‘Offerings seem to have been made on tribal boundaries,’ Jack continued, nodding. ‘Maybe the weapons were to arm the god of your tribe, a way of asserting territorial claims, a bit like the medieval ritual of beating the bounds of parishes on Rogation Day. And London was the biggest boundary site of them all, with at least five tribal areas converging on the river Thames. The distant island of Anglesey may have represented the edge of the British Iron Age world, but London may have been its ritual apex.’
‘Yet no Iron Age settlements have been found here, according to this plan,’ Costas said.
‘Remember Tacitus’ account, the sacred groves on Anglesey? London was densely wooded at the time of the Roman invasion, right up to the water’s edge. Within the forest, along the edge of the river and its tributaries, were clearings, groves, places now submerged under the streets of London.’
Costas peered hard at the map. ‘How about this. In AD 60, when Boudica rose in revolt, the one place the Britons really can’t stomach having a new Roman settlement is London, built on their sacred site. They save their worst retribution for it.’
Jack nodded enthusiastically. ‘After the rebels had ravaged Camulodunum and driven the Roman survivors into the Temple of Claudius there, Tacitus tells us that the Celtic warriors heard an augury. At the mouth of the Thames a phantom settlement had been seen, in ruins. The sea was a blood-red colour, and shapes like human corpses were seen in the ebb tide. For Boudica, it was a sign of where to go next.’
‘What happened when Boudica hit London?’
‘There were no survivors. Tacitus says that the Roman general Suetonius and his army reached London from Anglesey before Boudica arrived, but Suetonius decided his force was too weak to defend the place. There were lamentations and appeals, and the inhabitants were allowed to leave with him. Those who stayed, the elderly, the women, children, were all slaughtered by the Britons.’
‘Cassius Dio tells more.’ Jeremy picked up another book Jack had taken out of his bag. ‘As I recall, he’s our only other source on Boudica, writing over a hundred years after the revolt but perhaps based on lost first-hand accounts.’ He found a page. ‘Here’s what the Britons did to their captives: “The worst and most bestial atrocity committed by their captors was the following. They hung up naked the noblest and most eminent women, cut off their breasts and sewed them into their mouths, so that they seemed to be eating them; afterwards they impaled the women on sharp skewers run through the length of their bodies. All this they did to the accompaniment of sacrifices, feasts and wanton behaviour. This they did in their holy places, especially in the Grove of Andraste, their name for the goddess of Victory.”’
‘Sounds like a scene from Apocalypse Now,’ Costas murmured.
‘That may not be far off,’ Jack said quietly. ‘The name Boudica also meant Victory, and it could be that her sacred grove was some pool up the river, her own holy of holies.’
‘Her own private hell, you mean,’ Costas said.
‘Geoffrey of Monmouth thought there were mass beheadings,’ Jeremy said quietly. ‘He wrote in the twelfth century, when human skulls started to be found along the Walbrook, just yards from here. They’ve been found ever since, when the river’s been dug into. Skulls, hundreds of them, washed down from somewhere and embedded in the river gravel, right under the heart of the city of London where the Walbrook flows into the Thames. Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to link the skulls with the Boudican revolt.’
‘I don’t get it.’ Costas had picked up Jack’s copy of Tacitus, and was flicking through the pages, stopping and reading. ‘Here we go again. Sacrifices, orgies of slaughter. Whole towns razed, everyone murdered. Men, women, children. Correct me if I’m wrong, but these hardly seem acts of charity. I don’t get why Claudius would have brought his precious document with the word of Christ to this place, to the care of some pagan goddess.’
‘We don’t know what was going on,’ Jack murmured. ‘The British rebels who knew of Jesus, perhaps even Boudica, may have seen him as a fellow rebel against Roman rule. They may have been sympathetic to early Christians for that reason alone. If Tacitus and Dio Cassius are right about the violation of Boudica’s daughters by the Romans, she would have had ample cause for retribution, for vengeance wreaked in the ways of the barbarian, ways which she must have known would cast most fear into the hearts of Romans.’
‘She must also have known it was suicidal, that she was on a one-way ticket,’ Costas murmured. ‘Maybe it unhinged her. Remember Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz. A noble cause, unsound methods. Maybe Boudica got swallowed up in her own heart of darkness.’
‘Speaking of which, it’s time.’ Jeremy lurched to his feet. ‘The rector’s opened the crypt specially for us during the lunchtime concert in the church. Come on.’
A few minutes later they stood just inside the portico of the Guildhall Art Gallery, looking out over the yard with the elliptical line of the Roman amphitheatre arena marked across it. To their right was the medieval facade of the Guildhall itself, and to the left the solid, functional shape of St Lawrence Jewry, reconstructed after the Second World War to resemble as closely as possible the original design built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in
1666.
‘This place seems pristine now, but it’s seen three circles of hell,’ Jack said quietly, peering out into the drizzle. ‘Boudica’s revolt in AD 60, the massacre, possibly human sacrifice. Then the Great Fire of 1666. Of the buildings here, only the Guildhall wasn’t completely destroyed, because its old oaks wouldn’t burn. An eyewitness said it looked like a bright shining coal, as if it had been a Palace of Gold or a great building of burnished brass. Then, almost three centuries later, the inferno visited again. This time from above.’
‘The twenty-ninth of December 1940,’ Jeremy said. ‘The Blitz.’
‘One night of many,’ Jack replied. ‘But that night the Luftwaffe targeted the square mile, the City of London. My grandmother was here, a despatch rider at the Air Ministry. She said the sound of dropping incendiaries was ominously gentle, like a rain shower, but the high-explosive bombs had been fitted with tubes so they screamed rather than whistled. Hundreds were killed and maimed, men, women, children. That famous picture of St Paul’s Cathedral, wreathed in flames but miraculously intact, comes from that night. St Lawrence Jewry wasn’t so lucky. It went up like a Roman candle, the flames leaping above the city. One of the men standing next to my grandmother on the roof of the Air Ministry watching the churches burn was Air Vice Marshal Arthur Harris, “Bomber” Harris. He said he saw total war that night. He was the architect of the British bomber offensive against Germany.’
‘Another circle of hell,’ Jeremy murmured.
‘My grandmother heard a terrible scream that night, like a banshee,’ Jack said quietly. ‘It haunted her for the rest of her life.’
‘Must have been a lot of horror,’ Costas said.
‘The scream came from the church,’ Jack continued. ‘The organ was on fire and the hot air rushing through the pipes made it shriek, as if the church was in a death agony.’
‘Shit.’
‘You couldn’t put that in a horror movie, could you? Nobody would believe you.’
‘I think I’m getting the jitters about this place, Jack.’
‘It’s all still there, under our feet,’ Jack said. ‘The Boudican destruction layer, charred earth and smashed pottery, human bone. Then masses of rubble from the old medieval church destroyed in 1666, cleared and buried to make way for Sir Christopher Wren’s new structures. And then another layer of destruction debris from the Blitz, with reconstruction work still going on.’
‘Any unexploded ordnance?’ Costas said hopefully. ‘That’d make me happy. You owe me one. That stuff you wouldn’t let me touch on the sea bed off Sicily.’