The Awful Secret

by Bernard Knight

  The explanation meant nothing, but Cosimo seemed to accept it as yet more evidence of the peculiarity of the people of this damp island.

  Later, everyone settled down in their cloaks on the floor of the tavern, the soldiers having brought in hay and dry ferns from a barn up the glen. John was hopeful that, at last, the Templars and the abbot were satisfied that Bernardus was nowhere near, as their inspection of the five sanctuary seekers confirmed that they were genuine locals.

  The most delicate part of his plot was now to be put into motion. When his sense of time suggested that midnight was not far off, he got up quietly and went outside to relieve himself against the wall. He waited for ten minutes to make sure that no one had missed him from the crowded room, then walked along the riverbank and up the track to Lynton. The moon came and went through the broken clouds and in its light, before he reached the church, he saw two shadowy figures standing under a tree. After some murmured instructions to de Blanchefort, they went boldly to the covered lych-gate and found both guards sound asleep. Gwyn poked one with his foot and the man leaped guiltily to his feet.

  ‘Shall I report to you to the constable and sheriff?’ said de Wolfe with mock severity. ‘They may have you hanged for failing in your duty.’

  The man was both abashed and relieved that the coroner was not going to make trouble ‘All quiet here, sir. They’ve been cutting their hair and beards earlier – and losing more blood than on a battlefield!’

  Leaving the guards at the gate, they entered the church. This was the most sensitive part of the stratagem for de Wolfe, but he put the options baldly to the men. ‘You can co-operate with me or not – but if not, I promise that you will hang, for I’ll withdraw your sanctuary. The sheriff would be only too willing to string you all up, I assure you.’

  They all muttered their assent and the coroner went on, ‘I suspect that all of you will come back again from Wales before long. I am well aware that abjuration is but a temporary state for many people. Once the sheriff and his men have left, they are unlikely to return for years. Your reeve and your bailiff are your own problem but, again, I suspect they are not unaware of your activities and keep a tight mouth if they are bribed well enough.’ De Wolfe saw a few sheepish grins in the dim, flickering light of the altar candles. ‘As your exile is almost certainly temporary – and I want to know nothing of that – I wish to exchange my friend here for one of you, so that he may take passage on that vessel, disguised as an abjurer.’

  There was another mutter, but of astonishment not objection.

  ‘He is a large man, so I propose that you,’ the coroner indicated the middle-aged villager, who was of a size with Bernardus, ‘vanish into the woods for a day or two until the coast is clear and let this man take your place.’ He held up his hand to stifle queries. ‘The reasons for this are none of your business, but I say that one of you can go free now – and, no doubt, the rest of you will find a way to slide back home before long. The alternative is a rope around your neck tomorrow!’ he added harshly.

  There was no argument and the older man, beaming with relief, got out of his clothes and changed with de Blanchefort, who seemed not desperately pleased with the arrangement, but forced by necessity to go along with the coroner’s plan. Though he had only stubble and no beard or moustache, the crude removal of his head hair with a dagger blade did not increase his enthusiasm for de Wolfe’s machinations but, again, he submitted with ill grace.

  As soon as this had been done, the fisherman muffled himself in Bernardus’s dark cloak and hat and walked out between Gwyn and the coroner. With the moon hidden behind a cloud, the sleepy sentinels at the lych-gate took little notice of the three men who emerged, except to heed the coroner’s terse warning to try to keep awake for the rest of the night.

  Once out of sight at the head of the glen, the local man vanished into the undergrowth, gratefully taking a good cloak and hat with him as a bonus on top of his freedom.

  At dawn, the coroner and his two assistants were back at the church. After creeping back into the alehouse John had hardly slept for the remainder of the night. He was anxious that his ruse should be successful, and concerned at how keen an interest the Templars and Cosimo would take in the departure of the abjurers.

  The five were there, dressed in their ragged sackcloth, tied around the waist with lengths of creeper from the churchyard. They looked terrible, with hacked clumps of hair and bare, bleeding patches of scalp, their faces cut and scratched from their crude attempts at shaving. De Blanchefort looked as bad as the rest – in fact, little Eddida was less ravaged as he had had no facial hair to start with.

  Before they started from the church, de Blanchefort took John aside at the back of the nave. The coroner stared at his ravaged face in the dim dawn light. As well as the effects of the dagger on his head and stubble, a few days’ poor eating and sleeping and the constant stress of being a fugitive had taken a dreadful toll on the man, who looked haggard and drawn. Though not old, he had loose pouches of skin under his eyes and deep lines at the angles of his mouth, which had put twenty years on his appearance. His eyes were sunken in their sockets, but the the actual orbs had a strange glint that made de Wolfe wonder for his sanity. ‘The others have given you their oath of abjuration,’ he said. ‘I wish to do the same.’

  De Wolfe stared at him. ‘What the devil for? This is all a sham for your benefit.’

  The other man shook his head emphatically. ‘I would feel better – and appear more convincing – if I had done what should be done to become an abjurer.’

  To humour him, de Wolfe quickly administered the oath and the Templar solemnly repeated it.

  ‘Satisfied?’ snapped the coroner, anxious to get them down to the ship.

  ‘Partly – but now I also wish to confess, as did the others.’

  ‘Confess? Since when have you been a pirate?’ Exasperated with the man’s nonsense, de Wolfe watched the daylight strengthening through a window slit and was anxious to be gone.

  ‘I know that you are no priest, but I would feel better if I confessed.’

  ‘For God’s sake, de Blanchefort, stop this idiocy. We must leave now.’

  The renegade Templar seized his arm, and his face, suffused with a strange obsession, came close to his. ‘I must confess to someone!’ he hissed. ‘For it was I who killed Gilbert de Ridefort.’

  De Wolfe froze into the immobility of disbelief. ‘You killed him?’

  De Blanchefort leaned on his crude cross. ‘I had to – he deserved to die for his lack of faith. He had decided to retract his promise to me to reveal the secret. After all we had been through – losing our membership of the Order, putting our lives at risk – after all the months of heartrending discussion and decisions, he decided that he could not, would not, do it. So I killed him, for being a craven coward and a traitor to the new truth.’

  His voice became fanatical. ‘It is now left to me to reveal it! That is why I must survive to get to a place of safety, to preach and write the reality of Christendom.’

  De Wolfe’s shock was passing into anger, but he needed to know how it had been done. ‘How did you find him?’

  ‘I suspected that his determination was weakening, even before we left France, so I came to Devon some days earlier than I told you in order to observe him. I also followed you, Crowner, and saw you meet with him. I saw you leave the city with him and, by questioning people, easily guessed that you would have taken him to your family home at Stoke. So I went there to meet with de Ridefort.’

  ‘Intending to kill him?’

  De Blanchefort made an impatient gesture. ‘Of course not – I wanted to talk with him, to strengthen him. As I said, for some time I had sensed his wavering resolve, but not until we met in the woods near your manor did he tell me decisively that he had decided to give himself up to the Order and that he had abandoned our promise to reveal the truth.’ His voice became so impassioned that de Wolfe now knew that his mind was unhinged.

  Thomas had
been standing by all the time, listening open-mouthed at these frightful revelations, but Gwyn was more concerned with getting the abjurers out of the church. ‘We must go, Crowner, it is getting late!’ he urged, but de Wolfe ignored him.

  ‘So what happened?’ he demanded.

  ‘I was so incensed with him that we quarrelled violently, and I struck him on the head with a fallen branch. He fell dead, though I had not intended that. It was some freak blow – or maybe an act of God.’

  ‘But those other injuries – in the side and the hands,’ grated de Wolfe, holding his anger in check with difficulty.

  ‘My rage made me inflict on him those marks that denoted his lack of faith in our resolve. They were tokens that reflected the nature of the awful secret wilfully concealed by the Templars for all these years.’

  ‘The Awful Secret!’ rasped de Wolfe scornfully. ‘Was your secret worth the life of a brave man?’

  ‘A brave man!’ sneered de Blanchefort. ‘De Ridefort was a spineless coward when it came to the one thing in his life that really mattered. He could wield a sword, yes, and cut down Saracens, but he could not keep a promise to defy the hypocrisy and deceit that we discovered in the Church that we had served all these years.’ He waved his cross in de Wolfe’s face, his own contorted with manic emotion. ‘And as for the secret being worth one man’s life, I tell you, John de Wolfe, that if I and others like me are silenced, there will be tens of thousands of lives forfeited soon, when Rome’s scythe of repression slashes through the Languedoc. And in the centuries to come, the Inquisition that is blossoming now, like an evil flower, may annihilate millions who dare to question the autocracy of the Church.’

  Gwyn tried again to get his master to move the men out of the building, but John silenced him with a wave of his hand as he glared at the flushed face and protuberant eyes of de Blanchefort.

  ‘Listen, you mad rogue! I’ve no time to discuss your warped theology!’ His anger was steadily rising. ‘If this is true, you are a murderer and must be exposed! You cannot now go on that vessel. I must arrest you.’

  The man’s face was a mask of crazed cunning. ‘I am a sanctuary seeker and an abjurer – I have taken the oath and you have heard my confession. I am entitled to abjure.’

  ‘Nonsense, you arrogant fool! They were meaningless, obtained on your part by trickery and not sworn on the Holy Book!’

  ‘Then how are you to explain why I am here, deviously planted amongst your abjurers? And where is the man I replaced, the one you have wilfully let escape? You are guilty of deceit, perverting the course of justice and God knows what other crimes. You are trapped, de Wolfe, so let things take their course.’

  After rapid reflection on his position, de Wolfe had to resign himself to the inevitable. If the sheriff discovered his plotting, he would never let him forget it. In fact, he would probably pursue every legal avenue to have him condemned, to take revenge for the recent humiliation that the coroner had visited on him over the Prince John affair. In addition, the Templars and the Church would be after his blood for deliberately engineering the escape of such a notorious heretic.

  Fuming with anger, but powerless, he capitulated and signalled to Gwyn to lead the abjurers out of the church.

  The other men were lined up inside the door but just as de Blanchefort began moving to join them, the coroner grabbed him roughly by the shoulder and swung him round so that they were face to face again.

  ‘Listen, you evil bastard, before you go, I want to know what this damned secret was that has caused me so much trouble. Understand?’

  The former Templar shook his head slyly. ‘That will be revealed to the world at large soon, not dribbled out in whispers behind the hand.’

  De Wolfe put a hand behind him and whipped out the dagger from his belt. In a second it was at de Blanchefort’s neck, already drawing a drop of blood where the needle-sharp point pricked the skin. ‘Tell me or, by God, I’ll kill you now and be damned to the consequences!’ His tone left the other man in no doubt that he meant exactly what he threatened.

  ‘All right, let me go. I’ll tell you.’ John backed the knife off a few inches, but kept it hovering before Bernardus’ face.

  ‘We couldn’t discover the whole story, we had to piece together overheard fragments of talk between the Master and other more senior officers. Then we accidentally came across some documents no one was supposed to see, which sent us covertly searching amongst the secret archives in Paris. It took a year to make sense of it all.’

  ‘Come on, get on with it! My sister told me that de Ridefort hinted it was something to do with the mass.’

  Thomas, who stood listening open-mouthed alongside them, groaned and convulsively crossed himself, but de Blanchefort smirked. ‘The mass? You could say that, though it’s a detail. The early Templars found inscriptions on tablets in the catacombs beneath the Temple in Jeruslaem that recorded that Christ, though crucified, did not die on the Cross. The resurrection was a revival of the near-dead body, all prearranged by some influential friends. He lived for another thirty years, a great man, teacher and prophet, but he was mortal, so the concept of the Trinity is fiction, knowingly perpetuated by Rome.’

  There was a second’s silence then, with a strangled cry of desperate fury, little Thomas de Peyne launched himself at de Blanchefort and futilely tried to batter him with his small fists. The other pushed him away impatiently and the clerk subsided on to the floor, his face in his hands, weeping and keening.

  De Wolfe pulled him gently to his feet, as Gwyn and the other abjurers watched in astonishment from across the church. ‘Don’t fret yourself, Thomas. This madman’s pack of lies isn’t worth a clipped penny.’

  He turned back to de Blanchefort. ‘And is that all your precious secret amounts to? A fairy-tale, some legend peddled by Templars as deluded as yourself?’

  A supercilious expression came over the man’s face. ‘There’s more. The Templars have always had a special regard for Mary Magdalene and we discovered that not only was she Jesus’s wife but she bore him several children. She went with many other Jews to live in southern France, though we could not discover whether Christ himself went there or remained in Palestine.’

  This all sounded so outrageous to de Wolfe that he never for a moment contemplated that there was the slightest truth in de Blanchefort’s babblings. ‘I’m not sure whether you are to be condemned for your blasphemy and sacrilege or pitied for the unhinged state of your mind,’ he said scornfully. ‘Where is the proof of these preposterous ideas?’

  ‘Buried in a hillside in the foothills of the Pyrenees,’ replied de Blanchefort sharply, now incensed at being ridiculed. ‘The early Knights of Christ were ordered by Rome to place the evidence where it could never be rediscovered, so they brought it back to France when they returned in about 1127 and, with the aid of German miners, buried it within Mount Cardou, concealed for ever by an immense rockfall.’ He paused, as if momentarily overcome by his own revelations. ‘It was even suggested by some documents – though I can hardly credit it myself – that the bones of Christ himself were also found and buried with the tablets.’

  There was another groan from Thomas, who was rocking back and forth, his face still covered by his hands.

  ‘My own family comes from this area and the Chateau de Blanchefort, a former Templar possession, sits opposite Mount Cardou and guarded it in the early part of this century. You see now why I have such a personal interest in this momentous discovery!’

  De Wolfe was still convinced that the man was a dangerous lunatic, but any further revelations were cut short by Gwyn, who bellowed from across the church. ‘We have to go, Crowner! It’s broad daylight and the tide will soon be ebbing.’

  De Wolfe gave the former Templar a rough push and sent him stumbling on his way. With a shaken Thomas trailing behind, mumbling in Latin under his breath, they filed out of the church and into the final and most dangerous part of the escapade.

  The tide was full and the Brendan well afloa
t when the procession came down the track alongside the stream. A soldier walked in front, then came the five abjurers, each barefoot, each holding their cross two-handed before their faces. They looked like a line of scarecrows, shuffling along in their shapeless hessian robes, with their scratched, tufted scalps. The dwarf Eddida was the leader, and after the last man, another soldier was followed at a distance by the coroner, his officer and clerk. The older, tallest man came in the centre, the hands holding his cross tight against his face.

  De Wolfe was tense with anger at Bernardus and apprehension in case his elaborate plot was discovered at the last moment. As he walked, he cursed himself for allowing his sense of duty to Gilbert de Ridefort to have landed him in this situation. Far from wanting to help this man escape, he would now have cheerfully cut his evil, demented head from his shoulders – but it was too late and he was caught in a trap of his own making.

  The sad cavalcade reached the bottom of the track where it became pebbled. This was the most dangerous spot for the venture: it was nearest the alehouse where, in the doorway, Abbot Cosimo and the three Templar knights stood to see the departure of the abjurers. The sheriff was not there: he was too incensed at their easy escape to want to witness it and was at the back of the tavern with Ralph Morin as they supervised the impending departure of most of the men-at-arms, the rest being left to secure the village for a few days.

  As he came level with the alehouse door, de Wolfe saw that Cosimo’s gaze was again directed at Eddida and he wondered what strange emotions so attracted the abbot to the dwarf. He suspected that unnatural desires were the most likely reason for his fascination, though these little men were always objects of curiosity and cruel derision. The Templars watched the procession clamber across the pebbles, then turned back into the room behind to collect their arms and saddle-pouches ready for the journey home.