The Shadowy Horses

"Oh, aye?" He shifted against the wall, folding his arms across his chest. "And how is she behaving?"

I sidestepped the question by saying she'd appeared to be in good health. "We had quite a lovely visit, looking at old snapshots of Peter and your mother, and of you."

"Showing off all of my shortcomings, was she?"

A provocative smile tickled the coiners of my mouth.

"Well, we didn't actually get as far as the pictures of you in your bath, but perhaps next time ..."

He laughed. "Bloody cheek! You'll be paying for that."

Happily scoring a point, I looked at him, satisfied. "I do like your mother.''

"She's a likeable woman," he agreed, "when she's not being a pain in the—"

"Your mother says," I cut in, "that when a man accuses a woman of being difficult, he really means she has an independent mind."

"Is that a fact?" David's mouth curved, and his gaze grew warmly intimate. "What else does my mother say?"

Tipping my head down, I traced the creases between the stones with one finger. "She seems to think," I said, "that you might fancy me."

"Aye, well," he replied, with a shrug, "that'll teach me to tell her my secrets." He looked toward the field again. "Damn."

"What is it?"

"They've found something."

I smiled. "A fine attitude, for an archaeologist."

"I'd best go see what it is," he said heavily, and pushing himself away from the solid comfort of the stone wall, he slowly walked back out into the full heat of the afternoon. I watched him go, still smiling, and was turning from the wall myself when a sudden sound against the silence made me stop.

Beyond the wall, not three feet from where I was standing, a low clump of gorse crackled sharply, and the long grass bent and shivered as a set of measured footsteps followed David from the shadows, heading out into the wide and waiting field.

XXVII

It really was a most impressive sprint, considering the day's heat and the weight of my carrier bags. No one waited at the top of the hill, stopwatch in hand, to clock me as I came flying up the gravel drive, but I doubted Linford Christie could have bettered my time.

I must have looked a sight when I stumbled into the Principia, face burning, breathing hard, but my two student assistants were too deeply absorbed in their work to take notice. And I, for my part, was so hugely relieved to see them that I quite forgot to be embarrassed. The simple primal instinct to seek comfort and security in numbers was surprisingly effective, really. Just knowing I wasn't alone was enough to dissolve nearly all of my fears. The ghost might still walk, but I wasn't alone.

I breathed, a deep breath. My pulse calmed.

The students, hunched over their desks like monks transcribing the gospels, still hadn't looked up. With a smile I set down my carrier bags and walked over to lend a hand with sorting through the day's finds. It took a certain twist of mind to do this work. Jeannie, after watching me labor for twenty minutes, had pronounced my job "fykie," and when I'd later looked the word up in my trusty Scots dictionary I'd thought it awfully appropriate. Like cleaning whorled silver or painting in miniature, dealing with finds was indeed a fykie task.

I'd always felt a wistful sense of envy for my colleagues who broke open long-sealed tombs, or for film heroes who scraped about in the dirt for twenty seconds before pulling out some rare bejewelled and golden statue, carefully preserved, intact.

Almost everything I'd ever touched—with the notable exception of one small military dagger—had come to me in pieces, dull with dirt and worn with age.

The Rosehill dig, so far, was no exception. Every new day brought more bits of animal bone and shattered pottery and broken metalwork. And every scrap and fragment, no matter how unimpressive it might appear, had to be cleaned, sorted and labeled with an identifying number.

I hated labeling artifacts. My hands were never steady and my numbers came out crooked, and the work itself was mind-numbingly tedious, ft was enough of a challenge sometimes just to find a small spot on the artifact where a number could be visibly written without being glaringly obvious. Then, having applied a thin film of clear nail varnish on that spot, to seal the surface, I had to take an old-fashioned straight pen and liquid ink and, ever so carefully, write the number along that varnished strip, in tiny neat digits of white or black ink according to the color of the artifact, finishing off with a second coat of varnish, for protection.

This fussy method had its purpose, I admitted. Because of the sealing coats of nail varnish, the whole number could be easily removed without damaging the artifact, and since my penmanship left much to be desired I tended to remove as many numbers as I painted on.

And then, of course, the number had to be written down again, in the finds register, along with the particulars of the artifact itself—where and when it had been found, in what condition, what its dimensions were, and any other details we could think to add. Before, I'd always kept such notes by hand, in a series of ring-binders, but here at Rosehill the "finds register" was all on computer, in a uniform, fill-in- the-blank style that kept the format consistent whether an assistant or myself entered the information. Much more efficient, I thought, than the old methods.

But that didn't stop me from making odd notes and sketches of the artifacts, in my old-fashioned notebook, and from time to time I called Fabia in to take photographs.