The Lost Treasure of the Templars

by James Becker

  Stevens had seemed unimpressed, and Jessop, who had seen the way the conversation was heading and didn’t much like it, because she really didn’t want to have to waste her time looking at a collection of worthless old volumes, had marshaled her final arguments. A lot of old books, she had told Stevens, were so common and so undesirable that they might only fetch a few pounds at auction, and probably a lot less if they were sold to a dealer, especially as a job lot. The days of a genuine treasure turning up, like a fragment of a Gutenberg Bible or other fifteenth-century relic of the very earliest days of publishing, were long gone. There was even less chance of anything older being in the collection. Antiques programs on television and the arrival of the Internet had more or less ensured that almost all the genuine finds had been, not to put too fine a point on it, found.

  “But you don’t know that for certain,” Stevens had insisted. “As far as I know, old Isaac inherited this collection from his great-great-grandfather, and from what I’ve been able to find out it was always kept in the library at the old family home, and had been for centuries.”

  That had sounded to Jessop like something of an exaggeration.

  “The paperback novels as well?” she’d inquired mildly.

  “No, of course not. I meant the old stuff. It’s only seeing the light of day now because they’re having to sell the house up in Scotland. Bloody death duties, of course.”

  “Scotland?” Jessop had asked.

  “Yeah. Had to hire a bloody van to get it all down here, and now the boxes are blocking up half of my garage. Anyway, I hear what you say, but I still want you to look at the collection. If it’s worth anything, you can buy it off me and sell it through your shop, because I certainly don’t want it. I live in a small apartment, and I’ve got no room for it here. If you tell me that none of the books are of any value, either you can have them for nothing and sell them through the trade or I’ll get them picked up from your shop and give them away to some charity shop, I suppose. They seem to take pretty much anything these days. And if you don’t want the books I’ll pay you a reasonable fee for your time,” he added, before Jessop could point out that she had no option but to charge for the time it took her to do valuations.

  Part of success in life lies in recognizing a fait accompli when you’re looking at one. Robin Jessop knew that Stevens simply wasn’t going to let it go, not least because she was well aware that there were no other antiquarian bookshops anywhere in the area she could suggest as alternatives, and she had finally and reluctantly agreed to inspect the collection on the terms Stevens had suggested.

  Pretty much ever since the seven large heavy-duty cardboard boxes had been delivered to the back door of her shop, she’d been regretting her decision. Even as she’d unpacked the first box, she saw immediately that there was almost nothing in it of any obvious value. But she’d persevered, emptying all the boxes before picking up any of the books to inspect them.

  As a first step she’d gathered together all the paperbacks, some of which had been packed into each box, and replaced them in the largest of the cardboard boxes after only the most cursory of inspections. Paperbacks were disposable items, in her view, and almost none of them had any value at all. But she did check the first few pages of each book, just in case. A first edition paperback of Ian Fleming’s initial “Bond” book, Casino Royale, and signed by the author, for example, would be of very significant value. But she quickly saw that there was nothing of any interest, just a somewhat broad selection of Westerns, thrillers, and a few historical novels, none signed by anybody and all in only average condition.

  Shifting those had cleared the decks somewhat, and then Robin had begun working her way through the rest of the collection, but that had proved to be almost equally disappointing. She’d looked at a handful of religious books, a couple of old—but not valuable—Bibles, books of hymns, and others of common prayer, none of them first editions and all rather tatty. There were collections of significant English writers, including most of the usual suspects—Shakespeare, Bunyan, Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, and other Lakeland poets among them—but these books seemed to have been bought for their decorative appearance, for their leather spines to grace a bookshelf, rather than to be read. At least, as far as Jessop could see, none of them had ever actually been opened. All were comparatively recent reprints, just as she’d expected. Some charity shop, she thought, as she packed them away in one of the boxes, would probably be delighted to take them.

  Then there was a motley selection of hardback novels, and these she looked at with more care. Until the advent of the Kindle and its hideous electronic kin—devices that Jessop privately regarded as the work of the devil, and which had changed the face of publishing for all time, and much for the worse, in her opinion—most novels had been published first as hardbacks and only later, perhaps as long as a year or even more after hardback publication, being released as paperbacks. Some of these hardback editions had sold in very small numbers, but if for some reason the paperback had then shot into the bestseller lists, many of those first edition hardbacks had acquired significant rarity value, especially if the author had written anything in them. Or, ideally, had written something and then died. So she checked the printing record and the first few pages of each one carefully.

  There were a dozen or so first editions of little-known novels by obscure authors, all in reasonable condition, but none of them were signed. These Jessop put aside for checking later and packed the rest of them away. She had spent another couple of hours going through the remainder of the newer books—those less than a hundred years old—and had picked out another handful of books that looked interesting. And then she’d started working her way through the really old stuff, the genuinely ancient volumes.

  In the early days of publishing, most of the books produced were religious in nature, all lineal and spiritual descendants of the very first mass-produced book in history, the almost priceless forty-two-line Gutenberg Bible. Nobody knew for certain how many copies of that first book had been printed: two contradictory letters had been written in 1455, one stating that the total was a hundred and fifty-eight, while the other claimed one eighty. Most modern researchers agreed the total was probably over a hundred and sixty, but what was known for certain was that only a mere forty-eight had survived the trials and torments, the fires and floods and general neglect, of the almost six hundred years since they were printed in 1455, and only twenty-one of those were complete works, the others being incomplete in one or another respect.

  Robin was well aware of the value of the Gutenberg Bible. The last time a complete copy had been sold, back in 1978, it had fetched 2.2 million dollars, and most informed estimates suggested that the current value of such a volume would lie in the twenty-five-million to thirty-five-million range. Even individual pages, properly authenticated and with a provenance that stood up to scrutiny, could fetch anything between twenty thousand and a hundred thousand each.

  Of course, she wasn’t expecting to discover such a treasure, and in this she had not been disappointed. There were more Bibles—another seven of them in all—a couple in pretty good condition with heavy and ornate leather covers, the pages intact and virtually unmarked, each of which had most likely come from a parish church somewhere. Those, too, she put aside, because they clearly had a value, if only as decorative objects. She also picked out another ten books on various subjects that seemed interesting enough to merit further study, and consigned the remainder of that pile to the cardboard boxes. And there were a few other books, on very specialized subjects, that she believed one or two of her longtime customers would probably want to buy, though in all honesty she couldn’t charge very much money for them, because those particular areas of the market were both extremely limited and not especially popular.

  And that just left her with a final couple of piles of about forty old volumes to look at. She’d found the book entitled Ipse Dixit about halfway down the
final pile, and it had puzzled her immediately. Her business was books, especially old books, and she normally expected to recognize every volume she saw, and to know it well enough to be able to state the date of its first printing to within a decade or two, to provide a précis of its subject matter, and certainly to know the identity of the author, if the book had been written by a single individual.

  But the Ipse Dixit volume puzzled her, because not only had she never seen one before, but she’d never even heard of it, although she knew the title had been used on a recent memoir written by an American judge. Unless her professional knowledge was woefully lacking, that particular ancient tome had never appeared in any of the catalogues or listings with which she was familiar. That could make it unique, or possibly so, and that fact alone implied that it would have some value.

  She placed the book on one side of her desk, deciding to look at it only after she’d examined the remaining volumes. It might take quite some time to locate any information about it. Or, she thought, with a sudden frisson of excitement, to perhaps fail to locate any information about it, to establish that it really was a genuine lost volume of some sort, a book never previously known, seen, or catalogued by anyone.

  Just under an hour later, Jessop stood up from her desk, picked up the final three books she’d checked, and carried them over to the last of the cardboard boxes that lined the passageway, a box that was still under half-full because of the collection of books she’d put to one side to value separately.

  Looking at all those took almost another two hours, and by the time she’d finished, her back was aching from the constant bending as she’d studied the volumes on her desk. But she was fairly satisfied. She’d identified almost twenty books that would be worth selling through a specialist auction house. She’d jotted down her estimates of the likely values they could achieve, and even after deducting her fee for providing the valuation and examining all the volumes, and the commission charged by the auction house, she hoped William Stevens would be pleased. He should come out of it with at least a few hundred pounds in his hands. She would have to discuss it with him, obviously, and arrange for all the other books to be removed and disposed of, but it was actually a far better result than she had expected.

  She placed all those books in a separate box and moved it to one side of her study, leaving all the others out in the passageway, and made herself a cup of instant coffee in her tiny kitchen, a room the builder of the property had obviously decided was too small to serve any other function.

  She lived literally above the shop. Downstairs and fronting onto the street was her bookshop, a corner-shop-sized premises comprising a largish single room lined with bookshelves and with stand-alone bookcases forming a kind of small literary maze through which browsers could amble at their leisure, hopefully plucking volumes from the shelves as they did so. At one end, near the counter, she’d positioned a low coffee table and four small armchairs, to encourage potential buyers to sit down, to enjoy a coffee or tea, and flick through the books they’d selected.

  She still wasn’t sure that was a good idea, combining the functions of a café and a bookshop, but her business adviser had assured her it would help get her shop off the ground. And so far it had helped; the receipts from the drinks sold sometimes exceeded the sales of books.

  It also helped that Betty Howarth, who ran the shop most of the time, was an accomplished home cook, with a noticeable skill when it came to baking, and her homemade cakes proved to be something of a draw, even for people who had apparently never read a single book in their lives and had no obvious intention of doing so at any time in the future. Betty, a slightly plump, dark-haired middle-aged lady who lived across the river in Kingswear, shared Robin’s love of books, even if she didn’t share her knowledge. That didn’t matter, because everything on the shelves was priced, and in the event of a query Robin could be downstairs in less than a minute.

  Above the commercial premises was a small two-bedroom flat. When the estate agent had sent her the details of the property, the apartment had been described as “charming and compact.” Like almost everything said by estate agents, this was not actually a lie but certainly required the truth to be interpreted in a somewhat elastic manner. When Robin had seen the “spacious living room,” which supposedly doubled as a dining room, she almost pulled out there and then.

  “I doubt,” she’d said to the agent, “if you could swing a six-week-old kitten in that room, and if you tried it with a fully grown cat you’d hit all four walls every time. That would certainly piss off the cat, and it doesn’t do much for me, either.”

  “Actually,” the agent had replied, “that expression—”

  “I know,” she’d interrupted. “It refers to a very different kind of cat. You don’t need to tell me.”

  The agent had nodded—Robin suspected that all estate agents went through some kind of training course that taught them that whatever customers said you always had to agree with them—but pointed out certain advantages that she might not have appreciated. The small rooms would make it cheaper to heat in the winter, and she wouldn’t have to buy as much furniture with less space to fill. And he had closed his argument by emphasizing the unpalatable facts Robin already knew: that particular shop with the apartment above it was the only property for sale in the town that came anywhere near fitting her requirements and was also within her modest price range, and he did have three other clients who had all expressed a serious interest in the building.

  So she hadn’t discussed it any further, but simply said she’d take the property, subject to the usual survey and the bank deigning to grant her a mortgage in exchange for a slice of her soul and a large proportion of her disposable income for the next quarter of a century, and had moved in just over six weeks later.

  And, in fact, it hadn’t worked out too badly. The master bedroom—if the enlarged box room could be dignified with such a grandiose title—just about accommodated her six-foot-wide bed, albeit with only about a foot of space on either side and around five feet at the end of the bed. The so-called guest bedroom she had immediately turned into a study, and apart from that, and the miniscule living room, she also had a bathroom with a separate lavatory and a kitchen that was about six feet square.

  Compact it certainly was.

  She carried the mug of coffee into the study, maneuvering carefully around the cardboard boxes—even the central passage of the flat was quite narrow—and then resumed her seat, slightly altered the angle of the adjustable light on the desk, and positioned the mysterious book squarely on the leather desk protector in front of her. She took hold of the hand-tooled leather cover and lifted it.

  Then she sat back in her seat, an expression of mild shock on her face, because something totally unexpected had just happened. She’d made a discovery that both surprised her and also, she suspected, served to explain something that up until then she hadn’t understood.

  The Ipse Dixit book wasn’t actually a book at all.

  2

  Helston, Cornwall

  One of the biggest problems with performing genealogical research is that it can be incredibly addictive, as David Mallory had already discovered. In fact, there were three problems with doing it. Apart from the addiction question, it was also comparatively expensive and definitely time-consuming.

  His interest in the subject had been triggered by an apparently inconsequential remark his mother had made to him, just a few days before she’d died in the hospital the previous year after a long illness. At the time, he hadn’t given much thought to what she’d said—there were far more pressing matters occupying his mind in the days immediately before and following her death—but as the months had passed, his thoughts returned to what she’d told him, and he’d begun to wonder if she was right.

  He’d also wondered if it mattered. And, although he was quite sure that it didn’t, the switch that engaged his curiosity had been tripped,
and there didn’t seem to be any easy way of turning it off. So he’d done a little research on the Internet, but he had quickly realized that to fully explore his ancestors he would need a piece of specialized software to enable him to plot his family tree, because his standard word processing program just wasn’t capable of doing it and he didn’t want to have to write a database to do the job. He would also need a list of Web sites and other resources that he could access to obtain the information he was looking for. Successful genealogical research, he had quickly realized, was more a matter of knowing where to look rather than just knowing what to look for.

  Once he’d bought and loaded the genealogy software, which cost less than he had expected, and had more or less gotten used to its quirks and foibles, Mallory had started rolling back the years, tracking his ancestors through time. And he’d found it simply fascinating, not to mention all-consuming.

  Not the names themselves, of course, because that was what they were, just names and dates with links to other names and other dates, but the time he spent wandering off into the endlessly intriguing byways of history, fleshing out the characters behind the names on his charts, the men and women to whom he quite literally owed his very existence.

  He’d quickly established that his mother’s throwaway remark—she’d told him that he was the eldest son of an eldest son of an eldest son of an eldest son, though she couldn’t remember all the names—was absolutely accurate. For whatever reason, he appeared to be the end product of a patriarchal lineage that had invariably involved firstborn male children, or that, at least, was what his researches had shown so far, and he had already managed to dig back as far as the end of the eighteenth century with some of the branches of his family tree.