Midnight is a Lonely Place (10 page)

I CURSE YOU, MARCUS SEVERUS, FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE HERE THIS DAY

The voice was so sudden and so loud she dropped the torc onto the table. Frantically she shook her head. The sound had been inside her ears; it came from her brain. From her head. From her soul. Frightened she stared round the room. Then taking a deep breath she picked up the twisted metal again. It was very cold beneath her fingers. As cold as it had been when she first picked it out of the wet sand.

‘This is stupid.’ She said the words out loud, and her own voice sounded light and insubstantial in the empty room. She carried the torc and the piece of pottery to the small table in the corner on which the lamp stood and pulling out the drawer she laid them both in it. Closing it firmly she turned the key.

Auditory hallucination is a condition engendered by various states of mind and various physical conditions. She had read about it in one of Anne’s books. But which one of them, if any, applied to her? Picking up the bottle of Scotch she walked through into the kitchen and firmly closed the door behind her. The first thing she could do was restore her blood sugar levels to normal. Perhaps a cooked lunch would dispel whatever it was which was causing this to happen.

She was sitting at the small kitchen table, with a book propped up before her, eating baked beans on toast covered in melted cheese, when there was a loud knock at the front door. Pushing her plate away reluctantly she went to open it.

A girl stood on the doorstep, dressed in jeans and a bright blue anorak, her blonde pony-tailed hair blowing wildly in the wind.

‘I’ve come to tell you to keep away from my dig.’ The green eyes were furious, the face unsmiling. ‘Mum says you’ve been poking around in the dune. Well don’t. Just because you’ve rented this place it doesn’t give you any right to go poking around in other people’s affairs. Keep away from it.’ The young face was pale and strained. Her headache had been worse this morning, too bad to go to school, too bad to get up until Diana had told her what was happening out at the dune.

‘You must be Alison.’ Kate raised an eyebrow but, firmly suppressing the angry response which was her automatic reaction to the girl’s rudeness, she merely said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interfere in your excavation. Of course I won’t go near it again if you’d rather I didn’t.’

‘Please don’t.’ Alison scowled.

‘You’ve told the museum about your finds, I gather.’

‘I’m going to soon.’ The girl’s chin was set determinedly. She was very like her elder brother, Kate decided suddenly. They were a good-looking family, but obviously not noted for their charm. ‘I’m writing it up first and taking photos and things.’

‘Good.’ Kate smiled. ‘That’s exactly the right thing to do.’ She took a step back, about to shut the door but Alison still stood there, hands in pockets, obviously wanting to say something else. ‘Are you really a writer?’ It came out at last.

‘Yes,’ Kate smiled. ‘I am.’

‘And you’re writing about Byron, Dad said.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So, why did you come here?’

‘I wanted somewhere quiet so that I could concentrate on my work.’

‘And you know about history and things.’

Kate nodded. ‘A bit. I studied history at university.’

‘So you know about the Romans.’

‘A bit, as I said. I gather they came here.’

‘And there were people here even before that.’ Alison’s brow wrinkled slightly. ‘The Trinovantes lived in Essex before the Romans came. That’s a Roman grave.’ She nodded her head in the general direction of the beach.

‘A grave?’ Kate frowned. ‘What makes you think that?’

Marcus. The thought had come unbidden and as swiftly it had gone. Marcus Severus’s grave was found in somewhere called Stanway, which, she had seen on the diagrammatic map near his statue, was on the far side of Colchester, some twenty miles away.

‘I just know.’

Kate looked at the girl, disquieted. ‘Alison, when you’ve got some time, would you show me your dig? Show me properly. Explain what you’ve done – the digging looks very professional – and tell me what you’ve found.’

‘You really want to know?’

‘I do. Not to interfere. I’m interested.’

‘OK. Do you want to come now?’

With a moment’s regretful thought about her baked beans and her book Kate nodded. ‘Hold on. I’ll get my jacket and boots.’

The tide had receded a long way when they stood together side by side on the edge of the hollow looking at the excavated side of the dune. The wind was whipping the sand into little eddies which whispered amongst the thin dry grasses and the sun had gone, hidden behind huge threatening clouds. ‘I found some bits of pottery – shards, they’re called, and some metal objects,’ Alison said slowly. ‘They’re at home. I’ll show you when you come to supper if you like.’

‘I would like.’ Kate glanced at the girl. She did not seem to be showing any eagerness to jump down into the hollow. ‘How did you know where to dig?’

‘The sea started it. Half the dune collapsed. Then I began to find things.’

‘What made you think it was a Roman grave?’

‘That’s where you find things. In graves. There was a villa on our neighbour’s farm. It’s under his field, very near us, and there was a Roman road to the village and another to the other side of Redall Bay.’

‘Was there?’ Kate was fascinated. ‘Can we go down into the hollow? It’ll be out of the wind and you can show me exactly how you’ve been sectioning the soil.’

Alison seemed reluctant, but after a moment she jumped down into the soft sand and approached the exposed face where she had been working. ‘I’ve been very careful not to disturb anything. The trouble is the sand just falls away. You can’t stop it. The wind and the sea erode this coast all the time. Even houses fall over the edge a bit further along from here, at Redall Point.’ She raised her hand gently to the sand, and then drew back without touching it. ‘I’ve left my tools in your log shed.’

‘Oh, I wondered who the spade belonged to.’ Kate pushed her hair out of her eyes and reaching into her pocket for her glasses squinted more closely at the surface of the dune in front of her. ‘Look, do you see? Here, and here. There’s a change in texture. The sand is more glutinous. It’s stronger. I think there’s an outcrop of clay and peat of some sort. You may have more luck excavating that. It won’t crumble so easily.’

‘No.’ Alison took a step forward and examined the place Kate was pointing to. Then she shivered. Her headache had returned with a vengeance. ‘It’s too cold to work today. I think I’ll go home now.’ She turned away. As they scrambled out of the hollow into the full force of the wind again Kate saw the girl glance over her shoulder at the spot where they had been standing. There was an unhappy frown on her face as if she had seen something which puzzled her.

It was only after Kate had watched Alison disappear up the track through the woods and had let herself once more into the cottage that she realised that she had not said a word about her own finds. She walked back into the kitchen and looked with regret down at her plate. Then she scraped the congealed mess into the waste bin and put the kettle on. She had wasted enough time already today. Forget Alison Lindsey and her Roman grave. This afternoon she must go back to the world of the cold, bleak Aberdeen lodgings where the young George Gordon was learning the bible, and a lot more besides, at his nurse’s knee.

Her eyes glued to the screen of her lap top Kate did not notice the room growing dark. Her fingers were cramped; her arms stiff and heavy and there was a cold spot somewhere between her shoulder blades which had begun to hurt quite badly. Taking off her glasses, she stretched her hands out in front of her and wriggled her fingers painfully. The fire had died again and the room was icy. Climbing stiffly to her feet she went through the now routine acts of lighting, filling and closing the stove and stood for a moment staring down at the blackened glass of the little doors. She had done it on automatic pilot, her thoughts still with Catherine Gordon and May Grey and their volatile confusing relationships with the boy in their charge, relationships which would leave him scarred for life.

Satisfied at some subconscious level that the fire would now catch and warm her she went back to the table and, sitting down she began to read through the afternoon’s work.

May the gods of all eternity curse you, Marcus Severus, and bring your
putrid body and your rotten soul to judgement for what you have done
here this day
…

She stared at the words blankly. She did not remember writing them. She hadn’t written them. They appeared in the text suddenly, arbitrarily, half way through a description of eighteenth-century Aberdeen.

Pushing her chair back she stood up abruptly, conscious that her hands were shaking. Turning away from the screen she went back to the stove. Opening the doors she knelt in front of it and held out her hands, trying to warm them. It’s just a phrase that’s been whirling round in my head. I must have read it somewhere and it’s somehow lodged in my brain and I typed it out. Idiot. Idiot.

Her eyes went unwillingly to the table drawer. For several minutes she tried to resist the urge to go over to it, then, giving up, she rose and went to switch on the lamp.

Picking up the torc she took it back to the fire and, sitting down on the floor in front of the blaze she turned the piece of metal over and over in her hand. She was no expert, no archaeologist, but she knew enough to be fairly certain that this was a Celtic ornament; almost certainly silver and therefore once the property of a wealthy man; a man not a woman, judging by its weight and size. It was certainly not Roman, whatever Alison thought. So it did not belong to Marcus Severus. Had not belonged, she corrected herself at once. So, whose was it? What was it doing buried in the sand on the edge of Redall Bay? The British tribes who opposed Rome had been Celts. The Celtic world, which today is linked in the popular mind purely to Wales and Scotland and Ireland and Brittany, once covered the whole of Britain – the whole of Europe. East Anglia had been as Celtic as Gwynedd or Galloway. It had been the Saxon invasions that had overridden their traces in folk memory.

She sat back, leaning against the sofa, drawing her knees up, the metal in her hands. It was warm now. The places where she had rubbed and scratched it glinted faintly in the firelight. She closed her eyes. This part of the country – this part of Essex – had been as Alison said the land of the Trinovantes, the tribe who had joined Boudicca and the Iceni in their revolt against Rome. Disillusioned and cheated by their Roman overlords in Colchester, they had not hesitated in rising up against the foreign oppressor. Had this torc belonged to one of them? A highborn Celtic lord? A prince? Was that his burial mound out there on the beach, lashed by the winter sea?

And what had Marcus Severus Secundus to do with him?

The sound of hail rattling against the window made her look up. It had grown quite dark outside. The lamplight reflected in the glass and suddenly the room felt very cold. She glanced at the fire. With the doors open the stove had consumed the logs she had thrown on earlier. Only ash remained. Rising to her feet she put the torc back into its drawer, closed and locked it, then she went to the window and, shading her eyes against the reflection she looked out. The glass was cold against her forehead. Cold and hard. The evening was totally black. Against the rattle of the rain and the howl of the wind she thought she could hear the crash of waves on the beach. With a shudder she stepped back and drew the curtains across. Then for the third time that day she built up the fire.

She awoke in the early hours with a start. Her bedroom was very cold. The wind had risen and she could hear the sea clearly now. The waves crashing on the beach, the rush and rattle of shingle, and from the other side of the cottage – the western side – the thrash and creak of trees.

She peered across the room. She had left the landing light on – a relic of that old fear of the dark – and she could see the outline of the door, the comforting wedge shape of light. For a minute she lay there staring at it, then she reached for the bedside lamp. Propped against the pillows, huddled beneath the blankets with her book and her glasses she felt warm and safe. She half relished the battering of the storm.

A stronger than usual gust of wind flung itself against the window and she heard the groan and rattle of the glass and suddenly she was aware of the smell of wet earth. Bitter sweet, cloying, pervasive, it filled the bedroom. It was the smell of gardens, of newly-dug flower beds, of ancient woodlands.

Groping for her dressing gown she reached for her slippers and padded across the room. Opening the door fully she peered out onto the landing. It was ice cold out there and unbelievably draughty. Frowning she went towards the stairs and looked down.

The front door stood wide open.

For a moment she stood transfixed. It was the wind. It must have been the wind, but the front door was on the sheltered side of the house. She ran down the stairs and threw the door shut. She had bolted it. Surely she had bolted it the night before? Sliding the bolt hard home she turned the key in the lock as well.

The kitchen and the living room doors stood open, the rooms beyond, dark. She glanced at them with sudden misgiving. Supposing it wasn’t the wind that had thrown the door open? Supposing it was a burglar?