“Do you think your secretary will have finished by now?”
“More than likely. You know, I’m surprised you came here, searching for this mysterious ’sister.’ “
“Why? Where else would I go?”
“To your family, of course. To Gina. Perhaps you aren’t very close. Pity.” She led the way out of the chapel, back across the compound to the main block.
The secretary, Milly, had indeed come up with a stack of old preschool records. Forty years old, they were sheets of yellowed paper, some ruled into columns by hand, closely handwritten or typed, and kept in battered-looking box files. Somewhere there must be similarly dusty fossils of my own school career, I realized bleakly.
Ms. Gisborne riffled through the boxes briskly, running a manicured nail down rows of names. I could see she was getting nowhere. “There’s nobody with the surname Poole in here,” she said. “You can see I’ve looked a year or two to either side of—”
“Perhaps you could try another name. Casella.”
She frowned at me. “What’s that?”
“My mother’s maiden name. Maybe that was how she registered the child.”
She sighed and closed the box file. “I fear we are wasting our time, Mr. Poole.”
“I have the photograph,” I said plaintively.
“But that’s all you have.” She didn’t sound sympathetic. “There are many possible explanations. Perhaps it was a cousin, a more distant relative. Or simply another child, a playmate, with a chance resemblance.”
I struggled to say what I felt. “You must see this is important to me.”
She stared at me, an intimidating headmistress faced by an awkward student. But she turned back to the first of her box files and began again.
It took her five more minutes to find it. “Ah,” she said reluctantly. “ Casella. Rosa Casella, first attended nineteen sixty-two …”
I found my breath was short. Perhaps on some level I hadn’t quite believed in the reality of this lost sibling after all, even given the photograph. But now I had a kind of confirmation. Even a name — Rosa. “What happened to her?”
Ms. Gisborne riffled through a couple of pages. “When she reached primary school age she was transferred — ah, here we are — to an English-language school in Rome …” She read on.
I sat there feeling, of all things, jealous. Why should this mysterious Rosa have had the benefit of an education in some fancy Roman school? Why not me?
Abruptly Ms. Gisborne dropped the pages back in the box file and closed it with a snap. “I’m sorry. This is too irregular. I shouldn’t be telling you this. The connection is only through what you claim was your mother’s maiden name—”
I guessed at another connection. “This school in Rome. Was it run by a Catholic order?”
“Mr. Poole—”
“The Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins?”
“Mr. Poole.” She stood up.
“It was the Order, wasn’t it? That was the name you just read.” It was a strange situation. I couldn’t understand her sudden hostility when we had gotten to the records of the Order. It was as if she were defending it — but why I had no idea. Perhaps she had something to hide. I stabbed in the dark. “Does this school have links to the Order, too? Is that why you’re suddenly so defensive?”
She walked to the door. “Good day to you now.” As if by magic Milly opened the door, apparently waiting to throw me out.
I stood up. “Thanks for your time. And you know — you’re right. I will go see Gina. I should have gone there first.” I smiled, as coldly as I could. “And if I find out anything that embarrasses your school and its murky past you can be sure I’ll broadcast it.”
Ms. Gisborne’s face was as expressionless as a statue’s. “You are an unpleasant and flawed man, Mr. Poole. Good day to you.”
And as the big school door was closed against me, unpleasant and flawed was just how I felt — along with a big dose of good old Catholic guilt.
Guilty or not, on the way home I used my cell phone to book a flight to Miami.
Chapter 9
The journey south from the Wall, through a dismal, closed-in British autumn, was a blur, a bad dream. It was nothing like the adventure with Aetius, five years earlier. This time the three of them — Regina, Cartumandua, and Severus — weren’t even riding in a proper carriage but in a crude, dirty, stinking cart used for carrying hay and cattle muck. In five years the road had decayed badly, with the roadside ditches clogged with weeds and rubbish, the waystones tumbled, smashed, or stolen, and potholes where the locals had prised cobbles out of the surface for building materials. The way stations and inns seemed a lot more run-down, too.
But Regina didn’t care.
She sat in the back of the cart with Cartumandua, wrapped in her cucullus, hunched over on herself, with the three matres clutched to her belly. She didn’t talk, wouldn’t play games, and was reluctant to eat. She wasn’t even afraid, despite Severus’s constant, gloomy warnings of the danger they faced from bacaudae. These wanderers who plagued the countryside were refugees from failed towns and villas, or barbarian relics of beaten-back invasions, or even former soldiers who had abandoned their posts. The bacaudae were symptoms of the slow breakdown of the diocese’s society, and all had to be assumed a threat.
She slept as much as she could, though her dozing was interrupted by the jolting of the cart. At night she lay on straw-stuffed pallets, or sometimes just on blankets and cloaks scattered on dirt floors, listening to Severus’s drunken fumblings at Cartumandua. Sometimes she stayed awake all through the night, until the dawn came. At least she was alone in the dark. And if she stayed awake she had a better chance of escaping into the oblivion of sleep during the misery of the day.
But when she did sleep, each time she woke she was disappointed to be back in this uncomfortable reality, the endless, meaningless, arrow-straight road surface, and to the fact that she was alone now, alone save for the matres — and perhaps her mother, who had abandoned her to go to Rome.
At last they approached a walled town. The town was set beside a river, on a plain studded with farmsteads. Beyond the town a hillside rose steeply, with a scattering of buildings on its flanks and at its summit.
The town’s wall was at least twice Regina’s height. It was faced with square tiles of gray slate, but in places the slates had decayed away or had been stripped off, exposing a core of big rubble blocks set in concrete, interspersed with layers of flat red bricks. It would have been dwarfed, of course, by the great northern Wall.
They came to a gate, a massive structure with two cylindrical towers topped with battlements. There were two large entrances through which the road passed, and two smaller side passages, evidently meant for people. But the side passages were blocked with rubble, and one of the big archways had collapsed.
A man stood before the gate, blocking their way. He wore the remnants of a soldier’s armor, strips of tarnished metal held in place over his chest by much-patched leather bands. He was armed — but only, comically, with what looked like a farmer’s iron scythe. Severus negotiated. As a former soldier he had a basis of contact with the gatekeeper, and they shared dull, incomprehensible details of assignments and ranks and duties.