“There can be no mistake about the age?”
“Spectroscopic analysis is accurate within a margin of error less than ten percent for African juniper. There’s no doubt about it, Maurice: the instrument is forty-five hundred years old.”
“Merde,”
breathed the man, his crème caramel forgotten. “You know what this does to the basic paradigm of modern nautical history?”
“Destroys it,” answered Holliday flatly.
“This device would be as much a secret weapon as the atomic bomb,” said Bernheim. “A seafaring nation that had it would have an incredible advantage over a nation that lacked it.”
“At least for the two hundred years or so between Saint-Clair’s discovery and the Jacob’s Quadrant being invented in the fifteen hundreds,” said Holliday.
“Columbus goes out the window.”
“And it almost certainly means that those fairy tales about the Templars going to America are true. Or could be,” said Holliday.
“Saint-Clair, Sinclair,” mused Bernheim. He ran his thumb along the notches along the sides of the two strips of wood, then fitted the two pieces together. He held up the cruciform instrument. “Have you ever seen the ancient coat of arms of the Saint-Clairs?” Bernheim asked. “The original, as it was used in France?”
“Sure,” answered Holliday. “A scalloped cross.”
“Pas escallope, mon ami
. In France it is called
La Croix Engraal
,” said Bernheim. “An ‘engrailed’ cross.”
“Which means?” Holliday asked.
“In heraldic terms
engraal
means ‘protected by the Holy Grail,’ the Grail being indicated by what, in that silly
Da Vinci
book, was referred to as the V of the sacred feminine, not sangraal, the blood of Christ. But what if, on the Saint-Clair crest, the
engraal
notches on the cross referred to something else? Something much more practical.” Bernheim ran his thumbnail along the notches in the wood. Holliday suddenly understood.
“The gradation indentations on a Jacob’s Quadrant,” Holliday said and grinned. “The simplest explanation is most often the truth. Occam’s razor.”
“C’est ca,”
said Bernheim happily. “The mystery is solved.”
“Not until I find out more about this Jean de Saint-Clair, whoever he was.”
Bernheim had gone back to his crème caramel. He put down his spoon and wiped his lips with a napkin. He shrugged.
“Historically the Sinclairs of Scotland came from a little place known as Saint-Clair-sur-Epte. The Epte River once served as the border between Normandy and Ile de France; that is, between the English possessions and the rest of the country. It is also the river diverted by Claude Monet to create his famous water- lily pond.”
“What on earth does any of this have to do with maritime history?” Holliday laughed, impressed by Bernheim’s fund of knowledge on such an obscure subject.
“Your interest, your expertise is in medieval warfare, correct?”
“I’d like to think so.”
“Mine is ships and the sea. Before ships there must be wood; before wood there must be trees. Have you ever heard of the Beaulieu River in England?”
“No.”
“Then you’ve never heard of the village of Buckler’s Hard.”
“Not a name I’m familiar with.”
“Anyone involved in French maritime history would be,” said Bernheim. “HMS
Euryalus
, HMS
Swiftsure
and HMS
Agamemnon
were all built there, ships that were key during the Battle of Trafalgar in which the British defeated the French fleet in 1805. It was wood from the surrounding New Forest that built Nelson’s entire fleet.”
“You’re saying the Epte River had the same function?”
“Since the time of the Vikings,” Bernheim said with a nod. He scraped the last of the crème caramel from the sides of his dish. He smacked his lips and sighed. “If the Saint-Clair you seek was a seaman he almost certainly came from Saint-Clair-sur-Epte.” He stared mournfully down at his empty dish and sighed again. “There is an old abbey nearby, the Abbaye de Tiron. Speak with the librarian there, Brother Morvan. Pierre Morvan. Perhaps he will be able to help you.” He glanced over at Holliday’s untouched crème caramel. “Not hungry?” Bernheim inquired hopefully.
2
The average student thinks the best synonym for “research” is “Google.” Real, original research, however, has more to do with pinball than search engines; it’s usually a matter of hit and miss, with a lot more misses than hits. You ricochet around the table gathering points as you go, eventually finding out a direction before eventually reaching your destination.
Discovering the whereabouts of Pierre Morvan turned out to be a long-distance game of pinball, ricocheting northwest for a hundred miles from Paris to the monastery of the Abbaye de Tiron in the town of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, then seventy miles south to the tiny village of Le Pin-la-Garenne and its even smaller eleventh-century church, and finally a hundred miles due west to the town of Dol-de-Bretagne near the Brittany coast and the cathedral there.
It was time well spent. Holliday discovered that the Abbaye de Tiron was reputedly the birthplace of Freemasonry, which usually allied with the Templars. The little church in Le Pin- la-Garenne had a lot of Saint- Clairs buried in its crypt, and Dol-de-Bretagne was reputedly the original home of the Stuart kings of Scotland, also closely associated with the Templars, especially after the official dissolution of the order in A.D. 1312. It was also the birthplace of the ancestors of William Sinclair, First Earl of Caithness, Third Earl of Orkney, Baron of Roslin and the builder of Rosslyn Chapel, in Midlothian, the supposed location of the final secret in the book
The Da Vinci Code
.
The Cathedral of Dol was a grim-looking Gothic structure, black with a thousand years of soot and grime. The original church was built in A.D. 834 and added onto for the next six hundred years. According to legend, St. Samson, in the midst of building the cathedral, infuriated Satan, who threw a gigantic rock at the cathedral, destroying the north tower, which no longer exists. Holliday found Brother Morvan on his hands and knees taking a rubbing of a Latin inscription on the floor of the nave. Morvan was wearing the white habit and black scapular “apron” of a Cistercian, the sect of monks the Templars were most frequently associated with.
Holliday cleared his throat. “Brother Morvan?”
The gray-haired monk glanced up at him and smiled. He was a grandfatherly man, complete with twinkling eyes and old-fashioned rimless spectacles perched on a large hooked nose.
“You must be Mr. Holliday,” said the monk. “Do people ever call you ‘Doc’ like the famous western gunfighter?”
“All the time,” answered Holliday. “I came by it honestly, though; I do have a Ph.D.”
“In what?”
“Medieval history.”
“Which explains why you’re looking for me all over France.”
“How did you know I was looking for you?”
“I may wear a monk’s robe, Mr. Holliday, but that doesn’t prevent me from having a cellular telephone. Your reputation precedes you, courtesy of Société Française de Radiotéléphone.” Morvan stood up and dusted off his robe. He appeared to be in his early to mid-sixties. “How did you lose the eye?” he asked, nodding at the patch over Holliday’s right eye.
“A piece of gravel on a back road in Afghanistan.”
“So presumably it wasn’t always just plain ‘Mister’ Holliday.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Afghanistan from the twelfth century to the fifteenth was effectively under the rule of people like Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Not much to interest a medievalist. Also you have an officer’s bearing.”
“You’re good,” said Holliday, laughing.
“My cell is a BlackBerry,” answered the monk. “I Googled you, Colonel Holliday. Your specialty is medieval arms and armor. What brings you to a cathedral? There are a few dead knights entombed here, but any swords are carved in stone.”
“I use a BlackBerry, too,” Holliday said with a smile. “Maybe I should have Googled you first. Anyway, I’m looking for one knight in particular. A Templar named Jean de Saint-Clair.”
“Interesting,” said the monk. “Walk with me.”
Morvan didn’t wait for an answer. He headed back down the nave and then turned toward an open side door. A few moments later Holliday found himself in a small graveyard, an alleyway of ancient granite mausoleums, the stones old and worn, most of the inscriptions faded away to nothing.
“There are a great number of artisans buried here,” said the monk. “The man who crafted the Abraham Window in the cathedral, for instance, the so-called Abraham Master.” He stopped at a simple square mausoleum and rested his large gnarled hand on the old gray stone. There was the indistinct image of some strange beast over the door. A cat perhaps? “The image is the lion of St. Mark, the patron saint of stained-glass painters,” explained Morvan. “It is the only means we have to identify him, but six hundred years after his death we still see his work as though it was created only yesterday. It is living history, the very imagination of a single human being.”
“I know what you mean,” Holliday said and nodded. “I can go to some places that seemed soaked in history. You can almost breathe it in like perfume. Some battlefields are like that. There is graffiti on the walls of a brothel in Pompeii that’s two thousand years old.”
“Art endures is the lesson, I think. Businessmen are rarely remembered much past their time. No one remembers Michelangelo’s patrons, but they remember the man. The
Mona Lisa
’s smile endures, the pyramids still stand. It’s the reason I joined the Tironensian Order.”
“Because of their association with Freemasonry?”
“Not just the Masons,” said Morvan. “It was a community of artisans. ShipWalkers, or shipwrights, glassblowers, goldsmiths, stonecutters, craftsmen of all types. Creators of things that lasted. It seemed to me the greatest expression of God’s immortality, what he had given man to express infinity:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wildflower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour
“William Blake wrote that two hundred years ago but it’s still quoted today.”
“I’m not sure why that makes my question about Jean de Saint-Clair interesting,” said Holliday.
“Jean de Saint-Clair, also known as John Sinclair, was born in Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, the son of a master shipWalker. He ran away to sea, became a knight, joined the Templars, carried men and supplies to the Crusades and disappeared during the dissolution of the order in 1312. He returned to France and specifically to Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 1332 with a dispensation from Pope Gregory IX, the man who introduced the world to the Inquisition, by the way. Saint-Clair was one of a very few Templar knights to survive the dissolution. Most of the others were simply murdered or burned at the stake. He joined the monastery at the Abbaye de Tiron and spent the next twenty years in seclusion. When he died, a group of monks from the Abbey of Mont Saint-Michel appeared, pickled him in a barrel of Calvados apple brandy and took him to the island abbey, where he was then interred. His tomb bears the inscription
et in arcadia ego
, which has a number of translations, the most popular being ‘I lived in Arcadia.’ Both
The Da Vinci Code
and
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
use the phrase in relation to the bloodline of Christ, which of course is utter nonsense on a par with the discovery of Piltdown Man. But that’s not why your question was interesting.”
“Do tell,” said Holliday.
“What is truly interesting is the fact that you are the second person this week who’s asked me about Jean de Saint-Clair.”
“Really.”
“Really,” Morvan said, nodding.
“Who was he?”
“Not a he at all. A she. A nun from the Convent of St. Agnes of Prague. Her name is Sister Margaret Emily.”
“Not a very Czech name.”
“From her accent I’d say the American South. Mississippi or Alabama.”
“Why is she interested in Jean de Saint-Clair?”
“Apparently she’s writing a definitive history of the convent for a Ph.D. thesis at Notre Dame. Saint-Clair’s name came up in her research.”
“Apparently?”
“In my experience a great many people lie,” said Morvan, trying to keep his voice neutral.
“You think she was lying?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you must have thought it or you wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Perhaps.”
“A lying nun. Now
that’s
interesting.”
3
Mont Saint-Michel is a Walt Disney-style Fantasyland Castle, monastery and abbey on a tiny, rocky island half a mile off the Normandy Coast close to the mouth of the Couesnon River, not far from the town of Avranches. Once upon a time the narrow causeway connecting the island to the mainland was covered by the exceptionally high tides, but over the centuries the causeway has been built up so that the little island is always accessible.
The eleventh-century fortress and Benedictine refuge has been commercialized in direct proportion to its elevation. The lower levels of the island are crammed with overpriced souvenir shops, mediocre family hotels and expensive restaurants serving second-rate foods. By the time you reach the abbey and the top of the
grand degré
, the main staircase, you are back in the land of the pure and holy. There is one exception to this rule.
On the back of the island, away from the crowds and facing the sea, was a single-roomed chapel, nothing more than four stone walls and a slate roof. It was the Chapel of St. Aubert, named for Saint-Michel’s founder and one of the oldest existing structures on the island.
The exterior walls are crusted with barnacles, the stones battered by seventeen centuries of pounding storms. It is only a few yards away from the original stone breakwater that once served as the island’s port of entry. There is nothing between the chapel and the sea. Worn to near anonymity, a small granite statue of Bishop Aubert stands on the simple peaked roof, his back to the empty ocean.