As Bascot approached, the preceptor came forward and spoke quietly. “We are here, de Marins, as you asked. Where shall we keep watch?”
“The sacristy,” Bascot replied. “The door is in the shadows. You can see out, but none can see in.”
They went inside the church and d’Arderon and the priest crossed the nave, going to a small door near the altar. Just before he slipped inside d’Arderon turned and whispered a benediction. “God be with you, de Marins. And with this venture.”
Once they were out of sight, Bascot knelt at the low rail in front of the altar, crossing himself and murmuring a prayer as he did so. The darkness inside the building was relieved only by the small glimmer of the sanctuary lamp and the larger brightness of one fat beeswax candle. Above the altar hung a wooden crucifix carved with the tortured body of Christ, the candle’s light accentuating the hollows of the face and glistening upon the nails thrust cruelly through the hands. With one last plea for heavenly aid, Bascot stretched himself out full-length on the stones of the floor, face down and arms extended so that his body formed an imitation of the cross that hung above him.
As Bascot’s cheek touched the coldness of the stone, he was reminded of the night before he had taken his vow to become a Templar, when he had lain in just such a fashion. But then there had been gladness and joy in his heart, not stealth. This time, instead of meditating upon God and contemplating a future in His service, Bascot was laying his back open to an assassin’s knife, hoping that the murderer of Hugo and the others would be tempted to try to silence him before he had a chance to reveal the name that Anselm had supposedly whispered on his deathbed. It was a wild scheme, as d’Arderon had said, but Bascot hoped it would work.
There was no sound from the sacristy, but Bascot could feel d’Arderon’s presence as surely as if the preceptor were kneeling beside him. Since the laws of old King Henry stated that, other than a close relative, only a witness to the act of murder or attempted murder could lay a charge against the assailant, Bascot had asked the Temple for help in providing one. D’Arderon, on learning of the danger Bascot proposed to put himself in, had insisted on coming himself. He had brought a priest with him in case his services should be needed. Bascot fervently hoped they would not.
The stones beneath him smelled faintly of incense, along with a trace of the gritty aroma of leather and oil, a reminder that this chapel was used mainly by the castle garrison. Many a knee encased in mail must have bent in genuflection where Bascot now lay. It was a comforting thought. As the moments went by, the silence in the chapel became complete. Not the rustle of a mouse or the squeak of a bat could be heard. Only the faint exhalation of his own breath sounded in Bascot’s ears, and the beating of his heart.
The stillness dragged on. If the murderer came at all, it would be in the darkest part of the night, after all the guests and residents of the castle were asleep, but it had been necessary to come well before that time to make the vigil seem genuine. Bascot felt tension gather in his injured leg and tried to relax his muscles to ease it, thankful for the leather eye patch that shielded his cheek from the stone beneath. He would have an hour or two yet to wait.
Slowly his mind drifted, returning to thoughts of his long imprisonment. Was the capture of this murderer the reason he had been spared for all those years? He thought of the cell he had first been incarcerated in, the dust, the heat, the constant drone of flies, the evil smirking face of his gaoler when he threw him, twice a day, a mouldy lump of some hard bread-like substance. He remembered the day he had been herded out of his cell, lined up with other prisoners, not a Christian amongst them, and been inspected by a Saracen noble on a prancing white horse. Then the whip that had lashed across his shoulders as he was driven forward with a few others to become a slave in an infidel household. The Muslim overseer into whose care he and the other slaves had been entrusted had taken delight in finding the most menial and degrading tasks for the Christian captive to perform. Bascot had been unable to contain the humiliation and rage that had engulfed him.
It had been for insolence that his eye had been put out and the same reason, later, had prompted his sale, and that of Benjamin’s, to the captain of a pirate ship. He could still recall the monotonous rhythm of the ship’s drum as he and forty others pushed and pulled the huge oars to its beat, their feet chained into place, terror in their hearts when the ship of a trader was attacked and they were locked in place, defenceless while the battle between the pirates and their prey raged around them.
It had been during a storm that he had escaped, one of the sudden forceful tempests that were common in the sea south of the island of Cyprus. For the better part of a morning, rain and wind had lashed them, the waves of the ocean boiling and foaming as though they were afloat in a huge cauldron. Finally the flimsy planks of the boat, long past need of caulking, had given way, letting the sea rush in to batter captors and slaves alike. Bascot remembered how the mast had come crashing down to where he and Benjamin, along with two others, were chained, knocking free the hasp that held their leg irons in place. As it slid loose, the mast had suddenly tilted, trapping Bascot’s leg beneath it. Benjamin, already on his feet and preparing to dive overboard to freedom, had hesitated when he saw that Bascot could not move. Then the Jewish boy had turned and, putting all his weight to the mast, had freed Bascot’s trapped limb. It had been at that moment that one of the Saracen pirates had stumbled across them and, raising his sword, had cleaved Benjamin’s neck where it joined his shoulder. Amongst the struggling, howling mass of slaves and pirates, his leg useless, Bascot had found the strength to drag the guard down beside him and wrench the scimitar from the man’s grasp. With one swift stroke he had disembowelled him. But when he turned to Benjamin, the Jewish boy was almost dead, the bright blood pumping out of his throat like a geyser, mixing with the slicing drops of rain and covering his body in a mantle of red.
Bascot had tried, with difficulty, to raise Benjamin up, but the boy had looked at him with his soft brown eyes, moved his lips once in an attempt to speak and died. A moment later the pirate vessel was pitching and tossing in its own death throes and Bascot was thrown into the raging torrent of the sea. He remembered no more until the next day, when he found himself on an empty strand of shore, his body lying half-in and half-out of the receding waves. Like flotsam he had been thrown up on the beach with other bits of wreckage from the pirate ship. It had been there, his ankle smashed and his lungs full of seawater, that some fishermen had found him and taken him to their village. They cared for him until he could be removed to the Templar hospital on the island of Cyprus. The following months were misty in his memory, a blur of pain and fevered images, but he had not forgotten Benjamin, or the look on his face as he had died.
Bascot saw that look now, in his mind’s eye, and murmured a prayer for the soul of the dead Jew. It might be blasphemy to do so, but if Benjamin had not freed his leg, at the cost of his own life, Bascot would not be alive now. He pushed his face into the stone. If he had been spared it must have been for a purpose. Was it for this night’s vigil, this catching of a killer? Would the murderer even come? Had he been wrong in his assumptions, was the person he believed responsible for all those deaths innocent of it all? Was it another, even now sleeping the untroubled sleep of those without a conscience?