I was feeling dizzy again. I could hear Brian moving around in the tying room. I could imagine him in there with his bloody hands and dirty fingers, playing with hooks and feathers and reflecting back at himself in the dead eyes of a bird. I saw his coat hanging over the back of the chair. Suddenly I wanted to scrub it clean. I wanted to cook him his favourite tea or buy him a copy of whatever magazine he wanted. I wanted to make him happy.

‘They had a look in the churchyard too,’ said Harper, crossing to the teapot and pouring himself the last of the tea. ‘Every bit as interesting as the wall, they reckoned. One of them had notes by the bucketful on the place and I swear it was an education, even to Fairfax.’

I stiffened. ‘Fairfax knew them?’

Harper guffawed. I thought people only did that in books but that was the noise he made, I swear. It sounded like a donkey had wandered into the kitchen.

‘Fairfax knew every bugger, I thought you of all people knew that.’

‘Me of all people?’ I asked, and I heard my tone change.

‘A friend, I mean,’ he said, waving his hand. ‘You were like family to him.’

I turned away and felt Cordelia squeeze my shoulder. I didn’t know what I wanted next, truth be told. It was Cordelia who kept at him.

‘I’m a bit rusty on my local history,’ she said, and you wouldn’t have thought it was the same girl. ‘You look like you’re good at keeping facts in that big handsome head. What was it you learned?’ Suddenly she was looking sheepish and flirty and asking the big strong man to share his big brain with poor little her. I thought I were going to blush myself to dust.

‘Been there since before people wrote stuff down,’ he said, looking like the cat who’d got the cream. ‘I might have my dates wrong but I have it in my head it was 122 AD when they started building the wall and there’s plenty sign there was a church down the road there even before that. There’s been all sorts of oddities found locally over the years – altars to the gods of Greece and Rome and plenty of native pagan deities too. Jove, Jupiter, Mars – I forget them all but it boggled my mind to imagine these soldiers and natives and wives and all their camp followers getting on with their lives just like we do.’

‘Go on,’ said Cordelia.