Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows Read Free Page A

England?’
    ‘I’m making my home here,’ she said. ‘I’m taking a teaching job in a new comprehensive school, but that won’t begin until the September term. That’s why I’m trying to fill up the gap with a few concerts, but of course I’m not good enough for the big dates, it will be mostly provincial engagements. I’ll let you have word of all my movements.’
    ‘That would be most kind and helpful.’
    The interview seemed to have reached its natural conclusion. She picked up her handbag, and he rose from behind his desk to take a relieved and ceremonious farewell. But before they had reached the doorway she hesitated and halted.
    ‘You know what I would like? Could you let me have a list of all the books Uncle Alan’s written? If I’m going to be a stand-in for him, even temporarily, like this, I really need to know more about him, and that seems as good a way as any. They must surely convey something about him.’
    Strange, he thought resignedly, she’s not at all interested in how much her kinsman’s worth, only, rather suddenly and rather late, in what he’s like. And at this stage, isn’t that rather an academic consideration? But he said politely: ‘Yes, of course. If you’ll allow me, I’ll have a few of his titles sent round to your hotel. This last one, the text he sent from Istanbul—the publishers took care of the proof-reading, of course—that one I believe I’ve got here. Take it with you, if you’d care to. Though it’s hardly the most riveting of his works. He found Aurae Phiala, it seems, rather an over-rated site in revisiting it.’
    There was a large bookcase in the corner of his office, stocked mainly with leather-bound volumes; but the end of the lowest shelf was brightened by the clear colours of a number of paperbacks. He plucked one of them from its place and brought it to her. ‘The Roman Britain Library’, the jacket told her, and in larger print: ‘ A URAE P HIALA ’, and Alan Morris’s name, with a comet’s-tail of letters after it.
    The cover was a fine, delicately-composed, atmospheric photograph of a shallow bowl of meadows beside the silver sweep of a river, the whole foreground patterned with a mesh of low walls in amber stone and rosy, fired brick and tile, with two broken pillars to carry the accented rhythms up into a sky feathered with light cloud. Charlotte gazed at it, fascinated. A landscape obviously planned, disciplined, tamed long, long since, and long since abandoned to the river, the seasons and the sky; and not a human soul in sight. A less cunning photographer might have felt the urge to place a single figure, perhaps close to the columns, to give life and scale. This one had understood that Aurae Phiala was dead, and immense, needing no meretricious human yardstick to give it proportion.
    ‘But it’s beautiful!’ she said, and voice and accent had become wholly French for one moment. ‘This is where he spent those last few days?’ she said. ‘Before he caught that flight into Turkey?’
    ‘Yes. He knew the site from many previous visits, though I think he had never organised a dig there himself. The curator is an old friend of his, a fellow-student, I believe. But less distinguished.’
    ‘So Uncle Alan would be with friends, when he stayed there? And he went straight from this place, to catch his plane?’
    ‘So I understand. It is an attractive picture,’ said Mr Stanforth, with patronising tolerance. ‘Wonderful what a first rate photographer can do with even unpromising material. But you’ll see what Doctor Morris has to say about the place.’
    ‘Where is it?’ she asked, still viewing the sunlit, fluted hollow with pleasure and wonder.
    ‘Somewhere on the Welsh border, I believe. The text and maps will show you exactly where. The name means something like “the bowl of the gentle wind”. Apparently an ideal climatic site. But you’ll discover all about the place if you read it.’
    Clearly he hardly believed that she