A Coming Evil Read online

  She explained, "The story about the king who killed the messenger for bringing the news that they'd lost the battle?"

  He shook his head, although she was fairly certain the story was from Greek or Roman times, long before the 1300s.

  She shrugged to indicate it wasn't important. She sat down and patted the ground next to her. "Was your king the kind of man to kill someone for bringing bad news?"

  "Yes," Gerard said so simply that there was no response she could give. He sat where she'd indicated.

  "Who was he?" she asked.

  "Philippe," he told her, "the Fourth."

  The name meant nothing to her. She was most familiar with the kings starting from Louis XIII, which she knew was much too late. She picked up the book and found Philippe in the index. As she flipped to the appropriate section, she was aware of Gerard watching her with what was probably the same expression people had worn when Joan of Arc said she was hearing voices. "Here he is." There was even a portrait of him, wearing a silly hat. She put the book down between them. "Is it a good likeness?" she asked.

  Gerard looked at her helplessly.

  "Didn't you ever meet him?" she asked.

  "Have you met your king?" he countered.

  She didn't want to get started with that again.

  "Actually, we don't have a king anymore," she admitted, then added hastily: "But even if we did, I'm not anybody important. I thought knights had to pledge loyalty to the king."

  She thought he was still stuck on "We don't have a king anymore," but after a moment he said, "Not the religious orders. We answered to the pope."

  "Look," Lisette said, "here it says he reigned from 1285 until—"

  She stopped abruptly and Gerard looked up from her finger, pointing in the book, to her face. Apparently he couldn't read numbers either.

  "Thirteen fourteen," she finished. The same year Gerard had died.

  Gerard raised his eyebrows, surprised but obviously not overwhelmed. She had asked if his king was the kind of man to kill someone for bringing bad news and Gerard had answered yes. That wasn't the kind of person you mourned for. But he had been surprised, which indicated Gerard had died first. Many people must have died in 1314. There didn't have to be a connection.

  "Let's see..." She ran her finger down the text. "It talks about a war with Edward I of England, and a revolt in Flanders..."

  "My older brother was killed fighting the Flemish," Gerard said.

  Again, she had no idea how to answer. "It mentions several popes here," Lisette said. "Celestine V, pressured by Philippe to resign, replaced by Boniface VIII. Listen to this: Boniface threatened to excommunicate Philippe, but there was an uprising, possibly backed by Philippe, and Boniface died. He was followed by Benedict XI, who was poisoned, also possibly Philippe's doing, then after Benedict there was Clement V, who"—she looked up at Gerard—"died in 1314."

  No reaction this time. "Does your book speak of us?" he asked.

  Lisette silently skimmed more of the text. "'The Templars, who fought so bravely in the Crusades, were disbanded in dishonor in 1314,'" she read out loud—1314 yet again—"'on what is now generally thought to have been trumped-up charges.'"

  Gerard crossed his arms and sat back, his look hard and angry.

  She quickly looked away. "It says Philippe confiscated what the book calls their 'considerable properties,' which were supposed to go to the Knights Hospitallers. But Philippe claimed the money was owed him because of the expenses of the Templars' trial, and he never handed it over. Do you know anything about a trial?"

  "Yes," Gerard said. "Is that all?"

  "No, it says he also seized property from the Lombard bankers, whoever they were, and—listen to this—from the Jews. In 1306 he deported all the Jews and said anybody who owed anything to a Jewish person had to pay the debt to him. It also says he debased and inflated the coinage, so that if he owed somebody money he'd say it was worth one thing, but if somebody owed him, he'd say it was worth less so they had to pay him more. Did you know that?"

  "I was in Cyprus in 1306," Gerard said. "Does your book say nothing else of the Templars?"

  Lisette looked up Templars in the index. "Let's see. Founded in 1118, one of several—"

  Gerard sighed. Loudly.

  Lisette went to one of the later pages cited in the index. "'A Crusader's Castle,'" she read, underneath a picture of a grim-looking fortress. '"Krak des Chevaliers.' Were you there?"

  "I was never in the Holy Land," Gerard said.

  Lisette skipped forward some more. '"The fall of Acre'?"

  He shook his head.

  "All that's left is that little bit about Philippe disbanding them."

  Gerard rested his head in his hands.

  "What did happen?" she asked.

  He let his hands drop but said nothing.

  His entire life, Lisette thought, between where one sentence ends and the next starts.

  But there was more to it than that, she suspected.

  "Tell me about yourself," she said.

  "To what purpose?" He sounded tired and bitter.

  "Tell me," she repeated.

  19.

  Thursday, September 5, 1940

  "All my life I trained to be a knight," Gerard said. "And in my heart I always knew I wanted to be a Templar, to dedicate myself, body and soul, to God."

  "Did you have to make vows?" Lisette asked. "Like a priest?"

  Gerard nodded. "Obedience, chastity, and poverty. My brother had died by then, and my father. I turned over all my family property, all my possessions to the Order."

  He was speaking slowly enough, hesitantly enough that it didn't feel like interrupting to ask, "Were you rich before that?"

  "Yes," Gerard said simply. "By the time I took my vows, Jerusalem had been lost." He gestured vaguely toward the book on chivalry. "The fall of Acre." He shook his head. "But we always thought we'd win it back—eventually. Always."

  Like us, she thought. Like us when Germany invaded France.

  She saw him pull himself back together. "I joined the Templars in Cyprus, where we were fighting the Turks. Philippe ... was not a popular king."

  "I should think not," Lisette said.

  "There was a riot in Paris, and he took refuge for several days in the Paris Temple, our headquarters. We guessed, later—" Something about that thought made him wince. He ran his hands through his hair. "Understand, the individual Templars took a vow of poverty," he told her. "But the Order itself was very rich."

  "'Considerable properties,'" Lisette quoted from the book.

  Gerard nodded. "The King must have seen just how rich we were while he was the guest of the Paris chapter. Can you imagine them, trying to impress him, letting him see everything, thinking that if they showed him how rich and powerful we were, he'd leave us alone?"

  Lisette looked down at her hands on the book, away from the bitterness on Gerard's face.

  "Within the year," he said, "Pope Clement called us back from Cyprus to meet with King Philippe, to discuss another Crusade. I was young, a new knight, a nobody. It wasn't until afterwards that I learned there were already those who suspected he'd move against us. But nobody suspected..." He closed his eyes.

  Lisette waited.

  "We returned to Paris. Everything seemed normal. Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of our Order, was a pallbearer at the funeral for the King's brother's wife. The next day—the very day following the funeral—we were arrested."

  "Who?" Lisette started to ask, at the same moment Gerard said, "All of us."

  "All?" Lisette asked. "How many—"

  "Thousands. Of course," he told her, "not all the brothers were knights. There were confratres—"

  "What are confratres?"

  He paused to consider. "What you called regular soldiers."

  "Go on," she told him.

  "Chaplains, retainers, old men and boys who were shepherds and farm laborers for the Order and who had never been to the Holy Land or to Cyprus or anywhere be
sides the fief to which they'd been born." He put his hands together, almost as though he was praying. When he spoke again, his voice was very soft. "They came at night, and those of us at the Paris Temple had no idea how widespread the arrests were. Our leaders ordered us not to fight, to lay down our weapons. They thought that everything would be resolved shortly if we didn't resist."

  "But Philippe disbanded the Order anyway?" Lisette said.

  Gerard looked at her over his clasped hands.

  No, she realized. No, it hadn't been that easy.

  "We were accused..." He sighed, lowering his gaze. "They..." He put his hands down on his knees and looked at them rather than at her. He opened his mouth to start again, but again changed his mind.

  "You didn't do it," Lisette said, to show she believed in him.

  "No," he said. And the look of appreciation and relief nearly broke her heart. "We were rich and we were arrogant, and we weren't nearly as powerful as we thought; that was all we were guilty of."

  "What did they say?" she asked.

  He had a hard time getting it out: "Treason—selling the Holy Land to the Saracens."

  He was concentrating on his hands again so that she suspected there was more to it than that. "Yes?"

  "Heresy. Denying Christ. Spitting on the cross. Idol worship." He stole a quick glance at her that told her even that wasn't the worst of it.

  "Go on."

  He forced himself to meet her eyes. "Immorality."

  Now she looked away, but then she realized that suggested she didn't trust in his innocence. She turned back to face him. "Those are stupid accusations," she said. "Hundreds of Templars died in the Crusades."

  "Thousands, over the years," he corrected her.

  "Why would Saracen sympathizers or people who didn't believe in Jesus die in His name? What evidence did they have for any of it?"

  "Evidence?" Gerard pondered until Lisette wondered if the word hadn't existed in medieval times. "There were confessions," he said. Again he ran his hands over his face. He must have realized how frustrating it was for her to get his story piecemeal like this. "The Dominicans were in charge of the inquisition," he said. "The hounds of the Lord."

  "Dominican monks?" Lisette asked. "Inquisition" made her think of torture and death, and Dominicans taught in schools.

  But Gerard was nodding. "By law," he explained, "torture can be used on a person only once. If he does not confess, that means God has given him the strength to withstand the pain, which proves that he is innocent."

  "I see," Lisette said, though it sounded like a roundabout way of seeking justice to her.

  "But," Gerard continued, "the law does not stipulate what 'once' means."

  "Once means once," Lisette said.

  But Gerard said, "Once can be broken into many intervals."

  "How many?"

  Gerard shrugged. "Until you say whatever it is that they want you to say." He leaned forward, elbows resting on knees, head resting on his once-again clasped hands. "At first you think you'll be brave, like the heroes in the ballads. But that doesn't last long. And then you think you can't take it anymore, and surely if God won't stop them, at least He'll stop your heart and take you home to Him. And you can't stop screaming and you can't catch your breath and finally it all goes away, but then they throw a bucket of water on you and you haven't died at all, and they start all over again. Those first few days, we kept waiting for Jacques de Molay and the other leaders to do something, to get us out of there somehow. Then we heard that Molay had confessed. He was an old man. But, we said to ourselves, we're under the authority of the pope. The pope will protest, he'll demand our release. But the pope was afraid of the king. And finally he handed us over to Philippe for the greater good of the Church."

  Lisette would have given anything to be able to hug him, to console him. "How long?" she asked.

  "Seven years," Gerard answered, his voice a whisper. "At first I thought, I'm young but not too young. I'm innocent. I can resist. But they kept coming back and coming back. We were chained together in groups, sometimes five or six; some cells held twenty or thirty. And it was always cold and filthy, and we were always hungry, and they refused us the sacraments. And you could hear them coming, and you'd pray: Not today. God spare me today. Let them take somebody else, anybody else, one of the boys, one of the old men, my best friend. Just don't let them touch me. And then they'd tell us, 'Admit to the charges. Everybody else has. And then we can stop hurting you. This one or that one has admitted that at the receptions he presided over, the initiates were required to spit on the cross and pray to an idol. We know you were there. You don't have to give us any names, just say yes.' And after long enough, it seemed as though lying and saying yes was the only reasonable thing to do."

  He'd wrapped his arms around himself and was sitting hunched over as though to protect himself. Lisette said, "Oh, Gerard, I'm so sorry. Wasn't there anybody to speak up for the Templars?"

  "The third year," Gerard said, "Pope Clement ordered a papal commission to investigate. They asked, 'Who among you will defend the Order?' At first, nobody would. Nobody wanted to be noticed. But they said, 'We will protect you from retaliation. Speak freely. Speak the truth. No harm will come to you.' So we stepped forward, over five hundred of us. The commissioners put five men in charge: Pierre de Bologna and Renaud de Provins, who were priests; Guillaume de Chambonnet and Bertrand de Sartiges, knights; and Robert Vigier, a serving brother."

  Gerard gave the faintest of smiles. "Renaud was a lawyer at heart. If anybody could have done anything for us ... He said that we should be held in custody by the Church rather than by the civil authorities. He tried to ensure security for witnesses, both Templars and outsiders who would testify on our behalf. He demanded an inquiry into deathbed confessions, where many had recanted their earlier confessions of the charges against us. He said that those who accused us should appear before the commission, and that when the brothers were being examined by the commission, the king's agents should not be present."

  All reasonable requests, Lisette thought. "What happened?"

  "Several of the commissioners refused to attend the hearings; perhaps they were afraid, perhaps loyal to the king, I don't know why. Still, we gave our testimony. Lisette, sometimes somebody would speak in the morning, maintaining his innocence, then the same person would be brought back that afternoon or the next day, and suddenly his hands were bloodied and bandaged, or he couldn't even walk but was dragged in by the jailers, spitting blood or moaning in pain, and he'd say, 'Oh, I misunderstood the question. Yes, I did all those things.'"

  "Couldn't anybody see—"

  "They could see," Gerard said. "They could see. Sympathizers spread the word. In other lands—England, Scotland, Aragon—there were no confessions. Just in France. And in France, while the hearings were still going on, they loaded onto carts fifty-four of the men who had come forward to speak, and they took them outside Paris, where they burned them as relapsed heretics."

  "Was that the end of the papal commission?"

  "No. All in all it went on for more than two years. There were still some who spoke out, who said, 'I may eventually deny this, but that will be because of pain or fear: the Templars are innocent.' There were more burnings. Renaud de Provins was scheduled to die, but the commissioners demanded his return, since he was one of the leaders of the defense. Pierre de Bologna disappeared. They said he escaped." Gerard shook his head. "I don't know; it could be. I ... find this difficult to believe. Brothers who had offered to defend the Order renounced that offer." He was biting his lip. "I was one of those."

  "Gerard—" Lisette started.

  "The commission adjourned for six months. When it reconvened, more commissioners refused to attend. Pierre was gone, whether escaped or dead, and Renaud was prohibited from attending the hearings because the Archbishop of Sens—who was a friend of the king, who had been appointed by the king—had degraded him from priesthood. Sir Guillaume and Sir Bertrand asked to be excused be
cause they were unlettered men who didn't know the law, and I'm afraid I never quite noticed when Robert Vigier stopped attending, but it was much earlier." Gerard took a deep breath. "Eventually, the pope called an assembly. He announced that the Order could not be convicted on the evidence—"

  Lisette gave a start, surprised.

  "—but that he was personally convinced of our guilt. Those who had confessed and who had not renounced their confessions were released. Anyone who had refused to confess or who had retracted his confession was condemned to perpetual imprisonment."

  "There were some who hadn't confessed?" Lisette asked. "Despite the torture?" And something about his expression made her ask, though she had thought earlier that he must have given in, "Were you one of them?"

  "Yes," he said, barely loud enough to hear. "Eventually Jacques de Molay realized the pope would not defend us. Eventually he admitted that he had lied in confessing because of the torture. They burned him the next day. One of the jailers told us that Molay proclaimed his innocence even as the flames consumed him, that he called Philippe and Clement to meet him before God for judgment."

  So that was why Gerard hadn't been surprised to hear that they'd all died the same year.

  Lisette closed the book. She wanted to know what had happened to Gerard but couldn't bring herself to ask.

  Perhaps he could tell. Or perhaps it was just the logical end to his story. "I died in jail of my injuries," he said, in a voice that sounded much less emotional than when he had been describing the hearings.

  "Without confessing," Lisette finished for him. Surely that counted for something.

  "I should have confessed," Gerard said. "I accomplished nothing." And then the calm and flat voice was shown to be false for he buried his face in his hands and his shoulders began to shake.

  Instinctively Lisette threw her arms around him and she rocked him back and forth the way her mother used to do for her when she'd fallen or been upset. "It's all right," she murmured. "It's all over now," which had to be the stupidest thing in the world you could say to a ghost.

  But then she realized that she was actually holding Gerard, that she could feel him in her arms and his hot tears on her neck.