Лесли Чартерис - The Saint and the Templar Treasure

A stroll around the château grounds after breakfast had become something of a ritual, and that morning his route rook him first towards the chai and its dependent storehouse. In the cobbled courtyard which they partly enclosed he found Gaston Pichot leaning on a stout stick and watching a mound of laden baskets being carried in from the truck.

“These are the Petit Syrah,” Gaston explained. “Blended in our own proportion with the usual Cabernet grapes, they are what give the wines of Ingare their unique flavor.”

“I’m glad to see you’re on the job again,” said the Saint sincerely. “And feeling a lot better?”

“I could have felt so much worse,” said the indomitable old man. “But I was born in a good year. My vintage has outlasted many younger ones, and it will outlast many more. We have a proverb in Provencale: Vau miès pourta lou dou que lou linçou — it is better to wear the mourning than the coffin.”

“I shall adopt that as my motto,” Simon laughed. “A bien-tôt, mon ami.”

He sauntered on, around to the storehouse where Gaston had literally stumbled into one of the long-lost secrets of the château.

The floor was now securely pit-propped and the ladder had been solidly braced so that it practically became a steep flight of stairs. The debris had been removed, and a cable run from the generator in the adjoining pressing house supplied power for a couple of light bulbs.

Unexpectedly, the underground chamber was temporarily deserted. Since its discovery Norbert had virtually lived there, leaving it reluctantly only for hurried meals and snatched sleep. Reasoning that even professors are subject to the dictates of nature, Simon decided to wait for Norbert to return.

The statue looked somehow less sinister in the unglamorous glare of three hundred watts than it had in the wavering candle-power of flashlights. As he stood beside it facing the chilling emptiness of its eyes, he saw that it was not set flush against the wall as he had originally supposed. Only the plinth was attached to the wall, but the figure centred on it was well clear. A fetishist, if so inclined, could have put his arms around its horrors and embraced it.

The Saint did almost that, but with the purely idle object of testing whether the statue was integrated with its base or merely planted on it.

And the statue moved, with an ease quite disproportionate to the effort he had applied with respect to its presumable weight. In fact, so smoothly that he was momentarily thrown off balance. It was as if the statue had responded by coming to life in weird co-operation. And to add to the eeriness of the effect, a ghostly squeak and clink of chain whined through the chamber, while he had a visual hallucination of a part of the wall within his field of vision moving away from him.

As he regained his footing, both physically and intelligently, he realised that the wall actually had moved. In fact, a whole section of masonry had turned, in perfect synchronisation with the turning of the statue, opening a door into a passageway that instantly lost itself in total darkness.

Long afterwards, he would be profoundly impressed by the technical sophistication that was evidenced by the smooth working of the secret mechanism. After so many hundred years, anything made of iron or steel would have been rusted into permanent immovability. Yet bronze was an alloy that had been known even in the great days of the Château Ingare, although few engineers of that era seem to have concerned themselves with the problems of corrosion. The Templars who had installed that shrine of Hecate must have been centuries ahead of the thinking of their contemporaries, and what they built had been designed to outlast themselves by tens of generations.

But for those first moments, the Saint was too startled by his own discovery to stop and marvel at the technology which had made it possible. He took a deep breath and exhaled it in a long low whistle as he waited for his pulse rate to slow and a sense of reality to return and shuffle the jumbled sensations of the past seconds into a semblance of order.

That done, he walked over to the opening and peered cautiously in. The light from the bulbs in the crypt reached just far enough into the narrow passage to show that it was cut through the natural rock of the hillside, and the stone blocks of the pivoting secret door were only a few inches thick.

The door had not swung completely open but stood about two feet ajar. A heavy chain was around a toothed wheel at the bottom corner of the door, through the wall and into the base of the statue, where there would have to be another similar wheel. As one turned, so would the other. Simple but perfectly effective, and it still worked.

Two steps into the passage and he blocked his own light, making it impossible to see even inches ahead, and he returned to the chamber to cast around in the vain hope that a torch might have been left there.

Then he heard a movement somewhere above, and moved swiftly back to the statue. The creek of the chain as he turned the figure back to close the stone panel again sounded deafen-ingly loud to him in the confined space.

He need not have worried. Perhaps Louis Norbert was too engrossed in his own thoughts, perhaps he was slightly hard of hearing, or perhaps he was even a superb poker player, but whatever the reason he gave no indication of having heard anything unusual when he stepped from the ladder.

He regarded the Saint with a mixture of irritation and suspicion.

“Monsieur Templar. Were you looking for me?”

Simon uncrossed his legs and rose from the stone bench where he had hastily seated himself. The door had closed so perfectly that had he not known exactly where it was he would never have been able to guess. Even so, he kept his eyes away from the wall as he smiled amiably at the little professor.

“Not specially,” he said. “But it’s a pleasure to see you. You haven’t been very social since this hole was opened.”

“What can I do for you?” Norbert inquired in the politely uninterested tone of a shop assistant.

“I just dropped in to see how you were getting along,” Simon replied pleasantly.

Norbert scratched at the tuft of white hair that stuck out above his left ear. He looked tired and his clothes were crumpled. The collar of his shirt curled at the edges and the front of it was smeared with grime. He had the general appearance of a man who had spent the night on a park bench.

He continued to fix the Saint with an inquisitorial glare. Simon waved a hand towards the marble goddess.

“Has horrible Hecate told you anything yet?” he asked. “Opened up any new avenues of investigation?”

“No. Why should it? It’s just a very interesting work of ancient art,” Norbert said defensively.

“Vraiment?”

The Saint drawled the word so slowly and with such an inflection of cynical reverence that Professor Norbert flinched.

“I am just trying to make my studies,” he stammered, wrenching his gaze away and trying instead to concentrate on opening the carpenter’s rule he took from his pocket. “But trivial distractions make my task so much harder.”

Simon took the rule from his fumbling fingers and opened it out to its full length. He looked from Norbert to the statue and back again, and then proffered the metre of wood to the other’s hand like a general presenting a sword.

“I hope she measures up to your expectations,” he said suggestively; and while Norbert was trying to work out a double entendre Simon patted him encouragingly on the shoulder and leisurely climbed the ladder to the storehouse above.

Which in its own way was as good an exit as the circumstances allowed, he reflected as he made his way back to the château. He would have wished for more time to follow up his own discovery, but was sufficiently grateful that the professor’s fortuitous absence had allowed him the time to make it.