The Lost Treasure of the Templars (3 page)

De Gaudin blamed himself for the failure to summon reinforcements. He had both called for volunteers to fight against the infidels as a simple Christian duty and tried to hire mercenary soldiers, without success. Clearly even mercenaries were only too aware that attempting to take on the Mamluks was simply opting for an unusual form of suicide, and no amount of money would act as a sufficient inducement.

The reality was that never again would Christian forces occupy the Holy Land. The Crusades were over, and in less than twenty years the
Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici
, the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, would effectively cease to exist, betrayed by the greed, cupidity, and treachery of the king of France, Philip the Fair.

De Gaudin died a bitter and broken man less than two years after the fall of Acre, and was succeeded as grand master by Jacques de Molay, one of the senior knights who had accompanied him to Sidon and then on to Cyprus, and with whom he spent many hours talking in private.

And during one of those quiet conversations, toward the end of his life, de Gaudin finally and almost reluctantly confided a single piece of information to the man who would succeed him, vital information that de Molay would himself jealously guard during his tenure as grand master of the Knights Templar, and the agonizing end of his own life in the so-called cleansing flames of his execution pyre in Paris.

Dartmouth, Devon

Present day

Robin Jessop gazed curiously at the leather cover of the book in front of her. The lettering on the spine was nearly illegible, and the front of the volume, which should arguably have been better protected if it had, as she'd been told, been stored in a proper bookcase over the years, showed considerable signs of wear, although the title was still readable. What it said didn't make any sense, but she could certainly read it.

“‘Ipse Dixit,'”
Jessop murmured to herself. “Who on earth would give a book that title? And why? And no author's name, either.”

It was Latin, obviously, the two words translating more or less as “the master has spoken,” which Jessop, as a former classics scholar, albeit some time ago, and, lately, a somewhat reluctant antiquarian bookseller and valuer, a young woman operating in a world that was normally
occupied by elderly and shortsighted men, had not the slightest difficulty in translating.

It had seemed like an easy, if rather dull and tedious, assignment. A middle-aged man named William Stevens who lived just outside Torbay had received an unexpected bequest from an uncle whom he barely knew existed. It wasn't money, but simply the entire contents of the old man's library, a collection of well over one thousand books that ranged from a couple of hundred paperback novels published over the last few dozen years through early-twentieth-century hardback books to almost one hundred ancient leather-bound tomes. And it was these latter volumes that the beneficiary of the will hoped might be worth a small fortune.

When Stevens had first telephoned Jessop, she explained to him at some length that age in itself was no guarantee, or even a reliable indicator, of a high price. Condition, edition, and rarity, she went on, were the three most vital words. To have real value, the book had to be in as good a condition as possible, and the older the book the less likely it was that the condition would be fine enough to command a high price. And a first edition would invariably be worth more than all the subsequent printings, and by definition there were always a smaller number of first editions printed.

Stevens had seemed unimpressed, and Jessop, who had seen the way the conversation was heading and didn't much like it, because she really didn't want to have to waste her time looking at a collection of worthless old volumes, had marshaled her final arguments. A lot of old books, she had told Stevens, were so common and so undesirable that they might only fetch a few pounds at auction, and probably a lot less if they were sold to a dealer, especially as a job lot. The days of a
genuine treasure turning up, like a fragment of a Gutenberg Bible or other fifteenth-century relic of the very earliest days of publishing, were long gone. There was even less chance of anything older being in the collection. Antiques programs on television and the arrival of the Internet had more or less ensured that almost all the genuine finds had been, not to put too fine a point on it, found.

“But you don't know that for certain,” Stevens had insisted. “As far as I know, old Isaac inherited this collection from his great-great-grandfather, and from what I've been able to find out it was always kept in the library at the old family home, and had been for centuries.”

That had sounded to Jessop like something of an exaggeration.

“The paperback novels as well?” she'd inquired mildly.

“No, of course not. I meant the old stuff. It's only seeing the light of day now because they're having to sell the house up in Scotland. Bloody death duties, of course.”

“Scotland?” Jessop had asked.

“Yeah. Had to hire a bloody van to get it all down here, and now the boxes are blocking up half of my garage. Anyway, I hear what you say, but I still want you to look at the collection. If it's worth anything, you can buy it off me and sell it through your shop, because I certainly don't want it. I live in a small apartment, and I've got no room for it here. If you tell me that none of the books are of any value, either you can have them for nothing and sell them through the trade or I'll get them picked up from your shop and give them away to some charity shop, I suppose. They seem to take pretty much anything these days. And if you don't want the books I'll pay you a reasonable fee for your time,” he added, before Jessop could
point out that she had no option but to charge for the time it took her to do valuations.

Part of success in life lies in recognizing a fait accompli when you're looking at one. Robin Jessop knew that Stevens simply wasn't going to let it go, not least because she was well aware that there were no other antiquarian bookshops anywhere in the area she could suggest as alternatives, and she had finally and reluctantly agreed to inspect the collection on the terms Stevens had suggested.

Pretty much ever since the seven large heavy-duty cardboard boxes had been delivered to the back door of her shop, she'd been regretting her decision. Even as she'd unpacked the first box, she saw immediately that there was almost nothing in it of any obvious value. But she'd persevered, emptying all the boxes before picking up any of the books to inspect them.

As a first step she'd gathered together all the paperbacks, some of which had been packed into each box, and replaced them in the largest of the cardboard boxes after only the most cursory of inspections. Paperbacks were disposable items, in her view, and almost none of them had any value at all. But she did check the first few pages of each book, just in case. A first edition paperback of Ian Fleming's initial “Bond” book,
Casino Royale
, and signed by the author, for example, would be of very significant value. But she quickly saw that there was nothing of any interest, just a somewhat broad selection of Westerns, thrillers, and a few historical novels, none signed by anybody and all in only average condition.

Shifting those had cleared the decks somewhat, and then Robin had begun working her way through the rest of the collection, but that had proved to be almost equally disappointing. She'd looked at a handful of religious books,
a couple of old—but not valuable—Bibles, books of hymns, and others of common prayer, none of them first editions and all rather tatty. There were collections of significant English writers, including most of the usual suspects—Shakespeare, Bunyan, Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, and other Lakeland poets among them—but these books seemed to have been bought for their decorative appearance, for their leather spines to grace a bookshelf, rather than to be read. At least, as far as Jessop could see, none of them had ever actually been opened. All were comparatively recent reprints, just as she'd expected. Some charity shop, she thought, as she packed them away in one of the boxes, would probably be delighted to take them.

Then there was a motley selection of hardback novels, and these she looked at with more care. Until the advent of the Kindle and its hideous electronic kin—devices that Jessop privately regarded as the work of the devil, and which had changed the face of publishing for all time, and much for the worse, in her opinion—most novels had been published first as hardbacks and only later, perhaps as long as a year or even more after hardback publication, being released as paperbacks. Some of these hardback editions had sold in very small numbers, but if for some reason the paperback had then shot into the bestseller lists, many of those first edition hardbacks had acquired significant rarity value, especially if the author had written anything in them. Or, ideally, had written something and then died. So she checked the printing record and the first few pages of each one carefully.

There were a dozen or so first editions of little-known novels by obscure authors, all in reasonable condition, but none of them were signed. These Jessop put aside for checking later and packed the rest of them away. She had spent another couple of hours going through the
remainder of the newer books—those less than a hundred years old—and had picked out another handful of books that looked interesting. And then she'd started working her way through the really old stuff, the genuinely ancient volumes.

In the early days of publishing, most of the books produced were religious in nature, all lineal and spiritual descendants of the very first mass-produced book in history, the almost priceless forty-two-line Gutenberg Bible. Nobody knew for certain how many copies of that first book had been printed: two contradictory letters had been written in 1455, one stating that the total was a hundred and fifty-eight, while the other claimed one eighty. Most modern researchers agreed the total was probably over a hundred and sixty, but what was known for certain was that only a mere forty-eight had survived the trials and torments, the fires and floods and general neglect, of the almost six hundred years since they were printed in 1455, and only twenty-one of those were complete works, the others being incomplete in one or another respect.

Robin was well aware of the value of the Gutenberg Bible. The last time a complete copy had been sold, back in 1978, it had fetched 2.2 million dollars, and most informed estimates suggested that the current value of such a volume would lie in the twenty-five-million to thirty-five-million range. Even individual pages, properly authenticated and with a provenance that stood up to scrutiny, could fetch anything between twenty thousand and a hundred thousand each.

Of course, she wasn't expecting to discover such a treasure, and in this she had not been disappointed. There were more Bibles—another seven of them in all—a couple in pretty good condition with heavy and ornate leather covers, the pages intact and virtually unmarked,
each of which had most likely come from a parish church somewhere. Those, too, she put aside, because they clearly had a value, if only as decorative objects. She also picked out another ten books on various subjects that seemed interesting enough to merit further study, and consigned the remainder of that pile to the cardboard boxes. And there were a few other books, on very specialized subjects, that she believed one or two of her longtime customers would probably want to buy, though in all honesty she couldn't charge very much money for them, because those particular areas of the market were both extremely limited and not especially popular.

And that just left her with a final couple of piles of about forty old volumes to look at. She'd found the book entitled
Ipse Dixit
about halfway down the final pile, and it had puzzled her immediately. Her business was books, especially old books, and she normally expected to recognize every volume she saw, and to know it well enough to be able to state the date of its first printing to within a decade or two, to provide a précis of its subject matter, and certainly to know the identity of the author, if the book had been written by a single individual.

But the
Ipse Dixit
volume puzzled her, because not only had she never seen one before, but she'd never even heard of it, although she knew the title had been used on a recent memoir written by an American judge. Unless her professional knowledge was woefully lacking, that particular ancient tome had never appeared in any of the catalogues or listings with which she was familiar. That could make it unique, or possibly so, and that fact alone implied that it would have some value.

She placed the book on one side of her desk, deciding to look at it only after she'd examined the remaining volumes. It might take quite some time to locate any
information about it. Or, she thought, with a sudden frisson of excitement, to perhaps fail to locate any information about it, to establish that it really was a genuine lost volume of some sort, a book never previously known, seen, or catalogued by anyone.

Just under an hour later, Jessop stood up from her desk, picked up the final three books she'd checked, and carried them over to the last of the cardboard boxes that lined the passageway, a box that was still under half-f because of the collection of books she'd put to one side to value separately.

Looking at all those took almost another two hours, and by the time she'd finished, her back was aching from the constant bending as she'd studied the volumes on her desk. But she was fairly satisfied. She'd identified almost twenty books that would be worth selling through a specialist auction house. She'd jotted down her estimates of the likely values they could achieve, and even after deducting her fee for providing the valuation and examining all the volumes, and the commission charged by the auction house, she hoped William Stevens would be pleased. He should come out of it with at least a few hundred pounds in his hands. She would have to discuss it with him, obviously, and arrange for all the other books to be removed and disposed of, but it was actually a far better result than she had expected.

She placed all those books in a separate box and moved it to one side of her study, leaving all the others out in the passageway, and made herself a cup of instant coffee in her tiny kitchen, a room the builder of the property had obviously decided was too small to serve any other function.

She lived literally above the shop. Downstairs and fronting onto the street was her bookshop, a corner-shop-sized premises comprising a largish single room lined
with bookshelves and with stand-alone bookcases forming a kind of small literary maze through which browsers could amble at their leisure, hopefully plucking volumes from the shelves as they did so. At one end, near the counter, she'd positioned a low coffee table and four small armchairs, to encourage potential buyers to sit down, to enjoy a coffee or tea, and flick through the books they'd selected.

She still wasn't sure that was a good idea, combining the functions of a café and a bookshop, but her business adviser had assured her it would help get her shop off the ground. And so far it had helped; the receipts from the drinks sold sometimes exceeded the sales of books.

It also helped that Betty Howarth, who ran the shop most of the time, was an accomplished home cook, with a noticeable skill when it came to baking, and her homemade cakes proved to be something of a draw, even for people who had apparently never read a single book in their lives and had no obvious intention of doing so at any time in the future. Betty, a slightly plump, dark-haired middle-aged lady who lived across the river in Kingswear, shared Robin's love of books, even if she didn't share her knowledge. That didn't matter, because everything on the shelves was priced, and in the event of a query Robin could be downstairs in less than a minute.