“Yes, well, I can explain that.” I leaned more comfortably forward on the wall, confidingly. “I was looking at pictures of you in your pram.”
The quick sideways glance only showed surprise for a second, then a dawning comprehension. “You’ve been visiting my mother.”
“Mmm.” I nodded. “Peter asked me to call round and give her some photograph albums he’d fetched from her cottage. She wouldn’t let me leave the things and run—you know your mum. I had to stay for coffee.”
“Oh, aye?” He shifted against the wall, folding his arms across his chest. “And how is she behaving?”
I sidestepped the question by saying she’d appeared to be in good health. “We had quite a lovely visit, looking at old snapshots of Peter and your mother, and of you.”
“Showing off all of my shortcomings, was she?”
A provocative smile tickled the corners of my mouth. “Well, we didn’t actually get as far as the pictures of you in your bath, but perhaps next time…”
He laughed. “Bloody cheek! You’ll be paying for that.”
Happily scoring a point, I looked at him, satisfied. “I do like your mother.”
“She’s a likable woman,” he agreed, “when she’s not being a pain in the—”
“Your mother says,” I cut in, “that when a man accuses a woman of being difficult, he really means she has an independent mind.”
“Is that a fact?” David’s mouth curved, and his gaze grew warmly intimate. “What else does my mother say?”
Tipping my head down, I traced the creases between the stones with one finger. “She seems to think,” I said, “that you might fancy me.”
“Aye, well,” he replied, with a shrug, “that’ll teach me to tell her my secrets.” He looked toward the field again. “Damn.”
“What is it?”
“They’ve found something.”
I smiled. “A fine attitude, for an archaeologist.”
“I’d best go see what it is,” he said heavily, and pushing himself away from the solid comfort of the stone wall, he slowly walked back out into the full heat of the afternoon. I watched him go, still smiling, and was turning from the wall myself when a sudden sound against the silence made me stop.
Beyond the wall, not three feet from where I was standing, a low clump of gorse crackled sharply, and the long grass bent and shivered as a set of measured footsteps followed David from the shadows, heading out into the wide and waiting field.
Chapter 27
It really was a most impressive sprint, considering the day’s heat and the weight of my shopping bags. No one waited at the top of the hill, stopwatch in hand, to clock me as I came flying up the gravel drive, but I doubted any runner could have bettered my time.
I must have looked a sight when I stumbled into the Principia, face burning, breathing hard, but my two student assistants were too deeply absorbed in their work to take notice. And I, for my part, was so hugely relieved to see them that I quite forgot to be embarrassed. The simple primal instinct to seek comfort and security in numbers was surprisingly effective, really. Just knowing I wasn’t alone was enough to dissolve nearly all of my fears. The ghost might still walk, but I wasn’t alone.
I breathed, a deep breath. My pulse calmed.
The students, hunched over their desks like monks transcribing the gospels, still hadn’t looked up. With a smile I set down my shopping bags and walked over to lend a hand with sorting through the day’s finds. It took a certain twist of mind to do this work. Jeannie, after watching me labor for twenty minutes, had pronounced my job “fykie,” and when I’d later looked the word up in my trusty Scots dictionary I’d thought it awfully appropriate. Like cleaning whorled silver or painting in miniature, dealing with finds was indeed a fykie task.
I’d always felt a wistful sense of envy for my colleagues who broke open long-sealed tombs, or for film heroes who scraped about in the dirt for twenty seconds before pulling out some rare bejewelled and golden statue, carefully preserved, intact.
Almost everything I’d ever touched—with the notable exception of one small military dagger—had come to me in pieces, dull with dirt and worn with age.
The Rosehill dig, so far, was no exception. Every new day brought more bits of animal bone and shattered pottery and broken metalwork. And every scrap and fragment, no matter how unimpressive it might appear, had to be cleaned, sorted and labeled with an identifying number.
I hated labeling artifacts. My hands were never steady and my numbers came out crooked, and the work itself was mind-numbingly tedious. It was enough of a challenge sometimes just to find a small spot on the artifact where a number could be visibly written without being glaringly obvious. Then, having applied a thin film of clear nail varnish on that spot, to seal the surface, I had to take an old-fashioned straight pen and liquid ink and, ever so carefully, write the number along that varnished strip, in tiny neat digits of white or black ink according to the color of the artifact, finishing off with a second coat of varnish, for protection.
This fussy method had its purpose, I admitted. Because of the sealing coats of nail varnish, the whole number could be easily removed without damaging the artifact, and since my penmanship left much to be desired I tended to remove as many numbers as I painted on.
And then, of course, the number had to be written down again, in the finds register, along with the particulars of the artifact itself—where and when it had been found, in what condition, what its dimensions were, and any other details we could think to add. Before, I’d always kept such notes by hand, in a series of ring-binders, but here at Rosehill the “finds register” was all on computer, in a uniform, fill-in-the-blank style that kept the format consistent whether an assistant or myself entered the information. Much more efficient, I thought, than the old methods.
But that didn’t stop me from making odd notes and sketches of the artifacts in my old-fashioned notebook, and from time to time I called Fabia in to take photographs.
And every evening, while the students were having their meal in the long tent, I trundled the day’s finds down to Rose Cottage, for Robbie to read.
Tonight, I’d chosen to vary our game a little, without his knowledge. Taking my seat at the now familiar kitchen table, with the smell of baking biscuits drifting comfortingly round me and the collie sleeping underneath my chair, I watched with special interest while Robbie felt through the things I’d brought. It wasn’t really fair to test him, I knew, but his abilities intrigued me. It was already clear to me that certain pieces “spoke” to him, transmitting some impression of their former shape and usefulness, and of the people they’d belonged to. But did they also speak to him of time?
Robbie was, after all, only a very small boy. He had a small boy’s sense of time. He knew the Sentinel was Roman, and that the Romans came from a long time ago, but then so did Napoleon. So, to a child, did Churchill. At Robbie’s age, I had been confused about chronology too—it had taken my father several days to explain why Cleopatra and the first Elizabeth could not have taken tea together.
And yet, on this dig, time was so important. The fortress we were excavating dated from the late first century, but what we really hoped to find, evidence of the site’s occupation by the Ninth Legion, would date from the early second century. A potsherd left behind by the Ninth would be some forty years younger than the ones we’d found so far. Would Robbie, I wondered, be able to tell the difference?
Curious to know the answer, I’d set up a little experiment. Mixed in with the Roman-era sherds was a piece of a Victorian flowerpot that Wally had found broken in the garden. The glaze was red, almost the same color as Samian ware, and to the untrained eye the pieces looked very much the same, but Robbie picked the impostor out with ease, his fingers closing round it and then opening again abruptly.
“Hey, Grandad, feel this one?
??it’s hot!”
Wally, at the far end of the table, looked up from his paper and took the sherd obligingly, weighing it in his hand for a moment before passing it back to the boy. “Aye,” he agreed, “so it is.”
Jeannie, making use of her Thursday night off to catch up on her baking, turned from the counter, a smudge of flour clinging to her dimpled cheek. “You lying old devil,” she accused her father. “You don’t feel anything.”
“Do I not?” Wally raised his chin belligerently. “For a’ ye ken, the lad might hae got his gift fae me.” With a quick sideways wink in my direction, he shook his paper out and, lighting yet another cigarette, resumed his reading.
“You feel it, don’t you, Miss Grey?” Robbie turned his trusting eyes on me, but after dutifully holding the sherd in my hand for a moment, I had to admit that I didn’t.
“Is it very hot?” I asked him.
The small dark head tipped to one side as he considered the question. “Like a teacup,” he decided. He leaned forward and chose another sherd, to illustrate. “See, this one’s cold. That means it’s right, like. It belongs to the Roman part.”
“The fortress.”
“Aye. But the hot one belongs to the house.”
I puzzled over this statement for a minute, then realized that Robbie was making a judgment of time. When the Romans had come here, the hill and the field had been empty, but by the Victorian age the hill had been crowned with a house. A sherd that belonged to the house must be younger than one that belonged to the fortress. At least, I assumed that’s what he meant. I shifted in my chair, wanting to be sure. “Do you mean it comes from a later time? After the Romans were gone?”
He looked at me in silence, his face perplexed. “Gone?”
“Yes, after the Roman soldiers left Rosehill…”
“But they didn’t leave.”
I’d learned, with Robbie, not to alter my expression when he dropped a bombshell in my lap. If I looked at all excited it just made him want to please me more, and the strain of trying seemed to block up all his faculties. I kept my gaze trained now on the grain of the table, and asked him very lightly what he meant.
“They didn’t leave,” he said again. “They’re still here.”
God, I thought, if he could point us toward the bodies… “Where exactly are they, Robbie? Do you know?”
His shrug implied that the answer was obvious. “Everywhere.”
Wally’s paper crackled as he set it aside to peer across at his grandson. “Whit d’ye mean, they’re everywhere? Are ye sayin’ yon field’s stappit fu wi’ deid bodies?”
Jeannie turned and met my eyes knowingly. “Stappit fu,” she said, as I reached automatically for my pocket dictionary. “That’s s-t-a-p-p…”
Filled with as many of something as possible, was the dictionary’s definition, and satisfied, I snapped the pages shut and gave my attention back to the conversation.
Robbie was shaking his head. “Not with bodies.”
“Ye ken whit I mean,” said Wally, who knew as well as I did that Robbie sometimes took things rather literally. “They’ll no’ be bodies like ours efter sae lang i’ the ground—they’ll be banes. Dry banes.”
Robbie tipped his head, rethinking his position. “No,” he said at last, “I don’t think there are any bones. Not people bones.”
I cut in, to clarify. “So the soldiers, the Roman soldiers, they’re still here, but their bodies aren’t.”
The dark head nodded. “Aye.”
“What happened to the bodies, Robbie?”
He didn’t know the answer to that one, but he had a clear idea who might. “I could ask the Sentinel for you,” he offered, eagerly. “He’d ken all about it.”
Wally and Jeannie and I exchanged impassive glances and I sank back in my chair. “Yes, well,” I said to Robbie, “I don’t think that would be such a good idea.”
“Dad doesn’t have to ken.”
I blinked at that, surprised. We’d all been so careful not to mention Brian’s opposition to our using Robbie in the field again. Whatever I thought of Brian McMorran, I couldn’t bring myself to make him look a villain in the eyes of his own son. I’d simply forgotten that Robbie, while he couldn’t tap his father’s thoughts, could read the rest of us with ease. We had no hope of keeping secrets.
“Well now,” Jeannie said, “it’d not be very nice, to do a thing your father didn’t approve. And to do it without telling him would be the same as lying.”
Robbie didn’t appear overly concerned by the ethical implications. Suppressing my smile, I tried to bolster Jeannie’s argument. “Besides,” I reasoned, “it made you ill the last time, remember? We don’t want that to happen again.”
“But he wants to talk to you.”
My eyebrows lifted. “To me?”
“Aye. He tries sometimes, but you can’t hear him so he takes himself away again.”
My fingers curved in reflex round my teacup. “He tries to talk to me?” I echoed Robbie’s words, unable to form ones of my own.
“He likes you,” was the boy’s explanation. “I think… I think you mind him of someone, Miss Grey. He sort of looks at you sometimes, and… well, he likes to look at you.”
“I see.”
“Follows after you, he does,” Robbie added, helpfully. “So you’re always safe.”
Safety, I thought, was a relative term. My fingers were still clamped tightly round the empty teacup and I quietly willed them open, flexing them to ease the painful tension.
Jeannie was watching my face. “It must be the hair,” she decided.
“I’m sorry?”
“Men do have a weakness for bonny long hair.”
I smoothed my plait back with a self-conscious hand and Wally shot me an appraising look, eyes twinkling.
“That’s three ye’ve got noo,” he observed. “Three wee shadows. Our Robbie, the dug, and an auld Roman bogle.”
“I’m not a shadow,” Robbie defended himself, his chin jutting out in a stubborn expression. “I’m a finds assistant, aren’t I, Miss Grey?”
“Yes, Robbie, you’re a very good assistant.”
“And Kip’s not a shadow, neither.”
Under the table the collie stirred and shifted at the mention of his name. Yawning widely, he twisted his head round to look at me, giving a few hopeful thumps of his tail. Wally rose to his feet with a whistle. “Gaun yersel, then,” he urged the dog, and Kip flipped eagerly onto his feet, padding across to the door. Pausing to stub his cigarette, Wally squinted through the rising haze of smoke and studied me. “Did ye want tae come wi’ us, back up tae the hoose? I can carry thon thingies for ye,” he added, nodding at my shallow box of potsherds.
It was, I thought, rather gallant of him—not his offer to carry the sherds, which weren’t the least bit heavy, but his thinking I might not want to walk home alone this evening. Not up that long drive, with the trees telling things to each other in whispers. Not in the fading light, with darkness coming on.
“Thanks,” I said, “that would be a great help.”
“Let me, Grandad,” said Robbie, scooting forward to grab the tub. But as he climbed down from his chair, Jeannie intercepted him.
“You,” she said firmly, “are taking a bath, my wee man, and then going to bed. Say good night to Miss Grey.”
The stubborn chin came out again, but he knew better than to argue. Handing the sherds to Wally, he trailed over to give me a hug. As he drew back, he looked at me hopefully. “Am I a great help to you, too?”
“A very great help.”
I meant it sincerely.
But that didn’t stop me wishing, as I walked with Wally up the hill, with the warm evening air pressing close all around us… it didn’t stop me wishing Robbie wouldn’t tell me everything.
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***
“Bad dreams, last night?” Fabia steadied the camera against her eye and snapped the row of potsherds from a different angle.
I glanced up rather vaguely from my desk. “No, why?”
“You left the light on.”
“Ah.” She would know, I thought. Fabia was always the last in at night, these days. She had cooled a little toward Brian, and I might have suspected she’d found herself a boyfriend among the students if it hadn’t been for David’s careful supervision of the camp. He hadn’t gone so far as to set an official curfew, but after one or two incidents early on he’d made it quite clear that anyone who wasn’t fit to work would have to answer to him, and since no one seemed willing to test that threat, the students were usually out of the pubs and tucked into their sleeping bags well before midnight. If some young man was keeping Fabia out late at night, I could safely say he wasn’t one of ours.
At any rate, the late nights didn’t seem to be doing her any great harm. She looked lovely this morning, eyes glowing with vigor and youthful good health, her movements quick and fluid. I felt dreadfully pallid by comparison.
“Well, I didn’t mean to leave the light on,” I lied. “I was reading, you see, and—”
“Where did Peter want me to go next?” she asked, losing interest, replacing the cap on her lens.
I tried to recall exactly what Quinnell’s instructions had been, at breakfast. “Well, I think he said they were going to start a new trench where the principia ought to be, and he wanted you to take a photograph before they stripped away the sod and topsoil.”
Fabia frowned. “But we’re in the Principia.”
“No, he means the real one.” When she still looked blank, I stared in open disbelief. “Don’t tell me you’re Peter Quinnell’s granddaughter and you’ve never learned the layout of a basic Roman fortress?”
“Well, I—”
“Oh, Fabia!”
“It’s like I said. My father hated all this stuff, and Peter just assumes I ought to know.”