by James Becker
But what he could not afford to do was be caught by the gendarmes still in possession of the Glock. So he’d reduced the pistol to its component parts and disposed of them, along with the shoulder holster and the bullets, in rubbish bins in various lay-bys and rest areas en route. By the time he joined the N20, all trace of the pistol had vanished from the car.
In Toulouse, he drove straight to the car hire company and handed over the Peugeot. Then he and Angela picked a hotel at random and took a taxi to their destination.
Angela had been noticeably quiet on the journey, and had refused to tell him anything about the email she had received or, for that matter, exactly who the mysterious George was and why he would be likely to pick them up at the airport.
‘I’ll tell you at the hotel,’ was all she would say, and while Bronson concentrated on covering the distance as quickly as he reasonably could, she buried herself on various websites using her smartphone, occasionally muttering what sounded like muffled curses and just as often smiling with quiet satisfaction when something she was looking for apparently panned out.
‘Okay,’ Bronson said as he finally put down their bags on the floor of the hotel room not far from Toulouse’s Blagnac airport and turned to face her. ‘We’re at the hotel now, so spill the beans. What’s happened?’
‘You’ve been very patient, not to mention very quiet, which I did appreciate. I’ve got a lot to tell you, so let’s go down to the lounge. It looked quite a bit more comfortable than this bedroom.’
They went down to the ground floor, found seats at a corner table and ordered drinks. When they arrived, Angela took out her phone, navigated to the page she wanted and then looked at Bronson.
‘Let me get the easy bit out of the way first,’ she said. ‘The only George I know is the same George that you know of. That’s George Anderson, the academic from the British Museum who’s working at the Bibliothèque Serpente in Paris.’
‘The man who started this hare running.’
‘Exactly. I needed to make sure that you didn’t go ahead with booking a flight back to London, so I invented a mythical George to act as a taxi driver for us because that seemed like a good way of doing it. I was hinting that we would have to check that he was free to collect us before we booked a flight. And I had to do that because London isn’t where we need to go. George was on my mind anyway because, as you obviously guessed, the email I received didn’t come from the museum. It came from George himself. Let me read it to you.’
She leaned forward slightly to make sure that Bronson could hear.
‘“Dearest Angelina” – sorry about that; he’s always assumed that I spend most of my spare time robbing tombs like Lara Croft, and as she was played in the first movie by Angelina Jolie, that’s what he always calls me – “no more fake academics or homicidal Israelis, thank God, and all is quiet in the street of the snake. But I have found something quite interesting. Nothing to do with the Hautpoul papers, or not directly anyway. I became curious about the other family names mentioned in that archive because of the unwelcome attention it generated, and I ran a few searches just to see if we held any other material that might be relevant. Nothing much turned up about the Blancheforts, the Voisins or the Aniorts, so that looked like a dead end. Then I had a bit of a brainwave. Two of those family names start with consonants, but the name Aniort begins with a vowel, so I did a search under D for d’Aniort or Daniort, just in case we had been sent anything else and it had been misfiled. I discovered that the library had received a small collection of papers under that name a couple of weeks before the Hautpoul material arrived.”’
Angela looked up to make sure Bronson was paying attention, which he was. She stopped reading the email word for word and summarised the rest of the message.
‘George confirmed that this folio came from the same notary in Limoux, and listed what most of the papers cover; they’re the usual stuff you’d expect a noble family to accumulate, similar to what’s in the main Aniort archive. But there was one document that didn’t fit the pattern. It also wasn’t recorded in the library’s register, maybe because it was tucked inside another set of papers. It was a single sheet of parchment, written on both sides. George decided to call it the “Templar Codex” which he told me was—’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Bronson said, interrupting, ‘I thought a codex was—’
‘You’re absolutely right,’ Angela said, interrupting his interruption. ‘The smallest possible codex is two sheets of paper attached together along the left-hand edge, so this isn’t a codex. This is just George making a joke. He knows what a codex is as well as anyone. Anyway, the important thing is not what he’s called it but what the document actually says.’
‘Which is?’ Bronson sounded impatient.
‘First, it doesn’t mention the Ark explicitly, though the Templars get a name-check. Second, it’s not encrypted but plaintext. A plaintext written in Latin, in fact. Third, it’s dated 1423, which is almost two centuries after the fall of Montségur and over a hundred years after the purging of the Templars. George sent me scans of the parchment and his translation of the Latin. I’ve translated it as well from scratch and my version is pretty much the same as his.’
‘And it says…?’
‘It refers to “the relic of Solomon” – which is a clear reference to the Ark of the Covenant – and states that it was collected by a “ship of the order” from Cotlliure in the autumn of 1307. The ship sailed out of the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic coast of Iberia. Bad weather forced it to take refuge in Lisbon harbour for a couple of weeks, and then it sailed on to La Rochelle. It remained in that harbour until several other vessels had been assembled and loaded with what the parchment describes as “goods from Paris” – and I think we know exactly what that is describing. The small fleet waited a few days for a break in the weather and then set sail early one morning.’
Angela stopped talking and looked at Bronson.
‘Is that it?’ he asked, ‘because if it is, that doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know or hadn’t worked out.’
‘No, that’s not it,’ Angela replied. ‘That’s just the first part – the first third, in fact – of the story, and you’re right: it confirms what we already knew. The next sentence describes the ships making landfall in a harbour on the southern side of the mouth of a wide river to the east of a castle on a rock. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds remarkably like a description of Edinburgh and the harbour of Musselburgh.’
‘Yes, it does. My guess was that if the Templar fleet had reached Scotland it could easily have made landfall near Musselburgh. The present harbour is seventeenth-century, but there’s been a harbour there since Roman times, and in almost the same location.’
‘What the parchment says next removes any doubt about the location, because it describes transporting the unspecified “goods” south along a river to a town named after the order. You know about this kind of thing. Where are they talking about?’
‘Temple,’ Bronson replied immediately. ‘It can’t be anywhere else. That means the river they used was the Esk. Temple was originally known as Balantrodach, from a Gaelic phrase that meant “town of the warriors”, which was a direct reference to the Templars, but obviously “Temple” rolls off the tongue rather more easily. The Templars were granted the land by David I back in 1128, when the first Grand Master of the order was Hugues de Payens, and it became their most important base and main preceptory in Scotland. And although the Knights Templar order was officially abolished in 1312 in England and Scotland because of the papal directive in the Ad providam bull, they weren’t persecuted to anything like the same extent in Britain as they were in France. In fact, most of them were assimilated by the Hospitallers and very few were found guilty of anything.
‘So a landing at Musselburgh makes sense. The other interesting thing about Temple, and about Midlothian, is that it’s been a major producer of coal pretty much since the second century and the Roman occu
pation, which means there are plenty of abandoned mines in the area where the Ark and whatever else the Templars took out of the Paris commandery could have been secreted away as an alternative to storing them in their preceptory.’
‘Bravo. So that’s the second part of what this misnamed Templar Codex is telling us, but it’s the third part, the biggest section of the document, that’s the most interesting. That states specifically that at the end of the fourteenth century, in 1398, a small fleet of ships set out from Scotland and sailed west across the Atlantic carrying the relic of Solomon and a considerable quantity of other goods from Paris, all guarded by a group of Templar knights. The Templars were looking for somewhere safe to hide the items they were carrying to avoid any possibility of them being seized by either the Hospitallers or the still hostile Catholic Church. The final part of the text describes the return of only two ships from that expedition after having found safe places to store the cargo in the country where they’d landed.’
‘Are you serious?’ Bronson asked. ‘This was, what, about a century before Columbus set sail to find a westerly route to the East Indies and found a new world instead?’
Angela nodded. ‘I’m perfectly serious, and so, I believe, is whoever wrote this piece of text. You mentioned Columbus. There are two things you need to know about him. First, and despite what virtually every American believes, Columbus didn’t discover America. What he actually discovered were some of the islands of the Caribbean and a few bits of Central and South America, but he never saw or landed on any part of North America and had no idea that that vast continent lay just over the horizon. So when Americans talk about pre-Columbian times or celebrate Columbus Day, they’re just perpetuating a fundamental error about the discovery of their nation. They’re honouring a man for something he didn’t actually do.’
‘Okay, so if it wasn’t Columbus, who was it?’
‘It was a Venetian explorer named Giovanni Cabotto, more commonly known to us as John Cabot. He set sail from Bristol in England on board a small ship called the Matthew, and made landfall on the coast of Newfoundland in June 1497 – and I really don’t need to point out the obvious significance of that name in this context. Despite being a Venetian, Cabot’s voyage had been funded and sponsored by King Henry VII of England, and so the flag he planted was British and he claimed the new continent in the name of the king. Of course, even he wasn’t the first, though he was the first one to get there during the period when Columbus was exploring the world.
‘Apart from the native Americans who probably reached the continent over a northern land bridge during some interglacial period several millennia earlier, the honour of being the first people to reach America belongs to Leif Eriksson and his crew of Vikings who landed, again in Newfoundland, about half a millennium before Columbus even set sail. There’s a place called L’Anse aux Meadows – which is named after a kind of jellyfish, oddly enough – in northern Newfoundland. This site has been fully excavated and partially reconstructed. The remains there are clearly Viking and date from around 1000 ad. And there are plenty of relics in that part of the continent to prove that explorers who used a runic language – meaning Norsemen – were regular visitors.
‘Finally, if Columbus really had discovered America, the continent would probably have been called Columbia or something like that, but it was actually named after a Florentine explorer and navigator named Amerigo Vespucci. He sailed across the Atlantic at least twice between 1497 and 1504, once for the Spanish crown and the second time for the Portuguese ruling family, and then wrote a couple of very popular booklets about what he claimed to have seen and done. He established that Brazil was part of a new continent and not an unexplored part of the East Indies, as Columbus always believed, and he named the continent he’d visited “the New World”, a name that stuck. Then a cartographer called Martin Waldseemüller, who had studied Vespucci’s publications, applied a variant of the man’s first name – America rather than Amerigo – to a 1507 map he was preparing that included the new continent, and that name also stuck. That’s why America is called America. It’s named after a bloke from Florence who had nothing to do with its discovery.’
‘I think I knew some of that already,’ Bronson said. ‘So what was the second thing?’
‘What?’
‘You said there were two things I needed to know about Columbus. The first was that he didn’t discover America. What was the second?’
‘Oh yes. As well as being an explorer, Columbus was also the world’s first true socialist.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
Angela grinned at him. ‘Think about it, about what Columbus did. When he set out, he didn’t know where he was going. When he got there, he didn’t know where he was. When he got back, he didn’t know where he’d been. And he did it all on borrowed money. Isn’t that more or less a definition of true socialism?’
Bronson laughed. ‘Got me there,’ he said.
‘It’s an old joke, but it’s also true. Right up to the end of his life Columbus believed he really had found another route to the East Indies and had landed on bits of that region that hadn’t been discovered before. Allegedly, if any of his ship’s company disagreed with this contention, he had them flogged or even executed. He was, by most accounts, a spectacularly unpleasant man to deal with.’
‘Okay,’ Bronson said. ‘Let’s get back to this claim about an expedition across the Atlantic. Is there any independent evidence that that could have happened?’
‘Oddly enough, yes, though some of it is more circumstantial than concrete, and it suggests that the expedition of 1398 was just one of a series of voyages by the Templars that had probably started as early as the twelfth century. When the first of the Spanish conquistadors reached Yucatán, the arrival of white men apparently didn’t surprise the natives because they’d already encountered similar men who had visited years earlier and had taught them many things. According to the monks who were a part of Columbus’s voyages, the natives were also already familiar with red crosses on white tunics, which was the standard garment worn by the Templars over their armour. And there’s one other piece of anecdotal evidence that’s interesting. Have you ever heard the name Kukulkan?’
Bronson thought for a moment, then nodded cautiously. ‘Yes. I think he was an Aztec god, or maybe Mayan.’
‘Mayan, actually, and in carvings and sculptures he was normally depicted as a feathered snake. But strangely, after about 1200 ad, Kukulkan, who was also known as Quetzalcoatl to the Aztecs, was usually described as a human being rather than a serpent, a white man who wore a robe or cloth and who had blue eyes, blonde hair and a beard. Don’t forget that neither the Maya nor the Aztecs had beards. Just imagine how a Templar Knight, with his battle sword and armour, his white tunic and Caucasian features and beard – because the Templars didn’t shave – would have appeared to the natives, arriving in a huge vessel powered by the wind. It’s easy to imagine them seeing him as a divine being, as their god come to life. And apparently Kukulkan taught the Maya exactly the kind of things that a Templar Knight would have knowledge of, subjects like agriculture, astronomy, mathematics and medicine. It’s a long way from being conclusive, but it’s certainly indicative.’
‘Yes, but that’s the wrong place,’ Bronson said. ‘You said the parchment states that the Templars crossed the Atlantic from Scotland, which means they would have landed somewhere in the north of the continent, or maybe even in Canada, rather than in the Caribbean or South America.’
‘I know. Those legends about the Maya are just a bit of unconfirmed circumstantial evidence that suggests the New World wasn’t really that new even before Columbus set out. There are plenty of other stories about different groups of people making the journey across the pond, including Basque and English fishermen working the Grand Banks and even a bunch of Irish monks. But there is one piece of unambiguous evidence that definitely places travellers from Europe in Canada during the medieval period. I can’t find the date, but wh
en roadworks were being carried out in the town of Chester in Nova Scotia, two coins turned up that were later identified as being Italian, from the republic of Genoa, and minted between 1139 and 1339. They were apparently a very common type of coin at the time, hence the wide date range, but the point is that nobody travelling to the area in the seventeenth century when colonisation started would have had those coins in their pocket. That would be like you today carrying around a couple of seventeenth-century groats. They had to have been taken to Nova Scotia at some time in the medieval period. And there’s one other indicator of the Templars having been in the area. Have you ever heard of the Overton Stone?’
‘Heard of it, yes, but I can’t remember what or where it is.’
‘Okay, Overton’s a town on the western coast of Nova Scotia, and there’s a granite boulder there that has some interesting and very clear carvings on it. There’s a fairly typical cross pattée inscribed within a circle and with four dots outside the circle next to the ends of the arms. The Templars often used to mark their crosses with dots, though usually between the arms. It looks very similar in style to other known Templar carvings. And next to it are three native symbols, presumably carved by somebody from one of the local Mi’kmaq tribes.
‘The Mi’kmaq have an established oral tradition about men wearing white robes emblazoned with red crosses landing on their shores centuries ago, which is another pointer towards the Templars. The carvings show a crescent moon off to one side and a central carving of a feather overlying what look like tobacco leaves. The carvings haven’t been properly dated, but most estimates suggest they’ve been there for at least half a millennium. They’re certainly very old.
‘Now, what I haven’t told you about this piece of text is what it says the Templars did when they reached their destination. Or what their actual destination was.’
