The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  I watched, concerned, as a single tear traced a crooked path down one small freckled cheek. “Robbie, it’s all right, you needn’t—”

  “Claudia,” he whispered, quite as if I hadn’t spoken, and his face collapsed in anguish. “So sorry, Claudia.”

  “Right.” Brian pitched his spent cigarette into the sink and pushed himself away from the worktop, his eyes wary. “That’s enough, I think.”

  I nodded agreement. Stretching out my hand for the pendant, I sent the boy a bright smile. “That’s wonderful, Robbie, you’ve been a great help. I’ll just take this back up to the finds room, now…”

  “No!” It was a violent, unexpected response, almost a shout, and even Brian looked startled.

  “Now, lad…”

  Robbie ignored him, fixing me with an imploring gaze.

  “This can’t go in the finds room. It’s for protection. You don’t understand.”

  “Robbie—”

  “No.” Wincing, he shut his eyes tightly and shook his head once, as though trying to clear it. “Must keep my promise… must protect…”

  “Now.” Brian looked from his son’s face to mine. “It stops now.”

  “Robbie,” I said, “it’s all right, love. I’m perfectly safe. Just give me the—”

  The boy’s head jerked backwards as if a string had pulled it, and his eyes rolled. “Periculosa,” he said, in a hollow voice that sounded nothing like his own. “Via est periculosa.”

  “No, you don’t!” Brian surged forward, brimming with anger. “You let the lad be!”

  Stunned, I was opening my mouth to argue my innocence when Brian turned and roared again into the empty air around us. “D’you hear me, you great bloody bastard? You let my son be!”

  The emptiness blinked. A sharp gust of wind shook the glass in the windows, and Robbie, the tear-stains drying now, forgotten, on his cheeks, turned to look up at his father. “Who are you yelling at, Dad?”

  Brian drew in a steadying breath. “No one, Robbie. Just yelling.”

  “Oh.”

  “Give that back to Miss Grey now, there’s a good lad.”

  Robbie handed the pendant back placidly, and I took it with trembling fingers. “Thank you.” My hand closed for a moment round the small raised image of Fortuna, around the charm of good luck that a ghost had meant for me to find. For protection. And now he’d handed me a warning, too, through Robbie. In Latin, periculosa meant dangerous.

  Nearby a match flared as Brian lit another cigarette, and his eyes found mine in silence over Robbie’s head.

  ***

  “Via est periculosa?” Peter rolled his tongue around the word, considering. “He actually said that, did he?”

  “Yes.” I leaned back into the sofa and stroked the gray cat’s ears, grateful to be back in the sitting room at Rosehill with its cheerful clutter everywhere and Adrian and Fabia slumped in armchairs on either side of me, drinks in hand. My own dry sherry had been sorely needed. I was halfway down it already, and I hadn’t been back a quarter of an hour.

  “How curious,” Peter said. He was sitting in his own chair with Murphy draped across his knees, as usual. “I wonder what he meant.”

  “Gosh,” said Adrian, stretching his legs out and tipping his head back. “Let’s think this one through. He arranges for you to find a medallion of Fortuna, or Fortune, then tells you, ‘That way’s dangerous.’ Now who could he be warning you about, I wonder?”

  I rolled my eyes sideways to look at him. “Must you always be annoying?”

  Fabia frowned. “Davy’s not dangerous.”

  Adrian, swirling his drink with great dignity, remarked that it depended entirely upon one’s point of view.

  Fabia made a great show of studying Adrian as she lifted her own glass. “Your eyes are awfully green, aren’t they?”

  “Frequently.” Across the room their eyes met, and she looked away abruptly.

  “Via est periculosa,” Peter repeated, thoughtfully. “Of course, via has several meanings, doesn’t it? The road, the way, the method.”

  “‘The road is dangerous’?” Fabia tried the translation. “That sounds more a warning against your driving, Adrian.”

  “Very funny.”

  She curled herself into her armchair, like one of the cats.

  “Where is Davy, anyway?”

  Adrian shrugged. “Still playing scoutmaster, out in the field. He’ll be in when he feels like it.”

  Out in the field…

  I closed my eyes a moment, fighting the image that formed in my brain—the image of a solitary Roman soldier walking back and forth across the waving grass for all eternity, unheard and unseen, with no companions but the silent dead. How lonely that would be, I thought… how horribly lonely. I tried to clear my mind, but the soldier would not leave. He walked a little farther, looked across the field and thought he saw his sister standing, waiting for him, only it wasn’t her… not Claudia… a young woman with long hair, but not Claudia. Close enough, perhaps, to stir the coals of memory. Did ghosts have memories? I wondered. Did they love?

  I opened my eyes, and knew from the dreamy expression on Peter’s face that he was wondering the same thing. “Extraordinary,” was his final pronouncement. “Quite extraordinary.”

  “Yes.” Adrian looked at me, lazily. “So I suppose Brian’s banned you from the premises now, has he?”

  “Not at all. He handled the whole thing rather well, I thought. No recriminations.”

  Peter arched an eyebrow. “My dear girl, you do work miracles, don’t you? First Connelly, and now Brian. You have a great facility for dealing with difficult men.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at that. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  Adrian cast a sharp eye in my direction. “Watch it.”

  Fabia leaned forward. “Have you still got the pendant, Verity? I haven’t had a chance to really look at it yet.”

  I shook my head. “I gave it to one of my students, to put in the finds room.”

  “Trusting soul,” Adrian said.

  “There’s a lock on the finds room door,” I defended my action.

  “I meant giving it to a student. I’m surprised you gave it to anyone, actually, after what Robbie said.” His tone was dry. “If it’s supposed to be keeping you safe…”

  “I feel safer,” I said, “with it locked in the finds room, thanks all the same.”

  Peter stretched his hand out. “May I see your notes again, my dear? There’s one point in there that makes me rather curious.”

  “Of course. They’re on the table there, beside you.”

  “Ah.” He flipped the page and frowned. “Yes, here it is. ‘He said the ship would come’… that’s the bit I’m after. ‘The ship.’ Now, I wonder…?” And with that he lapsed into a sort of trance, unspeaking, drinking steadily and staring at the carpet.

  Archaeologists, I thought, were a breed apart. There was David, still out in the field in a bone-chilling wind with the rain coming on, because he didn’t want to stop what he was doing; and here sat Peter, completely oblivious to the world around him while he rebuilt the past in his mind.

  Neither one of them sat down to supper.

  David stayed out until it grew dark, then came and grabbed a plate of food to take up to his desk in the Principia. He took a plate in to Peter as well, but when I stopped by the sitting room later I found that plate untouched, the meat and vegetables turned cold and unappetizing. Peter, lost in his own world, didn’t seem to mind. He still had Murphy on his lap, and the vodka bottle was very nearly empty. He surfaced at the sound of my voice.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Good night,” I repeated.

  “Not off to bed already, are you?”

  “Well, it is”—I c
hecked my watch—“nearly half-past eleven, and I was up rather late last night.”

  “Oh.” He sounded disappointed, and I hesitated.

  “I suppose… I suppose I could stay up a little longer, if you wanted company.”

  “No, no.” One hand waved the offer aside, with a tragic air. “No, I’m quite all right, here by myself.”

  “In fact,” I said, more firmly, looking at his face, “I rather fancy a cup of coffee.”

  “No need to trouble yourself…”

  “Or perhaps a drink.”

  He beamed at me, delighted. “Well, if you’re absolutely certain. Because I’ve just been sitting here thinking, you know, about the fate of the Hispana, and I’ve hit upon a most intriguing theory…”

  Chapter 31

  “Has Peter always drunk like that?” I asked David’s mother, the following Wednesday.

  “Like what?”

  “Well, huge amounts.”

  Nancy Fortune smiled and stepped backwards, hammer in hand, to be sure that the picture she’d just hung was level. We’d been left to ourselves on the mezzanine floor of the Eyemouth Museum, in the large bright room used for temporary displays. “Aye, he does fair like his vodka,” she admitted, “but he holds it well, he always has. You’ll not see Peter act the fool. And you’ll rarely see him take a drink alone. If he does that,” she warned me, “it means deep thought, and that’s when you want to watch out, because when he’s done thinking he…”

  “Talks,” I supplied, rubbing my head at the memory. “Yes, I know. He kept me up till dawn, last week.”

  “Had a new theory, did he?” Her dancing eyes held sympathy. “He does like to talk them through. Used to be me that bore the brunt of it. He’d ring me up at all hours—still did, up until a few years back, but after the first heart attack he stopped all that. Never tells me anything, now, for fear it might excite me. And Davy’s just as bad.” She hammered in another nail, with a vengeance. “If it wasn’t for you and Robbie I’d not have a clue what was going on up at Rosehill.”

  I caught the frustration in her voice. I’d never been able to understand why she didn’t visit, or why Peter and David didn’t seem to want her at the house. David loved his mother, and Peter was terribly fond of her, and her interest in our work was undeniable. I fitted my back to the wall, contemplatively. “Why don’t you come up and see for yourself? I’d be happy to show you just what we’ve been up to.”

  Her mouth pulled down at the corners. “Then Peter’d have a coronary, worrying I’d overdo the walking. No, until the damfool doctor says I’m fit to run a mile, I’d not be welcome at Rosehill.” She leveled the second picture and looked at me. “There, how’s that looking?”

  “Lovely.”

  It really was, which relieved me no end. I’d only met the head of the Eyemouth Museum briefly this morning, but she was clearly expecting great things from the “visiting expert” that David’s mother had brought in to help, and I’d been trying my best to live up to her expectations. Attractive exhibits, unfortunately, had never been my forte. I was fine when it came to the actual artifacts—how to support them, what light levels to use, that sort of thing—but I fell all to pieces on proper design.

  Still, I hadn’t done too badly. The jumble of photographs and long formal gowns that we’d started with earlier had become a rather professional-looking display that traced the history of Herring Queen Week.

  And Herring Queen Week, David’s mother had informed me, was the big event in Eyemouth’s summer calendar.

  From what I’d heard, the traditional choosing of a local girl to be the new year’s Herring Queen sounded rather splendid—the girl and her attendant maids in gorgeous gowns and sashes, the careful ritual played out against a general air of festival. David’s mother had done her best to explain what went on, but in the end she’d said I ought to ask Jeannie. “Jeannie was Herring Queen, she’ll be able to tell you all about it. This was her frock, the purple one. I mind her mother making it.”

  At the British Museum I’d handled some marvelous artifacts—ancient mosaics and old Roman glassware, rare things beyond price. But the feeling I’d had when I’d set them on display was nothing compared to the satisfaction it gave me to take that one Herring Queen gown—a hideous flounced thing in grape-colored taffeta—and carefully arrange it in its place in the exhibition.

  Local history museums, I thought, did have advantages over their larger cousins. They were, if nothing else, a great deal friendlier. I didn’t belong to Eyemouth, as the locals would say—but standing here in the fishing museum with Nancy Fortune’s cheerful talk like a bracing breeze off the sea and Jeannie’s gown on a stand in the corner and the whole past of the community pressing in around me, I did feel a curious sense of belonging.

  It crept over me with the comfort of a woolly blanket, and I snuggled deep for a moment before practicality drove me to push it aside. You’re only here for the summer, really, I reminded myself. When the digging season ended and the field crew had disbanded for the unworkable winter months, I’d have to go back home, and then… well, there was always Dr. Lazenby’s new dig in Alexandria—I couldn’t keep avoiding him forever. Sooner or later he would track me down, and I would have to give the man an answer. Alexandria. I sighed. But then, the whole point of my leaving the British Museum had been the quest for change, for new adventures, for…

  “…a breath of air,” Nancy Fortune was saying.

  I looked up. “Sorry?”

  She smiled at my inattentiveness. “That’s perfect proof, that. I just said we’ve been cruived in too long: four hours of this work is far too long. D’ye fancy a bit of a walk?”

  I had grown accustomed to the wind and almost welcomed it as we stepped outside, lifting my face to the freshening scent of the sea and the sun that fell warm on my skin. Now, in midsummer, the streets seemed too crowded, and the harbor behind us bustled with the preparations for Saturday’s crowning of the Herring Queen, and so instead of walking in that direction, we turned and went through the town’s center, coming out at length onto the Bantry—the smooth paved promenade that ran from Eyemouth harbor to the beach, along the sea.

  There were people here as well, but not so many, and the sound of their chatter was drowned by the roar of the surf. The tide, coming in, rode on high rolling waves that broke like thunder against the harbor mouth. It proved too much to resist for one young girl playing at the end of the sea wall. Laughing, she darted like a bullet back and forth through the narrow gap between the wall and the harbor’s parade, testing her speed against the incoming waves and getting well soaked in the process.

  Below us, the empty beach, growing narrower by the minute, curved away to meet the bloodred cliffs that rose immovable against the sea, supporting the ruins of Eyemouth Fort, the playground of David’s childhood.

  I sighed, a little happy sigh, and rested my hands on the smooth stone wall that ran waist-high along the Bantry. “What a beautiful day,” I said.

  David’s mother smiled. “I take it you’re not keen to get back?”

  For an instant I thought she meant back to London, and fancied she had read my mind, but then I realized she was only speaking of Rosehill, and my work.

  “Peter did say I should take the day,” I told her. “He thinks I’ve been looking tired, lately.”

  “And small surprise, if he’s been keeping you up nights expounding his theories.”

  Conscience and fondness made me come to Peter’s defense. “It was a good theory, actually. Would you like to hear it?”

  “If you think my heart can stand it,” she said, leaning beside me on the sea wall.

  “Right. Well, you know we found the gold medallion, with the image of Fortuna on it?”

  “Aye, Robbie told me.”

  “There’s a bit more story to the piece than even Robbie knows,” I
said, and proceeded to fill her in on all the details, before moving on. “And so after I came back up from Rose Cottage, that’s when Peter began to think deeply, as you put it.” My lips twitched. “He thought himself right through a whole bottle of vodka.”

  “It’s not uncommon. But I’ll lay odds his mind touched on genius.”

  “Well, he does think that the reason why we haven’t yet found any trace of bodies is because the men were cremated. You know, the fact that Rosehill used to be ‘Rogue’s Hill,’ which could come from rogus, or funeral pyre.”

  “That would fit with Robbie saying that the Sentinel put his friend on the fire,” she agreed. “But still, there were thousands of men.”

  “Yes, I know, but… maybe I should just run through it all, like Peter did, from the beginning. We’re assuming that the Ninth came marching north and set up camp at Rosehill, within the ramparts of the old Agricolan vexillation fortress, which presumably had disappeared by then, right?”

  “Aye.”

  “And one of the reasons Agricola probably built here in the first place was because of the harbor,” I said. “The Roman navy had to be able to send in ships, to supply the legions on the northward march.” The critical role that the navy had played in the conquest of Britain was all too often overlooked. Absorbed as I was in land-based excavations, I’ll admit I hadn’t thought much about the naval connection myself until Peter had leaped on that statement of Robbie’s.

  “Robbie mentioned a ship that didn’t come,” I explained. “And Peter thinks it might have been a supply ship. Now, if the men depended on that ship, and if they were besieged or something, in their camp…”

  She nodded. “Aye, they might have taken ill, or starved.”

  “Or even mutinied. The Ninth,” I said, “did have a history of mutiny, as I recall. At any rate, they probably weren’t in any shape to ward off their attackers, when the final battle happened.”

  She admitted that, as theories went, it wasn’t bad. “So what became of the survivors?”