A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [176]
There were all those conspiracy theories, of course. A vast, complex international institution is hard to dismantle overnight, and the sudden dissolution of the Knights Templar had led to all sorts of fantastic tales about rogue Crusaders and underground operations. People still searched for traces of the Templars’ fabulous wealth. The fact that no one had ever found evidence of how it was disbursed only added to the intrigue.
The money. It was one of the first lessons historians learned: follow the money. I refocused my search.
The sturdy outlines of the first ledger were visible on the third shelf, tucked between Al-Hazen’s Optics and a romantic French chanson de geste. A small Greek letter was inked on the manuscript’s fore edge: α. Figuring it must be an indexing mark of some sort, I scanned the shelves and located the second account book. It, too, had a small Greek letter, β. My eyes lit on γ, δ, and ε, scattered among the shelves, too. A more careful search would locate the rest, I was sure.
Feeling like Eliot Ness waving a fistful of tax receipts in pursuit of Al Capone, I held up my hand. There was no time to waste on climbing to retrieve it. The first account book slid from its resting place and fell into my waiting palm.
Its entries were dated 1117 and were made by a number of different hands. Names and numbers danced across the pages. My fingers were busy, taking in all the information they could from the writing. A few faces bloomed out of the vellum repeatedly—Matthew, the dark man with the hawkish nose, a man with bright hair the color of burnished copper, another with warm brown eyes and a serious face.
My hands stilled over an entry for money received in 1149. “Eleanor Regina, 40,000 marks.” It was a staggering sum—more than half the yearly income of the kingdom of England. Why was the queen of England giving so much to a military order led by vampires? But the Middle Ages were too far outside my expertise for me to be able to answer that question or to know much about the people engaging in the transfers. I shut the book with a snap and went to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bookcases.
Nestled among the other books was a volume bearing the identifying mark of a Greek lambda. My eyes widened once it was open.
Based on this ledger, the Knights of Lazarus had paid—somewhat unbelievably—for a wide range of wars, goods, services, and diplomatic feats, including providing Mary Tudor’s dowry when she married Philip of Spain, buying the cannon for the Battle of Lepanto, bribing the French so they’d attend the Council of Trent, and financing most of the military actions of the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League. Apparently the brotherhood didn’t allow politics or religion to get in the way of their investment decisions. In a single year, they’d bankrolled Mary Stuart’s return to the Scottish throne and paid off Elizabeth I’s sizable debts to the Antwerp Bourse.
I walked along the shelves looking for more books marked with Greek letters. On the nineteenth-century shelves, there was one with the forked letter psi on its faded blue buckram spine. Inside, vast sums of money were meticulously accounted for, along with property sales that made my head spin—how did one secretly purchase most of the factories in Manchester?—and familiar names belonging to royalty, aristocrats, presidents, and Civil War generals. There were also smaller payouts for school fees, clothing allowances, and books, along with entries concerning dowries paid, hospital bills settled, and past-due rents brought up to date. Next to all the unfamiliar names was the abbreviation “MLB” or “FMLB.”
My Latin was not as good as it should be, but I was sure the abbreviations stood for the Knights of Lazarus of Bethany—militie Lazari a Bethania—or for filia militie or filius militie, the daughters and sons of the knights. And if the order was still disbursing funds in the middle of the nineteenth century, the same was probably true today. Somewhere in the world, a piece of paper—a real-estate