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

descent need be long delayed. He had the wit to keep talking.
    ‘It began as a sort of rest-station and leave resort, as seasonal and artificial as a seaside fun-fair. And then it grew, and traders and service providers thought it worthwhile to settle here and go into business. They brought their families, some of them intermarried with time-expired soldiers who chose to settle here, too, and it grew into a real, life-and death town, where everyone had a stake sunk so deep that when the legions started to leave, the locals still couldn’t get out. Everything they had was here. No, I don’t belong here, I’m only visiting,’ he ended disarmingly, coming roundabout to the answer to her question. ‘It’s my subject, that’s all. But I could see what you were thinking. It
is
a beautiful place.’
    He was taller than she by only a few inches, and slenderly built, an athletic lightweight in a heather tweed sportscoat and grey cords. He had a thick crop of wiry hair the colour of good toffee, and heavy eyelashes many shades darker, as lavish as on a Jersey cow, fringing golden-brown eyes of such steady and limpid sincerity that she felt certain he could not possibly be just what he seemed. The face that confronted her with so much earnest goodwill and innocence, and with, she felt mistrustfully, such incalculable thoughts behind it, was square and brown, with a good deal of chin and nose to it, and an odd mouth with one corner higher than the other. He could have been anything from twenty-five to thirty, but not, she judged, beyond thirty. He did not look like a wolf, but he did look like a young man with an eye for a girl, and techniques that would bear watching.
    ‘How kind of you,’ she said, balancing nicely on the edge of irony, in case a few minutes more of this should see him running out of line to shoot, and make it desirable to jettison him, ‘—how kind of you to tell me all about it!’
    ‘Not at all!’ he said, and had the grace to flush a little; she even had a fleeting suspicion that he enjoyed the ability to flush at will. ‘How kind of
you
not to resent being told! I get carried away. Amateurs do. And this one I really like. Look at that hillscape over in Wales!’ Fold on fold, rising gently from the water-meadows, the foothills receded in softening and paling shades of blue into the west. ‘No wonder the men who’d served out their time put their savings into market stalls and little businesses, tanneries, dye-works, gardens. Nobody knew the risks better than they did. It was a brave gamble, and in the end they lost it. But it was a stake worth throwing for.’
    ‘I should have thought,’ said Charlotte, trapped into genuine interest and speculation, ‘that they’d have built just a little further from the river. Weren’t they for ever in danger of floods? Look at the height of the water now.’
    ‘Ah, now, that’s interesting. You see, the Comer has changed its course since the third century. Exactly when, we don’t know, it may have been as late as the thirteenth century before it cut its way through. Come on down, and I’ll show you.’ And he actually took her arm, quite simply and confidently, and rushed her on the wings of his enthusiasm down through the green complexities of the bowl, between the crisp, serrated walls, across the fragments of tiled pavement, past the forum pillars, down to where the emerald turf sloped off under a token wire barrier to the riverside path and the waters of the Comer.
    Here, at close quarters, the fitful, elusive silver congealed into the turgid brown flood she had seen upriver, a silent surge of water looking almost solid in its power, sweeping along leaves and branches and roots and swathes of weed in its eddies, gnawing away loose red layers of the soil along this near bank, and eating at the muddy rim of the path. The speed of its silent, thrusting passage dazzled her eyes as she stared into it. The snows in Wales had lain long, and the spring