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

by David S. Brody

  “I don’t envy the synagogue leaders. They’re going to have their hands full with this. And it won’t help that they’re Jewish—you know how people can be, especially when it comes to religion.” She bit her lip. “They’d be wise to contact the Consortium for assistance. They’re the experts on Prince Henry and they belong to powerful families in Europe.”

  “And they’re Christian.”

  “Yes.” She paused. “Whatever that means.”

  * * *

  “I have a poem I want to read you. I think you’ll fancy it,” Amanda said. Cam had finished dressing and they were walking hand-in-hand up the Touro Street hill, past the Touro Synagogue and toward the Jewish Cemetery a block away. The tunnels ran pretty much beneath them.

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “It’s a verse from Longfellow’s poem, The Jewish Cemetery in Newport.” She pulled a piece of paper from her bag and read slowly.

  “Gone are the living but the dead remain,

  And not neglected, for a hand unseen,

  Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,

  Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.”

  She folded the paper slowly. “Sounds like Longfellow reckoned someone was secretly watching over the cemetery. Watching over a grave.”

  “A hand unseen,” he repeated. “It’s one of those things that once you know the mystery, you start seeing the clues all over the place.”

  “Speaking of clues, here’s another we missed: Prince Henry was not just a prince, he was also part of the Davidic line of the Kings of Israel. As the Monsignor said, Jesus was a direct descendant of King David. And Mary Magdalene herself was from the House of Benjamin, another royal line. Therefore their heirs would have been Jewish kings. Kings of Jerusalem.”

  “I like it. Prince Henry, King of the New Jerusalem.”

  “Here’s my point: In chess, where is the king positioned?”

  “Right next to the queen.” Then it hit him. “Oh, I get it. We didn’t take the chess clues far enough. Sinclair is the king. He’s buried next to the queen, Mary Magdalene, mother of the royal bloodline.”

  “We had it wrong. The Tower wasn’t just a rook. It also symbolized Mary Magdalene, Mary-of-the-Tower. It was the queen.”

  Not wrong, just not completely right. The Tower was both rook and queen. “Just like you told me: With the Templars, always look at things on multiple levels.”

  As they walked he thought more about Prince Henry being buried at the Jewish Cemetery, just a few hundred yards from the Newport Tower. “That helps explain why the Touro family protected these sites. As Masons they were keeping the Templar secrets. And as Jews they were protecting Mary Magdalene and her sacred bloodline.”

  Amanda nodded. “Just as their ancestors did in France after she fled Jerusalem. She was Jewish royalty.”

  “Hey, here’s a radical thought. Is there any chance Prince Henry and the Templars were protecting the Mary Magdalene bloodline, not the Jesus one? She was the female after all.”

  Amanda considered it for a few seconds. “Possibly, but I don’t think so. They still believed Jesus was the son of God; they must have assumed a female God—the Sacred Feminine—could have impregnated the Virgin Mary as easily as could a male deity. It was Jesus’ line that was paramount. They were still Christians; they still worshiped Christ.”

  They arrived at the front gate of the cemetery. Amanda reached between the wrought iron bars and snapped a red rose off its vine. Stretching forward, she dropped the flower onto a shaded rectangular area in the front quadrant of the cemetery, a few feet from where Frazon was buried. She bowed her head, took a deep breath. “Rest easy, Prince Henry.”

  Another tour bus cruised by, heading for the Tower. Cam grinned. “Yeah, rest up. It might get pretty crazy around here soon.”

  They stood silently for a few seconds, their fingers around the iron rails. She turned to him. “Did you realize the rose is the symbol for the Virgin Mary? And also for Venus? And also a pseudonym for Mary Magdalene?”

  “No, no and no.” He glanced at the rose vines. “But I’m not surprised.”

  “And Roslyn Chapel was so-named because it sits on an ancient European rose line, or prime meridian.”

  He nodded. “Just as the Newport Tower served as Prince Henry’s prime meridian in the New World. It all fits together.” He never would have figured this out without Amanda. “Roses. Another clue I missed.”

  “That’s to be expected from a man with your last name,” she deadpanned.

  He laughed. “So you think these rose bushes have been here for 600 years?”

  “Possibly. Just like the oak trees and the petroglyphs and the other clues they left.” She stared at the grave site, her lips pursed. “Yarborough was spot on about one thing. Prince Henry really was a brilliant, special man.” She stared at the patch of grass. “Years might pass before the crypt is opened. Perhaps we should give him a tombstone.”

  “Nice thought. What would you write on it?”

  “Something that wouldn’t reveal his identity, right? We can’t have folks digging up his grave.”

  “Right. So it needs to be cryptic.” He smiled. “And I think Prince Henry would prefer it that way.”

  The words popped into Cam’s head as if carried to his ears by the rose-scented wind. “You know how the archeologists are always saying the ground doesn’t lie?”

  She nodded.

  “Well I’d play off that theme using Niven Sinclair’s own words.” He took her hand. “It’d be a simple inscription: The rocks don’t lie: He was here, and he came because God and Nature are One.”

  EPILOGUE

  [December 21]

  There was one more thing they wanted to check out. Amanda stood huddled against Cam inside the Newport Tower, peering east toward the brightening morning sky. The temperature was in the teens and the wind howled across the park, swirling within the Tower.

  Amanda grinned as she blew on her hands. “Perhaps the windmill theory is correct after all.”

  They had received special permission from the town to get inside the Tower for the winter solstice. If their theory was right, if the Tower really was a medieval calendar as well as a prime meridian and baptistery, it should mark the winter solstice in some kind of dramatic fashion. In ancient times the solstice was the most important day of the year, the day when the sun reversed its pattern of descent in the southern sky and offered the first promise of spring, of rebirth, of life renewing after a time of death and darkness.

  Scott Wolter had noticed a tawny keystone above one of the eight arches on the interior of the Tower. He had done some calculations and theorized that, on the morning of the winter solstice, the sun’s rays would pass through one of the seemingly-randomly placed windows of the Tower and illuminate the egg-shaped keystone.

  His excitement on the phone a few nights earlier had been contagious. “The symbolism is perfect. If we believe the Tower is a shrine to the Sacred Feminine, then the egg-shaped keystone is what?”

  “The egg within the womb,” Amanda had immediately answered. It would have taken Cam a bit longer.

  “Right. And in ancient times, the sun was believed to be the male to the Venus female. So the sun comes in and shines on the egg--”

  “Fertilizing it,” she had interjected.

  “Exactly. It’s an allegory. The egg is fertilized, marking the rebirth of life. Mother Nature, the Sacred Feminine, Mother Earth, gives life again.”

  Cam and Amanda had awoken at dawn, camera in hand, to test Scott Wolter’s theory. From the looks of the angle of the sun and the height of the keystone it would be an hour or so—around 9:00—before the sun’s rays hit their target.

  Brandon had considered joining them but opted instead for a Caribbean cruise with one of the Mass. General nurses. He received his prosthetic leg in November; during Thanksgiving dinner someone asked for a drumstick and Brandon lifted his leg onto the table and made a show of removing the artificial section. E
ven Peter laughed. And he had already ordered a set of ski poles designed for one-legged skiers; no doubt he would re-master the sport before spring.

  While they waited for the sun to rise, Cam took some measurements. “Hey, did you know the Tower isn’t exactly round?”

  “Really?”

  “It’s off by about six inches. Do you think that’s on purpose?”

  “I’ve come to the belief that everything they did was on purpose.” She stared at the Tower walls for a few seconds. “It’s another allegory, Cam. The earth itself isn’t perfectly round. So why should a depiction of Mother Earth be? They built the Tower slightly ovular, just like the earth.”

  “I like it,” he smiled. “And I would have figured it out myself. Eventually.”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  A blue sedan approached and rolled to a stop on Mill Street, near the Tower. After the driver spoke on a cell phone for a minute or so, a middle-age woman and a small girl stepped out. Hand-in-hand, huddled in thick parkas and mittens, they approached across the frozen park, buffeted by the wind. “I wonder what they want,” Cam said.

  “Probably curious. Normally the gate to the Tower is locked.”

  The woman and girl stopped a few feet away from the Tower as if waiting for permission to come closer. Cam’s cell rang. “Thorne, this is Salazar.”

  The scar on his arm burned. According to Lieutenant Poulos they hadn’t been able to catch Salazar even though they knew he was probably headed to Nova Scotia. He motioned Amanda over and placed the call on speaker. “What do you want?”

  “Believe it or not, I have a favor to ask. That little girl in front of you is my Rosalita. With her grandmother.”

  A pair of bold brown eyes stared out at Cam from behind a fur-lined hood. “What, do you want us to baby-sit?”

  A short laugh. “Nothing like that. But if you’re right about the Tower, about it being used to measure astronomical alignments, I figured something would happen this morning and you’d be there to check it out. My people also mark the winter solstice. I wanted Rosalita to see it.”

  Amanda squeezed his hand. “He’s not trying to make trouble. And it’s never a bad thing to enlighten a child.” She turned to the girl. “Is your name Rosalita?”

  Rosalita’s grandmother, her face made-up even at the early hour, guided her forward. “I’m seven,” she announced, holding up two pink-gloved hands, one presumably shielding two raised fingers and the other five.

  Amanda stepped forward. “Seven? You certainly are a big girl.”

  “Yes,” Rosalita agreed. “Are you Daddy’s friends from work?”

  “In a way. Yes.”

  “Are you the ones who told Daddy that God is a woman? I told the nuns at school and they made me say ten Hail Marys.”

  Amanda laughed. “That’s quite an interesting choice of penance.” She smiled at Cam. “Did you also tell them Jesus was your great-great-great-great-grandfather?”

  “Yes but they already knew that. They said I shouldn’t brag about it.”

  “That’s good advice.” Amanda motioned her forward, into the Tower. “Your father wants us to show you something.”

  As Amanda took the girl’s hand, Cam tried to reconcile the competing versions of Salazar as both doting father and trained killer. Perhaps it wasn’t such a paradox—he just wanted what was best for his daughter like any other parent. “We have another friend, his name is Mr. Wolter,” Amanda explained. “And he has a theory, an idea. Do you see this rock? It’s called a keystone. If we pulled it out, the other stones would all fall on our heads. Do you see that?”

  Rosalita backed away a couple of steps.

  “No need to worry, honey, I won’t touch it. Now look around at the other arches. Do you see any other stones similar to this one?”

  Rosalita’s little body rotated like a second hand on a clock. “No.”

  “Well, that made Mr. Wolter curious. And there’s one other thing about this stone. Do you notice it’s not exactly in the middle of the arch? That also made Mr. Wolter curious. The men who built this tower were very smart—they would not have put the stone off to the side unless they had a good reason.”

  “When I draw a picture of my friend, I put her nose right in the middle of her face.”

  Amanda laughed lightly. “As would I. To understand Mr. Wolter’s theory, I need to tell you about the old days, before people had science to help them understand things. Well, in the fall, the people noticed the days were getting shorter and shorter. They were afraid the sun would never return, leaving them in permanent darkness and cold. They knew that without the sun the plants would die and they would starve.”

  “I can think of a plant that lives in the winter. A Christmas tree. Daddy and Grammy and I have one.”

  Cam smiled into the phone. So Salazar was in town. Did Poulos know?

  “Correct.” Amanda clapped her hands together. “In fact, in the old days, people used to place evergreen trees in their homes because they believed the trees were magic and would help bring the sun back.” Which explained the Christmas tree custom. “Anyway, they would watch the sky very carefully to see when the days would stop getting shorter. When they were certain the sun was rising again in the sky they held a big celebration.” Which explained the Christmas holiday itself—the Church took the date of the customary pagan rebirth-of-the-sun celebration and redefined it as Jesus’ birthday.

  She continued. “Well, Mr. Wolter believes that this tower was built to help tell the people when the days were going to start getting longer again.”

  “How will it do that?” Rosalita scanned the Tower walls. “Stones can’t talk.”

  “Not in words. But they can still tell us things.”

  The sun had risen so that its light shone through the Tower’s southeastern window and left a shoebox-size illumination high on the Tower’s interior northwestern wall. As the sun slowly rose and moved along the horizon, the box of light crept down the Tower wall in a diagonal descent toward the keystone.

  “Hey, Thorne. My mother-in-law has something for you,” Salazar said over the phone.

  Cam glanced up and the woman stepped forward, her dark eyes alert. She reached inside a canvas bag and, smiling tightly, handed him the Tower replica. “I made a mold and brought it up to Nova Scotia,” Salazar said. “I met the guys who owned the land—you can’t get near Oak Island they have so much security. Plus half the cops in Canada are looking for me. But I found the guys I needed, told them about the model, about Amanda’s theory. They must’ve bought it—they gave me a hundred grand for the mold. Not bad. I put it into a college fund for Rosalita.”

  Cam took the replica. Hard to hate the guy until you remembered the blood in his wake. “It belongs to the Gendrons. I’ll return it to them.” He had no desire to chat further. Was it okay to hang up on a guy who shot you?

  But Salazar wasn’t finished. “One thing I was thinking about. Anybody you ask in Rhode Island will tell you: You need stonework done, hire a Narragansett Indian. My grandfather was a stonemason. I always though they learned from the Colonists. But maybe it goes back further than that.”

  It made sense. Prince Henry would have needed help. He didn’t have enough men with him to build the Tower. Or even the tunnel and crypt. Perhaps his stonemasons trained the Narragansetts.

  Salazar continued. “Hey, thanks for letting Rosalita watch. She’s getting all this Catholic stuff from her grandmother. I want her to understand her Native American side also. This Prince Henry stuff, worshiping Mother Nature, is pretty close to what my grandfather taught me.”

  “It wasn’t just nature, Salazar. It was combining nature with Jesus’ teachings—you know, the Golden Rule, love thy neighbor as thyself.” He paused. “Maybe even some Commandment about murder being a bad thing.”

  “Yeah. I get that.”

  Cam ended the call and joined Amanda inside the Tower. “So, do we have a fertilized egg?”

  She took his hand, her other remaining linked wit
h Rosalita’s. “Not yet. But it won’t be long now.” The light box was creeping, angling directly toward the keystone.

  “I’d love to see Blinky Blank’s face when she sees these pictures. A Colonial windmill that also just happens to mark the winter solstice.”

  As if on cue, the light beam kissed the edge of the egg. The corner of stone, normally tawny-colored, flushed golden. Rosalita gasped and pointed. “It’s glowing.”

  Over the course of the next few minutes the box of light inched along until it illuminated the entire egg, the rectangle of light centered perfectly on the ovular stone. They stood and stared, transfixed. Normally adults were incapable of viewing the world through the eyes, wondrous and innocent, of children. Not this time. The egg-shaped stone radiated like an ember as the sun’s rays, narrowed and focused by the window, fired against it. “This must have been truly spectacular 600 years ago,” Amanda whispered. “They probably covered the other windows and the roof so that the Tower interior was dark. Then, every morning, probably commencing weeks ago, they’d watch as the light box approached the egg.”

  [Photos courtesy of Scott Wolter.]

  SERIES OF PHOTOS SHOWING LIGHT-BOX MOVING TOWARD AND ILLUMINATING EGG-SHAPED KEYSTONE ON NEWPORT TOWER, NEWPORT, RI, USA, DECEMBER 22, 2007

  Cam stared at the egg. “You can see how the keystone had to be placed just off-center for the light to hit it. It probably had to be moved a few times to get it perfect.”

  “Yes. Whoever built the Tower was good. But not that good.” She sighed. “Originally I expected this to be a parable for the duality of God—the sun, representing the male, fertilizing the egg in the womb of the Tower, representing the Sacred Feminine and Mother Earth. But then I began thinking about the beehive again. The drones fertilize the queen bee, but that doesn’t make them the king. They remain mere drones. It’s the same with the sun. It plays an essential role, but that doesn’t make it a king.”