The Shadowy Horses

Jeannie led us past the closed door and along a tiny passageway toward the front of the cottage. "Robbie'll be fair glad to see you. He's off school today with the smit." Then, suddenly remembering I wasn't Scottish, she rolled her eyes, smiled, and translated: "He has a cold. Nothing serious, ken, but I'll not send a son of mine to school when he's ill."

Her words had only just sunk in when, after a confident knock and reply, I was ushered through a second low doorway and into the presence of Peter Quinnell's Homer.

My first thought was that I'd been brought to the wrong room. The face that looked up from the bed in the corner was a child's face, around and questioning, sprayed with freckles and topped by a shock of unruly black hair.

Robbie McMorran could not have been older than eight.

"Heyah," David greeted the boy, glancing around as though something were missing. "Where's Kip?"

"Out with Grandad."

"Oh, aye?" The blue eyes swung to Jeannie McMorran. "Where's Wally away to this morning?"

"He didn't say." She seemed unconcerned. "Brian comes in, and Dad goes out—you ken how it is. It's only my wee sodger, here, who gives me a moment's peace." She laid one cooling hand on the boy's forehead, then rumpled his hair with a smile. "He's not dead yet," she pronounced. "I'm sure he'll survive a short visit. But just a short one, now. And no Nintendo." Fixing David Fortune with a stern look, she left us to return to her kitchen and the fragrant apple tart bubbling in the oven.

"No Nintendo!" The Scotsman pulled a face of mock dismay, which he shared with the bedridden boy. "How's a lad meant to get well?"

Robbie McMorran giggled. "It's not so bad. The electricity's going off, anyway, sometime soon."

"Is it, now? Did you tell Mr. Quinnell?"

"Aye. Mum rang him up, just afore you came."' The frank around eyes looked up at me, eagerly. "Is this Miss Grey?"

"It is. Verity Grey," he introduced me, "I'd like you to meet Robert Roy McMorran."

For such a little, gangly thing, he had a solemn handshake. "She doesn't look at all like what you said," he told the archaeologist, accusingly.

David Fortune chose to let the comment pass. He hiked a straight-backed chair closer to the bed, inviting me to sit down, and settled himself on the edge of young Robbie's bed. "I think Miss Grey would like to know what part you played in bringing Mr. Quinnell here, to Rosehill."

"Wasn't me," the boy replied. "It was Granny Nan. She wrote to Mr. Quinnell, like."

"Aye. She wrote to him, to tell him what?"

"About me seeing the Sentinel."

I interrupted, with a faint frown. "The Sentinel?"

"Aye." Robbie nodded. "On the hill Kip found him, first. And then Granny Nan showed me this book with pictures in it..."

"Granny Nan being my mother," interjected David, for my benefit. "She's Granny Nan to everyone, around here."

"... she showed me this book, and it had a picture of him in it, and she got all excited and wrote to Mr. Quinnell. She let me keep the picture." Rolling onto his stomach, Robbie stretched to reach the lower shelf of his bedside table, and I heard the rustle of paper. He rolled back, clasping a colorful sheet with ragged edges. "I ken you're not supposed to tear a book, but Granny Nan said most of the pages were missing anyway, and the rest were all runkled like this, so it was OK." He pressed the crumpled page into my hands.

Bending my head, I smoothed the torn picture with careful fingers. "And this is the man you saw, then, is it? Here at Rosehill?"

"Aye. His name's right there, and all. He walks up on the hill, just there." The boy pointed at the rear wall of the bedroom, in the direction of Rosehill House.

"I see."

Schliemann had his Homer, I thought, and now at last I understood what Quinnell meant when he said he had Robbie. Understood, too, why David Fortune had told me that Quinnell would dig here anyway, no matter what the surveys showed. If I were a less doubting person, I might dig, too.

My fingers flattened the wrinkled image once again, more slowly, as I read the printed caption:

"The Sentinel At His Post"—A Roman Legionary; Early Second Century, AD.

V

Adrian snapped a bit of thorn from the low hedge at the roadside and twirled it absently around in his fingers. "The man is six sandwiches short of a picnic, darling. Surely you noticed."

"Oh, so that's all right then, is it? Lying to someone because he's deluded?"

"Lying," said Adrian, "is a relative term." The thorn drew blood and he threw it away, then tucked himself behind me as a car went whistling past us. "Look, just stop walking, will you? We're far enough from the house, no one will hear."

I stopped, at a shaded place where the road bridged a shallow stream before beginning its curving downwards slope. Here, instead of hedge and fencing, low stone walls edged the road to keep the unwary from toppling into the briskly moving water below. On either side the trees rose tail and thin and ghostly pale, their naked branches faintly smudged with fuzzy green. They grew at all angles, like straws set into shifting sand, forming a screen that blocked our view of Rosehill House.

Adrian turned to settle himself against the stone barricade. "It wasn't even my idea, to begin with," he defended him- self. "It was Fabia's. She thought it might be nice to give the old boy some encouragement."