‘That figures.’ Costas was still staring into the middle distance, clearly trying to focus on something other than the physical horror around him. He cleared his throat. ‘The diary. It said the crypt was sealed up by Wren’s men, in the 1680s. It makes sense there shouldn’t be any more burials after that.’
Jack reached the far end of the chamber, having carefully circumvented the sticky slick on the floor. He squatted down again, and shifted a few fallen bricks with his hands. ‘And the earliest of these inscriptions is incredibly early,’ he murmured. ‘The oldest ones at this end have crumbled, but there are two here with Anglo-Saxon names. Aelfrida and Aethelreda. I can’t read the name on this one, but I can read the date. AD 535. My God,’ he said hoarsely. ‘That’s the Dark Age, the time of King Arthur, of Gildas. That’s even before Augustine brought Roman Christianity back to Britain, yet here’s a burial with a Christian symbol.’
‘The names are all women,’ Costas said quietly.
‘This chamber is a lot older than the medieval church,’ Jack continued, peering around. ‘It looks as if it was kept in repair during the medieval period, up to the time of the Great Fire, but the lower courses of brick and stone look Roman.’ He knelt down, and swept his hand under the furthest niche. ‘No doubt about it. We’re inside a catacomb built in the Roman period. The only one ever found in Britain.’
‘Check out the inscription above the doorway.’
Jack peered up, and saw a single register of letters carved into the masonry, covered in blackened accretion. Costas slowly read out the words: ‘Uri vinciri veberari ferroque necari.’
‘Good God,’ Jack exclaimed, standing up and staring, his mind in a whirl. ‘It’s the gladiator’s oath. The sacramentum gladiatorium.’
‘The Sibylline prophecy,’ Costas said, his voice hushed. ‘The wax tablet we found under Rome. It’s the same wording, isn’t it?’
‘Identical. To die in fire, to be bound, to be beaten, to die by the sword. Good old Claudius,’ Jack murmured. ‘I think we’re exactly where he wanted us to be.’
‘And where the Sibyl wanted him to be.’
‘This must originally have been the gladiators’ mortuary, the death chamber, where the mutilated corpses from the arena next to us were laid out before being taken away and burned,’ Jack murmured. ‘And then it was used as a Christian burial crypt, for over a thousand years. A burial crypt for women, for women who were somehow bound together, over all that time.’
‘Maybe they were a secret society, a guild,’ Costas said. ‘Maybe they wanted to be buried close to whatever lies beyond that wall.’
‘According to the diary, this is where the Roman amphoras were found by Wren’s men,’ Jack said. ‘And this must be the wall, where we are now.’
Costas placed both hands on the brick face in front of them, and cautiously pushed. He flinched as several of the bricks shifted. ‘It’s not mortared,’ he said. ‘It looks like they just stacked up the bricks.’
‘That makes sense,’ Jack said. ‘The diary says they decided to seal up the entire crypt back in the first chamber, where we’ve left Jeremy, so they must have abandoned sealing up this deeper chamber part-way through. We’ll have to take it down from the top, brick by brick.’
Costas experimentally pushed a little further, and one of the bricks that had shifted fell out behind. Suddenly the whole edifice collapsed inwards, and they both leapt backwards as the air filled with red dust. Costas narrowly avoided the sticky pool on the floor.
‘I was going to say, we don’t have time for finesse,’ Jack said, wiping the front of his visor.
‘Check it out,’ Costas said, picking himself up and moving forward.
Jack aimed his hand torch to where Costas was gesturing. Where the brick wall had been was now a gaping hole, but just inside to the left was a row of what looked like sections of old ceramic drainpipe, arranged in a row pointing upwards. Jack edged forward over the pile of fallen bricks and beckoned excitedly. ‘Recognize those?’
‘Amphoras. Roman amphoras. Just what we’re looking for.’
‘Right. And they’re exactly the same type of wine amphora we found on St Paul’s shipwreck, the ones made in Campania near Pompeii and Herculaneum. Remember the date of the wreck?’
‘AD 58, give or take a bit.’
‘Right. These were the typical wine amphoras of that period. What was the date of Boudica’s rebellion? AD 60, 61. If wine amphoras were being left as an offering here, these are exactly the type you’d expect to find at that date.’
Costas squeezed in beside Jack and peered into the darkness beyond. ‘Not sure where we go from here. Seems to be some kind of shaft.’
Jack looked intently around. To his left was a precarious mass of rubble, much of it old brick but including charred and blackened timbers, all jumbled and compressed into a tight mass. It protruded into a timber-lined shaft about two metres wide and three metres deep, with water at the bottom. ‘What we’ve got here is destruction debris from the Great Fire of 1666, probably dumped during Wren’s rebuilding of the church. If any of his men went beyond this crypt, that’s the way they must have gone. We’ll never get through all that without a major excavation. It’s out of the question. Our only hope now is going down this shaft.’
‘What is it?’
‘Looks like a well. There were fresh springs in the gravels beside the Thames. London water was remarkably healthy until it was swamped by sewage. Wells were often timber lined like this.’ Jack leaned in and peered at the wood. ‘Fascinating. Reused ship’s timbers. These are overlapping, clinker-built, Viking. Remember our Viking longship in the iceberg off Greenland?’
‘I never thought I’d say this, but I’d much rather be there now.’
‘I’m going in.’ Jack swung his legs over the edge of the hole, pivoting on his arms until he was facing backwards. He grasped Costas’ arm as he hung over the edge, his feet dangling a metre or so over the black pool below. ‘Let’s hope it’s not a bottomless pit.’ He let go and fell with a huge splash, coming to rest on his knees in mud, his upper body out of the water. ‘You next.’ He reached his foot experimentally around. ‘I think it’s a safe landing.’
Costas grunted, then lowered himself gingerly over the edge, his visor pressed up against the damp wood of the well lining. He shifted slightly to avoid falling on Jack. He had moved in front of a small section of wood in the well lining that had partly rotted away, and he suddenly froze.
‘What is it?’ Jack said.
Costas’ voice sounded distant, hoarse. ‘About this well, Jack. It wasn’t dug through gravel.’
‘What?’
‘It was dug through bones, Jack,’ Costas said, his voice sounding beyond emotion. ‘Human bones, thousands of them, packed in around us. It’s all I can see.’
‘It could be a plague pit,’ Jack said thoughtfully. ‘But more probably an ossuary, bones cleared from a crypt or a grave-yard. Still, a good thing we’ve got the e-suits on, just in case.’
Costas let go of the edge of the wall and dropped with an enormous splash, disappearing completely under the water down a hole beside Jack before rebounding in a tumult of mud. The water settled, and he raised his hands, looking at the dark glutinous streaks on his gloves. ‘Good old-fashioned dirt,’ he muttered. ‘I think I’ve had enough of human remains.’
‘What you said set me thinking,’ Jack said. ‘About a well, dug through an old ossuary. Pretty unlikely. I think I may have got it wrong. I think what we’ve actually got here is a cesspit.’