The Brotherhood Of The Holy Shroud (41 page)

The Templar waved him away.

"I have nothing to do with the trade between kings. My life belongs to God; the king may take it from me, but it
belongs
to God. Go and tell Philippe that I do not have this object he seeks, but that if I did I would never put it in hands such as his for any price whatsoever, including my life. I am a man of honor."

Scant hours later, Jacques de Molay, Geoffroy de Charney, and the rest of the Templars who remained in Villeneuve du Temple were arrested and taken to the dungeons of the king.

Philippe of France ordered the jailers to torture the Templar knights without mercy. They were to pay special attention to Jacques de Molay, until they secured the answers Philippe sought-namely, where the Grand Master was hiding the holy relic that bore the image of Christ.

The screams of the tortured men echoed within the thick walls of the dungeons. How many days had passed since they were arrested? The Templars had lost count. Broken on the wheel, burned with red-hot iron, their bodies flayed of skin and bathed in vinegar, some confessed crimes they had not committed, praying their agony would end. But their confessions were for naught, for their torturers continued to torment them implacably.

On occasion a man, his face concealed by a hood, watched from the shadows the suffering of the knights, these knights who had once wielded their swords and risked their very lives to defend the cross. Reveling in their torment, sick with avarice and cruelty, Philippe would signal the torturers to go on…

One evening he asked to be taken into the presence of Jacques de Molay. Broken and bloodied, the Grand Master could hardly see, but he sensed who it was beneath the hood. A smile came to his lips when the king demanded that he confess where he had hidden the Holy Shroud of Jesus.

At last, Philippe saw that it was futile to continue. De Molay would not yield. All that was left was public execution, so that the world might know that the Temple had been exterminated for all eternity.

It was the eighteenth of March in the year of Our Lord 1314 when the sentence of death was signed for the Grand Master of the Temple and those knights who had survived the interminable tortures that the king had ordered.

On the nineteenth, the city of Paris took on the aspect of a fair, for the king had ordered that before the majestic spires of Notre Dame a pyre be erected, upon which the proud Jacques de Molay would be publicly burned. Nobles and commoners alike congregated for the event, and there were rumors that the king himself would attend.

By the first light of day, the square was filled with the curious, who shoved and brawled to secure the ideal spot from which to watch the final suffering of the once mighty knights. The people always enjoyed the spectacle of the powerful of the earth humiliated- and the Temple had been powerful, though more good had come of its power than evil.

Jacques de Molay and Geofrroy de Charney were mounted on the same wagon and drawn into the square. They knew that soon their pain would end forever in the flames.

The court had put on its finest clothes, and the king laughed and joked with the ladies. He, Philippe, king of France, had done what no man had ever done before- he had brought the Temple low.

His deed would pass into the history of iniquity.

Fire began to burn the Templars' ravaged flesh. Jacques de Molay's eyes remained fixed on Philippe, and before him and the people of Paris the Grand Master proclaimed his innocence and called down divine justice on the king of France and Pope Clement, summoning them to stand with him before the judgment of God within the year.

A shiver ran down Philippe's spine as de Molay's words rang out. He trembled in fear and had to remind himself that he was king and nothing could harm him, for he had secured the consent of the pope and the highest authorities of the Church before he acted.

No, God could not be on the side of these Templars, these heretics who worshipped a secret idol, who had committed the sin of sodomy, and who were known to be friends of the Saracens. He, Philippe, king of France, was obeying the laws of the Church.

But was he obeying the laws of God?

"HAVE YOU FINISHED?"

Ana jumped. "Professor! You scared me! I was in the middle of reading about the execution of Jacques de Molay. It makes your hair stand on end. What is the judgment of God, anyway?"

Professor McFadden sighed heavily and gave her a bored look. She had been at the institute for two days, poking about in the archives and asking questions that sometimes sounded like pure nonsense.

She was bright but rather ignorant, and he'd had to give her several elementary lessons in history. Her knowledge of the Crusades and the chaotic world of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries was rudimentary at best. But she was no fool-her academic ignorance seemed to be inversely proportional to her instincts for the pearl within a sea of information, for going straight to the heart of a story. She searched and searched and searched, and she knew where and how to find things. She grasped at a phrase, a single word, an event as she went about her anarchic research. Anything might be a clue.

He had been careful; he'd taken pains to divert her attention from those events that he knew might be dangerous in the hands of a reporter.

He pushed up his glasses and began explaining what the judgment of God was. Ana couldn't contain a shiver when the professor's dramatic rendition repeated the words of Jacques de Molay. Then he came to the payoff.

"Pope Clement died forty days later, and Philip the Fair eight months after that. Their deaths were terrible, as I've told you before. God exacted His justice.". "I'm glad for Jacques de Molay," Ana told him.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I like him. He seems to have been a good man, and fair, and Philip the Fair, as you Brits call him, anything but. You have to admit how satisfying it is that, in this case at least, God decided to exact justice, as you put it. It's a shame He doesn't do it more often. But don't you think that the Templars were behind those unpleasant deaths?"

"No, not at all."

"Why? How can you be so sure?"

"There is detailed documentation on the circumstances of the king's and the pope's deaths, and I assure you that you will find no source that suggests, even as speculation, the possibility that the Templars avenged themselves. Besides, it's not the way the Templars lived or acted. With all you've read, you should realize that."

"I'd have done it."

"It?"

"Organize a group of knights to assassinate the pope and Philippe."

"Perhaps so. But the Knights Templar would never have allowed themselves such behavior. They killed in pursuit of their duty, as they saw it. But never for revenge."

"Tell me what this treasure was that the king was after. According to the archives, he'd already taken virtually everything. Yet Philippe insisted that Jacques de Molay hand over a 'treasure.' What treasure was he talking about? It must have been something concrete, something of great value, right?"

"Philippe was all too aware of the immense wealth the Temple had accumulated. He was obsessed with stripping the order bare and thought that Jacques de Molay had tricked him by concealing most of the order's gold."

"No… I don't think he was looking for more gold."

"No? How interesting! What do you think he was looking for?"

"Well, something concrete, as I said, something specific. An object of great, great value to the Temple and to the king of France, maybe for Christianity-there are hints of that in these accounts. I've read that the trade in Christian relics was pretty brisk in those days and that those things were considered as valuable as gold-or even more valuable. Why else would it have been such a big deal?"

'Ah. Well, then, tell me what such a thing might be-because I assure you that this is the first time that I've heard such… such…"

"If you weren't so polite, you'd say 'such nonsense.' You might be right-you're a historian and I'm a reporter; you look at known facts, I speculate to get to the facts we don't know."

'And there we are, Miss Jimenez. We're discussing history, and history, my dear, is not composed of speculation but of proven facts, corroborated by several sources."

Ana proceeded as though she had heard not a word he'd said.

"According to the archives I've seen so far, in the months prior to his arrest by the king, the Grand Master sent couriers with letters to several chapter houses. Many knights left and none returned. Are there copies of the letters written by de Molay?"

"We have some-copies we've been able to certify as authentic. Others have been lost forever."

"Could I see the ones you've got?"

"I'll ask whether I can show them to you."

"I'd really like to see them tomorrow if possible; I'm leaving early the next morning."

"Oh, you're leaving!"

"Yes, and I can see you're happy I am."

"Please, Miss Jimenez!"

"Professor, I know I'm being a pain in the neck and keeping you from your work."

McFadden allowed himself a smile. "I'll try to have the documents tomorrow. Are you going back to Spain?"

"No, to Paris."

"Ah, Paris. Very well, then. Come tomorrow, first thing."

Ana Jimenez left the mansion early the following evening. She had hoped to talk again to Anthony McGilles, but he seemed to have disappeared into thin air after their first meeting.

She was tired. She'd spent the entire day reading about the Temple's last months. The cold facts, the dates, the anonymous recountings of events-it was mind-numbing.

But she'd been blessed-or cursed, as her brother constantly contended-with a wonderful imagination, so every time she'd read, "Grand Master Jacques de Molay sent a letter to the chapter house in Maguncia with the knight de Lacey, who departed on the morning of July 15 accompanied by two squires," she tried to imagine what this de Lacey's face was like, whether he was riding a black horse or a white one, whether it had been hot that day, whether the squires were in a bad mood. But she knew that her imagination could never provide her with the truth about those men and that she would never know anything of importance that Jacques de Molay wrote in his letters to the Templar masters. The copies she had been given dealt with dry administrative matters, nothing more.

There was a detailed list of the knights who had been sent with letters just before the Temple's fall, and contrary to what she had thought, a few of them were said to have returned. One of them, Geoffroy de Charney, precept of Normandy, had burned at the stake alongside his master. All trace of the others had been lost forever, at least so far as she could glean from the archives.

She was leaving for Paris the next morning, for an appointment with a history professor at the Sorbonne. Professor Elianne Marchais, a worthy lady of sixty-something who had written several books of the kind read only by scholars like Marchais herself, was the biggest academic name for the fourteenth century, or so Ana's contacts had told her.

Ana went straight back to her hotel. It was costing her more than she ought to be spending, but she was giving herself the very sweet pleasure of sleeping in the Dorchester like a princess. Plus, she figured she'd be safer in a luxury hotel. She had begun to have the distinct feeling she was being followed. She'd told herself that was stupid-who was going to follow her? And then she'd decided it might be agents from the Art Crimes Department, trying to find out what she knew, and that eased her mind. Or maybe it was just all the double-dealing and death she had been delving into. The fourteenth century was finally getting to her. It had certainly taken over her life otherwise, waking and sleeping. She thought of nothing else.

She called room service for a sandwich and salad, eager to crawl into bed as soon as possible. The people in the Art Crimes Department could think whatever they wanted, but she was more convinced than ever that it was the Templars who'd bought the shroud from poor Balduino. What didn't make sense was that after that, the shroud turned up in Lirey, in France. How had it gotten there? Why, when the Templars seemed to have spirited away everything of value as far from Philippe's clutches as possible, would they have left so valuable a treasure in France?

She hoped that Professor Marchais could explain to her what good Professor McFadden apparently hadn't wanted to. Because every time she approached the subject of whether the Templars had bought the shroud in Constantinople, he snapped at her to stick to the facts. He couldn't, or wouldn't, see past the "fact" that there was no document, no source, that confirmed her theory-her
mad
theory, as he styled it-and he made it very clear that he found the mysteries people attributed to the Templars tiresome at best.

So Professor McFadden and his institute, an institute purportedly dedicated to the study of the Temple, denied even the possibility that the Templars had ever had possession of the shroud. He had also taken pains to remind her that the relic worshipped in Turin had been dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, not the first, so it was a moot point, anyway. He could understand superstition among the common run of people, he told her, but it held no interest for him, nor should it for her.

Ana knew she was missing something. Something right in front of her. The feeling had been driving her crazy all day. She took out her appointment book and began thumbing through it and the notes she'd made, retracing her steps. And suddenly it hit her. There it was. How had she missed it?

Flames shot up before her eyes, climbing to the heavens. Within them writhed the figures of men. Were they screaming? She couldn't tell; she was overcome by the heat and the roar of the conflagration that consumed everything. Then, brighter than the fire, more searing than the tendrils that seemed to scorch her own skin, a pair of eyes stared at her from the depths of the pyre and a voice rose above all else.