“Grandfather — no !”
She actually heard the blade go in. It rasped on the coarse wool of Aetius’s tunic. Aetius stood, staring at Septimius. Then dark blood gushed from his mouth. He shuddered and fell back, rigid, to the floor.
Septimius’s mouth dropped open, as if he were aware for the first time of where he was, what he had done. He turned and ran into the night. Aetius lay on the floor, breathing in great liquid gurgles.
There was blood on the floor, blood pooling as it once had from her father’s body. Regina forced herself to move. She ran to Aetius, and lifted his heavy head onto her lap. “Grandfather! Can you hear me? Oh, Grandfather!”
He tried to speak, coughed, and brought up a great gout of dark blood. “I’m sorry, little one. So sorry.”
“No—”
“Fool. Been a fool, fooling myself. It’s over. The Wall. They’ll leave now, the last of them. No pay, you see, no pay. Cilurnum fell, you know. You saw the fire on the horizon. Cilurnum gone …” He coughed again. “Go with Carta.”
“Cartumandua—”
“Go with her. Her people. No place for you here. Tell her I said …”
She asked the question that had burned in her young heart for five years. If he died, he could never answer it, she might never know. “Grandfather — where is my mother ?”
“Rome,” he gasped. “Her sister is there, Helena. So weak, that one. Wouldn’t even wait for you …” He grabbed her shoulder. His palm was slick with blood. “Forget her. Julia doesn’t matter. You’re the family now. Take the matres.”
“No! I won’t go. I won’t leave you.”
He thrashed in his spreading pool of blood, and more crimson fluid gushed from the ripped wound in his chest. “Take them …”
She reached out and grabbed the little statues from their shelf in the lararium. At last he seemed to relax. She thought he wanted to say more, but his voice was a gurgle and she could make out no words.
Suddenly something broke in her. She pushed away his head, letting it fall to the floor, and ran to the broken doorway, clutching the statues. She looked back once. His eyes were still open, looking at her. She fled into the night.
Chapter 8
Somewhat to my surprise, the head of Saint Bridget’s, the school Gina had attended, was welcoming, initially anyhow. She listened to my tale of the photograph, though she was obviously skeptical about my story of a missing sister.
She had me sit in her office, on an armchair before her big polished desk. Ms. Gisborne was a slim, elegant woman of maybe fifty-five, with severely cut silver-gray hair. Over a business suit she wore a black academic gown lined with blue — the school colors, as I vaguely remembered from my sister’s day. The office was well appointed, with a lush blue carpet, ornate plasterwork around the ceiling, a trophy cabinet, a large painting of the school on the wall opposite big windows, lots of expensive-looking desk furniture. It had the feel of a corporate boardroom; perhaps this sanctum was used to impress prospective parents and the local sponsors that seem essential to the running of any school these days. But an immense and disturbingly detailed Crucified Christ hung from one wall.
My chair, comically, was too low. I sat there sunk in the thing with my knees halfway up my chest, while the head loomed over me.
She didn’t remember Gina — in fact, Ms. Gisborne was actually about the same age as my older sister — but she had taken the trouble to find some of her reports. “She came over welclass="underline" a bright, pretty girl, natural leader …” The kind of thing people had always said of Gina. But she held out little hope of tracing any record of any younger sister, and clearly thought it odd that I should even be asking. “There was a preschool department here in those days — for the under-fives, you understand — but it has long since closed down. The school’s gone through a lot of changes since then. I’ll see if Milly can find the records, but I’m not optimistic. It’s all so long ago — no offense!”
“None taken.”
While we were waiting for the secretary to go down into the dungeons, Ms. Gisborne offered me the choice of a coffee, or a quick tour of the school. I felt restless, embarrassed, foolish, and I knew I would quickly run out of conversation with the headmistress of a Catholic school. I chose the tour. I had a little trouble hauling my bulk out of the tiny chair.
Out we walked.
The school was a place of layered history. A frame of two-story Victorian-era buildings enclosed a small grassy quadrangle. “We encourage the students to play croquet in the summer,” said Ms. Gisborne lightly. “Impresses the Oxbridge interviewers.” The corridors were narrow, the floor hardwood with dirt deeply ground in. There were immense, heroic radiators; huge heating pipes ran beneath the ceiling. We walked past classrooms. Behind thick windows rows of students, some in blue blazers, labored at unidentifiable tasks.
“It all reminds me of my own school,” I said uncomfortably.
“I know how you feel; many parents of your generation feel the same. Narrow corridors. Oppressive ceilings.” She sighed. “Doesn’t create the right atmosphere, but not much we can do short of pulling it all down.”
We passed out of the central block. The peripheral buildings were newer, dating from the fifties through to more recent times. I was shown a custom-built library constructed in the eighties, a bright and attractive building within which there seemed to be as many computer terminals as bookshelves. The students worked steadily enough, so far as I could see, though no doubt the presence of the head was an encouragement.
Ms. Gisborne kept up a kind of sales patter. Once the school had been run by a teaching order of nuns. During the comprehensivization of Britain’s schools they had left, or been driven out, depending on your point of view. “Although we still have contacts with them,” Ms. Gisborne said. “And with a number of other Catholic groupings. Since Gina’s time, as I said, we have closed down our preschool section, and merged administratively with a large boys’ school half a mile away. We now provide what would have been called sixth-form support in your day — sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds. Our academic record is good, and …”
I suspected she was as bored with me as I was of her, and that half her mind was elsewhere, engaged with the endless, complex task of running the place.
The most spectacular new building turned out to be a chapel. It had a concrete roof of elaborate curves. It turned out this was intended to model the tents within which Moses’s flock lived while crossing the desert. Beneath that startling roof the interior space was bright, littered with fragments of red and gold from the long stained-glass windows, and there was a smell of incense.
I felt oddly uncomfortable. The school still retained its profoundly religious core, within a shell of reform and renovation, persisting through the decades, an old, dark thing surviving.
Ms. Gisborne seemed to sense my unease, and from that moment in the chapel she grew oddly hostile.
“Tell me — when was the last time you were in a church?”
“Two weeks ago, for my father’s funeral,” I said, a bit harshly.
“I’m sorry,” she said evenly. “Was your parents’ faith strong?”
“Yes. But I’m not my parents.”
“Do you regret having had a Catholic education?”
“I don’t know. It was such a huge part of my life — I can’t imagine how I might have turned out if I hadn’t.”
“You will have left school with a strong moral sense, a sense of something bigger than you are. Even if you reject the answers, you keep the questions: Where did I come from, where am I going? What does my life mean? ” She was smiling, her face strong and assured. “Whether you turn away from the faith or not, at least you have been exposed to its reality and potential. Isn’t that a legacy worth taking away?”