Read Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows for Free Online Page B

you’d want it.’
    He eyed her with a suspicious but quite unabashed smile. ‘You know all this, don’t you? You’ve been reading this place up.’
    ‘I could hardly read up this bit, could I? It only came to light today.’ She strained her eyes into the broken circle of darkness, and a breath of ancient tension and fear seemed to issue chillingly from the hole the river had torn in history. ‘But they’re quite big, those flues, if that’s their width. A man could creep through them.’
    ‘They had to be cleaned periodically. These aren’t unusual. But the size of the whole complex is, if I’m right about this.’
    She let him help her back up the slope, round the other side of the danger area, and demonstrate by the skeletal walls where the various rooms of the baths lay, and their impressive extent.
    She had no idea why she suddenly looked back, as they set off across the level turf that stretched above that mysterious underworld of brick-built labyrinths. The newness of the scar, the crudity of the glimpse it afforded into long-past prosperities and distresses, the very fact that no one, since this city was abandoned overnight, had threaded the maze below—a matter of fifteen centuries or more—drew her imagination almost against her will, and she turned her head in involuntary salute and promise, knowing she would come back again and again. Thus she saw, with surprise and disquiet, the young, dark head cautiously hoisted out of cover to peer after them. How could he be there? And why should he want to? The incalculable Boden had somehow worked his way round once again into forbidden territory, had been lurking somewhere in the bushes, waiting for them to leave. The twentieth century, inquisitive, irreverent, quite without feeling for the past, homed in upon this ambiguous danger-zone with its life in its hand.
    She clutched at her companion’s arm, halting him in mid-spate and bringing his head round in respectful enquiry.
    ‘That boy! He’s there again—but inside the rope now! Why do they
have
to go where it says: Danger?’
    Gus Hambro wheeled about with unexpectedly authoritative aplomb, just in time to see the well-groomed young head duck out of sight. He dropped Charlotte’s hand, took three large strides back towards the crest, and launched a bellow of disapproval at least ten times as effective as the hapless teacher’s appeals:
    ‘Get out of that! Yes,
you
! Want me to come and fetch you?
And stay out
!’
    He noted the rapid, undignified scramble by which the culprit extricated himself from the ropes on the river path, followed by ominous little trickles of loose earth; and the exaggerated dignity with which he compensated as soon as he was clear, his slender back turned upon the voice that blasted him out of danger, his crest self-consciously reared in affected disregard of sounds which could not possibly be directed at him.
    ‘Those notices,’ announced Gus clearly to the general air, but not so loudly as to reach unauthorised ears, ‘mean exactly what they say. Anybody we have to dig out of there we’re going to skin alive afterwards. So watch it!’
    It was at that point that Charlotte began seriously to like her guide, and to respect his judgement. ‘That’s it,’ he said, tolerantly watching the Boden boy’s swaggering retreat towards the curator’s house. ‘He’ll lay off now. His own shower weren’t around to hear that, he’ll be glad to get back to where he rates as a hero.’
    She was not quite so sure, for some reason, but she didn’t say so. The tall, straight young back that sauntered away down-river, to come about in a wide circuit via the fence of the curator’s garden, and the box hedge that continued its line, maintained too secure an assurance, and too secret a satisfaction of its own, in spite of the dexterity with which it had removed itself from censure. This Boden observed other people’s taboos just so far as was necessary, but he went his own way,