From time to time the monks of Ruac had need to do commerce with outsiders or perchance they would meet a Ruac villager out on a ramble. It was during these encounters that the realisation eventually dawned. Time was claiming the outsiders but was not visiting itself upon the monks.
Outside the monastery, people were growing older.
They were not.
It was the tea, there was no doubt.
It became something to be jealously guarded. Nothing good could come from exposing their practice to outsiders. These were uneasy times and charges of heresy flew easily. Yes, there were rumours. There were always rumours about the secretive doings inside an abbey’s walls. The whispered speculation from villagers who lived near an abbey usually turned to debauchery, drunkenness and the like, even black arts from time to time. And yes, there were rumours in Ruac about monks who never seemed to die, but they stayed as just that – rumours.
So they hid themselves away, and when that became untenable, as when some of them were obligated to travel to the Priory of St Marcel on the occasion of Pierre Abélard’s death vigil, they hid their faces as much as possible. At his deathbed, Barthomieu was forced by dint of his devotion and respect to his brother Bernard, to reveal his secret, only to him.
Bernard once again was furious and in private, railed against the tea and its inherent affront to the laws of nature. But, for the sake of his sole-surviving brothers, he swore an oath to take the secret with him to the grave, as long as Barthomieu and Nivard agreed never to see him again.
And painfully, that bargain was struck. That was the last time Barthomieu saw Bernard in life.
Nivard, the youngest of the six brothers from Fontaines, came to Ruac to join Barthomieu in a circuitous fashion. There were two traditional family paths that he might follow: the priesthood or the sword. At first, he chose neither.
Two brothers, Gérard and Guy had fought for the king. The others, Bernard, Barthomieu and André had donned the habit. André died a young man, struck down by the pox during the first harsh winter at Clairvaux Abbey. Gérard and Guy left the King’s arms and came to Clairvaux when it was established. They took the cloth but soldiering never left their spirit. So it was a matter of course that following the Council of Troyes in 1128, they would become Knights of the Church. And when the Second Crusade began, they slipped on their white mantles with red crosses and joined their fellow Templars in the ill-fated raid on Damascus. There they fell under the deadly swarm of Nur ad-Din’s archers and were lost in a melee of blood.
As a young man Nivard was pious and hoped to follow his famous brother Bernard to Clairvaux but that was before he laid eyes on a young woman from Fontaines. Anne was a commoner and the daughter of a butcher. His father was livid, but Nivard was so smitten by the shapely, cheerful girl that when he was not with her he could not eat, sleep nor pray in earnest. Finally, he forsook the noble traditions of his family and married her. Cut off from the munificence of his father, he became a lowly tradesman and apprenticed himself to his father-in-law in a offal-filled butcher’s stall near the market place.
Three years of happiness was wiped away when the plague came to Fontaines and Nivard lost both his wife and infant child. He became a despondent rover, a drinker and an itinerant butcher and found himself in a godless haze in Rouen where, in 1120, in a stinking tavern smelling of piss, he heard of a position as a butcher on a new sailing ship. It was called the White Ship, the greatest vessel ever built in France. It was deemed so reliable and mighty that on a calm November night, it set out from Barfleur carrying the most precious of cargoes. On board was William Adelin, the only legitimate son of King Henry I of England, and with him a large entourage of British royals.
Navigation errors were made – or was it sabotage? It was never known. Near the harbour, the ship was steered into a submerged rock which tore through the hull. It quickly sank. Nivard was deep in the holds, fortified for his maiden voyage by wine, clad in butcher’s ramskins. He heard the cracking timbers, the screams of the crew, the whoosh of the incoming water and the next thing he knew the ship was gone and he was all alone in the dark sea, bobbing in his buoyant ramskins. The next morning a fishing boat plucked him from the channel, the only survivor. A hundred were lost. The heir to the throne of England was gone.
Why was he saved?
That question perplexed Nivard, nagged at him, caused him to foreswear strong drink and led him back to God. His embarrassment over his youthful transgressions prevented him from venturing to Bernard’s gate at Clairvaux. How could he explain his life and his choices to one so rigidly imperious? He could not. Instead, he made his way to the more forgiving climes of Ruac, where Barthomieu welcomed him with open arms.
‘You are my brother in blood and in Christ!’ he declared. ‘And besides, we can use a monk who knows how to butcher a hog well!’
The years passed. Nivard became an ardent user of the tea, a fellow cheater of time.
The monks at Ruac came to understand that while their infusion could do many things, it was certainly not a shield of invincibility. It was no protection against the scourges of the day: the white plague – just look at poor Abélard – the black plague, the pox. And bodies could still break and be crushed. Jean, the infirmarer, fell off his mule one day and broke his neck. There was a story there. Scandalously, a woman was involved.
But notwithstanding the Devil’s evil tricks, most of the brethren lived, and lived and lived.
It was high irony that one of Bernard’s most famous actions, the one that would resonate through history, would lead to Barthomieu and Nivard’s demise.
In 1118 Hugues de Payen, a lesser noble from Champagne, arrived in Jerusalem with a small band of men and presented his services at arms to the throne of Baudouin II. With Baudouin’s blessings, he spent a decade of rag-tag service protecting Christian pilgrims on their visitations to the Temple Mount. Then, in 1128, de Payen wrote to Bernard, the most influential man in the Church, the shining star of monasticism, to sponsor his fledgling effort and create an order of Holy Knights to fight for Jerusalem, for Christendom.
Bernard took to the idea readily and penned a treatise to Rome, De Laudibus Novae Militiae, a vigorous defense of the notion of holy warriors. At the ecclesiastical Council of Troyes, in his home territory of Champagne, he rammed through the approval, and Pope Innocent II formally accepted the formation of The Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon.
The Templars were born.
Some of the earliest knights joining Hugues de Payen were blood relatives of Bernard, including André de Montbard, his maternal uncle, and his brothers Gérard and Guy. A gaggle of nobles from Champagne took the oath. And from the moment of their inception, the Templars venerated Bernard and were unwavering in their affection – up to the fateful year of 1307.
With Bernard’s powerful patronage, the Templars received gifts from the nobility to aid their holy mission: money, land, noble-born sons. They could pass through any border freely. They paid no tax. They were exempt from all authority, save that of the Pope.
Though they were not able to secure a major victory during Bernard’s lifetime, and in fact suffered ignominious defeat at Damascus during the Second Crusade, in the years that followed they flourished as a militia. Gloriously, in 1177, five hundred Templar knights helped defeat Saladin’s army of twenty thousand at the Battle of Montgisard. One of these knights was Nivard of Fontaines, monk from Ruac, and a man his comrades could count upon to butcher a goat or camel.