The Shadowy Horses

At the British Museum I'd handled some marvelous artifacts—ancient mosaics and old Roman glassware, rare things beyond price. But the feeling I'd had when I'd set them on display was nothing compared to the satisfaction it gave me to take that one Herring Queen gown—a hideous flounced thing in grape-colored taffeta—and carefully arrange it in its place in the exhibition.

Local history museums, I thought, did have advantages over their larger cousins. They were, if nothing else, a great deal friendlier. I didn't belong to Eyemouth, as the locals would say—but standing here in the fishing museum with Nancy Fortune's cheerful talk like a bracing breeze off the sea and Jeannie's gown on a stand in the corner and the whole past of the community pressing in around me, I did feel a curious sense of belonging.

It crept over me with the comfort of a woolly blanket, and I snuggled deep for a moment before practicality drove me to push it aside. You 're only here for the summer, really, I reminded myself. When the digging season ended and the field crew had disbanded for the unworkable winter months, I'd have to go back home, and then ... well, there was always Dr. Lazenby's new dig in Alexandria—I couldn't keep avoiding him forever. Sooner or later he would track me down, and I would have to give the man an answer. Alexandria. I sighed. But then, the whole point of my leaving the British Museum had been the quest for change, for new adventures, for...

"... a breath of air," Nancy Fortune was saying.

I looked up. "Sorry?"

She smiled at my inattentiveness. "That's perfect proof, that. I just said we've been cruived in too long: four hours of this work is far too long. D'ye fancy a bit of a walk?"

I had grown accustomed to the wind and almost welcomed it as we stepped outside, lifting my face to the freshening scent of the sea and the sun that fell warm on my skin. Now, in midsummer, the streets seemed too crowded, and the harbor behind us bustled with the preparations for Saturday's crowning of the Herring Queen, and so instead of walking in that direction, we turned and went through the town's center, coming out at length onto the Bantry—the smooth paved promenade that ran from Eyemouth harbor to the beach, along the sea.

There were people here as well, but not so many, and the sound of their chatter was drowned by the roar of the surf. The tide, coming in, rode on high rolling waves that broke like thunder against the harbor mouth. It proved too much to resist for one young girl playing at the end of the sea wall. Laughing, she darted like a bullet back and forth through the narrow gap between the wall and the harbor's parade, testing her speed against the incoming waves and getting well soaked in the process.

Below us, the empty beach, growing narrower by the minute, curved away to meet the blood-red cliffs that rose immovable against the sea, supporting the ruins of Eyemouth Fort, the playground of David's childhood.

I sighed, a little happy sigh, and rested my hands on the smooth stone wall that ran waist-high along the Bantry. "What a beautiful day," I said.

David's mother smiled. "I take it you're not keen to get back?"

For an instant I thought she meant back to London, and fancied she had read my mind, but then I realized she was only speaking of Rosehill, and my work.

"Peter did say I should take the day," I told her. "He thinks I've been looking tired, lately."

"And small surprise, if he's been keeping you up nights expounding his theories."

Conscience and fondness made me come to Peter's defense. "It was a good theory, actually. Would you like to hear it?"

"If you think my heart can stand it," she said, leaning beside me on the sea wall.

"Right. Well, you know we found the gold medallion, with the image of Fortuna on it?"

"Aye, Robbie told me."

"There's a bit more story to the piece than even Robbie knows," I said, and proceeded to fill her in on all the details, before moving on. "And so after I came back up from Rose Cottage, that's when Peter began to think deeply, as you put it." My lips twitched. "He thought himself right through a whole bottle of vodka."

"It's not uncommon. But I'll lay odds his mind touched on genius."

"Well, he does think that the reason why we haven't yet found any trace of bodies is because the men were cremated. You know, the fact that Rosehill used to be 'Rogue's Hill,' which could come from rogus, or funeral pyre."

"That would fit with Robbie saying that the Sentinel put his friend on the fire," she agreed. "But still, there were thousands of men."

"Yes, I know, but... maybe I should just run through it all, like Peter did, from the beginning. We're assuming that the Ninth came marching north and set up camp at Rosehill, within the ramparts of the old Agricolan vexillation fortress, which presumably had disappeared by then, right?''

"Aye."

"And one of the reasons Agricola probably built here in the first place was because of the harbor," I said. "The Roman navy had to be able to send in ships, to supply the legions on the northward march." The critical role that the navy had played in the conquest of Britain was all too often overlooked. Absorbed as I was in land based excavations, I'll admit I hadn't thought much about the naval connection myself until Peter had leapt on that statement of Robbie's.

"Robbie mentioned a ship that didn't come," I explained. "And Peter thinks it might have been a supply ship. Now, if the men depended on that ship, and if they were besieged or something, in their camp ..."