The Sword of the Templars Read Online Free PDF

he’d never asked about it and now regretted not doing so. The desk looked Spanish, perhaps fifteenth century. He had no idea how it had come to be in a house on the shores of Lake Erie, but like many things in Uncle Henry’s life there was almost certainly a story behind it.
    There were three drawers in each pedestal and another drawer in between. Holliday went through each drawer carefully and methodically. The drawers on the left were filled with personal files relating to Uncle Henry’s bills, banking, old tax returns, receipts, and the general maintenance of the house. The drawers on the right were filled with more files, these mostly relating to his years at the university and his professional correspondence.
    There was one marble-sided cardboard accordion file filled with incomprehensible notes on scraps of paper, written in at least three languages that Holliday could decipher, including what appeared to be Hebrew. He also found several maps, including one of La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay coast of France.
    The map was small, the paper fragile and yellowed. It looked as though it had been torn out of an old Michelin guidebook. There were several faint notes on it in faded pencil: Huguenot? Ireland? Which Rock? Holliday put the map back in the cardboard file.
    He looked in the center drawer. There was nothing in it but stationery and an old, blunt-bladed, ebony-handled dagger that looked as though Uncle Henry might have used it as a letter opener. Holliday had never seen it before, but he immediately recognized it for what it was. He flipped it over to check the inscription engraved on the tarnished blade just to be sure: Meine Ehre Heisst Treue — My Honor Is Loyalty . It was a Nazi SS dagger.
    “What was he doing with one of these?” Holliday said aloud.
    “What?” Peggy asked. Holliday explained.
    “I guess it was a souvenir,” Holliday said finally, holding it up for her to see.
    “Was he ever in Germany during the war?” Peggy asked, frowning. “I thought he was in intelligence, like Ian Fleming and all those guys who sat around smoking pipes and thinking up ways to irritate the Gestapo. I never thought he actually did anything. I mean, you know, anything dangerous.”
    “Neither did I,” said Holliday.
    “Maybe it’s a fake, a reproduction,” suggested Peggy.
    “I don’t think so,” answered Holliday, hefting the old edged weapon. It had the cold weight of something used in a dark time for dark deeds. History was fused in the dagger, the sensuously shaped blade tempered in spilled blood. Or maybe he was reading too much into it. The lighting runes and swastika could still cast a nasty spell. He tipped the dagger back into the drawer and pushed it closed.
    “Maybe that’s what Broadbent was talking about,” said Peggy, getting up out of the chair and going to the wall of bookcases on the other side of the room.
    “You could call that dagger a lot of things,” answered Holliday. “But no one’s going to mistake it for a sword.”
    “I wonder why it was so important to his father?” Peggy said. She smiled suddenly. “Look at this!” she said excitedly. “All the old kids’ books he introduced me to. They’re all here.” She started reading titles. “All the Narnia books, Five Children and It , Swallows and Amazons , The Wouldbegoods , The Famous Five by Enid Blyton; they’re all here!”
    Holliday joined her, his eyes scanning the shelves and finally finding what he’d been searching for: a single heavy hardcover volume, still in its pale green and cream colored dust jacket, a first edition of T. H. White’s Arthurian epic, The Once and Future King .
    Uncle Henry had read the entire four-part story to him when he was a young boy, and later Holliday had reread it again by himself many times over. If ever there’d been a story for a boy on a rainy day in upstate New York, that was it. He smiled at the memory; the kind of book that Harry Potter would have read and treasured. He