The Babylon rite

2

Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

Everything you could read about in the guide books was here, in Rosslyn chapel, the great and famous fifteenth-century chapel of the Sinclairs, ten miles south of Edinburgh. The bizarre stone cubes in the Lady Chapel, the eerie carvings of exotic vegetation, the Dance of Death in the arches, the inverted Lucifer bound in ropes, the Norse serpents twined around the Prentice Pillar. And all of it was lavished with alluring detail, teasing symbolism and occult hieroglyphs, creating a splendid whirl of conspiratorial intrigue in weathered old stone. Right next to a gift shop, which sold special Sinclair tartan tins of Templar shortcake, baked with special Holy Grail motifs.

Adam Blackwood sighed. His last assignment as a full-time feature writer for the Guardian, and it was on the mighty commerce of nonsense that was Rosslyn Chapel.

‘You OK?’

It was his friend, and long-time colleague, Jason the Photographer. With the usual sarcastic tilt in his south London accent.

Adam sighed.

‘No, I’m not OK. I just lost my job.’

‘Tchuh. We all lose our jobs.’ Jason glanced at his camera, adjusting a lens. ‘And you’re not dead, are you? You’re just thirty-four. Come on, let’s go back inside the chapel, this shop is full of nutters.’

‘The whole town is full of nutters. Especially the chapel.’ Adam pointed through the glass door at the medieval church. ‘Everyone in there is walking around clutching The Da Vinci Code, looking for the Holy Grail under the font.’

‘Then let’s hurry up! Maybe we’ll find it first.’

Adam dawdled. Jason sighed. ‘Go on then, Blackwood. Cough it up. I know you want to share.’

‘It’s just… Well I thought that at least this time, my very last assignment, I might get something serious again, just for the hell of it, a serious news story, as a parting gift.’

‘Because they like you so much? Adam — you got sacked. What did you expect? You punched the fucking features editor at the Guardian Christmas party.’

‘He was hassling that girl. She was crying.’

‘Sure.’ Jason shook his head. ‘The guy’s a wanker of the first water. I agree. So you’re a great Aussie hero, and I’m glad you decked him, but is it really so surprising they snapped? It’s not the first time you’ve lost it.’

‘But-’

‘Stop whingeing! You did a few decent news stories, amongst the dross. And they’re sacking journos all over the world. You’re not unique.’

This was a fair point. ‘Guess not.’

‘And you got a bloody pay-off. Now you can bog off to Afghanistan, get yourself killed. Come on. We still got work to do.’

They walked out of the shop into the forecourt. And stared once more at the squat stone jewel-box that was Rosslyn Chapel. A faint, mean-spirited drizzle was falling out of the cold Midlothian sky. They stepped aside to let a middle-aged lady tourist enter the ancient building. She was carrying a dog-eared copy of The Da Vinci Code.

‘It’s under the font!’ said Adam, loudly. Jason chuckled.

The two men followed the woman into the chapel. The Prentice Pillar loomed exotically at the end. A young couple with short blonde hair — German? — were peering at the pillar as if they expected the Holy Grail to materialize from within its luxuriously carved stone, like a kind of hologram.

Jason got to work. Tutting at his light meter, taking some shots. Adam interviewed a Belgian tourist in his forties, standing by the grave of the Earl of Caithness, asking what had brought him here. The Belgian mentioned the Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code and the Knights Templar, in that order.

Adam got an initial glimpse of how he might write the piece. A light but sardonic tone, gently mocking all this lucrative naivety, this cottage industry of credulity that had grown up around Rosslyn Chapel. A feature that would explore how the entire town of Roslin, Midlothian, was living off the need of people in a secular age to believe, paradoxically, in deep religious conspiracies. No matter how absurd and embarrassing they might be.

He could start it with that GK Chesterton quote: ‘when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything’.

Adam turned as a baritone voice resonated down the nave: one of the more pompous guides, holding a fake plastic sword, was pointing at the ceiling, and reciting some history. Adam listened in to the guide’s well-practised spiel.

‘So who exactly were the Knights Templar? Their origins are simple enough.’ The guide levelled his plastic sword at a small stone carving, apparently of two men on a horse. ‘Sometime around 1119, two French knights, Hugues de Payens and Godfrey de Saint-Omer, veterans of the First Crusade, got together to discuss over a beaker of wine the safety of the many Christian pilgrims flocking to Jerusalem, since its brutal reconquest by the Crusaders of Pope Urban II.’ The guide’s sword wobbled as he continued. ‘The French knights proposed a new monastic order, a sect of chaste but muscular warrior monks, who would defend the pilgrims with their very lives against the depredations of bandits, and robbers, and hostile Muslims. This audacious idea was instantly popular: the new King Baldwin II of Jerusalem agreed to the knights’ request, and gifted them a headquarters on the Temple Mount, in the recently captured Al-Aqsa Mosque. Hence the full name of the Order: the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, or, in Latin, Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici. Ever since then, the question has been asked: was there also an esoteric reason for this significant choice of headquarters?’ He hesitated, with the air of a well-trained actor. ‘Naturally, we can never know. But the Temple Mount very definitely had a mystique: as it was located above what was believed to be the ruins of the first Temple of Solomon. Which,’ the guide smiled at his attentive audience, ‘is thought, in turn, to be a model for the church in which you stand today!’

He let the notion hang in the air like the fading vibrations of a tolling bell, then trotted through the rest of the story: the Templars’ rise and supremacy; the twenty thousand knightly members at the very peak of the Order’s strength; the great, Europe-wide power and wealth of the ‘world’s first multinational’. And then, of course, the dramatic downfall, after two proud centuries, when the French king, coveting the Templars’ money, and envying their lands and status, crushed them with a wave of violent arrests and ferocious torture, beginning on one fateful night.

The guide flashed a florid smile: ‘What was the date of that medieval Gotterdammerung, that Kristallnacht of kingly revenge? Friday the 13th, 1307. Yes, Friday the 13th! ’

Adam repressed a laugh. The guide was a walking store of cliches. But entertaining, nonetheless. If he’d been here for the fun of it, he’d have been happy to sit here and listen some more. But he had just seen something pretty interesting.

‘Jason…’ He nudged his friend, who was trying to get a decent shot of the Prentice Pillar.

‘What?’

‘Isn’t that Archibald McLintock?’

‘What?’

‘The old guy, sitting in the pew by the Master Pillar. It’s Archibald McLintock.’

‘And he is?’

‘Maybe the most famous writer on the Knights Templar alive. Wrote a good book about Rosslyn too. Proper sceptic. You never heard of him?’

‘Dude, you do the research, you’re the hack. I have to worry about lenses.’

‘Very true. You lazy bastard. OK, I suggest we go and interview him. He might give me some good quotes, we could get a picture too.’

Advancing on the older man, Adam extended a hand. ‘Adam Blackwood. The Guardian? We’ve actually met before.’

Archibald McLintock had sandy-grey hair and a demeanour of quiet, satisfied knowledge. Remaining seated, he accepted Adam’s handshake with a vague, distracted grasp.

An odd silence intervened. Adam wondered how to begin; but at last the Scotsman said, ‘Afraid I don’t recall our meeting. So sorry.’ His expression melted into a distant smile. ‘Ah. Wait. Yes, yes. You interviewed me, about the Crusades? The Spear of Destiny?’

‘Yes. That’s right, a few years back. It was just a light-hearted article.’

‘Good good. And now you are writing about the Chapel of Rosslyn?’

‘Well, yes,’ Adam shrugged, mildly embarrassed. ‘We’re kind of doing another fun piece about all the… y’know… all the Dan Brown and Freemasons stuff. Templars hiding in the crypt. How Rosslyn has become so famous for its myths.’

‘And you want another quote from me?’

‘Do you mind?’ Adam flushed, painfully aware he was disturbing a serious academic with all this fatuous, astrological absurdity. ‘It’s just that you famously debunked all this rubbish. Didn’t you? What was that thing you said? “The Chapel of Rosslyn bears no more resemblance to the Temple of Solomon than my local farmer’s cowshed is modelled on the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu.”’

Another long silence. The tourists whispered and bustled. Adam waited for McLintock to answer. But he just smiled. And then he said, very quietly. ‘Did I write that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hm! A little piquant. But why not? Yes, I’ll give you a quote.’ Abruptly, Archibald McLintock stood up and Adam recalled with a start that the old man might be ageing but he was notably tall. Fully an inch taller than Adam, who was six foot two.

‘Here’s your quote, young man. I was wrong. ’

‘Sorry?’ Adam was distracted: making sure his digicorder was switched on. ‘Wrong about… what?’

The historian smiled. ‘Remember what Umberto Eco said about the Templars?’

Adam struggled to recall. ‘Ah yes! “When a man talks about the Templars you know he is going mad,” You mean that one?’

‘No. Mr Blackwood. The other quote. “The Templars are connected to everything.”’

A pause. ‘You’re saying… you mean…?’

‘I was wrong. Wrong about the whole thing. There really is a connection. The pentagrams. The pillars. The Templar initiations. It’s all here, Mr Blackwood, it’s all true, it’s more strange than you could ever realize. Rosslyn Chapel really is the key.’ McLintock was laughing so loudly now that some tourists were nervously looking over. ‘Can you believe it? The stature of this irony? The key to everything was here all along!’

Adam was perplexed. Was McLintock drunk? ‘But you debunked all this — you said it was crap, you’re famous for it!’

McLintock waved a dismissive hand and began to make his way down the medieval aisle. ‘Just look around and you will see what I didn’t see. Goodbye.’

Adam watched as the historian walked to the door and disappeared into the drizzly light beyond. The journalist gazed for a full minute as the door shut, and the tourists thronged the nave and the aisles. And then he looked up, to the ancient roof of the Collegiate Chapel of St Michael in Roslin, where a hundred Green Men stared back at him, their faces carved by medieval stonemasons, into perpetual and sarcastic grins.