‘And he isn’t in it,’ said George, drawing the obvious inference with immense relief. ‘That’s the good news?’
‘That’s it. Good as far as it goes, anyhow. No body, no luggage, nothing visible bigger than a rug on the floor. But it leaves you with a problem, all right. Since he isn’t there, where is he? Because whoever put his car out of commission down a hole can’t have been exactly well-disposed to the owner, can he?’
The air was getting fouler, and he was getting weaker, and he was almost as far away as ever from that unattainable corner where the hypocaust opened one vein to the light of day; though whether it was night or day, and what the hour was, he had now no means of knowing. He had given up hope of finding a way through the centre of the maze. Every hopeful passage he had attempted towards the river had only closed up in front of him and driven him still further to the right, and three times now he had had to turn off to the right even from that line for a short distance, so that he had lost some ground gained earlier. He must now be at the very site, he thought, of that last minor dig, and the one hope he had left was that this right-hand boundary wall might have survived in better case than the opposite one. Since the centre was bedded solid, and the obvious way to his objective had failed him, try the long way round, and pray that it might yet turn out to be the shortest way home. The flues at the rim of the hypocaust had the best chance of surviving, since on one side they backed all the way into solid earth, the brickwork unbroken by cross-passages. And this one towards which he was now crawling, on no remaining fuel but his native obstinacy, would certainly have carried less traffic and less weight during the centuries of cultivation, since the vast bases of the forum pillars alongside it had defied removal even by the ingenious village builders, and baulked all attempts at getting this piece of land under plough. It had always, he remembered from old photographs in the museum, been a scrub hedge between the fields, and a strip of waste ground, good only for blackberrying. This side he might have better luck.
The boundary flue had one other great advantage, considering his present condition of exhaustion and light-headedness. When he came to it, it would be a blank T-crossing, with no way ahead, and could not be mistaken. He had been telling himself as much, and promising that it would come soon, for what seemed hours, which only indicated how tenuous his grasp of time had become, and how slow his progress. But at every move he still reached out a hopeful hand to flatten against the facing wall that still wasn’t there—as now.
But this time it was there. His palm encountered the unmistakable rough texture of brickwork, squarely closing the way ahead. He lay still for a few minutes, his head swimming with the weakness of relief, and also with the thick, smothering odour of the air, which had congealed into a peculiar horror of old, cold physical death. He groped out fearfully towards the left, which was now his way, and the flue beside him was open, and clear of rubble as far as he could reach. He fingered the walls, and they were sound; the ceiling above, and it felt firm as rock. He shifted his weight with labour and pain, carefully moving the dangling mask out of harm’s way, and reached out towards the right. If that way, too, the flue seemed whole and sturdy, he would begin to believe that his luck was changing at last, and in time. Because either this air was fouler than any he had encountered yet, or he was losing control of his remaining senses.
The vault to the right held up as strongly as on the other side. He felt his way down from ceiling to floor, and his hand touched something which was not mere dust or the ground fragments of brick, or even thick, foul cobweb, but parted beneath his touch in rotting threads, with the unmistakable texture of cloth.
He couldn’t believe it, and yet it revived him as nothing else could have done. The helmet was no find of his, but if this was cloth, then this was all his own. His questing fingers felt shudderingly over the scrap he had detected, passed over a few inches of flooring, and recaptured the same evident textile quality in several more tindery rags. And they had this up, he thought, and never found anything better than a few animal bones and pottery, when they couldn’t have been more than a few feet away from here. Curiously, though he had no way of verifying his calculations, at this moment he was absolutely sure of them.
And it was at that very moment that his fingers, moving with wincing delicacy where there might be priceless discoveries to be made, encountered what was unquestionably bone, but exceptional in being not fragmentary, but whole, as far as he could reach, without lesion. Stretching, he touched a joint, where the bone homed into the cup of another mass, as naked and as clean. He searched in his blind but acute memory, and brought up vividly the image of a human hip joint, intricate and marvellous.
He was a hundred per cent alive again, and he had to get out of here alive now if it killed him, because he had to know. There was one minor city, not unlike this one in its history, where they found two human skeletons in the hypocaust, some poor souls who had taken refuge in the empty heating system when the place was attacked, and almost certainly suffocated when most of the town was fired over their heads. The same could have happened here. He forgot how nearly dead he was, and how completely and precisely buried, and quickened to sympathy and pity for this poor soul who had died after his burial, so many centuries ago. Very softly he drew his finger-tips down the mass of the femur, stroked over the rounded marble of a knee-joint, and then reached out tentatively where the foot should be. For a leather sandal might have remained embalmed perfectly all this time, as durable almost as the ivory of the wearer’s bones. Quite close to his right knee, under the wall of the flue, his knuckles struck against the erected hardness, and the sound was music to him. A solid, thick sole. He felt from heel to toe, and then round to where the straps should be, and the still-articulated bones of instep and toes within. Gently, not to do damage. Also out of some reverence a great deal older than Christian ethics, the universal tenderness towards the dead.
The leather sole was sewn to a leather upper. Clearly his raw finger-tips relayed to him, with agony, what they found. No straps, no voids between. A very hard, dehydrated shape moulded inwards from the sole, seamed over a smooth vamp, finished at the heel with a hand-stitched band. Above, where the two wings joined over the instep, the small, metallic roundels of eyelets, and the taut cross-threading of laces. The bow he touched parted at the impact, and slid, still formed, after his withdrawing fingers.
Not a fourth-century Roman sandal on this skeleton foot, but a conventional, hand-sewn, custom-made, twentieth-century English shoe.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
« ^ »
It was approaching half past seven that evening when George Felse made his appearance at the curator’s house, completely shattering Lesley’s arrangements for dinner, and throwing the entire household into confusion. He delayed saying what he had to say until Bill Lawrence was summoned from the lodge to join them; and he made no pretence of maintaining a social relationship with any of them while they waited. The atmosphere of strain that built up in the silence might well have been intentional; or he might, Charlotte acknowledged, simply have shut them out of his consciousness while he considered more important things, and the fever might have been their own contribution, a kind of infection infiltrating from person to person, guilty and innocent alike, if there were here any guilty creatures, or any totally innocent. George sat contained and civil and pseudo-simple outside their circle, and waited patiently until it was completed by the arrival of a dishevelled and uncertain Bill.