Jilly leaned forward. "But I didn't think that was your period, David—I thought you were strictly medieval?"
Audley nodded. "So I am."
"So—"
Audley held up his hand. "So listen, my children, and you shall hear what you shall hear!"
"And know neither Doubt nor Fear?" murmured Roche.
"Ah!'' Audley stared at him, and rocked dangerously on the three-legged stool, the huge shadow dancing on the wall behind him. " You know then! 'I am born out of my due time'—remember? 'Five hundred years ago . . . five hundred years hence ... I should have been such a counsellor to kings as the world has never dreamed of." He tapped his head. " Tis all here . . . but it hath no play in this black age'—remember?
Puck of Pook's Hill?"
"De Aquila?" Roche was almost certain of the reference, and it was interesting to him that Audley identified himself with the cunning old blackguard. For either by accident or design Kipling had drawn a classic blueprint for the successful spymaster there, using a judicious mixture of force, blackmail, threats and torture to turn an enemy agent. It was an irony that he himself had identified with de Aquila's dummy5
victim, the faithless Fulke, envying him his chance of changing to the winning side with honour and profit.
Audley nodded back, the lamplight glinting in his spectacles.
" 'The Old Dog' himself. Good man, Roche!"
"Kipling lives again," murmured Bradford.
Audley drew himself up on the stool. "All right then—you barbarians, I'll give you barbarians . . . barbarians all the way from the Rhine and the Danube into the Sea of Grass in the east, to the Volga—Angles, Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Thuringians, Burgundians . . . Alemanni and Marcomanni. . .
Quadi and Rugians and Gepids and Vandals and Goths—
Visigoths and Ostrogoths—"
"As far as the Volga?" Bradford emphasised the name disbelievingly.
"That's right. Stalingrad wasn't the first time the Germans were there. The Romans turned them away from the west, so they went east."
" 'Lebensraum', it's called." Stein nodded. "An old German custom."
"But then they came back." As ever, Jilly had her facts neatly cut-and-dried. "Third century AD? Fourth century?"
"Fourth'll do. Say . . . sixteen hundred years ago . . . give or take a few decades." Audley smiled. "Sixteen centuries ago we could all have been sitting here, nice and cosy, drinking our wine—the good wine of Cahors—" he lifted his glass "—
drinking our wine, and listening to ... Lady Alexandra's titbits dummy5
of scandal from the City, and Stein's news from Alexandria . . . and Jilly would be trying to convert us all to Christianity, probably—" the glass moved from one to the other of them "—and Roche. . .now what would Captain Roche be doing here, among us fat civilians?" The lamplight caught the blood-red of the wine. "On leave from the frontier, maybe? From the heather and the bare hills where the wolves howl and the clouds play like cavalry charging? What price Britannia, Captain? Will the frontier hold next time?"
The American saved Roche with a grunt. "Huh! So where does a goddamn Yankee figure at the Court of King David?"
Jilly chuckled. "You don't, Mike—you're an anachronism."
"A who?" asked Lexy.
"A Visigoth, honey," said Bradford.
"And that's exactly right," said Audley quickly. "The hirsute Bradford doesn't fit in our Roman orgy—not sixteen hundred years ago. But if we make him a Visigoth and move on another hundred years . . . then he's here, by God!"
"The frontier didn't hold," said Jilly.
"You didn't do your goddamn job, Captain," said Bradford accusingly. "You let the Krauts in!"
He had to play—
"We didn't have enough men. It was the government's fault
—" he spread his hands "—you expected us to hold the line all the way from the Black Sea to the Irish Channel—"
"Excuses, excuses! You had a job to do, and you didn't do it, dummy5
soldier!" Jilly leaned forward towards Audley. "But I thought it was the Huns that were the cause of it all, not the Germans? I mean, they pushed the Germans westwards again, and the Germans were just shunted into the Roman Empire, running away from them?"
Lexy sat up. "I thought the Huns were the Germans?"
Oh, for God's sake, Lexy!" Jilly turned on her irritably.
"You've read the book—don't you remember? Germans—big and blond and hairy; Huns—short and dark and ugly."
"I read somewhere that if you were downwind of the Huns, you could smell them at twenty miles," said Stein. "Is that true? Or was it the Mongols?"
"Much the same article," said Audley. "But twenty-five miles, not twenty, if there were enough of them."
"Anyway, they forced the Germans back to the west," said Jilly firmly.
"If they smelt that bad I don't goddamn wonder," said Bradford.
"Well, the book didn't say they were different," complained Lexy. "They were just nastier, that's all."
"What book?" inquired Stein. "You haven't been actually reading a history book, have you, Alexandra?"
" No!" snapped Jilly irritably. " Not a history book—a historical novel, that's all."
"Well, it's like a darned history book, anyway," said Lexy.
dummy5
"It's got footnotes at the back, saying that it all really happened—all about this Roman princess, and how the Visigoths carried her off, after they sacked Rome, and how she had to marry the king's brother . . . At— At- something—"
"Ataulf." Audley sounded surprised. "Brother of Theodoric the Great?"
"That's him—Atwulf—" Lexy plunged on breathlessly "— and because of her he decided to save the Roman Empire instead of destroying it—"
"That's a large assumption," said Audley.
"Well, she said so."
"She?"
"This princess—Galla Placidia, of course. And she ought to know, after having been thoroughly screwed by Atwulf and his elder brother! Only their little son died, and the Romans got her back, and she married this great general, Constantine
—"
"Constantius."
"That's the one. And after he died she ruled the whole empire, with the help of her confessor, Simplicius—"
"Who?"
"Simplicius. He's the one who tells the story—who's in bed with who, and who's double-crossing who—"
"Lexy—there's no such person as Simplicius," Audley shook his head. "And Galla Placidia didn't leave any memoirs.
dummy5
You're talking fiction, pure and simple, nothing more."
"Huh!" grunted Bradford, from behind his bottles. "Maybe fiction, maybe not. But not pure and not simple, by God!"
"Eh?" The tone in the American's voice made Audley drop Lexy. "Not . . . ?"
"Not pure—damn right not pure, because the Hays Office threw a fit over it. And sure as hell not simple, because a million bucks isn't simple, old buddy." Bradford shook his head. "In fact, that was one dirty, crafty book, if you ask me.
And written by one crafty lady, too."
"What lady? What book?" Audley looked around him.
"Hell, David—are you really telling us you haven't heard of Antonia Palfrey and Princess in the Sunset!"
"I don't read historical novels."
Roche was glad of the shadows which masked his reaction to this most palpable and absolute untruth, the evidence of which he had seen scattered on Audley's own driveway. In the litany of the man's defects neither Wimpy nor even Oliver St.John Latimer had included intellectual snobbery, but here it was. And yet, even allowing for the envy of a non-seller for a best-seller, it struck an oddly discordant note.
"You missed out, then," said Bradford. "Because it wasn't at all bad, minus the purple passages about Ataulf pawing Galla Placidia's heaving bosom, and Constantius putting his hand up her toga."