The Templar's Code

a brolly in one hand and a butter knife in the other as I reenacted the Siege of Acre.”

Chuckling, Edie reached over and smoothed a lock of hair from his brow. “As an adult, do you ever, you know, fantasize about being a Knights Templar?”

“You mean do I still imagine myself swinging a broadsword at Acre? No, never,” he retorted, emphatically shaking his head. “The fact that the Templars didn’t shave, rarely bathed, and that they took a vow of celibacy doesn’t make for a lusty male fantasy.”

“Oooh, I want to hear more about the lusty stuff.” As she spoke, Edie provocatively shimmied her shoulders.

“There’s a reason why St. Bernard of Clairvaux famously wrote that ‘the company of women is a dangerous thing, for by it the devil has led many from the straight path to Paradise.’ ” He gestured to the small stack of books on the tabletop. “Since I’m on this blasted quest, I must refrain from the pleasures of the flesh.”

She scooted her backside off the edge of the table — landing squarely in his lap.

Unable to help himself, Caedmon slid a hand under her skirt.

Wrapping her arms around his neck, Edie leaned in close and whispered, “If you don’t tell St. Bernard, I won’t tell St. Bernard.”

CHAPTER 50

“Your dressing gown, milady.”

Edie languorously rolled onto her back and peered up at Caedmon, a red silk kimono dangling from his fingertips. Sprawled on the mussed bed, she felt like a castaway who’d washed up onto a warm, welcoming beach. Surrounded by a sea of colorful pillows.

“Thank you, Sir Peter.” She took the kimono from him. Their hands brushed. She loved Caedmon’s hands. Loved the fact that they were lean and strong. That his fingers were sprinkled with sun-bleached hair. She even loved the smattering of ginger-colored freckles. And she’d yet to tire of seeing his hands on her body.

She swung her bare legs over the side of the mattress. “Now that I’m rejuvenated, I’m ready to hit the books.”

Smiling, Caedmon brushed several damp curls from her face. “Would have taken you to bed hours ago had I known the restorative effect.”

“Magic elixir, what can I say.” She rose to her feet and slipped on the kimono.

“Actually, the seventeenth-century alchemists thought the very same thing, semen used as an ingredient in quite a few alchemical concoctions.”

“Now that is pushing the esoteric envelope. And not in a good way.” Belting her kimono, she peered over her shoulder. “Come on, Big Red. You need to get dressed. It’s time to burn the midnight oil.”

“Right.”

He padded, naked, to the other side of the room. Edie’s gaze zeroed in on the deep groove of his spine, the play of muscles in his back as he lifted his robe off a hook on the bathroom door. Donning the blue-checked robe, he winced slightly, his left arm still bandaged.

Seating herself in a wood chair with a carved quatrefoil back, Edie clapped her hands together. “Okay, ready to get to it.”

Caedmon handed her a blank sheet of paper and a sharpened pencil with an eraser. The Mylar-covered print was set between them. “As I said earlier, Bacon’s frontispiece is a damned labyrinth.”

She stared at the engraving. Struck with a sudden idea, she reached across the table and grabbed the magnifying glass, holding it within inches of her face as she examined the engraving. Noticing something odd, she handed the magnifying glass to Caedmon. “Take a look at the ladders, trees, and mulberries.”

Wearing a quizzical expression, he viewed the illustration through the magnifying lens.

A split second later, raising his head, he grinned. Einstein figuring out E, M, and C.

“It’s a numeric cipher! In the Athena box, the mulberry has thirteen drupelets, but next door in the Calliope box, the mulberry has five drupelets.”

“Same with the tree and the ladder.” She snatched the magnifier out of his hand. “As you move from box to box, the number of drupelets, leaves, and rungs changes.”

“Let’s diagram the frontispiece and see what we get.” Snatching a clean sheet of paper, Caedmon quickly drew a blank frontispiece — ten squares around the perimeter of the sheet with a blank square in the middle. He neatly wrote the name of each muse in the appropriate box. “Now we fill in the blanks,” he said, his pencil tip hovering over the Athena box. “You count, I’ll notate. Let’s start with the spear shaker herself.”

For the next few minutes, they seesawed back and forth until all the ladders, trees, and mulberries had been counted.

“Okay, now what?” Although pleased with their progress, Edie had no idea where they were headed.

As he silently stared at their diagram, Caedmon rubbed a hand over his bristled cheek. “I found evidence in the historic record of Bacon using a twenty-four-letter simple replacement cipher. I suggest we begin with that.” He quickly scrawled a cipher chart on a sheet of blank paper.

“I’m guessing that we now work backward and assign a letter to each number.” When he nodded, she began assigning letters to numbers.

Caedmon examined her handiwork.

“Excellent. All we have to do is figure out the correct order in which to read the letters. I suggest we go clockwise, using Pallas Athena as our start point.”

Edie watched, her excitement mounting, as Caedmon next wrote out a long string of letters, thirty in total. She noticed that his hand quivered slightly, his excitement mounting.

“We must now determine where the word breaks occur.” His gaze narrowed as he stared at the string of thirty letters. Then, lips pursed, head cocked to one side, he made four slash marks. That done, he carefully placed his pencil on the table. A student finishing the exam.

“My God… it all makes sense now. The auto-da-fe of the fourteenth century. The witch hunts of the seventeenth century.” Lurching to his feet, Caedmon snatched the deciphered message off the table and strode to the other side of the room. With the sheet of paper clutched in his right hand, he furiously paced back and forth across the Aubusson carpet. “This is an absolutely astounding revelation and it certainly explains why the church and the monarchs of the day slaughtered anyone and everyone who had knowledge of the Templar secret. Even in our day and age, this could ignite a religious conflagration.”

Edie scooted back her chair and headed to where Caedmon stood at the window. Curious, she plucked the sheet of paper out of his hand. moses/egypticus/mined/thoths/stone

“The only three words I completely comprehend are ‘moses mined stone,’ ” she said, wondering what all the hullabaloo was about. “I assume that refers to the fact that Moses carved the Ten Commandments on the stone tablets. Of which there were two, not one. That’s straight out of the book of Exodus, so no shocker there.”

“Well and good. However, the addition of the other two words radically alters the cipher’s meaning. The full message reads ‘Moses Egypticus mined Thoth’s stone.’ Same Moses, but different stone altogether.”

“And why is that significant? Or even shocking?”

“ ‘Thoth’s stone’ is a figure of speech, a metaphor for the Emerald Tablet. In his encrypted frontispiece, Francis Bacon is boldly claiming that not only was Moses, the patriarch of the Old Testament, an Egyptian, but he had the fabled Emerald Tablet in his possession.”

Caedmon walked over to the table and gracelessly plunked down on the Gothic monstrosity. Hunkering forward, he braced his elbows on top of his thighs as he held his head in his hands.

“It’s truly astonishing. Breathtaking, in fact. My God… the Emerald Tablet… the Templars’ modus vivendi,” he whispered. “Not only did the Knights Templar have the Emerald Tablet, but Moses may