Betrayed (33 page)

The president nodded sombrely. “Trust between our peoples is of the utmost importance to me. You have my word that I will look into this matter as soon as possible. Thank you for your time, Mr. Summers. I'm afraid, however, that I must depart for my next meeting.”

They stood and shook hands.

“It's been a pleasure, Mr. President.”

Thomas Summers disembarked from the helicopter and walked over to Eric, who was waiting excitedly by the van.

“What did the president want to talk to you about, Grandpa?”

“The president wanted me to tell him a story.”

“Which story, Grandpa?”

He wrapped an arm about the boy as they meandered back toward the office. As they walked, Thomas reached around his neck and removed the ancient Celtic pendant. Bending over, he placed it around his grandson's neck.

“What's this, Grandpa?” he asked, feeling the worn grooves of the stone pendant.

“Have I ever told you about the time when our Oneida ancestors met a traveller the Mi'kmaq people called Glooscap?”

The president sighed as the helicopter lifted up into the air. He had hoped the old storyteller could have given him a further clue to the location to the missing treasure. What a moment it would be for the entire country if he could somehow locate the Templar treasure trove and put it on display, perhaps at the Met in New York City or at the Smithsonian in Washington!

The president gazed out the window at the shrinking truck stop and the rolling hills to the east of the highway. The hills had almost a human-like outline to them, reminding him of a woman lying on her side. Looking down, he found it rather amusing that the curling off-ramps from the both the I-97 and the New York Thruway looped around the truck stop in a perfectly symmetrical fashion. From the air, the hills, highway and ramps looked very much like a beautiful woman holding a five-petalled rose.

The legend of Prince Henry Sinclair and his voyages across the Atlantic Ocean were first introduced to me by my friends Paul and Dina who live in Edinburgh, Scotland. As part of my introduction to Scottish history, they took me on a tour of local historical sites, and one of our stops was a small medieval church named Rosslyn Chapel. It had been built by William Sinclair, the grandson of Prince Henry Sinclair. It was a structure unlike any other I had ever seen. There was the “Apprentice Pillar” with the legend of the master mason murdering his apprentice for creating a pillar of such magnificence that it put his own pillars to shame. There were the hundred “green men” that peered down at the worshippers from all angles of the church. There were Templar tombs and images scattered throughout the building. But what really fired my imagination were what appears to be carvings of ears of corn on the ceiling. Corn itself is not a breathtaking vegetable by any means, but seeing it in a building that was built forty years before Columbus's famous voyages to the west was quite startling. Corn is a North American grain. It was Columbus who first brought corn to Europe, so what was this plant doing carved in the roof? It was a mystery that has been churning in my head for the last ten years since my first visit to Rosslyn Chapel.

Is it inconceivable that a fourteenth century Scottish prince could make the journey across the ocean to the New World? Not at all. Prince Henry had many ties to the descendants of the famous Viking explorers. He would have heard their sagas describing lands to the far west. He also had the second largest fleet of ships in northern Europe and of a quality that matched or surpassed the classic longboat design that took the Vikings across the Atlantic four hundred years before the birth of Henry Sinclair. He certainly had the knowledge and the ships to make the crossing. All he needed was a motive.

The Templar Knights have been a popular topic of late by both authors and filmmakers.
The Da Vinci Code
is a classic example of taking the Templar legend and having a lot of fun with it. I'm thankful that I saw Rosslyn Chapel five years before
The Da Vinci Code
came out, or else I'm sure the hype of the book and movie would have changed my own ideas on the legend. It is a fact that the Templar Knights were persecuted by both the pope in Rome and many European kings. Before their destruction, they had been in put in charge of protecting Christian pilgrims as they travelled to the Holy Lands. The thankful pilgrims rewarded the efforts of the Templar Knights with donations of money and land in order to help support their cause. Over the decades, those donations resulted in the Templar Knights amassing a fortune that rivaled that of some European kings.

When Jerusalem fell to the armies of Islam, the Templar Knights lost their purpose for existence, but their fortune remained. The envious King of France convinced the pope and others that the time was right to destroy the Order and claim the treasures for themselves. The Templar Knights,
however, caught wind of the king's plans, and in the darkness of night, sailed their substantial fleet and priceless treasure away from mainland Europe, never to be seen again.

To this day, no one beyond the members of the old Templar Order has ever figured out the final destination of the Templar fleet. There are, however, many theories as to where the ships found refuge. One popular theory that I feel seems to be the most reasonable is that they set sail for Scotland. The Scottish king at that time was sympathetic to the Templar cause and may have allowed their ships to harbour in Scottish waters. There were also powerful Scottish clans that had ties to the Templar Order as well. Members of the Sinclair clan were descendants of the French St. Clair family. The French St. Clairs were strong Templar supporters and may have had a hand in directing the Templar Knights to Scotland and their Sinclair brethren. Did the Templar Order reestablish itself in Scotland? Besides the evidence found in Rosslyn Chapel, there are also medieval Templar gravestones found throughout the Scottish highlands.

Many people also believe that the banished Templar Order transformed itself into a new movement called Freemasonry. Scottish Freemasonry is the oldest form of freemasonry in Europe and coincidentally began just after the disappearance of the Templar Order. Interestingly, an ancient tapestry recently found in a Freemason hall in Kirkwall, Orkney Islands, amazed researchers as it was chock full of Templar symbols and historical references. I often wonder if that tapestry once hung in the Sinclair sea fortress in Kirkwall, now only a ruin after being destroyed by the English. It's also interesting that in the fourteenth
century, the leader of the Sinclair clan was appointed the hereditary Grand Master of the fledgling Scottish Freemason Order for over a hundred years.

So if there is a connection between the Templar Order, Freemasonry and the Sinclair clan, what of the legendary treasure? If you were Prince Henry Sinclair, and you needed to hide a massive treasure somewhere far from the greedy armies of European kings, where would you hide it? Perhaps in a land known only to your Viking ancestors? I think we now have a good motive for Prince Henry to take his fleet and sail west to North America.

The next logical question is: if he had taken the Templar treasure to North America, where did he hide it? Another mystery that has fascinated me for years is Oak Island, Nova Scotia. Oak Island is keeping a fantastic secret from us. There may be a booby-trapped pit in the middle of the island that was built long before settlers arrived in the area, and the salt-water trap was simply an amazing piece of engineering. For reasons that have completely escaped me, Canadian governments at all levels have allowed private companies to go onto this mysterious island and destroy every possible archeological clue that might have led us to the builders of what is popularly called the Oak Island Money Pit. Most people think the pit was the work of pirates, but I would like to know how many pirates have degrees in engineering, for the layout of the money pit is similar to the one that I described in the book (minus the passageway . . . so far). Could it have been Prince Henry and his men who built the pit? After the ridiculous open pit mining of the island by modern day treasure hunters, we may never find out who the builders really were.

If it was Prince Henry who designed the pit at Oak Island, I can only hope that the island was a ruse for another secret location, for any company which goes at an archeological site in as ham-fisted a fashion as the recent owners of Oak Island don't, in my opinion, deserve any treasure at all. In my story, I did use Oak Island as the site for a Templar Depository and the final resting place of Mary Magdalene. She also has a fascinating French legend attached to her life, but that's another story.

There are some who try to connect the Mi'kmaq stories of Glooscap to that of the voyages of Prince Henry Sinclair. There are some interesting connections between the two, too many to mention in this short space, but I personally like the story that talks of Glooscap riding on the back of a great whale to the land of the Mi'kmaq and teaching the people how to fish with nets.

I would like to mention another one of my favourite North American mysteries, the Newport Tower. Newport Tower has architecture unlike any other building in North America. If it had been built anywhere in Northern Europe, an historian would instantly tell you that it was a small medieval chapel. But what is this building doing on the east coast of the United States of America? Because of its location, many historians refuse to believe that it could be a medieval chapel, because there were no European medieval worshippers in North America to build it. However, there is an almost identical chapel to this one in the Scottish Orkney Islands (a coincidence?), and the Newport Tower is built perfectly to Scottish measurements. It also has the eight columns associated with other Templar chapels. Just like the pit at Oak Island, I can't say that it was built
by Templar hands, but it sure makes for an interesting storyline! If there was a medieval Templar village below the chapel, it would now be impossible to verify its existence, as the City of Newport surrounds all of the Newport Tower and its streets stretch right down to the water line. Newport may have been the ancient location of New Jerusalem!

Is there any other evidence of a fourteenth century voyage to North America? Interestingly enough, a fourteenth century cannon of Venetian design was brought to the surface in Louisburg Harbour by fishermen and it now sits in a Nova Scotia museum. It's hard to understand how a fourtheenth century cannon arrived in Canadian waters hundreds of years after it was made when there were far better and safer weapons available to the first ships of exploration in the sixteenth century. Perhaps Zeno and Sinclair brought the weapon to the New World in the fourteenth century.

Historical adventure stories have always been one of my favourite genres. I hope you have enjoyed this adventure, and perhaps you might want to follow up the story with a little research of your own. The truth, as you will find out, is often stranger than fiction!

When publisher Sylvia McConnell first called eight years ago, expressing an interest in my first novel
Broken Circle
, she enquired as to what other writing projects I might have in mind for the future. After giving it a moment's thought, I told her I had an interest in writing two more adventure stories based on early European explorers, stories that I felt were long-overdue to be told to the young adult audience. With the publications of
Stolen Away
and now
Betrayed
, my three original ideas from that phone call have now been published. I would like to give my most sincere thanks to Sylvia, Allister and the rest of the Napoleon & Company crew for their faith, guidance and expertise in bringing my three stories to print.

I would like to express my most heartfelt thanks to my wife and front-line editor, Amanda, for her constant encouragement and support. As well, a big thank-you goes out to my daughters Sarah, Johanna and Stephanie who are always the first to test-drive each rough draft. I would like to thank Paul and Dina for their generous Scottish hospitality over the years and for the tour of Rosslyn Chapel—the experience that firmly planted the seed for
Betrayed
in my imagination. Endless thanks goes to my mom for allowing me to huddle with my laptop out on the tranquil screen porch of the family cottage every summer where I weave my storylines. Thank you as well to the Newmarket and Aurora Public Libraries for their wide range of excellent reference material. I would also like to thank my principal Lynda Hill and the staff of both Clearmeadow Public School and the York Region District School Board for their wonderful support of my writing projects. And finally, I would like to thank the children, adults and students from all over Canada who have encouraged me to continue my writing with their fantastic words of support. Enjoy the adventure!