Chapter 2
The knocking seemed to last forever. I struggled toward wakefulness and grunted an incoherent acknowledgment.
“Breakfast is in fifteen minutes.” Mrs. Fern’s daylight sprightliness irritated me, but the sound of her voice brought back her night time kindness. It was going to be a morning, then, of contradictions, of opposites, and it began in me.
English bacon is not remotely like what Americans eat. Oh, it comes in strips of alternating fat and meat, and it’s fried in a skillet, but there all resemblance ends. I managed to get it down, but the fried, ripe tomatoes were too much to stomach. Still, the coffee was hot and the effort put into the meal carried a lot of weight. I felt fortified.
“I haven’t cooked for anyone since Henry died,” Mrs. Fern told me. “He always liked a big breakfast, but he was a big man.”
I eyed the remains on the table. “How big?” I didn’t realize I had spoken aloud.
“Oh, eighteen stone, easily.”
A stone is fourteen pounds. I did the math—Henry had been just over twice my weight. No wonder I felt stuffed.
“I rang up Lady Phelps,” Mrs. Fern said. She was smiling, again. “If you can be at the hotel at noon, you’ll be met.”
“Thank you,” I managed.
“Saint Albans is really quite the small town.” My hostess busied herself with the dishes. “You’ll get used to it, I daresay.”
Mrs. Fern’s attentions, as well intentioned as they obviously were, left me feeling a little boxed in. Traffic rumbled outside. It was still early in the day. I decided to play tourist before the meeting.
The Abbey towered high above the street. It is less, now, than it was four hundred years ago—most of the out-buildings are long gone—so I could only wonder how the spire had seemed to a medieval villager in a town a tenth the size of the present Saint Albans.
Once the stables had held stalls for three hundred horses. There had been a dormitory with room for a hundred monks, who had owned property the length and breadth of England that raised crops and animals to support them. Even the town mill had been the abbey’s property. In every way, the abbey had been the center of the life of the town.
Now, it was just a church, something on the periphery of these people’s lives, a relic of the past.
Cars zipped along the road. Citroens and Vauxhalls, Mercedes and an incongruous American minivan. The street shuddered with the passing of a truck—a lorry, I remembered.
When a break in the rush hour traffic came, I scooted across the sun-shot street.
I glanced back at Mrs. Fern’s house; the corner of a curtain twitched discreetly. I turned down the hill, pretending to survey the ground that dropped gently away below me.
A low hum grew out of the traffic noise, rhythmic and mechan-ical. It swelled to a clattering roar. Shadows darkened the earth. A flight of three military helicopters, one bloated transport and two vicious gunships, split the heavens. Their rotor blades beat the sky, the earth, and the space between. I felt an instant of sharp panic before I realized that it must be the remnants of the royal family leaving Saint Albans. As the sound diminished and the helicopters flew off to the south, I finally released the breath I had been holding.
The curtain twitched again. The abbey could wait until I didn’t feel the pressure of prying eyes.
I walked down the hill. I had spent so much time imagining the place, it was as if I’d been here before. The maps I had studied unfolded on the land before me. I turned left at Abbey Mill Lane and went through the ancient gate house, passing the almonry on my left, where the monks had distributed alms to the poor of the town. Even then, charity had been bureaucratic.
On the right, as I went further, parallel to the long-fallen wall, lay the foundations of the old stables. Ahead, at the bottom of the hill, the River Ver flowed, and beyond it were the ruins of the original Roman town, Verulamium. Further lay the suburbs, where there had once been woodland.
Stop here.
I whirled, but no one was near me. The last of the morning’s dew sparkled on the mown lawn. I don’t need a nervous breakdown now, I thought. I walked on, determined to maintain my self control.
Clio.
“Stop it, whoever you are,” I said, my voice as firm as I could make it. “It’s a lousy joke.”
Silence was the only answer.
I had things to do. The town library awaited me, with its collection of old books, records of times past. Lady Phelps was preparing for the meeting that would determine my future. I was nervous about what I might be getting myself into. I was impatient to get on with my tasks, whatever they were. I very much did not want to hear any more from an inexplicable voice.
So of course, I did.
Clio, he said.
The voice came from behind me. I turned. The lawn was empty.
If this was a hallucination, I didn’t have to respond.
Don’t you want proof?
If this was really happening—and it couldn’t be—the owner of a voice that could speak inside my head would know what I was thinking. It didn’t need my verbalized answer. Proof of what—that I had snapped under the strain of travel?
Come this way. Something tugged at me. I shivered and backtracked in the direction the pull came from, as if the voice were a magnet and all the iron in my blood longed for it.
Here.
The tug turned into a push. A weight on my shoulders, a weakness in my knees.
I knelt on the grass. Dew soaked cold and wet through my hose. I felt through the grass until my hand, chilled with the morning’s moisture, closed on a small, hard object.
The thing filled my hand, heavy for its size. A hint of coppery blue-green glowed through the whitish crust that covered it. The encrustation, pitted and brittle, gave way as I picked at it. Finally, a use for the long nails I’d worked so hard to maintain. Underneath, corroded by God knows how long an immersion in the soil, was a brooch. The long pin, the thinnest part, was missing, dissolved by centuries of seepage.
I thought it might be bronze. The body of the brooch was intact, the abstract outline of a fish.
I turned it over, still picking at the crust, until my nail broke.
The brooch scared me. It was a talisman, a juju. I didn’t know what to make of my find, but I knew where to go to discover how old it was.
When frightened, I seek knowledge; it’s how I keep the goblins away. If this thing was real, was ancient, was put into my hands by a voice I didn’t want to admit the existence of, I didn’t know what I would do.
The Verulamium museum lay within walking distance to the northwest. I stuffed the brooch, if that’s what it was, into my purse and continued down the hill. Abbey Mill Lane ended near an old Roman wall. A paved path led between the river and a small lake. Somewhere nearby was a burial ground that dated back to before even the Romans.
The museum came into view at my left, at one end of a neatly tended park. As I reached for the door, it swung open. A volunteer, gray-headed and petite, jumped back. I flinched, as well.
“Oaow!” Her voice slithered through a nasal swamp of vowels before she regained control.
“I’m so sorry,” she apologized. Then she gave me that “Can I help you?” routine, in a tone that means you’re not to be trusted alone with the goods. Finally, she looked past me and managed a smile. “You’re alone, then. People aren’t usually waiting at the door.” Her accent improved with every word and her face mirrored the transition. “Two pounds fifty, please.”
I apologized for frightening her and paid the entry fee.
The jewelry display cases were in the middle of the large room. I bent over a collection of brooches, under glass like tiny, ancient pheasants.
It was there. The card denoted the pin as fourth century C.E., Romano-British.
It was ancient.
My hand went into my purse. I didn’t want to take my find out for comparison, for fear of being accused of making off with a national treasure, but I let my fingers trace the rough shape while my eyes did the same with the brooch under the glass—a simple icon of a fish, pointed on one end, with the hint of an eye, the tail formed where the two bronze curves met and crossed.
They were identical. So it was real, or a perfect fake.
Satisfied?
The voice, insistent, intruding, startled me. In the next instant, the docent spoke at my side.
“Is there something I can help you with?”
“Leave me alone!”
I thought she was the ghost. I didn’t mean to be rude. The words just popped out.
“I’m sorry.” I stuttered through an apology. “I thought‑‑”
“It’s quite all right, I’m sure.” She eyed me as if she thought I carried a bomb in my purse.
The thought of explaining that I had believed her a disembodied voice who’d been bothering me drove me outside. I was off to a great start. By tomorrow, the whole museum staff would be on the lookout for a crazy, rude American woman. Thanks a lot, I muttered to my subconscious. It was blessedly silent.
I didn’t want to go back to my room; Mrs. Fern would ask questions to which I had no answers. I was already persona non grata at the museum. I had my meeting with the mysterious Lady Phelps, but not until noon.
So I walked. The pull, the voice, and the brooch tantalized me with a pattern that I might understand with only a little more knowledge. I turned a corner into the park and, out of sight of the museum, pulled the brooch from my purse and slipped it into my skirt pocket. I willed myself into invisibility, afraid of being caught with contraband. Britain, after stealing God knows how many archeological objects from Egypt, Greece, and every other land its empire had reached, no doubt had a national treasures act of its own, and I was in violation of it.
I don’t know how long I walked. Verulamium was a ghost town, so in some sort of way, I suppose I belonged there. It was part of the pattern.
I tried to come to grips with what had happened to me. All of it could be explained. Archeologists had been pulling similar Romano-Celtic jewelry from the dirt around here for decades; the proof was in the museum. I just happened on the latest piece to work itself up out of the earth, like the stones in a New England farm field.
And it wasn’t really a voice; it was just my intuition. “You have a wonderful imagination, Clio.” That’s what my teachers had always said. “Don’t trust it,” Mama had warned. “It’ll turn on you, the way it turned against me.” So she never put my crayoned pictures on the refrigerator. And she didn’t let me make up stories. Only the real and the solid and the agreed-upon was allowed into her house. So whatever it was, there was a rational explanation.
But still, as I walked among the buried ruins of the old city, I half-expected to hear the voice again. I passed the old Roman theatre, then turned back into the park proper. A couple of insulae—city blocks, literally, “islands”—had been excavated decades before. A second dig had been made in the last few years and publication of the results scheduled, but then canceled without explanation. The book had even made it into the publisher’s catalogue before being pulled.
The sun climbed as I walked. I lost track of time and had to hurry back to the living city.
Winded from the uphill climb, I finally reached the hotel. At night, the building was unprepossessing. During the day, it reeked of Georgian solidity and price. It was the only place in town that might house the royals for a night. The Communion impressed me more.
I passed the registration desk. The same clerk was on duty. We ignored each other gleefully. I marched into the dining room to meet Lady Phelps and to see what was what with the Communion of the Saint.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment