The Sword of the Templars by Paul Christopher

but wasn’t, and an equally terrible cup of coffee. Breakfast eaten, they climbed aboard the Virgin Rail train to Wales and three hours later found themselves in the country town of Leominster.
    “Lemster,” as Peggy pronounced it, had achieved some notoriety in the Middle Ages as a thriving market town where you could buy the best lamb’s wool in the world—“Leominster Oro” as it was called. Since then it had become a quaint backwater on the ancient and often disputed border between England and Wales. To Holliday it seemed to have the same faintly over-varnished look of tourist towns in the States that often survived on their questionable history, their tourist appeal, and the quality of their French fries, or in the case of Leominster, its Mousetrap Cheese and its endless variety of antique shops.
    “Just a little ‘twee,’ ” as Peggy put it, strolling down the High Street toward something called “The Butter-cross” looking for a place to rent a car. She settled on a squat-looking little Toyota Altis from Avis, and after getting some complicated directions from a pimply young attendant named Billy who kept on referring to Peggy and Holliday as “Yanks” they set off, heading west on the Monkland Road. Switching to the even narrower A44 after a few miles, Peggy gripped the wheel tightly as she piloted the car between the bracketing hedgerows on both sides of the road. Every now and again they’d reach the top of a hill and, for a second or two, they’d catch a glimpse of the pastoral patchwork of fields they were driving through.
    “Its like going down a bobsled run,” she muttered, praying that they wouldn’t meet someone driving in the opposite direction; the road was barely wide enough for the compact Altis, let alone a full-sized car, truck, or God help them, some lumbering piece of farm machinery—or even worse, a flock of the wooly sheep the area had once been so famous for.
    “Okay,” Peggy said to Holliday, keeping her eyes peeled for jaywalking sheep. “Reality check time. You’re giving up a month of trout fishing in Patagonia, and I turned down a choice assignment in New Zealand, a place I’ve never been, I might add. So once again, why are we doing this?”
    “Because that son of a bitch Broadbent had Uncle Henry’s house burnt down,” said Holliday.
    “That doesn’t explain why we caught the red-eye to Heathrow and had to eat British Airways cheese rolls,” said Peggy.
    “Presumably he burned down the house in an effort to hide the fact that he’d stolen the sword,” answered Holliday. “The sword was that important to him.”
    “It’s just a sword, Doc. An artifact from the Middle Ages, like Leominster back there. What does it have to do with us?”
    “A thousand years ago somebody in the Knights Templar sent a message to one of the Templar founders in France. It was so important that the message was sent in code, wrapped around the hilt of the sword that Uncle Henry found in Hitler’s country house in the Bavarian Alps. Uncle Henry thought it was important enough to have hidden it away and never mentioned it for more than half a century. In fact he was making sure that no one got hold of the sword until after he was dead—that’s why he put the clue in that copy of The Once and Future King . It was important to the Knights Templar a thousand years ago—it was so important that your grandfather went to great lengths to hide it away, and it was important enough for Broadbent to commit a crime for it. That means the message encoded on the sword is still important. That’s why we’re doing this.”
    Following young Billy’s directions they took the second right turn after the A44 intersection and headed down a narrow unnamed road for a hundred yards or so, then turned onto a wooded country lane with a small sign that read L’ESPOIR in faded white letters painted on a rusted milk can perched precariously on a pile of stones.
    “The Hope,” translated Holliday,