The Republican Coin

By Pamela Lamb

In the dying days of the Roman republic, Military Tribune Marcus Fabius Aquila of the XIIth Legion drops a silver denarius on the ramparts of Cado’s Burg, a hilltop fortress in south west Britannia. What is he doing there - a Roman soldier - eighty years before Britannia is invaded by the troops of the Emperor Claudius?
In 1966, some two thousand years later, the coin is discovered by Lynette Mason, a seventeen year old girl volunteering on an archaeological excavation during her summer holidays. Lynette becomes involved with a postgraduate student on the dig. It is an encounter that changes her life forever.
Lynette’s coin has the potential to rewrite the history of Britain. When it is brought to the attention of a professor at Lynette’s local university, the race is on to find the coin and reap the academic rewards. But the person who wants it most of all is someone Lynette hoped she would never see again in her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pamela Lamb
• Release date: Mar 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301053926

Pamela Lamb

Must ... stop ... writing ... Sometimes I really wish I could. It gets in the way of real life. At the weekend I prefer sitting in front of the computer with my pretend friends instead of going out with my real ones. It destroys my sleep. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night knowing I need to change one word in the paragraph I wrote the evening before - and I have to get up and do it. And it makes me a dangerous driver. Get me on the road and my characters start having conversations in my head. And why are they so much more lucid and logical then than when I attempt to scribble them down at the next red light?I write because I love language. I love English with its collection of mongrel words. It's like an enormous button box where you can pick between half a dozen languages each one of which holds the history of Britain at its heart. I love the shape of words and the sound of them. I love what you can make them do on the page. And what you can make them do to your readers. Laugh, cry, stay up at night.What I like best is having a conversation with a reader about one of my characters. The reader talks about my character as if s/he is a real person. Discusses the character's motivation. Speculates about what the character did after the end of the novel. And I think, but it's all made up. Every bit of it. Out of my head.Then I know it is all worthwhile. Bringing characters alive to walk on the page. Creating a world for them to live in. Immersing myself in the shape and rhythm of a novel in the making. It's exciting stuff. And it's even more exciting when the book is finished and I hand it over to you, the reader. Enjoy!

Book preview

The Republican Coin

Pamela Lamb

Published by Agneau Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Pamela Lamb

Discover other titles by Pamela Lamb at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/pamelalamb

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Introduction

Although I have lived in Australia for the past 40 years, I was born and raised on the wild west coast of Britain. In 1966 when I was 17 and still at school I volunteered on a dig at Cadbury Castle, an Iron Age hill fort in Somerset. There were persistent folk stories in the area about the hill’s connection to Arthurian and Dark Age history and the purpose of the excavation was to find out if there was any archaeological evidence to support these stories.

During the dig a worn silver Republican denarius was pulled out of the ground. The archaeologists decided the coin had been dropped by a Roman soldier in AD45 when the hill fort was attacked during the invasion of Britannia by the Emperor Claudius. I was never happy with that explanation. Why would a Roman soldier, a long way from home and part of an invading army, have an 80 year old coin in his possession? To put it in context, try to imagine an Australian soldier serving in Afghanistan today having a coin in his pocket that was minted before World War II.

While I was on the dig I became involved with a postgraduate student. What happened between us has remained in my mind all these years, along with my curiosity about that old coin. Five years ago, as an older and, hopefully, wiser woman I decided it was time to write down the stories of the Roman soldier who lost the coin and the young woman who found it. The result is a mixture of truth and fiction.

For my Roman soldier, Marcus Fabius Aquila, the truth came from Caesar’s Gallic Wars, written at the time the Republican coin was in circulation, the fiction from reading between the lines and imagining a situation that would take Marcus to Cadbury Castle with the coin in his possession. For Lynette Mason my young volunteer ... I’ll leave you to decide which is her story and which is my own. Originally I was going to weave Marcus’ and Lynette’s stories together but I think they are better told apart. Although I have placed Lynette’s story at the beginning, it’s up to you which one you read first.

Of course, the real story of that silver denarius remains elusive, as it always will.

LYNETTE’S STORY

Chapter 1

Brisbane

July 1998

‘Terminus post quem,’ said the man behind the desk but Lynette had stopped listening. She wondered how his students could stand it. That voice droning on and on. No wonder the ones she’d seen in the corridor looked so miserable. It reminded her of being at school and hating every minute of it. Even the smell was the same.

The man reached out his large soft hand and, with surprising delicacy, picked up the small silver coin that lay on the desk between them. Lynette suppressed the urge to snatch it back. She clasped her hands in her lap and tried to look attentive.

‘So you see, Mrs er …’ He turned his large head and consulted a scrap of paper lying by the telephone. ‘… Ms Mason … Lynette. I can call you Lynette, can’t I?’ The head reared up revealing a pair of startling blue eyes. ‘So you see, Lynette, this coin can’t possibly have come from where you said it did.’

‘Are you calling me a liar, Professor Scott?’

‘No, no, of course not. Nothing like that.’ Professor Scott leaned forward and deposited the small coin on Lynette’s side of the desk. ‘Let me explain it again. Though I have got students waiting ...’

‘No, it’s okay. I understand. Just tell me again. What is it?’

‘It’s a silver denarius, quite a nice one. Minted in the late republic. By the Julians as a matter of fact.’ Professor Scott’s large pink finger descended onto the coin. ‘You can see the goddess Venus here. The Julians believed they were descended from her son Aeneas.’

‘Julians as in Julius Caesar?’

‘Precisely right. And you say you found it on a hill fort in Somerset?’

‘Cadbury Castle.’ Lynette picked up the coin and slipped it back into its worn velvet pouch.

Professor Scott clasped his hands together. ‘There’s the problem, d’you see? The Roman republic ended in 44 BC, give or take a year or two. And Britain was invaded by the Emperor Claudius in AD 43. Eighty years later. So how did it get there, that’s the question?’

‘My question is what should I do with it?’

‘We can look after it for you. Did you see our museum on your way in?’

Lynette had seen the museum and hadn’t liked it. All that shiny glass made her wonder who did the cleaning. She shook her head. ‘I think I’ll just hang on to it for the time being.’

Outside the building, Lynette wondered what to do next. A day away from the office was a rare thing and not to be wasted. She could go to Indooroopilly and look at the shops. She could go home and water the garden. In the end, she pulled her mobile phone out of her handbag and called her daughter at work.

‘Are you doing anything for lunch?’ Lynette tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice. Jodie had learned to be cool at her private girls’ school and had never really lost the habit.

‘Looks like I am now. What time do you want to meet?’

‘Half an hour?’

‘I won’t have much time. Can you order for me?’

‘What do you want?

‘Just a pot of tea.’

‘Anything to eat? I’m going to have a sandwich.’

‘Just the tea, Mum.’

‘Tea, then.’

Another diet, thought Lynette. She was like a string of spaghetti as she was.

‘Thanks, Mum. See you soon.’ Jodie hung up.

Lynette stared at the illuminated screen of her phone and wondered if she had to do anything to end the call. The mobile had been her receptionist’s idea but Lynette had soon discovered that having one and using it were two entirely different concepts. The screen went blank and she shoved the phone back into her handbag. Okay, she thought, find the car and then the shopping centre. I hope I can find somewhere to park. As she walked down the slope towards the river, she rehearsed in her mind what she would tell Jodie about her encounter with the professor.

It was almost twelve by the time Lynette had parked her car in the bowels of the building and ridden the escalators to the top floor. The coffee shop was crowded with young mothers eating an early lunch, their strollers creating a chrome palisade around the edge of the eating area. Lynette gave her order at the counter, then threaded her way to an empty table in the middle of the room.

She had intended to keep watch so she could give herself the pleasure of watching her tall elegant daughter striding towards her through the lunchtime crowds but as soon as she sat down her mind began to work and, when Jodie arrived at the table, she was scribbling notes on the back of an old envelope.

‘Have you ordered?’ Jodie dumped her handbag on the floor and slid into the chair on the other side of the table. She twisted her small gold watch around on her wrist and scowled at its tiny face.

‘Busy?’ Lynette pushed the envelope into her bag.

Jodie rolled her eyes. ‘It’s tax time. Anyway what are you doing away from the office in the middle of the day? There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

‘No, there’s nothing wrong.’ Lynette allowed herself a small smile. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve just come from the university.’

‘The university? What on earth were you doing there?’

‘Showing them this.’ Lynette took the small velvet pouch out of her handbag and emptied the coin onto the table.

Jodie picked it up between finger and thumb and squinted at it, front and back. She looked up at Lynette. ‘Who’s this on the front?’

Lynette smiled. ‘That’s the goddess Venus. She’s supposed to be the ancestor of Julius Caesar. ‘

Jodie raised one elegant eye brow. ‘Seriously?’

‘According to the professor I spoke to at the uni.’

‘Where did it come from?’

‘The coin? I found it at the back of my bedside drawer when I was cleaning up. I’d forgotten all about it. It very nearly ended up in a garbage bag.’

Jodie narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re not still thinking about selling the house?’

‘Thinking about it, yes. I need a smaller place, Jodie. A unit, if I can find one I like. I can’t manage the garden by myself. I don’t have the time for it these days.’

‘Don’t be too hasty, Mum.’

‘Your father’s been gone for five years, and you moved out - what, two years ago? I wouldn’t call that being hasty.’

‘Let me know before you decide anything, okay?’ Jodie waited while the waitress placed cup and saucer, teapot, and milk jug on the table in front of her. Then, ‘So this coin. Where did you get it? You’ve never been to Rome.’

‘I didn’t find it in Rome.’ Lynette looked up and smiled at the waitress who placed her coffee and salad sandwich in front of her. ‘I found it in England the summer before you were born. Although Professor Scott said I was lying about where I found it.’

‘Lying? Why would he say a thing like that?’ Jodie dropped the coin back into its bag and pushed it across the table towards her mother.

Because, according to him, it was too old to be where I said it was.’

‘How did he work that one out?’

‘He told me some Latin term, but I think I can explain it in English.’ Lynette separated the two halves of her sandwich and turned the plate towards her daughter. ‘If you cut a slice through the ground it’s going to look like this sandwich. Newest at the top and oldest at the bottom. That makes sense, right?’

A brief nod from Jodie.

‘The archaeologists have this rule that says you can get something new lower down …’ Lynette picked up her coffee spoon and gouged a hole in the top of one half of her sandwich. She picked off a bit of crust and dropped it in the hole. ‘See? But you can’t get something old in the top layers.’

Jodie leaned forward. ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘Look, I’ll show you.’ Lynette lifted the top off the other half of her sandwich, shedding bits of lettuce and grated carrot onto her plate. ‘When they made my sandwich they added the tomatoes before the carrot and lettuce.’ She picked up a slice of tomato and held it in the air. ‘So how would you get a piece of tomato up here in the carrot layer?’

‘Okay, I can see that.’ Jodie reached out and grabbed a piece of tomato that had toppled onto Lynette’s plate. ‘But what’s that got to do with your coin?’

‘Professor Scott said it was minted in the time of the Roman Republic, but Britain wasn’t invaded until eighty years later. So how did the coin get there? That’s the question.’

‘Someone’s lucky coin?’

Lynette shook her head. ‘He said it was spending money. Like a twenty cent piece. People don’t hang on to coins like that. Not for eighty years.’

‘So he said you were lying.’

‘Not in so many words. But I know where that coin came from, Jodie.’

‘I wish I’d been there. I wouldn’t have let him talk to you like that.’ Jodie reserved for herself the right to give her mother a hard time. ‘He’s wrong. He must be. There has to be another explanation.’

Lynette grinned. She liked the idea of Professor Scott being wrong. ‘Well, if he’s wrong they’re all wrong. According to the historians, Rome invaded Britain in 43 AD and there’s no way a Roman coin could have arrived there any earlier.’

‘So what are you going to do with it?’ Jodie tweaked a piece of cucumber from Lynette’s sandwich.

‘Professor Scott wanted me to give it to him for his museum.’

‘But you’re not going to.’

‘No, I’m not.’ Lynette gave up on her sandwich and pushed the plate within her daughter’s reach. ‘I only took it in to see what it was. I have no intention of giving it to anyone.’

‘Good for you. Look, I’ve got to go.’ Jodie finished her tea and pushed the cup away. ‘Come over on Sunday. Phil’s cooking a roast.’

Lynette’s mobile phone rang three times while she was walking to her car and, in the end, she gave in to the inevitable and went back to work. Her real estate agency, purchased three years previously, was finally getting on its feet and she didn’t want to give it any reason to lose momentum. It had been a gamble buying an agency in Ipswich: an area that was on the nose for buyers and investors alike. But Lynette’s hunch that low prices and a stock of unrenovated Queenslanders would attract the market was beginning to pay off. The flood of Mexicans from south of the border for whom a 40 minute train ride to the city was no deterrent, plus the Brisbane thirty-somethings looking for a renovation special that didn’t cost the earth had seen the beginnings of a mini boom in the city. There were plenty in the game who had jeered at Lynette’s decision to buy the agency and she was looking forward to having the last laugh.

She was home by six thirty and her first move after kicking off her shoes was towards the small stock of spirits she kept under the kitchen bench. She poured herself a measure of whisky, splashed in a little extra, and topped up the glass with water from the tap. The whisky was her reward for spending the afternoon at the office and for getting home alive along Ipswich Road. It was the kind of game Lynette played with herself, now she was living alone. Otherwise she would drink too much, get into her pyjamas straight after dinner and go to bed at half past eight because there was nothing to watch on TV.

She took her drink into Jodie’s old room which, with the addition of a cheap flat-pack desk to hold her computer, she now used as her office. She bent to the bottom shelf of the bookcase where the photo albums stood in a row and selected the first one, so old now that the plastic sheets had stuck together and the photographs had fallen into drunken heaps at the bottoms of the pages. The photographs were from the few short years between Lynette leaving school and getting married. Faded colour pictures of skinny girls in mini skirts posing in front of buildings or scenery, the significance of which Lynette had long forgotten. Herself in long pants and a tight polo-neck jumper standing next to a lake that looked like it might be somewhere in North Wales. A group shot outside a pub – there were boys and cars in this one but she didn’t have a clue who any of them were. And, at the very back, photos of the dig at Cadbury Castle where she’d found the Republican coin. People eating lunch at trestle tables set up outside an army tent. A girl in shorts and a bikini top scrubbing pottery in a washing up bowl. A view down the embankment to a tiny figure holding a striped pole. That’s Emryn Owens, thought Lynette, doing his survey of the ramparts.

There was a thin booklet, too, with a dull brown cover. It was a copy of the report on the dig that had been published in an academic journal. It had followed Lynette out to Australia and had arrived not long after Jodie was born. Lynette hadn’t wanted to look at it, not just then, and she’d shoved it in the album out of the way. Now she sat down on Jodie’s bed, put her drink on the bedside table and opened the report. No happy snaps in here. This was a scientific report and the photos were of the finds: the end of a bronze pin, a corroded iron knife, part of a belt buckle. And pottery. Photos of pieces of pot stuck together into some sort of shape and drawings of imaginary jugs and beakers showing what they would have looked like when they were new, instead of coming out of the ground in bits, covered in mud.

It had been her friend Sheila’s idea to go on the dig. Lynette had been planning a trip to Spain with a girl from work who’d announced just before the deposit was due to be paid that she was getting engaged and needed to save her money so they could buy a house.

‘Come on, Lynne, it’ll be fun. Free accommodation, free food and all the boys you want,’ Sheila had said to Lynette that Saturday night way back in February when they could hardly imagine it ever being warm enough to go outside, never mind sit on a hillside digging holes. Sheila was an old hand. She’d even done an Easter dig the year before when she’d spent a week halfway up a scree slope in North Wales excavating Neolithic axe heads with a boy from New Jersey which had been fun too, according to her, even when the sleet blew in from the Irish Sea and nearly froze them to death. So Lynette had agreed to go, and Sheila had signed them up before she had a chance to change her mind.

She and Sheila had travelled by bus from Liverpool to Yeovil where they had been picked up by one of the diggers in a disreputable green van who drove far too quickly along narrow green lanes to the quaintly named village of Massingham St Mary.

They were staying in Massingham House, a dodgy hotel owned by Colonel Peters who Lynette remembered as a strange winking, ogling man with a freckled scalp and a stained moustache who left the hard work to his wispy blue-eyed wife and their sullen domestic staff. Mrs Peters was always ready with clean sheets, fresh soap and hot water bottles, and she toiled long and hard in the kitchen producing stringy roasts and vast fruit cakes to feed her hungry guests.

The story was that Colonel Peters had bought Massingham House as a retirement investment after he left the army. It had not occurred to him at the time to wonder whether people would want to spend their holidays in Massingham St Mary where there was nothing to see but little round hills and fields full of cows. And he had done very little to entice them. Apart from cramming a few extra bathrooms into odd corners of the house and turning the morning room into a bar, his biggest investment had been a large sign at the front gate that guests had to negotiate several miles of twisty country roads to find.

Before Colonel Peters bought it, Massingham House had been a private boys’ boarding school where