The five were there, dressed in their ragged sackcloth, tied around the waist with lengths of creeper from the churchyard. They looked terrible, with hacked clumps of hair and bare, bleeding patches of scalp, their faces cut and scratched from their crude attempts at shaving. De Blanchefort looked as bad as the rest – in fact, little Eddida was less ravaged as he had had no facial hair to start with.
Before they started from the church, de Blanchefort took John aside at the back of the nave. The coroner stared at his ravaged face in the dim dawn light. As well as the effects of the dagger on his head and stubble, a few days’ poor eating and sleeping and the constant stress of being a fugitive had taken a dreadful toll on the man, who looked haggard and drawn. Though not old, he had loose pouches of skin under his eyes and deep lines at the angles of his mouth, which had put twenty years on his appearance. His eyes were sunken in their sockets, but the actual orbs had a strange glint that made de Wolfe wonder for his sanity. ‘The others have given you their oath of abjuration,’ he said. ‘I wish to do the same.’
De Wolfe stared at him. ‘What the devil for? This is all a sham for your benefit.’
The other man shook his head emphatically. ‘I would feel better – and appear more convincing – if I had done what should be done to become an abjurer.’
To humour him, de Wolfe quickly administered the oath and the Templar solemnly repeated it.
‘Satisfied?’ snapped the coroner, anxious to get them down to the ship.
‘Partly – but now I also wish to confess, as did the others.’
‘Confess? Since when have you been a pirate?’ Exasperated with the man’s nonsense, de Wolfe watched the daylight strengthening through a window slit and was anxious to be gone.
‘I know that you are no priest, but I would feel better if I confessed.’
‘For God’s sake, de Blanchefort, stop this idiocy. We must leave now.’
The renegade Templar seized his arm, and his face, suffused with a strange obsession, came close to his. ‘I must confess to someone!’ he hissed. ‘For it was I who killed Gilbert de Ridefort.’
De Wolfe froze into the immobility of disbelief. ‘You killed him?’
De Blanchefort leaned on his crude cross. ‘I had to – he deserved to die for his lack of faith. He had decided to retract his promise to me to reveal the secret. After all we had been through – losing our membership of the Order, putting our lives at risk – after all the months of heartrending discussion and decisions, he decided that he could not, would not, do it. So I killed him, for being a craven coward and a traitor to the new truth.’
His voice became fanatical. ‘It is now left to me to reveal it! That is why I must survive to get to a place of safety, to preach and write the reality of Christendom.’
De Wolfe’s shock was passing into anger, but he needed to know how it had been done. ‘How did you find him?’
‘I suspected that his determination was weakening, even before we left France, so I came to Devon some days earlier than I told you in order to observe him. I also followed you, Crowner, and saw you meet with him. I saw you leave the city with him and, by questioning people, easily guessed that you would have taken him to your family home at Stoke. So I went there to meet with de Ridefort.’
‘Intending to kill him?’
De Blanchefort made an impatient gesture. ‘Of course not – I wanted to talk with him, to strengthen him. As I said, for some time I had sensed his wavering resolve, but not until we met in the woods near your manor did he tell me decisively that he had decided to give himself up to the Order and that he had abandoned our promise to reveal the truth.’ His voice became so impassioned that de Wolfe now knew that his mind was unhinged.
Thomas had been standing by all the time, listening open-mouthed at these frightful revelations, but Gwyn was more concerned with getting the abjurers out of the church. ‘We must go, Crowner, it is getting late!’ he urged, but de Wolfe ignored him.
‘So what happened?’ he demanded.
‘I was so incensed with him that we quarrelled violently, and I struck him on the head with a fallen branch. He fell dead, though I had not intended that. It was some freak blow – or maybe an act of God.’
‘But those other injuries – in the side and the hands,’ grated de Wolfe, holding his anger in check with difficulty.
‘My rage made me inflict on him those marks that denoted his lack of faith in our resolve. They were tokens that reflected the nature of the awful secret wilfully concealed by the Templars for all these years.’
‘The Awful Secret!’ rasped de Wolfe scornfully. ‘Was your secret worth the life of a brave man?’
‘A brave man!’ sneered de Blanchefort. ‘De Ridefort was a spineless coward when it came to the one thing in his life that really mattered. He could wield a sword, yes, and cut down Saracens, but he could not keep a promise to defy the hypocrisy and deceit that we discovered in the Church that we had served all these years.’ He waved his cross in de Wolfe’s face, his own contorted with manic emotion. ‘And as for the secret being worth one man’s life, I tell you, John de Wolfe, that if I and others like me are silenced, there will be tens of thousands of lives forfeited soon, when Rome’s scythe of repression slashes through the Languedoc. And in the centuries to come, the Inquisition that is blossoming now, like an evil flower, may annihilate millions who dare to question the autocracy of the Church.’
Gwyn tried again to get his master to move the men out of the building, but John silenced him with a wave of his hand as he glared at the flushed face and protuberant eyes of de Blanchefort.
‘Listen, you mad rogue! I’ve no time to discuss your warped theology!’ His anger was steadily rising. ‘If this is true, you are a murderer and must be exposed! You cannot now go on that vessel. I must arrest you.’
The man’s face was a mask of crazed cunning. ‘I am a sanctuary seeker and an abjurer – I have taken the oath and you have heard my confession. I am entitled to abjure.’
‘Nonsense, you arrogant fool! They were meaningless, obtained on your part by trickery and not sworn on the Holy Book!’
‘Then how are you to explain why I am here, deviously planted amongst your abjurers? And where is the man I replaced, the one you have wilfully let escape? You are guilty of deceit, perverting the course of justice and God knows what other crimes. You are trapped, de Wolfe, so let things take their course.’
After rapid reflection on his position, de Wolfe had to resign himself to the inevitable. If the sheriff discovered his plotting, he would never let him forget it. In fact, he would probably pursue every legal avenue to have him condemned, to take revenge for the recent humiliation that the coroner had visited on him over the Prince John affair. In addition, the Templars and the Church would be after his blood for deliberately engineering the escape of such a notorious heretic.
Fuming with anger, but powerless, he capitulated and signalled to Gwyn to lead the abjurers out of the church.
The other men were lined up inside the door but just as de Blanchefort began moving to join them, the coroner grabbed him roughly by the shoulder and swung him round so that they were face to face again.
‘Listen, you evil bastard, before you go, I want to know what this damned secret was that has caused me so much trouble. Understand?’
The former Templar shook his head slyly. ‘That will be revealed to the world at large soon, not dribbled out in whispers behind the hand.’
De Wolfe put a hand behind him and whipped out the dagger from his belt. In a second it was at de Blanchefort’s neck, already drawing a drop of blood where the needle-sharp point pricked the skin. ‘Tell me or, by God, I’ll kill you now and be damned to the consequences!’ His tone left the other man in no doubt that he meant exactly what he threatened.