Ivy Tree (30 page)

He smiled at me, narrowing his eyes against the sun. They were grey-blue, and puckered at the corners. He spoke easily, as if there could be no constraint between us.

"Hullo. Were you looking for Johnny Rudd? I'm afraid he's gone."

"I came for some strawberries. The cat's been at the trifle, and it's Grandfather's birthday, so Lisa rang up with an S.O.S., and Johnny said he'd try to save some."

"Then he'll have left them up in the packing-shed. Come and see." We walked up the path together. I saw him eyeing me, as curious as I had been, no doubt, to see what the daylight showed.

I said: "Have you met Julie's young man? Donald Seton?" "No. Why?"

"He came across with me just now, to see you about something, but he thought you'd have finished for the day, so he went along to the Lodge."

"Oh? What's it about, d'you know?"

"Yes, but I'll leave him to tell you himself." I caught his quick look, and smiled a little. "Oh, don't worry, it's nothing personal. You're still quite safe."

We had reached a door in the wall behind the green-houses, which led to the workrooms of the place—boiler-room, potting-, houses, cold frames. He stopped with his hand on the knob, and turned. I noticed all at once that his eyes looked tired, as if he didn't sleep well. "Safe? /?"

"Indeed, yes. If you're not an accessory after the fact, I don't know what you arc. You never came after that passport. You

never came across to Whitescar, and tried to trip me up and catch me out in front of Grandfather, as no doubt you think you could easily have done. You've done nothing. Why?"

"I don't know. I honestly don't know." He hesitated, as if to say something more. Then, instead, he merely turned, and pushed the door open for me. "This way, now; leave the door, it's all right; Seton may come looking for me. Is Julie with him?"

"No. She's gone into Newcastle with Bill Fenwick."

He shot me a look. "That troubles you. Why?"

"Because Con won't like it one bit," I said crisply, "and Con is a . .. creature of impulse."

"That's absurd." He said it as he had done before, but with just a shade less conviction.

"Any situation bordering on violence is absurd—until it suddenly breaks, and then, wham, there you are, in the middle of something you'd thought only happened in the Sunday Press."

"What about this man who's here, Seton, was it?"

"That's different. He'll take her away from Whitescar, and they'll live in London, and spend half the year in a tent somewhere, digging. Con's all for that, as you may imagine—and the further away, the better. Uzbekistan, for instance, or the Desert of Lop, if the Romans went there. I wouldn't know."

"Does she want to go?"

"Pining to," I said cheerfully. "Don't worry, I've practically fixed it. I told you I'd look after Julie." I caught his eye, and laughed. "What is it?"

"This—crazy business; and I'm as crazy as any part of it. That's what comes of working by instinct instead of sense; I suppose women do it every day, but I'm not accustomed to it, and I dislike it. There's nothing to assure you that you're still rational. Look at the situation: I'm not sure who you are; I'm not sure what you're doing; I'm certain it's wrong; but for some reason I'm prepared to let you do it."

"I told you who I was, and what I was doing."

"Yes, you did. You were honest, as far as that went. And you've got me into a position where I seem to be condoning what you do, even though I'm damned if I do more. I suppose it's because I think rather a lot of old Mr. Winslow, and oddly enough, I’d trust you over Julie, who seems to me to be the only other person who matters. I confess I'd wondered, before you came, just what the set-up would be at Whitescar, when Mr. Winslow died. You say you're 'looking after' her interests. Well, as long as Julie comes to no harm, I don't care how much you and Connor fight it out the rest of the way. If you can get it, I shan't grudge you your 'competence'."

"You needn't worry; you can trust me over Julie."

He sighed. "The odd thing is, that I believe you, and for that alone I deserve to be behind bars as an accessory, just as soon as you are. Here's the packing-shed. Come and see if Johnny's left your strawberries."

The shed was big and cool, its basic smell, of geraniums and damp peat, dizzily overlaid by that of a tank crammed full with sweet peas. It was as orderly as the garden: there were shelves of plant-pots and boxes, in graded sizes; printed labels in rows (probably in alphabetical order); raffia hanging in loops that looked as if they would never dare tangle or snap; and two or three pairs of clean cotton gloves on a hook beside the window.

I watched Adam Forrest with some awe as he crossed the shed and reached down a pair of these. There were two punnets of strawberries on a bench to the left of the window. "Enough, do you think?" he asked.

"I think so."

"There may be a few more ripe, in the bed by the dove-houses. I can pick them, if you've time to wait."

"No, don't trouble. I'm sure there'll be enough, and I promised to get back quickly. Dinner's at half-past seven, and we'll have them to pick over. Look, I brought a basket. We can tip them all in together, and you can keep the punnets."

"It comes cheaper that way," agreed Adam gravely.

I gaped at him for a second, for some absurd reason more embarrassed than at any time in our too-rapidly intimate relationship. Lisa hadn't mentioned money; I had none with me, and hadn't thought about it till now. I said, stammering: "I— I'm afraid I can't pay for them now."

"I'll charge them," said Adam imperturbably. He reached for a notebook, and made a jotting on a meticulously-columned page headed "Winslow". He caught my eye on him, and grinned, and suddenly, in the shadowed shed, the years fell away, and there was the lover of the moonlit tryst, the actor of that early film. I caught my breath. He said: "Whitescar runs an account. They don't seem to have time to grow any vegetables there themselves ... I doubt if anybody has even touched the garden"—he shut the book and returned it neatly to its place —"since you left. Careful 1 You're spilling those! What did I say to make you jump."

"You know quite well. You did it deliberately. You . . . got under my skin."

"That makes two of us," said Adam; at least, that's what I thought he said, but he muttered it under his breath, and the words were swallowed as he turned his head quickly to the door, adding aloud: "I suppose this is Mr. Seton?"

"Oh . . . hullo, Donald. Yes, Mr. Forrest's still here. Mr. Seton, Adam..." The men exchanged greetings. Donald said: "You got your strawberries?"

"I did. Your dinner's safe. I told Mr. Forrest you wanted to see him, Donald, but I managed to keep quiet about the reason."

"You needn't have done that." He turned to Adam. "I don't know if Annabel told you, sir, but I'm an archaeologist; I'm attached to the Commission—the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments—and just at present I'm in charge of the work being done up at West Woodburn."

"I had heard that excavating has started there," said Adam. "Just what are you hoping to do?"

"Well, the Commission's job is to list and describe all existing Roman monuments, with maps and photographs and so on—to make a complete survey, eventually covering die whole country. It's worked on a county basis, and I'm one of the team assigned to Northumberland. We haven't got very far, yet, with this particular site; I've got some students from Durham and London working for me on the job, and we're now busy on a trial trench ..."

I had got the strawberries all tipped into my basket, but lingered a little, interested to hear the outcome of what Donald had to say. He gave Adam a very brief account of the work he was engaged on, and then passed, with an admirably Scottish economy of time and words, to the business of the moment. When he described how he had seen the 'Roman stones' in the quarry, it was obvious that he had caught Adam's interest, "And you think it likely, if that quarry was originally Roman, that there may be some Roman buildings near by?"

"Fairly near, at any rate," said Donald. "There's nothing remarkable about the rock itself—the quarried rock—if you follow me. If it were marble, for example, you might expect it to be worked, even if it had to be carried long distances; but this kind of sandstone is the common local stone. If the Romans did start a quarry there, then they would do so for pure reasons of convenience. In other words, they were building locally."

"I see," said Adam, "and am I right in thinking that there's nothing recorded hereabouts? I've never read of anything, though I've always been interested in local history."

"Quite right. There's nothing nearer than the camp at Four Laws, and, since that's on Dere Street, the materials for building it would certainly be taken from somewhere on the road, not right across country from here. So it did occur to me that, if the quarry was started here, in the peninsula, when the same stone occurs all along the ridge above the river ... and is rather more get-at-able there ... it did occur to me to wonder if whatever was built, was built on the peninsula itself."

"Somewhere in Forrest Park?"

"Yes. I wanted to ask your permission to have a look round, if I may."

"With the greatest of pleasure. I'm afraid the Forestry Commission acres are out of my jurisdiction, but the meadowland, and the Hall grounds, by all means. Go where you like. But what exactly will you be looking-for? Surely anything there was, will be deep under several feet of earth and trees by now?"

"Oh yes. But I did wonder if you could help me. Can you remember if there's anything else in the way of a quarry, anything that might be an overgrown pit, or artificial bank—you know the kind of thing?"

"Not at the moment, but I'll think it over. The only pit I can .think of is the old ice-house near the Forrest Lodge. That's dug deep into the earth under the trees, but that can hardly—wait a minute!" He broke off, his brows knitted in an effort of memory. I watched him half-excitedly, Donald with the utmost placidity.

Doubtless he was very much better aware than I was, that 'discoveries' rarely, if ever, come out of the blue.

"The ice-house," said Adam. "Mentioning the ice-house struck a chord. Wait a minute, I can't be sure, but somewhere, some time, when I was a child, I think . . . I've seen something at Forrest. A stone . . . Roman, I'll swear." He thought a moment longer, then shook his head. "No, it's gone. Could it have been the same ones, I wonder, that I saw? The ones in the quarry?"

"Not unless there was a very dry season, and you probably wouldn't have noticed them unless they were even nearer the surface than they are now. Wouldn't you say so, Annabel?"

"Certainly. And anyway, nobody but an expert could possibly have guessed those were Roman. They looked quite ordinary to me, and to a child they'd mean nothing at all."

"That's true. You can't remember anything more, sir? What made you think it was Roman stone? Why the ice-house? What is the ice-house, anyway?"

"A primitive sort of refrigerator. They usually built them somewhere in the grounds of big houses, in the eighteenth century," said Adam. "They were big square pits, as a rule, dug somewhere deep in the woods where it was cool. They had curved roofs, with the eaves flush with the ground, and a door in one end, over the pit. People used to cut the ice off the lake— there's a small pool beyond the house—in winter, and store it underground in layers of straw, to bring out in summer. The one of Forrest's in the woods near the old lodge."

"Then you may have seen this thing there, surely? It was quite usual for later builders to lay hands on any Roman stones they could, to use again. They were good blocks, well shaped and dressed. If there were a few left stacked in the old quarry, above water-level, a local eighteenth-century builder may well have taken them and—"

"The cellars!" said Adam. "That was it! Not the ice-house, we weren't allowed in; it wasn't safe, and it was kept locked. We weren't allowed in the cellars, either, but that was different; they were at least accessible." He grinned. "I thought there was something surreptitious and candle-lit about the memory, and it also accounts for the fact that we never mentioned it to anyone. I'd forgotten all about it until this moment. Yes, I'm fairly sure it was in the cellars at Forrest. I can't remember any more than that, except that we were rather intrigued for the moment, as children are, by the carving on the stone. It was upside down, which made it harder to make-out what it said, even if we could have-?"

"What it said?" Donald's voice was sharp, for him.

Adam looked surprised. "Yes. Didn't you say the stones were carved? There was some sort of lettering, as far as I remember, and a carving of some kind ... an animal."

"I said 'chiselled', not 'carved'," said Donald. "If you're right, it sounds as if you may have seen an inscription. All I saw were the ordinary tooling-marks on the stone, the marks made by dressing with chisels. Like this . . ." He fished in his inside pocket, and came out with a thick wad of papers. There seemed to be (besides a wallet, several dozen letters and a driving-licence) an Ordnance Survey map of the North Tyne, and a thin booklet of what looked like—but surely could not be—logarithms. Donald looked at them vaguely, selected an old envelope, on which I distinctly saw a postmark two years old, and restored the rest to his pocket.

Adam handed him a pencil. "Thanks. This," said Donald, drawing with beautiful economy and accuracy on the dog-eared envelope, "is something like the stones I saw."

He handed the paper to Adam, who studied it. "I see. No, that conveys nothing to me; I'd never have known that was Roman . . . not even now, let alone ten years old. Well, the obvious thing to do is to go and look, isn't it? This is really rather exciting. If it turns out to be an inscription of the Ninth Legion or something, will Forrest's fortune be re-made?"

"Well," said Donald cautiously, "you might get it on to T.V. . . . The house is a ruin, isn't it? Is it still possible to get into the cellars?"

"I think you'll find you can get down. I don't have to tell you to watch yourself: I'm not sure what sort of condition the place is in. But you may certainly go just where you like. Look, I'll make you a plan." He reached to the near-by shelf for paper—it looked like an invoice-form—and spread it on the bench. Donald handed back the pencil. I came to Adam's elbow to look. He drew a couple of lines, then, with a subdued exclamation of irritation, pulled off the cotton gloves, dropped them on the bench beside him, and picked the pencil up again, "I can't write in them. Do you