The Shadowy Horses

The wind had played havoc with my hair, as well. Against my face I felt the strands that had been tugged free of their plait, and when I vainly tried to coax them back my fingers found a bit of twig tangled behind my ear. I drew it out with a rueful smile. "I don't feel much like a stoater now," I confessed, "no matter what your son might think."

"You look just fine," said Jeannie firmly. "And anyway, I don't think Robbie's alone in his opinion."

"I'm sorry?”

“That's Davy's jacket you're wearing, isn't it?"

To be perfectly honest, I'd forgotten all about the windcheater. I looked down now at the dark green folds of it that swallowed me and smelled of him, a clean elusive scent, quite different from the men's colognes to which I'd grown accustomed. I was all but hugging it, like a schoolgirl proudly wearing her boyfriend's football jersey.

I hadn't been aware of the fact before, but now I found myself wondering whether David Fortune had noticed it, too. Frowning slightly, I cleared my throat. "He let me have the loan of it because I was cold.''

Jeannie said nothing, but I caught the simmering laughter in her eyes as she bent to clear away the teapot and our empty cups. I sighed again, and let the matter drop, shrugging my arms out of the oversized jacket as though my wearing it was unimportant.

But I did feel cold, without it.

X

The rain fell steadily through the night and when the morning came there was no sun at all, only a dull gray light and a dull gray sky and the dreary rhythm of the raindrops beating ceaselessly upon the roof above. The only variation came from rain blown hard against my bedroom window—it spattered there and trickled down in crooked lines and struck the ground below with deep plop-plunks that formed a bass line for the uninspired melody.

I'd never learned the knack of leaping out of bed on dismal mornings. A quick look through unfocused eyes, a mental groan of protest, and I'd pull the blankets back up around my ears and wriggle purposefully into them, trying to reclaim the drifting realm of sleep. It never worked, of course. Once wakened, I could never quite drop off again, but still there was something gloriously sinful about stealing an' extra quarter of an hour in bed on a Sunday morning. Besides, I reasoned, with the weather outside so bleak and the whole house shuddering with every blast of wind, there was little incentive to wake up.

The air outside the covers bit my nose, but my bed was warm, made all the warmer by the fact that both cats had chosen to join me some time in the night. The black torn . Murphy lay sprawled full across my feet, while little Charlie snuggled underneath my elbow, breathing shallow, even breaths that stirred her fur. Shame to disturb them, I thought ... so I didn't. Instead I closed my eyes and sifted idly through the strange events of yesterday.

We'd found a potsherd, I reminded myself. And a ditch. Well, what appeared to be a ditch, my logical mind corrected me. My logical mind was, to be honest, still finding it difficult to absorb the fact that we'd found anything at all, let alone the ditch and rampart of a Roman marching camp. Not that the rampart—if it was a rampart—was necessarily Roman. In a childish way I almost wished it wasn't. I could forget, then, about psychic children and long-dead Roman sentinels and unseen people breathing down my neck.

As it stood, I hadn't a hope of forgetting. I felt like one of those poor blighters plucked from a magician's audience to play assistant onstage, forced to stand there dazzled by the mirrors and tempted at each sleight of hand to ask "How did you do that?''

The trick, when revealed, was usually dead simple, but that didn't make it any less impressive. And it was no small trick to make me believe, however briefly, in ghosts.

Even now, the morning after the fact, I still felt an irrational touch of panic when a floorboard creaked outside my bedroom. For the space of a heartbeat I held myself motionless, screwed my eyes shut tighter, turned away from it... and then I heard a thinly stifled yawn and knew that it was only Fabia, passing by on her way downstairs. Relaxing into the pillows, I breathed and reached an automatic hand to switch off my alarm before it sounded.

Murphy, disturbed by the small movement, raised his head to glare at me a moment before leaping neatly from the foot of my bed to the windowsill. "And don't you start," I warned him, as his tail began to twitch. "If you see anything through that mess you can bloody well keep it to yourself." As though he understood my words the black cat settled himself at the window and stared in stony silence at the pouring rain outside.

There was to be no digging today, not just because of the wet weather but because Quinnell held Sunday to be a day of rest. "If the good Lord had wanted us to work on Sundays," he'd told me last night, sounding for the first time like an Irishman, "he'd not have allowed the pubs to stay open."

Which explained why, when I finally extricated myself from my blankets and made my way downstairs in search of coffee, I was surprised to learn that Quinnell had ignored his own decree.

"He's gone up to the Principia," said Fabia, uninterested. The Sunday Telegraph lay sprawled across the kitchen table in disordered sections, and she'd drawn up a second chair so she could prop her feet up, ankles crossed, and read in comfort. Picking up the Review section, she shook it out and looked at me over the spread pages. "He'll have coffee on up there, if you want some. I don't drink the stuff."

The kettle sat cold on the stove and the air felt cold in the kitchen. Deciding that Quinnell's company would be more cheering than his granddaughter's, I borrowed a bright yellow mac from a peg in the front entry and made a dash for it, up the hill.