The Awful Secret (25 page)

De Wolfe was more interested in Abbot Cosimo, on whom he had never laid eyes until now. As Thomas had described, he was a short, slight man of middle age, with a strange facial profile, his forehead coming down in an absolutely straight line with his prominent nose. His hair was black and his complexion sallow, with a marked Mediterranean look about it. His small black eyes and thin lips over projecting teeth, gave him a rodent-like appearance. As the outspoken but perceptive Gwyn said later, he was the sort of creature you wanted to tread on when it crossed your path.

As he passed to go to the gate, the abbot looked right through de Wolfe as if he didn’t exist, making no acknowledgement of him whatsoever. His two sour-faced acolytes closed ranks behind him, and the trio vanished rapidly into the rain, following the Templars. The abbot’s henchmen, who de Wolfe learned later were men-at-arms from the Temple in London, were heavily built men in sombre tunics and mantles, who seemed rarely to speak and certainly never smiled. He never discovered their names and they seemed to view anyone who approached Cosimo with suspicion, fingering their swords or daggers as if they expected an assassination attempt at any moment. As John came through the gate and stared after them, he saw that Cosimo had caught up with the knights and was talking animatedly to them.

Matilda curtly expressed a wish to go to St Olave’s and, in such an unsavoury neighbourhood as Bretayne, demanded her husband’s company as escort, though the church was only a few hundred yards distant. The lanes were lined with hovels of board and cob, mostly roofed with turf or thatch, much of it tattered and disintegrating. Many of the dwellings were little better than ramshackle huts, tilted and leaning against each other. The narrow alleys were barely the span of two arms and the ground ran with sewage, rubbish and mud, amongst which dogs, cats, rats, fowls and a few pigs vied for space with urchins and toddlers, all seemingly oblivious of the filth and the rain.

With Gwyn and Thomas trudging behind, de Wolfe chaperoned his wife to her favourite place of worship and then, with some relief, suggested to the others that they adjourn to the Bush for discussion and refreshment.

As they crossed Fore Street, Gwyn looked several times over his shoulder, before stopping dead and staring back. ‘Who’s this following us?’

De Wolfe swung round and experienced a momentary
déjà vu
sensation, harking back to de Ridefort’s early antics. A man in a wide-brimmed pilgrim’s felt hat was behind him, enveloped in a soaking cloak of nondescript dun colour. De Wolfe recognised the hat as having been on one of the heads looking over the graveyard wall a few minutes earlier. ‘What is it, fellow? Do you want me?’ he challenged.

The man, tall and powerfully built, came up close to him and Gwyn stepped forward, his hand going to his dagger. The coroner had made a few enemies and, like Cosimo’s men, the Cornishman was ever on his guard. But his caution was unnecessary, if the fellow’s first words were true.

‘Sir John, I am Bernardus de Blanchefort. I think you may have been expecting me.’

With his cloak steaming over the wattle screen near John’s favourite table, the new arrival sat before a trencher of salt bacon and onions, a quart of ale by his elbow. Whether or not the man was still a Templar, he was allowed to eat the meat of four-legged animals, unlike the usual monk: the philosophy of the warrior-monks was that a fighting man needed to keep up his strength, which was also why the Order forbade its members to fast. Certainly, this warrior was eating Nesta’s viands with a gusto that suggested he had had little food that day. The coroner and his assistants sat around the table, each with a more modest meal than the famished newcomer. Nesta and Edwin hovered nearby, the nosy old pot-man concealing his avid curiosity less successfully than his mistress as they fussed with supplies of food and drink.

‘I arrived here from Weymouth yesterday, after a terrible passage a sennight ago from Caen,’ explained de Blanchefort, between mouthfuls. ‘I stayed last night in some fleapit tavern not far from here, whose landlord was a mean fat bastard who overcharged me.’

‘Willem the Fleming, at the Saracen!’ said Nesta indignantly, from where she stood at the end of the table. ‘He gives our inns in Exeter a bad name, the way he runs that hovel.’

Bernardus had already been told by the coroner of the demise of his Templar friend. He said that he had gone to the funeral at St Bartholomew’s not because he knew the deceased was Gilbert de Ridefort but because he was seeking John de Wolfe to make himself known. He had been told by someone at the castle gate that the coroner was at the burial ground, but when he saw the Templars there and Abbot Cosimo, he had been shocked and kept clear of de Wolfe until the others had dispersed. ‘At first, I had no idea who the dead person might have been, but the sight of those wolves from the New Temple and Paris soon made it clear that it could only have been de Ridefort who had died.’

As he spoke, de Wolfe studied him from close quarters. Whereas Gilbert had been a handsome, elegant man, this southern Frenchman was a blunt, tough fellow with a direct, almost pugnacious manner. A few years younger than John, he had a square face, dark brown hair and thick eyebrows. The upper part of his features was tanned but his chin and lips were pale where he had recently shaved off the obligatory Templar beard and moustache. De Wolfe suspected that he was far more enthusiastic about matters of faith than de Ridefort had been, perhaps even to the point of obsession.

‘They will kill us both if they can,’ he said finally, having finished his food and pushed aside the trencher to take up his pot of ale. ‘Now that Gilbert is silenced, I will be the next target. But I care not for them, this secret must be told, to dispel the myth that has plagued the world for a thousand years!’ An evangelical tone had crept into his voice, though he kept it low and accompanied his words with furtive glances about the room. There were only a few other customers in the Bush at that early hour, all locals whom de Wolfe recognised as tradesmen and merchants.

‘Are you going to tell us what this mystery is?’ he demanded. ‘De Ridefort seemed reluctant to divulge what was at issue – even though it seems to have cost him his life.’

‘I will indeed – and that very soon. But I want to do it in a way that cannot be smothered by the forces against me.’

Though John frankly had little interest in whatever theological revelations these Templars wished to make, his clerk Thomas was hanging on every word. Crouched at the end of the table, his peaky face was fixed on de Blanchefort and his mouth was hanging open with expectation. ‘Does this concern the Cathars and the Albigensian diversion from the holy teachings?’ he squeaked, clutching his small cup of cider tightly as if to hang on to some remnant of security in the face of burgeoning heresy.

‘It is not unconnected, but compared with those beliefs, it is as massive as the Alps compared with a molehill,’ proclaimed de Blanchefort ominously. This sent Thomas into a paroxysm of crossing himself, as if to ward off the devil himself.

‘So why have you come to Devon – and what are you going to do now that you are here?’ enquired the ever-practical coroner, whose priority was still the discovery of Gilbert de Ridefort’s killer.

‘Like Gilbert, I come in flight, to escape the wrath of the established Church. I have no particular desire to be a martyr as I enjoy the only life I am likely to have. But if I need to die for the truth, as de Ridefort did, then so be it. We both sought to escape to a land more tolerant of revised beliefs, such as Scotland. He suggested that we made our way there from France, which is so dangerous for anyone who diverts from the rigid dictates of Rome.’

‘So why Devon? This is a backwater in the mainstream of Europe.’

‘Gilbert suggested it as a route to Scotland, perhaps via Ireland. To reach that northern land direct from France would be very hazardous with the full length of England between, containing many Templar Preceptories and endless Roman dioceses stretching the length of the country. And he remembered you for a fair-minded man and had heard that you were from Devonshire. Like him, I trust that you can see your way to helping me.’

‘What is it you want from me?’ asked de Wolfe, rather suspiciously. His attempts to help de Ridefort had ended in disaster and he was not keen to repeat the process.

‘I came here only with the intention of procuring assistance to journey onwards. I wanted to know how best to go about getting a passage from the many ports you have along these coasts, in an area where I fondly thought the long arm of the Order and the Inquisition would be unlikely to reach. But obviously I was wrong. Somehow, they must have discovered where Gilbert was heading, possibly by torturing some poor wretch in Paris to whom he had mentioned his destination.’

De Wolfe’s great beak of a nose came closer to Bernardus’ face. ‘You put all those words in the past, as if you now have different desires?’ he rumbled.

The former Templar shrugged. ‘I still wish to save my skin if I can – mainly to stay alive and active to help my message on its way. There are others of our Order still in France, and elsewhere, who are unhappy with the status quo, but they do not yet seem ready to come out into the open as Gilbert and I have done.’

He stopped for a long sup at his ale pot, then continued. ‘But now that Gilbert de Ridefort is not with me, I am willing to risk proclaiming this secret to all who will hear it and be damned to the consequences,’ he declared harshly.

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked de Wolfe, apprehensive that this determined hothead was likely to make more trouble for the law officers of the county.

‘The time has come to stop skulking about the country with this knowledge. I intend proclaiming it as publicly as possible – and the best place to do so would be on the cathedral steps tomorrow morning!’

Even Gwyn stopped in mid-swallow at this – and Thomas looked if he was going to faint. Of all of them, apart from Bernardus, the little ex-priest knew best the gravity of what the latter was proposing, if it had any connection at all with the heresy rampant in the Languedoc of southern France. Just as Gilbert had lectured Evelyn on the day of his death, Thomas knew of the rising concern of Rome against those who held gnostic views of Christianity and was aware of the increasing wrath of the ecclesiastical establishment against the Cathars and others in the French lands.

‘A sermon on the cathedral steps!’ barked de Wolfe, incredulously. ‘The bishop will have some views on that – or he would have, if he was in the city.’ He thought that the archdeacons and the other senior canons would more than compensate for the absence of Henry Marshal when it came to the prospect of a renegade monk preaching heresy from the West Front of the cathedral.

‘Who d’you think would come to listen to you?’ grunted the agnostic Gwyn.

‘I shall wait until the end of Nones, Terce and High Mass to catch the congregation as they come out of the building,’ said Bernardus, a joyful glee in his bright brown eyes that, in spite of his earlier protestations, suggested to John a willingness for martyrdom.

‘You wouldn’t last five minutes,’ he objected. ‘The canons would soon have the proctors on you.’

‘Five minutes would be all I need to sow the seeds of doubt – and maybe the ears of the cathedral priests would be more fertile soil than those of the common people.’

De Wolfe was beginning to think that this man was mad, but the fact that Gilbert de Ridefort had had the same convictions – and de Blanchefort claimed that there were others still in France and even the Holy Land who agreed with them – weighed against this being some individual mental abberation. As he thought about de Blanchefort’s plan for a heretical sermon, it occurred to him that this might be a way to smoke out de Ridefort’s killers. If the former Templar tried to go ahead with this crazy idea, then similar means could be tried to silence him and the perpetrators might be unmasked.

As the man began some earnest theological debate across the table with the apprehensive Thomas, the coroner weighed up the risk of getting him killed with the chances of identifying the killers. He decided that if the damned fool wanted to stick his head into a noose – or more likely get burned at the stake – then that was his affair, but to reduce the likelihood somewhat, it would help if his intention to preach heresy was bandied about in advance. Then the opposition might take action before de Blanchefort committed some fatal indiscretion.

‘You will be assured of a bigger audience if it is known about beforehand,’ he said, with wily insincerity. ‘We can put about the news quite readily. Thomas here is especially well placed to noise it abroad amongst the clergy and all those in the cathedral Close.’ He looked at Gwyn with a lop-sided grin. ‘And my officer here could broadcast it in almost every alehouse in Exeter, although maybe the patrons of taverns are not too concerned with new concepts of religion.’

De Blanchefort accepted this advice with a readiness that almost made de Wolfe ashamed at his own duplicity, but he salved his conscience with the thought that he might be saving the man’s life, if not his liberty, in ensuring that he would be arrested before he committed some ecclesiastical treason.

Now de Wolfe changed the subject. ‘These three Templars you saw at St Bartholomew’s – do you know them?’

‘Godfrey Capra is a stranger to me,’ answered Bernardus. ‘But I certainly know the other two. Roland de Ver was prominent in the Paris headquarters until a year ago. I think he was sent to the new Temple in London to stiffen their sinews with the same discipline demanded by the Master in France. And Brian de Falaise is also known to me from Outremer, where I knew him for a courageous, if reckless warrior.’

‘They claimed to me to be in this part of England only to seek new estates for the Templars.’

‘I find that very hard to accept,’ said Bernardus scornfully. ‘That’s a task either for old members well past their fighting age – or, even more likely, for their sergeants. It is ludicrous to believe that three senior knights would be sent on such a mundane mission.’