The Sword of the Templars

4

As usual the old diner around the corner on Eagle Street was packed with SUNY students, but eventually Peggy and Holliday got a booth next to a window and spent a long lunch hour catching up and going over old times. Apparently Peggy had been on assignment covering the most recent G8 summit being held in Niagara Falls when the call came in about Uncle Henry, which put her only a two-hour drive away from the old man’s deathbed. At least he hadn’t died alone. In that way, at least, she’d been lucky. Before that she’d been in Nepal, and before that she’d been in the new African war zone in the Jwaneng district of Botswana, documenting yet another potential genocide.

“How’s your love life?” Holliday asked, changing the subject. There had been boyfriends in Peggy’s life since the third grade, and she was notoriously either falling in love or out of it. She had the combination of good looks and flashing, energetic personality that drew men to her like a magnet.

She shrugged her shoulders absently and speared a French fry with her fork. “A little fling with a guy named Olivier the last time I was in Rwanda but nothing serious since then.”

“Maybe you should get together with our friend Broadbent the lawyer. He seemed pretty interested.”

“Ee-uw,” said Peggy in her best Lisa Simpson voice, wrinkling her nose. “Birth control in a pin-striped suit.” She swirled another French fry in a pool of ketchup on the edge of her plate and popped it into her mouth. “I’d rather die first.”

“Maybe you should start thinking about settling down,” said Holliday.

“Why?” Peggy asked. “I like things the way they are, at least right now.”

They spent some time talking about her work and a book she’d been working on about modern photojour nalism and about Holliday’s endless treatise on arms and armor and about the past and the future for both of them. Finally they talked about Henry and the present and what they should do about it.

“What about the house?” Peggy asked. A waitress came and cleared away their plates and brought them coffee. The diner was clearing out; the students were leaving and the afternoon was fading away. Clouds were sweeping in off Lake Erie, and the sky was turning gray.

“I’ve been trying not to think about it,” answered Holliday. He suddenly had a frighteningly strong urge for a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked since Amy died. “Sometimes I think I spent the best days of my childhood there.”

“Me, too,” said Peggy. Holliday could see tears welling in the corners of her eyes and could hear them beginning to clog in her throat. “He gave me my first camera, you know,” she continued. She blinked the tears away at least for the moment. “It was a Kodak Baby Brownie from the forties. I think he picked it up when he was in England. I used to take pictures of bugs and things down by the creek. I got so frustrated that what I saw in the viewfinder was never what showed up in the pictures; then Grandpa Henry explained it to me. I was the only kid in grade three who knew what parallax was.”

“He taught me the same lesson, except it was about trout fishing and the Cattaraugus Indians,” Holliday said with a laugh. “The fish wasn’t quite where you thought it was even when you could see it in the water.” He shook his head sadly. “There was a time in my life when I thought Uncle Henry knew everything worth knowing. I still think that way sometimes.”

“I’m going to miss him so much,” whispered Peggy.

“Me, too,” said Holliday. “But that’s not answering your question about the house, is it?”

“No,” the young woman agreed.

“Maybe it’s time we confronted the inevitable,” sighed Holliday.

“Maybe you’re right,” answered Peggy.

Twenty-six Hart Street was like a Walt Disney version of a haunted house, complete with a spooky turret and a widow’s walk with a wrought iron railing on the flat peak of the steeply sloping mansard roof. The house was set back on the property, enclosed by a low brick wall and surrounded by plantings of ancient elms, birch and gnarled black walnut trees, their limbs goitered and twisted like the arthritic crones found in fairy tales. Nobody had cut the grass in a while.

A sloping gravel path led down between the trees to the bank of Canadaway Creek, the burbling shallow stream hidden behind the long drooping branches of a dozen weeping willows, the far bank much higher than the near one and dense with undergrowth. Approaching the tottering Shingle Style Queen Anne monstrosity at the end of the street was like the opening pages of one of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia tales; there was a sense that entering the house might take you anywhere and not necessarily to places you’d like to go, a vaguely sinister call to adventure.

John Holliday and Peggy Blackstock went up five worn wooden steps to the covered piazza-style front porch. Holliday brought out the fat bunch of keys the lawyer had grudgingly handed over and tried them one at a time. Finally he found one that fit into the old Yale lock and turned it. He grasped the faceted crystal doorknob and opened the door. Holliday stepped inside, Peggy close behind him.

Instantly they were assailed by a cloying, familiar scent. “He’s riding high,” said Holliday.

Peggy smiled. “He has P.A.”

“Pipe Appeal and Prince Albert,” they said together, finishing the old advertisement that Uncle Henry would quote every time he took his ancient briar out of his jacket pocket, polishing the bowl against the satin fabric of the waistcoat he always wore before clamping the smelly pipe between his teeth, smoke fuming up and staining his white mustache a permanent nicotine yellow.

In the center of the wide hall a stairway spiraled up to the second floor. To their left was the library; to the right was the old-fashioned parlor. Behind the stairway was the dining room with its imposing fireplace, and at the end of the hall were the pantry and the kitchen. A glass-enclosed conservatory had been added at the rear of the house, and for many years Henry had bred roses there.

The floors throughout were heavily varnished pine, covered with a collection of worn Persian carpets and runners of every age and description. The walls were wainscoted in black walnut, with plain plaster above, painted white once but faded to a neutral beige after so much time. The furniture was all dark late-Victorian with heavy, deep brown velvet drapes to match. Small landscapes in plain gold frames lined the walls in the hallway, each with its own brass-sconced light. Against the wall opposite an old elephant’s foot coatrack and umbrella stand was a giant longcase grandfather clock, the brass face enclosed in an oak case inlaid with mahogany and satinwood. It ticked heavily, the steady sound echoing a little, making the empty silence in the rest of the house even more oppressive.

“It sure feels empty,” whispered Peggy sadly.

“Yeah,” agreed Holliday. “It sure does.”

They did a quick tour of the house. Every horizontal surface was covered with knickknacks and collectibles: shelves full of antique bottles, tables covered with stacks of old magazines, collections of minerals and fossils in glass-fronted display cases. A mantelpiece filled with ships in bottles, some of the bottles so old the glass was clouding.

There were four bedrooms on the second floor, a bathroom with a separate water closet, stairs leading up to the widow’s walk and the turret room. Everything was equally cluttered. Located conveniently beside the toilet was a stack of Life magazines dating back to the 1930s. Once upon a time the turret room had been a children’s play area, but now it was only a repository for broken furniture awaiting repairs that would never come and old luggage and boxes that would have been stored in the attic or garage of most houses.

Only one of the bedrooms had been occupied, the smallest, which had its own fireplace. Like everywhere else in the house it didn’t look as though anyone had dusted in decades, and soot from the fireplace and smoke from Henry’s inevitable pipe had made the window that looked out over the rear yard and the creek almost opaque.

“Never the greatest housekeeper, was he?” Peggy commented. She fluffed up the down-filled pillow and smoothed out the pale blue chenille comforter on the big four-poster bed that took up most of the room, her fingers running sadly across the old fabric.

“No,” murmured Holliday. They made their way downstairs again, going through to the kitchen. The furniture here was Early American-a pine table in the middle of the room with four plain matching chairs, ladder-backed with woven rush seats. The cupboards were painted wood inset with pale blue Delft tiles. The floor was gray-green linoleum.

The old Kelvinator refrigerator was filled with bits and pieces of past meals-a dried-out piece of steak badly wrapped in wax paper, a chunk of orange-colored cheese, an open half-used can of Campbell’s Chunky Chicken soup, some limp celery; an enormous jar of Cheez Whiz squatted on one of the racks.

“Uncle Henry’s secret vice,” said Holliday. “Cheez Whiz on toasted Wonder Bread.”

“Grandpa Henry once wrote an article for Smithsonian magazine about Edwin Traisman,” said Peggy. “I did the photo research and layout for him.”

“Who?”

“Edwin Traisman. A Latvian from Wisconsin. The guy who invented Cheez Whiz.”

“Figures he’d be from Wisconsin,” said Holliday.

“Turns out he also invented the McDonald’s French fry,” continued Peggy. “He was ninety-one when he died.”

“Guess he kept away from his own creations,” grunted Holliday. They went through the pantry and into the dining room. The darkly paneled room was dominated by an enormous display cabinet that took up one entire wall from floor to ceiling. The glass-fronted cabinet was filled with tier upon tier of stuffed birds and animals, from a tiny sparrow to an enormous horned owl, from a glass-eyed chipmunk forever climbing an amputated length of tree limb to a snarling bobcat riding a papier-mвchй and chicken wire boulder. The rest of the room was filled with a long, highly polished dining room table flanked by eight high-backed chairs upholstered in blue morocco leather. There was an ornate morini bowl of wax fruit as a centerpiece that was as dusty as everything else in the house.

“It always made me nervous eating in here,” said Peggy. “All those glass eyes watching me.”

“He bought the whole thing from a small-town natural history museum that was closing its doors,” said Holliday. “He was never into birds or animals really. He told me he’d picked it up at an auction for next to nothing. It was the bargain that attracted him.”

“Was he working on anything?” Peggy asked. “I’ve been out of touch.”

“Me, too,” said Holliday. “I hadn’t talked to him in quite a while. The last time we spoke he’d just come back from some sort of research jaunt to Oxford. I think it was just an excuse to see some of his old friends from before the war. That was more than a year ago. I really don’t know what he was up to. He always had some sort of project going.”

They moved into the library. It was a magnificent room, the walls lined with arch-topped fruitwood bookcases, the spaces in between hung with fantastic oil paintings of medieval battle scenes done by long-forgotten artists. There was a wrought iron chandelier hanging from the dark oak coffered ceiling, and the floor was covered with a gigantic tree of life-pattern Persian carpet done in shades of rose and deep blue.

There was a functional desk set at an angle in one corner, several comfortable old fan-backed club chairs upholstered in faded velvet that had once been red but that had worn down through the years to a faded pink, a small couch, and Henry’s personal chair, a giant green leather monstrosity that looked as though it had been spirited out of a nineteenth-century English men’s club. There was a conveniently placed pole lamp with a fringed shade and a side table at the chair’s right hand, just the perfect size for a book and a late-night tipple of sherry, or perhaps a small tumbler of Henry’s favorite single malt.

The chair stood just beyond the hearth of the plain, practical fireplace. Above the fireplace was a signed mezzotint by the apocalyptic British artist John Martin, showing the fall of Babylon in desperate, murderous detail, complete with a tiny Assyrian priest being scorched by bolts of divine lightning descending from boiling, wrathful thunderheads above the ancient temple. There was a quotation in Italian printed within the frame. Holliday quoted it from memory; it had been Uncle Henry’s credo:

“Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra

traffito da un raggio di sole:

ed и subito sera.”

“Which means?” Peggy asked.

“Every one of us stands alone on the heart of the

earth,

Transfixed by a beam of sun;

And suddenly it is evening.”

“Easy for you to say,” quipped Peggy.

“It’s from a poem called ‘It Is Now Evening’ by Salvatore Quasimodo.”

“The hunchback?”

“The Italian poet. He won the Nobel Prize, if I remember correctly. Henry met him in Rome after the war.”

“Sad,” said Peggy, staring up at the print above the fireplace.

“Not to Uncle Henry.” Holliday shrugged. “To him it was a caution: your time on earth is brief, don’t waste it. Death comes to us all. Every day is a gift.”

“And it came to Grandpa in the end,” sighed Peggy, slumping down into the big green chair.

Holliday went to the desk and sat down in Uncle Henry’s old-fashioned wooden swivel chair. The desk was a massive oak rectangle, the twin pedestals roughly carved with trails of ivy and shapes of birds and small forest animals. There was a large, leather-edged blotter on the top surface and a green-shaded brass banker’s lamp to light it.

The wood was dark, worm-eaten, and polished by time, the edges of the pedestals worn and chipped. Holliday had always assumed that the desk had been made from the remains of a shipwreck, although he’d never asked about it and now regretted not doing so. The desk looked Spanish, perhaps fifteenth century. He had no idea how it had come to be in a house on the shores of Lake Erie, but like many things in Uncle Henry’s life there was almost certainly a story behind it.

There were three drawers in each pedestal and another drawer in between. Holliday went through each drawer carefully and methodically. The drawers on the left were filled with personal files relating to Uncle Henry’s bills, banking, old tax returns, receipts, and the general maintenance of the house. The drawers on the right were filled with more files, these mostly relating to his years at the university and his professional correspondence.

There was one marble-sided cardboard accordion file filled with incomprehensible notes on scraps of paper, written in at least three languages that Holliday could decipher, including what appeared to be Hebrew. He also found several maps, including one of La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay coast of France.

The map was small, the paper fragile and yellowed. It looked as though it had been torn out of an old Michelin guidebook. There were several faint notes on it in faded pencil: Huguenot? Ireland? Which Rock? Holliday put the map back in the cardboard file.

He looked in the center drawer. There was nothing in it but stationery and an old, blunt-bladed, ebony-handled dagger that looked as though Uncle Henry might have used it as a letter opener. Holliday had never seen it before, but he immediately recognized it for what it was. He flipped it over to check the inscription engraved on the tarnished blade just to be sure: Meine Ehre Heisst Treue-My Honor Is Loyalty. It was a Nazi SS dagger.

“What was he doing with one of these?” Holliday said aloud.

“What?” Peggy asked. Holliday explained.

“I guess it was a souvenir,” Holliday said finally, holding it up for her to see.

“Was he ever in Germany during the war?” Peggy asked, frowning. “I thought he was in intelligence, like Ian Fleming and all those guys who sat around smoking pipes and thinking up ways to irritate the Gestapo. I never thought he actually did anything. I mean, you know, anything dangerous.”

“Neither did I,” said Holliday.

“Maybe it’s a fake, a reproduction,” suggested Peggy.

“I don’t think so,” answered Holliday, hefting the old edged weapon. It had the cold weight of something used in a dark time for dark deeds. History was fused in the dagger, the sensuously shaped blade tempered in spilled blood. Or maybe he was reading too much into it. The lighting runes and swastika could still cast a nasty spell. He tipped the dagger back into the drawer and pushed it closed.

“Maybe that’s what Broadbent was talking about,” said Peggy, getting up out of the chair and going to the wall of bookcases on the other side of the room.

“You could call that dagger a lot of things,” answered Holliday. “But no one’s going to mistake it for a sword.”

“I wonder why it was so important to his father?” Peggy said. She smiled suddenly. “Look at this!” she said excitedly. “All the old kids’ books he introduced me to. They’re all here.” She started reading titles. “All the Narnia books, Five Children and It, Swallows and Amazons, The Wouldbegoods, The Famous Five by Enid Blyton; they’re all here!”

Holliday joined her, his eyes scanning the shelves and finally finding what he’d been searching for: a single heavy hardcover volume, still in its pale green and cream colored dust jacket, a first edition of T. H. White’s Arthurian epic, The Once and Future King.

Uncle Henry had read the entire four-part story to him when he was a young boy, and later Holliday had reread it again by himself many times over. If ever there’d been a story for a boy on a rainy day in upstate New York, that was it. He smiled at the memory; the kind of book that Harry Potter would have read and treasured. He flipped open the book to the title page and a small piece of paper fluttered out and drifted down onto the carpet. Holliday slid the book back into place and bent to retrieve the folded scrap. There was writing on it done in Uncle Henry’s unmistakable cop perplate script with a fountain pen, the black ink faded to a sepia.

“ ‘Hic iacet Arthurus rex quondam rexque futuris: Here lies Arthur, the Once and Future King. Seek through the storied years to find the treasure down below: thus it is for you to seek and thus it is for me to know.’ ”

“What’s that all about?” Peggy asked.

“The first part of it is supposed to be the Latin inscription on King Arthur ’s grave in Avalon. It’s the last sentence in the T. H. White book.”

“What about the rest of it?”

“Some kind of riddle.”

“Who for?”

“Me presumably,” said Holliday. “It was my favorite book. He knew that eventually I’d come back for it.” He paused, then added softly: “After he died.”

“Any idea what it means?”

Holliday whispered the riddle to himself again, then stepped back from the bookcase, looking at the collection of children’s stories as a whole. “The storied years: all these books. Your childhood and mine.”

“Treasure down below?” Peggy queried.

“There’s nothing down below,” said Holliday. “Just more books.”

“Down in the basement, under the floorboards?”

“I never saw Henry hammer a nail in his life, let alone tear up floorboards,” snorted Holliday. “Not his style.”

Holliday stared at the bookcases. They had obviously been custom made, fitted into the house as it was being built, which predated Uncle Henry’s occupation by decades. They were like a row of narrow Gothic arches, the kind of exotic cabinetry the late Victorians were so fond of, especially in a town like Fredonia which was full of houses like Henry’s. Each bookcase had eight shelves, floor to ceiling except for the points of the arches and the ornately scrolled kick plates at the bottom.

Holliday looked down at the riddle again. “Thus it is for you to seek and thus it is for me to know.”

Peggy saw it first.

“The kick plate,” she said, dropping down on her hands and knees. She ran her fingers along the four-inch-high strip of wood, pressing lightly every few inches. At the center of the kick plate the pressure resulted in an audible clicking sound and the wood jumped forward an inch or so on some kind of spring mechanism.

“A secret drawer,” said Holliday.

“Grandpa Henry’s stash?” Peggy said, smiling up at Holliday.

“Open it,” he said.

She did. The drawer was the same depth as the bookcase, about eight inches, running from one side to the other. It was lined with very old and very worn satin that might have been purple a hundred years ago but which was now faded to a pale eggplant shade. There was a single object in the drawer. It was wrapped in a red, gold, black, and white silk pennant that was as unmistakable as the dagger in the desk.

“What the hell is that?” Peggy asked, horrified.

“It’s the Standarte des Fьhrers und Obersten Befehlshabers der Wehrmacht,” said Holliday, wrapping his tongue around the German. “Adolf Hitler’s personal standard. His battle flag.” He paused. “Let’s see what ‘treasure’ is hidden underneath it.” Peggy tentatively unwrapped the silk covering.

“Amazing,” she whispered.

“A sword,” said Holliday, looking at the object nestled in the secret compartment. “A crusader’s sword.”