Jack Whyte - Order in Chaos

“No, sir, I do not, although I have in the past, on King Robert’s behalf. Why would you ask me such a thing?”

Douglas had the grace to look embarrassed, but he shrugged his wide shoulders. “Because I have tidings that the monks on Arran should know of. King Robert has received word privily, from Archbishop Lamberton in England, that the Pope has sent a communication regarding the Temple to all the kings and princes in Christendom. King Robert himself did not receive the missive because he is excommunicate.”

Jessie’s breath caught in her throat, because she could see from Douglas’s expression that this communication would offer no solace to Will Sinclair and his men. “What did it say, this missive?”

Douglas cleared his throat. “It bore a title, Pastoralis Praeeminentiae . In it, the Pope asked all who received it to arrest all the Templars in their lands, and to do it—and these the King took to be important words—prudently, discreetly, and secretly. That done, they were to confiscate all their property and hold it in safekeeping for the Church.”

“But that is infamous! All Templars, everywhere in Christendom?”

“Aye, my lady.”

“So Sir William was right. He foretold this …” Jessie stopped, thinking hard, then looked at her nephew. “Did you know anything of this, Thomas?”

Randolph merely looked back at her, utterly mystified as to what she meant, and she turned back to Douglas. “When did this happen?”

“The Archbishop wrote that the letter was dated November the twenty-second, last year.”

“Barely a month after the arrests in France. Surely they could not have proven any of de Nogaret’s lies by then?”

“So it would seem, my lady … but I know nothing more than I have told you.”

Jessie fought to keep her face expressionless, merely nodding in acceptance of what she had been told, but her mind was full of the knowledge that the letter over which she had spent so much time and thought was now outdated and would have to be rewritten.

THREE

In the north anteroom of the Great Hall at Brodick, Will Sinclair set down his pen on the long refectory table that served him as a desk and stretched, arching his back and rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands as he grunted aloud with the pleasure of flexing his shoulders and straightening his spine. He had been working without rest since dawn, digging his way through the mountain of papers and parchment that had confronted him after weeks of neglect caused by other priorities. Most he had merely read and marked with his name, as evidence of his examination, before setting them aside on a smaller table to his left. Others he had examined more meticulously, making occasional notes to himself to remind him of their content and what had been achieved in recent months, and these he had also set aside, to his right.

His companions and brethren had achieved great things in a short time. Each of the two Arran chapters now had its own Chapter House, and each of those administered its own affairs and resources, from devotions and ritual procedures to stables, barracks, houses, crude farms, and warehouses. The program of horse breeding, training, and maintenance was now firmly established in both chapters, and military drill, albeit discreet, had come back into its own as a sine qua non of their daily practice. A strong and resilient trading schedule had been set in place, too, with their ships coming and going to and from both Brodick and Lochranza at regular intervals, plying the waters of Britain for the most part but venturing into Ireland and France, and occasionally, in the summer months, crossing the northern waters eastward to reach Norway and Denmark and the Germanic coastline to the Low Countries. Food was now plentiful, in sufficient supply to be stored and husbanded, and even livestock had been brought ashore in small numbers—swine, sheep, and goats in the main, but also a few cattle and oxen, tame geese with clipped wings, and fat white ducks whose eggs were a luxurious addition to the island diet, which consisted mainly of fish and oats.

Housing had sprung up throughout the island, but it was hidden in most places, carefully concealed from any stranger looking from a distance. The buildings were long and low, their walls and even their roofs made from peat and sod, their floors frequently excavated to provide the building material for the walls, so that although the height of most roofs was less than that of a man, the tallest man could stand easily inside. The first of the longhouses had been designed and built by a brother called Anselm, who had in better times been one of the Order’s most gifted architects and builders, and when Will, surprised by the apparent gracelessness of the construction, had called in the elderly monk to question him, Anselm had looked at him in surprise. Was it not their intent to keep their presence on the island secret, he asked, and was it not also true that they would not be remaining on Arran forever? When Will agreed that it was, the monk had shrugged expressively and spread his hands. That was what he had set out to do, he said: to keep their presence shrouded from strange eyes, and to ensure that they would leave little trace behind when they returned to France. Besides, he said, they had insufficient supplies of wood and lumber to do otherwise. The peat-built buildings could be quickly torn down when the time came to leave, and within a few years their walls would return to the ground from which they were made, leaving no trace of their existence. Will had been unable to argue against the old man’s logic, and so he had given his blessing to the project and decreed that all their impermanent buildings would be made from peat thenceforth.

Now he was tired, but he had completed his work and could speak out loud and clear at the chapter gathering in two days’ time, giving praise and credit confidently where he felt each was due. He called in his earnest, humorless assistant, Brother Fernando, and instructed him in what he wished done with the different piles of documents, and then he sat thinking while the emaciated cleric bustled around him, collecting all the documents.

As soon as the brother had left, carrying a heavy basket full of scrolls, Will bent forward and took a fresh sheet of parchment from the pile at the back of his desk, then picked up his pen again, playing idly with it while he thought of what he would say in the report he had been planning for his superiors in Aix-en-Provence. He had sent three reports already, in February, April, and June, detailing the progress of the works he had set in motion in Arran, and requesting information on the status of the Temple in France. The third of those, in which he had labored long and hard to outline the dilemma he might face in the bleakest of all possible futures and the possibility of releasing the younger brethren from their vow of chastity, thereby permitting them to marry and procreate, had thus far gone unanswered, to his intense chagrin, for he had been hoping for some solid words of guidance. And the two replies he had received to his initial reports had both been terse, lacking in specifics and generally discouraging.

What he had not done, to this point, was set down in writing a description of what he had discovered when he opened the chests committed to his care upon leaving France. He had sent word, in his third report, that the Treasure now lay safely concealed, and had included a map of its location in the underground vault on his father’s lands in Roslin, but he had made no mention of having opened the chests and viewed the contents. Nor had he identified the location shown on the map. That information would be supplied in this next report, once he had confirmation that the map had arrived safely in the hands of the Order in Aix.