Authors: Susanna Kearsley
Peter seemed to age before my eyes, his features collapsing with the weight of painful memory. "Fabia," he tried to explain, "your father was ill..."
"He was not."
"He was ill but I loved him."
"Liar!" She hissed the word. "You never loved Daddy as much as you loved your precious work, your precious reputation. He told me." Her eyes, filled with hate, found her grandfather's stricken ones. "He told me everything."
The lights flickered briefly and I suddenly realized how dark it had grown outside—the shadows closed around us and vanished again as the warm glow hummed to life. And then the sky exploded, and the storm came down like vengeance.
XXXV
Jeannie, blown into the big room on a wet and swirling wind, seemed scarcely to notice the tension. She was too busy looking at Brian. "Where's Robbie?"
Forgetting the drama in progress, he turned. "Is he not with you?"
She shook her head. "I thought you had him down the harbor."
The thunder crashed directly overhead, and Kip cringed under my chair, whining. I'd forgotten him completely. I reached down to stroke his head, reassuring him softly.
"Right." Brian crushed the dead cigarette under his heel. "I'll go and have a look. Did you ring around his friends?"
"I couldn't," she said. "It's this wind, see. Our phone line's been out of order since breakfast."
"It can't be out," said Adrian. "Fortune's mother rang not long ago, from her cottage."
But Jeannie disputed the fact. "She couldn't have. I've been checking the line myself, every ten minutes, like."
"But Fabia said..."
"No one rang," Jeannie told him a second time, positive.
In the space of an instant my own mind sifted through a hundred things that Fabia had said, and fitted the statements
together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I didn't like the picture that was forming.
Above all, I remembered her saying that the perfect revenge on one's enemy would be to take from him everything and everyone he loved, yet make him go on living. Everything Peter loved ... well, that would be his work, his reputation. She'd already tried to take that. And as for the "everyone" ... My mind balked, not wanting to follow that thought, but I forced it.
If Fabia knew what her father had known—if he had, as she said, told her everything—then she knew about Peter and Nancy. Was she trying to harm Nancy, somehow? And had she needed to get David out of the way, first, by inventing that telephone call; by sending David out alone on the road to St. Abbs?
The storm rose and wailed like a living thing, beating its fists on the shuddering walls, and I clenched my fist, convulsively.
The road.
The road is dangerous.
"Oh, God," I breathed, as the shred of doubt grew and swelled to certainty.
My head jerked round, to stare at the tiny gold medallion sitting atop my disordered papers. The Fortuna pendant. It had been on David's desk, this morning—that's what Peter had told me.
David's
desk.
Oh, how could I have been so stupid? Stupid, stupid— thinking that the warning was for me. It was David that the Sentinel had tried to warn. David who had found the pendant in the first place, not by chance. What had Robbie said?
It's for protection. You don't understand.
And now, too late, I understood.
I understood why Fabia had chosen the nasty, unlikeable Mick to be her latest boyfriend. As Brian had told Adrian, Fabia's interest only lasted so long as the men were useful. And Mick, at the moment, was terribly useful. She needed a violent, unprincipled man to help her destroy what her grandfather loved. She needed a man who could murder.
And now that same man, I felt sure, was somewhere near St. Abbs, where Nancy Fortune—an old woman with a weak heart—sat waiting out the storm in her cottage, alone and
unprotected. And where David, unaware of the danger, would shortly walk into an ambush.
I was not aware of moving, but I heard my own voice saying "No" quite loudly, and somebody reached to take my arm, but I pushed them away and was through the great arched doorway before anyone could stop me. Kip howled after me, and I thought I heard Adrian shouting my name, but the sound of the wind swallowed both of them and I was running, running, the rain in my eyes and the bitter wind tearing the breath from my throat.
The Jaguar roared to life at the first twist of the dangling key. I hauled at the wheel, spinning gravel, and took the drive at twice the prudent speed.
The students had abandoned their tents in the downpour and were scurrying across the road toward the safety of Rosehill, holding their coats above their heads and screaming with laughter. I swerved to go around them and the bonnet kissed the big stone gatepost with an ugly grating sound, but I didn't slow the car at all and two of the students were forced to jump clear.
I barely noticed.
I was too busy praying. "Please," I whispered to the furies that were beating on the windscreen. "Please let me be wrong."
The rain was so thick I could scarcely see and the windows steamed, but I kept my foot to the floor through the village of Coldingham, taking the hills and the turnings blindly, letting the tires shriek their protest through a stunning arc of spray.
Biting my lip until I tasted blood, I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. "Please let me be wrong."
But as I came out onto the Coldingham Moor, the wiper blades swept cleanly through the pounding flood of water and I saw what I'd been fearing.
He had lost control of the Range Rover, and it had rolled, coming to rest on its battered roof. One metal door, bizarrely twisted, lay drowning in the river that had been the road. What remained of the windscreen was pure white with splinters, like smashed river ice. There was no sign of life.
The Jaguar spun out as I hit the brakes, and I covered my face with my hands. When I lowered them a minute later,
they were wet. The car had come to rest against a rail fence at the far edge of the road, directly across from the battered Range Rover. I could see the empty seats. Fumbling with my door latch, I stumbled out, uncaring of the storm.
"David!" I screamed in panic, raising my hands in a futile defense against the lashing of the wind. He wasn't in the Range Rover. My hands scraped raw against the battered metal as I pulled the vehicle apart in search of him, but he wasn't there. Sobbing now, my body trembling with shock and pain, I turned away and staggered through the tangle of gorse and thorn at the side of the road. "David," I called again, but the storm stole my cry and I sank to the ground, defeated.
My hair was streaming water and I couldn't see before me and my hands made bloody marks upon my water-plastered clothes. The wind passed through me like a frozen blade. I shivered.
A deep voice called me, indistinct. I raised an anguished face. But it wasn't David. It wasn't David.
It wasn't anybody. A jagged spear of lightning showed the empty moor, the blowing thorn. But as the thunder rolled and died I heard the voice again, strangely hollow, as though straining to reach me across a great distance. "Claudia."
Struggling to resolve itself, the faint transparent outline of a man took form and faded in the slashing silver rain. And as I blinked against the stinging wetness, he made a supreme effort and his shadow reappeared. Dark eyes, not wholly human, met mine, softened.
He raised what might have been an arm, a hand, as if he meant to touch me, and I saw the effort this time, saw him fight to frame the words.
"Non lacrimas, Claudia."
Don't cry.
I felt a gentle trail of ice across my cheek, as if he sought to brush the tears away, and then I half-believed the shadow smiled. “
Non lacrimas,"
he said again, and melted in the rain.
Afraid to move, I went on staring at the place where he had been, unmindful of the screaming wind, the dark and rolling sky. The lightning split the clouds again, and flashed across the roughened ground, and all at once I felt the breath tear from me in a sob of pure relief.
A man was coming across the moor.
He looked enormous to my eyes, a great dark giant moving over bracken and thorn with an effortless stride. It was as if the hourglass had tipped and the sands were spilling back and I was sitting on the bus again, and watching for the first time while he came to me across the wild moor.
He was carrying something, wrapped up in a bright yellow mac. Some animal, with legs that dangled.
I saw him stop, and standing square against the storm he stared at the Jaguar, its bright red bonnet buried at a crazy angle in the rail fence. Then his chin jerked upwards and I knew he'd seen me, crouched amid the wreckage of the Range Rover, and even as I raised my voice to call him he began to run.
I couldn't seem to let him go. We were safe inside the Jaguar, warm and safe and dripping on the leather, but my hands had fastened to his wet shirt and I couldn't let him go.
David, one-handed, had made use of Adrian's cellphone to check that his mother was safe, and now he rolled me sideways so he could replace the handset in its cradle. We were both of us wedged in the passenger seat, but he didn't seem to mind. Flipping a lever he slid the seat back to make room for his legs, and settled me against his chest, one arm wrapped warm around my shoulders.
The bundle he'd brought with him sat propped on the driver's seat, small head lolled sideways, and I reached my hand to smooth one darkly dripping curl away from Robbie's pallid face. He was unhurt, and breathing normally, and tucked within the folds of David's raincoat he slept soundly, deeply, unaware.
Which was just as well, I thought. The things I'd said to David as we'd clung to each other outside in the rain ... such things were not intended to be overheard by anyone. Least of all an eight-year-old.
I frowned. "You're sure he's all right?"
"Aye. Though how a wee laddie like that got himself all the way out here .. ." David put his own hand out to pull the folds of the raincoat tighter around Robbie's shoulders,
then closed his fingers around my own and drew my hand back, away from the child's face. "You'll wake him if you keep that up."
I stopped fussing, and snuggled against David's heartbeat. "It's only that he's so pale."
"I'm the one that should be pale. I nearly ran him over. The lad bolted clear across the road in front of me—fair scared me to death. I barely had time to see that it was Robbie afore I rolled the Rover, and after I got myself clear of that mess, I had to go chasing after him. I couldn't leave him out on the moor in this storm," he explained. I felt his chin turn against my hair as his gaze drifted back to the sleeping boy. "I wanted to take my hand off his face, to begin with. I might have been killed."
His voice trailed away and his chin shifted a fraction further, so he could look to where the moor stretched out toward St. Abbs, beyond the fogging window.
"I might have been killed," he repeated.
I held him tighter. I had explained, as best I could, what had happened, but I knew my explanation had left much to be desired. My words had tumbled out in no specific order, incoherent, a confusing narrative that leapt from Fabia to the Fortuna pendant, with yawning gaps between. I'd have to do a better job, I told myself, and sort things out more clearly, so that he could understand them.
But not now. Not now. There would be time enough for talking, when we all got back to Rosehill.
"David?"
"Aye?"
"I think I've lost the car keys."
He laughed. "Not to worry. They'd not be much use, from what I can see. We're well stuck in this fence."
I moved my head, to look out in dismay at the crumpled bonnet of the Jaguar, but David's hand in my hair drew me back again, holding me close while the gusting wind set the car rocking. "It's all right," he assured me. "If I ken my mother, we'll not have to wait long for the cavalry."
He barely got the sentence out before the blue lights flashed behind us and the storm itself was drowned beneath the stronger wail of sirens.
REQUIESCAT
.. ..and trust
With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved
Tennyson, "In Memoriam", CXXX
XXXVI
The storm had passed by teatime but the sullen sky, flat gray and dreary, pressed heavily upon the sodden Melds and dripping walls of Rosehill.
"For God's sake," Peter said, "do put a light on, somebody." Stretching himself in his cracked leather armchair he took up his half-finished drink and settled his free hand on Murphy's black back. "I've had enough of shadows, for one day."
I reached to switch the lamp on, and the red walls warmed. The gray cat Charlie, on my lap, stirred and blinked in the sudden light, then burrowed her small face against
my
leg with a tiny sigh. She and I, I thought, were rather the odd ones out in this room—two females being suffered by a gathering of men. But then this was, essentially, a man's room. Wally, with his feet up in one corner, eyes half closed against the drifting haze of his cigarette, looked perfectly at home here, as did David, slouched beside me on the old worn leather sofa, one arm slung lazily along my shoulders while the other cradled Robbie close against his other side.
Robbie, wide awake now, showed no ill effects from his morning's adventure. He couldn't remember leaving Rose-hill, or walking cross-country to Coldingham Moor—a trip
that must surely have taken him two and a half hours, by David's estimate. Nor could he even clearly tell us why he'd done it. "The Sentinel needed me," was the only explanation he could give.
I
suspected that the Sentinel, lacking human hands, had needed Robbie to fetch the Fortuna medallion from the finds room, as well, and leave it on David's desk. But Robbie couldn't recall being in the Principia, either. His memory of the day's events were blurred at best. "Was I really in Mr. Sutton-Clarke's car?"
"Indeed you were." Adrian, lounging in a corner chair beyond the reach of lamplight, chased down another headache tablet with a swallow of stiff gin. "I've got the water-stains on the seats to prove it."
Adrian, I thought, was bearing up remarkably well, all things considered. I'd expected histrionics when we'd arrived at Rosehill with the Jaguar in tow, but Adrian had merely looked in mournful silence at the dents and scratches, then he'd sighed and turned to David. "Well, at least
you're
in one piece. That's something, anyway." With which surprising speech he'd left us, and gone back inside the house.
David had raised his eyebrows. "What was that, d'ye think?"
"A beginning," I'd told him, linking my arm through his with a smile.
Adrian, I knew, had meant it as a peacemaking of sorts; a gesture of conciliation and acceptance. Not that he and David were ever likely to become firm friends, I admitted, as I looked from one face to the other now in the cozy red-walled sitting room, but still... I had seen stranger things today, and could no longer call anything impossible.
The comforting thing about the past, to me, had always been that it repeated itself in predictable patterns. One knew which result to expect from which circumstance. But today, here at Rosehill, the past had come loose like a runaway cart and the present ran on in confusion, a horse still in harness with nothing behind it and no one controlling the reins.
And so Adrian, who had always read me the riot act if I so much as slammed his car door, was now sitting across
from me, holding his tongue. And Wally, who had always hated Brian, had spent the past hour praising what his son-in-law had done.
And what Brian had done, I decided, was in itself a fine example of how the patterns of the past had been disrupted. Brian, selfish and conceited, who lived at his own whims for pleasure and gain, had today risked his own neck to save Peter's. Once word had reached him that Robbie was safe, he had set about clearing the cellar of anything incriminating. At the height of the storm and in three separate carloads, he'd shuttled the crates of vodka and cigarettes from Rosehill House to their new hiding place, in the town. "And efter a' that," Wally'd told us, complaining, "the dampt exciseman didna even come."
But at least, if they did come, the house would be clean. There'd be no damage done, now, to Peter's credibility—no scandalous headlines, no ruinous charges. The only news would be that Peter Quinnell’s granddaughter, still suffering from nerves after her father's suicide, had been admitted to an undisclosed private hospital, where she'd be receiving counseling and treatment.
"So it was Fabia," said David, "who did all that messing about with the computers."
"And mislaid Peter's notebook," I added. "And told Connelly about our ghost hunt in the field, that night, saying it was all Peter's idea. She would have done anything, I think, to be sure our dig didn't succeed."
Peter, from his corner, gently reminded me that he, and not the dig, had been the true target of Fabia's campaign of sabotage. "At the end of the day," he said, "it all comes down to her wanting to discredit me, to see me—as she put it—suffer."
Had she been able to see him now, I thought, she would have felt quite satisfied. The lines of suffering were still etched plainly in his handsome face, for all of us to see. Still, Peter, I reflected, had remained consistent in his actions. Saddened but unbowed, he'd spent the afternoon dispensing drinks and comfort, telephoning doctors, taking care of
everything. It was, as Nancy Fortune said, his nature—taking care of things.
"Good heavens," I said, suddenly remembering. "Your mother."
David looked at me. "Whose mother?"
"Yours. We forgot all about her. She'll still be waiting for us to come and fetch her at the cottage, won't she?"
"Aye, well," David shrugged, "I can't do much of anything until Jeannie and Brian come back—I've no car."
Peter eyed him thoughtfully. "I really think, my boy, it might be best to let someone else collect your mother. You've had bad luck with borrowed cars, today."
David raised his drink defensively. "It wasn't me that wrapped the Jaguar around a fence post.''
"No, but it was your fault Verity drove out there in the first place," Peter pointed out, smoothly logical. "So you see ..."
Robbie interrupted, twisting to look up at David's face. "You didn't take the necklace," he said, as if that explained everything. "You were supposed to wear it, like."
Besieged on all sides, David drank his whiskey with a faint smile. "Aye, well, next time we're talking to your Sentinel, Robbie, you mind me to tell him why no self-respecting archaeologist wears artifacts."
"Why?" Robbie asked.
Peter explained. "Because we'd damage them. We shouldn't dig things up at all, unless we can take care of them." He was silent a moment, mulling something over. "Can he really hear us, when we speak? The Sentinel, I mean."
Robbie nodded. "He can see you and all. Only you've got to speak Latin, or he doesn't ken what you're saying. / can say 'hello'," he announced proudly.
"Well done," said Peter vaguely, deep in thought. The crunch of tires on the gravel roused him, and he raised his head expectantly. "Ah, here are Jeannie and Brian now."
Jeannie looked relieved to have the whole thing over with. "It wasn't so bad," she said. "It was just an identification, like."
"It did take us a while, though," Brian admitted. "Just to be sure, with the bandages and all. What the devil did your mother hit him with, anyway?"
"Teapot," said David. "Her famous tin teapot"
Peter smiled, faintly. "And I rather suspect it was full at the time."
Brian winced. "Bloody hell!"
"Will they have enough," asked Adrian, "to make the charges stick?"
"Oh, aye," Brian nodded.
"What makes you so certain?"
"Well, for one thing," said Brian, leaning back with a thoughtful expression, "the police are going to find Mick's caravan is filled near to bursting with black market vodka and fags."
David looked at him. "Brian, you didn't"
"I did. He's a right sodding bastard, and he needs to get more than your mother's blinking teapot in his eye."
Peter stopped swirling the vodka in his glass, and glanced at Jeannie, suddenly remembering. “I do hale to ask you this, my dear, because I know you've just got back, but would you mind very much driving over to fetch Nancy?"
"Of course, not." Picking up the car keys, she held out her free hand.”Come on, Robbie, let's go get Granny Nan."
"And don't take her to Saltgreens. You're to bring her back here," Peter said. "For dinner. It's high time she had a look at what we've been up to."
So much for Peter remaining predictable, I thought Even Jeannie stared at him for a long moment, and her slowly spreading smile was beautiful. "Aye," she said, "I think you're right."
"Any chance of a lift into town?" Adrian asked, rising with a self-indulgent stretch. "I have a dinner dale myself, as I recall, with a rather smashing redhead."
I sent him a mildly suspicious glance. "One of my finds assistants is a redhead."
"Is
she? What a coincidence."
"Hmm. Just see that she's not late for work in the morning, will you?”
“My dear girl," he asked me, "do I look like the sort of person who'd corrupt an innocent student?"
None of us answered him, but his words set Peter off on a new train of thought. "The students," he mused. "I must go and check on them, see that they're comfortable. I don't believe we'll have the tents set up again before tomorrow, but—"
"Aye, well," said David, stretching himself, "maybe Wally and I can go down now and take a look around at the damage."
Brian went with them. Which left only me, sitting there with the cats, in no hurry to do much of anything.
It was the telephone, jangling in the front hall, that finally got me off the sofa. With a sigh, I lifted the receiver, wishing the thing could have stayed out of order till dinnertime, at least.
"Verity?" A voice I knew. "It's Howard. You're not an easy woman to get hold of, are you? I've been trying for
days,"
he complained. "Your sister thinks I'm some sort of maniac, you know."
I smiled. "Yes, well. She's a bit protective, is Alison."
"Protective," Howard said, "is not the word. I'd rattier face a Rottweiler."
"She did tell me you'd called," I defended my sister.
"Well, I should hope so. I told her it was damned important."
"What was?"
"I've been feeling like an idiot all week."
"Howard..." I warned him.
"What? Oh, sorry. I'll get to the point. Do you remember those photographs you sent me a while back—the Samian sherds?"
"Yes."
"Yes." He coughed. "The thing is, I was clearing my desk up last Friday... you know how my desk gets, and people had begun to, well,
say
things... and anyway, I found the envelope you'd sent the photos in, and I was just about to tear it up when I realized there was a photograph still stuck inside it. Got wedged in the bottom somehow, against the cardboard backing, and I simply hadn't noticed ..."
"Howard." I cut him off again. "What are you trying to tell me?"
"I told you those sherds were Agricolan, didn't I?"
"Aren't they?"
"Yes, the ones that I saw were," he told me. "Of course they were. But this last one, darling... the one in the photograph I
didn't
see, it's entirely different."
Remembering the one sherd that I'd thought was younger than the others, I gripped the handset tighter, hoping. "In what way?"
"The rim pattern is quite distinctive, you know, and ... well, I'd have to see the actual sherd, naturally, before I could give it a positive date ... but it certainly couldn't have been made before
AD
115."
My heart gave a tiny, joyful leap. "You're sure?"
"It is my job," he reminded me dryly.
"Not before 115?"
"Not a chance."
I smiled, not caring that he couldn't see it. "Oh Howard, that's wonderful."
"Helpful, is it?"
"You have no idea."
"You still owe me five pounds," he said. "As I recall, the bet was that you'd find a marching camp, and the word down here is you've found a good deal more."
He meant our digging team, of course, but the statement struck me personally. "Yes," I told him. "Yes, I have."
"Well, well," said Howard.
"What?"
"Nothing. Look, just send that sherd to me tomorrow, will you?"
"Right."
"And my fiver."
"And your fiver," I promised. "And Howard?"
"Yes?"
"If you're talking to Dr. Lazenby ..."
"Yes?"
"Would you tell him I'm not interested in Alexandria?"
A pause. "Are you ill?"
"No, I'm perfectly healthy. And perfectly happy, right here."
I did feel almost ridiculously happy as I rang off. Odd, I thought, how good and bad things always seemed to come at once, as if some unseen force were seeking balance. Peter, for all his brave exterior, had suffered today as no man deserved to suffer. And now, after all that, he was about to learn that Rosehill had been twice occupied—not only during the Agricolan campaigns, but later, after
AD
115, around the time the Ninth
Hispana
had started its fateful march northwards.