Now Boadicea was no local barmaid. She happened to be the Queen of the Iceni, a tough mob. Breasts seethed in the Iceni kingdom. And, remember, Suetonius was away in Anglesey with his legions, a detail the arrogant conquerors forgot.
It was all suddenly too much for the bewildered British tribes. One dark day the terrible Iceni rose. The whole of eastern England smouldered as the Roman settlements were annihilated crunch by savage crunch. The famous Ninth Legion strolled out from Lincoln innocently intending to chastise the local rabble, a shovel to stop an avalanche. The thousands of legionaries died in a macabre lunatic battle in the dank forests. St Albans was obliterated in a single evening's holocaust. The outposts and the river stations were snuffed as Boadicea's grim blue-painted hordes churned southwards, until only the brand new Roman city of Colonia was left. Catus the Procurator skipped to Gaul in a flash, promising legions which never came. Politicians.
There was nothing left but the smouldering forests, the waiting city, and silence. Then the spooks began. The statue of Victory tumbling to the ground and swivelling its sightless stone eyes ominously away from Rome. Omens multiplied. Rivers ran red. Air burned. Statues wailed in temples. I won't go on if you don't mind. You get the picture.
Finally, one gruesome dark wet dawn Boadicea's warmen erupted from the forests, coming at a low fast run in their tens of thousands. The Temple of Jupiter, with the Roman populace crammed inside, was burned. The rest were slaughtered in the streets.
The city was razed. Boadicea jauntily crucified seventy thousand people, Roman and Briton alike, and nobody survived. It's called patriotism.
In the nick of time Suetonius miraculously returned to evacuate London, shoving everybody south of the Thames while Boadicea burned London and everywhere else she could think of. See what I mean, about women never giving up. Naturally, Rome being Rome, Suetonius made a comeback and the British Queen took poison after her great defeat, woman to the last.
I'd always accepted the story at its face value, but now I couldn't help wondering about something which had never struck me before.
Hadn't Suetonius been a long time coming back?
Nowadays our locals say to newcomers, 'Don't dig below the ash, will you? The ash is so good for the roses. And there's bits of bone, too. Calcium and phosphorus. We're quite famous for our roses hereabouts.' It's such good advice to gardeners.
I don't do any gardening.
Janie went in the nick of time. Eleanor collected Henry, now awake and singing with his foot in his mouth. I'm really proud of that trick, but Janie said they all do it. I waved from the front door.
I cleared up and got the map. The Isle of Anglesey is about half a mile from the Welsh coast. Thomas Telford even flung a bridge over the narrow Menai Straits. (Incidentally, Telford's engraved designs are worth far more nowadays than the paper they're printed on. They're hardly impressionistic but give me first choice of any you get.) One old historian, Polydore Vergil, always said Suetonius invaded the Isle of Man, but he was an erratic Italian everybody said was a nut anyway. There is even a belief that Suetonius had with him the famous Gemini Legion, but that must be wrong as well.
Augustus Caesar once received a delegation from a far country and is reputed to have whispered behind his hand to an aide: 'Are they worth conquering?' The country happened to be Ceylon, Sri Lanka, which for size could dwarf Rome any day of the week. The point is that the ancient Romans were distinctly cool. And one of the coolest was Suetonius, that dour, unsmiling, decisive and superb soldier whose tactical judgement, however grim, was unswervingly accurate.
As the evening drew on I tried to light a fire but the bloody wood was wet. I switched on the electric again instead. The birds outside had shut up. Only the robin was left on a low apple branch. My hedgehogs were milling about for nothing, rolling from side to side like fat brown shoppers.
Had the might of Rome been paralysed by a stretch of water you can spit over? Was Suetonius held up by a few Druids booing on the other side? History says yes. This old chap Bexon was telling me no.
I gazed at the garden till it was too dark to see.
CHAPTER VI
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NEXT MORNING I shaved before seven. I had some cereal in powdered milk and fed the robin my last bit of cheese. I went to have a word with Manton and Wilkinson, gave them their groundsel.
'Now, Manton,' I demanded as it noshed its greenery sitting on my arm, 'what's all this Roman jazz?'
It wisely said nothing, knowing there was more to come.
'The old man leaves two diaries. But why two?'
Wilkinson flew on me for his share.
'If he was crackers, let's forget it, eh?' They hesitated suspiciously. 'On the other hand, curators may be duckeggs but Popplewell can tell genuine Roman antiques, coins or otherwise. Right?' They closed up along my arm, interested now. 'Bexon's coins being genuine, pals, what can there possibly be, I wonder, stuck in an old lead coffin in some well-remembered spot in the Isle of Man?'
We thought hard.
'And who should benefit better,' I demanded, 'than Lovejoy Antiques, Inc.?'
Wilkinson fluffed out, pleased. Manton looked sceptical.
'Don't be so bloody miserable,' I told Manton angrily, 'just because I haven't the fare to get there. You're always critical.'
I shoved them on to a branch and shut their flight door. Both were looking sceptical now.
'I can get some money,' I snapped. 'Don't you worry. I'll have the sketch and the fare from Dandy. I'll be back. You see.'
By my front door the robin was cackling with fury. He was quite full but battling to keep the sparrows from the cheese he didn't want. Very feminine, robins.
The bus was on time. In my innocence I thought it a good omen.
Dandy Jack's is a typical lock-up, a shop front and two rooms. The clutter held miscellaneous modern tarted up as old, a brass 1890 bedstead (worth more than you'd think, incidentally), pottery, wooden furniture and some ornamentals plus a small gaggle of portabilia in a glass-fronted cabinet.
A few people milled about inside, mostly grockles (dealers' slang: tourists, not necessarily foreign, derogatory) and the odd dealer. Big Frank Wilson from Suffolk was there. He gave me a nod which said, nothing worth a groat. I shrugged. He's a Regency silver by desire, William IV furniture by obligation, and undetected bigamist by the skin of his teeth, as if scratching a quid in the antiques game isn't enough nightmare to be going on with. Jenny from the coast (she's tapestries and Georgian household items) was painstakingly examining a crate of porcelain. She and Harry Bateman were desperately trying to stock up their new shop on East Hill. They'd badly overspent lately to catch the tourist wave, but their stuff was too 'thin' (dealer's slang again: much low quality spiced with only rare desirable items).
I pushed among the driftwood - not being unkind, but I really had seen better antiques on Mersea beach-.
'Hello, Lovejoy.'
'What's new, Dandy?'
'Bloody near everything,' he grinned. I had to laugh. 'Message for you from Bill Fairdale.
He says to call in.'
Bill was from my village, rare manuscripts and antique musical instruments. The only trouble was that his rare illuminated manuscripts are a bit too good to be true. The sheepskin parchments pegged out drying in his garden do very little to restore a buyer's confidence. He's even been known to ask a visitor's help in mixing 'mediaeval' monks'
egg-tempera pigments with an unfinished carpet page of Lindisfarne design in clear view, only to offer the same visitor the completed 'antique' next day. He's very forgetful.