Order in Chaos Page 9

  “Gladly. Damnation to de Nogaret. But tell me more about your good-sister, for her situation intrigues me. Why is she here at all, and why is de Nogaret hunting her? Did you not say she lives in England?”

  “She did. And as her story involves William de Nogaret, if this warning you have brought to us proves valid, her life will be in grave danger, for that devil will put her to the torture to gain what he is after.”

  Sinclair had no illusions about de Nogaret’s malevolence. “He will indeed, if he catches her. No doubt of that. But what is he after? And why is she even here in France if she is on de Nogaret’s black list?”

  “Money, Sir William. The King’s minister smells money. What else ever motivates that man, other than hatred?” St. Valéry sighed. “I told you my brother Etienne was an agent of the King, sent to live in England to administer Philip’s affairs there at the English court of Edward Plantagenet.” He sat down in the nearest chair and leaned back, his fingers laced over his midriff. “He found opportunities for himself, there in England, opportunities for trade, all of them legitimate and of the kind he judged would hold no interest for his master. And on an early return visit to France, he traveled south into the Languedoc before returning to England, specifically, as I have discovered, to set up a trading venture there with a man whom he had befriended years earlier, a Jewish merchant in the coastal town of Béziers, called Yeshua Bar Simeon.

  “Etienne said nothing of this to anyone at the time, not even to us, his own family, preferring, as he ever did, to keep his own affairs secret and safely shielded from the eyes of others. He then went back to England, leaving the running of their activities in the hands of this Bar Simeon, and their venture prospered beyond belief, it would appear, for almost twenty years, until Bar Simeon fell ill two years ago. He was very old by then, a full score and more years older than Etienne. He knew that he was dying, and the nature of his agreement with my brother forbade him from delegating the work or passing it on to anyone else to execute.

  “And so the old man sold off all their holdings everywhere and deposited the entire proceeds with our brethren, in the preceptory at Marseille. The preceptor there at the time, a fine man called Theodoric de Champagne, issued all the proper recordings of the transaction, but instead of taking them into his own possession, Yeshua Bar Simeon requested that the documents—the principal one being a letter of credit to be drawn on the Preceptory of Marseille—be sent directly to Etienne in London.”

  St. Valéry set his tumbler down carefully beside him on the floor and then rose from his chair and began to pace the room, his hands now clasped at his back and his head bent to splay his long, forked beard against his chest. “Unfortunately, that was a request that could not be met, because it contravened our rules … the rules of our system.”

  He stopped pacing and glanced sideways at Sir William. “You are a man of action, Sir William, a knight and a member of the Governing Council, but I suspect you may have had little experience in the commercial side of our undertakings, and so I know not if you are familiar with the precise way in which these things work.” He stopped, waiting for Sinclair to respond, and when the other man shook his head and waved for him to continue, he resumed his pacing, holding one hand still behind his back and gesturing with the other to emphasize the points he was making.

  “Above all else, and I know you are aware of this, it is fundamentally simple. A man facing a long and dangerous journey brings his money to whatever Temple or commandery is closest to him. We take the specie into custody and issue him with a document, a formal letter of credit attesting to the amount of the deposit he has made, and he then carries that on his person and presents it to the nearest Templar presence when he arrives at his destination. In the meantime, using our own fleet as a direct courier, we have supplied a record of the transaction, including an enciphered code word for recognition, to whatever preceptory the man has decided to use at his journey’s end.

  “Once there, our traveler presents his bona fides and proves his identity—a necessary precaution against fraud—and provides the code word, upon which he receives the full value of his letter of credit, minus a small administrative fee. It works very well as a system, but it has limitations. The man designated in the letter of credit must carry it and present himself in person. The letter of credit cannot be transferable to anyone else—no deputies, no assignees—for if that were possible, the system would break down, with no one truly able to verify anyone’s right to claim the monies involved.

  “Thus, in this particular case, an impasse had been reached. Bar Simeon knew he was dying. He suffered a virulent attack of some kind, there in the preceptory, and was convinced he would last no more than a few days. He told de Champagne he had been ill for months, growing worse all the time, and did not expect to live to see his home again, and from the look of him, and the convulsions he had witnessed for himself, de Champagne knew it was the truth. Thus it would be useless for the old man to have the letter issued in his own name, for with his death the unclaimed deposit would be lost forever, declared forfeit and absorbed into our system. And for the same reason, he was in no condition to withdraw his funds again from Marseille and take them away with him. That left Theodoric in a moral quandary.”

  “Aye, it would. So what did he do?”

  St. Valéry had stopped pacing and now stood staring into the fire basket. “He prayed. And then he made a decision that ignored the rules that were impeding him, in this instance, from doing what he knew to be morally correct …

  “Old Bar Simeon had told him the entire story, probably in desperation, once he realized that he had placed himself unwittingly in a cleft stick, so de Champagne knew that the monies belonged rightly and legally to my brother Etienne. He therefore acted upon his own authority, defying all our rules, and wrote the letter of credit in Etienne’s name. He then sent the documents to me under seal, accompanied by a letter explaining the situation and informing me that Bar Simeon had assured him that Etienne would know the code word involved, because it had been a password between the two of them since their first collaboration. De Champagne and I have known each other for many years and he trusted me to respect his confidence. Yeshua Bar Simeon was dead by then, of course. He died within two days of completing the transaction.”

  “Hmm.” Sir William had been sitting forward in his chair, listening closely, and now he was impatient to hear more. “And what did you do?”

  “Nothing at first. I was caught unprepared, never having known about, or even suspected, Etienne’s venture with the Jew, whom he evidently—and with good reason, it transpired—held in the highest esteem. But once I had thought about it for a time, I conferred with my friend and colleague here, Sir Arnold de Thierry, as the Preceptor of La Rochelle, because although I thought I knew what must be done, it seemed an arrogant and prideful course for me to steer, so far outside the confines of our rules. But Arnold believed I would be doing the right thing, and he encouraged me to proceed.”

  “So you sent the letter to your brother in England.”

  “No. That I could not do. That would have been flagrant defiance of our law. I held it in trust for him, here, where he must collect it in person. But I wrote to him in England, informing him that I had the documents in my possession.

  “It must have been around that point that de Nogaret got wind of it, although we did not know that at the time. But until that transaction took place, and the documents were sent to me, no one, including myself and the rest of our family, had ever known that Bar Simeon and Etienne were connected in any way. None of us had even been aware of Bar Simeon’s existence. So the betrayal must have come from within our own ranks—from one of our brethren in Marseille, a corrupt knight or a sergeant in the pay of de Nogaret. It hardly seems believable, and it galls me more than I can say, but I can find no other explanation. But be that as it may, the word was out—de Nogaret was informed, and the reputation of our Order was besmirched.”

  “How do you know the
information was betrayed from Marseille? The spy might have been quartered here and read your letter before you ever sent it.”

  “Not possible, Sir William, because I wrote and sealed the letter myself, at my own desk, and sent it off the same day aboard one of our galleys headed directly for London. And by the time it arrived in England my brother had already sailed for France on an urgent summons from the King. He had been preparing to come back anyway, and to bring the Lady Jessica with him, to visit our mother, who loves her dearly, so he merely advanced his plans and left as soon as he received the King’s summons. Fortunately for the Lady Jessica, and thanks to the urgency of his recall, he left her on the coast on making landfall, in the care of the Temple at Le Havre, and went directly to Paris on his own. He was arrested upon his arrival, we learned later, and thrown into prison, where he was tortured at great length and eventually died.”

  Sir William sat silent, mulling over what he had been told, and then he slumped backwards, chin in hand, his elbow propped on the arm of his chair. “So why has de Nogaret not been beating down our doors? If they put your brother to the torture for an extended time, he must have told them everything he knew.”

  “Aye, true, but he knew nothing … at least nothing that de Nogaret could use. Etienne left England before my letter arrived there. He had not received it and did not even know that Bar Simeon had been sick, or that he was dead. He certainly did not know that all his assets had been sold and the proceeds lodged with us. All he could tell the torturers was what he knew up to the time before the old man fell sick. De Nogaret had blundered badly; he had moved too soon. He knew the funds were in our hands, because of the report he had received from his spy among us, but he was powerless to do anything about that without the letter of entitlement, and he did not know where that was. Thanks be to God in His wisdom, our laws are clear on such things. The letter of credit goes to the depositor and no copies are made of it. The Temple holds the funds in trust, and no king or king’s henchman holds jurisdiction over our Order. It would never have occurred to de Nogaret that one of our preceptors might contravene the laws of our system and do what de Champagne actually did in sending the documents to me.

  “And so he assumed the obvious: that the letter still existed and that Bar Simeon had passed it for safekeeping to another of his race.”

  “A Jew, you mean. Wait you now, wait just a minute.” Sinclair sat frowning, his thoughts tumbling over each other. “When did all this occur?”

  “More than a year ago and probably closer to two.”

  “Before the purge.”

  “Immediately before it. The plans for that event must have been well in hand already, for it was a massive operation.”

  “Aye, it was, and there is not a single Jew left alive in France today to denounce it, even if anyone would listen. It was seen as right and fitting that the confiscated Jewish money—the riches of the Christ-killers—should enrich the French treasury.”

  “You sound as if you disagree with that.”

  “I do. Are you surprised, knowing the roots of our own ancient brotherhood in Sion? I have no truck with anti-Jewish hatred. I find it despicable and demeaning, involving willful denial of the fact that Jesus himself was Jew.”

  “True, he was.” St. Valéry sat down again and retrieved his tumbler from beside his chair. “But none of the Jews in France—apart from Yeshua Bar Simeon, of course—had anything to do with Etienne’s money. Only we, the Temple, knew anything of that …” He sipped at his drink. “Has it occurred to you that we might arguably be considered usurers?”

  Sinclair eyed the admiral askance. “No, because we are no such thing. We levy a small fee to cover the costs of doing what we do, safeguarding and transferring funds, but that is far from usury.”

  “Aye, that is what we claim, but is it true? So much of us is little known, even among ourselves, that I fear much truth might have been lost since first the Temple was conceived in Outremer. Can you, for example, cite me the true meaning of the Order’s first medallion, the one with two knights mounted on a single horse?”

  “Sigillum Militum Christi? It merely represents the fact that in the Order’s earliest days the knights were so impoverished that two men would often have to share one horse.”

  St. Valéry’s lips twisted with disdain. “Again, that is what is said. I choose to doubt it. Think about it, Sir William. The original nine members of Hugh de Payens’s cadre were all members of the Order of Sion—the Order of Rebirth in Sion, as it was then known. After their discovery in the Temple ruins, their numbers swelled and the Temple was born, full of Christian fire and zealotry and underpinned with bigotry and bloodthirsty passion. It pleases me to believe that the first symbol they adopted—the two-man medallion—was an irony, developed, I tend to think, by de Payens himself, the founder of the Temple Order. To me, it depicts the fundamental duality of the transformed organization—not two men on one horse, but two men within each of the founding knights, the first of them the knight of the Temple Mount, the other the far more ancient Brother of Sion. That may be nonsense, born of my own solitude and too much thought, but I take comfort from it.”

  His listener nodded slowly. “That would never have occurred to me,” he said eventually, his voice filled with admiration. “Not if I lived to be a hundred years old. But having heard it from your mouth, I believe it might be true.” He smiled, then stooped to pick up his own tumbler, draining it and savoring its fiery potency for long moments, and when he spoke again his voice was lower than it had been. “We never really learn much of anything, do we? Most of us cannot wait to forget all that we know. But what were we talking about before that?”

  “About the Jewish purge, how well it succeeded.”

  “Ah yes.” He hefted the empty glass in his cupped hand. “Those Benedictine monks must deal in magic. I have never had the likes of this before … my head is swimming.” He waved his hand, dismissing that topic. “And that was nigh on two years ago. What happened to the Baroness at that time?”

  “Her people saved her.”

  “What people, and how?”

  “She and Etienne traveled at all times with a bodyguard of Scots, assigned to them by Lord Thomas Randolph himself. They were as loyal as wolfhounds, and as savage. Etienne took half of them with him when he went to Paris. They were with him when he was arrested and were cut down by the King’s Guard when they tried to intervene. But they trusted no one and had posted a rear guard outside the gates to keep watch. The watchers saw what happened and returned directly to Le Havre, where they commandeered a ship and took their lady off to safety. To her home in Scotland, though, not in England. As I say, they trusted no one, and Edward of England had been waging his war against the Scots for years, so the Baroness’s bodyguard chose to return her to her home and not to risk the goodwill of the English. I knew nothing of any of this at the time.

  “Eventually, the letter I had sent to Etienne was forwarded to the Temple in Edinburgh from the Temple in London, but by then a good six months had elapsed. And then, completely unexpectedly, Lady Jessica sailed into La Rochelle, just over a month ago, to reclaim the treasure we held in trust for her, as my brother’s widow.”

  “It must be a deal of money.” Sinclair’s tone was ironic, but St. Valéry nodded.

  “It is. Six large chests of gold, in bars and coin, and five more of silver, bars and coin. Sufficient to ransom a king … or to support one in a time of desperate need …

  “The Lady Jessica is quite open about her intentions. She intends to give the gold to Robert Bruce, your King of Scots. That is her absolute right, of course, but it entailed another problem that I had not foreseen. I required a password to release the money properly, and only Etienne could have known what that might have been. And so I sent another letter to Theodoric de Champagne in Marseille, explaining my dilemma and requesting the word from him, since he had the only duplicate. He sent it without commentary or demur, having been instrumental in launching this entire adventure
, but in the interim the Lady Jessica decided that while waiting, she would visit my mother in Tours. My brother’s widow is a strong-willed woman and was convinced there would be no danger entailed, provided she went alone with only the smallest escort for protection.”

  “And?”

  “She was denounced and betrayed. A steward in my mother’s household was in the pay of de Nogaret. He sent off a messenger to Paris, but then was foolish and arrogant enough to demand that the Lady Jessica stay where she was when she prepared to leave. My youngest brother, Gilbert, killed the man and fled, leaving a trail and allowing Lady Jessica to make her escape.” St. Valéry paused, then continued in a level voice. “We have not heard from Gilbert since he disappeared, but we hope he is still alive. In the meantime, the Lady Jessica has been hunted all over France, and had it not been for your kinsman Tam Sinclair and his assistance today, she would have been captured trying to enter La Rochelle. The three men you saw killed were with her. She had hired them to smuggle her into the city, but they panicked when the guards began to check their handcart a second time, for they knew they were discovered.”

  “So now you wish me to escort this lady back to Scotland.”

  St. Valéry looked straight at Sinclair. “I do, but not alone. I will be coming with you, bear in mind. And with her you will accompany and safeguard the treasure for the King of Scots. It is my good-sister’s, and it is of incalculable value, and if it remains here, de Nogaret will seize it and he will have won a sizable victory even should he fail in all else.” He hesitated. “It is already loaded aboard my galley, along with a lesser treasure of our own.”