have to be totally focused on surviving and looking after your own. Who’d care about a few old women hanged here and there?’
Felix sniffed in the air and tossed his head back. The sunlight touched his crown, picking out golden threads. ‘Puts it in context.’ He sat up brightly and crushed the empty coffee cup in his hand. ‘So, shall we sink into some more history? Is Ms Asquith ready?’
I nodded quickly and stood up. ‘Here,’ I said holding out my hand to him. ‘Give me your rubbish. I’ll put it in that bin over there.’
I honestly don’t know why I did the next thing. I suppose it may have been eagerness to get out and on our way round the castle. Maybe I was showing off to Felix. Whatever, it all backfired.
A semi-circular flowerbed stretched between our bench and the bin. I should have nipped round along the pavement to it but instead I decided to skip over the actual bed. The soil was wetter than I anticipated and, once I’d popped the rubbish in, I spun around and felt my heel slip. Failing to correct my balance I tried to take another step forwards, but was suckered into the muddy part of the bed and fell head first onto the dirt. Fantastic, I thought kneeling there on my hands and knees. Good look.
Felix, being the gentleman he was, wasted no time in coming to my aid. This time even my olive skin didn’t manage to hide my flush.
He gallantly helped me to my feet and brushed me down, avoiding the smattering of mud on my arse. I was in full flow – apologising whilst focusing hard on scraping mud off my jeans, when I heard him say, ‘Good Lord.’
He was crouching over the earth where I had fallen. ‘What is that?’ he said, and poked a cluster of soil.
There was a slick furrow of mud where my boot had slipped. On one side, under the crumbly mass of earth I’d dislodged, something thin, whitish in colour, protruded from the ground. I put my hands on my dirty knees and leant over to inspect it more closely.
It was a small object, no more than three or four inches long, perhaps a quarter of an inch wide, hollow, like a whistle or a pipe.
Felix put his hand out to touch it and looked as if he was about to pick it up when an awful feeling of apprehension came over me.
‘Don’t. Don’t touch it,’ I shouted.
He withdrew his hand sharply and looked up. ‘Why? What is it?’
‘Don’t touch it.’ I moderated my tone. ‘I mean, you shouldn’t touch it. I don’t know what it is. But it might
be –’ the word on the tip of my tongue was ‘evil’. Where had that come from? Bloody ridiculous notion. Thank God I stopped myself in time I thought, and quickly substituted my chosen word for something far less hysterical. ‘Antique,’ I said. ‘Old.’
It was indeed ancient looking and fragile, but that wasn’t my worry. There was something indescribably nasty about the thing. I was sure it was made out of bone and had a feeling that it had once been human. ‘We should get someone official and tell them what we’ve found.’
‘Is it a pipe?’ Felix ignored my warning and stretched out his hand to prod it.
An image of the Witchfinder sucking on its end flashed in front of my eyes. Wasn’t he meant to have smoked? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t actually think clearly at all. In fact, I felt unaccountably wobbly.
A cloud briefly blocked out the sun, as the pipe flipped over to reveal a tiny row of characters on its underside.
‘Wow.’ Felix was fascinated. He picked it up. ‘Ouch,’ he hissed. ‘That’s sharp.’ The smaller, narrow end of the pipe was jagged like a broken tooth. ‘The damn thing cut me.’ Felix held up his hand to show me, a drop of blood bubbling from a thin horizontal slit in his palm. He cursed and pulled his gaze back to the thing in his hand.
‘Look, it’s got writing on it.’ His shirt cuff rubbed lightly against the pipe. The skinny red dribble of his blood smeared over the characters, the contrast lending them clarity. ‘I think it’s Latin. Quis.’
‘That means “who”.’ My grammar school education had its uses.
Felix was peering closer. The letters were minuscule. ‘Qui est iste qui venit.’
My Latin was worse than rusty, more like completely decayed. These days I could just about remember something about Caecilius