The Chapel of Bones: (Knights Templar 18) by Michael Jecks Read Free Book Online

plan was similar to Joel and Henry’s arrangement. Vince’s father was a tanner, and he had a friend who would take the tanned hide and work it into useable leather. Then there was another apprentice, Jack, who worked with one of the cheaper saddlers up near the East Gate. With all of them working in conjunction, they could make saddles that would be ideal for the merchants of Exeter …
    ‘Vince? What the hell are you doing in there? Get a move on!’
    Joel was really in a foul mood. Vince left his daydream behind and began working again, making the chips fly. Yes, one day he would be a known face in Exeter. He’d be a man with money.

Chapter Three
     
    Dean Alfred of Exeter Cathedral was by nature a quiet and introspective man, better suited to studying than vigorous effort, but today he felt he should go outside when he heard that a mason had been crushed.
    The weather was as clement as usual in late October, which was to say it was cold and the air damp. He felt the chill on his tonsured head. The spare fringe of white hair did little to keep him warm, and he pulled on a woollen cap before he left his chamber and made his way down the stairs.
    ‘Dean. Good of you to come so soon.’
    The voice belonged to Brother Stephen, Treasurer to the Cathedral. He was a taller man, stooped and somewhat drawn-looking, with deep trenches of disapproval gouged at either side of his mouth.
    ‘Oh … ahm … yes, Treasurer?’ The Dean knew that his mannerisms irritated Brother Stephen, but this only spurred him on. For some reason the Treasurer got on his nerves. He appeared to think figures were more important than the souls they were all supposed to be saving.
    ‘Ah – yes – hmm. I came as soon as I could,’ the Dean murmured happily. At the first clearing of his throat he could almost hear Stephen’s infuriation. His eye took in the ruined body, and he automatically crossed himself. ‘My dear fellow! How could this have happened?’
    ‘This man was walking along here,’ Stephen said in a cold tone, ‘while another mason was up on the scaffolding removing a stone from the wall.’
    ‘It was a sad accident,’ Robert de Cantebrigge stated.
    ‘It was either incompetence or an act of malice,’ Stephen countered.
    ‘Ah?’ the Dean enquired.
    ‘You know how they lift the heavier blocks …’ Stephen began, but then he caught sight of the expression of baffled amiability on the Dean’s face and gritted his teeth. Stalking to a block nearby, he pointed. ‘Look! All the masonry has to be taken down from the wall.’
    ‘Yes. I – ah – thought so,’ the Dean agreed affably.
    ‘Except: how to lift them?’
    ‘They use a crane, do they not? Hmm?’
    ‘But the stones are too heavy to lash to a crane safely, so each has this channel cut into it,’ Stephen said.
    The Dean peered. Where the Treasurer was pointing, a deep curiously-shaped hole had been carved. From above, it looked like two slots, joined to each other on their longer edges. Above was the shorter, below the longer, which overlapped its neighbour at either end by about two inches. Looking into the hole, the Dean saw that both slots had the same base. That with the narrower entrance still had a ten-inch base deep inside the stone, but its sides sloped inwards towards the entrance-hole. If the rock were to break where this hole was dug into the stone, that part would look like a dove’s tail, the Dean thought wonderingly.
    ‘This is how they lift them,’ Stephen said. He picked up an iron bar. In section it was a trapezium – like an isosceles triangle with the topmost part of the narrower angle cut off. It had a base of almost ten inches, and was some two inches thick. Incross-section, it was the same shape and dimension as the dove’s tail shape inside the rock, the Dean guessed. He was right. ‘This bar drops into the larger slot,’ Stephen said, plunging it in. ‘And then it’s shoved over into the recess carved to fit it,’ he grunted,