Shadowy Horses (14 page)

Adrian, rummaging at his desk, glanced around in mid-yawn. "What a good idea. Why don't I go and get her now, for you—no point in letting it wait."

"We can tell her on the way," said David. "Peter will be thinking we've forgotten all about him."

"Oh, right." Adrian looked disappointed.

His survey equipment was stored safe behind the locked door of the finds room, and while he went to retrieve it I took a thoughtful sip of coffee, touching the sherds again, feeling the raised impression of what appeared to be a flower petal. I'd seen a pattern similar to this one when I'd worked on Dr. Lazenby's excavations in the south of England, but that site had been Agricolan, dating from the seven-year period during which Gnaeus Julius Agricola had served as governor of Britain. And Agricola had been recalled in AD 84— forty years or so before the disappearance of the Ninth.

"Well, that's us away, then," said David, shouldering his probe. "We'll leave you in peace to eat your breakfast. And it's no good trying to give it away to the dog—he can't eat eggs. Bloats up like a balloon, he does."

His pale eyes were teasing, and I toyed with the idea of pitching a sausage at him, but instead, I took a bite of toast
and chased it down with coffee, smiling my most amenable smile. "Right then. Have a good time."

I waited until I couldn't hear his cheerful whistling anymore before I glanced down at the dog sprawled beneath my chair. Kip's one visible eye met mine hopefully, and his tail thumped once against the floor. "Look love," I offered, "here's the deal. I'll eat the eggs, if you'll cat everything else. How does that suit you?"

Evidently, it suited the collie fine. The empty plate was positively shining when I set it on the corner of my desk.

Well satisfied, I washed my hands and settled down to start my labored drawings of the sherds.

XIV

I sent the drawings and photographs off by the afternoon post, then sat back and waited for Howard's reply. He'd always been frightfully efficient. I half expected him to ring me the following day, when the envelope hit his desk, but it wasn't until Friday morning that I got my call from the British Museum.

"Before I give you my opinion on these sherds," he said, "I simply have to ask: What the devil are you
doing
up there? We had to look Eyemouth up on the map, for heaven's sake. Pondered it all through tea break yesterday, but no one could recall an excavation going on in your area."

I smiled against the receiver, feeling in my pocket for a pen while balancing my notepad on the narrow front-hall table. "Well," I told him, "as I'm constantly being reminded by people here, you don't know everything down there in London."

"So it is an excavation? Led by whom?"

I told him, and waited while he paused for thought, Howard's memory was slow, but encyclopedic. It took him less than a minute to place the name. "Good God, not
the
Peter Quinnell? Don't tell me he's still on the trail of the Ninth Legion?"

"Well..."

Howard groaned, with feeling. "My dear girl, no one's taken Quinnell seriously since I was in short pants. And he must be ancient, surely?"

"Oh, don't be such a snob," I replied, picking a barb that I knew would hit home. "He's only in his seventies, that's hardly doddering these days. And I find him rather fascinating."

"Well, so long as he pays you heaps of money ..."

"The sherds?" I prompted, patiently.

"Ah. Yes, well, your initial hunch was quite correct."

"They're Agricolan." I felt a twinge of disappointment even as I spoke the words.

"Yes."

"All of them?"

"All pieces of the same bowl, I should think."

"Oh." So much, I thought, for my suspicions that the rim sherd didn't match. Howard's knowledge of Samian ware was indisputable.

"Quite a lovely small bowl," he went on. "A perfect match to one dug up in Germany by—"

I cut him off. "So what date are we looking at, exactly?"

"Oh, somewhere between AD 80 and 82, I should think. Not much help to you in finding the Ninth Legion, I'm afraid."

"You never know. At least it's an earlier date, and not a later one. For all we know the pot might have been forty years old when it was broken," I reasoned stubbornly. "And anyway, we've only just begun to map the boundaries of the site. I'm sure we'll find more pottery when we start the proper digging."

"What you want to find," he coached me, "is a sherd that's been hammered down a post hole, or something, so you know for certain that it dates from the time of the ... what is it, exactly, that you're excavating?"

"A marching camp."

"Ah," he said again, without enthusiasm. "Not much chance of finding post holes there, unfortunately. Not ones of any real size."
He was, as always, right. Marching camps, constructed for the one night only, had no permanent structures, and even the stakes used on top of the ramparts were smaller than those used in forts. They often left no trace at all.

"And anyway," Howard reminded me, "it's long odds that you'll even find a marching camp. Not if you're working for Peter Quinnell."

"I'll bet you a fiver."

"I'm sorry?"

"That this is a marching camp."

"Make it a bottle of Bell's and you're on."

"A fiver," I repeated firmly.

"Fair enough. Oh, by the way," he said, remembering, "you do know Lazenby is looking for you?"

"Dr. Lazenby? Whatever for?"

"He's taking a team out to Alexandria in September. Quite a high-profile venture, from what I've been hearing. The Beeb's sending a film crew along, and everything."

"And?"

"And he wants you as part of his team," Howard explained, speaking as if to a child.

"You're joking."

"Darling," he chastised me. "I never joke."

"Alexandria..."

"Mmm. Shall I give him your number?"

I thought of Quinnell, and shook my head. "No, not just yet. I'll... I'll give him a ring in a few days, all right? And Howard?"

"Yes?"

"Thanks. For the expert opinion, I mean."

"Any time." The smile in his voice almost made me miss my days at the museum, and I rang off with a small sigh.

The little gray cat, Charlie, neatly leapt onto the hall table to investigate my notebook, and I stroked her dainty chin, forcing the nostalgic mist from my eyes. I had made the right decision, after all, in leaving the museum, leaving Lazenby.

Charlie made a small sound like the squeak of a closing door, as though approving my desire for independence. A cat, I thought, was the very model of an independent animal,
so long as someone remembered to scratch around its chin, just there ...

Charlie's eyes snapped open and she raised her head, alarmed. Ears flattening, she arched her back and gave a sharp, high-pitched meow.

"For heaven's sake!" I burst out, when my lunging heartbeat paused for breath,
"Will
you stop that? I'll be a mass of nerves if you cats keep—" And then I too broke off and cocked my head, listening.

Someone was climbing the cellar stairs.

The footsteps were heavy—a man's footsteps—only all the men were down at the far end of the field. I knew that because I'd left them there, a quarter of an hour ago. Not just the men, but Fabia as well... and even Jeannie, who'd come down to fetch me for my telephone call, had stayed behind to watch the crew in progress. I ought to have been alone in the house.

But still the footsteps came on, climbing, bold and clearly audible.

My mind raced swiftly through the possibilities. The ghost... oh, God, don't let it be the ghost. A burglar... there, that was more probable, and in my muddled state of mind seemed much less frightening. My brain found reason, told my feet to move, but the message took a moment to reach its mark and in that moment the man came up the final stair and into the entrance hall.

He seemed, to his credit, more shocked by my presence than I was by his. "Jesus!" he said, then recovered and came forward, wiping one hand on the back of his denim jeans before holding it out in a friendly greeting. "Sorry," he apologized, with a self-deprecating grin, "I thought you were all down in the field. You must be Miss Grey, am I right? My son's not stopped talking about you."

So this, I thought, was Brian McMorran. I studied him with interest over the handshake.

He was nothing like I had expected. He was older, for one thing—nearing forty, I judged, with silvered brown hair and rather an appealing sort of face. Not a tall man either, though his body had the hardness of a lifetime of labor and I
wouldn't have wanted to take sides against him in a fight He wore an earring, which looked somewhat out of place; a small gold hoop that glinted dashingly against his graying hair, and below the rolled sleeves of his flannel work shirt his forearms were a fascinating canvas of dark tattoos.

Releasing his grip, he raised a hand to rake it through his hair, his brown eyes crinkling with surprising charm. He didn't look a drunkard or a bully, and I found it hard to reconcile the image I had formed with the reality.

"I expect," he said, "that I gave you a fright as well. You'd not have known I'd come home."

"No," I admitted. "No, I didn't."

"Eh, well. I don't imagine anybody's noticed, yet. I just got in. Is Jeannie anywhere about? I've looked, but—"

"She's down with Quinnell."

"Is she? Heading back yourself, then, are you? Good, I'll tag along."

He didn't talk much, while we walked. A brief exchange of comments on the warming of the weather was the closest that we came to conversation.

David saw us coming first. Leaning full on the handle of the hollow probe, he glanced up briefly, stopped and looked again. "Heyah, Brian," he said, coolly. "When did you get back?"

"About an hour ago. Stealing my wife again, are you?"

"Of course he isn't." Jeannie moved from David's side to give her husband a welcoming kiss in spite of her father's scowl. "Don't be daft. How did it go?"

Brian shrugged. "Not bad. We netted a fair haul, this trip."

"Any fish?" Wally asked sourly. I didn't understand the barb behind the comment but it glanced off Brian harmlessly, and he whistled a snatch of a tune through his teeth, ignoring the old man completely.

"You've been busy," he noted, looking back at the trail of brightly colored golf tees that marked our progress along the buried ditch.

From the trial trench in the southwest corner, the western ditch ran roughly parallel to the long drive, traveling up at
a slight diagonal for some three hundred yards before it turned a rounded, playing-card-shaped corner, just below the ridge, and started back across the field.

Quinnell followed Brian McMorran's gaze proudly, not appearing to mind the man's presence. "Yes, we're making good progress."

"Looks like it. Is that where the walls were, then—where you've stuck all them tees? Bloody big camp, wasn't it?"

"About twenty acres," Quinnell estimated. "It's not like a fort, you understand. Forts were built smaller. They only had to house an auxiliary force, but a marching camp was meant to hold the whole legion, on campaign. It had to be huge."

"I see." Brian's eyes swung back across the field to the southwest comer, where the green thorn hedge blocked the noise of the road, and the russet walls of Rose Cottage showed plainly through the frieze of trees edging the drive. "And what's our Mr. Sutton-Clarke up to, over there?"

Fabia tossed the short fall of hair from her face. “Doing a survey, what else?''

I hadn't even noticed, to be honest, that Adrian wasn't with us. I'd been too absorbed in watching David, admiring the unholy force with which he rammed the steel probe home.

It was easy to see why the act of probing held little appeal for Adrian. His interest lay in the larger picture of what lay beneath the landscape, not in the soil itself. And he'd never liked getting his hands dirty. For a man who'd spent so many hours on archaeological sites, patiently mapping and measuring, he had a surprising lack of patience with the actual work of excavation. Give him good clean technology every time.

Indeed, when I wandered down to join him a few minutes later, I found him preparing the section of field for another pass with the ground-penetrating radar unit, happily laying out neat lines of nonmagnetic tape for guidance, and humming to himself.

"Guilty conscience?" I asked him.

"What?"

"You've already done this bit of the field, remember? Produced a smashing image."

"Sarcasm," he informed me, "doesn't suit you. And if you must know, Peter asked me to repeat the survey. It seems he's misplaced the initial results, and he wants to have a record for his files."

"And how did he come to misplace them?" I asked, suspiciously.

"I had nothing to do with it." He raised a hand in Boy Scout fashion, as proof of his sincerity. "I'm rather pleased the damn thing's gone, mind you, but I had nothing to do with it."

After scrutinizing his face a moment I decided he was telling the truth. More likely, I thought, Peter had pitched the fake survey results on the fire himself, thus solving a prickly problem. Having "lost" the results, and being unable to obtain a duplicate printout from Adrian's computer—I was sure Adrian would have thought of some suitable technical excuse for
that
—Peter would be wholly justified in asking for another survey of the southwest corner. Not only would that erase all traces of the false record; it also gave Adrian a chance to redeem himself professionally.

As a solution it was, I thought, decidedly Peter's style, and endearingly gallant.

Adrian, who didn't know that Quinnell knew, and therefore didn't fully appreciate the subtleties of his mission, cast a vaguely impatient look at my knees. "Does that blasted animal have to follow you everywhere?"

I looked down in mild surprise, and Kip looked back at me, one ear flopped softly forward. During the hours when Robbie was at school, the collie had taken to keeping me company, trailing at my heels so quietly that I frequently forgot he was even there. Wally had joked that the dog, like its young master, was faintly besotted with me. Personally, I put it down to the sausage.

"It's like you have six legs, these days," said Adrian. He paused, his eyes flicking past my shoulder toward Rose Cottage. "Do me a favor, Verity love, and measure how far it is from where I'm standing to that bit of wall over there.”

“What, with this?" I bent to pick up his yard measure with a sinking heart. "Where's your little wheel thing? You know, the one you just push around?"

"Oh, don't be such a baby. You know how to use a yard measure, I've seen you do it." He nodded firmly in the direction I was meant to go. "Just to the wall, please."