The Adept Book 3 The Templar Treasure (14 page)

“No, don’t change your plans,” Adam said. “You’re newly engaged. It wouldn’t be fair to Julia, when there’s no need. The afternoon will do just as well—better, in fact, since it will give me the morning to do a bit of historical review. Just don’t let your luncheon engagement drag on too late.”

“That’s no problem,” Peregrine agreed. “What time do you want me here?”

“I think we’ll ride up, to help set the mood,” Adam said, “so I’d like to be in the saddle no later than three. Actually, you can bring Julia along, if you like. You can show her how the restoration is progressing; bring those first sketches you did, when it was all still falling to bits. I’d like you there with your sketch pad, just on general principles, but I don’t expect I’ll need to call on you for anything she shouldn’t see. She does ride, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, she does,” Peregrine said, “and weather permitting, I’m sure she’d enjoy that—as long as you’re quite certain she isn’t likely to come face-to-face with a Templar ghost in full battle armor.”

He cocked an owlish look at his mentor, and Adam chuckled.

“I think you can rest easy on that account,” he said with a smile. “As far as any visible demonstrations of our work are concerned, all Julia’s likely to see is you making a few imaginative sketches while I daydream about the family past.”

“I’ll take your word for that,” Peregrine said with a wry grin. “Now that I’ve finally convinced Julia’s family I’m capable of earning a living with a paintbrush, the last thing I want to do is scare her off!”

True to his plan, Adam spent the better part of the following morning tracking down the names and locations of former Templar properties in Scotland. It was common knowledge to anyone with a background in Scottish history that most of the lands belonging to the Order of the Temple at the time of its suppression had ended up in the hands of the Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Of six baronies held by the Knights of St. John after the suppression of the Templars, five were former Templar sites: Thankerton, Denny, Temple Liston, Maryculter, and Balantrodoch, the latter of which had been the preceptory for all of Scotland.

There were scores of lesser sites as well. One source mentioned nearly six hundred Templar holdings in Scotland alone, and named a fair number of them. Running the names through his mind like beads on a string, Adam had to wonder whether any of these places might yield a clue to the mystery he and his colleagues were seeking to unravel.

Peregrine and Julia arrived shortly after two o’clock, both of them in breeches and boots and equipped with velvet-covered riding caps. As they headed out to the stableyard, Peregrine donned a day-pack containing his art supplies over his tweed hacking jacket. Julia, with her red-gold curls pulled back in a ribbon at the nape of her neck, looked almost the cavalier lady in her riding jacket of forest green, with a hunting stock tied close around her throat.

John, the former Household Cavalry trooper who looked after Adam’s horses, had their mounts standing saddled and ready for them, and helped Julia get mounted up and adjust her equipment. Adam took the lead as they set out, mounted as usual on his tall grey hunter, Khalid, with Peregrine following after on Khalid’s stablemate, a spirited blood-bay mare called Poppy. Julia brought up the rear on Crichton, a reliable, well-schooled dun gelding borrowed with permission from the daughter of one of Adam’s tenant farmers.

The afternoon was bright and cool. Skirting a wide field full of golden hay stubble, they trotted decorously along a drainage ditch until they came to a gate at the edge of a rolling pasture. Once past the gate, they quickened their pace to an easy canter, making for the belt of mingled larch and fir trees on the far side. Above the firs rose the wooded slopes of Templemor Hill, surmounted at its crown by the twin turrets of Templemor Tower.

Even at a distance, Adam could appreciate the difference wrought by recent months of intensive restoration. A year ago, the tower house had been roofless and under siege by ivy, its stair turrets headless and jagged, with small trees growing from the first-floor vaulting. Since then, the gaps in the walls had been rebuilt, the tower reroofed, and the cap houses restored atop the stair turrets to present a picturesque skyline of crow-stepped gables and jutting dormers capped by grey-green slate. Most of the scaffolding around the chimneys had disappeared since his last visit. Much interior work remained yet to be done, but Adam was pleased with all that had been accomplished so far.

At the foot of the hill, he and his companions slowed as they struck a wooded bridle path that wound its way upward, in and out of shadow, like a thread laid down by a weaver’s shuttle. The first time Adam had brought Peregrine up to see the tower, before restoration began, there had been no other way to approach it. Now a single-lane tarmacadam track ran up the back of the hill from a farm access road a quarter mile away—a necessity so that the men engaged in doing the reconstruction work could more easily bring in supplies and machinery, but once that work was complete, Adam hoped one day to see the unsightly lane transformed into a graceful private avenue.

The air grew fresher as they climbed toward the summit of the hill. At the top of the path, the trees parted, affording them a clear view of the tower house itself, its newly reharled walls whitely agleam. Down below the clearing on the other side of the hill, a parked earth-mover guarded the partially opened trench being dug to accommodate supply connections for plumbing, electrical, gas, and telephone service. The view in that direction, however, was effectively obscured by a thick screen of trees, their leaves only lightly touched with the beginnings of autumn color. Gazing around him as they dismounted, Adam was satisfied that there were no visible distractions to compromise the investigation he had planned for the next half hour or so.

The three of them tethered their horses at the edge of the clearing and left them to graze, Julia gawking delightedly as they continued on foot.

“Adam, this is really wonderful!” she exclaimed, tipping her head back to get a better look at the upper stories of the house. “It looks almost like something out of a fairy tale. Leave out the doors and the lower windows, and you’d have a proper artist’s setting for Rapunzel.”

Peregrine laughed. “If you’d seen it before the restoration started, you’d have said it looked like something out of a
horror
tale. It was really sad. Here, I’ll show you.”

He shrugged off his day-pack and drew out a largish binder bulging with plastic sheet protectors. As he opened it to the first sketch for Julia’s inspection, Adam recognized one of the studies the young artist had made on his very first visit here. The collection as a whole represented Peregrine’s first effective exercise of the esoteric talent he had since come to use so effectively in the service of the Hunting Lodge—a composite historical picture of Templemor Tower, based on what Peregrine had Seen of its past and its structure. The accuracy of those studies was reflected in the present-day reconstruction of the building.

“My architects found Peregrine’s drawings extremely useful when they were drawing up their plans for the reconstruction,” Adam said, watching Julia’s face as she leafed through the pages in the notebook. “I have your future husband to thank for much of the success of this enterprise.”

This remark bought a warm smile to Julia’s lips. “He is
awfully
good, isn’t he?” she confided with a mischievous twinkle. “Just don’t say things like that too loudly in his hearing, or you’ll make him terribly conceited!”

“Me? Conceited?” Peregrine exclaimed in tones of mock outrage. “Here I am, positively
pining
for a few kind words—”

He broke off with a muffled yip as Julia reached out and gave him a playful tweak on the ear.

“I can see you two are headed for a lifetime of marital bliss,” Adam laughed. “Peregrine, why don’t you go show Julia the layout on the inside, now that they’ve got the stairs rebuilt? I probably ought to go inspect the site farther down and see how they’re coming on with the gas mains, but it’s
not
a view I would recommend to anyone else.”

“I agree,” Peregrine said, covering his slight nod of comprehension with an easy grin. “Come on, Julia. Let’s see if this gives you any ideas about what you’d like in the way of a dream house.”

The two of them disappeared across the threshold, the cheerful echoes of their conversation floating after them as they moved off to explore the rooms that now made up the tower house’s interior. Satisfied that he could count on being alone for the next little while, Adam turned his gaze briefly to the Sinclair crest painted on the lintel above the doorway, where vibrant color picked out the nearly obliterated carving of its original device: above a twisted torse of red and gold, a red Maltese cross surrounded by seven gold stars rather than the phoenix crest used by Adam’s more recent branch of the family. The cross and the stars together suggested even more of an esoteric connection than had occurred to him on previous visits, even when watching Peregrine paint in the design some weeks before.

That anchor and link to the past gave him focus as he turned and withdrew to the edge of the clearing, seating himself on a large cut stone block facing the entrance to the old keep. He was wearing his signet ring under his riding glove, and he clasped his left hand over it in physical affirmation of his intent as he briefly bowed his head in prayer. Then, mentally commending himself to the inspiration of the Light, he straightened and set both hands on his thighs with palms upturned and composed himself to settle into an effective working level of trance.

A sense of deep calm stole over him as he drew in a deep breath and let it out. Grounded in that calm, he called to mind the image of a knight in Templar array, standing in the open doorway of the tower. It was an image he had glimpsed before and never pursued, but now he made it the focus of his concentration. Drawing further in upon himself in spirit, he willed himself to even deeper levels of awareness as he framed a voiceless appeal to his knightly kinsman of bygone days.

The silence around him expanded, insulating him from all outward distractions, and a faint tingling in that stillness moved him to let his gaze drift outward. As he waited passively, a light that was not of the waking world or of the weakening afternoon sun manifested itself in the shadows of the tower’s open doorway, gradually growing fuller and brighter until, shimmering on the threshold, it resolved into the luminous image of a knightly form.

The knight was accoutred for battle, with the red cross
formée
of ancient Templar usage bold on the front of his white surcoat. His gauntleted hands gripped the quillons of a great sword, its blade flickering like quicksilver along the length of his mailed legs. The face beneath the mail coif was bearded and stern, the eyes keen and compelling.

Who summons Aubrey de St. Clair?
came the knight’s sharp query, understood rather than heard.
Speak, for I may not tarry long.

In vision, Adam met the other’s piercing gaze without flinching. Drawing himself up, he gave back the reply.

I am Adam Sinclair, descendant of your blood and lineage and brother in spirit to your Order. In this time and place, I am also Master of the Hunt, with a task set before me that concerns the Order of the Temple. I dare to hope that you may have knowledge that will assist me in its execution.

The figure from the doorway was suddenly before him, close enough to touch, its brightness expanding to encompass Adam in its shimmer. In that instant, he became aware of a change in his own appearance, of a ghost-image of himself rising out of his entranced body, garbed not in the fashionable riding clothes his body wore, but the white mantle and gleaming mail of a Templar knight.

That change of aspect, he realized, betokened Aubrey’s recognition and acceptance of their common bonds. As he clasped the gauntleted hands that Aubrey offered, Adam opened his mind to that of his Templar kinsman, sharing with him unreservedly all he had been able to learn so far of Solomon’s Seal and Solomon’s Crown. Nor did he hold back from communicating his fear that the thief who had stolen the Seal would find a way to track down the Crown as well, along with any other artifacts associated with it.

All I know at this point is that these Templar treasures collectively represent a power too dangerous to be let loose on the world,
he informed his counterpart soberly, using thought-framed words to emphasize his own feeling of urgency.
If you have knowledge bearing on this matter, I entreat you to tell me.

There was a brief pause, followed by a strong nonverbal surge of bleak regret from Aubrey de St. Clair. Then the other knight’s thoughts crystallized briefly into language.

I have no information to offer. Certain it is that our fleet brought many treasures out of France, but nothing came to Templemor. Perhaps the preceptory at Balantrodoch holds what you seek.

Alas, Balantrodoch stands no more,
Adam replied.
Is there some other location that might have served as a secret treasury? I
must
have a starting point.

Again the regretful negative, and this time a note of restlessness, a pulling back.

Aware that the light surrounding him was starting to fade, Adam resigned himself to accept failure, at least in this attempt. Letting his feelings speak wordless thanks, he watched in dazed silence as the shade of Aubrey de St. Clair slowly dissipated. Just before it vanished completely, however, he was briefly aware of a gentle touch, like a benison, just at the back of his mind.