Shadowy Horses (16 page)

"It's not blind faith, it's—"

He cut me off. "Bloody hell," he said, without violence. He was staring at the screen of his computer, and something in his expression made me sit up smartly, instantly alert.

"What is it?"

"Look at this." He moved aside to make room as I rolled my chair closer and peered at the jagged black-and-white bands. At first glance, the radar profile bore a striking similarity to the image he and Fabia had faked, the boundary ditch and rampart marked at nearly the same spot by a sharp dip in the lines. But Adrian was pointing to a different, smaller feature. "There, do you see that?"

"What is it?"

"Hang on a minute." A few clicks on the computer keyboard replaced the single image with six smaller ones, while Adrian explained. "I made several runs across that area, this afternoon, and this is what the chart recorder printed off. You see? There's one blip, there. And that's another."

I scrutinized the profiles. "I count three."

"Right. Now," he told me, keying in another series of commands, "let me show you what they'd look like, on our site map."

The image on the screen changed shape again, becoming a topographical map section of the southwest comer, on which the three mysterious blips now showed as small black dots.

I shook my head. "They could be anything."

Ignoring me, Adrian drew in the known line of ditch and rampart, and positioned one more dot on the screen. "Look again," he advised.

I looked. He was speculating, of course—adding the fourth dot to create a perfect square, set at an angle to the rampart's corner curve. Still, the image
was
suggestive. On any other site, I would have said those dots were post holes, hinting at some buried structure underneath the level turf. And on any other site, I'd have been tempted to identify that structure as a guard tower, only ... only ...

"I'm afraid you've lost your fiver, darling," Adrian said slowly. He sounded nearly as stunned as I felt, and he turned his head to lock his eyes with mine. "This is no marching camp."

THIRD HORSE

And hear at times a sentinel

Who moves about from place to place,

And whispers to the worlds of space,

In the deep night, that all is well.

Tennyson, "In Memoriam",
CXXV

XVI

Quinnell rejected the evidence. "Your equipment must be off, my boy," he told Adrian, leaning forward to tap the computer screen with an accusing finger. "Blips on the landscape, that's all. Or the remnants of a garden shed."

It was obvious to me why Peter didn't think that what we'd found could be a guard tower. Roman marching camps didn't have any permanent structures—only forts and fortresses had guard towers.

And our site could not have been either.

Roman forts were much too small. Built to defend and supply the spreading imperial forces, they were occupied by auxiliary troops, not legionaries. The famous fort at Housesteads on Hadrian's Wall could have barely held a quarter of a legion, and that only if the men stood cheek to jowl.

At the other end of the scale, a legionary fortress would have been enormous—fifty acres or more. And we knew from our surveys and excavations that our ditch and rampart had enclosed an area of roughly twenty acres. Which left us somewhere in between—too large to be a fort, too small to be a fortress. Marching-camp size, as a matter of fact.

But one couldn't deny that the survey had found some-
thing, down in the southwest comer. And that something
did
look like a guard tower.

The three of us frowned at the computer screen until David joined us, took one look, rubbed his jaw, and offered another solution.

"Might be a vexillation fortress," he said.

Which was, I thought, entirely plausible. A
vexillatio
was a detachment of a legion, so a vexillation fortress didn't need to be as large as a full legionary fortress—it didn't need to hold as many buildings. I'd seen a vexillation fortress myself, at Clyro in Wales, that was roughly the size of our own site. And since they were only built as temporary campaign bases, they left very little evidence behind, much like a marching camp.

But Quinnell rejected
that
suggestion out of hand, refusing to admit the possibility. He wanted a site from the early second century, after all, and vexillation fortresses were remnants of the century before—the conquest years.

"No, no," he said, and tapped the screen again, accusingly. "A garden shed, or some old fence. That's what we'll find down there."

But as the week wore on, a careful expansion of the trial trench exposed clear evidence of post molds, and by the following Saturday Peter's optimism had evaporated. "A guard tower," he identified it, sadly. "It can be nothing else."

And marching camps, whatever else they had, did not have guard towers. Which meant that what we'd found could not have been the marching camp that sheltered the Ninth Legion on the eve of its last battle.

Peter sighed and poked the soil despondently with his trowel. "No, this really is the worst thing that could have happened."

It was the first time I had known Peter Quinnell to be wrong. Because the
worst
thing turned up half an hour later, on the end of his own trowel.

"The terrible part," I told Jeannie the next morning, as we sat together in the tiny, homely kitchen of Rose Cottage, "is that the head of David's department comes to lunch on Tuesday, the day after tomorrow, and Peter seems to have completely given up."

I'd never seen a man so unutterably depressed, so devoid of any interest in the goings-on around him. Since yesterday at noon I'd hardly seen him, and when I did he looked a shadow of his normal cheerful self, sitting wrapped in morose silence with one or both of the cats to comfort him, and his vodka bottle close at hand.

He didn't want company. And so, after breakfast, feeling utterly helpless, I'd come down to Rose Cottage and Jeannie.

She was a most relaxing woman. For all her energy and bubbly nature she seemed somehow to radiate an inner calm. Motherly, I thought, putting my finger on the quality. She was very motherly. Already she had filled my teacup twice and urged half a plate of her chocolate biscuits upon me.

"Aye, well, naturally he's disappointed," she said, stirring a second lump of sugar into her teacup and settling back. “It was coins that you found, was it?''

I nodded. ' "Three Roman
asses
—copper coins—from the reign of the Emperor Domitian. He was Emperor during Agricola's campaigns."

"And who was Agricola?"

"Oh, sorry. Governor of Britain, for a time. Agricola," I explained, “built forts and things all over Scotland, trying to push back the native tribes. Only then Domitian called him back to Rome, and the army withdrew again. They didn't really have enough men, anyway, to keep a proper occupying force up here. Our own fortress, or whatever it is, was probably abandoned within a year or so of
AD
86—long before the disappearance of the Ninth."

"Why AD 86?"

"That's when the coins we found were minted."

Her expression was doubting. "But the coins could have been old when they were dropped here, couldn't they?"

"No." I shook my head, positive. "No, they were all three in splendid condition, unworn. And that kind of coin, once it's in circulation, tends to show wear very quickly. So they had to have been buried just a short time after they were struck. It gives us a very tight
terminus post quern.”

“
Oh, aye, that's just what I was thinking." Jeannie's mouth curved. "You're worse than Davy, you are, for explaining things."

"Sorry," I apologized, again. "It's just a term we use, for dating sites. In translation, it would mean the time after which something happened."

"Like, the Romans left
after
those coins were made?"

"That's right. We use a
terminus post quern
to help set a date range for the site, to say when it was occupied. Here
at
Rosehill, with the pottery we've found, and now these coins, we're looking at a rather tight date range of only a few years . .."

"Terminus pout quern,
" she murmured slowly, testing the sound of the words. "That's Latin, isn't it? D'ye ken Latin very well?"

"Well enough. It comes in handy, in my work."

"Aye." Her smile surprised me. "Robbie said you kent it. He was wanting to ask you what a word meant, I think, only yesterday wasn't the best day for it. I guess he decided to wait."

"He could always ask David," I said. "Archaeologists study Latin and Greek as a matter of course."

"Aye, so they do," agreed Jeannie. "But I think my son prefers your opinion to Davy's. You've prettier eyes."

Which was, I thought, a debatable fact, but I knew what she was saying. Robbie, like his collie dog, had rather taken to following me around while I did my work, and though the boy was much too young to have a true romantic crush on me, he evidently thought I was, as my father would say, “a bit of all right."

Neither Robbie nor Kip was around at the moment. Out for a late morning ramble with Wally, I expected. And Brian McMorran was away on his boat again, fishing. Which left just the two of us, Jeannie and me.

"Have another biscuit," she invited, nudging the plate closer.

I did as I was told. "I am glad you're here. I'd have gone mad this morning, with no one to talk to."

"What, is Fabia not around?" she teased.
"Oh, very funny. And no, since you mention it'—Fabia isn't around. She went roaring off in her Range Rover, after breakfast. Seemed quite cheerful, actually. I don't think she has any clue how disappointing all of this is for Peter."

Jeannie shrugged. "No, well, she wouldn't. Fabia can't be bothered, ken, with other people's feelings." The words were spoken lightly, but I didn't miss their sharpness and I found myself wondering whether Fabia really had made a play for Jeannie's husband.

Still, I thought, it wasn't altogether fair to Fabia to suggest she didn't care how Peter felt. After all, by her own admission, the plan she'd hatched with Adrian to fake the radar survey—misguided though it was—had been in aid of keeping Peter happy. And everyone, surely, had some redeeming feature.

But before I could voice my opinion to Jeannie, the peace of the kitchen was shattered by the boisterous return of Robbie and Kip. The collie, muddied from his long walk, greeted me energetically, distracting me while Robbie made a grab for the last biscuit.

"Not till you've washed your hands," Jeannie told him with a firm shake of her head. "You'll be carrying germs, you will."

I held back a smile as I watched him trudge reluctantly to the kitchen sink, showing the same enthusiasm for soap and water as I'd felt myself at his age. Not that I knew exactly what his age was, mind, but...

"Nearly eight and three-quarters," he told me, turning as though I'd spoken the words out loud. "I'll be nine in September."

I sighed.
"Must
you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Answer my questions before I've asked them. It puts me at a disadvantage."

Jeannie smiled. "Aye, well, we're all at a disadvantage, with this wee laddie around. All of us except his dad, that is," she corrected herself. "He can't read Brian, very well. Can you?'' she asked her son, who simply shook his head.

"Dad's fuzzy.”

“He is that," Jeannie agreed, her smile widening. "Och, I'm forgetting now, what was that word that you wanted to ask Miss Grey about? The Latin word?''

"Solway," came the answer, through a mumbly mouthful of biscuit. "I looked in Mr. Quinnell's dictionary, but I couldn't find it."

Jeannie frowned. "Solway?"

The dark curls bobbed affirmatively. "Aye, that's what he said. At first I thought he meant the Firth, like, but Granny Nan says it would have had a different name, back then, and anyways he wouldn't speak English."

Thoroughly confused, I gave my own head a faint shake, to clear it. "Who wouldn't?"

"The Sentinel."

My teacup clattered in its saucer. "The Sentinel
talks'!"

"Aye. Granny Nan says he's probably talking Latin, like, only I don't ken Latin."

"He talks." I repeated the words to myself, surprised that anything still had the power to surprise me. Rosehill had forced me to suspend my natural skepticism. There were no horses in the field behind the house, yet horses ran there every night. There were no ghosts, yet one had walked right past me. And there could be no psychics, yet I knew whatever Robbie spoke was certain truth.

I cleared my throat. "Does the Sentinel talk to you often?"

Robbie raised one thin shoulder in a cavalier shrug. "He just says 'solway'. And then I don't ken what to say back, so he goes away again."

"Oh."

"What does 'solway' mean, then?"

"Well, I think he's saying
salve,
Robbie," I said, and spelled the word out for him. "The Latin V is pronounced rather like our 'w'. And
salve
means good day, how are you doing, all of that.''

"So he's just saying hello, like."

"That right." It was pointless to tell the boy to say
salve
in return, since he wouldn't understand anything else the Sentinel said to him. Pity I couldn't see the ghost myself, I
thought—it would be quite an experience, conversing with a Roman legionary ...

"What?" asked Jeannie, watching my face.

I glanced up. "Oh, nothing. I was just thinking, that's all."

Kip yawned beneath my chair, and Jeannie looked down at her watch to check the time. "Och, it's nearly eleven already. Robbie, finish up now and get ready, you don't want to be late for your piano lesson."

He pulled a telling face, slid down from his chair, and went scuffing along the back corridor to his bedroom, while I drained my cooling cup of tea. "I might just beg a lift, if you don't mind."

"What, into Eyemouth? Of course."

"Just as far as the Ship Hotel, if that's no bother."

"Oh, aye?"

I nodded, too deep in thought to notice her sudden interest. "I want to catch David, if I can, before he goes out anywhere. I've got a proposal for him."

"He'll be pleased," said Jeannie, straight-faced, but her dark eyes danced with humor as she stood to clear the tea things.

"Yes," I murmured absently, still thinking. "Yes, he just might be, at that."