Jack Whyte - Order in Chaos

“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.”