“It was the Order, wasn’t it? That was the name you just read.” It was a strange situation. I couldn’t understand her sudden hostility when we had gotten to the records of the Order. It was as if she were defending it—but why I had no idea. Perhaps she had something to hide. I stabbed in the dark. “Does this school have links to the Order, too? Is that why you’re suddenly so defensive?”

She walked to the door. “Good day to you now.” As if by magic Milly opened the door, apparently waiting to throw me out.

I stood up. “Thanks for your time. And you know—you’re right. I will go see Gina. I should have gone there first.” I smiled, as coldly as I could. “And if I find out anything that embarrasses your school and its murky past you can be sure I’ll broadcast it.”

Ms. Gisborne’s face was as expressionless as a statue’s. “You are an unpleasant and flawed man, Mr. Poole. Good day to you.”

And as the big school door was closed against me, unpleasant and flawed was just how I felt—along with a big dose of good old Catholic guilt.

Guilty or not, on the way home I used my cell phone to book a flight to Miami.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

The journey south from the Wall, through a dismal, closed-in British autumn, was a blur, a bad dream. It was nothing like the adventure with Aetius, five years earlier. This time the three of them—Regina, Cartumandua, and Severus—weren’t even riding in a proper carriage but in a crude, dirty, stinking cart used for carrying hay and cattle muck. In five years the road had decayed badly, with the roadside ditches clogged with weeds and rubbish, the waystones tumbled, smashed, or stolen, and potholes where the locals had prised cobbles out of the surface for building materials. The way stations and inns seemed a lot more run-down, too.

But Regina didn’t care.

She sat in the back of the cart with Cartumandua, wrapped in her cucullus, hunched over on herself, with the three matres clutched to her belly. She didn’t talk, wouldn’t play games, and was reluctant to eat. She wasn’t even afraid, despite Severus’s constant, gloomy warnings of the danger they faced from bacaudae. These wanderers who plagued the countryside were refugees from failed towns and villas, or barbarian relics of beaten-back invasions, or even former soldiers who had abandoned their posts. The bacaudae were symptoms of the slow breakdown of the diocese’s society, and all had to be assumed a threat.