The Detective Omnibus: "City of Gold and Shadows", "Flight of a Witch" and "Funeral of Figaro"

CHAPTER TWO

« ^ »

She paid her ten pence at the glass cage of the entrance booth, to a young man who could not possibly be the custodian, Great-Uncle Alan’s contemporary, but was clearly something rather more scholarly than a mere gate-keeper. He had a long, agreeable, supercilious face, dark eyes which dwelt upon his latest customer appreciatively but not offensively, and a general style that hovered oddly between the fastidious and the casual. His long hair stopped neatly at the level where it curved most attractively, but his shave was indifferent. Either that, or he had only yesterday decided to bow to fashion and grow a beard. His slacks and sweater were well-styled and good, but he managed to wear them as if they were about to fall off him. His aim had been either hopelessly inaccurate, or else capricious of intent. He had a pile of books, two or three open, and a large loose-leaf notebook at his table in a corner of the booth. It was early in the season yet, and he probably had long periods of inactivity to fill up between visitors; but he was not going to be left at leisure for long this time, for in the gravelled car park outside the enclosure a large bus was just disgorging a load of loud and active schoolboys, shepherded by a frantic youth hardly older than the eldest of his charges. The schools were evidently back after Easter. Charlotte took her ticket, and went on into the enclosure of Aurae Phiala. Once round the low barrier of the gatehouse and the prefabricated museum building, with her back turned on the plateau along which the road cruised towards distant Silcaster, the shallow, silver-green bowl of the book-jacket opened before her, wide and tranquil. There, even on this windy and showery day of late April, there was a stillness and a warmth, and in the flower-beds that had been laid out among the stretches of lush emerald turf the daffodils and narcissi were at least two weeks ahead of their fellows in the outer world. It was a naturally sheltered basin, a trick of the undulating meadows along the Comer. Narrow, gravelled paths led forward into the maze of low, broken stone walls, the pale ground-plan of a dead settlement. Delicately placed on a slight ridge, left-centre and midway between gatehouse and river, the surviving columns of the forum balanced, lifting the eyes to the exactly right focal point in a sky of scintillating, tearful blue feathered with airy clouds. Two groups of higher walls clustered below in the hollow of the bowl. And everywhere the orderly, skeletal bones of foundations, brittle and austere, patterned the brilliant grass.

The distant border of the enclosure was the river itself, sweeping in serpentine curves round the perimeter. From where she stood it shimmered in silver under a glancing sun, though upstream at the inn, where she had seen it close to, it rolled darkly brown and turgid, and laden with the debris of bushes, for the spring thaw had come late and violently, bringing down an immense weight of snow-water from the mountains of Wales. They were constructing a series of weirs upstream, so they had told her at ‘The Salmon’s Return’, which would eventually control this annual predator, but for this year, at least, it surged down irresistibly as ever, biting acres out of its banks as it cornered, like a ferocious animal frustrated. Its wildness and this elegiac calm met, circled each other, and survived. The demon passed, not once for all, but constantly, and the dead turned over in their sleep, and went on dreaming.

From here, where she stood orientating herself to the unknown photographer’s vision of Aurae Phiala, and sharing his revelation, even that violent force, at once protection and threat, seemed charmed into tameness, passing on tiptoe by this idyllic place.

‘Idyllic! You’re perfectly right,’ said a voice just behind her shoulder; a male voice, pitched almost apologetically low, to make its uninvited approach respectable and respectful. And she was quite sure she had not said a word aloud! How did he know what she was thinking? It was a liberty. But wasn’t it also a compliment? ‘That’s why they chose it,’ the voice said, diverting her possible resentment before she could even be aware of it herself. ‘It was a pleasure city, quite unreal like all its kind. And then it turned real—always the beginning of tragedy. People walked a tightrope here, in search of a secure living, just like today. And history walked out on them, and left them to die. It happens to most paradisial places. That’s the irony.’

Many times during this pocket lecture she could have turned and looked at her instructor, and put him clean out of countenance merely by looking; but she had not done it because she was so sure that he was the young man from the entrance booth, a licensed enthusiast, and entitled to his brief moments of emotional escape. His bus-load of senior schoolboys were all over Aurae Phiala by this time, gushing downhill towards the river like streams in spate, and no doubt he was free for a minute or two to breathe again and care about his own theories and idylls. Besides, she liked his voice. It was low-pitched and reverentially modulated, a nice, crisp, modest baritone. And knowledgeable! She had a respect for people who knew their subject, and she was here to discover Aurae Phiala; he could be very useful to her.

‘Are you doing research here?’ she asked, and turned to face him.

Leaning over the glass counter of his booth, the young man in charge was deep in conversation with an elderly gentleman draped with cameras, and she was gazing into the face of quite a different person. The small shock of surprise disturbed her judgement for a moment, and the awareness of feeling and looking disconcerted inclined her to resent him, and to look for and find impudence in an approach which would have seemed perfectly excusable in a resident scholar. For that matter, she might not have been far out in thinking him impudent; his manner was innocence itself, his deference if anything delicately overdone, as though he were ready to come down off his high horse the moment she came down off hers, and didn’t anticipate that the descent need be long delayed. He had the wit to keep talking.

‘It began as a sort of rest-station and leave resort, as seasonal and artificial as a seaside fun-fair. And then it grew, and traders and service providers thought it worthwhile to settle here and go into business. They brought their families, some of them intermarried with time-expired soldiers who chose to settle here, too, and it grew into a real, life-and death town, where everyone had a stake sunk so deep that when the legions started to leave, the locals still couldn’t get out. Everything they had was here. No, I don’t belong here, I’m only visiting,’ he ended disarmingly, coming roundabout to the answer to her question. ‘It’s my subject, that’s all. But I could see what you were thinking. It is a beautiful place.’

He was taller than she by only a few inches, and slenderly built, an athletic lightweight in a heather tweed sportscoat and grey cords. He had a thick crop of wiry hair the colour of good toffee, and heavy eyelashes many shades darker, as lavish as on a Jersey cow, fringing golden-brown eyes of such steady and limpid sincerity that she felt certain he could not possibly be just what he seemed. The face that confronted her with so much earnest goodwill and innocence, and with, she felt mistrustfully, such incalculable thoughts behind it, was square and brown, with a good deal of chin and nose to it, and an odd mouth with one corner higher than the other. He could have been anything from twenty-five to thirty, but not, she judged, beyond thirty. He did not look like a wolf, but he did look like a young man with an eye for a girl, and techniques that would bear watching.

‘How kind of you,’ she said, balancing nicely on the edge of irony, in case a few minutes more of this should see him running out of line to shoot, and make it desirable to jettison him, ‘—how kind of you to tell me all about it!’

‘Not at all!’ he said, and had the grace to flush a little; she even had a fleeting suspicion that he enjoyed the ability to flush at will. ‘How kind of you not to resent being told! I get carried away. Amateurs do. And this one I really like. Look at that hillscape over in Wales!’ Fold on fold, rising gently from the water-meadows, the foothills receded in softening and paling shades of blue into the west. ‘No wonder the men who’d served out their time put their savings into market stalls and little businesses, tanneries, dye-works, gardens. Nobody knew the risks better than they did. It was a brave gamble, and in the end they lost it. But it was a stake worth throwing for.’

‘I should have thought,’ said Charlotte, trapped into genuine interest and speculation, ‘that they’d have built just a little further from the river. Weren’t they for ever in danger of floods? Look at the height of the water now.’

‘Ah, now, that’s interesting. You see, the Comer has changed its course since the third century. Exactly when, we don’t know, it may have been as late as the thirteenth century before it cut its way through. Come on down, and I’ll show you.’ And he actually took her arm, quite simply and confidently, and rushed her on the wings of his enthusiasm down through the green complexities of the bowl, between the crisp, serrated walls, across the fragments of tiled pavement, past the forum pillars, down to where the emerald turf sloped off under a token wire barrier to the riverside path and the waters of the Comer.

Here, at close quarters, the fitful, elusive silver congealed into the turgid brown flood she had seen upriver, a silent surge of water looking almost solid in its power, sweeping along leaves and branches and roots and swathes of weed in its eddies, gnawing away loose red layers of the soil along this near bank, and eating at the muddy rim of the path. The speed of its silent, thrusting passage dazzled her eyes as she stared into it. The snows in Wales had lain long, and the spring rains had been heavy and protracted; the Comer drank, and grew quietly mad.

‘That’s it!’ she said, fascinated. ‘That’s what I meant. Would you choose to live close by that?’

‘But look across the river there. You see how the level rises? Gently, but it rises, look right round where I’m pointing, and you’ll see there’s a whole oval island of higher ground. In Roman times the river flowed on the far side of that. Aurae Phiala was close enough for fishing, close to two good fords, in all but the flood months, and safe from actual flooding. In a broad valley like this you inevitably get these S-bends, and this was the biggest one. By the Middle Ages the river had gradually cut back through the neck of land at this side of the rise, until it cut right through to where it runs now. You can still trace the old course by the lush growth of bushes and trees. Look, a regular horseshoe of them.’

She looked, and was impressed almost against her will, for everything was as he said. Alders and willows and rich grass and wild rose briars described a great, smooth horseshoe shape that was still hollowed gently into the green earth, with such authority that it had been acknowledged in perpetuity as a natural boundary, and a single large field hemmed within it.

‘Probably if they ever raise the funds to do a proper dig here, they’ll find the town had a guard outpost on that hillock. Not that the tribesmen would attempt anything more than a quick raid by night, not until the legions were withdrawn. And if they ever did set out to open up this place,’ he said consideringly, ‘there are a dozen more important places to begin, of course.’

‘Why haven’t they ever? Labour isn’t a problem, is it? I thought there were armies of students only too anxious to join digs in the long vacation.’

‘It isn’t the labour, it’s the money. Excavation is a costly business, and Silcaster hasn’t got enough money or enough interest.’

‘Oh?’ she said, surprised. ‘I thought it was Ministry property.’

‘No, it’s privately owned. It belongs to Lord Silcaster. He keeps it up pretty decently, considering, but it’s all done on a shoe-string, it has practically to pay for itself. The curator has a house downstream there, among the trees—you can see the red roof. And the only other staff seems to be that young fellow in the kiosk, and I rather think he’s working for peanuts while he mugs up a thesis.’

‘And a gardener-handyman,’ said Charlotte, her eyes following the vigorous heave and surge of the mole-brown water as it tore down past them and ripped at the curve of the bank, lipping half across the trodden right of way. It had been higher still, probably some three or four days earlier, for it had bitten a great red hole in the shelving bank, like a long wound in the smooth turf, and left the traces of its attack in half-dried puddles of silky clay and a litter of sodden leaves and bushes. Round this broken area a big, blond young man in stained corduroys and a donkey jacket was busy erecting a system of iron posts striped in red and white, and stringing a rope from them to cordon off the slip.

‘Hey, there’s brickwork breaking through there!’ Charlotte’s companion said with quickening interest, and set off to have a closer look. The cordoned area was much bigger than they had realised, for several square yards of the level ground on top had subsided into ominous, shallow holes, here and there breaking the turf, and the slope down to the river path, once dropping gradually a matter of fifteen feet or so, now sagged in red rolls of soil and grass. The gardener had completed his magic circle, and was hanging three warning boards from the stanchions, with the legend boldly and hurriedly slashed in red paint: DANGER! KEEP CLEAR!

By a natural enough process, this injunction immediately attracted the most unruly fringe of the school party, straying from the group of their fellows in the forum. They came like flies to honey, not the heedless junior element, either, but a knot of budding sophisticates in their teens, led by a tall, slim sixteen-year-old on whose walk, manner and style all the rest appeared to be modelling themselves.

The young teacher, observing this deliberate defection, broke off his lecture to raise his voice, none too hopefully, after his strays. ‘Boys, come back here at once! Come here and pay attention! Boden, do you hear?’

The boy who must be Boden heard very well. His strolling gait became exaggeratedly languid and assured. One or two of his following hesitated, wavered and turned back. Most of the others hovered diplomatically to make it look as if they were about to turn back, while still edging gingerly forward. Boden advanced at an insolent saunter to the stretched rope. The gardener, suddenly aware of him, reared erect to his full impressive six-feet-two and stood still, narrowly observing this unchancy opponent. The boy gazed back sweetly, forbearing from touching anything, and daring anyone to challenge his intentions. He was a good-looking boy, and knew it. He was pushing manhood, and much too well aware of that, though he believed himself to be much nearer maturity than he actually was. Twice he advanced a hand with deliberate teasing towards the hook that sustained the rope on the posts, and twice diverted the gesture into something innocuous. The gardener narrowed long, grey-blue eyes and made never a move. The boy stretched out a foot under the rope, and prodded with the toe of a well-polished shoe at the edge of one of the ominous cracks in the grass. The gardener, with deliberation, put down the spade he held, and took one long step to circle the obstruction between them.

The boy gave an amused flick of his head, swung round unhurriedly—yet not too slowly, either—and sauntered away with a laugh, his admirers tittering after him. Distant across the grass, the young teacher, with opportunist alacrity, chose that moment to call: ‘That’s better, Boden! Come on, now, quickly, you’re holding up the whole party.’

‘The secret of success with performing fleas,’ said Charlotte’s self-constituted guide startlingly, diverted even from his Roman passion, ‘is to synchronise your orders with their hops. Our unfortunate young friend seems to know the principle, whether he can make it work or not.’

The gardener stood a moment to make sure that his antagonist was really retiring, then turned back to complete his work. His eye met Charlotte’s, and his face flashed into a sudden brief, almost reluctant smile. ‘Flipping kids!’ he said in a broad, deep country voice, with a hint of the singing eloquence of Wales.

‘They give you much trouble normally?’ asked the young man.

‘What you’d expect. Not that much,’ he allowed tolerantly. ‘But that one’s a case.’

‘You know him?’ the young man asked sympathetically.

‘Never seen him before. I know his sort, though, on sight.’

‘Oh, I don’t know… he’s just flexing his muscles.’ He looked over his shoulder, to where the youthful shepherd was fretfully hustling his flock from the forum into the skeleton entrance of the baths. ‘He’s got a teacher bossing him around who’s about four years older than he is, if that, and a lot less self-confident, but holding all the aces. Not that he plays them all that well,’ he admitted, thoughtfully watching the harried youngster trying to be as tall as his tallest and most formidable charge. ‘And of course,’ he said aside to Charlotte, with a devastating smile, ‘having a girl like you around doesn’t make their problem any easier for either of them.’

‘I could go away,’ Charlotte offered, between offence and gratification.

‘Don’t do that!’ he said hastily. ‘Each of them would blame the other. And you haven’t seen half what’s here to be seen yet.’ He turned back to the gardener. ‘When did this slip happen?’

‘This morning. Water’s been right up over the path two days or more, I reckon it’s loosened part o’ the foundations under here.’ He stood at the edge of the slope, looking down the line of his cordon and into the turgid water. ‘Who’d get the blame, I ask you, if some young big-head like him got larking about in that lot, and the whole thing caved in and buried him alive? I don’t reckon they’d allow as a rope and three notices was enough. It’d be me for it, me and Mr Paviour and his lordship—ah, and in that order! But they expect us to keep the place open for ’em. We got stated hours, nobody lets us off because the Comer floods.’

His deep, warm western voice had risen into plangent eloquence, indignant and rapt. And Charlotte was suddenly aware of him as a person, and by no means an unintelligent person, either; but above all a vital presence, to be ignored only at the general peril. He was built rather heavily even for his height, a monumental creature admirably suited to these classic and heroic surroundings; and his face was a mask of antique beauty, but crudely cut out of a local stone. She could see him as a prototype for the border entrepreneur trapped here in the decline and fall of this precarious city, the market-stallholder, the baths attendant, the potter, the vegetable grower, any one of the native opportunists who had rallied to serve and exploit this hothouse community of time-expired settlers and pay-happy leave-men. He had a forehead and nose any Greek might have acknowledged with pride, and long, grey-blue eyes like slivers of self-illuminating stone, somewhere between lapis-lazuli and granite. His fairness inclined ever so slightly towards the Celtic red of parts of Wales, an alien colouring in both countries. He had a full, passionate, childlike mouth, generously shaped but brutally finished; and his cleanshaven cheeks and jaw were powerful and fleshless, pure, massive bone under the fine, fair skin. It was easy to see that his roots went down fathoms deep in this soil, and transplanting would have destroyed everything in him that was of quality. There was nowhere else he belonged.

Charlotte said, on an impulse she only partially understood: ‘Don’t worry about him. In an hour they’ll be gone.’ And just as impulsively she turned to check on the movements of that incalculable swarm of half-grown children who were causing him this natural anxiety. The boys and their uneasy pastor were moving tidily enough into the first green enclosure which must be the frigidarium of the baths, emerging in little, bulbous groups from between the broken walls of the entrance. She saw the stragglers gather, none too enthusiastically, but not unwillingly, either, and waited for the last-comers. Something was missing there. It took her a few minutes to realise what it was. The teacher, selfconsciously gathering his chicks about him, was now the tallest person in sight. Where had the odious senior, Boden, gone, somewhere among those broken, enfolding walls? And how had he shed his train? The numbers there looked more or less complete. He was a natural stray, of course. He needed the minimum of cover to drop out of sight, whenever it suited him. But at least he was well away from here. No doubt something else had diverted his attention, and afforded him another cue to spread confusion everywhere around him.

‘There’s always closing-time,’ said the gardener-handyman philosophically. He lifted one narrowed glance of blue-grey eyes, slanting from Charlotte to her escort and sharing a fleeting smile between them as recognised allies. He was gone, withdrawing rather like a mountain on the move, downriver where the water most encroached. He walked like a mountain should walk, too, striding without upheaval, drawing his roots with him.

‘Come down to the path,’ said the enthusiast, abruptly returning to his passion as soon as the distractions withdrew, ‘and I’ll show you something. Round this way it’s not so steep. Here, let me go first.’ He took possession of her hand with almost too much confidence, drawing her with him down the slippery slope of wet grass towards the waterside. Her smooth-soled court shoes glissaded in the glazed turf, and he stood solidly, large feet planted, and let her slide bodily against him. He looked willowy enough, but he felt like a rock. They blinked at each other for a moment at close quarters, wide-eyed and brow to brow.

‘I ought to have introduced myself,’ said the young man, as though prompted by this accidental intimacy, and gave her a dazzled smile. ‘My name’s Hambro—Augustus, of all the dirty tricks. My friends call me Gus.’

‘I suspect,’ she said, shifting a little to recover firmer standing, ‘that should be Professor Hambro? And F.S.A. after it? At least!’ But she did not respond with her own name. She was not yet ready to commit herself so far. And after all, this could be only a very passing encounter.

‘Just an amateur,’ he said modestly, evading questioning as adroitly as she. ‘Hold tight… the gravel breaks through here, there’s a better grip. Now, look what the river did to one bit of the baths.’

They stood on the landward edge of the riverside path, very close to the lipping water. Before them the bevelled slope, fifteen feet high, cut off from them the whole upper expanse of Aurae Phiala, with all its flower-beds and stone walls; and all its visitors had vanished with it. They were alone with the silently hurtling river and the great, gross wound it had made in this bank, curls of dark-red soil peeled back and rolling downhill, and a tangle of uprooted broom bushes. At a level slightly higher than their heads, and several yards within the cordon, this raw soil fell away from a dark hole like the mouth of a deep, narrow cave, large enough, perhaps, to admit a small child. The top of it was arched, and looked like brickwork, the pale amber brick of Aurae Phiala. Bushes sagged loosely beneath it; and the masonry at the crown of the arch showed paler than on either curve, as though it had been exposed to the air longer, perhaps concealed by the sheltering broom.

‘You know,’ said Gus, as proudly as if he had discovered it himself, ‘what that is? It’s the extreme corner of what must be one hell of a huge hypocaust.’

‘Really?’ she said cautiously, still not quite convinced that he was not shooting a shameless line in exploitation of her supposed ignorance. ‘What’s a hypocaust?’

‘It’s the system of brick flues that runs under the entire floor of the caldarium—the hot room of the baths—to circulate the hot air from the furnace. That’s how they heated the place. Narrow passages like that one, built in a network right from here to about where the school party was standing a few minutes ago. They’d just come in, as it were, from the street, through the palaestra, the games courts and exercise ground, and into the cold room. The chaps who wanted the cold plunge would undress and leave their things in lockers there, and there were two small cold basins to swim in—two here, anyhow—one on either side. The sybarites who wanted the hot water bath or the hot air bath would pass through into the slightly heated room one stage farther in, and undress there, then go on in to whichever they fancied. The hypocaust ran under both. If you were fond of hot water, you wallowed in a sunken basin. If you favoured sweating it out, you sat around on tiered benches and chatted with your friends until you started dissolving into steam, and then got yourself scraped down by a slave with a sort of sickle thing called a strigil, and massaged, and oiled and perfumed, or if you were a real fanatic you probably went straight from the hot room to take a cold plunge, like sauna addicts rolling in the snow. And then you were considered in a fit state to go and eat your dinner.’

‘By then,’ she said demurely, ‘I should think you’d want it.’

He eyed her with a suspicious but quite unabashed smile. ‘You know all this, don’t you? You’ve been reading this place up.’

‘I could hardly read up this bit, could I? It only came to light today.’ She strained her eyes into the broken circle of darkness, and a breath of ancient tension and fear seemed to issue chillingly from the hole the river had torn in history. ‘But they’re quite big, those flues, if that’s their width. A man could creep through them.’

‘They had to be cleaned periodically. These aren’t unusual. But the size of the whole complex is, if I’m right about this.’

She let him help her back up the slope, round the other side of the danger area, and demonstrate by the skeletal walls where the various rooms of the baths lay, and their impressive extent.

She had no idea why she suddenly looked back, as they set off across the level turf that stretched above that mysterious underworld of brick-built labyrinths. The newness of the scar, the crudity of the glimpse it afforded into long-past prosperities and distresses, the very fact that no one, since this city was abandoned overnight, had threaded the maze below—a matter of fifteen centuries or more—drew her imagination almost against her will, and she turned her head in involuntary salute and promise, knowing she would come back again and again. Thus she saw, with surprise and disquiet, the young, dark head cautiously hoisted out of cover to peer after them. How could he be there? And why should he want to? The incalculable Boden had somehow worked his way round once again into forbidden territory, had been lurking somewhere in the bushes, waiting for them to leave. The twentieth century, inquisitive, irreverent, quite without feeling for the past, homed in upon this ambiguous danger-zone with its life in its hand.

She clutched at her companion’s arm, halting him in mid-spate and bringing his head round in respectful enquiry.

‘That boy! He’s there again—but inside the rope now! Why do they have to go where it says: Danger?’

Gus Hambro wheeled about with unexpectedly authoritative aplomb, just in time to see the well-groomed young head duck out of sight. He dropped Charlotte’s hand, took three large strides back towards the crest, and launched a bellow of disapproval at least ten times as effective as the hapless teacher’s appeals:

‘Get out of that! Yes, you! Want me to come and fetch you? And stay out!’

He noted the rapid, undignified scramble by which the culprit extricated himself from the ropes on the river path, followed by ominous little trickles of loose earth; and the exaggerated dignity with which he compensated as soon as he was clear, his slender back turned upon the voice that blasted him out of danger, his crest self-consciously reared in affected disregard of sounds which could not possibly be directed at him.

‘Those notices,’ announced Gus clearly to the general air, but not so loudly as to reach unauthorised ears, ‘mean exactly what they say. Anybody we have to dig out of there we’re going to skin alive afterwards. So watch it!’

It was at that point that Charlotte began seriously to like her guide, and to respect his judgement. ‘That’s it,’ he said, tolerantly watching the Boden boy’s swaggering retreat towards the curator’s house. ‘He’ll lay off now. His own shower weren’t around to hear that, he’ll be glad to get back to where he rates as a hero.’

She was not quite so sure, for some reason, but she didn’t say so. The tall, straight young back that sauntered away down-river, to come about in a wide circuit via the fence of the curator’s garden, and the box hedge that continued its line, maintained too secure an assurance, and too secret a satisfaction of its own, in spite of the dexterity with which it had removed itself from censure. This Boden observed other people’s taboos just so far as was necessary, but he went his own way, sure that no values were valid but his own. Still, he removed himself, if only as a gesture. That was something.

‘You did that very nicely,’ she said, surprising herself.

‘I try my best,’ he said, unsurprised. ‘After all, I’ve been sixteen myself. I know it’s some time ago, but I do remember, vaguely. And I’m not sure it isn’t all your fault.’

She felt sure by then that it was not; she was completely irrelevant. But she did not say so. She was beginning to think that this Gus Hambro was a good deal more ingenuous than he supposed; but if so, it was an engaging disability in him.

‘I was going to show you the laconicum,’ he said, and he turned and snuffed like a hound across the green, open bowl, and set out on a selected trail, nose to scent, heading obliquely for the complex of standing walls where several rooms of the ancient baths converged. The amber brickwork and rosy layers of tile soared here into the complicated pattern of masonry against the pale azure sky.

‘You see? That same floor we’ve been crossing reaches right to here, one great caldarium, with that hypocaust deployed underneath it all the way. And just here is the vent from the heating system, the column that brought the hot air directly up here into the room when required.’

It was merely a framework of broken, blonde walls, barely knee-high, like the shaft of a huge well, a shell withdrawn into a corner of the great room. Over the round vent a rough wooden cover, obviously modern, was laid. Gus put a hand to its edge and lifted, and the cover rose on its rim, and showed them a glimpse of a deep shaft dropping into darkness, partially silted up below with rubble.

‘Yes—it would take some money and labour to dig that lot out! Wonder what happened to the original cover? It would be bronze, probably. Maybe it’s in the museum, though I think some of the better finds went to the town museum in Silcaster.’

‘This is what you call the laconicum?’ she asked, drawing back rather dubiously from the dank breath that distilled out of the earth.

‘That’s it. Though you might, in some places, get the word laconia used for small hot-air rooms, too. They could send the temperature up quickly when required, by raising the cover—even admit the flames from the furnace if they wanted to. Come and have a look round the museum. If you’ve time? But perhaps you’ve got a long drive ahead,’ he said, not so much hesitantly as enquiringly.

‘I’m staying at “The Salmon’s Return”, just upstream,’ she said. ‘Ten minutes’ walk, if that. Yes, let’s see the museum, too.’

It was a square, prefabricated building, none too appropriate to the site, but banished to the least obtrusive position, behind the entrance kiosk. It was full of glass cases, blocks of stone bearing vestigial carving, some fragments of very beautiful lettering upon the remains of a stone tablet, chattering schoolboys prodding inquisitively everywhere, and the young teacher, perspiring freely now, delivering a lecture upon Samian ware. Boden was not among his listeners, nor anywhere in the three small, crowded rooms. By this time Charlotte would have felt a shock of surprise at ever finding that young man where he was supposed to be.

They made the round of the place. A great deal of red glaze pottery, some glass vessels, even one or two fragments of silver; tarnished mirrors, ivory pins, little bronze brooches, a ring or two. Gus, tepid about the collection in general, grew excited about one or two personal ornaments.

‘See this little dragon brooch—there isn’t a straight line in it, it’s composed of a dozen quite unnecessarily complex curves. Can you think of anything less Roman? Yet it is Roman—interbred with Celtic. Like the mixed marriages that were general here. This kind of ornament, in a great many variations, you can locate all down this border. In the north, too, but they differ enough to be recognisable.’

She found the same curvilinear decoration in several other pieces, and delighted him by picking them out without hesitation from the precise and formal Roman artifacts round them.

‘Anything that looks like a symbol for a labyrinth, odds on it’s either Celtic or Norse.’

It was nearly closing time, and the school party, thankfully marshalled by its young leader, was pouring vociferously out into the chill of the early evening, and heading with released shouts for its waiting coach. The last and smallest darted back, self-importantly, to inscribe his name with care in the visitors’ book, which lay open on a table by the door, before allowing himself to be shepherded after his companions. On impulse, Charlotte stopped to look at what he had added in the ‘Remarks’ column, and laughed. ‘Veni, vidi, vici’, announced the ball-pen scrawl.

‘You should sign, too,’ said Gus, at her shoulder.

She knew why, but by then it was almost over in any case, for when was she likely to see him again? So she signed ‘Charlotte Rossignol’, well aware that he was reading the letters as fast as she formed them.

‘Now may I drive you back to the pub?’ he said casually, as they emerged into the open air, and found the studious young man of the kiosk waiting to see his last customers out, one finger still keeping his place in a book. ‘I’m staying there, too. And as it happens, I didn’t walk. I’ve got my car here.’

The car park was empty but for the elderly gentleman’s massive Ford, which was just crunching over the gravel towards the road, an old but impressive bronze Aston Martin which Charlotte supposed must belong to Gus—it sent him up a couple of notches in her regard—and the school bus, still stationary, boiling over with bored boys, and emitting a plaintive chorus of: ‘Why are we waiting?’ The driver stood leaning negligently against a front wing, rolling himself a cigarette. Clearly he had long since trained himself to tune out all awareness of boys unless they menaced his engine or coachwork.

And why were they waiting? The noise they were making indicated that no teacher was present, and there could be only one explanation for his absence now.

‘He’s lost his stray again,’ said Gus, halting with the car keys levelled in his hand.

‘Here he comes now.’ And so he did, puffing up out of the silvered, twilit bowl of Aurae Phiala, ominous at dusk under a low ceiling of dun cloud severed from the earth by a rim of lurid gold. A glass bowl of fragile relics closed with a pewter lid; and outside, the fires of ruin, like a momentary recollection of the night, how many centuries ago, when the Welsh tribesmen massed, raided, killed and burned, writing ‘Finis’ to the history of this haunted city.

‘Poor boy!’ said Charlotte, suddenly outraged by the weariness and exasperation of this ineffectual little man, worn out by a job he had probably chosen as the most profitable within his scope, and now found to be extending him far beyond the end of his tether. ‘Whoever persuaded him he ought to be a teacher?’

‘He’s not that far gone,’ Gus assured her with unexpected shrewdness. ‘He knows when to write off his losses.’

The young man came surging up to them, as the only other responsible people left around. ‘I beg your pardon, but you haven’t seen one of my senior pupils around anywhere, by any chance? A dark boy, nearly seventeen, answers—when he answers!—to the name of Gerry Boden. He’s a professional absentee. Where we are, he is most likely not to be. Sometimes with escort—chorus, rather! This time, apparently, without, which must be by his own contriving. I’m missing just one boy—the magnate himself.’

Between them they supplied all they could remember of the encounter by the roped-off enclosure above the river.

‘He never did come back to us,’ said the young man positively. ‘I always know whether he’s there or not. Like a pain, if you know what I mean.’ They knew what he meant. He shrugged, not merely helplessly, rather with malevolent acceptance. ‘Well, I’ve looked everywhere. He does it on purpose, of course. This isn’t the first time. He’s nearly seventeen, he has plenty of money in his pockets, and he knows this district like the palm of his hand. We’re no more than ten miles from home. He can get a bus or a taxi, and he knows very well where to get either. I don’t know why I worry about him.’

‘Having a conscience does complicate things,’ said Gus with sympathy.

‘It simplifies this one,’ said the teacher grimly. ‘I’ve got a conscience about all this lot, all of ’em younger than our Gerry. This time he can look out for himself, I’m going to get the rest home on time.‘

He clambered aboard the coach, the juniors raised a brief, cheeky cheer, half mocking and half friendly, the driver hoisted himself imperturbably into his cab, and the coach started up and surged ponderously through the gates and away along the Silcaster road.

Charlotte turned, before getting into the car, and looked back once in a long, sweeping survey of the twilit bowl of turf and stone. Nothing moved there except the few blackheaded gulls wheeling and crying above the river. A shadowy, elegiac beauty clothed Aurae Phiala, but there was nothing alive within it.

‘When did it happen?’ she asked. ‘The attack from the west, the one that finally drove the survivors away?’

‘Quite late, around the end of the fourth century. Most of the legions were gone long before that. Frantic appeals for help kept going out to Rome—Rome was still the patron, the protector, the fortress, even when she was falling to pieces herself. About twenty years after the sack of Aurae Phiala, Honorius finally issued an edict that recognised what had been true for nearly a century. He told the Britons they could look for nothing more, no money, no troops, no aid. From then on they had to shift for themselves.’

‘And the Saxons moved in,’ said Charlotte.

He smiled, holding the passenger door open for her. By this time he would not have been surprised if she had taken up the lecture and returned him a brief history of the next four centuries. ‘Well, the Welsh, over this side. Death from the past, not the future. A couple of anachronisms fighting it out here while real life moved in on them from the east almost unnoticed. But their kin survived and intermarried. Nothing quite disappears in history.’

But she thought, looking back at that pewter sky and narrow saffron afterglow as the Aston Martin purred into life and shot away at speed: Yes, individuals do! Perversely, wilfully or haplessly, they do vanish. One elderly, raffish archaeologist in Turkey, one uneasy, spoiled adolescent here. But of course they’ll both emerge somewhere. Probably the boy’s halfway home by now, ahead of his party, probably he thumbed a lift the other way along this road as soon as he got intolerably bored. That would amuse him, the thought of the fuss and the delay and the inconvenience to everyone, while he rode home to wherever home is, in the cab of a friendly lorry.

And Doctor Alan Morris? He could be accounted for just as easily, and much more rationally. Total absorption in his passion could submerge him far below the surface of mere time. Somewhere in Anatolia, as yet unheralded, a major news story was surely brewing, to burst on the world presently in a rash of photographs, films, television interviews—some new discovery, one more Roman footprint in the east, stumbled on happily, and of such delirious interest that its discoverer forgot about the passing of the year, his minor responsibilities, and his fretful solicitor.

Over Aurae Phiala the April dusk closed very softly and calmly, like a hand crushing a silvery moth. But her back was turned on the dead city then, and she did not see.