‘Ah, here you are.’ Bishop Ammanius approached, a calculated smile on his broad, well-fed face. He wore more practical clothes than in Lunden: a coarse tunic, leather trousers, sturdy boots, a cloak. He was accompanied by a couple of young monks, heavily laden with baggage, their tonsured scalps bright pink. Ammanius called them ‘novices’ and barely gave them a second glance.

With him, too, was the British girl Sulpicia. Wuffa couldn’t take his eyes off her. The sturdy, almost mannish clothes she wore today set off the delicate beauty of her face. She looked strong, he thought, strong and supple. She was British, she was Christian, she was different - and yet his body cared nothing about that.

He approached her. ‘So you came,’ he said.

She returned his stare. ‘My father is safely dispatched to Armorica. I have some skills in writing and figuring; I will be of use to the bishop, I think.’

‘And you will be with us for fifty days, perhaps more. How lucky for me.’

‘We have a holy mission to fulfil,’ she said, faintly mocking. ‘That should be uppermost in our thoughts.’

‘Ah, but I’m no Christian.’

‘Then we have nothing more to say to each other.’ She turned away. Her hair blew across her face in the soft breeze off the sea. She smiled.

The game is on, he thought warmly.

Ammanius insisted on walking them around the port. Within the walls of the old Roman fort, timber houses stood on the plans of ruined stone buildings. On a low mound at the centre of the fort he pointed out a complicated series of foundations and stumps. ‘They built an arch here to celebrate the triumph of Claudius. This was the very first place the Romans landed.’ He took a deep breath of sharp, salt-laden air. ‘Why, Christ was barely down from His cross. Later the arch was demolished to help build the walls of the fort, to deter you hairy-arsed raiders and your bee-sting assaults on the coast. But you came even so. And then a king called the Vortigern fought and won a great battle against you, here on this very spot ...’

Britannia had been a Roman diocese, with its capital at Londinium. The British had thrown off the imperial yoke by their own will, through rebellion. The diocesan authority collapsed, but the four sub-provinces survived. The provincial states were successful. The old towns and villas continued to function; taxes continued to be collected. Literate and Christian, the British even exported their Roman culture to the peripheries of Britain, to the west and north and to Ireland, places where the eagle standard had never flown.