Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(3)

His acquaintance had been quite right. Major Peabody had been ecstatic to employ Saul, with his doctorate from Oxford and his two years’ work excavating alongside the great Leonard Woolley. He hadn’t given a damn about Saul’s war record or the conviction, and unlike the very few other people who’d been prepared to give him work since 1918, hadn’t expected him to accept lower pay and worse treatment as a consequence. He was in every way a fair and reasonable employer, except that his theories were tripe, his credulity exasperating, and his obsessions laughable. He believed every bit of folklore that came his way, every medieval myth or Victorian fantasy of the past. If Saul had harboured any hope of returning to a career in archaeology, working for Major Peabody would have destroyed it. He had, repeatedly, to remind himself that he had and deserved no such hope.

The Major’s great idea was that London was a mass of sacred sites laid out in mystical patterns. He’d covered a map in pins and connected them with threads, crowing with pride when he could connect five pins to form a pentacle or six for a Star of David. Worse, he’d concluded that if he had three likely sites that might be part of a pattern, the missing points in it could be logically inferred and a new, previously hidden sacred site discovered. This meant that he would stick a pin in a featureless bit of Metro-land, and then ask Saul to find evidence of a holy well, plague pit, or undiscovered Anglo-Saxon earthwork. Saul had wondered whether to warn him about the dangers of looking for data to fit one’s theory, and decided that was akin to advising a deep-sea diver that it was a bit wet out.

It had been a year of astounding futility right up to the point the tree burst into flame.

Major Peabody regarded that admittedly bizarre event as a spectacular vindication of his theories. Saul considered that, since this was the first of some hundred and fifty “sacred sites” that had been anything more than a random rock or patch of grass, his strike rate was significantly lower than might be expected by chance. He didn’t say so. Let the Major enjoy his triumph; it did no harm.

*

It proved surprisingly easy to track Mrs. Southcott’s box down. Saul had harboured an idea that any such thing would be a closely guarded relic, but the prophetess’s band of believers were only too happy to point him in the right direction, and two days later he and Major Peabody were at Paddington Station, taking a train to Newport. Saul had telegraphed ahead to the family who held the absurd thing, and had booked first-class seats for them both at his employer’s generous insistence. He might be acting as the private secretary to a crank, but at least he would do it well.

His mild sense of satisfaction lasted until the train was about to move off. They sat in a six-person compartment, in the usual configuration of two facing benches. It was empty except for themselves, but as the whistle screeched and steam billowed, the door opened, and a man sprang in.

“Good day, gentlemen,” he said, slamming the door and removing his hat. “I beg pardon for intruding.”

“Not at all,” cried Major Peabody as the train set off. “It is, after all, public transport; I trust my colleague and I won’t disturb you with too much talk. Good day to you.”

The man sat down opposite Saul, took up his newspaper, looked over it, and smiled. It was a sly, charming, insincere smile and it was worn by the man from the burning tree.

Saul was sure of it. He’d paid enough attention at the time, he’d had that sardonic, highly bred face and voice in his mind for hours after, and here he was, the man who’d been at the Southcott tree, as they set off to see the Southcott box.

It was the kind of coincidence that would delight the Major’s heart, and Saul wasn’t sure he could bear it. He could imagine the saturnine man’s sneer as the Major spouted mystical nonsense, and for all his fussy employer exasperated him Saul didn’t wish to see him mocked, any more than he wished to be known as a lunatic’s jack-of-all-work.

The man was still looking over his newspaper at Saul, and as their eyes met, he tilted a brow in unmistakable question.

God. It couldn’t be—

No, of course it wasn’t an approach. Surely that was just Saul’s own wishful thinking. Although there had been that Like what you see?...

No. And even if it was, Saul had no intention of entertaining it. The man was undeniably the kind he liked—those long, brown, strong fingers on the newspaper, the lean build, the winging brows—but Saul had been husbanding pennies and rationing himself to one meal a day before he secured this post; if he lost it he’d be ruined. He was not going to commit indecent acts in a railway station convenience with a total stranger on his employer’s time, even if that was the stranger’s intent, which, he told himself firmly, it probably wasn’t.

The man was looking at him with amused puzzlement, as though Saul had spoken his determination out loud, and it dawned on him that if it wasn’t an approach, he must seem deranged not to acknowledge the fellow.

“Pardon me, sir,” he said. “I think we’ve met before?”

“I think we did,” the man agreed, lowering his paper. “Randolph Glyde, at your service.”

“Saul Lazenby.”

“Charmed.” Mr. Glyde glanced at Major Peabody, who hastened to introduce himself, and volunteered that he was an antiquarian researcher.

“How fascinating,” Mr. Glyde said. “And are you an antiquarian as well, Mr. Lazenby?”