The Missing Treasure Read online

  “Hoy, My Dears. It’s good to see you.”

  And, of course, there was an especially warm welcome from my son and heir.

  “My God George, look at you— I swear you’ve grown a foot in these past months while I was gone. Good on you, son, good on you.”

  Then I looked over my shoulder and gave an important order.

  “Harold, please have some of your men carry the chests to the hall. You and I can carry them upstairs later.”

  It was an order I needn’t have given. I smiled and nodded an appreciative acknowledgement at Harold as soon as I looked over my shoulder as I was making it—for as the words came out of my mouth I turned and saw that the chests with the gold from the emperor’s treasury and the refugee coins were already being unloaded on to our little wharf and carried ashore.

  Harold and I promptly beamed at each other. Harold’s one of my five lieutenants, a good and loyal man and that’s the all of it. Freeing him from being a galley slave when we bought our first ships with the coins we took off the murdering bishop Thomas killed was one of the best moves Thomas and I ever made.

  I can hardly wait to tell Thomas about all the gold we gulled off the Greeks. He’ll be astonished. It certainly advances our plan for George, doesn’t it? I’ll tell him tonight when we’re alone. A lot of people know we’ve brought some refugee coins with us as we usually do; but only Harold and Peter and I know about the gold we gulled out of the emperor and his men.

  ******

  We’ve been away for some time and my initial impression as we gathered together and talked on the grassy shore next to the wharf where the archers trained was that we were continuing to grow and prosper.

  If I understand correctly from what I heard as we walked up the cart path to the castle, the biggest change while I’ve been away is that Thomas and his assistant teacher, Ranulph, and the boys they’ve been learning now have their own building—they’ve moved out of the castle’s great hall and taken over and improved the long shed in the bailey along the inside of the curtain wall between two of its defensive towers. That’s where the stables for the castle’s horses used to be.

  The stables, as I later came to find out, were moved to the much larger bailey inside the second curtain wall, the outer wall.

  Thomas’s school, he proudly showed me, is a long wattle and daub shed with wooden shutters and a thatched roof running all along the west side of the outer wall below the ramparts. The boys are now sleeping and studying there instead of in the castle’s hall.

  “We put out a piss pot and dug a shite hole nearby and we’re almost finished building a fireplace so it will be warm enough come winter. Next year we’ll put slate on the roof so it won’t catch fire if there is an accident or we are attacked.”

  Before I left, Thomas and I had talked about him putting George and the other students in one or more of the towers of the inner curtain wall. Thomas said he decided against it because the towers were nowhere near large enough unless we split the boys up—which he did not want to do.

  “I want them all together so the older boys can learn to be sergeants by sergeanting the young ones, and Ranulph and I can watch them all.”

  It was probably the best decision. The towers built into the inner wall are primarily bastions with arrow slits so archers can shoot at attackers trying to shelter against the wall while they climb it or break through it. They’re good fighting positions but they don’t have much room where the boys can sleep and be learnt.

  Thomas has always wanted to keep the boys living and being learnt together with himself and Ranulph nearby so they can keep an eye on them—and now, Thomas informed me with a great deal of satisfaction as we walked up the cart path, they are all living and studying together even though there are more of them.

  He and Ranulph are each living in one of the towers of the inner curtain wall with the school running all along the inside of wall between them.

  Henry and Peter live in the other two towers at the corners of the castle’s inner wall while the senior sergeants and sergeants posted to Restormel and their women share the seven short towers of the outer wall. The archers and their chosen men and the castle’s horses are in the sheds and stables that run all the way around the inside of the outer curtain wall.

  Our unpaid apprentice archers, of course, are still in their tents outside the second wall; the servants and workers are in the various hovels they’ve erected for themselves outside the partially finished third wall of which only one section is complete.

  Our servants and workers don’t know it yet, but in the years ahead they may end up having to move their hovels—we’ve already decided to build a fourth wall when the third curtain wall is finished and also to install apron walls to divide each of the baileys into defensible sections. A home with gold and coins to protect can never be too strong these days and we’ve got to keep the men busy, don’t we?

  ******

  Supper that evening in the castle hall was a happy and boisterous occasion with my excited women chattering away, infant children howling, boys playing, and George sitting next to me listening to the men talk and trying to act like a grown up. It was a homecoming celebration so we used three candles to light the hall up. The younger boys in Thomas’s school used their hands and fingers to make shadow figures on the wall while the adults talked and the older boys listened.

  Later that evening, when things quieted down, my brother and I finally had a chance to talk privately. Much has happened since we both left Cornwall last autumn—me to go to the Holy Land and end up coming home with the emperor’s gold; Thomas and Peter to go to Rome to pay the Pope his share of the passengers’ prayer donations and being asked to deliver a message to the crusaders.

  Delivering the Pope’s message, of course, was how Thomas ended up getting captured last year by the damn Venetians—they grabbed him because they didn’t want the message delivered.

  The sun had long ago gone down and everyone else had gone to bed when we sat together, just the three of us, at the long table in the hall. It was time for my brother and I to bring each other up to date by talking about our men and galleys, about Constantinople and Rome, and about the crusaders and Venetians and everything else.

  George sat with us to listen and learn so we talked about everything except certain personal matters and other things that are best left unsaid with a young boy is present even if he is approaching manhood. And approaching it rather nicely if I do say so myself.

  We had much to talk about. It’s been a couple of months since I’d led the raid on the Venetian galleys and transports that resulted in my priestly brother being released by the Venetians and hurrying home. Unfortunately, Thomas left Constantinople so quickly to return to Cornwall and his students after the Venetians freed him that we didn’t have much time to talk.

  Before he left Thomas had tried to explain what had happened and why the Venetians grabbed him. I didn’t really learn very much because he immediately left for Cornwall. Moreover, at the time I was distracted—first by the need to bring in men and galleys to cope with the flood of rich refugees coming out of Constantinople, and then by the lure of the gold bars and the coins and jewels the emperor and his various officials were trying to remove from the Byzantine treasury and take with them as they fled.

  Now that I’m finally back in Cornwall, Thomas was once again explaining what caused him and some of our men to be captured by the crusaders and Venetians when he tried to deliver the Pope’s letter. It’s something we’re overdue to talk about—there is a lot I need to know, particularly since I’ll be turning around and going right back out to Constantinople again in a couple of weeks.

  “There is no question about it,” I assured Thomas with a nod of agreement and a serious look on my face. “If I’m going to make good decisions out there I need to know more about all sorts of things.” I said that about my having to know many things to make good decisions to help learn George; my brother understood and nodded his appreciation as I continued.

  “So let me tell you what I know about what happened and why I think it happened.

  “For me, the situation between the Greeks and the crusaders is still a bit confusing. But I certainly understand more than I did a couple of years ago when the Greeks grabbed some of our men and wanted us to pay a ransom to free them. As I'm sure you remember, that was when we replied to the Greeks’ ransom demands by making the emperor and his courtiers a counter offer they didn’t dare refuse—you free our men and we’ll stop taking your galleys and killing your men.

  “As you might remember, we responded to the Greeks’ ransom demands by attacking their wormy old fleet where it was anchored next to the city’s walls and then fighting off an attack by their sad excuse for an army. To this day I wonder if we could have taken the city. But the Greeks quickly freed our men and gave us a small parcel of land outside the wall and a quay of our own to use for a trading concession, so I guess we’ll never find out.

  “After that, everything went smoothly for us for a while until the Venetians brought the crusaders to the city instead of taking them to the Holy Land—and grabbed you when you tried to deliver the Pope’s message threatening the crusaders with excommunication if they attacked the city.”

  Then I told my brother and son all about how we attacked the Venetian fleet until they freed Thomas and how I got the gold when the emperor and his courtiers fled after Thomas left to go back to England. They could hardly believe it and laughed heartily when I told them how I gulled the Greeks and ended up with the gold by moving the chests back and forth under their very eyes until we had the chests filled with gold and they had the chests filled with stones.

  “Forty-five big chests?” Thomas exclaimed. “My God, William, those chests are heavy. I carried a
couple of them up the stairs myself and it was all I could do to lift them by myself. They must hold a couple of thousand pounds of gold; maybe more, by God.”

  Then I laughed to myself and told Thomas and George more of the details of how I’d done it and who had helped and why the emperor and some of his officials probably still think they’ve succeeded in getting the gold for themselves and hiding it away.

  What I didn’t mention to Thomas and George, and never will, is the truth—that the only reason the emperor and his courtiers didn’t succeed in carrying the gold away for themselves was because the temptation for me to steal it for myself was just too great to overcome. All Thomas and George know is that I gulled Greeks and took it—and so far no one even seems to know the gold is gone, let alone who actually has it.

  “It all started, the taking of the gold that is, when we were paid handsomely to have some of our galleys stand by to carry the emperor and some of his priests and courtiers to safety in the event they decided to flee the city.

  “That was in the early days right after the Venetians brought the crusaders from Zara and began their siege of Constantinople—and, sure enough, the emperor and his senior courtiers and churchmen fled. That happened right after the emperor led his army out to fight the crusaders and then turned around and scurried back behind his walls when he realized that people get killed when armies fight and that he himself might be one of them.

  “The Greeks had earlier come to us and made their marks on the contracts wherein they gave us a goodly amount of coins and we agreed to have galleys standing by to carry the emperor and some of his courtiers away to safety if they ever so requested. Just passengers, mind you, that’s all we contracted to carry.

  “Unfortunately for the emperor and his fellow thieves, they didn’t want us to know they were stealing the gold so not a single one of the contracts on which we all made our marks obliged us to carry or protect anything else except our passengers—so we didn’t.”

  Then I spent quite some time telling my brother and my son the details of how we moved the gold chests back and forth through the little window we made in one of the galley’s inside walls—and over and over again gulled the various Greeks by substituting chests full of rocks for those with all the gold.

  I embellished the tale and had both of them laughing with delight as I described how each of the Greeks sent a man down to get the gold chests out of the galley’s specially constructed little hold—and how he couldn’t get them out because the ladder he needed to stand on was in the way. So the only possible solution was to remove the ladder and have a strong and very tall archer go down into the hold by himself and lift them out, someone so tall he didn’t need a ladder.

  “So far we seem to have gotten away with it. We carried the emperor and each of our other distinguished escaping passengers safely away from the city and each thinks he has hidden the gold chests away where no one else can find them. In fact each hid chests full of stones; the chests with the gold are all right here in Cornwall at this very moment—upstairs with the rest of our coin chests as a matter of fact.”

  Thomas put down his bowl of ale and looked at young George quite seriously.

  “There are a lot of lessons for you in what your father just told us, George,” Thomas admonished my wide eyed and smiling son and heir when I finished and took a big slurp of ale from my bowl.

  “Absolutely never ever abandon your men; get all the information you can before you make your decisions; consider the future not just today; honor your contracts to keep your reputation and attract future custom; never give in to blackmail; and be smart when you seize your opportunities—and never trust Greeks and Venetians.”

  God, I hope my son looks up to me and Thomas is learning him good. Now I need to take a piss before it’s Thomas’s turn to talk.

  ******

  Thomas is my priestly brother and he’s usually right when he suggests something—so after I came back from pissing, I dipped myself another bowl of ale out of the barrel by the fireplace, put both elbows on the table, and settled in to listen with George once again at my side.

  According to what Thomas began explaining to us, it all started in 1182 when Constantinople’s Roman Catholic population was removed from the city in a “great massacre of the Latins,” meaning primarily the Venetians who had come to dominate most of the Byzantine empire’s maritime and financial trade.

  The last straw for the Greeks and their emperor came when the Venetians began openly fighting with the Genoans and Pisans and other Latins living in the city to get control of the rest of the empire’s affairs—and at the same time committed the unpardonable sin of bringing in their own priests to perform their ceremonies and collect the tithes and fees and donations generated by the Christian churches.

  “The Greeks killed them all, didn’t they? Almost everyone in the city whose priests prayed in Latin was slaughtered. Tens of thousands of good Roman Catholics fell, almost all of them Venetians—except three or four thousand women and children the emperor sold to the Moors as slaves.

  “As you might imagine, George, killing off just about all the Venetians and selling some of their women and children into slavery greatly upset Venice and the Venetians. They’ve been trying to get revenge on the Greeks and their empire ever since.

  “For a while everything went along fairly smoothly in the Greeks’ empire after the massacre—until 1195. That’s the year when the emperor in Constantinople was overthrown and replaced. Allegedly it happened in response to the corruption and financial extravagance of the emperor and his courtiers.

  “He was overthrown by his own brother, Alexios, who promptly seized his brother’s wealth and women and replaced his brother’s courtiers with his own. But the new emperor made a serious mistake—he merely blinded and sent his deposed older brother off to prison.

  “Blinding instead of killing his older brother when he deposed him was a serious weakness and it came back to haunt Alexios years later when the deposed emperor’s son joined up with the crusaders and tried to restore his father to the throne.

  “Efforts to restore the old and blinded emperor didn’t begin immediately, of course. At first everything continued to go along fairly smoothly for the new emperor, meaning the emperor’s Varangian Guards were paid their wages and the corruption and mismanagement continued to the satisfaction of the new emperor’s courtiers.

  “That relative calm lasted for almost twenty years—until a couple of years ago when some of the new emperor’s courtiers ran out of money and began trying to raise new money—by grabbing people visiting and working in Constantinople, particularly foreigners, and holding them for ransom.” And chopping off their heads if their families and overlords didn’t pay.

  “Things began to change when a couple of the emperor’s courtiers made the mistake of grabbing some of our archers who were in Constantinople operating our trading post. The emperor and his courtiers thought Englishmen, being as we look to the Pope in Rome for our priests and prayers the same as the Venetians and the other Italians do, were like them and so would be willing to pay a ransom to regain our men’s freedom just as some of the Venetians did twenty years ago to avoid being killed or sold into slavery.

  “That was a bad mistake the Greek’s made, George, thinking we English are like the Venetians and other Italians—instead of paying the ransom they demanded, your father and our archers promptly destroyed a good portion of the emperor’s wormy and useless fleet—and forced him to free our men and give us payments and additional concessions to stop your father from continuing his attacks on the city and its ships. We also kept the emperor’s galleys even though they were virtually worthless because of their sad condition.

  “Then last year something important happened—the son of the blinded and imprisoned former emperor met Boniface, the Italian who had became the leader of the crusaders when their first leader died. It was a significant meeting because the son of the former emperor promised the crusaders all the gold coins and bars in the empire’s treasury if they would go to Constantinople and help his father regain his throne instead of going to the Holy Land to fight the Saracens and regain Jerusalem.