Requiem: The Fall of the Templars (77 page)

Will felt a hand on his arm.

Ysenda smiled at him. “Are you coming inside? It’s going to be cold tonight.” She glanced around as her husband put his arm around her.

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John Campbell nodded to Will. “It was a good service, I thought.” He looked up hearing his name, and his brown face crinkled as a young boy came racing down the hill toward them.

The boy came to a breathless stop, tossing his hair from his eyes. “Can we get some more apples from the store?”

“What for?” asked John, groaning as he hoisted him into the air.

The boy was whip-lean, but tall for his age. Sometimes, Will saw glimpses of Philippe in his face, which for a time had disturbed him, but the more he had come to know his grandson, the more those fears had dissipated, since he couldn’t have been more unlike his father in temperament.

“For the lamb’s wool. Christian says I’m to make it.”

John’s smile broadened. The drink, made of roasted apples, ale and nut-meg, was a favorite in the household. “That sounds like an important task for one so young.”

“I can do it.”

“I’m sure,” said John with a chuckle, letting the boy down. “Perhaps your grandfather can help?”

Will nodded as the boy’s eyes darted hopefully to him. “I’ll be up soon, William.”

Ysenda caught his eye. Taking the boy’s hand and with her husband’s arm still slung around her waist, she led them toward the house, following the rest of the children and adults up the darkening path.

“You’ll soon not be able to do anything without him, you know.”

Will didn’t turn. A cold hand threaded through his and he closed his eye as his daughter rested her head on his shoulder. For a time they stood there, neither of them speaking.

Finally, she gave his hand a squeeze. “I had better help prepare the feast.”

Rose paused, wrapping her cloak tighter around her as the wind snatched it back. “I’ll set the place for them.”

Will stared out across the sea as his daughter followed Ysenda and the others.

It was a night of celebration. Tonight they would drink to the close of the year and thank God for their blessings. But it was also a night of sadness, a feast for the dead, when all souls were remembered. In chapel that evening they had said prayers for the departed and an extra seat would be set at the table in honor of those who had gone before. Tonight, the air was thick with their memories. Here on this cliff edge, with the gold light fading to blue, he could feel them thronging around him: his mother and father, Elwen and 458 robyn

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Owein, Everard and Elias, William Wallace, Jacques de Molay, even Garin. He stayed there for some time before heading up the track, his stick tapping the ground.

As he neared the house, Will heard David’s voice, clear and strong, coming from inside. His nephew had arrived a week ago, alive with stories of King Robert. There had been further skirmishes with England over the past few years, but Edward II wasn’t the warrior his father had been and in a decisive battle at midsummer, Robert Bruce had driven the king and his men back across the border. These events seemed a long way away to Will, out here on this remote coast. It was a time for younger men to forge out histories for themselves, to become legends. For him, it was a time of reflection. Last year he had started to add his own words to those begun by Everard, the old yellowed parchments eagerly soaking up the ink from his quill. It didn’t seem important these days to keep the secrets of the Anima Templi so closely guarded, indeed it felt more appropriate that he finally tell the truth, and so he wrote freely about the Brethren, about the men of the Temple, and its Soul.

Will was approaching the door when he heard the thud of hooves. Turning, he saw a horse moving swiftly up the cliff path toward him. Brow furrowed, he squinted into the gathering gloom, trying to make out the rider. His frown deepened as he heard his name come to him over the rumble of hooves.

Suddenly, he knew who it was.

As Robert reined in the horse and slid stiffly from the saddle, Will called over his shoulder through the open door and went to meet him, fl ooded with relief at the sight of his old comrade.

“It is done,” said Robert quietly, when Will greeted him.

John was in the doorway. “Set another place!” he bellowed, as Will and Robert followed him into the house, one of the servants hastening to take the knight’s weary mount.

“I brought these with me,” said Robert, hanging back in the doorway and holding out the pack he was carrying to Will. “It didn’t seem right to burn them.”

Will took the pack and looked inside.

His grandson’s face appeared around the kitchen door. “Christian says you’re to help us.”

“Did she now?” Will smiled. “Tell her I’ll be there shortly.” He gestured Robert to an empty room off the hallway. As they passed the kitchen, Will caught a glimpse of his grandson climbing up on a stool to reach the table, where Christian and Rose were slicing up a pile of wrinkled apples. Ysenda the fall of the templars

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was crouched before Ede by the hearth and Simon was talking with David, who was pouring out two jars of ale.

“Will you tell him?” asked Robert, as they entered the empty room. The servants had stoked the fire and the flames roared in gusts of wind, fi lling the chamber with the peppery smell of burning wood. “Your grandson?”

Will closed the door. “About his father?” He turned to meet Robert’s gaze.

“In time, yes. He deserves to know where he came from. There have been too many lies in this family.” He crossed to a chest by the window. Opening the pack, he withdrew the three folded mantles and placed them inside the chest, next to Everard’s book and the hilt of his father’s broken sword that Rose had saved from the palace.

“It doesn’t seem like much to be left with, does it?” murmured Robert, looking over Will’s shoulder. “Not after two hundred years.”

“It isn’t all.” Will glanced at him. “We still have the treasury.”

“Have you decided what to do with it yet?”

“I’m not certain that is for us to decide,” answered Will, after a pause.

“Who then?”

“Those who come after us.” Will stared into the chest at the broken sword and the white mantles. “Those of the future.”

“And us? What will we do now?”

Will shut the lid and stood. “Let us speak of that tomorrow.” He put a hand on the knight’s shoulder and smiled slightly. “Tonight we feast.”

The two men left the room side by side, Will leaning heavily on his stick.

Together they entered the warmth of the crowded kitchen, enveloped by a host of welcoming voices and the ring of laughter.

Author’s Note

Back in 1999 I was sitting in a bar listening to two friends discussing the Templars. I’d never heard of them, but was instantly intrigued by the idea of these warrior monks. Some months later, I came across
The Trial of the Templars
, by historian Malcolm Barber, which detailed the downfall of the order. I read it in one afternoon and by the time I had fi nished I knew I had to tell this story. I initially embarked on a stand-alone novel, but the more research I did into the knights, the more I discovered of the richness of the period: the Crusades, the rise of the Mamluks, the politics, the courtly dramas, and before long the book became a trilogy.

Starting
The Fall of the Templars
last year, it felt as though I had come full circle, the Templars’ end being the story that inspired it all. I was exploring the voices of characters who had been in my mind for almost a decade, but I was also writing what is perhaps the best known of the three periods covered in the trilogy.

As with
Brethren
and
Crusade
, I have made slight changes to the history, mainly chrono-logical, but as much of the narrative in
The Fall of the Templars
is based on real events and people I thought it useful to note some of the places in the story where fact and fi ction meet.

Most of the alterations are in the form of the simplification of events that either went on for much longer or were more complex than portrayed. As a historical novelist you often have to make a judgment call as to whether to keep the history exactly as it was or to change it to make it more interesting or accessible. This becomes even more necessary when you’re covering nineteen years in one novel.

I have, for instance, simplified the war between France and Flanders, although events such as the Matins of Bruges, the French defeat at Courtrai and the alliance between Edward I and Guy de Dampierre are all based in fact. The uprising in Gascony against French royal forces occurred in 1303, not 1302, and Bertrand de Got was in Rome at the time. Philippe IV

did expel the Jews from France, but not until 1306, and his grandfather, Louis IX, was canonized a little later than portrayed. Boniface’s bull,
Clericis laicos
, was issued in February 1296 and
Unam Sanctam
in November 1302. Guillaume de Nogaret died around 1313, rather than 1308, and although Philippe did take the Cross it occurred a year earlier than portrayed.

The king himself died in a riding accident in November 1314.

So as to keep a level of consistency in the hierarchy of the Temple I have avoided the introduction of certain officials who would, in reality, have been important figures in the order, such as the master of France. Sometimes there were long gaps between a post being filled after one man’s death and it wasn’t uncommon for an official to hold two positions at once. Hugues de Pairaud was visitor and master of France for a time.

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Incredibly, the attack on Pope Boniface VIII in Anagni, led by Guillaume de Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna, did happen and in much the way I have described (there are even reports that suggest they arrived to find Templars guarding the pope), but again I have con-densed the sequence of events so as to keep the pace. It has been speculated that Boniface’s convoy, fleeing the town, may have been attacked by Colonna’s men, but this isn’t known.

What is known is that the pope died in Rome several weeks later. Some say he went mad, others that his heart gave out over the shock of the assault. It is not clear how his successor, Benedict XI, met his death, although one report states he died after eating poisoned fi gs and it has been theorized that Philippe and his lawyers may indeed have had a hand in this.

With regard to King Edward’s first Scottish campaign, John Balliol didn’t renounce the French treaty until July and Edward received word of this in Perth, not Edinburgh. Balliol then appeared before the king at Montrose to be stripped of his royal tabard and Edward’s famously contemptuous remark about a man doing good business when he rids himself of shit was apparently uttered as he crossed the border into England in the autumn of 1296.

Likewise, on the Scottish side for the campaign of 1297, details have been tweaked. William Wallace was attempting to relieve Dundee in August and it was from here, rather than Selkirk Forest, that he advanced on Stirling. He had, however, spent much of the previous month in the forest, gathering his army and training his men, and he often used it as a base.

The proceedings against the Templars were an incredibly protracted and complicated affair, which, although fascinating and indeed what drew me to this story, doesn’t lend itself to a fast-paced narrative. For anyone wanting to read the whole story, I would seriously recommend Barber’s
The Trial of the Templars
. Much of what I have chosen to portray in the narrative, however, is based in fact, or at least conjecture.

One chronicler states that Philippe IV secretly met with Bertrand de Got before he became pope and persuaded him to fulfill certain obligations. Modern scholars, in the main, dismiss this, but whether fact or fiction it is clear the king went to a great deal of trouble to have a hand in the election, ordering Nogaret to pressure the Sacred College to elect someone sympathetic to French royal policy. I invented Bertrand’s son, although the archbishop was accused of having an affair with a local noblewoman. Esquin de Floyran, a rather obscure character, was a Templar who had been imprisoned and who first accused the knights of heresy, writing to both King Philippe and King James of Aragon supposedly with evidence to support his claims, but his nephew, Martin, is fictitious. The establishment of the papal commission and the knights’ defense occurred later in the trial, as did the systematic burning of knights outside Paris. What happened to the Templars’ famed treasure isn’t known, although it is thought that around twenty knights escaped the initial arrests in Paris and may have had some warning. Where these men went and whether or not they took the treasury with them has been the subject of fervent speculation throughout the centuries.

The Order of the Temple was never found guilty of the 127 charges against it, Clement only dissolving the organization because its reputation had been so severely damaged during the trial. It was a different story for the offi cials. Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney were burned at the stake in March 1314 as relapsed heretics. De Molay’s famous judgment against king and pope has echoed down the years to us and although we have no way of knowing if the account is purely apocryphal, Philippe and Clement were both dead within that year. The Capetian dynasty, of which Philippe had been so proud, ended in scandal and disaster, his three sons dying in rapid succession.

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The Templars in France and elsewhere admitted most of the charges leveled at them, but their confessions were extracted during horrific tortures and many of the knights recanted these confessions once they had recovered, including de Molay and de Charney, who went to their pyre protesting their innocence. The charges against the order bear striking similarities to those the Cathars were accused of, as well as other groups that became targets of the Church’s war on heresy. If you wanted public opinion on your side in the Middle Ages, stirring up people’s fear of sorcery and devil worship was an effective way to get it and Philippe and his ministers proved more than once that they were incredibly adept at this sort of propaganda. There is one charge, however, that does crop up again and again in the trial and almost always around the fi gure of Hugues de Pairaud: the charge of knights spitting on the cross. One theory for this is that it was a practice adopted by some in the order as a form of obedience test. The truth behind the trial and the motivations of those involved will probably never be known for certain, but whatever really happened it does say something for the character of the Templars that these warrior monks in their sinless white mantles continue to live on so vividly in our consciousness almost seven hundred years after their exit from this world.