The Shadowy Horses

"Blast!" Adrian fastened off the final guiding line of tape as the rain began in earnest, a steady soaking shower that made spikes of my eyelashes and tasted sweet on my tongue.

"Come on," he said, turning to make a dash for it. But I lingered one more minute in the cool and cleansing rain, eyes closed, my face tipped upwards like a child's, wondering why the thought of David Fortune's frowning face, jealous or otherwise, made me so damnably happy.

XV

Jeannie promptly banished me upstairs, to take a bath. "You'll catch your death, with that wet hair," she told me firmly, "and you've half an hour till lunch."

There never seemed much point, I thought, in arguing with Jeannie. And it wasn't altogether unpleasant to strip off my soaked clothing and sink into the hot bath, scented with exotic hints of sandalwood and spice, courtesy of Peter's own expensive bath salts. Even the Romans, I was sure, could not have known luxury like this.

Although, to be fair, one had to admit that the Romans had been experts on the gentle art of bathing.

I'd visited the graceful arched chambers at Bath, with their great echoing colonnaded aisles and the water as pale as an aquamarine, water that had once closed around the shoulders of some tired Roman woman of my own age, who'd sought comfort in the heated pools from all the aches and chills that plagued her young but weary bones.

I closed my eyes, as she might have done, slipping down until the water touched my chin. The steam curled up deliciously against my face, as my hair sagged limply down from its loose pile atop my head.

I wondered if the Roman woman in her bath had dreamed of men, as I did. If she'd thought on some old lover, some smooth merchant with a charming smile, or conjured up the wistful image of some strong and stoic legionary, dark-haired with eyes of blue, and a body that no mortal had a right to.

My sigh rippled the surface of the bathwater. I opened my eyes. Give it up, I told myself good-naturedly.

The woman who peered back at me fan the foggy depths of the mirror, when I finally emerged from my bath, looked nothing like a Roman. The face was too scrubbed, and the hair too straggly. That was my one complaint with long hair, I reflected. I'd undone my plait and toweled dry the dripping strands as best I could, but a quick check of my watch told me I didn't have time to do a proper job. Leaving my hair loose and hanging damply down my back, I shivered into a dry pair of jeans and a clean shirt before scooting downstairs to join the others.

Peter Quinnell, I had learned, liked to lake his meals on schedule.

Breakfasts were a bit of an exception. All of us woke at different times, and our morning routines made any sort of synchronization difficult. Adrian and David usually breakfasted at their hotel, before they came to work, while Peter, Fabia and I ate sometimes together and sometimes by turns in the bright narrow kitchen, with Jeannie standing over us, stirring her ever-present pot of porridge on the stove. Sometimes Wally was there as well, or Robbie... it all depended on the earliness of the hour.

But lunch was a different matter. Lunch at Rosehill House was a strictly observed ritual that, while not exactly formal, still carried a faint echo of the grand old days of the country house, when people dressed for dinner and the servants ate below stairs. The impression was made all the stronger by the fact that Jeannie, when she wasn't serving food or clearing plates, kept to her kitchen and left us alone. And the dining room itself seemed to demand a certain degree of gentility, of respect for the rules of etiquette.

It was a most impressive room, tucked discreetly away in the rear comer of the ground floor, just beyond the kitchen and directly behind the "posh" sitting room. The walls were paneled in palest oak, the window gleamed wide and uncurtained, a gas fire hissed in the elegant fireplace on the end wall, and beneath the long polished table, which could easily have seated twelve, a thickly cushioned carpet of rich Cambridge blue ran the length of the room, from skirting-board to hearth.

"It was originally a bedroom," Peter had told me earlier that week, when I'd remarked on the beauty of the room, "but a lady who owned Rosehill in the late eighteenth century had the bad fortune to be murdered in here by her butler. He cut her throat, I'm told. So they changed this to a dining room. For, after all," he'd said, buttering a slice of bread with admirable nonchalance, "no one would want to sleep in a room where there'd been a murder."

When Adrian had pointed out that some might not exactly relish the thought of eating in a murder room, either, Peter had dismissed the notion with a casual wave of his hand, maintaining that it wasn't at all the same thing. That was one of the marvelous things about Peter, I thought. He had a way of saying something, in that beautifully theatrical voice of his, that made the illogical sound entirely reasonable. It was a gift. Already this week he'd used that gift to win three lunchtime debates with Adrian.

But today, no one seemed inclined to begin a debate. Because it was Friday, with David not up in Edinburgh giving lectures, we were five, seated boy-girl-boy-girl in a half-circle around one end of the long table. Peter sat at the head, with his back to the fireplace and Fabia and I to his left and right, respectively. Adrian, being left-handed, had been assigned the seat beside Fabia, which not only gave his left arm a free range of motion, but also allowed him to keep an eye on me.

Adrian was an only child; he didn't like to share.

If David, at my shoulder, leaned too close or made me smile, it was a safe bet Adrian would smoothly intervene, like a child jealously guarding a discarded plaything. As he was past reforming, I generally ignored him, counting mentally backwards from one hundred while I turned my eyes to the window opposite and its peaceful view of garden, field and sky. Today I found myself admiring that view more than usual, not just because of Adrian but because I simply didn't know where else to look.