Free The Adept Book 3 The Templar Treasure by Katherine Kurtz, Deborah Turner Harris

little while to savor the beauty of the cathedral, strolling up as far as the transept to crane his neck backwards and gaze up at the soaring vault of the lantern tower, the largest of its kind in England. Shortly thereafter, vergers began quietly herding visitors toward the door, so he drifted outside to mount the city wall at Bootham Bar and stroll along its esplanade, gazing out over the city by the light of the dying day.
    After tea so late in the afternoon, he did not feel like eating dinner, so he returned to the Fiennes residence at about half past nine and, after inquiring whether there was any way he could assist the family, declared his intention to head up to bed for a proper night’s sleep after the short hours of the night before. Before retiring, however, he paused at the phone in a niche at the foot of the stairs to make a brief call to McLeod.
    “Hullo, Noel,” he said without preamble, when McLeod himself answered. “I know you’ve only been home a few hours, but any progress?”
    “None on Gerard,” McLeod replied, “though I did talk to Treville. He’s supposed to get back to me sometime tomorrow. I had some luck with Nathan’s computer, though. Have you got a minute?”
    “What did you find?”
    “Well, he’s got some very interesting files in here,” McLeod said. Adam could hear the gentle click of the keyboard as McLeod called up material on his screen to refer to it. “A lot of it is diary-type entries, probably similar to what you were reading in the notebooks, but he’s got some actual transcripts and translations of some of his documents as well. Do you want to hear some of this?”
    “Give me a sampling,” Adam replied, pulling a notepad closer and taking out a pen. “I don’t want to tie up this line too long, in case relatives are trying to get through to the family, but it might give me something to work on while I sleep. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted after last night’s late hours.”
    “So am I,” McLeod agreed, to the accompaniment of more keys clicking. “I nodded off on the flight home, slept right through the landing. I’ve never done that before. Anyway, I’m looking at a chain of references that appears to link the Templars with our Graeme of Templegrange, who pawned the Seal. A minor demesne called Templegrange is mentioned in a letter of 1284 from King Alexander III to the Bishop of Dunkeld. The wording leaves it uncertain whether Templegrange belongs to the King or the bishop, but Nathan cites later evidence suggesting that the property was probably a minor Templar commandery at the time of the Order’s dissolution in 1314. The Order had a lot of land in Scotland, as you know.”
    “Yes, Templemor has a similar history,” Adam said, jotting down notes. “Go on.”
    “A little later on, Nathan references a grant of lands by Robert the Bruce to a Sir James Graeme of Perthshire, in gratitude for support given to the King at the Battle of Bannockburn the previous year. There’s no transcription of the document itself, but even I remember that Bannockburn was also 1314. After that, something else is obviously missing, but Nathan somehow makes the connection that Templegrange was the particular land granted to Sir James Graeme, and concludes that this same Sir James may have been an ancestor of the Graeme of Templegrange who pawned the Seal in 1381. Have you got all that?”
    “It seems like a straightforward chain of logic, if it’s all supportable,” Adam replied. “The important thing is the Templar connection—though we’d supposed that, from the name Templegrange.”
    “There’s more,” McLeod continued, “and you’re going to feel really foolish over this one. I certainly did.”
    “Go on.”
    “Well, I also cracked the Dundee file. I think Nathan meant the person, not the place-as in ‘Bonnie Dundee,’ whose full name was—?”
    “John Grahame of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee,” Adam supplied, feeling foolish as