Saint and the Templar Treasure Read Online Free PDF Page B

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