Authors: Wendy Holden
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Contemporary Women, #cookie429, #Kat, #Extratorrents
Marrying Up
Simply Divine
Bad Heir Day
Pastures Nouveaux
Fame Fatale
Azur Like It
The Wives of Bath
The School for Husbands
Filthy Rich
Beautiful People
Gallery Girl
Marrying Up
WENDY HOLDEN
Copyright © 2011 Wendy Holden
First published in Great Britain in 2011
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN: 9780755352432
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
An Hachette UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
To Noj, Andrew and Isabella.
Chapter 1
‘Miss! Miss!’ Squinting in the bright sunshine, the little boy with the trowel was waving at Polly. ‘I’ve found something,
miss. It’s Roman.
Definitely
Roman.’
Polly grinned, got up from where she was crouched sieving soil and went over.
‘Let’s have a look, Kyle.’
The small, skinny boy with the buzz-cut hair proudly extended a filthy palm on which lay a small, dirty disc. He looked at
her expectantly.
‘It’s a really interesting find, Kyle,’ Polly said. ‘But it’s not a denarius – a Roman coin – not
exactly
. It’s, um, actually a sixpenny piece dating from the nineteen fifties.’
Far from being disappointed, Kyle looked thrilled. ‘Nineteen fifties!’ he exclaimed excitedly. ‘That’s
centuries
ago! That’s, like,
ancient
, miss.’
Polly giggled. Probably she seemed ancient to eight-year-old Kyle, despite being only twenty-two. That time was relative was
one thing you learnt as an archaeologist.
‘What’s it worth, miss?’ Kyle urged, his grubby face blazing with hope and bravado. ‘Millions?’
‘Not
quite
millions,’ Polly explained tactfully. ‘But it’s very pretty. And maybe it’s a good thing that it’s not Roman. Can anyone
tell me why?’
The group of four children looked doubtful.
‘Well, what is it we’re digging up here?’ Polly waved a hand around the wide, shallow trench whose reddish earth they had
been exploring.
‘Toilets!’ they roared in unison, smiling broadly.
Polly nodded, tucking a stray dark brown curl behind her ear. ‘Exactly. This section,’ she pointed at a low clump of narrow
brown bricks, ‘used to be loos, and if it’s a Roman coin, someone must have lost it in the loo. And remember what I told you
about Roman loos?’
‘Yes! Yes!’ Four hands pumped into the air. Polly looked along the row of eager faces before picking Hannah, whose cloud of
dark hair hid a lazy eye. Polly, who’d had a squint herself as a child, knew what it was to be less confident than the rest.
‘They flushed,’ Hannah said shyly.
As everyone laughed derisively, Hannah went as red as her primary school sweatshirt. Polly leapt to her defence. ‘As a matter
of fact, Hannah’s quite right,’ she said. ‘And well done for remembering, Hannah, because I did mention very briefly that
some Roman lavatories, in the forts on Hadrian’s Wall for example, had a type of flushing system. But not this one here,’
she added. ‘So what else can you remember about Romans and toilets?’
The hands were pulsing in the air again. ‘Yes, Leo?’ Polly invited a chubby boy whose face shone with exertion and excitement.
‘You said,’ Leo took his customary deep breath before beginning a long speech, ‘that they used to go to the loo all at once,
and sit in long rows and laugh and joke while they were . . . while they were . . .’ He tailed off, embarrassed.
‘Pooing!’ shouted Kyle irrepressibly.
‘Yuck!’ said Poppy, a forthright child with bright green eyes and a pixie face. ‘Fancy pooing with other people.’
‘Better than what usually happened,’ Polly riposted, going on to explain that for most Romans the communal loo was a large
jar at the end of the street into which they tipped the contents of
their chamber pots. As the children howled in disgusted disbelief, she thought, not for the first time, how the history of
lavatories was the history of civilisation. She had never intended to end up specialising in it, but her initial interest
in tessellated flooring seemed to have drifted towards the privy and somehow never come back. There were good reasons for
it to remain there too; Roman plumbing systems, being one of archaeology’s less sexy areas, offered more opportunities for
graduates.
How else, for example, would she have ended up here, in the gardens of the local stately home, after a pipe-laying project
ended in historical discovery? Admittedly the dig had not unearthed the entire Roman palace foundations that Lord Shropshire,
the landowner, had been hoping for. So far as he was concerned, a Roman villa, especially one this far north, would have been
both a powerful tourist draw and a source of revenue, not to mention useful grants. Even a reality TV series had been mooted
at one stage.
But once it became clear that nothing much beside the distinctly untelegenic lavatory foundations were to be found, interest,
as it were, drained away. Even Polly herself, expert though she was, could not quite explain why the usually logical and practical
Romans had apparently decided to build a loo block in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest road or settlement. But
archaeology was full of mystery; you often unearthed more questions than answers.
She had been called in by the local council, who had been left with the necessity of recording the find and making sure there
was nothing else of note on the site. The connection had come through a lecturer on her university course who also happened
to be the county archaeologist. Aware that Polly would be spending the summer at home, he had landed her the gig. The money
– small though it was – was one benefit; another, more unexpected, was the pupils from the local primary school, which had
taken an interest in the excavation.
Polly had never previously spent much time with children.
She had been doubtful at first, imagining them rampaging on the ruins and throwing dirt at each other. In the event it was
themselves they had thrown, into the project with gusto, listening to Polly carefully and treating the excavations with respect.
They had quickly mastered the various skills, such as making drawings of any finds and plotting their position carefully on
a chart before removing them.
And while they were only allowed to poke and dig in a safe area removed from the Roman brickwork, their small, strong fingers
had nonetheless managed to unearth all manner of treasures. Kyle had spent the best part of one afternoon painstakingly drawing
his find of a broken Matchbox car, while Hannah had sieved up a contact lens.
‘A bone, miss!’ Leo called now. ‘I’ve found a yuman bone!’
He was waving something large and pale in the air. The other children were crowding round, shouting in excitement. Polly hurried
over. A burial site? Unlikely, but you never knew.
‘Miss?
Miss?
’ Leo gasped, his dirt-smeared face red with agitation as he handed the object over to her.
‘Maybe he got murdered in the loo,’ Kyle was theorising.
‘P’raps he’d been in too long,’ Poppy added. ‘People got fed up of waiting.’
Polly looked up from the bone, hating to disappoint them. ‘It’s a cow bone, I’m afraid. Probably from a beef joint. Not that
old, either.’
There was a howl of disappointment.
A little later, Polly stood up and stretched in the hot afternoon sunshine. Archaeologist’s back was a professional hazard,
and as courses of physio were expensive, prevention was definitely better than cure. She was in no position to run up unnecessary
bills at the moment.
A couple were passing, some of the many elderly shufflers who descended on the gardens in the afternoon. The old man stopped.
‘Digging for gold, are you?’
The old lady whooped with laughter and dug her husband in his pastel nylon V-necked ribs. ‘He’s awful, he is. Always has to
have his joke. Take no notice of him, love.’
Polly smiled tolerantly, resisting the observation that this was not his joke, it was everyone’s. At least ten people a day,
all labouring under the delusion that it was wit of the highest order, asked if she was digging for gold. Others would enquire
how long her university course was and then exclaim in rude amazement, ‘Four
years
? To learn to dig
holes
?’
‘Found anything good yet?’ was another sally.
‘Yes,’ Polly would reply. ‘Everything we dig up is good. Bits of rock, shards of pottery, it’s all good.’
‘Can I have a go?’ some people asked, their joviality masking their obvious real hope. These were the ones Polly liked best.
Her own passion for her subject had been sparked by seeing archaeologists uncovering a stretch of Roman road. It had been
raining, and she had watched, fascinated, as mud-spattered people dressed like builders combed cheerfully through sludgy trenches.
It had been love at first sight.
As it had been with Jake. But at that happy, head-spinning stage, she had not known that rats of the worst kind lurked in
archaeologists’ muddy pits. Love rats. She tightened her lips and rubbed her back harder.
As the old people moved off towards the garden café, she gazed across the lawns at the great pale stone mansion of Oakeshott
House. The front unfolded in a succession of columns and windows, a carved baroque palace whose roof line bristled with muscular
gods and horns of plenty. Beyond the house and gardens stretched the softly curving park, an enchanted valley whose grassy
slopes rolled gently down to a broad silver river sliding slowly between banks of red earth topped with a rich fringe of green.