Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 9

"Rome," he gasped. "Her sister is there, Helena. So weak, that one. Wouldn't even wait for you . . ." He grabbed her shoulder. His palm was slick with blood. "Forget her. Julia doesn't matter. You're the family now. Take thematres ."

"No! I won't go. I won't leave you."

He thrashed in his spreading pool of blood, and more crimson fluid gushed from the ripped wound in his chest. "Take them . . ."

She reached out and grabbed the little statues from their shelf in thelararium . At last he seemed to relax.

She thought he wanted to say more, but his voice was a gurgle and she could make out no words.

Suddenly something broke in her. She pushed away his head, letting it fall to the floor, and ran to the broken doorway, clutching the statues. She looked back once. His eyes were still open, looking at her.

She fled into the night.

Chapter 8.

Somewhat to my surprise, the head of Saint Bridget's, the school Gina had attended, was welcoming, initially anyhow. She listened to my tale of the photograph, though she was obviously skeptical about my story of a missing sister.

She had me sit in her office, on an armchair before her big polished desk. Ms. Gisborne was a slim, elegant woman of maybe fifty-five, with severely cut silver-gray hair. Over a business suit she wore a black academic gown lined with blue-the school colors, as I vaguely remembered from my sister's day.

The office was well appointed, with a lush blue carpet, ornate plasterwork around the ceiling, a trophy cabinet, a large painting of the school on the wall opposite big windows, lots of expensive-looking desk furniture. It had the feel of a corporate boardroom; perhaps this sanctum was used to impress prospective parents and the local sponsors that seem essential to the running of any school these days. But an immense and disturbingly detailed Crucified Christ hung from one wall.

My chair, comically, was too low. I sat there sunk in the thing with my knees halfway up my chest, while the head loomed over me.

She didn't remember Gina-in fact, Ms. Gisborne was actually about the same age as my older sister- but she had taken the trouble to find some of her reports. "She came over well: a bright, pretty girl, natural leader . . ." The kind of thing people had always said of Gina. But she held out little hope of tracing any record of any younger sister, and clearly thought it odd that I should even be asking. "There was a preschool department here in those days-for the under-fives, you understand-but it has long since closed down. The school's gone through a lot of changes since then. I'll see if Milly can find the records, but I'm not optimistic. It's all so long ago-no offense!"

"None taken."

While we were waiting for the secretary to go down into the dungeons, Ms. Gisborne offered me the choice of a coffee, or a quick tour of the school. I felt restless, embarra.s.sed, foolish, and I knew I would quickly run out of conversation with the headmistress of a Catholic school. I chose the tour. I had a little trouble hauling my bulk out of the tiny chair.

Out we walked.

The school was a place of layered history. A frame of two-story Victorian-era buildings enclosed a small gra.s.sy quadrangle. "We encourage the students to play croquet in the summer," said Ms. Gisborne lightly. "Impresses the Oxbridge interviewers." The corridors were narrow, the floor hardwood with dirt deeply ground in. There were immense, heroic radiators; huge heating pipes ran beneath the ceiling. We walked past cla.s.srooms. Behind thick windows rows of students, some in blue blazers, labored at unidentifiable tasks.

"It all reminds me of my own school," I said uncomfortably.

"I know how you feel; many parents of your generation feel the same. Narrow corridors. Oppressive ceilings." She sighed. "Doesn't create the right atmosphere, but not much we can do short of pulling it all down."

We pa.s.sed out of the central block. The peripheral buildings were newer, dating from the fifties through to more recent times. I was shown a custom-built library constructed in the eighties, a bright and attractive building within which there seemed to be as many computer terminals as bookshelves. The students worked steadily enough, so far as I could see, though no doubt the presence of the head was an encouragement.

Ms. Gisborne kept up a kind of sales patter. Once the school had been run by a teaching order of nuns.

During the comprehensivization of Britain's schools they had left, or been driven out, depending on your point of view. "Although we still have contacts with them," Ms. Gisborne said. "And with a number of other Catholic groupings. Since Gina's time, as I said, we have closed down our preschool section, and merged administratively with a large boys' school half a mile away. We now provide what would have been called sixth-form support in your day-sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds. Our academic record is good, and . . ."

I suspected she was as bored with me as I was of her, and that half her mind was elsewhere, engaged with the endless, complex task of running the place.

The most spectacular new building turned out to be a chapel. It had a concrete roof of elaborate curves.

It turned out this was intended to model the tents within which Moses's flock lived while crossing the desert. Beneath that startling roof the interior s.p.a.ce was bright, littered with fragments of red and gold from the long stained-gla.s.s windows, and there was a smell of incense.

I felt oddly uncomfortable. The school still retained its profoundly religious core, within a sh.e.l.l of reform and renovation, persisting through the decades, an old, dark thing surviving.

Ms. Gisborne seemed to sense my unease, and from that moment in the chapel she grew oddly hostile.

"Tell me-when was the last time you were in a church?"

"Two weeks ago, for my father's funeral," I said, a bit harshly.

"I'm sorry," she said evenly. "Was your parents' faith strong?"

"Yes. But I'm not my parents."

"Do you regret having had a Catholic education?"

"I don't know. It was such a huge part of my life-I can't imagine how I might have turned out if I hadn't."

"You will have left school with a strong moral sense, a sense of somethingbigger than you are. Even if you reject the answers, you keep the questions:Where did I come from, where am I going? What does my life mean? " She was smiling, her face strong and a.s.sured. "Whether you turn away from the faith or not, at least you have been exposed to its reality and potential. Isn't that a legacy worth taking away?"

"Do you think your secretary will have finished by now?"

"More than likely. You know, I'm surprised you came here, searching for this mysterious 'sister.' "

"Why? Where else would I go?"

"To your family, of course. To Gina. Perhaps you aren't very close. Pity." She led the way out of the chapel, back across the compound to the main block.

The secretary, Milly, had indeed come up with a stack of old preschool records. Forty years old, they were sheets of yellowed paper, some ruled into columns by hand, closely handwritten or typed, and kept in battered-looking box files. Somewhere there must be similarly dusty fossils of my own school career, I realized bleakly.

Ms. Gisborne riffled through the boxes briskly, running a manicured nail down rows of names. I could see she was getting nowhere. "There's n.o.body with the surnamePoole in here," she said. "You can see I've looked a year or two to either side of-"

"Perhaps you could try another name. Casella."

She frowned at me. "What's that?"

"My mother's maiden name. Maybe that was how she registered the child."

She sighed and closed the box file. "I fear we are wasting our time, Mr. Poole."

"I have the photograph," I said plaintively.

"But that's all you have." She didn't sound sympathetic. "There are many possible explanations. Perhaps it was a cousin, a more distant relative. Or simply another child, a playmate, with a chance resemblance."

I struggled to say what I felt. "You must see this is important to me."

She stared at me, an intimidating headmistress faced by an awkward student. But she turned back to the first of her box files and began again.

It took her five more minutes to find it. "Ah," she said reluctantly. "Casella.Rosa Casella, first attended nineteen sixty-two . . ."

I found my breath was short. Perhaps on some level I hadn't quite believed in the reality of this lost sibling after all, even given the photograph. But now I had a kind of confirmation. Even a name-Rosa.

"What happened to her?"

Ms. Gisborne riffled through a couple of pages. "When she reached primary school age she was transferred-ah, here we are-to an English-language school in Rome . . ." She read on.

I sat there feeling, of all things, jealous. Why should this mysterious Rosa have had the benefit of an education in some fancy Roman school? Why not me?

Abruptly Ms. Gisborne dropped the pages back in the box file and closed it with a snap. "I'm sorry. This is too irregular. I shouldn't be telling you this. The connection is only through what you claim was your mother's maiden name-"

I guessed at another connection. "This school in Rome. Was it run by a Catholic order?"

"Mr. Poole-"

"The Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins?"

"Mr. Poole."She stood up.

"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 embarra.s.ses 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.

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 hercucullus , hunched over on herself, with the threematres 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 frombacaudae . 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. Thebacaudae were symptoms of the slow breakdown of the diocese's society, and all had to be a.s.sumed a threat.

She slept as much as she could, though her dozing was interrupted by the jolting of the cart. At night she lay on straw-stuffed pallets, or sometimes just on blankets and cloaks scattered on dirt floors, listening to Severus's drunken fumblings at Cartumandua. Sometimes she stayed awake all through the night, until the dawn came. At least she was alone in the dark. And if she stayed awake she had a better chance of escaping into the oblivion of sleep during the misery of the day.

But when she did sleep, each time she woke she was disappointed to be back in this uncomfortable reality, the endless, meaningless, arrow-straight road surface, and to the fact that she wasalone now, alone save for thematres -and perhaps her mother, who had abandoned her to go to Rome.

At last they approached a walled town. The town was set beside a river, on a plain studded with farmsteads. Beyond the town a hillside rose steeply, with a scattering of buildings on its flanks and at its summit.

The town's wall was at least twice Regina's height. It was faced with square tiles of gray slate, but in places the slates had decayed away or had been stripped off, exposing a core of big rubble blocks set in concrete, interspersed with layers of flat red bricks. It would have been dwarfed, of course, by the great northern Wall.

They came to a gate, a ma.s.sive structure with two cylindrical towers topped with battlements. There were two large entrances through which the road pa.s.sed, and two smaller side pa.s.sages, evidently meant for people. But the side pa.s.sages were blocked with rubble, and one of the big archways had collapsed.

A man stood before the gate, blocking their way. He wore the remnants of a soldier's armor, strips of tarnished metal held in place over his chest by much-patched leather bands. He was armed-but only, comically, with what looked like a farmer's iron scythe. Severus negotiated. As a former soldier he had a basis of contact with the gatekeeper, and they shared dull, incomprehensible details of a.s.signments and ranks and duties.

From the walls other men watched, men armed with swords and bows. They peered down speculatively at Regina and Carta. Regina stayed hunched inside her cloak, trying to make herself shapeless and insignificant.

Old soldier or not, Severus had to pay a toll to be allowed into the town, at which he grumbled loudly.

The cart rattled through the gateway, jolting over debris. The wall was thick enough that the gateway was a kind of tunnel, and the clatter of the horses' hooves echoed briefly.

When they emerged into the light again, they were inside the town-but Regina's first impression was of green. Away from the road almost every bit of land was farmed, given over to orchards and vegetable gardens. Animals wandered: sheep, goats, chickens, even a pig rooting at a broken bit of the roadway.

People bustled, adults and children walking or running everywhere, all of them dressed in simple woolen tunics and cloaks. There was a strong stink of animals, of cooking food, and a more powerful stench underlying it all, the stench of sewage.

It wasn't like a town at all. It was a slice of countryside, cut out by the wall. But here and there grander structures-arches, columns-loomed out of the green, and threads of smoke lifted to the sky.

Under Severus's direction the cart nudged forward cautiously through the crowd.

Carta murmured to Regina, "Well, we have arrived. Do you know where you are?" When Regina didn't answer, she said, "Do you even care?"

"Verulamium," Regina snapped. "I'm notstupid ."

Carta smiled. "But I would call itVerlamion . This was the town of the Catuvellauni, my people. In the days when we battled Caesar himself, under our great king Cymbeline . . ."

"I know all that. So you've come home."

"Yes." Carta leaned and faced her. "But it ismy home," she said. "I am no slave now."

"Am I to beyour slave, Cartumandua?"

"No. But you are a guest here. You will remember that."

Regina turned away, not wanting to be with Carta, not wanting to be here in Verulamium, not wanting to beanywhere . But even she was impressed when the cart pulled up at a grand town house, set at the corner of two intersecting streets. A central courtyard was bordered by an open cloister lined by slim columns. In the courtyard itself was a small hut that might have been a porter's lodge, but it was boarded up. There were some signs of dilapidation, but the white-painted walls and the red-tiled roofs were mostly intact.

Three people came out of the buildings. An older man and a woman were similarly dressed, in plain woolen tunics, but the younger man wore brighter colors. The woman, it turned out, was a servant, called Marina. She helped Severus remove the horses' harness, and led them away to a small stable outside the main compound.

"Marina is a servant, but not a slave," Carta murmured in Regina's ear. "Remember that."

The older man, beaming, embraced Carta. But he seemed to shun Severus. He turned to Regina and bowed politely. "Cartumandua wrote to tell me all about you. You're very welcome in our home. I am Carta's uncle-the brother of her mother. My name is Carausias . . ." He was a short, stocky man, shorter than Carta, with the big, callused hands of a farm laborer. He had Carta's dark coloring, deep brown eyes, and broad features, though his neatly cropped black hair was shot with gray, and his wide nose was flattened and crooked, as if it had been broken.

"And this is my son. His name is Amator."