When he woke up, a little after dawn, he found the door again unlocked. He looked outside, but there was no one there, no one standing guard, no one to stop him going where he would. He dressed quickly and started down the long corridor and down a flight of stairs. He stopped at an open doorway, the entrance to a gallery he estimated to be at least two hundred feet in length, a room with a high, arched ceiling and, at discreet intervals, tall peaked windows to let in the light. Along the entire length of both facing walls were painted portraits, most, though not all of them, life size or even larger. Hart stepped inside to look closer at the first one in the series, a knight in full armor, a white tunic emblazoned with a red cross, holding a shiny plumed helmet in his hand, standing next to a white charger. In the background, at the crest of a shadowed hill, lay the smoking ruins of a tan-colored stone fortress.
“The First Crusade,” said a voice just behind him.
Hart turned around to find Jean Valette sitting on a backless wooden bench. Instead of a business suit of the sort he had worn yesterday, he was dressed in a fashion that, if not nearly as old as the chateau, was still years out of date. He looked like something painted by one of the Impressionists, or one of the painters themselves, in flowing green corduroy trousers and a loose-fitting yellow linen jacket, a lavender shirt, brown calf-leather shoes, and blue socks. He was lounging on the bench, half-reclining on his elbow. There was a drowsy, languid expression in his eyes, and, as if to serve as a counterpoint, a mocking smile on his lips. With an idle gesture of his hand, he motioned toward a portrait that, from the long angle of his perspective, looked like a single portrait, a single person, seen in the infinitely receding image of a double set of mirrors.
“Doesn’t everyone greet their family at the beginning of a new day?” he asked with a slight tip of his head that signaled the double meaning of a private joke. With surprising agility, he sprang to his feet. “Come, I’ll introduce you.”
Hart did not move.
“Someone locked me in last night. Am I being kept a prisoner?”
“No, of course not. The door wasn’t locked this morning, was it? You’re free to go wherever you like, to do whatever you please. Yes, it was locked last night, but there was a reason. Had you come downstairs in the middle of the night, it might have been-what shall I say?-awkward.”
“Because I might have tried to do something about what was going on: that man you brought here, blindfolded and tied up. I may not be a prisoner, but he certainly is!”
Jean Valette seemed faintly amused at the suggestion. Placing his hands in the oversize pockets of his jacket, he lowered his eyes. His head moved side to side in the rhythm of someone used to being misunderstood. He looked up and shrugged.
“He would have come if we had invited him, but, as I think you’ll agree after you meet him, it’s better all around if his coming here is a surprise.”
Apparently, it was to be as much a surprise for Hart as for this mysterious, unwilling guest. Valette pointed to the portrait that had first caught Hart’s attention, and began a long disquisition on his ancestor and the founder of his house.
“We don’t know these things for sure, but it would be reasonable to suppose that he must have been one of the close confederates of William the Conqueror. He was certainly one of the leaders of the Normans when William conquered England, a man who would have been where we were yesterday, Mont Saint-Michel, when it was first constructed and all the Norman nobility would gather there to make their plans and say their prayers before embarking on that first crusade to return to Christendom the birthplace of Christ.”
Moving slowly from portrait to portrait, Jean Valette offered a few insightful remarks about each of his once famous ancestors, but none of that was as interesting to Hart as the way he described each life, each heroic achievement, as links in a chain that bound them all together, points on a line drawn by a hand none of them could see.
“Step back,” he advised Hart. “Let your eye run down the wall, then turn around and do the same thing the other way. Don’t study their faces, don’t look at them as individuals; look instead at the changes in the long sweep of time. What do you notice?” he asked as Hart turned and looked. “What is the first thing you see?”
Jean Valette led him down the gallery, moving past each portrait, but not stopping in front of any of them.
“Notice the way the armor changes. It starts with a whole suit of it, every part of the body covered in steel; then, gradually, there is less of it, until, finally, when we reach the seventeenth century and the reign of Louis XIV, there isn’t any armor at all. We are no longer warriors, ready to die for our religion; we are courtiers-Look there! See how that one is dressed-velvet, silk, and satin; his fingers full of rings. Look at the difference! In those earlier portraits you could almost feel the sense of adventure, the strength, the courage, the lack of any hesitation. They knew what they believed in-they did not have any doubt about it. They were willing, eager, to die for it. When they listened to the Song of Roland, they were listening to a story about themselves: men for whom the only real sin was not to fight when war was needed. And this courtier, this preening favorite of the court? Do those look like the eyes of someone you would follow into battle? They are too full of cunning, too full of contempt for all the people he looks down on. He never rides a horse; he sits in a carriage. He doesn’t fight with a sword; he uses words to wound. Still,” added Jean Valette with a wry glance, “though only with words, he at least sometimes fought face to face. When we get to the nineteenth century, he does not fight at all; he only makes money. Look over there,” he said, turning toward the wall behind them and a long line of portraits of men dressed in black. “We became bankers, financiers. We didn’t believe in anything enough to go to war about it. We only believed in profit.”
Jean Valette had begun to get nervous, agitated, as he spoke. He held his hands behind his back as if it were the only way to keep them under control. He became conscious of what he was doing and began to laugh without embarrassment at what he seemed prepared to concede were his own peculiarities. One hand on his hip, he scratched his head with the other.
“I’m being very unfair, of course. Many of them were men of decency and courage, generous and kind: my father, for example.”
“I’ve heard what he did in the war.”
Jean Valette seemed surprised. He looked at Hart with gratitude.
“Later, perhaps, I’ll tell you something about him.”
He was silent for a moment, pondering, as it seemed, what his father had done. Then his eyes brightened and he motioned Hart to follow him back to the other side and the portrait of that other Jean Valette.
“Painted, as you might expect, to show him at the forefront in the Battle of Malta. Look at the way he stands there, the flag with the cross in one hand, the sword held high in the other. He looks like Saint Michael himself, Jean Valette, Grand Master of the Order of St. John!”
“Five hundred years ago,” said Hart, turning away from the portrait to Jean Valette, “and the order still exists. You spoke to them yesterday, at Mont Saint-Michel. You do every year, I gather. But the people who were there-they aren’t the only members of the Order, are they?”
Jean Valette was at first confused, but then he understood that the confusion was not his.
“Five hundred years ago, yes, but even more than that, back to the early part of the fourteenth century, when the Templars were all executed and their order dissolved. But you think…? Yes, I see: an ancient order, full of mystic secrets-always existing, never gone away; kept alive through passwords and special codes, down through the generations, waiting for the day when it can spring back to life and take its proper, leading part and save the world!” exclaimed Jean Valette, his eyes now bold, cheerful, and defiant. “I wish it were so. I wish the Order of St. John was what it was at the beginning, when it replaced the Templars as the militant arm of the church, when the church still believed there were things worth fighting for. I wish it were almost anything but what it has actually become: a church auxiliary for the idle rich, people who give money so they can call each other knights and think they can buy a place in heaven!”