Simon Tolkien - The Inheritance

“Give me it,” she said. “You know what I’ll do if you don’t.”

For a moment Sasha felt a sense of power rush through her veins, but then doubt set in. Mary didn’t seem in the least frightened of the revolver, and the odd air of authority that she carried with her was in no way diminished.

“You better follow me,” she said in an even voice. “It’s down here.” Then, without any hesitation, she turned her back on Sasha and the gun, went through the door into the vestry, and began climbing down the winding stairway to the crypt. Sasha followed a little way behind, listening to Mary’s voice coming back up to her from below.

“The cure who was here before this one, Pere Martin, was my father’s best friend. He took me in when my parents died, and afterward he helped me escape to another part of France. But before I left he gave me a locket that my father had entrusted to him when the Nazis came, to give to me if anything happened. There was a picture of my parents in the front and the code was written inside the back.”

“Crux Petri in manibus Petri est.”

“That’s right. I don’t know if my father knew what it meant. Pere Martin certainly didn’t.”

“But you know, don’t you?” said Sasha, retraining the gun on Mary now that she had reached the bottom of the stairs. “Tell me what it means.”

“It means just what you think it means. Simon Peter’s cross is in Simon Peter’s hands.”

“Abbot Simon’s hands?”

“Yes. Of course it wouldn’t have taken Cade long to work that out, but he had to crack the code first,” said Mary, who continued to seem entirely unfazed by the gun. “He didn’t come back here for four long years after 1944, and when he did, he found nothing.”

“Why?”

“Because he looked in the wrong place. Just like you did. And then he got impatient and opened up all the tombs, and still he found nothing. He tore the place apart, and that’s when Pere Martin found him down here among all the skulls and bones, beating his head against the wall in frustration. I wish I could’ve seen him,” said Mary, with a faraway look in her eye.

“Cade told Pere Martin he was looking for a jewelled cross that the Nazis had hidden somewhere in the church. Of course Pere Martin knew it was a lie. He was the one who’d told me about the legend of the Marjean cross years before when he gave me the locket. But he said nothing. Just waited until Cade had gone, and then he told me everything that had happened. I already knew that Cade was after the cross. After all, I’d heard him torturing my mother for it before he killed her. And after Cade came back, I made the connection between the Peter in the code and the Abbot Simon who was buried down here. But I didn’t need to open his tomb to know that the cross wasn’t there, because I knew from Pere Martin that Cade had already done that. I realised the answer was somewhere else, but it still took me a long time to work it out.”

“So what is the answer? Where is the cross?” demanded Sasha, unable to contain her impatience any longer. But Mary ignored the questions. It was as if she was determined to tell the story her own way, and neither Sasha nor the gun were going to deflect her from her purpose.

“I found the cross and Cade didn’t,” she said, “because I knew this place a great deal better than he did. That was the difference between us. You probably haven’t noticed, but down beyond the house there are a few old broken-down walls. They’re almost disappearing in the long grass now, but I played there a lot when I was a child, spying on the German soldiers as they went backward and forward from the house. And one day I was digging, making a tunnel to Australia, and I found an old moss-covered stone buried in the ground with a Latin inscription indented in its surface. It was square, the wrong shape for a tombstone, and I never told anyone about it because it was my secret, my lucky stone, and I kept it covered up with leaves and grass. It was only much later,

years after I’d left this place, that I realised it was the foundation stone of a chapter house for the monastery, laid by Simon, Abbot of Marjean, in the year of our Lord 1328.”

Mary spoke slowly, emphasising the date, but Sasha just looked perplexed, and Mary had to say the year again.

“1328, Sasha. Doesn’t it mean anything to you?” she asked pointedly. “It was the year after Abbot Simon died according to the dates on the wall over there. Except that that’s not what the dates mean. The foundation stone made me realise that. Look. You see the same thing all along both these walls. One date for each name. And the date is the year they became abbot. But Simon is different from everyone else. He has two dates. 1321 and 1327. Why’s that?”

“Because there are two Simons,” said Sasha breathlessly, suddenly beginning to understand.

“Yes. Two. And the second one died within a year of his promotion. That’s why the next abbot, Josephus, has the year 1328 under his name. And the beauty of the whole thing is that there’s no record anywhere of this second Simon. Nothing except the foundation stone lost under the grass. The monks who hid the cross must have seen to that. And so no one knew about his existence except me. That is, until I told Cade all about him in the summer of 1956.”

“Why? Why would you do that?” asked Sasha, shocked. It was the last thing she’d expected to hear.

“To lure him over here so I could take a shot at him. Give him back a little of what he’d done to my parents. The cure helped me, although perhaps he wouldn’t have done so if he’d known what I had in mind. But still there was no need to spell it out. Back in 1948 Cade had promised him a reward for any new information that might lead Cade to the cross, and so the opening was already there. Everything went perfectly. The cure wrote to him about the foundation stone, and less than two weeks later he was here with Ritter. I waited to see him come out empty-handed before I fired. That was part of what I’d promised myself. But I wasn’t brave enough, or perhaps I was just nervous. I shot him from too far away and he lived to tell the tale. Until I got inside the manor house last summer, that is, and did what I’d failed to do four years ago.”

“So the cross was in the tomb until he came. You had it all the time,” said Sasha. Her agitation was plain to see. The gun was trembling in her hand. But the threat of it still seemed to have no effect on Mary. She smiled and said nothing.

“Where is it now?” demanded Sasha, finally losing her self-control. “Tell me where it is or I’ll kill you.”

“It’s where it always was,” said Mary evenly. “I know of no better hiding place than the one the monks made for it six hundred years ago.”

Mary crossed over to Abbot Simon’s tomb. The lid was still slightly officentre, resting in the same position that Sasha had left it in the week before. But Mary ignored the top of the tomb. Instead she took a small chisel out of her pocket and chipped away the stone-coloured plaster in a line halfway down the side. It came off easily, and Sasha could see that it had only recently been applied. Soon a clear dividing line was visible, and it was obvious that there were two tombs, one on top of the other. When Mary had finished removing the plaster, she pushed with only moderate force against one end of the lower sarcophagus, and the other end came swinging out into the open.

Sasha looked down into the open tomb and saw what she had been searching for all her life. The cross of St. Peter. It was lying between the two skeletal hands of the dead man, and the red rubies and green emeralds embedded in the ancient wood drew Sasha forward as much as the hollow eye sockets and empty mouth repelled her. The cross was bigger than she’d imagined and glowed with a kaleidoscope of colours, so that the wood of first-century Palestine was almost invisible underneath. The jewels were there because this object was as close as men could get in this world to the Son of God. Nothing was more precious than the true cross on which the Saviour had redeemed the sins of mankind and given back to a fallen race the hope of everlasting life.