The Assassin King

The ladder glittered silver in their lamplight as Anna and Oliver returned towards it, as if to indicate the way out they really ought to take. But neither was in any mood for retreat now that they were down here, so they clambered back over the mound of fallen earth and rubble without a word, then continued onwards to the far end of the ambulatory, from which a narrow stone staircase led down, its steps so steep and badly rutted that they had to turn sideways to focus on their footing – which perhaps explained why Anna was already at the bottom before she noticed that this section wasn’t built from limestone blocks, as was the ambulatory above, but rather had been hewn out of bedrock.

Oliver arrived behind her with his better light. They set off along a passage. It kinked right after a few paces, taking them down a flight of three shallow steps into a chamber with unfinished walls, so that it looked more like a cave or grotto than a burial vault. Yet a burial vault was what it unquestionably was, with three raised tombs on either side of its central aisle, each topped by the effigy of a Knight Templar.

Five of these were neatly groomed and dressed in chain-mail, with solemn or even beatific expressions on their faces, and their hands pressed together in prayer. But the sixth was very different. He had unkempt long hair and a huge beard that lay like a bib over his chest, as well as a fat scar that ran from his hairline down to his right eye. He was missing most of his right ear too, though that might simply have been an accident, or the passage of time. He looked to be well into his fifties, or even older, yet he had a Templar shield strapped to his left arm and was drawing his longsword from its scabbard with his right hand. His legs were similarly captured in motion, his left sinking into the tomb beneath him, while his right was raised as if striding into battle, so that their lamplight brought him to a kind of life, causing Anna to put a sympathetic hand upon his arm. But the stone was rough and cold and still, and the spell was broken.

Another short flight of steps led up to a second crypt, dedicated to a single Templar grandee. His tomb and effigy were to their left, but it was the wall to their right that caught the eye, for the stone had first been smoothed flat and then sculpted in relief into a battle scene that commemorated what presumably had been the great moment of the man’s life, leading a mounted charge against the infidel.

A third chamber followed, this one more like a morgue, with columns of loculi cut into its walls, and crude yet evocative portraits painted on the plaster seals. Several of these had fallen away over the centuries, exposing the skeletons within, their broken grins and dully glowing skulls patched with dessicated hair, and their leg bones folded up beneath their jaws to fit into the cramped, boxlike spaces.

A labyrinth of more such crypts followed, all linked by short passages and flights of steps set at odd angles to one another, sometimes splitting off only to rejoin again further along, or turning into dead ends from which they had to retreat. Anna was beginning to think that this necropolis was all there was when they passed through a narrow opening into a longer passage that ended in a fan of steps down into a large domed chamber whose floor was submerged beneath a foot or so of water, at least to judge from how high it reached up the legs of the four granite tables that were set in a diamond pattern at its centre, and the stone blocks on either side of them on which wooden planks would presumably once have rested, to turn them into benches. There were three other doorways too, one at each point of the compass, though the mouth of the one directly across from them was completely blocked by earth and broken brickwork that spewed well out into the chamber, suggesting that whatever lay beyond had collapsed in the distant past, allowing all this rainwater to seep through its imperfect filter ever since, and gather here.

There were tall marble niches in each of the walls too, though the statues they presumably had once housed were long gone, leaving only their empty shells behind, casting ghostly reflections on the water’s surface, which was flat as a silvered mirror, save only for a few tiny ripples provoked by skippers and other insects.

Anna sat down on the steps to remove her shoes and socks. Oliver likewise. She dipped in her toes. It was cool rather than cold. She rolled her trousers up above her knees to test its depth, her foot pale and shimmering as a fish as it sank some six or seven inches through crystal clear water before hitting the sludge beneath and stirring up an ugly dark cloud.

The doorway to their left looked the more inviting. She waded over to it, setting off waves that threw rippling bands of lamplight onto the walls. It led to a long corridor with partly flooded storerooms on either side, some with crude shelving cut into their walls, but all empty save for a few earthenware vessels of various shapes and vastly different sizes, but all broken or at least badly cracked, making it ever clearer that this place had been deliberately abandoned, with everything of value removed.

The passage sloped gently upwards. Soon they were out of the water. Anna stopped to brush dry her legs. The floor here was worn almost smooth by ancient feet, yet it still felt as scratchy as fine sandpaper on her bare soles. There was enough dust on it, too, to see the tracks Uncle Dun had left. It touched her disproportionately to see the little dabs left by his toes.

They reached a pair of armouries, still sparsely stocked with broken swords, rotted shields and the concentric rings of rusted iron hoops left behind by a wooden barrel that presumably had once contained arrows, to judge from what remained – not only barbed arrowheads but others like tiny baskets designed to be stuffed with pitch and set alight before being fired at haystacks or thatched roofs. Helmets too, a pair of greaves, even a suit of chain-mail, all long-since rusted into uselessness, though that couldn’t disguise the wretched state they’d been in anyway – mend-and-make-do equipment just about good enough for practice, but not for the crusades.

The passage grew narrower and lower, until first Oliver and then even Anna had to watch their heads. A relief, then, to reach the final storeroom. She shone in her torch, expecting to find it as empty as the others – and so it was, after a fashion, save for a broken pot or two, including a number of shards that looked very much like the ones she’d dug up with the silver pennies. It was smaller as well – the same breadth and height as its predecessors, but barely half as deep. Yet the explanation for that was instantly apparent, and it stopped her dead; for its far wall wasn’t hewn out of the bedrock, as were the others, but built instead from stone blocks that had been plastered over and smeared with grime. Time had since done what time will do, cracking the plaster badly enough that clumps had fallen away to reveal the brickwork behind. And Uncle Dun had clearly spotted this for himself, for he’d knocked a hole in the wall at around chest height, plenty large enough for a man his size to have clambered through.

She felt light-headed as she made her way towards it, torn between shame for what her uncle had done and excitement at what he’d discovered. For where else could those silver pennies have come from? Yet she still wasn’t prepared for what she found, the floor of this secret chamber packed tight with baskets and caskets, with bowls and chests, each filled to the brim with treasures of one kind or another, all in fine condition too, kept so by their hermetic seal, and thus glittering, gleaming and sparkling in their twin beams, which themselves were given extra potency by the pair of huge silver platters leaned up against the facing wall, each large enough to hold a haunch of beef, and still bright enough to act like tarnished mirrors.

There were two half-tubs of rotted oak directly beneath the hole. The first contained a high mound of silver pennies, hollowed like a quarried mountain at its peak, thanks to the fistfuls Uncle Dun had taken home to plant – far more than the forty-six so far recovered. But it was the second tub that shocked her, not only because it was filled with ancient brooches, buckles, rings and clasps, but because it too had clearly been plundered. And where the hell had all that gone?

‘How about this?’ she said, while running her torch across the floor, which at least relieved her of one concern, for there was no sign that Uncle Dun had ever made it through his hole. ‘He has it all lying on the ground next to him, planning to bury it next. Only that’s when Gregory Scott comes across him.’

‘So he killed him out of greed,’ said Oliver. ‘Bang goes his claim of self defence.’ He shook his head, struggling to take it in. ‘I don’t get it, though. What even is this place? Why go to all the trouble and risk of hijacking John’s baggage train only to wall it up again?’

‘I don’t suppose they meant it to be forever,’ said Anna. ‘But obviously I got it wrong earlier. They didn’t weed out the Lynn coins as they took them out to spend. They did it all upfront. I mean look at this stuff. What does it have in common?’

‘It’s that it’s identifiable. The Lynn pennies we already know about. But look at these brooches and buckles. Animals and birds, flowers and geometric patterns. Trust me, anyone who’d seen them before and who had even a half-decent eye would have recognised them at once.’

‘Stamped with a royal crest, I’ll bet. King John and his army were only a day’s ride away. For all anyone here knew, he might have got wind of what they’d done and been already on his way. So they’d have needed to get rid of the evidence fast. They might even have prepared this place ahead of time. It wasn’t as though they’d have been needing this stuff anytime soon. They’d have had cartloads of coins and bullion and other anonymous loot that they could safely add to their general stores. But not this. This would see them hanged. They didn’t have time to cut it up or melt it down either, so they had to separate it out and wall it up until it was safe again.’

‘Which it was within days,’ pointed out Oliver. ‘After John died.’

‘Yes, but only to be succeeded by his son. A son who’d loved him dearly. Better safe than sorry, right? Wait until the dust had fully settled. Henry was a Plantagenet, after all, and only a boy. Some ambitious cousin was sure to knock him off in a month or two. But he lived fifty more years, during which time Temple Bruer would have filled with idealistic young knights who’d have felt great loyalty to their new king, and who’d have been horrified to learn that their order had been party to his father’s murder.’

‘That’s an awful lot of daisies for a single chain,’ said Oliver. ‘And if you’re right, where are the crown jewels? The sceptres? The Sword of Mercy?’

Anna didn’t answer, struck by a different curiosity. She reached across to raise Oliver’s camera so that its lamp lit up the facing wall, and yes, there was indeed a mural on it. She’d missed it before, partly because it was half hidden behind the two silver platters, but also because its colours had faded over the years, and because it was naturally dark and shadowy anyway, being of a night-time scene, as attested by the crescent moon in its top right corner. But it was easy enough to make out, now that Oliver’s lamplight was upon it. Its main subjects were two men wearing hooded capes over chain-mail coifs and coats, seated together upon a chestnut warhorse with a white blaze. They were depicted in three-quarter profile, as if headed off over Anna’s left shoulder, while a line of other mounted knights trailed along behind, riding escort to a baggage train.

‘My god,’ muttered Oliver. ‘They painted their own confession.’

‘Their own homage, more like,’ said Anna. ‘They’d all have been for the gallows anyway had this place ever been found. So why not celebrate it where they could?’

‘A whole damned baggage train. You’d think those two up front could afford a horse each.’

‘It’s a symbol,’ she told him. Two men on a single horse had been depicted on Templar seal stones, pottery and everything else. All kinds of ingenious explanations had been offered for this, including that it had been to honour the poverty of their two founders, or to represent their dual roles as warriors and monks, or their refusal to leave fallen comrades behind on the battlefield. But no one knew for sure.

The two knights in the motif were typically depicted in profile, charging the enemy with a lance and a shield apiece. Yet its use here couldn’t be an accident. No. It was meant as a tribute to these two particular men. What was more, Anna knew who they were. The man sitting behind had to be Aymeric de St Maur, head of the Knights Templar in England. She was confident of that, even though she didn’t recognise him, because she did recognise the man in front, the evident leader of this extraordinary expedition, for his long thin face, his aristocratic nose and chevron moustache were virtually identical to those on his tomb effigy in London’s Temple Church.