by Ellis Peters
The distant border of the enclosure was the river itself, sweeping in serpentine curves round the perimeter. From where she stood it shimmered in silver under a glancing sun, though upstream at the inn, where she had seen it close to, it rolled darkly brown and turgid, and laden with the debris of bushes, for the spring thaw had come late and violently, bringing down an immense weight of snow-water from the mountains of Wales. They were constructing a series of weirs upstream, so they had told her at ‘The Salmon’s Return’, which would eventually control this annual predator, but for this year, at least, it surged down irresistibly as ever, biting acres out of its banks as it cornered, like a ferocious animal frustrated. Its wildness and this elegiac calm met, circled each other, and survived. The demon passed, not once for all, but constantly, and the dead turned over in their sleep, and went on dreaming.
From here, where she stood orientating herself to the unknown photographer’s vision of Aurae Phiala, and sharing his revelation, even that violent force, at once protection and threat, seemed charmed into tameness, passing on tiptoe by this idyllic place.
‘Idyllic! You’re perfectly right,’ said a voice just behind her shoulder; a male voice, pitched almost apologetically low, to make its uninvited approach respectable and respectful. And she was quite sure she had not said a word aloud! How did he know what she was thinking? It was a liberty. But wasn’t it also a compliment? ‘That’s why they chose it,’ the voice said, diverting her possible resentment before she could even be aware of it herself. ‘It was a pleasure city, quite unreal like all its kind. And then it turned real—always the beginning of tragedy. People walked a tightrope here, in search of a secure living, just like today. And history walked out on them, and left them to die. It happens to most paradisial places. That’s the irony.’
Many times during this pocket lecture she could have turned and looked at her instructor, and put him clean out of countenance merely by looking; but she had not done it because she was so sure that he was the young man from the entrance booth, a licensed enthusiast, and entitled to his brief moments of emotional escape. His bus-load of senior schoolboys were all over Aurae Phiala by this time, gushing downhill towards the river like streams in spate, and no doubt he was free for a minute or two to breathe again and care about his own theories and idylls. Besides, she liked his voice. It was low-pitched and reverentially modulated, a nice, crisp, modest baritone. And knowledgeable! She had a respect for people who knew their subject, and she was here to discover Aurae Phiala; he could be very useful to her.
‘Are you doing research here?’ she asked, and turned to face him.
Leaning over the glass counter of his booth, the young man in charge was deep in conversation with an elderly gentleman draped with cameras, and she was gazing into the face of quite a different person. The small shock of surprise disturbed her judgement for a moment, and the awareness of feeling and looking disconcerted inclined her to resent him, and to look for and find impudence in an approach which would have seemed perfectly excusable in a resident scholar. For that matter, she might not have been far out in thinking him impudent; his manner was innocence itself, his deference if anything delicately overdone, as though he were ready to come down off his high horse the moment she came down off hers, and didn’t anticipate that the descent need be long delayed. He had the wit to keep talking.
‘It began as a sort of rest-station and leave resort, as seasonal and artificial as a seaside fun-fair. And then it grew, and traders and service providers thought it worthwhile to settle here and go into business. They brought their families, some of them intermarried with time-expired soldiers who chose to settle here, too, and it grew into a real, life-and death town, where everyone had a stake sunk so deep that when the legions started to leave, the locals still couldn’t get out. Everything they had was here. No, I don’t belong here, I’m only visiting,’ he ended disarmingly, coming roundabout to the answer to her question. ‘It’s my subject, that’s all. But I could see what you were thinking. It is a beautiful place.’
He was taller than she by only a few inches, and slenderly built, an athletic lightweight in a heather tweed sportscoat and grey cords. He had a thick crop of wiry hair the colour of good toffee, and heavy eyelashes many shades darker, as lavish as on a Jersey cow, fringing golden-brown eyes of such steady and limpid sincerity that she felt certain he could not possibly be just what he seemed. The face that confronted her with so much earnest goodwill and innocence, and with, she felt mistrustfully, such incalculable thoughts behind it, was square and brown, with a good deal of chin and nose to it, and an odd mouth with one corner higher than the other. He could have been anything from twenty-five to thirty, but not, she judged, beyond thirty. He did not look like a wolf, but he did look like a young man with an eye for a girl, and techniques that would bear watching.
‘How kind of you,’ she said, balancing nicely on the edge of irony, in case a few minutes more of this should see him running out of line to shoot, and make it desirable to jettison him, ‘—how kind of you to tell me all about it!’
‘Not at all!’ he said, and had the grace to flush a little; she even had a fleeting suspicion that he enjoyed the ability to flush at will. ‘How kind of you not to resent being told! I get carried away. Amateurs do. And this one I really like. Look at that hillscape over in Wales!’ Fold on fold, rising gently from the water-meadows, the foothills receded in softening and paling shades of blue into the west. ‘No wonder the men who’d served out their time put their savings into market stalls and little businesses, tanneries, dye-works, gardens. Nobody knew the risks better than they did. It was a brave gamble, and in the end they lost it. But it was a stake worth throwing for.’
‘I should have thought,’ said Charlotte, trapped into genuine interest and speculation, ‘that they’d have built just a little further from the river. Weren’t they for ever in danger of floods? Look at the height of the water now.’
‘Ah, now, that’s interesting. You see, the Comer has changed its course since the third century. Exactly when, we don’t know, it may have been as late as the thirteenth century before it cut its way through. Come on down, and I’ll show you.’ And he actually took her arm, quite simply and confidently, and rushed her on the wings of his enthusiasm down through the green complexities of the bowl, between the crisp, serrated walls, across the fragments of tiled pavement, past the forum pillars, down to where the emerald turf sloped off under a token wire barrier to the riverside path and the waters of the Comer.
Here, at close quarters, the fitful, elusive silver congealed into the turgid brown flood she had seen upriver, a silent surge of water looking almost solid in its power, sweeping along leaves and branches and roots and swathes of weed in its eddies, gnawing away loose red layers of the soil along this near bank, and eating at the muddy rim of the path. The speed of its silent, thrusting passage dazzled her eyes as she stared into it. The snows in Wales had lain long, and the spring rains had been heavy and protracted; the Comer drank, and grew quietly mad.
‘That’s it!’ she said, fascinated. ‘That’s what I meant. Would you choose to live close by that?’
‘But look across the river there. You see how the level rises? Gently, but it rises, look right round where I’m pointing, and you’ll see there’s a whole oval island of higher ground. In Roman times the river flowed on the far side of that. Aurae Phiala was close enough for fishing, close to two good fords, in all but the flood months, and safe from actual flooding. In a broad valley like this you inevitably get these S-bends, and this was the biggest one. By the Middle Ages the river had gradually cut back through the neck of land at this side of the rise, until it cut right through to where it runs now. You can still trace the old course by the lush growth of bushes and trees. Look, a regular horseshoe of them.’
She looked, and was impressed almost against her will, for everything was as he said. Alders and willows and rich grass and wild rose briars described a great, smooth horseshoe shape that was
still hollowed gently into the green earth, with such authority that it had been acknowledged in perpetuity as a natural boundary, and a single large field hemmed within it.
‘Probably if they ever raise the funds to do a proper dig here, they’ll find the town had a guard outpost on that hillock. Not that the tribesmen would attempt anything more than a quick raid by night, not until the legions were withdrawn. And if they ever did set out to open up this place,’ he said consideringly, ‘there are a dozen more important places to begin, of course.’
‘Why haven’t they ever? Labour isn’t a problem, is it? I thought there were armies of students only too anxious to join digs in the long vacation.’
‘It isn’t the labour, it’s the money. Excavation is a costly business, and Silcaster hasn’t got enough money or enough interest.’
‘Oh?’ she said, surprised. ‘I thought it was Ministry property.’
‘No, it’s privately owned. It belongs to Lord Silcaster. He keeps it up pretty decently, considering, but it’s all done on a shoe-string, it has practically to pay for itself. The curator has a house downstream there, among the trees—you can see the red roof. And the only other staff seems to be that young fellow in the kiosk, and I rather think he’s working for peanuts while he mugs up a thesis.’
‘And a gardener-handyman,’ said Charlotte, her eyes following the vigorous heave and surge of the mole-brown water as it tore down past them and ripped at the curve of the bank, lipping half across the trodden right of way. It had been higher still, probably some three or four days earlier, for it had bitten a great red hole in the shelving bank, like a long wound in the smooth turf, and left the traces of its attack in half-dried puddles of silky clay and a litter of sodden leaves and bushes. Round this broken area a big, blond young man in stained corduroys and a donkey jacket was busy erecting a system of iron posts striped in red and white, and stringing a rope from them to cordon off the slip.
‘Hey, there’s brickwork breaking through there!’ Charlotte’s companion said with quickening interest, and set off to have a closer look. The cordoned area was much bigger than they had realised, for several square yards of the level ground on top had subsided into ominous, shallow holes, here and there breaking the turf, and the slope down to the river path, once dropping gradually a matter of fifteen feet or so, now sagged in red rolls of soil and grass. The gardener had completed his magic circle, and was hanging three warning boards from the stanchions, with the legend boldly and hurriedly slashed in red paint: DANGER! KEEP CLEAR!
By a natural enough process, this injunction immediately attracted the most unruly fringe of the school party, straying from the group of their fellows in the forum. They came like flies to honey, not the heedless junior element, either, but a knot of budding sophisticates in their teens, led by a tall, slim sixteen-year-old on whose walk, manner and style all the rest appeared to be modelling themselves.
The young teacher, observing this deliberate defection, broke off his lecture to raise his voice, none too hopefully, after his strays. ‘Boys, come back here at once! Come here and pay attention! Boden, do you hear?’
The boy who must be Boden heard very well. His strolling gait became exaggeratedly languid and assured. One or two of his following hesitated, wavered and turned back. Most of the others hovered diplomatically to make it look as if they were about to turn back, while still edging gingerly forward. Boden advanced at an insolent saunter to the stretched rope. The gardener, suddenly aware of him, reared erect to his full impressive six-feet-two and stood still, narrowly observing this unchancy opponent. The boy gazed back sweetly, forbearing from touching anything, and daring anyone to challenge his intentions. He was a good-looking boy, and knew it. He was pushing manhood, and much too well aware of that, though he believed himself to be much nearer maturity than he actually was. Twice he advanced a hand with deliberate teasing towards the hook that sustained the rope on the posts, and twice diverted the gesture into something innocuous. The gardener narrowed long, grey-blue eyes and made never a move. The boy stretched out a foot under the rope, and prodded with the toe of a well-polished shoe at the edge of one of the ominous cracks in the grass. The gardener, with deliberation, put down the spade he held, and took one long step to circle the obstruction between them.
The boy gave an amused flick of his head, swung round unhurriedly—yet not too slowly, either—and sauntered away with a laugh, his admirers tittering after him. Distant across the grass, the young teacher, with opportunist alacrity, chose that moment to call: ‘That’s better, Boden! Come on, now, quickly, you’re holding up the whole party.’
‘The secret of success with performing fleas,’ said Charlotte’s self-constituted guide startlingly, diverted even from his Roman passion, ‘is to synchronise your orders with their hops. Our unfortunate young friend seems to know the principle, whether he can make it work or not.’
The gardener stood a moment to make sure that his antagonist was really retiring, then turned back to complete his work. His eye met Charlotte’s, and his face flashed into a sudden brief, almost reluctant smile. ‘Flipping kids!’ he said in a broad, deep country voice, with a hint of the singing eloquence of Wales.
‘They give you much trouble normally?’ asked the young man.
‘What you’d expect. Not that much,’ he allowed tolerantly. ‘But that one’s a case.’
‘You know him?’ the young man asked sympathetically.
‘Never seen him before. I know his sort, though, on sight.’
‘Oh, I don’t know… he’s just flexing his muscles.’ He looked over his shoulder, to where the youthful shepherd was fretfully hustling his flock from the forum into the skeleton entrance of the baths. ‘He’s got a teacher bossing him around who’s about four years older than he is, if that, and a lot less self-confident, but holding all the aces. Not that he plays them all that well,’ he admitted, thoughtfully watching the harried youngster trying to be as tall as his tallest and most formidable charge. ‘And of course,’ he said aside to Charlotte, with a devastating smile, ‘having a girl like you around doesn’t make their problem any easier for either of them.’
‘I could go away,’ Charlotte offered, between offence and gratification.
‘Don’t do that!’ he said hastily. ‘Each of them would blame the other. And you haven’t seen half what’s here to be seen yet.’ He turned back to the gardener. ‘When did this slip happen?’
‘This morning. Water’s been right up over the path two days or more, I reckon it’s loosened part o’ the foundations under here.’ He stood at the edge of the slope, looking down the line of his cordon and into the turgid water. ‘Who’d get the blame, I ask you, if some young big-head like him got larking about in that lot, and the whole thing caved in and buried him alive? I don’t reckon they’d allow as a rope and three notices was enough. It’d be me for it, me and Mr Paviour and his lordship—ah, and in that order! But they expect us to keep the place open for ’em. We got stated hours, nobody lets us off because the Comer floods.’
His deep, warm western voice had risen into plangent eloquence, indignant and rapt. And Charlotte was suddenly aware of him as a person, and by no means an unintelligent person, either; but above all a vital presence, to be ignored only at the general peril. He was built rather heavily even for his height, a monumental creature admirably suited to these classic and heroic surroundings; and his face was a mask of antique beauty, but crudely cut out of a local stone. She could see him as a prototype for the border entrepreneur trapped here in the decline and fall of this precarious city, the market-stallholder, the baths attendant, the potter, the vegetable grower, any one of the native opportunists who had rallied to serve and exploit this hothouse community of time-expired settlers and pay-happy leave-men. He had a forehead and nose any Greek might have acknowledged with pride, and long, grey-blue eyes like slivers of self-illuminating stone, somewhere between lapis-lazuli and granite. His fairness inclined ever so slightly towards the Celtic red of par
ts of Wales, an alien colouring in both countries. He had a full, passionate, childlike mouth, generously shaped but brutally finished; and his cleanshaven cheeks and jaw were powerful and fleshless, pure, massive bone under the fine, fair skin. It was easy to see that his roots went down fathoms deep in this soil, and transplanting would have destroyed everything in him that was of quality. There was nowhere else he belonged.
Charlotte said, on an impulse she only partially understood: ‘Don’t worry about him. In an hour they’ll be gone.’ And just as impulsively she turned to check on the movements of that incalculable swarm of half-grown children who were causing him this natural anxiety. The boys and their uneasy pastor were moving tidily enough into the first green enclosure which must be the frigidarium of the baths, emerging in little, bulbous groups from between the broken walls of the entrance. She saw the stragglers gather, none too enthusiastically, but not unwillingly, either, and waited for the last-comers. Something was missing there. It took her a few minutes to realise what it was. The teacher, selfconsciously gathering his chicks about him, was now the tallest person in sight. Where had the odious senior, Boden, gone, somewhere among those broken, enfolding walls? And how had he shed his train? The numbers there looked more or less complete. He was a natural stray, of course. He needed the minimum of cover to drop out of sight, whenever it suited him. But at least he was well away from here. No doubt something else had diverted his attention, and afforded him another cue to spread confusion everywhere around him.