The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  Still, it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that Fabia was lying. She and Adrian weren’t at all eager to see the southwest corner excavated, and Quinnell hadn’t helped matters last night, going on and on over dinner about his plans, as though the ground-penetrating radar survey had been genuine. I, for my part, had kept my promise to Quinnell and not said a word about it, and if I didn’t exactly enjoy watching Adrian’s discomfort, I could salve my guilty conscience with the knowledge that it probably did him good.

  “Yes, well, these things happen,” Quinnell said now, with a rather deliberate innocence, and I thought I caught the shadow of a smile as he turned to talk to Wally Tyler.

  Certainly, Adrian’s car appeared healthy enough when he finally turned into the drive, ten minutes later. He parked at the top of the hill, by the house, and came slowly down to meet us, frowning. “D’you know,” he said, to Quinnell, “I’ve been re-examining the results of that survey, and I can’t be absolutely sure, but—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, that anomaly doesn’t look quite the right size, you know, for what we’re after…”

  “Ah. Perhaps we ought to double-check.” Quinnell smiled. “Robbie?”

  Robbie, still poking about with his stick, looked round a second time. “Aye, Mr. Quinnell?”

  “Mr. Sutton-Clarke’s afraid we might be digging in the wrong place for our ditch.”

  “The ditch the soldiers dug?”

  “That’s right.”

  Robbie screwed his eyes up while he gave the matter thought. “No, it’s here. It’s all filled up, like, but it’s here.”

  “Good lad.” Quinnell turned back to Adrian like a proud father. “You see? There’s no need to worry. If you’d just be so kind as to verify my measurements…”

  A few minutes later, as Wally Tyler’s spade attacked the toughened sod, my shoulders lifted in a little sigh.

  Such a pity, I thought, that Quinnell would be disappointed. It didn’t seem fair.

  “The ditch is here,” repeated Robbie, but he wasn’t talking to Quinnell. He’d come round to stand beside me and his blue eyes tilted up to meet my doubting ones, offering reassurance. “It’s OK, he’s going to find it.”

  No one can really be psychic, I reminded myself firmly. But Robbie only smiled as though I’d told him something funny, and went bouncing off to throw his stick for Kip.

  Chapter 8

  “It must be teatime, surely.” Fabia pushed her hair back with an impatient hand, setting down her end of the large wood-framed screen while I reached for the next bucket of soil.

  Overhead the clouds had thickened and the shadows in our sheltered place beside the trial trench had flattened into nothingness. Unable to tell the hour from the sun, I checked my wristwatch, arching my back in a work-weary stretch. “Another hour yet, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, this is dead boring.” She glared past my shoulder to where the men, several feet away, were sinking ever lower in the trench. “You’d think with four of them digging they’d be able to go a lot faster.”

  I halted in mid-stretch, surprised. There were only three of them digging, in actual fact—Adrian, useless with a shovel, had been given the less critical chore of passing the buckets of excavated soil over to us to be sieved. But even without Adrian, the men were making quite good progress, I thought, their shovels scraping steadily, persistently, as they scooped up the soil in thin measured layers, moving deeper by stratified levels. If Fabia thought they could go any faster, she’d never tried digging herself.

  And she’d certainly never held a sieve before today. I was beginning to think I could do the work better without her.

  Leaving the sieve on the ground for a moment, I tipped over the next bucket, letting the freshly dug soil spill out onto the fine metal mesh. “I suppose,” I said, lightly probing, “as Peter Quinnell’s granddaughter, you’ve been doing this sort of thing since before you could walk.”

  “God, no.” She tossed her blonde hair back again and bent to pick up her end of the screen. “This is a first. I’ve no interest in dead things. I’m like my father, that way.”

  “Ah.” Not wanting to pry, I took a firmer hold on the sieve’s wooden frame and we started the shaking motion again, back and forth, back and forth, like two children tugging at opposite ends of a blanket. The clumps of soil rolled and broke and sifted through the sieve like flour.

  “I can’t believe, sometimes,” she said, “that Dad and Peter were related. Dad was so alive, you know? So interested in everything.”

  I shot a sideways look at Quinnell, laboring single-mindedly in the trench, and thought I’d never seen a man look more alive. But I kept my opinion to myself.

  “Peter isn’t interested in anything,” said Fabia, with certainty, “except this bloody dig. It’s all he cares about.” And then, as though she’d reached some unseen stopping-place, she switched the subject. “I can’t believe you do this for a living, honestly. It would put me to sleep.”

  I smiled, hearing the note of complaint in her voice and knowing she’d imagined archaeology to be more glamorous. She hadn’t learned, as I had, that true archaeologists were not the swashbuckling heroes of Hollywood films, dashing madly round the world from danger zone to danger zone in search of priceless treasures. True archaeologists were scientists. They moved slowly, for fear of overlooking something, damaging something, being inaccurate. For most of them, a single broken bit of pottery—what we in the field called a “sherd”—could be as great a find as Agamemnon’s mask.

  Hollywood, I reasoned, rarely concerned itself with getting things right. And who could blame it? Who on earth would want to make a film that showed the reality of excavation work, with all its repetition and tedium and endless note-taking? More to the point, who on earth would want to watch it? There was only so much interest one could muster in the act of sieving soil.

  “What’s that?” Fabia asked, as I picked a small drooping thing up from the sieve.

  “Earthworm.” I gently set it back where it belonged, on the ground at my feet. Bad enough, I thought, that he’d been shovelled from his peaceful home in the first place, and rattled all around. Tipping out the few remaining pebbles onto the spoil heap, I lowered the sieve and hefted the next bucket, smiling encouragement at Fabia. “Last one,” I promised.

  The heavy tread of footsteps heralded Adrian’s approach. “Last one?” he echoed. “Then you must have more. That spoil heap’s not nearly high enough.” Cheerfully, he swung two full buckets beside the growing mound of sieved soil and rested, hands on hips, waiting for us to call him names.

  Fabia, to my surprise, chose not to call him anything. Instead she ran a hand through her hair, in a self-conscious, womanly way, and her swift upward glance was designed to bewitch the observer. “Adrian, darling, I wonder…” She paused, as though embarrassed, and approached from a different angle. “It’s only that I desperately need to go to the loo, you see, and I wondered if you might be a prince…” With a hopeful smile, she held up her edge of the framed square of screening.

  “Certainly.” Gullible as always, he stepped in to relieve her, watching fondly as she flounced away toward the house. When she’d disappeared from view, he brought his head around to meet my pitying eyes. “What?”

  “You ought to have remembered your Greek myths.”

  “My what?”

  “Hercules and Atlas.”

  “What about them?”

  “Didn’t they teach you anything at school? Atlas was the chap who had to hold the sky on his back, remember? So it didn’t touch the earth. And then Hercules took over for a bit, while Atlas went to fetch the golden apples. Only when Atlas came back, he wasn’t keen to take the sky again, so Hercules said: ‘Fair enough, old boy, only I haven’t got my shoulders set quite right. Could you just hold this for a moment while I get a better g
rip?’”

  “And then he buggered off, right?”

  “Oldest trick in the book.”

  “You are a cynic, aren’t you?” Adrian commented. “Fabia’s coming back.”

  By the time we’d started into the second bucket he’d brought, his frowning glances up toward the house had grown more frequent and his voice held none of its former confidence. “She is coming back.”

  “Of course she is. Could you hold your end up properly, please? You’re spilling all the soil.”

  “Sorry. I’d really forgotten how much I disliked… hang on, what was that?” He stopped shaking, peering closely at the sieve.

  “What was what?”

  “Blast, it’s gone under again. I shook too hard. A piece about this big,” he identified the mystery object, making a circle with thumb and forefinger, “a sort of triangle. I think it’s down near you, now.”

  It took me a moment to find it. Frowning, I held the hard flat lump with careful fingers and gingerly brushed away most of the clinging dirt. It was a small potsherd with still-sharp edges and the worn remnants of a fine glaze. On any other site, I would have been excited by such a find. But now, as I stared down at it, I felt the pricking of irrational anger.

  Adrian held out his hand. “Can I have a look?”

  In stony-faced silence I passed him the sherd and watched him weigh it in the palm of his hand. Head bent, he lowered his eyebrows in the frown of concentration that I still found more attractive than his smile. “It’s Samian ware, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly appears to be.”

  “But that’s encouraging, surely? I mean, one expects to find Samian ware on a Roman site.”

  “Yes. How clever of you to remember.”

  He glanced up. “What?”

  “Were you planning,” I asked him coldly, “to fake the whole of this excavation?”

  “Verity…”

  “Just so I know.”

  “Verity…”

  “Mind you, it’s not a perfect plant. Samian ware might have been scattered throughout Roman Britain, but I’d think it more common to villas and forts than to marching camps.”

  “Verity, I swear.” He raised his right hand in defense. “This is not my doing.”

  “Please. Fabia may have the brains, but she doesn’t have your access to artifacts. Where’d you nick this from?”

  He sighed, and sent me a look that mingled exasperation and amusement. “What makes you so bloody sure it’s not a genuine find?”

  “Oh, don’t play the innocent. You know as well as I do that there’s nothing here to find.”

  Quinnell, I thought later, could not have had a better cue.

  I’d barely finished my sentence when his shout of delight went rolling up the green hill like a thunderclap. Forgetting Adrian, I turned toward the sound. Robbie and Kip had returned to crouch near the far edge of the deepening trench, and I saw Robbie lean forward excitedly, pointing.

  “Good God,” said Adrian. He set the potsherd back on its bed of dirt and let go of his end of the sieve, forcing me to shift my grip or drop the thing altogether. “They’ve found something.”

  “Damn it, Adrian,” I began, staggering beneath the weight of the framed square of screening, but he was already gone, hurrying over the grass to investigate. With a muttered curse I lowered the sieve to the ground and creaked upright again, massaging my strained back muscles as I rounded the edge of the trench.

  The collie met me halfway, feathered tail waving a welcome. “Careful, Kip,” I warned as he bumped against my legs, but the dog just drew its lips back in a grin and danced a few steps farther on, urging me to follow.

  Quinnell looked up, beaming. “We’ve found the ditch,” he announced. “Right where we expected it to be.”

  Adrian was plainly stunned. “Right where we expected it…”

  “Yes.” Quinnell beckoned me closer. “Just there, do you see? I’m afraid the rampart itself has been leveled at some point, there’s nothing left of it at all, but you can clearly trace its edge against the dark fill of the ditch.”

  I looked, enthralled. They’d done an expert job of excavating, and the line where ditch and rampart had once met stood out quite clearly, running crosswise at the bottom of the trench.

  The Romans had dug ditches all the way round their marching camps, great ditches nine feet wide and seven feet deep, piling the earth and turf to one side to create a soaring rampart. It must have looked a daunting obstacle, to any barbarians trying to attack the Roman camp.

  And now nothing was left but a line in the soil.

  Wally Tyler hoisted himself out of the trench, and David’s eyes tipped up to scan the waving rim of grass. “Wally, would you hand me down that brush, there?”

  “Aye.” The old man complied, nearly tripping over his grandson in the process. “A body cannae move with ye aboot,” he complained. He gave the boy a nudge with one foot. “Shift yerself forrit a wee bit.”

  Robbie obligingly shifted himself forward, careful not to get too close to the edge of the trench. Someone had obviously explained to him how important it was not to collapse the trench wall and lose all the information contained in its various strata. Leaning over cautiously, he watched the work below him. “Davy…”

  “Aye, lad?”

  “How could that”—he pointed one shoe at the eroded rampart—“keep anybody out?”

  David smiled. “Well, it used to be much bigger, lad. Like a hill—nearly ten feet tall. And on top the Romans built a wall of wooden poles, to make it taller. And all this,” he added, waving his trowel over the darker area, “this was a ditch then, like the moats you see round castles.”

  “Filled with water?”

  “No, just dry. It made it difficult enough, to scramble up.”

  Robbie pondered this a moment. “Where’d they get the wood from?”

  “What?”

  “The wooden poles. Where’d they come from?”

  “Oh.” David’s face cleared, and he lowered his head to concentrate on brushing loose dirt from the leveled rampart’s edge. “The Romans were like Boy Scouts, lad. They came prepared. The legionaries carried two poles each when they were on the march.”

  “What, on their backs, like?”

  “Aye. Along with their armor and their weapons and the things they used for cooking—”

  Adrian cut him off abruptly. “We found a sherd,” he said, as if he’d only just remembered. Not that one could blame him for forgetting, really. Our find had been so small compared to this one, and if the sight of the ditch had astounded me, it must have stunned Adrian speechless. It wasn’t every day one’s lie turned out to be the truth.

  Quinnell brought his head round, interested. “What did you say?”

  “A sherd,” repeated Adrian. “Samian ware, we think.”

  “Oh, yes? Perhaps, David, you might take a look at it? You’re so much better with pottery than I am. And I do want to get this trench photographed, in case it starts to rain. Wally, do you think that you could bring the stepladder round, so Fabia can get a shot from higher up?”

  “Aye.” The wiry Scotsman rolled a cigarette between his stained fingers, placed it in his mouth unlit and shuffled off, no doubt glad of the opportunity to leave the field for a smoke. Most archaeologists didn’t allow smoking on their sites, as radiocarbon dates would be contaminated by the ashes.

  “And Fabia…” Quinnell paused, his eyes resting rather vaguely on Adrian and myself. “Where is Fabia?”

  Adrian informed him she’d gone back up to the house. “Shall I fetch her?”

  “Please. And Verity, if you wouldn’t mind showing this sherd of yours to David?”

  Robbie, still crouched beside the trench, looked up hopefully. “And what can I do?”

 
; “You,” David said solemnly, handing over his brush, “can lend a hand to Mr. Quinnell, lad.”

  “Really?”

  “Aye. He likes a bit of help, don’t you, Peter?”

  “What?” The older man glanced round. “Oh, yes, indeed I do. Come down here, Robbie, let me show you…”

  David Fortune smiled. In one easy motion he pulled himself out of the trench like a swimmer stepping out of a pool, and wiping his hands on his sturdy cotton trousers he came across to join me. “Peter does love teaching things,” he confided. “He had me out on digs when I was half Robbie’s age.”

  I couldn’t imagine him at half Robbie’s age. I looked behind me at the small dark tousled head bent close by Quinnell’s in the trench, and thought: impossible. A man as big as David Fortune could never have been Robbie’s size. He must have sprung from somewhere fully grown.

  He towered beside me as we walked, our silence broken only by the thump and scuffle of our shoes falling on the thick green grass that cloaked the pitted ground. Kip came with us, tail wagging, eager to be off on some adventure, but when we stopped a few yards on at the end of the trench, the collie lost interest and trotted off on a new course.

  The sieving screen was right where I had left it, balanced on the spoil heap, and David bent to examine the small bit of broken pottery lying nestled on its bed of dirt.

  “That was in the last load of soil Adrian brought over,” I told him.

  “Careless of us to miss it in the digging.”

  I studied the back of his head for a moment. “You weren’t at all surprised, were you?”

  “That we found something, d’you mean?” He glanced round, his eyes touching mine with level honesty. “No.”

  “But it’s… I mean, it seems so incredible, when you think about it—Adrian and Fabia going to all that trouble to fake the survey results, and in the end the bloody ditch is exactly where… exactly…” My voice trailed off ineffectually as I brushed a hand across my forehead, smoothing a small frown. “Incredible,” I said again.