The Last Gospel (32 page)

‘If only I had our remote-sensing equipment from
Seaquest II
, then we could snake in a camera and see what’s behind that wall.’

‘Nothing beats the human eye,’ Jack said. ‘Come on.’ He nodded back at Jeremy, who had taken a laptop out of his bag and spread out his notebooks. Jack crouched down on all fours and made his way through the hole in the brickwork, his headlamp illuminating the darkness in front of him. Once he was through, Costas came alongside. They were perched on a stone landing, and in front of them a dozen steps led down to another entranceway, a low arched doorway about four feet high. Jack squatted on his haunches and began to sidle down the steps, playing the torch in his hand across the stone steps in front of him.

‘Let’s hope the ceiling doesn’t give way,’ Costas muttered.

Jack glanced up. ‘It’s corbelled stone, about as strong as you could hope for. The masonry looks identical to the old part of the burial crypt we’ve just come through. Fourteenth century, maybe earlier. I can see reused Roman tile and ragstone, probably taken from the ruins of the amphitheatre.’ He carried on down the steps, reached the bottom and stood up, his back stooped awkwardly over. In front of him the arched stone entrance was blocked by the partly rotted remains of a wooden door, with a grilled window about ten inches wide directly in front of him. Jack shone his headlamp through as Costas came alongside.

‘Looks like a prison cell,’ Costas said.

‘It’s a crypt,’ Jack murmured. ‘Another burial crypt. Exactly as Sir Christopher Wren’s mason described in his diary. And it looks undisturbed.’

‘What do you mean, undisturbed? I thought Wren’s guys got in here.’

‘I mean it looks full. No parking space.’

‘Oh no.’

Jack pushed cautiously at the door, and it gave way slightly. ‘It’s still solid,’ he said. ‘Damp conditions, ideal for organic survival. We could find some pretty amazing preservation down here.’

‘Oh good,’ Costas said weakly.

Jack pushed again with both hands, and the door came completely ajar. They peered into the space ahead of them. It was a single vaulted chamber, similar in dimensions to the burial crypt they had just come through but about three times as large. Ranged along either side were stone cavities, some of them crudely bricked over, others open and brimming with old wooden coffins, some intact and lidded, others crumbled and decayed. Dark shapeless forms were just visible within. Jack took a few steps forward, while Costas remained glued to the spot, staring straight ahead. ‘This is my worst nightmare, Jack.’

‘Come on,’ Jack said. ‘It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry.’

Costas edged forward, paused, then resolutely stepped over and peered closely at one of the erupted coffins, clearly having decided that scientific inspection was the best therapy. ‘Interesting,’ he murmured, clearing his throat. ‘There’s a pottery pipe emerging from the top of this coffin, blackened at one end. I never realized people made libations in Christian burials.’

‘Nice try, but wrong,’ Jack said. ‘You brought it up, so I’m telling you. Those pipes were for letting off steam.’

‘What?’

‘You see them in Victorian catacombs,’ Jack said. ‘The trouble with a lead-lined coffin is that it can explode, especially if the body’s sealed in it too soon after death. It’s the first stage of decomposition, you know. Off-gassing.’

‘Off-gassing.’ Costas swayed slightly, but remained fixated on the coffin.

‘The pipes were lit to burn it off,’ Jack said. ‘That’s where the blackening comes from.’

Costas swayed backwards, then slipped on the floor, catching himself just in time on the edge of an open niche on the opposite wall. He pulled himself upright again, then lifted his foot from a sticky pool that extended under one of the niches near the entrance. ‘We must be closer to the water level than I thought,’ he murmured. ‘There’s too much here for it just to be condensation.’

‘I’ve got more bad news for you, I’m afraid.’

Costas stared at the pool, then at the dark stain running down the stonework towards it from the burial niche above. ‘Oh no,’ he whispered.

‘Saponification,’ Jack said cheerfully. ‘There’s a wonderful account by Sir Thomas Browne, a kind of seventeenth-century Pliny. He loved digging up old graves. Hiebermeyer and I did a course on mummification with the Home Office forensics people, and I can remember it word for word. “We met with a fat concretion, when the nitre of the Earth, and the soft and lixivious liqueur of the body, had coagulated large lumps of fat, like the consistency of the hardest candle soap; whereof part remaineth with us.”’

‘Body liqueur,’ Costas whispered, frantically wiping his foot on a fallen brick. ‘Get me out of here, Jack.’

‘Mortuary wax,’ Jack replied. ‘The slow hydrolysis of fats into adipocere. Especially likely in alkaline conditions, where the bodies are sealed off from bacteria, and where it’s damp. Like I said, we’re going to find amazing preservational conditions here.’

‘It couldn’t get any worse than this.’

‘Don’t count on it.’ Jack squatted down to peer at the inscribed stone blocks he could now see in front of each intact niche, built into the centre of the brick facings. He moved along, from one to the next. ‘Fascinating,’ he murmured. ‘Normally, crypts in London churches were used for a few decades, maybe a century or so, stuffed full and then sealed up. But this one’s very strange. The formula on each of these inscriptions is virtually identical, but they range over a huge time span. Each of them has a chi-rho symbol, followed by a Latin name. Look, here. Maria de Kirkpatrick. And there, Bronwyn ap Llewellyn. They’re mostly Latin renditions of British names. And they’ve got dates, in Roman numerals. The one nearest to you, on the lower shelf by the door, is the latest, from 1664, just a few years before the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the medieval church.’

‘That figures.’ Costas was still staring into the middle distance, clearly trying to focus on something other than the physical horror around him. He cleared his throat. ‘The diary. It said the crypt was sealed up by Wren’s men, in the 1680s. It makes sense there shouldn’t be any more burials after that.’

Jack reached the far end of the chamber, having carefully circumvented the sticky slick on the floor. He squatted down again, and shifted a few fallen bricks with his hands. ‘And the earliest of these inscriptions is incredibly early,’ he murmured. ‘The oldest ones at this end have crumbled, but there are two here with Anglo-Saxon names. Aelfrida and Aethelreda. I can’t read the name on this one, but I can read the date. AD 535. My God,’ he said hoarsely. ‘That’s the Dark Age, the time of King Arthur, of Gildas. That’s even before Augustine brought Roman Christianity back to Britain, yet here’s a burial with a Christian symbol.’

‘The names are all women,’ Costas said quietly.

‘This chamber is a lot older than the medieval church,’ Jack continued, peering around. ‘It looks as if it was kept in repair during the medieval period, up to the time of the Great Fire, but the lower courses of brick and stone look Roman.’ He knelt down, and swept his hand under the furthest niche. ‘No doubt about it. We’re inside a catacomb built in the Roman period. The only one ever found in Britain.’

‘Check out the inscription above the doorway.’

Jack peered up, and saw a single register of letters carved into the masonry, covered in blackened accretion. Costas slowly read out the words: ‘Uri vinciri veberari ferroque necari.’

‘Good God,’ Jack exclaimed, standing up and staring, his mind in a whirl. ‘It’s the gladiator’s oath. The
sacramentum gladiatorium
.’

‘The Sibylline prophecy,’ Costas said, his voice hushed. ‘The wax tablet we found under Rome. It’s the same wording, isn’t it?’

‘Identical.
To die in fire, to be bound, to be beaten, to die by the sword
. Good old Claudius,’ Jack murmured. ‘I think we’re exactly where he wanted us to be.’

‘And where the Sibyl wanted him to be.’

‘This must originally have been the gladiators’ mortuary, the death chamber, where the mutilated corpses from the arena next to us were laid out before being taken away and burned,’ Jack murmured. ‘And then it was used as a Christian burial crypt, for over a thousand years. A burial crypt for women, for women who were somehow bound together, over all that time.’

‘Maybe they were a secret society, a guild,’ Costas said. ‘Maybe they wanted to be buried close to whatever lies beyond that wall.’

‘According to the diary, this is where the Roman amphoras were found by Wren’s men,’ Jack said. ‘And this must be the wall, where we are now.’

Costas placed both hands on the brick face in front of them, and cautiously pushed. He flinched as several of the bricks shifted. ‘It’s not mortared,’ he said. ‘It looks like they just stacked up the bricks.’

‘That makes sense,’ Jack said. ‘The diary says they decided to seal up the entire crypt back in the first chamber, where we’ve left Jeremy, so they must have abandoned sealing up this deeper chamber part-way through. We’ll have to take it down from the top, brick by brick.’

Costas experimentally pushed a little further, and one of the bricks that had shifted fell out behind. Suddenly the whole edifice collapsed inwards, and they both leapt backwards as the air filled with red dust. Costas narrowly avoided the sticky pool on the floor.

‘I was going to say, we don’t have time for finesse,’ Jack said, wiping the front of his visor.

‘Check it out,’ Costas said, picking himself up and moving forward.

Jack aimed his hand torch to where Costas was gesturing. Where the brick wall had been was now a gaping hole, but just inside to the left was a row of what looked like sections of old ceramic drainpipe, arranged in a row pointing upwards. Jack edged forward over the pile of fallen bricks and beckoned excitedly. ‘Recognize those?’

‘Amphoras. Roman amphoras. Just what we’re looking for.’

‘Right. And they’re exactly the same type of wine amphora we found on St Paul’s shipwreck, the ones made in Campania near Pompeii and Herculaneum. Remember the date of the wreck?’

‘AD 58, give or take a bit.’

‘Right. These were the typical wine amphoras of that period. What was the date of Boudica’s rebellion? AD 60, 61. If wine amphoras were being left as an offering here, these are exactly the type you’d expect to find at that date.’

Costas squeezed in beside Jack and peered into the darkness beyond. ‘Not sure where we go from here. Seems to be some kind of shaft.’

Jack looked intently around. To his left was a precarious mass of rubble, much of it old brick but including charred and blackened timbers, all jumbled and compressed into a tight mass. It protruded into a timber-lined shaft about two metres wide and three metres deep, with water at the bottom. ‘What we’ve got here is destruction debris from the Great Fire of 1666, probably dumped during Wren’s rebuilding of the church. If any of his men went beyond this crypt, that’s the way they must have gone. We’ll never get through all that without a major excavation. It’s out of the question. Our only hope now is going down this shaft.’

‘What is it?’

‘Looks like a well. There were fresh springs in the gravels beside the Thames. London water was remarkably healthy until it was swamped by sewage. Wells were often timber lined like this.’ Jack leaned in and peered at the wood. ‘Fascinating. Reused ship’s timbers. These are overlapping, clinker-built, Viking. Remember our Viking longship in the iceberg off Greenland?’

‘I never thought I’d say this, but I’d much rather be there now.’

‘I’m going in.’ Jack swung his legs over the edge of the hole, pivoting on his arms until he was facing backwards. He grasped Costas’ arm as he hung over the edge, his feet dangling a metre or so over the black pool below. ‘Let’s hope it’s not a bottomless pit.’ He let go and fell with a huge splash, coming to rest on his knees in mud, his upper body out of the water. ‘You next.’ He reached his foot experimentally around. ‘I think it’s a safe landing.’

Costas grunted, then lowered himself gingerly over the edge, his visor pressed up against the damp wood of the well lining. He shifted slightly to avoid falling on Jack. He had moved in front of a small section of wood in the well lining that had partly rotted away, and he suddenly froze.

‘What is it?’ Jack said.

Costas’ voice sounded distant, hoarse. ‘About this well, Jack. It wasn’t dug through gravel.’

‘What?’

‘It was dug through bones, Jack,’ Costas said, his voice sounding beyond emotion. ‘Human bones, thousands of them, packed in around us. It’s all I can see.’

‘It could be a plague pit,’ Jack said thoughtfully. ‘But more probably an ossuary, bones cleared from a crypt or a grave-yard. Still, a good thing we’ve got the e-suits on, just in case.’

Costas let go of the edge of the wall and dropped with an enormous splash, disappearing completely under the water down a hole beside Jack before rebounding in a tumult of mud. The water settled, and he raised his hands, looking at the dark glutinous streaks on his gloves. ‘Good old-fashioned dirt,’ he muttered. ‘I think I’ve had enough of human remains.’

‘What you said set me thinking,’ Jack said. ‘About a well, dug through an old ossuary. Pretty unlikely. I think I may have got it wrong. I think what we’ve actually got here is a cesspit.’

Costas wiped his visor, streaking it with brown, and stared speechless at Jack.

‘Actually, cesspits were quite hygienic,’ Jack said. ‘Each dwelling usually had one. It was only when they flooded that raw sewage was a problem, and then after people started using sewers that weren’t up to the job.’

‘Is that supposed to be reassuring?’ Costas sounded close to tears. ‘Come diving with Jack Howard. No latrine too deep.’ He tried to struggle upwards, and suddenly disappeared out of sight, then bobbed up again. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘There’s water flowing below us. This shaft has broken through into an underground stream.’