggots down?” He was no longer insisting Cam come in for questioning.

  “Planning to. Tell Brandon I’ll call him tomorrow.”

  Once in Salem, they paid cash at a Bed and Breakfast in the historic part of town, then went out and bought food, toiletries and a change of clothes; fortunately Cam had a few days worth of insulin in his fanny pack which hadn’t gone bad yet. They grabbed a pizza and bottle of wine for their room and spent a couple of hours soaking together in a Jacuzzi. For a few hours, at least, they were just ordinary lovers, thankful to be alive.

  * * *

  Salazar didn’t need X-rays. He knew what broken ribs felt like and there wasn’t much you could do about them other than kill the pain. He popped a couple of Advils—he didn’t want anything stronger in his body—as he sat in a desk chair in a small office in the America’s Stonehenge building, waiting for Reichmann to finish up with the nasty Englishwoman and the Vatican historian in the conference room.

  He phoned Rosalita on his cell, reached her as Gloria was drawing her bedtime bath. “How are you, my little rosebud?”

  “Hi Daddy! Grandma says I can take the kitty into the bath with me tonight.”

  “Really? But aren’t cats afraid of water?”

  “Well, how will we know unless we put her in and try?”

  His laugh turned into a gasp as pain shot through his chest.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?”

  “I got hurt at work today, honey. But I’m okay.”

  “Did you fall down?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I fell down.”

  “Well, you should be more careful.”

  Another laugh, another bolt of pain. He grabbed two more Advils. “I gotta go now, sweetheart. I just wanted to say goodnight and I love you.”

  “I love you more!” she shouted as she hung up.

  A few minutes later Reichmann entered, shaking his head. “What were you doing? Your orders were to let them escape.”

  He coughed and winced as Reichmann eyed him. There was something to be said for taking one for the team, even a team accustomed to violence and death. It would preclude anyone questioning his commitment to the mission. “You said make it look good.”

  The truth was he needed to make sure the girl didn’t drop the messenger bag. She and Thorne would need the papers in the bag, and probably also the lantern, to find the treasure. And he needed to ensure the homing device he tucked inside the bag stayed with them.

  * * *

  [Saturday]

  They woke early Saturday morning, Amanda curled into the crook of Cam’s bent body. He stroked her hair gently as she stirred and snuggled closer against him. He had been attracted to many women in his life and even been involved in a few quasi-serious relationships, but inevitably he felt the need for some separation, some personal space, a few hours of alone time mixed in with all the intimacy. It was like ice cream, he used to tell himself: It tasted delicious but even so you couldn’t eat it all day long. But Amanda was different, every kiss like the first bite of mint chocolate chip on a hot summer day. He was beginning to understand what all the poets and love songs made such a fuss about.

  But in order to have a life with Amanda they had to survive the week first. He kissed her on the cheek, the rash and blisters pretty much gone. “We need to get moving, sweetheart.” He swung his feet off the bed and headed for the shower.

  In an effort to make themselves harder to track he shaved his beard and Amanda dyed her hair raven black. After blow-drying it she stepped out of the bathroom. His breath caught in his throat. With her porcelain skin and shamrock green eyes she looked like something off a fashion runway in Paris. “You look … exotically beautiful,” he stammered. “Wow.”

  She grinned. “I’m pleased you like it.” She winked playfully. “It makes me feel naughty. A bit witch-like.”

  He felt a stirring in his groin but fought the urge to guide her to the bed, instead settling for the last two bites of his breakfast bar. Ignoring popular tourist sites like the Witch Museum and waterfront shops, they walked to the town library, a square-front, red-brick, Italianate-style structure. Other than the white-railed widow’s walk capping the roof, the building looked like it belonged in Boston’s Back Bay among the other Victorian structures, not in Colonial Salem. They were waiting at the front door when the it opened at 9:00.

  They plopped onto the carpeted floor among the stacks in the history section, surrounded by piles of dusty, yellowing books. “You’re spot on,” she observed. “It says here that Judge Sewall believed the American Indians were the lost tribe of Israel. He lists a number of similarities between the Jews and your Indians—the women move to a separate tent during menstruation, they don’t eat pork and they practice circumcision.” She read further, her black hair brushing against the book’s pages. “Just as you said, he advocated that the Puritans join your Indians and form a New Jerusalem in America.”

  “You know, that’s some pretty advanced, almost radical thinking. Most Puritans just wanted to be rid of the natives, wanted them cleared from the land.”

  A few minutes passed while they read. Amanda’s curse broke the silence. “Bloody hell!”

  “What?”

  “You won’t believe this.” She pushed herself to her knees. “Do you remember I showed you a picture of the Bourne Stone, on Cape Cod?”

  “Yeah.” The stone featured the medieval ship that looked like the one on the Boat Stone in Westford.

  She focused her eyes on his to make sure he was paying full attention. “The Bourne Stone was discovered in a church built in the 1600s on Cape Cod for the earliest Native American converts to Christianity. Well, it says here the local legend is that the stone wasn’t carved by the Indians. Rather, it was given to them as a gift by Judge Samuel Sewall.”

  Blood rushed to Cam’s face. Judge Sewall? How did a Puritan judge from Salem end up with an ancient petroglyph? And why would he gift it to an Indian tribe on Cape Cod, on the other end of the state?

  She filled in a bit of the mystery. “Apparently he paid to have the church built as part of his plan to combine the Puritans and the natives and form a New Jerusalem.”

  Again with the New Jerusalem. Bu
t the mystery of how Sewall ended up with the stone, and why he gave it to the Indians, remained.

  Amanda was back in her book before Cam could comment. After a few seconds she looked up. “I’ve also got him visiting Noman’s Land, the island off of Martha’s Vineyard, in 1702.”

  It was one thing to be on Cape Cod. But Noman’s Land was an obscure, remote island. Especially 300 years ago. “What the hell was he doing there? Judge Sewall is like that Waldo character in the children’s books. Every time you turn the page, there he is.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “The book doesn’t say why he was there. I’m quite certain it had nothing to do with the Leif Eriksson Rune Stone,” she said wryly, referring to the rune stone with Leif Eriksson’s name and the year 1001—and possibly the word Vinland—carved into it.

  Cam smiled. “Nah. He was just picking grapes. Vinland, you know.”

  “This is too much fun. Shall we continue reading?”

  A few minutes later he looked up from his own book. “In 1689, Sewall traveled to England and visited Stonehenge. They called him America’s first tourist.”

  “Stonehenge?” she laughed. “That’s wonderful.”

  “And while he was there, he also visited a Jewish cemetery. Weird.”

  “Does it say why?”

  “No. But he went alone. He left his other Puritan friends behind.”

  He kept reading. “And here’s what I was talking about earlier; this is from his diary. He writes about how his wife was having trouble breastfeeding but the baby eventually took to the right nipple, the longer of the two, and then two days later finally took the shorter left one also.”

  She bit her lower lip. “I think I’d rather my husband not measure my nipples.”

  He kept his head down. “Here’s something else interesting. Sewall befriended a Jewish guy named Joseph Frazon. When Frazon died, Sewall helped arrange for him to be buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Newport.”

  “Really, Newport? And once more with a Jewish cemetery, just like in London?”

  “There are a lot of strange coincidences involving old Judge Sewall.”

  “Was he a Mason?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Heck, I didn’t even know my uncle Peter was. It wouldn’t surprise me. But he would have had to keep it secret if he was.” The Masons became prominent in American politics and society in the 18th century but their Templar-inspired ideals championing individual rights and liberties (including freedom of religion) would have seemed blasphemous to the rigid Puritans. Other than perhaps Judge Sewall.

  He contemplated the latest revelations for a few minutes. Travel in the 17th century was extremely difficult and dangerous. But here was a man who sailed back and forth to England during a time of war between England and France, and who apparently made multiple trips from Salem to Cape Cod, and even further south to Noman’s Land, a remote island, during a time when Native American raids were common. Curiously, none of these journeys seemed to have any commercial purpose. But they were anything but random. In fact, Judge Sewall’s explorations struck him as eerily familiar. They followed the path of a man investigating unexplained artifacts, trying to educate himself on the very matters he and Amanda were immersing themselves in now.

  He read for another 15 minutes but didn’t find anything else of particular significance. He put his book down and switched gears. “I came across an interesting factoid yesterday at the Groton library. Did you know that a compass doesn’t always point north?”

  “Especially if you carry magnets in your pocket.”

  He met her smile. This was serious stuff—they had just yesterday been shot at in the woods—yet she always managed to be in good humor, always tried to wring a few drops of joy out of even the most parched circumstances. “Apparently the magnetic North Pole bounces around up there. So, especially if you’re far north already, there might be quite a difference between due north and magnetic north. Today, magnetic north is about 450 miles southwest of the North Pole.”

  “That is quite a difference.”

  “Yeah, you can see how that would mess up navigation. That’s why they used stars also—Polaris doesn’t really move that much, it’s always due north.”

  “I don’t see the relevance.”

  “Well, I was thinking. We drew our chess piece line north-south, based on celestial north. And it ran right through America’s Stonehenge. But if the Newport Tower really was meant to be a prime meridian, shouldn’t it also be used as ground zero for magnetic north?”

  “They would want to measure both?”

  “Sure. There are weeks that go by when the stars aren’t visible. And who’s to say you’ll always have a compass.”

  “Okay. But you said magnetic north is always shifting around. If we want to pursue this, don’t we need to know where it was in the late 1300s?”

  He smiled, flipped open a book to a page he had marked with a pencil. “In 1400, magnetic north was southwest of due north about 300 miles, not far from where it is today.” He turned to another page. “Here’s a map, with lines showing how a compass would point at different spots. For example, in far northern Maine, a compass reading north is actually pointing more west than north. Even in Boston, it has a significant westward tilt.”

  She grabbed the book. “What are we waiting for? Let’s find a map and sketch some lines.”

  While she unfolded the map they had marked with the chess piece movements, he studied the magnetic declination patterns described in his book. On America’s east coast, magnetic north angled to the west, the westward tilt becoming more pronounced the further north one went. On the west coast, the declination was the opposite, to the east. In the center of the country—on a line that passed, perhaps significantly, close to the site of the Kensington Rune Stone in Minnesota—magnetic north and celestial north were identical.

  She returned from borrowing a protractor from the reference desk. “One of the mysteries of the Tower is that the pillars do not sit precisely on the compass points. They’re a few degrees off.”

  “Let me guess. The north pillar is rotated slightly to the west?”

  She tilted her head. “Bingo.”

  Sitting on the floor with his laptop, he pulled up the Google Earth program, marked the Newport Tower and the location of magnetic north circa 1400. He turned the map so Amanda could see it. The back of his neck tingled. “Check out where our magnetic north line passes.”

  MAP WITH PLACEMARKS SHOWING MAGNETIC NORTH CIRCA 1400 (TOP OF IMAGE) AND (ON BOTTOM RIGHT OF IMAGE), MOVING SOUTHWARD IN SUCCESSION, TROIS RIVIERES, QUEBEC; LAKE MEMPHREMAGOG, QUEBEC; THE WESTFORD KNIGHT SITE; AND THE NEWPORT TOWER SITE

  She leaned in. “Straight through Westford.” She grinned. “I never saw that one coming. What’s more, the Knight’s sword points a bit west of north, just as the Tower does. We’ve always wondered why it didn’t point precisely due north. You’ve answered the riddle now—the Tower and the Knight are oriented to magnetic north instead.” She stared at the line. “If this is all a coincidence, it’s a pretty damn unlikely one.”

  He was one step ahead of her. “Keep following the line north.”

  Her eyes moved up the page. “Straight through Lake Memphremagog.” Many believed Prince Henry followed the river system north to Lake Memphremagog on the Vermont-Quebec border, a site where a number of Templar artifacts have been found.

  He tapped the northern portion of the map. “The line crosses the St. Lawrence at a place called Trois Rivieres. I was sort of hoping it would go right through Montreal. But does Trois Rivieres have any significance?”

  She chewed her lip. “There is something familiar about that name.” She closed her eyes, then her lids flew open. “I recall. A coin and a ring were uncovered at an archeological dig there. Both artifacts featured Templar symbols on them.”

  “Okay. So that’s four points.” He marked them on the map and saved the image. He was beyond the stage of being surprised by any of this. In fact, he had reached the point wher
e he would be surprised if the woods and mountains and river beds were not filled with more petroglyphs evidencing the Prince Henry expedition.

  She studied the map. “You may be on to something here. They probably used the Tower as the prime meridian—you called it ground zero—for both celestial north and magnetic north. That’s part of the ‘mapping of the New World’ Eric Forsberg believed these explorers were undertaking. But how does it help us?”

  “What’s that expression? You don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been?”

  Her green eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we keep thinking about the petroglyphs and stone holes marking a journey beginning at the Newport Tower. But they had to come back, right? Maybe the Tower is an ending point also, not just a beginning.”

  “Very well. But I still don’t see how Judge Sewall fits in.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe it’s a dead end.” He pondered it for a moment. “So far, the only connections between Judge Sewall and this mystery are the Bourne Stone, Sewall’s travels to Stonehenge and Noman’s Land, and this guy Frazon, Sewall’s Jewish friend, buried in Newport.”

  “Don’t forget Sewall’s friendship with the natives—New Jerusalem and all that. His attitude toward the natives sounds much like Prince Henry’s.”

  “Good point.” He pulled out his TracFone. “Let’s put Brandon on it. Maybe he can find something.”

  Brandon answered on the first ring. “I was just about to call you. I thought you might be hanging from your thumbs somewhere.”

  “No, we’re okay. You feeling better?”