Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series (16 page)

‘I do,’ said Mr Disvan. ‘That land’s owned by a man called Griffiths and he’s got a real mania for tidiness. He drove his wife mad, he did, following her round straightening piles of magazines and looking for dust. I well recall their wedding and the rumpus over the confetti. They had to get in extra police from Goldenford.’

I interrupted a potential stream of Disvan remembrances and brought the conversation back to the matter in hand.

‘Well then, Ellie, I’m afraid that all my good ideas are brought to nought.’

‘It seems so, yes.’

‘One thing,’ said Mr Disvan, ‘what exactly did you mean by saying it was too easy to feel at home on the ridge?’

‘Just that, Mr D. Despite the voice, despite everything, I more and more feel that I belong up there. I don’t want to feel that way, but it just keeps on growing.’

‘That is worrying,’ said Disvan. ‘You’ve no Binscombe blood in you, unless I’m very much mistaken.’

‘No, I shouldn’t think so. My family, such as it is, are from all over.’

‘How much longer did you say you are staying here?’

‘Two to three weeks.’

Mr Disvan fixed her with one of the most earnest and impressive looks in his extensive repertoire.

‘Don’t make it any longer,’ he said.

‘I shan’t, don’t worry.’

‘Good. In the meanwhile I advise you to ignore what the voice says to you. Just try to live with it but don’t listen to it. You can borrow my Walkman if you like. I’ve also got one of those portable compact disc players. It’s very impressive.’

‘Thanks anyway, but no thanks.’

‘Just as you wish.’

‘A lift home would be more than welcome, though.’

‘It would be our pleasure,’ said Mr Disvan.

‘Absolutely’ I agreed.

Accordingly, in due course, I conveyed Ellie home. As we approached the infamous gate I turned the radio on loud while Mr Disvan disembarked to clear our path. The sounds of Little Richard pounding his inimitable way through ‘Tutti Fruiti’ percolated from the car into the silent woods, raucously drowning out, I hoped, anything Ellie’s voice might wish to express. Within a brief moment Mr Disvan rejoined us and we were on our way. In deference to the sleep or other activities of the ménage I halted a little way off from the tents and turned the radio right down.

‘Here we are, then,’ I said, turning round to speak to Ellie in the back seat. ‘How was that?’

Her face contained an eloquent answer to my question. She was pointing, plainly horrified, at the radio.

‘Can’t you hear it?’ she said. ‘It keeps breaking in to the song!’

Disvan and I listened intently but could discern nothing other than that which the artist intended.

‘Oh my God,’ Ellie cried almost panic-stricken, ‘it says—‘

And then she fainted.

*  *  *

‘Feeling better now?’ asked Mr Disvan.

‘Yes thank you, very much better,’ Ellie replied.

‘How did you explain to Dave and co about us carrying you in?’ I asked.

‘That was very simple. I said I was dead drunk. Knowing me as they do, it had the ring of truth. I’d have said anything rather than let it be known that I’d fainted.’

‘There’s no shame in it,’ said Mr Disvan. ‘You’d had a bad shock.’

‘You don’t know the half of it. But even so, fainting just isn’t my image. Where did you say that villa was, Mr Disvan?’

Ellie obviously wanted the subject of the voice left alone. Disvan obliged by pointing out once again the position of one of the two Roman farms which had constituted, a civilisation ago, the Binscombe of the day, and whose one-time inhabitants presumably rested in the cemetery on the ridge.

The Friday had dawned promisingly clear and bright and developed into a fine sunny day that a persistent breath of wind saved from becoming too warm. Mr Disvan and I met by arrangement early on, and after breakfast in a café we had driven up to the dig. The ‘Bone Specialist’ from London was already there, supervising Ros and Jayney as they uncovered the barrow burials. Ellie, having set the rest of the diggers to work, was at something of an anticipatory loose end and was thus free to give us a tour round the site.

Mr Disvan made intelligent and incisive comments about the finds and holes we were shown, and I nodded sagely at what seemed the right moments. It all looked very professional to me, but the repeated sight of pottery and bone fragments and alleged soil features that I found invisible soon began to pall. I was pleased, therefore, when Dave rattled on the hearth’s tin roof to signify it was lunch time, and Ellie suggested we fetch our sandwiches from the site hut and sit lower down on the hillside to eat them.

Behind us, the motley crew of government-enlisted youths and genteel volunteers sprawled around the hearth area munching their food and listening to Capital Radio on a transistor. Carried away by enthusiasm, the Specialist and Ros and Jayney worked on.

‘It was an enclosed courtyard type villa by the middle fourth century,’ continued Mr Disvan, ‘ very much in the continental style, really, which adds to the theory that there were a lot of rich Gallo-Romans coming over to Britannia at that time to escape the social troubles in their province.’

‘The
Bacaudae
you mean?’ said Ellie.

‘That’s right. Bands of brigands and revolutionaries and army deserters. Anyway, this villa was unusual in that it later had a defensive wall and rampart built around it.’

‘How do you know that?’ Ellie asked.

‘How? Well, it was in the 1960 excavation report by the Goldenford Archaeological Society.’

‘No it wasn’t. I’ve read it. They were digging in advance of an expansion of the council estate and they didn’t have time to excavate anything other the building itself.’

‘Oh well, I must have seen it in the report of Janaway’s dig in 1908.’

‘No, I don’t think so, I’ve read that as well.’

‘How strange,’ said Disvan hurriedly, ‘I could have sworn I read it somewhere. Anyway, getting back to what you told us last week, have you heard anything more of your voice?’

‘Not the voice, no. Well, maybe some mumbling on the very edge of my hearing but nothing like... like when I fainted.’

‘You don’t want to explain about that by any chance, do you?’ said Mr Disvan.

‘No, it’s too personal. However... there is something I can tell you about.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I think the voice or whatever it is has taken shape.’

‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

‘It sounds quite an innocent story when I tell it.’

‘Go ahead, even so,’ said Disvan.

‘It’s just that I was lying awake in my tent a couple of nights ago—I’ve not been sleeping well for obvious reasons—when someone came marching along and stood outside.’

‘What’s so strange about that?’ I queried.

‘Look at where my tent is.’

We did as we were asked, and saw that on one side the thick bracken which surrounded the cleared camp site grew chest high.

‘And the footsteps came from the side where the bracken is?’ I hazarded.

‘You’ve guessed it. No one could walk at a steady normal pace through that. It’d be hard work for a strong man to walk even a few paces, and he wouldn’t be able to stride along like the footsteps I heard.

‘No, you’re right,’ said Disvan. ‘What did you do?’

‘I stayed put, terrified out of my mind, until the sun came up and I heard the footsteps walk away.’

‘That was wise, I’m thinking.’

‘Did you inspect the bracken in the morning?’ I asked.

‘Yes—very cautiously, but I did. There was a line of dead and blackened plants leading back into the woods.’

‘Leading where?’

‘Nowhere. Dave followed the trail for me, and apparently it just petered out after a hundred feet or so.’

There was silence for a moment (if one discounts Capital Radio and the sound of eating) while we considered this story. Disvan then turned to speak to Ellie.

‘I think you should leave here. Leave now and never come back.’

Ellie looked out over the panorama of Binscombe and beyond. When she replied she sounded listless and resigned.

‘I can’t. You’re probably right, but I just can’t leave now. There’s too much tied up for me in this dig. I’m very scared by what’s going on, but somehow I’m not so scared as perhaps I should be. It’s a strange sensation, but I think I feel less and less threatened by whatever it is.’

‘Therein lies the danger,’ said Mr Disvan, ‘because if you don’t—‘

Jayney came racing along and interrupted what Disvan was about to say.

‘Ellie, come and look,’ she said, ‘the burials are really amazing!’

‘Marvellous,’ said Ellie, instantly her old self once again. ‘Come on, gents, follow me and see my doctorate come to fruition!’

Mr Disvan shook his head in dismay, but did as he was told without trying to complete his warning.

A few minutes brisk walk took us to the top of the ridge and the barrow. Dave, Ros and the Specialist were huddled around a neat rectangular excavation in the barrow’s side and were gesturing excitedly. Our approach was heard and the ‘bone man’, as Ellie had termed him, came to meet us. He was a thick-set young man whose eyes contained an unhappy, dangerous energy, placated, for the moment, by the pleasure of his discovery. An ancient and baggy black woolly hat distinguished his pseudo-martial dress from all the other archaeologists I’d so far met.

‘It’s a beauty, Ellie,’ he said. ‘Two inhumations, man and a woman, articulation and dentition practically complete in both cases, so we’ll get age and any pathological indicators, no trouble. There’s no sign of a coffin and no trace of soil staining from a shroud that I can detect, but there are grave goods—fantastic stuff too—just right for your purposes.’

‘What are they?’ Ellie said.

‘Coins over the eyes.’

‘Pagan Roman then.’

‘Yep. Pretty late, I think, as well.’

‘Great.’

‘And there’s a gold ring. Looks like there might be an inscription on it.’

‘Fantastic. Let me have a look.’

We all gathered round to survey the find as described. Two skeletons lay on the ground, all the soil skilfully cleared away from them, as if they had been beached there during the Great Flood. Their involuntary grin greeted the rays of the sun for the first time in perhaps fifteen hundred years, and its light shone brightly off their skulls and the large golden coins resting neatly in their eye sockets.

Ellie knelt beside them and with a tweezer device gently picked up the coins one by one.

‘A gold
solidus
of Honorius and... another of the same for this one.’

‘That’s the male,’ said the bone man.

‘And a... don’t know, and a
trimus
of Magnus Maximus for this one.’

‘The female,’ the woolly-hatted man added unnecessarily.