What the green man had to do with the Templars Teddy couldn’t explain, but this was a Templar church so it must have had some significance.
Everything in a Templar church was significant. They’d moved on to the matching long stones set into the chancel steps, the altar steps and one window ledge – these identified by Teddy as the lids of Templar stone coffins, now part of the fabric of the church. Teddy laughing, in his element now, the historian, the tour guide.
‘Someone said you can throw the Templars out of the building, but you’ll never get the building back from the Templars.’
Giving her the primary-school version, for which she’d been quite grateful.
The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon: founded in the early twelfth century, the time of the crusades, ostensibly to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem. The King of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, had allowed them to establish their headquarters at the al-Aqsa mosque, believed to be the site of the original Temple.
They’d begun, it was said, with only nine members, led by one Hugh de Payens. Monastic soldiers, red crosses on their surcoats, growing over the next century into something internationally powerful, influential and very wealthy.
Too wealthy and too powerful, by the thirteenth century, for the King of France, Philip IV, and the pet pope he’d acquired, Clement V, accommodated at the time in Avignon. The French Templars had all been arrested in a series of simultaneous dawn raids on Friday, 13 October 1307, accused of a black catalogue of heresies.
‘Hang on …’ It hadn’t taken much calculation. ‘Doesn’t that mean it’s exactly—’
‘I’m afraid it does. Seven hundred years ago next Saturday. I was hoping we’d have a permanent minister in place by then, but it was not to be. It therefore falls to me to conduct some sort of memorial service for the poor chaps.’
‘You don’t sound totally enthused.’
‘It is so obvious?’
‘And the problem is … what?’
‘Fanatics, Merrily. The known facts about the Templars are relatively few – the amount of wild speculation has been quite monumental in recent years.’
‘The Da Vinci Code?’
‘And its source, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. All the preposterous theories undermining the central tenets of Christianity as we know it.’
‘Mmm.’
Everybody knew about it now: the alleged bloodline of Jesus from his alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene, the female disciple whose crucial role was supposedly written out of the scriptures by the Roman Catholic Church. Jane had been quite taken with the idea that the real reason for the suppression of the Knights Templar had been their guardianship of this secret knowledge … and the whereabouts of the tomb of Christ, unrisen.
Whether or not you accepted this, Teddy Murray had said, the charges against the Templars were surely made up.
‘Like many of those levelled at various abbots by Henry VIII’s people during the Reformation. What kings tended to covet most in religious organizations was their money.’
The last Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay, had been burned alive in Paris, but the persecution had been less extreme in Britain, where most Templars had been allowed to join other monastic orders – except, apparently, the order of Hospitallers of St John to which the properties of Garway had been transferred.
De Molay was now seen as a martyr and Friday the Thirteenth … ‘Because of this? That’s the reason for the whole superstition and a bunch of slightly distasteful movies?’
‘Such is the received wisdom, Merrily. What rather bothers me is that the church promises to be packed. I’ve had letters from all kinds of organizations wanting to be represented – from Templar re-enactment groups to more … shall we say more sinistersounding societies.’
‘Like what?’
Teddy had said there seemed to be a number of occult-sounding groups whose rituals were supposed to be based on Templar practices. He said he didn’t know much about them. Merrily knew a little more, from Huw Owen’s reading list. Supposedly ancient formulae handed down through Renaissance magical orders and then developed by the fashionable fraternities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mainly bollocks.
‘Lucky the anniversary is going to be a Saturday, then,’ Merrily said.
‘You think that will change anything? I don’t. It’s their first opportunity in a century to commemorate the suppression – and a century ago few, if any, of these theories were in the public domain.’
‘Why here? There must lots of Templar churches all over the country. In fact—’
‘Actually, no,’ Teddy said. ‘Nothing so perfectly preserved. The London temple, for instance, was wrecked in the Blitz. There’s nowhere more authentic. Or more isolated and yet … get-at-able.’
He’d unlocked the tower, dark and starkly atmospheric with its funeral bier and a magnificent medieval oak chest hewn from a massive log.
‘Whose idea was it to have a memorial service?’
‘So many people wrote in, we couldn’t get out of it, Merrily. So I’m quite anxious that this business with the Master House should be dealt with before then. Do you think that will be possible?’
‘Before next weekend?’
‘Bad enough when the girl arrived. Wish I hadn’t been here.’
Merrily had been forced to say that she’d do her best to get it wrapped. And if Huw was right that might be on the cards. She’d asked Teddy where the Master House came into the picture. One of the Templar farms, he’d said, that was all. They farmed sheep, as did the Hospitallers after them.
As did the locals today. Not much had really changed in Garway, Merrily was thinking as the mobile chimed to indicate that DI Bliss had left the building.
‘Raining hard in the police car park, is it, Frannie?’
‘It’s not raining at all, and I’m not in the police car-park. I’m off the premises entirely, and if it was known I was calling you I’d probably have a tail.’
‘Sorry?’
Merrily was still thinking about the Garway Green Man who, having small, stubby horns, might be expected also to have a tail.
‘All right, listen,’ Bliss said. ‘I may be touching upon something you already know about, but why would the gentlefolk that humble coppers like myself used to call the Funnies suddenly have become interested in you?’
‘The Funnies?’
‘I’m thinking specifically of a feller in an unmarked room at headquarters who very occasionally creeps around this division when it’s felt that national security might be at stake.’
Merrily rubbed vainly at the condensation on the windscreen. Without the engine running, it kept re-forming under her palm.
‘You’re talking about the Special Branch?’
‘I hope you’re on your own using language like that.’
‘Frannie, are you actually saying the Special Branch are making inquiries about me?’
‘I’m saying nothing, Merrily.’
She scrubbed furiously at the windscreen, starting to put it together, and it was … it was beyond ridiculous.
‘What are you doing, exactly?’ Bliss said.
‘Trying to see out of the bloody—’ She sank back in her seat. ‘I’m looking into something connected with the Duchy of Cornwall’s investments in Herefordshire. Would that explain anything?’
A short silence, except for a car engine somewhere and a clanging that became duller. What sounded like Bliss moving away from something to a place of greater safety.