But there was, of course! There was some seven feet of flue laid open to daylight at the far end of this hypocaust, down by the river. Even the inner end of that was blocked by rubble. Not completely, though. There was room at the top for a cat to wriggle through; and the barrier might be thin, would certainly be loose, since the roof still held up, and no great weight had fallen upon it to pack it hard.
His mind was clearing, he could actually think. With his eyes closed he could even draw himself a diagram of the caldarium, and he had seen for himself, in the one flue they had excavated, how the grid ran, with true Roman regularity.
Consider the landward perimeter, one of the shorter sides of the rectangle, as its base. Then the laconicum is located in the bottom left-hand corner, and that’s where I am. And the open flue is very close to the top left-hand corner, the length of the hypocaust away, but on my side. He thought of the huge extent of the caldarium on top of him, and felt sick. My God, it might as well be a hundred miles! Better get moving, Hambro, and just hope, because there isn’t for ever, and there isn’t all that much air down here, and what there is isn’t too good.
Careful, though, don’t be in too big a hurry to move until you’re sure which way you’re going, he reminded himself urgently. And he began to think his way back, with crazily methodical deliberation, to his fall. He had come from the road, towards the river, following the bronze spark; and though he had tried to turn at the last moment, his impression was that in falling he had still been facing fairly directly towards the same point, and had been hoisted over in that direction. When stones began to fall after him he had not turned, simply clawed his way forward until he encountered the wall of the flue, and turned left into its tenuous shelter. Therefore he was now facing towards the left-hand boundary of the rectangle, and no great distance from it. His best line was to crawl ahead until this flue terminated in the blank boundary-wall, then turn right along it, and keep straight ahead, and he would be on the right course for the distant corner where the flue was laid open. If the air held out. If he found the brick passages still intact throughout, or at least passable. If the final barrier—supposing he ever survived to reach it!—didn’t prove so thick that he would die miserably, digging his way through it with his finger-nails.
All right, that was settled. Better die trying than just lie here and rot. So before he moved off, he had now to edge his way back a few yards, without turning, for fear of losing that tenuous sense of direction, and feel gingerly among the rubble for his suitcase.
Movement hurt, but goaded instead of discouraging him. The sudden small, hurtling body that went skittering over his feet and away along the route he favoured startled but braced him. The rats got in and out somewhere—probably in a dozen places—and if he could find even a rat-sized hole on starlight he would find a way of enlarging it somehow to let his own body out. If there was a hole there would be air, and he was not going to starve for days, at least.
He was beginning to be aware of the minor horrors that up to now had been obliterated in the single immense horror of being buried alive: the chill, the closeness and earthy heaviness of the air, its graveyard odour, the oppression of the low ceiling over his head, and the soft, settled dirt of centuries cold and thick under his hands, so fine that he sank to the wrist in it in every slight depression where it had silted more thickly, and so filthy that every touch was loathsome, though not so disgusting as the foul drapings of old cobwebs that plastered his head and shoulders from the roof.
His left hand groped among stones and soil, disturbing fresh, rustling falls, but he found the corner of the leather case, and patiently worked it clear. The lock had burst open, clothes spilled from it. He found the torch, small and inadequate but better than nothing, and snapped it on for a second to be sure it still worked. Better conserve that. As long as progress was possible along the outermost flue he could do without light. It took him longer to find the gloves, but he did it finally, and thrust them into his pocket. Now forward, and careful at any offered turning. Far better not risk the interior of the maze. Once reach the outside wall, and all he had to do was keep his left hand on it until he reached the far end. If… My God, he thought, feeling the cold sweat run down his lips and into his mouth, so many ifs!
He had moved forward only a couple of feet, crawling carefully on hands and knees, when he set his left hand upon something smooth and marble-cold, and feeling over its surface with cautious finger-tips, traced in stupefaction the features of a rigid face, and above the forehead rough, moulded bands, and a shallow, battlemented coronal. He sat back on his heels and dug away silting soil that half-covered it, and his nails rang little, metallic sounds against its rim. It seemed to him then that he remembered the ring of metal as the stones began to fall.
He used the torch for the first time. A bronze face sprang startlingly out of the darkness, a hollow bronze head with chiselled, empty, hieratic features and elongated voids for eyes, with a frieze of fighting figures across its forehead, and curls of formal hair for ear-pieces. The visor had broken away at one hinge from the brow, the crown was dented in its fall, but he knew what he was holding, and even here, in this extremity, it filled him with the exultation of delirious discovery. The thing was a Roman ceremonial helmet, of the kind elaborated not for battle but for formal cavalry exercises, complete with face mask of chilling beauty. He knew of only one as perfect in existence. Moreover, this one had been carefully cleaned and polished, he thought even subjected to minor repairs, to make it wearable at need. He was holding in his hands the moonlit spark that had been used to lure him back to the laconicum and to his death, only half an hour ago, and had here been jettisoned and buried with him.
The Paviour household was at breakfast when Bill brought the news that his guest had departed overnight. Lesley read the note of explanation and apology with a still, displeased face, and looked up once, very briefly, at her husband, before crumpling the paper in her hand with a gesture which alone betrayed something more than consternation, a flash of hurt, highly personal anger. But she said nothing in reproach against the departed, Charlotte noticed; the anger was not with him, nor did she see any point in expressing it further.
‘Nothing I could do about it,’ said Bill, hoisting his shoulders in deprecation. ‘He was gone when I got back. I shouldn’t have thought he need have dashed off overnight, but he knows his markets, I suppose. And if you don’t work at it, you don’t keep your clients.’
‘Mr Hambro has a living to make, like all of us,’ said Paviour austerely, ‘and no doubt he knows his own business best. But it’s a pity he couldn’t stay longer. He was a very competent archaeologist, from what I saw of him.’
It was that use of the past tense that crystallised for Charlotte everything that she found out of character in this abrupt departure. She looked from face to face round the table, and all three of them were perfectly comprehensible, both on the surface level and beneath it. She could take the situation at its face value, flatly literal like that note lying beside Lesley’s plate, or she could delve beneath the upper layer and recall all yesterday’s curious emotional signals, and begin to put together quite a different picture. But in both versions she was negligible, without a part to play. And she was well aware that she had been playing a part, one which had now been written out by some alien hand, and that she was not negligible. He would not go away like this without word or hint to her. Word might, of course, be on its way by a devious route, and she could wait a little; but not long. She was uneasy, and convinced she had grounds for uneasiness. She simply did not believe in what she was witnessing.