The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  David Fortune looked around, and sniffed the fragrant air. “Been baking, have you?”

  “Apple tart for Brian’s tea.”

  The big man’s eyes flicked briefly to the closed door at the far end of the room. “He’s back, then, is he?”

  “Aye. He came in late last night. No need to be quiet, though,” she added. “He’ll be sleeping it off for a few hours yet.”

  Jeannie led us past the closed door and along a tiny passageway toward the front of the cottage. “Robbie’ll be fair glad to see you. He’s off school today with the smit.” Then, suddenly remembering I wasn’t Scottish, she rolled her eyes, smiled and translated: “He has a cold. Nothing serious, ye ken, but I’ll not send a son of mine to school when he’s ill.”

  Her words had only just sunk in when, after a confident knock and reply, I was ushered through a second low doorway and into the presence of Peter Quinnell’s Homer.

  My first thought was that I’d been brought to the wrong room. The face that looked up from the bed in the corner was a child’s face, round and questioning, sprayed with freckles and topped by a shock of unruly black hair.

  Robbie McMorran could not have been older than eight.

  “Heyah,” David greeted the boy, glancing round as though something were missing. “Where’s Kip?”

  “Out with Grandad.”

  “Oh, aye?” The blue eyes swung to Jeannie McMorran. “Where’s Wally away to this morning?”

  “He didn’t say.” She seemed unconcerned. “Brian comes in, and Dad goes out—you ken how it is. It’s only my wee sodger, here, who gives me a moment’s peace.” She laid one cooling hand on the boy’s forehead, then rumpled his hair with a smile. “He’s not dead yet,” she pronounced. “I’m sure he’ll survive a short visit. But just a short one, now. And no Nintendo.” Fixing David Fortune with a stern look, she left us to return to her kitchen and the fragrant apple tart bubbling in the oven.

  “No Nintendo!” The Scotsman pulled a face of mock dismay, which he shared with the bedridden boy. “How’s a lad meant to get well?”

  Robbie McMorran giggled. “It’s no sae bad. The electricity’s going off, anyway, some time soon.”

  “Is it, now? Did you tell Mr. Quinnell?”

  “Aye. Mum rang him up, just afore you came.” The frank round eyes looked up at me, eagerly. “Is this Miss Grey?”

  “It is. Verity Grey,” he introduced me, “I’d like you to meet Robert Roy McMorran.”

  For such a little, gangly thing, he had a solemn handshake. “She doesn’t look at all like what you said,” he told the archaeologist, accusingly.

  David Fortune chose to let the comment pass. He hiked a straight-backed chair closer to the bed, inviting me to sit down, and settled himself on the edge of young Robbie’s bed. “I think Miss Grey would like to ken what part you played in bringing Mr. Quinnell here, to Rosehill.”

  “Wasn’t me,” the boy replied. “It was Granny Nan. She wrote to Mr. Quinnell, like.”

  “Aye. She wrote to him, to tell him what?”

  “About me seeing the Sentinel.”

  I interrupted, with a faint frown. “The Sentinel?”

  “Aye.” Robbie nodded. “On the hill. Kip found him, first. And then Granny Nan showed me this book with pictures in it…”

  “Granny Nan being my mother,” interjected David, for my benefit. “She’s Granny Nan to everyone, round here.”

  “…she showed me this book, and it had a picture of him in it, and she got all excited and wrote to Mr. Quinnell. She let me keep the picture.” Rolling onto his stomach, Robbie stretched to reach the lower shelf of his bedside table, and I heard the rustle of paper. He rolled back, clasping a colorful sheet with ragged edges. “I ken you’re not supposed to tear a book, but Granny Nan said most of the pages were missing anyway, and the rest were all runkled like this, so it was OK.” He pressed the crumpled page into my hands.

  Bending my head, I smoothed the torn picture with careful fingers. “And this is the man you saw, then, is it? Here at Rosehill?”

  “Aye. His name’s right there, and all. He walks up on the hill, just there.” The boy pointed at the rear wall of the bedroom, in the direction of Rosehill House.

  “I see.”

  Schliemann had his Homer, I thought, and now at last I understood what Quinnell meant when he said he had Robbie. Understood, too, why David Fortune had told me that Quinnell would dig here anyway, no matter what the surveys showed. If I were a less doubting person, I might dig, too.

  My fingers flattened the wrinkled image once again, more slowly, as I read the printed caption:

  “The Sentinel At His Post”—A Roman Legionary; Early Second Century, AD.

  Chapter 5

  Adrian snapped a bit of thorn from the low hedge at the roadside and twirled it absently round in his fingers. “The man is six sandwiches short of a picnic, darling. Surely you noticed.”

  “Oh, so that’s all right then, is it? Lying to someone because he’s deluded?”

  “Lying,” said Adrian, “is a relative term.” The thorn drew blood and he threw it away, then tucked himself behind me as a car went whistling past us. “Look, just stop walking, will you? We’re far enough from the house, no one will hear.”

  I stopped, at a shaded place where the road bridged a shallow stream before beginning its curving downwards slope. Here, instead of hedge and fencing, low stone walls edged the road to keep the unwary from toppling into the briskly moving water below. On either side the trees rose tall and thin and ghostly pale, their naked branches faintly smudged with fuzzy green. They grew at all angles, like straws set into shifting sand, forming a screen that blocked our view of Rosehill House.

  Adrian turned to settle himself against the stone barricade.

  “It wasn’t even my idea, to begin with,” he defended himself. “It was Fabia’s. She thought it might be nice to give the old boy some encouragement.”

  I sent him an icy look, unsympathetic. “Can you even spell the word ‘ethics’?”

  “I don’t know why you’re so angry about it.”

  “I’m not angry. I’m bloody furious. You’re supposed to be a professional, for God’s sake. Professionals don’t fake their data.”

  “They might if they worked for Quinnell. Saves effort, really, because he’ll dig the field up anyway, no matter what the tests show. Quinnell doesn’t need me, or my surveys, to tell him where to dig. He’ll use his little psychic friend for that.”

  “I don’t believe this.” I rubbed my forehead with a heavy hand. “I really don’t believe you dragged me all the way up here from London, for nothing. Of all the rotten—”

  “Who says it was for nothing?”

  I glanced up, irritated. “Oh, come on, Adrian! Roman soldiers walking on the hills?”

  “I’ll admit it’s a bit weird to dig a field up just because some kid watched Ben-Hur one time too many, but—”

  “Did anyone take aerial photographs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you see a marching camp?”

  “No, but that field is in permanent pasture, and you know as well as I do that pasture hides quite a lot. It can take years of photographing—different seasons, different times of day—and even then you might not see a thing. Doesn’t mean that nothing’s there.”

  “Look me in the eye,” I challenged him, “and tell me you honestly believe there’s a Roman camp at Rosehill.”

  In a way, it was a trick question. I knew Adrian well enough to know that if he looked me in the eye at all, he was lying.

  Instead he surprised me by looking away, squinting thoughtfully into the shadowy tangle of leaning, leafless trees. “I believe,” he said, “that Quinnell believes it. And for the amount he’s paying me, I’m prepared to play along.”

>   “Of course, I should have known. It all comes down to money, doesn’t it?” I studied him. “Do you know, I’m almost tempted to take the job, if only to protect Peter Quinnell from the lot of you.”

  Adrian smiled at my disapproving expression. “Is that why poor old Fortune wasted no time disappearing, when I met you in the drive? Did you tear a strip off him, as well?”

  “I don’t know the man well enough to tear a strip off him. But he’s well aware of what I think.” He hadn’t kept me long at Rose Cottage, not after I’d seen the picture of the Roman legionary. Jeannie McMorran had offered us tea and biscuits, but he’d merely flashed his handsome smile and made some excuse about work to be done and guided me out of the warm little house, out into the crisp morning air that smelt cleanly of fresh earth and flowers and sunshine.

  He had known, of course, that I’d be disappointed. Known it all along, and still he’d taken me to meet Robbie, had let me hear the whole fantastic tale. And as we’d trudged back up the curving drive, he’d offered no apology. “So now you ken as much as I do,” he’d told me, and his eyes had held an understanding. “It’s your choice, to stay or to go, but I will tell you one thing: Quinnell’s set his heart on your staying.”

  He’d said that last bit almost… well, almost as if it went against his better judgment, and I’d had the curious impression that David Fortune would be happier if I didn’t stay. But before I’d fully registered the thought, a sleek red sports car had roared up the drive—Adrian’s car—and with a final, unreadable glance, the big dark Scotsman had turned to climb the final hundred yards or so to the low-slung stables on the ridge, where that perfectly appointed office waited patiently for my answer.

  “Damn, damn, damn.” I spoke the words aloud now with a vehemence that brought Adrian’s head around. “It’s all your fault,” I told him, and because he deserved it I shoved his arm, for emphasis.

  He bounced back like a punching-ball, unperturbed. “What is?”

  “I like him.”

  “Who, Fortune?” The idea seemed to shock him.

  “Quinnell. I like him, Adrian, and I don’t want to see him disappointed.”

  “So take the job, then, like a good girl.”

  “Yes, but don’t you see? If I do that, if I just go along with his fantasy like the rest of you are doing, then I’ll have to actually stand by and watch him digging trenches, finding nothing. I don’t know which is worse.”

  Adrian shrugged. “One of them pays better.”

  “Oh, damn the pay,” I started to say, but my words were drowned by an urgent squeal of tires on the road, followed by the unmistakable thud and crunch of metal slamming into metal and the sound of splintered glass. In the second of silence that trailed the crash, something began to crack and tear like a tree branch ripped free in a storm, and a softer thud echoed the first.

  “That sounded bloody close,” said Adrian.

  His reflexes were better than mine. By the time I caught up with him, he’d reached the scene of the accident and was wading into the thick of things, playing referee between a red-faced man with wild eyes, and a smaller chap with spectacles who clutched a road map to his chest, staring dismayed at the wreckage of his car. I had difficulty making sense of the colorful language spewing from the larger man, but I gathered the driver with the map had stopped suddenly on the road to get his bearings, with predictable results.

  Quinnell came hurrying down the long drive, his expression concerned, and a moment later Fabia came, too, to stand by the road and watch. Jeannie McMorran appeared briefly in the doorway of Rose Cottage, took one look and withdrew with a practical, purposeful air. She’s gone to ring the police, I thought, and a few minutes later the wail of a siren proved me right. I moved well back, out of the way, against the cottage wall.

  The curtains twitched in a nearby window, and I caught a glimpse of Robbie’s small pale face. A road accident, I thought, must surely be a spot of unexpected brightness in a sick child’s boring day. And the boy was, at any rate, getting a lesson on language. The large, red-faced man—who seemed to have grown somehow larger and more florid—had used nearly every curse invented and a few I’d never heard, in explaining his side of things to the beleaguered-looking police officer. “Ah mean,” he raged, in a Scots dialect so thick it sounded like a foreign tongue, “will ye just look at what the daftie’s done to yon great pole! The dampt thing’s cowpit ower!”

  I listened with a frown, intrigued. “Daftie” was simple enough, I thought, and “dampt” was clearly “damned,” but “cowpit ower”? And then I looked where he was pointing, and my frown cleared. Fallen over, I decided. That’s what he must mean. The huge wooden pole had indeed split on impact and toppled into the field across the road, crushing a section of hedge in a tangle of thick black power lines.

  Power lines…

  I froze a moment, tried to think. What was it Robbie had said to David Fortune, only an hour ago? I could see his bright-eyed, freckled face, and hear the confident young voice proclaim: “The electricity’s going off, anyway, some time soon…”

  I couldn’t help the chill. My head turned slowly, cautiously, as if I were compelled to look, yet didn’t want to see. Beside me, the curtains at the window twitched once more and then lay still, and though I went on watching them, they didn’t move again.

  ***

  “It’s quite remarkable,” said Quinnell, “what the boy knows. If I weren’t bothered by ethics I’d take him to Newmarket, make a small fortune.” Smiling at the prospect, he leaned forward to take a chocolate digestive biscuit from the tray between us.

  The electricity was on again, and he’d taken advantage of the fact to brew a pot of tea. One steaming sweet sip chased away the lingering chill of the old house and made the red-walled sitting room feel cozy in spite of the west wind that rattled the window panes. To one side of me the big black tomcat, Murphy, lay draped along a bookshelf, lazy-eyed, while his girlfriend Charlie slumbered on the armrest of my chair. I stroked her thick fur and she flexed one paw in what might have been a protest or a gesture of contentment. One never could tell, with cats.

  I would have felt a whole lot better myself, I acknowledged, if Quinnell hadn’t used that one word: ethics.

  “My mother,” he went on, “fancied herself a spiritualist, but then it was all the rage, in her day—séances and table-knocking, that sort of nonsense. I didn’t believe in it, myself. Still don’t, in many ways.”

  “But Robbie McMorran…”

  “Robbie is rather a special case.” He took another biscuit, settled back. “For one thing, he was introduced to me by an old friend, whose opinion I very much value. And for another, he has told me things that… well, let’s just say he’s convincing.” He smiled gently, watching my face. “You’re not convinced, I take it.”

  I hesitated, searching for words that would give no offense. “I’ve only just met the boy, really, and we didn’t talk much, what with him being poorly.”

  “No, no, it’s quite all right,” he forgave me, crossing one long leg over the other. “It is the natural response, you know. I think I’d worry about someone who simply accepted the idea, no questions asked. Ghosts and goblins, spooks and psychics—they’re so far removed from science, and we are all children of the scientific age.”

  Again I felt a twinge of conscience, and I turned my eyes away, feigning an intense interest in the sleeping cat. “Mr. Quinnell…”

  “Peter, please.”

  “Peter… there’s something I must tell you.”

  “Yes?”

  “About the radar survey…”

  “Yes?”

  My teacup clattered in the saucer with a force I hadn’t intended, and Charlie the cat half opened one eye accusingly. “I saw the results today, up at the lab, and I think that there’s been a mistake. I don’t think the findings are accura
te.” There, I thought, I’d said it. Said it, moreover, without actually coming straight out and calling Adrian a liar, without telling Quinnell his granddaughter had orchestrated the deception. I held my breath, waiting for him to ask me why I didn’t trust the survey. When the question didn’t come, I raised my head.

  The long eyes met mine levelly, with deep approving warmth. “It is a rare commodity, these days,” he told me. “Honesty.”

  I stared. “You knew.”

  “Suspected. Did he take it from another site, then? One that you and he had worked on?” The answer must have shown in my face, because he nodded, satisfied. “And you recognized it. Bit of bad luck, for Adrian, although it can’t have been his idea, in the first place. I expect he was led astray by Fabia. My granddaughter has rather a knack, I fear, for leading young men astray.”

  So the shrewdness I had glimpsed last night had not been an illusion. Those languid eyes saw more than they revealed. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t mad, I told myself. It only meant that Peter Quinnell was no fool.

  He smiled at me again, and said: “Of course, I shan’t let on. And you mustn’t tell them that I know. That would upset them terribly. I’m sure they did it with the best of intentions, after all, and it’s always wise to let young people feel that little bit superior.”

  “But your excavation…”

  “Oh, I intend to begin in the southwest corner, regardless. Robbie’s very certain that there’s something there, and it’s as good a place to start as any.”

  He sounded so certain, I thought. Frowning, I scratched Charlie’s ears. “Mr. Quinnell…”

  “Peter.”

  “I’m sorry to be such a skeptic, but I just don’t see what proof you have that the Ninth Legion was ever here.”

  “No proof,” he admitted, amiably. “Though it’s not quite as random as it may seem, my choosing Rosehill. I’ve been chasing the Ninth for fifty years, now, and I’ve developed something of a sixth sense myself, where the Hispana is concerned. You know, of course, most modern historians believe the Ninth was simply sent to Lower Germany, that it wasn’t destroyed at all—at least, not here on good old British soil. But I feel it in my bones, my dear. I feel it in my bones.” His mild eyes moved past my shoulder to the window, where the chestnut tree shaded the gravel drive. “The Devil’s Causeway came this way, the Roman road from York. For years, I thought the Hispana must have marched northwest, but now I don’t believe that. They came along the east coast,” he said calmly. “They came here. Even if Robbie hadn’t seen his Sentinel, I’d still have found this field. It was the name of the house, you see, that intrigued me.”