Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows by Ellis Peters Read Free Book Online Page B

what he meant. He shrugged, not merely helplessly, rather with malevolent acceptance. ‘Well, I’ve looked everywhere. He does it on purpose, of course. This isn’t the first time. He’s nearly seventeen, he has plenty of money in his pockets, and he knows this district like the palm of his hand. We’re no more than ten miles from home. He can get a bus or a taxi, and he knows very well where to get either. I don’t know why I worry about him.’
    ‘Having a conscience does complicate things,’ said Gus with sympathy.
    ‘It simplifies this one,’ said the teacher grimly. ‘I’ve got a conscience about all this lot, all of ’em younger than our Gerry. This time he can look out for himself, I’m going to get the rest home on time.‘
    He clambered aboard the coach, the juniors raised a brief, cheeky cheer, half mocking and half friendly, the driver hoisted himself imperturbably into his cab, and the coach started up and surged ponderously through the gates and away along the Silcaster road.
    Charlotte turned, before getting into the car, and looked back once in a long, sweeping survey of the twilit bowl of turf and stone. Nothing moved there except the few blackheaded gulls wheeling and crying above the river. A shadowy, elegiac beauty clothed Aurae Phiala, but there was nothing alive within it.
    ‘When did it happen?’ she asked. ‘The attack from the west, the one that finally drove the survivors away?’
    ‘Quite late, around the end of the fourth century. Most of the legions were gone long before that. Frantic appeals for help kept going out to Rome—Rome was still the patron, the protector, the fortress, even when she was falling to pieces herself. About twenty years after the sack of Aurae Phiala, Honorius finally issued an edict that recognised what had been true for nearly a century. He told the Britons they could look for nothing more, no money, no troops, no aid. From then on they had to shift for themselves.’
    ‘And the Saxons moved in,’ said Charlotte.
    He smiled, holding the passenger door open for her. By this time he would not have been surprised if she had taken up the lecture and returned him a brief history of the next four centuries. ‘Well, the Welsh, over this side. Death from the past, not the future. A couple of anachronisms fighting it out here while real life moved in on them from the east almost unnoticed. But their kin survived and intermarried. Nothing quite disappears in history.’
    But she thought, looking back at that pewter sky and narrow saffron afterglow as the Aston Martin purred into life and shot away at speed: Yes, individuals do! Perversely, wilfully or haplessly, they do vanish. One elderly, raffish archaeologist in Turkey, one uneasy, spoiled adolescent here. But of course they’ll both emerge somewhere. Probably the boy’s halfway home by now, ahead of his party, probably he thumbed a lift the other way along this road as soon as he got intolerably bored. That would amuse him, the thought of the fuss and the delay and the inconvenience to everyone, while he rode home to wherever home is, in the cab of a friendly lorry.
    And Doctor Alan Morris? He could be accounted for just as easily, and much more rationally. Total absorption in his passion could submerge him far below the surface of mere time. Somewhere in Anatolia, as yet unheralded, a major news story was surely brewing, to burst on the world presently in a rash of photographs, films, television interviews—some new discovery, one more Roman footprint in the east, stumbled on happily, and of such delirious interest that its discoverer forgot about the passing of the year, his minor responsibilities, and his fretful solicitor.
    Over Aurae Phiala the April dusk closed very softly and calmly, like a hand crushing a silvery moth. But her back was turned on the dead city then, and she did not see.

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CHAPTER THREE
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    The Salmon’s Return’ lay a quarter of a mile up-river, and dated back to the