15
A tall, rangy young man with glasses and a shock of blond hair came loping up to Jack and Costas, smiling and waving his hand in greeting. With his dripping Barbour jacket and pale corduroys, Jeremy Haverstock looked the quintessential English country squire, but his accent was American. ‘Hi, guys. Just got off the train from Oxford. Lucky your call got me at the Institute yesterday, Jack. I was on my way out for a week in Hereford studying the lost cathedral library. Maria gave me complete responsibility for it, you know. It’s a big break for me, and I was a little worried about cancelling. I couldn’t get her on her cell phone.’
‘She’s back in Naples by now,’ Jack said. ‘She and Hiebermeyer are tying themselves up in red tape. Don’t worry, I’ll put in a word.’
‘I had time for a couple of hours in Balliol College library in Oxford yesterday evening,’ Jeremy said. ‘Turns out Balliol owned the Church of St Lawrence Jewry from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and they still have the archive. I looked up what you wanted. I think I found enough for you to go on, but I need to get back there after we visit the church. There’s one really intriguing lead I want to follow.’
‘Great to see you again, by the way, Jeremy,’ Costas said. ‘Hadn’t expected it so soon.’
‘The whole thing still seems like a dream, our expedition,’ Jeremy said. ‘The hunt for the lost Jewish treasure, Harald Hardrada and the Vikings, the underground caves in the Yucatan. I thought I might try to write it down, but nobody would believe it.’
‘Just make it fiction,’ Costas said. ‘And leave our names out of it. At the moment, we’re trying to remain anonymous. We’ve had a slightly unpleasant encounter in Rome. Underground.’
‘So Jack tells me,’ Jeremy said quietly. ‘You guys seem to make a habit of it. I thought I recognized someone in the art gallery above, from Seaquest II.’
‘Good,’ Jack murmured. ‘They’re here.’
‘We’ve got half an hour until we can get into the crypt.’
‘Crypt?’ Costas said.
‘Fear not,’ Jeremy said. ‘It’s empty. The first one is, anyway.’
Costas gave him a dubious look, then sat down on a chair and leaned back, stretching out his legs. ‘Okay. So we’ve got a little time. Some questions. Put me in the picture. Tell me about this place before the Romans. In the lead-up to Claudius,’ he said.
Jack looked at him keenly. ‘Prehistoric London was a weird place. Not a settlement, as far as we can tell, but a place where something was going on. Best guess is some kind of sacred site. Trouble is, we don’t know much about religion in the Iron Age, because they didn’t build temples or make representations of their gods that have survived. Almost all we have to go on are the Roman historians, most of them biased, all second-hand.’
‘Druids,’ Jeremy said, sitting down on the edge of the amphitheatre wall and leaning forward. ‘Druids, and human sacrifice.’
Jack nodded. ‘When the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus heard of Boudica’s revolt, he was attacking the remote island of Mona, modern Anglesey off north Wales. It was the last bastion of the British who’d refused to come under Rome’s yoke, and the sacred stronghold of the druids.’
‘Guys in white robes,’ Costas murmured.
‘That’s the Victorian image of the druid, a kind of Gandalf figure, Merlin, gathering mistletoe and travelling unharmed between warring kingdoms. The idea of priestly mediators is probably accurate, but the rest is pure fantasy.’
‘Tacitus paints a pretty appalling picture,’ Jeremy said.
Jack nodded, extracted a book from his khaki bag and flipped it open. ‘Tacitus’ father-in-law Agricola had been governor of Britain, so he knew what he was talking about. The Romans at Mona were confronted by a dense mass of enemy along the shoreline. Among them were the druids, who he says were “raising their hands to heaven and screaming dreadful curses”. After the Romans were victorious, they destroyed the sacred groves of the druids, places where they “drench their altars in the blood of prisoners and consult their gods by means of human entrails”.’
‘Sounds like a few modern priests I’ve known,’ Costas said wryly. ‘Power through terror.’
‘There are plenty of historical parallels, as you say.’
‘The Church in the Middle Ages, for one,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘Submission, obedience, confession, vengeance, retribution.’
‘All things the earliest Christians would have abhorred,’ Jack said.
‘And it wasn’t just male druids on Anglesey,’ Jeremy said.
Jack opened the book again. ‘The thing that really terrified the Romans, that awed them to the point of paralysis, was the women.’
‘This gets even better,’ Costas murmured.
‘Hordes of fanatical women, “black-robed women with dishevelled hair like Furies, brandishing torches”.’ Jack put down the book. ‘It was the Romans’ worst nightmare. The image of the Amazon, the warrior queen, really kept the Roman male awake at night, and it wasn’t lust. Tacitus may have exaggerated this aspect of Britain to play on Roman fantasies about the barbarian world, a world beyond control, a world with no apparent method or rationale. But all the evidence suggests it was true, that the Romans in Britain really had walked into their own vision of hell, a world of Amazon queens and screaming banshees.’
‘Boudica,’ Costas said. ‘Was she some kind of druid?’
‘We know of one other British queen, Cartimandua of the Brigantes,’ Jack replied. ‘And queen usually meant high priestess. There was nothing unusual in that. The Roman emperor was Pontifex Maximus, the Egyptian pharaohs were priest-kings, the queens and kings of England are Defenders of the Faith.’
‘A redhead arch-druid warrior queen,’ Costas said weakly. ‘God help her enemies.’
‘And how does London fit into all this?’ Jeremy said.
‘That’s where we really get our teeth into the archaeology. ’ Jack took a plan from his bag and rolled it out on the floor, and Jeremy knelt down and held the corners. ‘Or rather, the lack of it. This shows the London area during the Iron Age. As you can see, there’s no clear indication of habitation on the site of Londinium, where we are now. A few finds of pottery, some of the silver coins the tribes began producing in the decades before the Roman conquest. Not much else.’
‘What’s this?’ Costas pointed to an object marked in the river Thames west of the Roman town. ‘Armour?’
‘The Battersea Shield. One of the finest pieces of metalwork ever found from antiquity, rivalling the best the Romans produced. You can see it in the British Museum. It probably dates to the century before the Romans arrived, and it may suggest what actually went on at this place.’
‘Go on.’
Jack rested on his haunches. ‘Almost all the other major towns of Roman Britain were built on the site of Iron Age tribal capitals, often right next to the prehistoric earthworks. Camulodunum, where they built the temple to Claudius, was a colony for Roman veterans right on top of the Iron Age tribal capital of the Trinovantes. Verulamium was built next to the old capital of the Catuvellauni. It was an ingenious system, designed to stamp Roman authority on the heart of the tribal world, yet also to maintain the power base of the old tribal leaders who became the new magistrates. It was rule by devolution, maintaining the pretence of native authority, just as the British did in India.’
‘But London was the exception,’ Jeremy said.
Jack nodded. ‘After starting as a river port, London became the provincial capital when it was rebuilt following the Boudican revolt. But something was going on here before the Romans arrived, something really fascinating. The Battersea Shield was almost certainly a ritual deposition, a valued object deliberately thrown into the river as a votive offering. There are other finds like this from the Thames and its tributaries. Swords, shields, spears. It’s a tradition that goes back at least to the Bronze Age, and lasted well into the medieval period.’
‘Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake,’ Jeremy murmured.