Saint and the Templar Treasure (4 page)

Gaston told her almost too helpfully: “If you want to take him to the chateau, mademoiselle, I and the others will take care of everything here. Although there is really almost nothing to be done.”

The fire was too solidly established by then for amateur extinguishing. It would have to burn itself out until it exhausted the contents of the barn and failed to make an impression on the stone walls. Mimette saw the sense of the old man’s words and sighed.

“Yes, I suppose you are right, Gaston,” she said, and there was more than a hint of tiredness in her voice. “As you always are. Pascal and-?” She looked questioningly at the other student.

“Jules.”

“And Jules will help, too. Afterwards you will find them quarters with the other pickers.”

Gaston nodded. “Of course.”

“Oui, mademoiselle.”

Simon showed Mimette the Hirondel.

“That is my car. Perhaps you would like to drive, since you know where we are going.”

“Thank you.”

She took the keys he held out as they walked over to the car.

“She’s rather fierce on the throttle. Be careful how you put your foot down, or you might find you’re where you were going before you realise you’ve started.”

His warning was answered with a withering look, and the Saint held up his hands in a pantomime of surrender.

“I’m sorry! I was forgetting that you know how to handle a car. But then if I hadn’t braked so quickly I’d have had a new mascot for the bonnet.”

Her frown slowly dissolved into a smile.

“Of course! I was trying to remember where I had seen it before.” She examined the sleek lines of the Hirondel with evident approval. “You were the man who nearly hit me.”

The Saint laughed as he held the door open for her.

“Actually I was under the impression that it was the other way round, but we won’t labour the point.”

He climbed in and turned in his seat so that he could watch her. She started the engine and let in the clutch. After an initial kangeroo hop she handled the car competently enough.

They took the driveway down which the jeep had come, towards the backdrop of buildings that he had not yet had time to sort out. The Saint admired her coolness, but it puzzled him. She could not have been much over twenty-one, but she had accepted the destruction of the barn and the threat it posed to the harvest without the dramatics he would have expected from someone of that age.

As they climbed the slope he was surprised to see that what had looked from below like the crest of an escarpment was in fact only the first of a series of hills set close together, each one topping the one before it. Only the dependencies which he had seen from the barn were actually on the first ridge: The chateau which overlooked them stood in fact on the next hill, with a narrow valley between. Only an illusion of perspective had made its turrets and battlements seem to grow directly out of the nearer buildings.

Mimette seemed prepared to complete the trip in silence, but the Saint had no intention of wasting such an opportunity for conversation.

“I suppose you’re getting hardened to disasters like this by now,” he remarked, as if he was just making an idle comment to pass the time.

“What do you know about the things that have been happening here?” said Mimette sharply.

“Only what Pascal told me on the drive here. That you’ve been having a lot of problems lately. Something about a curse.”

Mimette laughed scornfully.

“That is superstitious nonsense.”

“Of course,” Simon assented readily. “There was certainly nothing ghostly about the two men who set fire to the barn. I know. I tackled one of them. I was amazed when my arm didn’t go right through him.”

Mimette laughed again, and this time it was with genuine amusement.

“I’m quite sure they were real, just as all the other things that have happened have been done by real people and not the spooks the workers prefer to believe in.”

They had reached the foot of the valley and were climbing the second hill. In a few minutes they would reach the chateau and then it might be too late to gather all the information he wanted. There was no time for subtlety.

“What other things?”

“They are no concern of yours.”

“Perhaps not,” he agreed, but there was a new and harsher edge to his voice that she could not ignore. “But I risked my skin to try to save your property. I think that entitles me to be curious.”

“Excuse me,” Mimette said penitently. “I was very rude.”

“So what is the story?”

“It all started last year, shortly after the stone was dug up …”

“The stone?”

“Yes. A sort of tombstone. Very old and covered in ancient writing. One of the workmen discovered it when they were planting some new vines. Apparently it is some relic of the Templiers. They used to own the chateau.”

“Pascal told me about them.”

“Well, from then on things started happening. The vines we planted were sprayed with weed-killer. A few weeks later there was a fire in the pressing house, and a month after that my father was taken seriously ill with food poisoning. It’s just gone on and on, one thing after another. Now nobody is surprised at anything that happens. The staff believe it is all to do with the stone. They say that it has awoken the Templars’ curse. Some have even become so scared that they have left us.”

“And what do you believe, Mimette?” he asked gently.

He had been watching her as she talked and for the first time felt he had penetrated behind the mask of aloof efficiency.

The girl sighed.

“Quite honestly I don’t know what to believe any more. Perhaps someone hates us enough to want the family bankrupted. Perhaps there really is a curse on the Florians. I really don’t know.”

As they approached the chateau Simon surveyed it in more detail. It was exactly as Pascal had described it, half mansion, half castle. The Saint had seen bigger and more grandiose chateaux in the Loire but never one more appropriate to its setting. There was at least four hundred years between the building of each element, yet they blended as harmoniously as if they had been designed by the same architect.

From where the driveway curved in front of it, the land rolled gently down to meet the fertile plain to the east through which a tributary river wound southwards on its way to join the Rhone. The remains of the walls of the ancient fortress ringed the site like a coronet. Made from stone hewn from the hillside and skilfully pieced together, they stretched from either side of an imposing gatehouse to completely enclose the chateau and the formal gardens behind it. The height of the wall varied, in some places twice the height of a man, in others only a few stones remained. The only part that appeared quite untouched by the centuries was a castellated tower in the west corner. It rose sheer for seventy feet, and the ivy that covered other sections of the wall appeared to have found no hold there.

The castle-mansion itself dominated the hilltop. The main central building of four storeys had clearly been restored from the old fortress, while the lower newer wings had been built with square sawn blocks of more modern masonry. The Saint guessed that the chateau had developed from the original keep, and that the remains of the wall that ran straight across the hill in front of it would have served as the last line of defence. Perhaps it was there, he mused, that the Templars had made their final stand. It was the sort of place that made one think of knights and archers and sieges. As they drove past the massive base of the once imposing towers of the gatehouse he would not have been surprised if D’Artagnan had swaggered out to greet them.

Between the remains of the inner wall and the chateau was a rectangular courtyard. Mimette drove across it and stopped in front of a flight of stone steps that swept up to a pair of high iron-studded double doors. Instead of D’Artagnan, a bent-backed major-domo who looked half as old as the house opened a door for them as they reached the top step. He had the appearance and the manner of someone who had been bowing and opening doors all his life, as impersonal as a portrait, listening to everything and hearing nothing.

“Thank you, Charles. You can bring some whisky to the small salon,” said Mimette, hardly glancing at him.

The butler bowed from the shoulders and shuffled off. The Saint looked around him and observed the simplicity of the hall. It was large and airy but almost bare. The floor was paved in plain white marble and a broad staircase of the same stone rose from the far end to serve a wooden gallery that ran around three sides of the hall. A few paintings of long dead Florians hung in ornately gilded frames, and equally heavy armchairs stood against the walls on each side of the three doors that led off it. With the exception of a long trestle table in the centre and the large porcelain bowl that rested upon it, there was no other furniture.

The only other object of interest was a large rock shaped like a gravestone that stood in a recess by the stairs. It was covered with hieroglyphics that appeared to be some form of writing.

As Simon sauntered towards it, the door on his left opened to admit a small man who would have seemed quite at home keeping Snow White company. He could not have been much more than five feet tall, and his lack of inches was not helped by a pair of rounded shoulders and a toddling kind of gait. His chubby face was as round as a full moon, and apart from a few tufts of white hair above his ears he was completely bald.

The new arrival wavered apologetically between the Saint and Mimette.

“Monsieur Norbert, this is …” She had to appeal to the Saint. “I’m sorry, but you haven’t told me your name.”

The Saint smiled. This, finally, was the moment of truth.

“So I haven’t. And you’re going to find it hard to believe. My name is Templar. Simon Templar.”

II

How Charles was kept Busy, and the Saint saw the Light.

1

What’s in a name? The answer depends on whether you have a nice euphonic one like William Shakespeare or were baptised Aloysius Codpiece. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but life would have been a lot harder for poets had it been called a cabbage.

The Saint considered Simon Templar a very satisfactory name and was always interested in the way others responded to it. The disclosure of his identity had been known to evoke a wide range of emotions, from apprehension among those with something to hide, through hatred among those who had cause to wish he had never been born, to blank indifference on the part of those whose reading of newspapers might be confined to the sports or fashion pages.

But on this unique occasion the reactions had to be something special.

Simon was prepared to enjoy the touch of melodrama which he had inevitably created, and he was not disappointed. Watching Mimette, he saw her stiffen as the name registered. The polite smile froze. Her eyes flashed with anger as her first instinct was to suspect him of making some insolent kind of joke.

“It’s true,” he insisted softly. “Would you like to see my passport?”

The blaze died out of her eyes, but they became hard and guarded as the mask of imperturbability slipped back into place.

“How interesting,” she remarked with calculated indifference.

“Interesting! It is more than interesting,” Norbert exclaimed, and the Saint regarded him with renewed curiosity.

He had not ignored the little man’s reaction and had noticed the drooping shoulders straighten and the new light that sparkled in the prominent fishlike eyes at the word “Templar.”

“Monsieur Norbert is an authority on the Templars,” Mi-mette stated flatly. “He is professor of medieval history at the Sorbonne and is here to try to decipher the inscription on the stone.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” said the Saint cordially, and held out his hand.

Norbert grasped it between both fleshy palms and shook it as if trying to draw water from a pump.

“And to meet you. I would like to talk with you at length,” he enthused. “Do you know your genealogy? How far back can you trace your family? You have almost no accent, but perhaps an emigre family after the Revolution? Yes?”

The Saint winced and retrieved his hand to readjust the handkerchief wrapping. He appeared to consider the questions seriously for a moment.

“A fellow called Adam on my father’s side and a lady named Eve on my mother’s. We haven’t gone beyond that yet,” he replied brightly.

Mimette stepped between them with the adroitness of a cocktail party hostess disengaging two incompatible guests.

“Monsieur Templar is hurt,” she explained. “I was about to tend to his injury.” She turned back to the Saint. “This way, please.”

She began to climb the stairs and the Saint made to follow her but Norbert grabbed his arm.

“I am sorry. But you touch on my obsession. Another time, perhaps?”

The Saint disengaged his sleeve as deftly as possible. He had an unreasonable prejudice against men with damp clutching hands.

“Certainly,” he acceded pleasantly. “I always wondered how Great-great-grandfather made it to England without his head.”

Before the earnest professor could relaunch his attack the Saint had joined Mimette at the top of the stairs. When he looked back Norbert was kneeling beside the stone, with lines of intense concentration furrowing his brow as he scribbled in a small notebook.

“What a character!” commented the Saint, shaking his head in discreet ambiguity.

“Oh, he’s very harmless,” Mimette said. “Quite sweet really when he isn’t going on about the Templars, which is ninety per cent of the time.”

“Where did you find him?”

“We didn’t. He found us. He was in charge of an archaeological dig at Orange when he heard about the stone. He was so excited that he came over and my father asked him to stay for a few days. He has practically lived here ever since.”

“If he hangs around till Christmas you could always put him on top of the tree,” Simon suggested helpfully, but the smile faded from Mimette’s lips and her eyes clouded over again.

“If we are still here at Christmas,” she said wryly, and then, as if regretting her words, quickened her steps briskly.