The Complete Mapp & Lucia (159 page)

As the excavation deepened Lucia with a garden-spud, raked carefully among the baskets of earth which were brought up, and soon had a small heap of fragments of pottery, which she carried into Mallards. Georgie was completely puzzled at this odd conduct, and, making himself understood with difficulty through the gas-mask, asked her what she was doing.

Lucia looked round to make sure she would not be overheard.

“Roman pottery without a doubt,” she whispered. “I am sure they will presently come across some remains of my Roman villa—”

A burst of cheering came from the bowels of the earth. One of the gas workmen with a vigorous stroke of his pick at the side of the pit close to the garden-room brought down a slide of earth, and exposed the mouth of a tiled aperture some nine inches square.

“Drains and sewers it is,” he cried, “and out we go,” and he and his comrade downed tools and clambered out of the pit, leaving the town surveyor’s men to attend to the job now demonstrated to be theirs.

The two gay brethren instantly jumped into the excavation. The aperture certainly did look like a drain, but just as certainly there was nothing coming down it. Percy put his nose into it, and inhaled deeply as a Yogi, drawing a long breath through his nostrils.

“Clean as a whistle, Georgie,” he said, “and sweet as a sugar-plum. Drains it may have been, old man, but not in the sense of our bet. We were looking for something active and stinkful—”

“But drains it is, Per,” said Georgie.

A broken tile had fallen from the side of it, and Percy picked it up.

“There’s been no sewage passing along that for a sight of years,” he said. “Perhaps it was never a drain at all.”

Into Lucia’s mind there flashed an illuminating hypocaustic idea.

“Please give me that tile,” she called out.

“Certainly, ma’am,” said Percy, reaching up with it, “and have a sniff at it yourself. Nothing there to make your garden-room stink. You might lay that on your pillow—”

Percy’s sentence was interrupted by a second cheer from his two men who had gone on working, and they also downed tools.

“‘Ere’s the gas pipe at last,” cried one. “Get going at your work again, gas brigade!”

“And lumme, don’t it stink,” said the other. “Leaking fit to blow up the whole neighbourhood. Soil’s full of it.”

They clambered out of the excavation, and stood with the gas workers to await further orders.

“Have a sniff at that, Georgie,” said Per encouragingly, “and then hand me a bob. That’s something like a smell, that is. Put that on your pillow and you’ll sleep so as you’ll never wake again.”

Georgie, though crestfallen, retained his sense of fairness, and made no attempt to deny that the smell that now spread freely from the disengaged pipe was the same as that which filled the garden-room.

“Seems like it,” he said, “and there’s your bob, not but what the other was a drain. We’ll find the leak and have it put to rights now.”

“And then I hope you’ll fill up that great hole,” said Lucia.

“No time to-day, ma’am,” said Georgie. “I’ll see if I can spare a couple of men to-morrow, or next day at the latest.”

Lucia’s Georgie, standing on the threshold of Mallards, suddenly observed that the excavation extended right across the street, and that he was quite cut off from the Cottage. He pulled off his gas-mask.

“But, look, how am I to get home?” he asked in a voice of acute lamentation. “I can’t climb down into that pit and up on the other side.”

Great laughter from the brethren.

“Well, sir, that is awkward,” said Per. “I’m afraid you’ll have to nip round by the High Street and up the next turning to get to your little place. But it will be all right, come the day after to-morrow.”

Lucia carried her tile reverently into the house, and beckoned to Georgie.

“That square-tiled opening confirms all I conjectured about the lines of foundation in the cellar,” she said. “Those wonderful Romans used to have furnaces underneath the floors of their houses and their temples—I’ve been reading about it—and the hot air was conveyed in tiled flues through the walls to heat them. Undoubtedly this was a hot-air flue and not a drain at all.”

“That would be interesting,” said Georgie. “But the pipe seemed to run through the earth, not through a wall. At least there was no sign of a wall that I saw.”

“The wall may have perished at that point,” said Lucia after only a moment’s thought. “I shall certainly find it further on in the garden, where I must begin digging at once. But not a word to anybody yet. Without doubt, Georgie, a Roman villa stood here or perhaps a temple. I should be inclined to say a temple. On the top of the hill, you know: just where they always put temples.”

Dusk had fallen before the leak in the gas pipe was repaired, and a rope was put up round the excavation and hung with red lanterns. Had the pit been less deep, or the sides of it less precipitous, Lucia would have climbed down into it and continued her study of the hot-air flue. She took the tile to her bathroom and scrubbed it clean. Close to the broken edge of it there were stamped the letters S.P.

She dined alone that night and went back to the garden-room from which the last odours of gas had vanished. She searched in vain in her books from the London Library for any mention of Tilling having once been a Roman town, but its absence made the discovery more important, as likely to prove a new chapter in the history of Roman Britain. Eagerly she turned over the pages: there were illustrations of pottery which fortified her conviction that her fragments were of Roman origin: there was a picture of a Roman tile as used in hot-air flues which was positively identical with her specimen. Then what could S.P. stand for? She ploughed through a list of inscriptions found in the South of England and suddenly gave a great crow of delight. There was one headed S.P.Q.R., which being interpreted meant
Senatus Populusque Romanus,
“the Senate and the People of Rome.” Her instinct had been right: a private villa would never have borne those imperial letters; they were reserved for state-erected buildings, such as temples… It said so in her book.

For the next few days Lucia was never once seen in the streets of Tilling, for all day she supervised the excavations in her garden. To the great indignation of her gardener, she hired two unemployed labourers at very high wages in view of the importance of their work, and set them to dig a trench across the potato-patch which Elizabeth had despoiled and the corner of the asparagus bed, so that she must again strike the line of the hot-air flue, which had been so providentially discovered at the corner of the garden-room. Great was her triumph when she hit it once more, though it was a pity to find that it still ran through the earth, and not, as she had hoped through the buried remains of a wall. But the soil was rich in relics, it abounded in pieces of pottery on the same type as those she had decided were Roman, and there were many pretty fragments of iridescent, oxydised glass, and a few bones which she hoped might turn out to be those of red deer which at the time of the Roman occupation were common in Kent and Sussex. Her big table in the garden-room was cleared of its books and writing apparatus, and loaded with cardboard trays of glass and pottery. She scarcely entered the Office at all, and but skimmed through the communications from Mammoncash.

Georgie dined with her on the evening of the joyful day when she had come across the hot-air flue again. There was a slightly earthy odour in the garden-room where after dinner they pored over fragments of pottery, and vainly endeavoured to make pieces fit together.

“It’s most important, Georgie,” she said, “as you will readily understand, to keep note of the levels at which objects are discovered. Those in Tray D come from four feet down in the corner of the asparagus bed: that is the lowest level we have reached at present, and they, of course, are the earliest.”

“Oh, and look at Tray A,” said Georgie. “All those pieces of clay tobacco pipes. I didn’t know the Romans smoked. Did they?”

Lucia gave a slightly superior laugh.

“
Caro,
of course they didn’t,” she said. “Tray A: yes, I thought so. Tray A is from a much higher level, let me see, yes, a foot below the surface of the ground. We may put it down therefore as being subsequent to Queen Elizabeth when tobacco was introduced. At a guess I should say those pipes were Cromwellian. A Cromwellian look, I fancy. I am rather inclined to take a complete tile from the continuation of the air flue which I laid bare this morning, and see if it is marked in full S.P.Q.R. The tile from the street, you remember, was broken and had only S.P. on it. Yet is it a Vandalism to meddle at all with such a fine specimen of a flue evidently
in situ?”

“I think I should do it,” said Georgie, “you can put it back when you’ve found the letters.”

“I will then. To-morrow I expect my trench to get down to floor level. There may be a tesselated pavement like that found at Richborough. I shall have to unearth it all, even if I have to dig up the entire kitchen garden. And if it goes under the garden-room, I shall have to underpin it, I think they call it. Fancy all this having come out of a smell of gas!”

“Yes, that was a bit of luck,” said Georgie stifling a yawn over Tray A, where he was vainly trying to make a complete pipe out of the fragments.

Lucia put on the kind, the indulgent smile suitable to occasions when Georgie did not fully appreciate her wisdom or her brilliance.

“Scarcely fair to call it entirely luck,” she said, “for you must remember that when the cellar was dug out I told you plainly that I should find Roman remains in the garden. That was before the gas smelt.”

“I’d forgotten that,” said Georgie. “To be sure you did.”

“Thank you, dear. And to-morrow morning, if you are strolling and shopping in the High Street, I think you might let it be known that I am excavating in the garden and that the results, so far, are most promising. Roman remains: you might go as far as that. But I do not want a crowd of sightseers yet: they will only impede the work. I shall admit nobody at present.”

Foljambe had very delicately told Georgie that there was a slight defect in the plumbing system at Mallards Cottage, and accordingly he went down to the High Street next day to see about this. It was pleasant to be the bearer of such exciting news about Roman remains, and he announced it to Diva through the window and presently met Elizabeth. She had detached the tiger-skin border from the familiar green skirt.

“Hope the smell of gas or drains or both has quite gone away now, Mr. Georgie,” she said. “I’m told it was enough to stifle anybody. Odd that I never had any trouble in my time nor Aunt Caroline in hers. Lucia none the worse?”

“Not a bit. And no smell left,” said Georgie.

“So glad! Most dangerous it must have been. Any news?”

“Yes: she’s very busy digging up the kitchen garden—”

“What? My beautiful garden?” cried Elizabeth shrilly. “Ah, I forgot. Yes?”

“And she’s finding most interesting Roman remains. A villa, she thinks, or more probably a temple.”

“Indeed! I must go up and have a peep at them.”

“She’s not showing them to anybody just yet,” said Georgie. “She’s deep down in the asparagus bed. Pottery. Glass. Air flues.”

“Well, that is news! Quite an archæologist, and nobody ever suspected it,” observed Elizabeth smiling her widest. “Padre, dear Lucia has found a Roman temple in my asparagus bed.”

“Ye dinna say! I’ll rin up, bedad.”

“No use,” said Elizabeth. “Not to be shown to anybody yet.”

Georgie passed on to the plumbers. “Spencer & Son” was the name of the firm, and there was the proud legend in the window that it had been established in Tilling in 1820 and undertook all kinds of work connected with plumbing and drains. Mr. Spencer promised to send a reliable workman up at once to Mallards Cottage.

The news disseminated by Georgie quickly spread from end to end of the High Street, and reached the ears of an enterprising young gentleman who wrote paragraphs of local news for the
Hastings Chronicle.
This should make a thrilling item, and he called at Mallards just as Lucia was coming in from her morning’s digging, and begged to be allowed to communicate any particulars she could give him to the paper. There seemed no harm in telling him what she had allowed Georgie to reveal to Tilling (in fact she liked the idea) and told him briefly that she had good reason to hope that she was on the track of a Roman villa, or, more probably, a temple. It was too late for the news to appear in this week’s issue, but it would appear next week, and he would send her a copy. Lucia lunched in a great hurry and returned to the asparagus bed.

Soon after Georgie appeared to help. Lucia was standing in the trench with half of her figure below ground level, like Erda in Wagner’s justly famous opera. If only Georgie had not dyed his beard, he might have been Wotan.

“
Ben arrivato,”
she called to him in the Italian translation. “I’m on the point of taking out a tile from my hot-air flue. I am glad you are here as a witness, and it will be interesting for you. This looks rather a loose one. Now.”

She pulled it out and turned it over.

“Georgie,” she cried. “Here’s the whole of the stamped letters of which I had only two.”

“Oh, how exciting,” said Georgie. “I do hope there’s a Q.R. as well as the S.P.”

Lucia rubbed the dirt off the inscription and then replaced the tile.

“What is the name of that plumber in the High Street established a century ago?” she asked in a perfectly calm voice.

Georgie guessed what she had found.

“My dear, how tarsome!” he said. “I’m afraid it
is
Spencer.”

Lucia got nimbly out of the trench, and wiped her muddy boots against the box edging of the path.

“Georgie, that is a valuable piece of evidence,” she said. “No doubt this is an old drain. I confess I was wrong about it. Let us date it, tentatively,
circa
1830. Now we know more about the actual levels. First we have the Cromwellian stratum: tobacco pipes. Below again—what is that?”