The Awful Secret

Chapter Sixteen In which Crowner John takes confession

Richard de Revelle was far from pleased when de Wolfe informed him that some of the pirates had sought sanctuary in Lynton church. He was in the process of setting up his Shire Court in the alehouse when the coroner rode back to the lower village. The sight of Thomas behind him seemed to arouse suspicious interest in the three Templars, and John noticed them in deep conversation with Abbot Cosimo. Soon afterwards, Godfrey Capra rode away and de Wolfe was sure that he had gone up to Lynton to check on the village and look in the church to confirm the identity of the five sanctuary seekers.

The prisoners had been marched to another barn-like shed just behind the tavern and locked in, with guards at the door. Outside, the womenfolk were gathered, crying and keening, or shouting through the flimsy walls to their doomed men inside.

The sheriff had taken over the single large room of the alehouse, bringing in a trestle table and a few rough benches. A quantity of fresh fish, from this morning’s catch, had been commandeered and some of Gabriel’s men were cooking it over a fire at the back. Bread had been taken from the nearest houses, over the protests of the owners, and soon a scratch meal was being put before the leaders in the tavern, while the soldiers ate around their fire.

The prospect of a mass execution had no effect on anyone’s appetite, but as they ate Richard de Revelle went back to complaining about the men in the church. ‘Why should they escape a hanging, just because they were craven enough to leave their friends to fight, and because they could run faster than our men?’

De Wolfe pulled the meat off a grilled herring with his knife and waited for it to cool. ‘Don’t ask me. I didn’t make the law.’

Abbot Cosimo, his fish on a slice of bread in his hand, looked up with a frown. ‘Sanctuary is one of the sacred traditions of Christianity. In fact, it existed long before Our Saviour – the Hebrews had six Levitical cities of refuge and the Greeks and Romans also recognised the concept.’

The sheriff voiced his disapproval of anyone being able to escape the noose and cost the community money for his keep while doing so. ‘I’ve a mind to go into that church and haul the bastards out!’ he muttered, but the alert Cosimo heard him and was shocked.

‘I forbid you, Sheriff! You would bring damnation upon yourself for such sacrilege – and I could excommunicate you.’ As with many others, de Revelle’s religious beliefs were a matter of habit rather than conviction, and the prospect of exclusion from the Church did not weigh too heavily upon him.

De Wolfe knew this, so added a more practical discouragement. ‘The laws of the first Henry stipulate penalties for laying violent hands on fugitives in sanctuary – a hundred shillings for a cathedral or abbey and twenty for a parish church.’ Still muttering, de Revelle abandoned the subject, but for once, de Wolfe was thankful for Cosimo’s presence as any violation of sanctuary would upset his plans.

When the meal was finished, the room was rapidly converted to the Shire Court, though still smelling strongly of grilled fish. The sheriff sat in the middle behind the crude table, with de Wolfe on one side and Ralph Morin on the other. The Templars and the abbot formed an interested audience on a pair of benches at the side.

In the absence of a court clerk, Thomas was sat at one end of the table, with his bag of parchments, quills and ink to make a brief record of the proceedings, a copy of which de Wolfe intended to place before the king’s justices when they eventually came to Devon.

The twelve captives were marched in two at a time by Gabriel and two soldiers, their wrists roped together behind their backs. De Revelle demanded their names and a statement as to whether they were Saxon, Norman or indeterminate. So much intermarriage had taken place in the century since the Conquest that mixed blood was common, especially when stray Celts arrived from Cornwall or even from Wales, just across the water.

Then he accused them of piracy and murder, which they all denied. He yelled ‘Liar!’ at the top of his voice, and pointed out that each man had run away and seized arms to fight the king’s law officers. Furthermore, they had two galleys and a shed full of goods that could only have been acquired by either piracy or smuggling, both of which crimes were a felony and a capital offence.

The reactions of the men varied: some defiantly admitted it, some denied it, others said nothing, and a few collapsed to their knees in sobbing heaps, pleading for mercy. Whatever their demeanour, de Revelle’s decision was the same for each: he declared them guilty of piracy and murder, and sentenced them to be hanged later that day. The whole proceedings lasted barely half an hour and soon the condemned were back in their hut under guard.

De Wolfe was uneasy about the summary justice, and if it had been in or near Exeter he would have fought the sheriff tooth and nail to commit them to the next Eyre. But in this case, he saw the practical difficulties – and also had to admit that there could be no realistic alternative to a guilty sentence, given the circumstances. His only contribution to the proceedings was to ask each pair of captives if they recalled attacking the vessel Saint Isan a couple of weeks before and if they admitted to slaying most of the crew. Two of the most brazen rogues admitted that this was the last ship they had attacked and also confessed to dispatching the seamen. But they had no idea who killed whom, reasonably pleading that in the heat of a fight no one recalled details of their victims. However, this was good enough for de Wolfe, as he could now get Thomas to tidy up the inquest record on the corpse from Ilfracombe and eventually deliver a firm verdict to the Eyre.

The afternoon wore on, and as the fitful sun showed itself just before it slid behind the high western rim of the glen, the condemned men were led out to death. The parish priest was conspicuous by his absence, even with fugitives in his church. When de Wolfe enquired where he was, he was met with evasion from some older men of the village, but eventually one said that they had had no parson for the last three months, though no one had yet told the archdeacon of Barnstaple that the parish was bereft of pastoral care. Discovering what had happened to the priest was even more difficult, but it seemed that he had been found dead at the bottom of a cliff.

Gwyn’s explanation was as likely as any: ‘He was either drunk and fell off or they threw him off for threatening to inform on their crimes.’

John thought that perhaps the parson had fallen out with the villagers over his share of the loot, but speculation seemed futile. In any event, he was not here to shrive the condemned men in the hour of their death, but Abbot Cosimo agreed to say the appropriate Latin words over them. Thomas would gladly have volunteered, even though long unfrocked, and was greatly disappointed that the Italian denied him even such a dismal task.

As the sun set, the men were dragged out of their shed by the soldiers, who in truth were not unsympathetic to these poor people who made life a little less frugal by stealing from passing ships. But duty was duty and, one by one, they were pushed up a ladder propped against the branch of a tree at the bottom of the cliff. A noose secured to the branch was dropped over each head, and as the abbot muttered and made the sign of the Cross in the air, they were shoved sideways off the ladder.

The drop was the height of a man and some died instantly, their neck broken or its arteries hammerblowed, though they still jerked and twitched for a few minutes in full view of those still waiting their turn. Others went blue in the face, eyes bulging and tongues protruding, and danced obscenely for long minutes, until a soldier dragged on their legs to end the agony.

As the grotesque ceremony went on, the wives and families of the victims stood sobbing and screaming in the background, some fainting and many yelling obscenities at the sheriff and his men. A line of men-at-arms kept them away from the hanging tree, using staves to whack them back when emotion drove them to desperation.

But the executions went on with grim efficiency and, as with the trial, were all over in half an hour. The bodies were laid in a row on the riverbank with those killed in the fight, and the families were allowed to take their dead for burial.

In the twilight, de Wolfe sought out his brother-in-law to talk to him again about the men in sanctuary. They had taken over the tavern for the night and were eating more bread and fish, though some enterprising soldier had also ‘acquired’ a few scrawny fowls for roasting.

The Templars and the abbot were there as usual, still regarding the coroner with some suspicion, though John knew they could have no inkling that de Blanchefort lurked less than a mile away.

De Revelle again began a tirade against allowing the men in the church to escape, but John held up a hand peremptorily. ‘It’s no good going on about it, Richard. They are entitled to abjure the realm and the sooner the better. I have no intention of staying in this godforsaken village for any longer than I need to see them depart.’

He explained that he had spoken to the shipmaster of the Brendan, who was leaving – without his casks of wine – on the morning tide. Though bound for Falmouth, he was willing for a fee to add a day to his voyage and cross to Swansea to drop off the abjurers.

‘Where’s the money coming from?’ snapped the sheriff.

‘The fugitives say they can scrape together a few marks, with the help of their families, if it will save their lives,’ lied de Wolfe, as he intended de Blanchefort to pay for the passage – he seemed to have ample funds to sustain his travelling.

The sheriff rapidly lost interest in the matter, though the abbot seemed to approve this most Christian of acts and the Templars, devout monks that they were, nodded assent.

‘As soon as I’ve eaten, I must go up there and take their confessions, getting my clerk to record such details as are needed,’ said de Wolfe. He saw Roland de Ver exchange glances with Godfrey Capra and Brian de Falaise.

‘An interesting process, sanctuary,’ said de Ver easily. ‘We would like to see it at first hand, never having encountered the coroner’s role in this.’

De Wolfe cursed them under his breath – they were intent on making matters more difficult for him. This was compounded when Cosimo too invited himself to attend, allegedly ‘to see the compassion of the Holy Church being applied in practice’.

Before they left, the coroner managed a covert word with Gwyn, ordering him to find Bernardus in the wood beyond the village and bring him to the church at midnight.

In the last of the twilight, they walked their horses up the glen to Lynton. Earlier, when he had examined the pirated contraband in the shed on the beach, de Wolfe had noticed a roll of hessian and commandeered it. Now he carried it on his saddle to the church and threw it down on the altar step. The five anxious fugitives had lit the stumps of the altar candles to produce a dim light and looked down at the roll of sacking with puzzlement. ‘You can tear that into five lengths and make yourselves long tabards. Rip a hole in the centre and put them over your heads. Did you make those crosses?’

They mutely produced sticks broken from the churchyard trees, crudely lashed together.

John pulled Thomas forward and pushed aside one of the altar candles. ‘Here’s your writing table – you even have light near at hand.’

The clerk seemed reluctant to put the sanctified board to such a mundane purpose, but he had little choice. Tentatively, with much genuflecting and crossing himself, he spread out his parchment and prepared his pen.

De Wolfe was conscious of the Templars and the Italian watching the process keenly, scanning the five men for any sign of recognition. The dwarf seemed to fascinate Cosimo, who licked his lips as he stared at the strange figure with the peculiar limbs. At least there was no way that Eddida Curt-arm could be de Blanchefort, but the coroner could see that the other men were subjected to close scrutiny.

‘You can act as a jury of witnesses, sirs, as the law demands, when I take the oath and confession of these men.’

De Wolfe made the abjurers kneel on the chancel step and each one in turn repeated his words. Each gave his name and village, then confessed to having been a pirate and murderer against the king’s peace. The oath of abjuration was a problem, as it should have been sworn on the Gospels, which neither de Wolfe nor the priestless church appeared to possess. However, Cosimo came to the rescue by pulling a small breviary from the folds of his cassock. Holding this each man had to say, ‘I swear on the Holy Book that I will leave the realm of England and never return without the king’s permission. I will hasten by the direct road to the port allotted me and not leave the King’s highway under pain of arrest or execution. I will not stay at one place more than one night and will seek diligently for a passage across the sea as soon as I arrive, delaying only one tide if possible. If I cannot secure such passage, I will walk into the sea up to my knees every day as a token of my desire to cross. And if I fail in all this, then peril shall be my lot.’

After they had all sworn, John instructed them formally about the procedure next morning, extemporising as he went. ‘You should have cast off your own clothing, which would be sold, but because time is short you cannot make proper garments of this sackcloth so drape it over your clothes. You will go bareheaded and you will have your hair and beard shorn off. You will carry a cross in front of you and not leave the pathway, and you must never set foot in England again, or you will be outlawed and may be treated as the wolf’s head, to be beheaded by any man who can lift a sword. Do you understand?’

There was a mumbled chorus of agreement.

‘Then before dawn I will come again and take you down to a vessel below, which will sail on the high tide for Wales, as I told you earlier.’

He made sure that Thomas had written down a summary of the facts then that the men had a sharp enough knife to hack off their hair and beards and attempt to shave their chins.

Their business done for the night, the party left, leaving two soldiers on guard, and went back to the alehouse. On the way Cosimo queried part of the ceremony he had just witnessed. ‘Sanctuary is common to all Christendom and I am more familiar with Italy and France. But I never heard of the hair and beard being shorn as a requirement.’

As de Wolfe had just invented it, this was not surprising, but he felt that the priest’s question came of curiosity rather than suspicion. ‘This is part of the abjuration process, not sanctuary,’ he said gravely. ‘England is different from your continental countries in that we are an island and therefore abjuration has to be by sea. Our formalities vary from other lands and this shaving of hair is to further mark out the abjurer as outside the pale of ordinary men.’

The explanation meant nothing, but Cosimo seemed to accept it as yet more evidence of the peculiarity of the people of this damp island.

Later, everyone settled down in their cloaks on the floor of the tavern, the soldiers having brought in hay and dry ferns from a barn up the glen. John was hopeful that, at last, the Templars and the abbot were satisfied that Bernardus was nowhere near, as their inspection of the five sanctuary seekers confirmed that they were genuine locals.

The most delicate part of his plot was now to be put into motion. When his sense of time suggested that midnight was not far off, he got up quietly and went outside to relieve himself against the wall. He waited for ten minutes to make sure that no one had missed him from the crowded room, then walked along the riverbank and up the track to Lynton. The moon came and went through the broken clouds and in its light, before he reached the church, he saw two shadowy figures standing under a tree. After some murmured instructions to de Blanchefort, they went boldly to the covered lych-gate and found both guards sound asleep. Gwyn poked one with his foot and the man leaped guiltily to his feet.

‘Shall I report to you to the constable and sheriff?’ said de Wolfe with mock severity. ‘They may have you hanged for failing in your duty.’

The man was both abashed and relieved that the coroner was not going to make trouble ‘All quiet here, sir. They’ve been cutting their hair and beards earlier – and losing more blood than on a battlefield!’

Leaving the guards at the gate, they entered the church. This was the most sensitive part of the stratagem for de Wolfe, but he put the options baldly to the men. ‘You can co-operate with me or not – but if not, I promise that you will hang, for I’ll withdraw your sanctuary. The sheriff would be only too willing to string you all up, I assure you.’

They all muttered their assent and the coroner went on, ‘I suspect that all of you will come back again from Wales before long. I am well aware that abjuration is but a temporary state for many people. Once the sheriff and his men have left, they are unlikely to return for years. Your reeve and your bailiff are your own problem but, again, I suspect they are not unaware of your activities and keep a tight mouth if they are bribed well enough.’ De Wolfe saw a few sheepish grins in the dim, flickering light of the altar candles. ‘As your exile is almost certainly temporary – and I want to know nothing of that – I wish to exchange my friend here for one of you, so that he may take passage on that vessel, disguised as an abjurer.’

There was another mutter, but of astonishment not objection.

‘He is a large man, so I propose that you,’ the coroner indicated the middle-aged villager, who was of a size with Bernardus, ‘vanish into the woods for a day or two until the coast is clear and let this man take your place.’ He held up his hand to stifle queries. ‘The reasons for this are none of your business, but I say that one of you can go free now – and, no doubt, the rest of you will find a way to slide back home before long. The alternative is a rope around your neck tomorrow!’ he added harshly.

There was no argument and the older man, beaming with relief, got out of his clothes and changed with de Blanchefort, who seemed not desperately pleased with the arrangement, but forced by necessity to go along with the coroner’s plan. Though he had only stubble and no beard or moustache, the crude removal of his head hair with a dagger blade did not increase his enthusiasm for de Wolfe’s machinations but, again, he submitted with ill grace.

As soon as this had been done, the fisherman muffled himself in Bernardus’s dark cloak and hat and walked out between Gwyn and the coroner. With the moon hidden behind a cloud, the sleepy sentinels at the lych-gate took little notice of the three men who emerged, except to heed the coroner’s terse warning to try to keep awake for the rest of the night.

Once out of sight at the head of the glen, the local man vanished into the undergrowth, gratefully taking a good cloak and hat with him as a bonus on top of his freedom.

At dawn, the coroner and his two assistants were back at the church. After creeping back into the alehouse John had hardly slept for the remainder of the night. He was anxious that his ruse should be successful, and concerned at how keen an interest the Templars and Cosimo would take in the departure of the abjurers.

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.

‘All right, let me go. I’ll tell you.’ John backed the knife off a few inches, but kept it hovering before Bernardus’ face.

‘We couldn’t discover the whole story, we had to piece together overheard fragments of talk between the Master and other more senior officers. Then we accidentally came across some documents no one was supposed to see, which sent us covertly searching amongst the secret archives in Paris. It took a year to make sense of it all.’

‘Come on, get on with it! My sister told me that de Ridefort hinted it was something to do with the mass.’

Thomas, who stood listening open-mouthed alongside them, groaned and convulsively crossed himself, but de Blanchefort smirked. ‘The mass? You could say that, though it’s a detail. The early Templars found inscriptions on tablets in the catacombs beneath the Temple in Jeruslaem that recorded that Christ, though crucified, did not die on the Cross. The resurrection was a revival of the near-dead body, all prearranged by some influential friends. He lived for another thirty years, a great man, teacher and prophet, but he was mortal, so the concept of the Trinity is fiction, knowingly perpetuated by Rome.’

There was a second’s silence then, with a strangled cry of desperate fury, little Thomas de Peyne launched himself at de Blanchefort and futilely tried to batter him with his small fists. The other pushed him away impatiently and the clerk subsided on to the floor, his face in his hands, weeping and keening.

De Wolfe pulled him gently to his feet, as Gwyn and the other abjurers watched in astonishment from across the church. ‘Don’t fret yourself, Thomas. This madman’s pack of lies isn’t worth a clipped penny.’

He turned back to de Blanchefort. ‘And is that all your precious secret amounts to? A fairy-tale, some legend peddled by Templars as deluded as yourself?’

A supercilious expression came over the man’s face. ‘There’s more. The Templars have always had a special regard for Mary Magdalene and we discovered that not only was she Jesus’s wife but she bore him several children. She went with many other Jews to live in southern France, though we could not discover whether Christ himself went there or remained in Palestine.’

This all sounded so outrageous to de Wolfe that he never for a moment contemplated that there was the slightest truth in de Blanchefort’s babblings. ‘I’m not sure whether you are to be condemned for your blasphemy and sacrilege or pitied for the unhinged state of your mind,’ he said scornfully. ‘Where is the proof of these preposterous ideas?’

‘Buried in a hillside in the foothills of the Pyrenees,’ replied de Blanchefort sharply, now incensed at being ridiculed. ‘The early Knights of Christ were ordered by Rome to place the evidence where it could never be rediscovered, so they brought it back to France when they returned in about 1127 and, with the aid of German miners, buried it within Mount Cardou, concealed for ever by an immense rockfall.’ He paused, as if momentarily overcome by his own revelations. ‘It was even suggested by some documents – though I can hardly credit it myself – that the bones of Christ himself were also found and buried with the tablets.’

There was another groan from Thomas, who was rocking back and forth, his face still covered by his hands.

‘My own family comes from this area and the Chateau de Blanchefort, a former Templar possession, sits opposite Mount Cardou and guarded it in the early part of this century. You see now why I have such a personal interest in this momentous discovery!’

De Wolfe was still convinced that the man was a dangerous lunatic, but any further revelations were cut short by Gwyn, who bellowed from across the church. ‘We have to go, Crowner! It’s broad daylight and the tide will soon be ebbing.’

De Wolfe gave the former Templar a rough push and sent him stumbling on his way. With a shaken Thomas trailing behind, mumbling in Latin under his breath, they filed out of the church and into the final and most dangerous part of the escapade.

The tide was full and the Brendan well afloat when the procession came down the track alongside the stream. A soldier walked in front, then came the five abjurers, each barefoot, each holding their cross two-handed before their faces. They looked like a line of scarecrows, shuffling along in their shapeless hessian robes, with their scratched, tufted scalps. The dwarf Eddida was the leader, and after the last man, another soldier was followed at a distance by the coroner, his officer and clerk. The older, tallest man came in the centre, the hands holding his cross tight against his face.

De Wolfe was tense with anger at Bernardus and apprehension in case his elaborate plot was discovered at the last moment. As he walked, he cursed himself for allowing his sense of duty to Gilbert de Ridefort to have landed him in this situation. Far from wanting to help this man escape, he would now have cheerfully cut his evil, demented head from his shoulders – but it was too late and he was caught in a trap of his own making.

The sad cavalcade reached the bottom of the track where it became pebbled. This was the most dangerous spot for the venture: it was nearest the alehouse where, in the doorway, Abbot Cosimo and the three Templar knights stood to see the departure of the abjurers. The sheriff was not there: he was too incensed at their easy escape to want to witness it and was at the back of the tavern with Ralph Morin as they supervised the impending departure of most of the men-at-arms, the rest being left to secure the village for a few days.

As he came level with the alehouse door, de Wolfe saw that Cosimo’s gaze was again directed at Eddida and he wondered what strange emotions so attracted the abbot to the dwarf. He suspected that unnatural desires were the most likely reason for his fascination, though these little men were always objects of curiosity and cruel derision. The Templars watched the procession clamber across the pebbles, then turned back into the room behind to collect their arms and saddle-pouches ready for the journey home.

De Wolfe sighed with relief, especially when the Italian priest also vanished into the tavern to join them. He strode across the stones to where the forced emigrants were wading through the knee-high wavelets to reach the side of the knarr. As the crew hoisted up little Eddida with coarse comments about his size, John splashed into the shallows and caught up with de Blanchefort. For a moment, he even considered sticking his dagger under the killer’s ribs, but good sense prevailed. ‘You evil bastard, I hope you rot in Hell!’ he offered as a farewell.

As he grabbed the ship’s side, de Blanchefort gave him an enigmatic smile. ‘If there is a hell, brother – though I’ve come to doubt it – then I’ll see you there!’

He swung himself aboard and de Wolfe backed away in frustration.

The small vessel was pulled astern by a pair of long oars until it had enough sea-room to raise the clumsy sail and turn out into the bay.

In sullen anger, the coroner walked back to where Gwyn and Thomas waited for him at the edge of the beach. The little clerk was still pale and shaking with the insult his faith had received from de Blanchefort’s blasphemy.

‘Shall we saddle up with the rest of them?’ asked Gwyn, pointing to the preparations behind them where the men-at-arms were checking their horses’ harness. The sheriff and constable were already mounted and the Templars were helping Cosimo’s surviving guard to saddle the abbot’s mare.

‘Let’s wait a while. I’ve no stomach for listening to de Revelle complaining half-way to Exeter.’ John turned to watch the Brendan moving away from the shore, her sail now filled with the breeze. ‘Maybe a bolt of lightning will strike that black-hearted swine out there.’

A few minutes later, the horsemen moved off and Ralph Morin shouted across to de Wolfe that they would see the Templars and abbot on their way for a few miles, then return to Exeter through South Molton, a more direct route than via Barnstaple. ‘We’ll catch you up in an hour or two, or when you stop to eat,’ promised the coroner. He watched the procession plodding up the track through the glen, lined by silent widows, fatherless children and old men.

‘Why didn’t we go with them?’ asked Gwyn.

‘I want to see that damned ship well out of sight,’ answered the coroner bitterly.

They saddled their own horses and climbed up to Lynton, then to a nearby headland on the seaward side of the valley of rocks. Here they had a panoramic view of the coastline in either direction, from the great prominence of the Foreland Point on their right across to a headland near Martinhoe on the left. Sitting in their saddles, they watched in silence as the little ship clawed its way across the westerly breeze, making slowly northwards towards the Welsh coast, clearly visible over twenty miles away.

Then, suddenly, from around the Foreland, they saw two long lean ships racing side by side, each propelled against the wind by a dozen oars on either side. High curved posts rose at stem and stern and their whole appearance was blatantly foreign. Like two greyhounds after a badger, the predatory galleys sped after the clumsy knarr, the gap closing rapidly as the three men watched.

Thomas de Peyne crossed himself for the tenth time that morning and murmured quietly to himself in Latin, ‘Requiescat in pace!’ while Sir John de Wolfe’s feeble belief in a jealous God was suddenly strengthened.