Matilda looked back at the hotel. The students who’d decided not to stay with the dig were trudging up the street toward the bus station. Jason, not surprisingly, was in the lead. He’d sputtered all during breakfast about suing the Corcester constabulary for unlawful arrest. Even after Matilda had pointed out he hadn’t been arrested, he’d been helping the police with their inquiries, he continued to fire random shots at everyone who crossed his bows. “Let him rant,” Matilda had whispered to Ashley. “He’s trying to repair his damaged manhood.”
“Like he has much to repair,” she’d returned. “You almost have to feel sorry for him.”
Matilda had assured the defectors that she and Sweeney would arrange some sort of course credit for the work they’d completed. Not that she’d bothered to consult with Sweeney before telling them that. She was less irritated with him for setting up a situation where students could be in danger than with herself for going along with the idea.
She turned back to the dig to see Ashley putting Jennifer to work sketching several broken glass vials. Matilda was gratified the girl had decided to stay—most timid people hid a kernel of stubbornness. Bryan was staying too, just to give her a little extra motivation. Not that she was paying any attention to him. She was trying to act cool in front of Gareth, probably. Bryan stood holding a meter stick and eyeing the back of Ashley’s head, frowning slightly.
A slight frown had been Gareth’s expression this morning. Matilda couldn’t speak for Bryan, but she knew what Gareth’s problem was: He was waiting for her to take last night’s moment of vulnerability and bludgeon him with it. With a grimace, Matilda picked her way into the Miller ravine.
Gareth stood, hands in pockets, glumly surveying the trampled mud and caved-in banks concealing his carefully-excavated apse of the Mithraeum. “Trust Sweeney to fall just here.”
“It looks like a hippopotamus wallow,” Matilda agreed. “But the paramedics had to do their job.”
Pulling his trowel from his pocket, Gareth squatted down and began scraping at the mud-splattered stones. “I’ll have at go at Dunning tomorrow, if Sweeney’s back by then.”
“He should be, unless he’s developed complications overnight.”
“Watkins tells me that Clive is a nephew of our Mr. Clapper—so we’d better start watching what we say in front of him. Although if the lad’s in the area, he’s keeping a low profile. You don’t suppose it was him driving the bus that almost had you off the road, do you?”
“Elvis Presley could’ve been driving that bus,” said Matilda.
“Right. Watkins agrees that it’s time to bring Nick in for questioning—again.”
“I doubt if they’ll have a lot to say to each other. Maybe I should go out to the camp and look helpless or something, try to win his trust.”
“Yes.” Gareth’s trowel grated across the rock.
That wasn’t what I was doing with you, Matilda said silently, and added to herself, odd, how sometimes the best way to help a relationship along is to pretend it doesn’t exist.
She turned away and inspected the trench. Between the rain and last night’s stampede, its sides looked as though they’d been chewed and spat out. Column drums thrust themselves from the muck. Bits of mosaic tile lay among the weeds. Blocks of masonry in several different shapes lay scattered in no discernible pattern.
As the excavators peeled away the layers of dirt and time the ruins were opened not so much to the light of day as to the perceptions. It was like opening the doors of a concert hall, so that anyone who cared to stop and listen could hear the music inside. Matilda half-closed her eyes, conjuring the place as it had once looked.
Faintly, like an image on smoke, she saw the foursquare Roman temple before the perimeter wall. The stones of its foundations, skewed slightly from the wall, were larger and dressed more roughly than the Roman masonry. Those stones were relics of the temple to Epona, the Celtic temenos, razed by the conquerors as though tearing down a building would destroy the deity within. The entrance to the underground Mithras temple lay just outside the largest stone in the foundation. Inside was something else, a cellar room, perhaps, a crevice that rang hollowly like deep water. . . .
“Matilda?”
Matilda blinked away her vision and looked up. “Yes, Jennifer?”
“Manfred’s found some armor. Do you want him to take the pictures?”
“I’ll come, thank you.”
Gareth was kneeling before the wall, focused on his task. She didn’t speak to him when she left.
What with one thing and another, Matilda had very little time to work on the inscription, after all. She managed to fit the “spolia” fragment into place, and deduced that the message was, indeed, commemorating Suetonius’s dedication of the temple. The Roman politicians must have rushed its completion, so that the old general would have ceremonial recognition of his victory before he was hustled away from the scene. Before he had a chance to be vindictive toward his former enemies.
And what of Boudicca? Matilda wondered. Supposedly she had taken poison after her defeat, and her grave now lay below platform ten at Kings Cross station in London. Whatever, her statue beside Westminster Bridge was a splendid bit of fantasy.
“Matilda,” Bryan called, “we’ve found some cups and plates. . . .”
Howard Sweeney made his entrance right before quitting time, dapper as ever, needing only an ivory-handled cane to complete the image. In its absence he was leaning on Ted Ionescu’s arm.
“Yes, yes,” Sweeney announced, “I’m quite well, no thanks to the villain who pushed me down the trench. I was in more danger, I think, from Signor Alfredo Rossi, who came straight from the airport to the hospital and accused me of interfering with his daughter.”
“No,” muttered someone in the group of students, “that was Jason.”
“So is Caterina on her way home?” Matilda asked.
“Yes, the sweet young thing will soon be safe in the bosom of her family. I assured her that her services were no longer required here—she was only piecing together a bit of inscription, after all, anyone could do that.”
His fall hadn’t improved Sweeney’s personality, thought Matilda. She backed away and let him introduce his assistant to the students. Ionescu smiled nervously, glasses and teeth shining. Serving as Sweeney’s crutch probably wasn’t anything new to him.
From the corner of her eye she saw Gareth emerge from the trench, splotched with mud from head to toe. His expression was less tense than it had been in the morning. He said something pleasant to Ashley, who grinned back. He still hadn’t a clue that she had a crush on him, had he?
Gareth turned to Matilda with a brief but intense look that she felt in the pit of her stomach. So lust canceled out doubt yet again. That was one of nature’s little tricks to keep life amusing and the human race viable.
“Let’s tidy everything away,” called Sweeney. “Jennifer, bring me your sketches. And I want to see the team leaders—Manfred, Bryan, Jason. . . .”
“Jason has gone,” said Manfred. “Ashley is now the leader.”
Sweeney swung around not to Ashley but to Matilda. “A little feminist conspiracy behind my back, is it?”
“It’s called equal opportunity, Howard. Welcome to the new millennium.”
Gobbling indistinctly, Sweeney gave Ashley a suspicious glare and then limped off toward the hotel, dragging Ionescu behind him.
“He’s not going to be out to get me now, is he?” Ashley asked Matilda.
“Not at all,” Matilda assured her. “He’ll come around when he sees what good work you’re doing.”
“Let him take his lumps with the rest of us,” Gareth added with a grin, and together they went in to dinner.
* * * * *
It wasn’t strictly necessary to go ghost-hunting at dusk. But there was no point in searching for echoes of personalities past when personalities present clogged the scene. And the lowering clouds added atmosphere, Matilda told herself. Not to mention darknes
s. She walked through the gate and up the side of the embankment.
A couple of cars passed on the road below. Distant music, or amplified noise optimistically called music, echoed from the town. The lights of Fortuna Stud glowed like Gareth’s corpse candles in the gloom. Reynolds hadn’t made his tour of inspection today. Whether he was sulking about being questioned by Watkins, or gloating at having pared a few witnesses away from his fort, Matilda wasn’t about to guess.
A shadowy human figure slipped along the driveway and into the garden behind Reynolds’s house. A traveler? Matilda wondered. There was no reason Reynolds, Linda, and Nick couldn’t have been conspiring together. And why not Della and Clapper, too, just to make things even more interesting.
The gate by the road opened and shut behind her. Footsteps splashed and squelched. She knew without turning around that it was Gareth, come to protect her not from ghosties and ghoulies but from all-too-solid miscreants.
“Will I be in your way?” his voice asked.
“Not if you’re quiet.”
“Right.”
Matilda picked her way through the excavated patches and along the edge of the Miller trench. A breath of cold air eddied upward, chilling her face. From her pocket she pulled the spindle she’d picked up her first day in Cornovium. No coincidence, she thought. None at all.
A shape resolved itself from the twilight like a sunlit image projected upon a dark screen. Columns of reddish-brown stone stood in parallel rows below a triangular architrave. Steps mounted upward, skewed just a bit at the side where the foundation stones were of a different shape. Just around the corner of the building a door opened into a low mound. The odor of incense tickled Matilda’s nostrils, along with that of horses, bread, and sweat.
Claudia walked toward the temple carrying a basket of daffodils. Her features were drawn tight, as though she was wracked by pain but was too proud to admit it. She climbed the steps and disappeared through the portico into the darkened interior of the temple.
Matilda followed. The stone steps felt like grass and mud beneath her feet. The columns dissolved around her. She found herself in a square chamber lit by high windows and lined with altars. An incense burner emitted a tendril of smoke. Opposite the door stood a heroic bronze statue on a plinth. “Dia Pater” read the inscription. God the Father, Matilda translated. It looked like Charlton Heston playing Moses with a better haircut.
At the god’s feet were arrayed several small statues—a leopard, a bull, miniature warriors. Even now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, those were magnificent pieces. New, unstained by time and larceny, they had been breathtaking. Matilda could hardly blame Reynolds for being bitter about their loss.
Claudia wasn’t looking at either the votive statuary or the image of the god. Branwen sat on the top step of a short flight of stairs that led downward to a door closed by a grille. A solitary shaft of light illuminated the chamber within, filling it with the reddish-yellow glow of Celtic gold.
Matilda chanced one more step forward. She knew what Branwen was looking at. Near the door lay a careless pile of gold torcs, no doubt wrenched from the throats of defeated Celts. Some were thick coiled braids, some were chains, and some were fine strands of wire. Some had finials carved in intricate anthropomorphic patterns, others ended with simple knobs. All of them were symbols of the Celts’ dedication to their gods, gods now disgraced by the display of gold as simple booty.
“Why are you sitting there?” Claudia asked quietly.
“I’m spoils of war just as surely as those torcs. Except I’m tainted, and the gold is not.” Branwen extended her right hand and regarded it narrowly.
“Tainted? Not by Marcus, surely.”
“No. He acts within right and custom, doesn’t he? And he’s a good man. . . .” Branwen’s hand clenched. She turned swiftly around. “He doesn’t know who I am.”
“Of the Iceni, you said.”
“My mother was Boudicca’s daughter, violated by a Roman soldier. I’m not Iceni, I’m not Roman—I was conceived in degradation and born in shame. If my grandmother had won her war, perhaps I would know peace. But now, like this—I’ll find peace only in the next life.”
The tendril of smoke wavered in a draft. Claudia said, “I have heard that your priests, your Druids, preach the immortality of the soul. I too believe in a life after death.”
“I thought Mithras was a man’s god,” said Branwen, nodding toward the underground temple on the other side of the wall from the treasury.
“Marcus follows Mithras. I don’t.” With a sigh Claudia sat down on the step beside Branwen, and did not protest when the girl inched away from her. “When I was a child I heard a man called Peter speak, not of a god, but of the son of God. He lived in Judaea, preached compassion and forgiveness, and died to bring us all to everlasting life.”
Branwen tilted her head to the side skeptically.
“Like him, Peter was executed for treason, for saying that the emperor is no god. When I was last in Rome I visited his grave. It’s become a shrine.” Claudia reached into her basket and pulled out a short knife. With it she scratched a symbol in the stone, a “P” with an “x” and three horizontal lines superimposed on the stem.
A thrill ran down Matilda’s back. Claudia had heard the apostle Peter. She had visited his grave. That grave was now deep beneath the Vatican’s great basilica, enclosed by a stucco wall on which the symbol she had scratched was repeated over and over.
“And does this god demand sacrifice?” Branwen asked.
“The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit.” A spasm of pain crossed Claudia’s face, quickly quelled and replaced by a thin smile. “And a few flowers.” She spilled the daffodils from her basket across the stone she had scratched. Their cheerful yellow-gold made the gleam of the torcs seem tarnished.
“Pray to your god for me,” said Branwen, and rose to her feet.
“Pray to yours for me, and for Marcus,” Claudia returned.
“I pray to Brighid, Rhiannon, and Keridwen. I pray for an end to this life, and glory in the next. I pray for the speedy arrival of the quarter-day. . . .” Branwen shook her head, as though she’d revealed too much, and fled the temple.
Claudia sat on the step, caught between the golden spoils and the golden flowers. “Marcus,” she said softly, “I want you back. God forgive me, but I will have you back.”
Matilda took a step toward the woman. Daffodils. Sacrifice. The spring quarter day. Beltane. Did Claudia realize what Branwen was telling her?
A hand grasped her arm. Matilda swam upward through currents of memory and desire and broke the surface of night. The air was ice-cold and still. Hard, crisp lights dotted the darkness. Gareth pulled her back from the rim of the Miller trench. “Sorry, you were almost over the edge.”
Matilda returned the spindle to her pocket. She tried to speak, croaked, swallowed, and tried again. “Claudia’s going to let Branwen go to her death, without telling Marcus, without trying to stop her. Against her faith, perhaps, but it’s Branwen’s faith that’s compelling her.”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on, I’ll fill you in.” Matilda slipped her arm through his, and leaning together with a subtle and yet unmistakable friction they walked down from the fort. She told him every detail, right down to the smell of the incense.
“Sounds like a proper soap,” Gareth concluded, and added, ever practical, “It’s all over and done with. Maybe the bog body is Branwen’s, but you’re a bit late to save her, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
Gareth opened the gate for her and handed her through. “Is the gold still here?”
“Some of it is, I think. . . .” Matilda stopped dead, pulling Gareth around with her. Someone, a man, was crouching just past the corner of the bowling green wall. A student wouldn’t have any reason to hide from them. Neither would one of the constables. Reynolds? Her hyper-extended senses picked up a low chuckle of amusement that didn’t remind her of anyone she had m
et before. A receding chuckle, as the man slipped away into the night.
“What is it?” Gareth asked.
“Someone was hiding behind the wall—no, wait, he’s already gone. . . .”
Gareth released her arm and sprinted around the corner. He covered thirty or forty yards down the road before he gave it up and came back. He was hardly breathing any faster. “No joy. I didn’t see him.”
“Thank you for believing that I did.”
Gareth replied with a noncommittal sniff.
Now walking a demure two feet apart, they passed the cottages, crossed the street, and greeted the evening constable as he headed toward the fort. “Mind your back,” Gareth told him. “Someone’s messing about out there.”
“That’s why I’m standing about here instead having a pint in my local,” the man answered, and walked on.
Ashley stood outside the door of the hotel, her blond hair glowing in the light streaming from the windows. Matilda had the distinct impression she was waiting for someone, or at least hoping for someone to appear.
“Aren’t you a little nervous out there in the dark?” the girl asked them.
“You have to wonder what’s in the dark with you,” Matilda responded.
“Ghosts?”
Had some unguarded phrase tipped Ashley off, Matilda asked herself, or was the girl simply curious? “You know what Samuel Johnson said about the likelihood of ghosts? All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.”
“Don’t stay out long,” Gareth said. “And don’t leave the area just next the hotel.”
Ashley nodded. “Don’t worry.”
The lights in the lobby were blindingly bright. Reynolds’s nasal voice echoed from the bar, counterpointed by the saccharine strains of “If Ever I Would Leave You.” Matilda saw Bryan sitting in the sitting room watching television. She wondered suddenly whether she’d been wrong about Ashley going drinking with him. If not him, though, who?
“So if you believe in ghosts they exist?” Gareth asked.
“Probably. But I know what I’ve seen here. Tomorrow I’ll prove it to you.”
Time Enough to Die Page 16
