The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Sod it! Sorry,” I apologized, remembering too late to mind my language. “It’s only Kip, our… well, not our collie, exactly. He belongs to the cottage, down the bottom of the drive.”

  “Fine fellow,” Connelly praised the dog, giving the cocked ears a friendly scratch before turning to me with an expectant expression. “Now, shall we have a look at your trial trench?”

  Kip’s presence made me braver, less self-conscious. After twenty minutes of touring the field, I frowned and looked at my companion. “Why did you want me?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “To show you around. Why me, specifically?”

  “Ah.” His mouth curved into a smile that was not unpleasant. “Because I reasoned you were the only person likely to be truthful, my dear.”

  “But why?”

  “Well, Peter has a rather deep investment here, now doesn’t he? His granddaughter, I’d imagine, doesn’t want to see him disappointed. That surveyor—Sutton-Clarke—his kind say anything to keep their jobs secure. No point killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. And young Fortune,” he concluded, “would swear black was white, if Peter asked him to. Which left only you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides,” he said, confidingly, “I know old Lazenby, and he speaks very highly of the work you did on his Suffolk excavations. I gather that he wants to take you out to Alexandria.”

  “So I’m told.” Only I didn’t want to think of Alexandria, or Lazenby, or the decision I would have to make before the summer’s end. I kicked over a stick in the grass and threw it out for Kip to chase.

  Dr. Connelly stopped walking. “There are people,” he said slowly, “who’d call Peter Quinnell mad. And you must admit he acts the madman, sometimes. I have been told he sits out in this field at night, and talks to ghosts.”

  I looked up sharply, trying to read his inscrutable face. “Who told you that?”

  “It’s true, then?”

  “No, it’s not. I’ve never known Peter to come out here after dark,” I answered truthfully. “You must be misinformed.”

  Connelly accepted this with a philosophical nod. “So tell me, Miss Grey, in your professional opinion, is there anything behind all this Ninth Legion nonsense?” His eyes peered at me through the spectacles like hard, glittering stones. “Do you believe—honestly believe—that we are standing, right this moment, on something more than a vexillation fortress?”

  They seemed too bright, those eyes. Too penetrating. I looked away.

  Kip had stopped chasing the stick and was loping happily up the hill, tail wagging a welcome to the empty air. He gave a small woof and stopped suddenly, tipping his head up and wagging more violently, as though someone were bending down to stroke him.

  Slowly, I brought my gaze back to Dr. Connelly’s. “I’ve never been so sure of anything in all my life.”

  He studied my face for a long moment, and what he saw there must have satisfied him because at last he gave a fatalistic nod. “Then I must bow to your conviction,” he said grandly. “You shall have my students for this digging season. And God help both our reputations, if you find there’s nothing here.”

  Chapter 25

  The next three weeks sped past me like a whirlwind, in one long connected blur of motion and emotion and that tingling raw excitement that one feels when starting any voyage.

  Bank Holiday weekend came and went, and no one really noticed. David’s mother came out of hospital and surprised everyone by checking herself into Saltgreens, the local home for the aged, for a few months’ convalescence. That is, she surprised everyone except Jeannie.

  “Have you seen Saltgreens?” Jeannie’d asked me, grinning.

  “Isn’t it that modern building, the brick and glass one, beside the museum?”

  “Aye, with its front end facing on to the harbor, across from the Ship Hotel’s parking lot. You’d think it was luxury flats, to look at it. She’ll not be suffering in there. I expect,” Jeannie had added, turning away to chop an onion, “she’s only doing it to get a bit of peace.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she’s got Davy on the one hand, saying he’ll hire someone to live in at the cottage, so she’ll not be on her own; and Peter on the other hand, saying that she ought to sell the cottage, and let him buy her something in the town.” Jeannie smiled. “But she’s an independent woman, Davy’s mother, and she’ll not be a burden to anyone.”

  A woman cut from my own cloth, I’d thought approvingly. “Will she sell her cottage, do you think?”

  “Oh, I have my doubts. She’ll probably stay on at Saltgreens for the summer, like, then go back home and get a wee companion in. But not with Davy’s money. She’s an independent woman,” Jeannie had repeated, as though it bore repeating, like the bold refrain of some old Scottish ballad. “Whatever she does, it’ll be Nancy Fortune’s choice and Nancy Fortune’s money paying for it.”

  Robbie, I was sure, already knew what David’s mother would decide, but he was much too excited by all the preparations for the arrival of the university students to waste time telling fortunes on demand. This morning he and Kip had been my shadows, dancing up and down and up again between the house and the Principia. Now, as we came into the offices for the third time, with Robbie’s constant chatter ringing cheerfully behind me, Adrian looked up from his computer and sighed, with feeling.

  “Robbie.”

  “Aye, Mr. Sutton-Clarke?”

  “Do you know what a filibuster is?”

  “No, Mr. Sutton-Clarke.”

  “Well, when you grow up,” Adrian suggested darkly, “you must really stand for parliament. You’d make a cracking good MP.”

  Robbie replied that he’d rather join the lifeboat brigade. “I really like the lifeboat. Ours doesn’t go wheeching down a ramp, like some of them do, but I think it’s magic.”

  “Marvelous.” Adrian looked at his watch. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “It’s Saturday.”

  “Ah.”

  “The people come tomorrow.”

  “Do they, really?”

  But all attempts at sarcasm were wasted breath with Robbie. “Aye,” the boy said, sagely. “Grandad and Davy are putting up the tents. Will you be living in a tent, Mr. Sutton-Clarke?”

  “No,” said Adrian.

  “Wouldn’t you like to live in a tent?”

  “No,” said Adrian.

  I smiled, moving past them to my desk. “Mr. Sutton-Clarke would miss his nice room at the Ship Hotel, Robbie.”

  “Mmm.” Adrian swiveled in his chair and leaned back, hands linked comfortably behind his head. “Not to mention the bar. D’you know, my love, if you cleared your desk once in a while, you’d not have to shift a mountain of papers every time you needed something. What have you lost this time?”

  I frowned. “The list of the students. Have you seen it?”

  “No, but it’s a simple thing to print you off another one.” Clicking into his database, he punched a key and set the printer humming. “What do you want it for? Counting numbers again? Because I think there were seventeen…”

  “Eighteen,” I corrected him. “And it’s not for that. Peter asked me if I’d go through all the names and group them into threes, for sharing tents.”

  “Oh, well, I can do that…”

  “Give it up.” I tore the paper from his hand and grinned. “You’d have them all mixed in together, boys among the girls—I know you.”

  “It is meant to be an educational experience.”

  “How they choose to educate themselves is their business. But when they sleep,” I said, with matronly firmness, “it’s boys with boys and girls with girls, and good strong canvas in between them.”

  “I’d like to live in a tent,” said Robbie, essentially pick
ing up his train of thought where he’d left off. “Davy’s got his own tent, did you see it? It’s a barrie big tent, with a window, and all.”

  “Yes, well, Davy is an idiot,” Adrian replied, rocking back in his soft padded chair.

  “Mr. Sutton-Clarke is only joking, Robbie,” I assured the boy, not looking up.

  “Mr. Sutton-Clarke,” said Adrian, “is wholly serious. Any man who throws over a nice wide bed in a warm room—with private toilet, I might add—in favor of a leaky tent on soggy ground, with students for neighbors, is indisputably an idiot.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Even if half those students are nubile young women?”

  “My dear girl, what can one do with a nubile young woman in a leaky tent? Besides, I don’t think that was the deciding factor where our Mr. Fortune was concerned.”

  I ignored the meaningful look. “No, you’re right. He just thought one of us should be there, close at hand, in case the students needed anything.”

  “And the location of the camp,” said Adrian slyly, “is so very convenient. You can see it from your bedroom window, can’t you? And vice versa.”

  Robbie came to my rescue. Clasping the post that divided two of the box-stall offices, he swung himself from side to side and looked at Adrian. “Why don’t they put the tents up here?”

  Adrian knew as well as I did why the camp was where it was, but after a quick glance at me he proceeded to give Robbie a more complex explanation. “Well, the ground is much more level over across the road, and the stream runs right along there, and it’s very important to keep tent pegs and open fires away from the digging site, and…”

  “Is it because the Sentinel doesn’t go over there?” Robbie wanted to know.

  Adrian paused, looking to me for assistance.

  “Some people,” I put in, “don’t like ghosts, Robbie. Peter thought it might be better if we put the students where the Sentinel wasn’t likely to bother them.”

  He thought about this. “He wouldn’t hurt them. He just watches, like.”

  Resisting the sudden urge to look over my own shoulder, I gathered up a stack of notes and shoved them into a drawer.

  “Some people,” I said evenly, “might not want to be watched.”

  He pondered this as well, then seemed to dismiss the idea as one of those queer conundrums of the adult world. Still swinging back and forth around his post, he watched me working at my desk. “I’m going to be a finds supervisor, when I grow up,” he announced.

  Adrian, in a dry voice, reminded Robbie he’d already promised himself to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

  “I can do both,” said Robbie, confidently. “Lifeboat men are volunteers, like, so I can work on the lifeboat, and be a finds supervisor, and live in a tent.”

  “I don’t suppose,” ventured Adrian, “you’d also want to learn computer maintenance?”

  “What?”

  “Because my computer’s going to need repair, if you keep banging round my wall like that.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Come on, then,” I invited, shifting my chair to make room for Robbie in my cubicle. Taking a few of the less impressive potsherds from the shelf beside me, I set them neatly on my desk and gave the boy a drawing tablet. “If you’re going to do my job, I’d best start training you. Draw me some pictures of those, all right?”

  He happily complied. Adrian, across the aisle, threw me a grateful glance and in the blissful silence gave his concentration back to the computer.

  It took me less than half an hour to sort the students into threesomes for their tents. To my relief the twelve young women and six young men divided evenly, not leaving any stragglers to clutter up my chart. As I finished jotting down the tent numbers beside the names, Robbie proudly thrust his drawings in front of me.

  “There,” he said.

  “Well done.” I studied the papers solemnly. “And what do you make of our finds, then, Mr. McMorran?”

  “They’re OK.”

  “Come now, dear boy,” I said, in a fair imitation of Dr. Connelly, “that’s not very scientific.”

  Robbie giggled.

  Continuing my gruff impersonation, I chose a sherd and handed it to him, peering closely at him through imaginary spectacles. “Now, what would your impressions be of this piece, for example?”

  Playing along with the game, Robbie frowned in a way that made his small face, for an instant, look like David’s. Rubbing his jaw as he’d seen David do a hundred times, he turned the broken bit of pottery over twice, and frowned still harder. “It’s from a pot, like.”

  “Brilliant!” I applauded him.

  “And it’s red.”

  “Well spotted! Anything else?”

  “He didn’t like it here.”

  Across the aisle the steady clacking sound of Adrian’s computer keyboard stopped abruptly, and in the small, surprised silence I dropped my Dr. Connelly impersonation. “Come again?”

  “The man who used this pot,” said Robbie, handing back the tiny Samian-ware fragment, “he didn’t like it here. He was always too cold, and his tooth hurt.”

  ***

  “Psychometry.”

  Peter rolled the word out in his glorious voice, balancing the heavy dictionary in one hand as he ran his finger down the definition. The daylight had grown flatter, which meant clouds were moving in, and the red walls of the sitting room looked cheerless until Peter put the light on, to read by. “Yes, psychometry. I thought that was it. ‘The divination of facts about an object from the touching of that object.’”

  “Well, whatever it’s called, Robbie can do it.” I tossed a little ball of paper onto the carpet for the cats to chase, and tucked my feet beneath me on the sofa, leaning back against the leather with a tired sigh. “Mind you, he didn’t rattle off the chap’s name, rank, and regiment, and of course we have no way of knowing just how accurate his observations are, but I just thought you’d like to know.”

  “Yes, quite.” He closed the dictionary and hefted it back into place on the shelves. “I’m sure it will be very useful, when we’re sifting through our finds.”

  I knew what he was thinking—I’d been thinking it myself, these past few hours. Through methods of pure science we could learn an awful lot about an artifact. Dating methods, simple or sophisticated, helped us fix an object in its place in time. We could learn where it was made, and what culture or group had made it, and identify the tools they’d used to make it with. Quite often, objects spoke to us about their owners. A pair of shoes, for example, when examined for signs of wear, might tell us that someone had walked with a limp. A shattered helmet might reveal, in gruesome detail, how the man who’d worn it had died. But how the man who’d worn it had felt… that was a mystery quite beyond the reach of science.

  I envied Robbie terribly. I’d spent years holding bits and pieces of the past, poking them and prodding them and willing them to tell me things. And now this child, this little child, just touched a potsherd and was instantly connected to the person who had held it several centuries before. How wonderful, I thought wistfully.

  Aloud, I said: “I did think I might keep a separate notebook, to record what Robbie says about the things we find. A sort of unofficial record, if you like, to complement the finds register. I know the pundits frown on things like this, but…”

  “Pundits,” Peter told me, “frown on everything. I think your notebook is a very sound idea. Would you like another drink?”

  “No thanks.” My half-closed eyes drifted guiltily past the empty glass on the coffee table. “One whisky’s quite enough for me, this time of day. I think you’ll have to wake me up for teatime, as it is.”

  “Whisky does have that effect,” Peter agreed, with an amiable nod. “I can’t abide the stuff myself. A traitorous thing for an Irishman to admi
t, I know, but there it is. I switched to vodka in my Cambridge days. The chap I roomed with fancied himself a Marxist, very strange lad, always talking revolution. He’d have gone to Russia himself, I imagine, only he couldn’t bear the cold. Das Kapital and vodka was the closest he could get.” Peter smiled to himself, remembering, as he poured himself another measure. “Symbols,” he said, “do intrigue me.” Lowering himself into his customary chair, he casually crossed his legs and sent me a rather naughty look. “For instance, I can’t help noticing you’ve traded in your English gin for good stout Scottish whisky.”

  I closed my eyes and opted not to respond to that, blaming the good stout Scottish whisky for the growing flame of heat along my cheekbones.

  “Rather suggestive, that,” he went on, and from the tone of his voice I knew that he was now speaking to the cats, as if I were invisible. “Don’t you think so, Murphy my boy? I wonder what—”

  His words were interrupted by the rhythmic crunch of footsteps coming up the gravel drive. Not Adrian, I thought. I’d left him up at the Principia, and these footsteps were coming from the opposite direction. At any rate, they were too quick to be Adrian’s, just as they were too heavy to be Robbie’s and too even to belong to Wally, who walked with a distinctive scuffing sound.

  The front door banged and I opened my eyes, careful not to look at Peter as David materialized in the doorway of the sitting room.

  “Heyah,” the deep voice greeted us briskly. “Getting drunk again, are you?”

  Peter smiled archly. “Would you like one?”

  “Wouldn’t mind.” Crossing the worn carpet, David helped himself at the drinks cabinet and came to sit beside me, sagging into the sofa and stretching out his legs. The little cat, Charlie, attacked his bootlaces. David tasted his whisky with a satisfied air, and turned his attention to Peter. “Well, the tents are up, if you’d like to have a look.”

  “Splendid. Six tents, were there?”

  The dark head nodded. “Six, plus mine, plus the big dining tent. We’ve some fair puzzled cows in the pasture next door.”