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night, unobserved, or so he thought.”
    “Was his hair white when he came up?”
    “He did not come up.”
    “Um. Oh. So, who is buried down there?”
    Caius shook his head. “I do not know, young Owens. But I felt him, back when this place was empty. I could feel something waiting even then, deep in the hill.”
    “What was he waiting for?”
    “All I could feel,” said Caius Pompeius, “was the waiting.”
     
    Scarlett was carrying a large picture book, and she sat next to her mother on the green bench near the gates, and she read her book while her mother inspected an educational supplement. She enjoyed the spring sunshine and she did her best to ignore the small boy who waved at her first from behind an ivy-covered monument, then, when she had resolved to no longer look at the monument, the boy popped up—literally, like a jack-in-a-box—from behind a tombstone (Joji G. Shoji, d. 1921, I was a stranger and you took me in ). He gestured towards her, frantically. She ignored him.
    Eventually she put her book down on the bench.
    “Mummy? I’m going for a walk, now.”
    “Stay on the path, dear.”
    She stayed on the path until she was round the corner, and she could see Bod waving at her from further up the hill. She made a face at him.
    “I’ve found things out,” said Scarlett.
    “Me too,” said Bod.
    “There were people before the Romans,” she said. “Way back. They lived, I mean, when they died they put them underground in these hills, with treasure and stuff. And they were called barrows.”
    “Oh. Right,” said Bod. “That explains it. Do you want to come and see one?”
    “Now?” Scarlett looked doubtful. “You don’t really know where one is, do you? And you know I can’t always follow you where you go.” She had seen him slip through walls, like a shadow.
    In reply, he held up a large, rusted, iron key. “This was in the chapel,” he said. “It should open most of the gates up there. They used the same key for all of them. It was less work.”
    She scrambled up the hillside beside him.
    “You’re telling the truth?”
    He nodded, a pleased smile dancing at the corners of his lips. “Come on,” he said.
    It was a perfect spring day, and the air was alive with birdsong and bee hum. The daffodils bustled in the breeze and here and there on the side of the hill a few early tulips nodded. A blue powdering of forget-me-nots and fine, fat yellow primroses punctuated the green of the slope as the two children walked up the hill toward the Frobishers’ little mausoleum.
    It was old and simple in design, a small, forgotten stone house with a metal gate for a door. Bod unlocked the gate with his key, and they went in.
    “It’s a hole,” said Bod. “Or a door. Behind one of the coffins.”
    They found it behind a coffin on the bottom shelf—a simple crawl space. “Down there,” said Bod. “We go down there.”
    Scarlett found herself suddenly enjoying the adventure rather less. She said, “We can’t see down there. It’s dark.”
    “I don’t need light,” said Bod. “Not while I’m in the graveyard.”
    “I do,” said Scarlett. “It’s dark.”
    Bod thought about the reassuring things that he could say, like “there’s nothing bad down there,” but the tales of hair turning white and people never returning meant that he could not have said them with a clear conscience, so he said, “I’ll go down. You wait for me up here.”
    Scarlett frowned. “You shouldn’t leave me,” she said.
    “I’ll go down,” said Bod, “and I’ll see who’s there, and I’ll come back and tell you all about it.”
    He turned to the opening, bent down, and clambered through on his hands and knees. He was in a space big enough to stand up in, and he could see steps cut into the stone. “I’m going down the steps now,” he said.
    “Do they go down a long way?”
    “I think so.”
    “If you held my hand and told me where I was walking,” she said, “then I could come with