“Did you wish for me?” she asked.
Marcus inclined his head with a small bow. “I wondered whether you might care to see the older parts of the grounds.”
She placed her hand upon his arm with a ready smile. “I should like that very much.”
They walked in companionable silence toward the southern lawn, where the foundations of the present house met with remnants far more ancient. Marcus guided her beyond the hedgerows and through a small iron gate set into a crumbling wall of stone and earth.
“These walls were uncovered during my grandfather’s additions,” he said. “He fancied himself a patron of antiquities, though he never possessed the patience for true scholarship.”
Catherine bent to study the cut of a partially buried stone.
“This looks Roman,” she observed. “The tooling is finer than the others.”
Marcus nodded.
“It is,” he said, surprised and gratified. “Most visitors remark only on the moss.”
Her smile appeared, quiet and steady.
“They miss what lies beneath the surface,” she said softly.
He pointed to a darker patch of stone half-exposed by weather.
“That is a threshold,” he said. “We believe it belonged to a bathhouse. There was a small outpost here, or so the pottery fragments suggest.”
She stepped nearer.
“Have any coins been found?” she asked.
Marcus nodded.
“Two,” he said. “One commemorating the reign of Antoninus Pius, the other too corroded for certainty. I can show them to you in my study, if you are curious.”
Catherine’s eyes lit up, and Marcus’s heart performed an odd flutter.
“I am,” she said. “These sites reveal so much of ordinary life, like what they cooked, what they wore, how they built things to last.”
He nodded eagerly.
“Exactly,” Marcus said. “The domestic evidence is more instructive than the ceremonial.”
They moved from stone to stone, brushing aside low grasses and fragments of lichen. Catherine touched one carved rim and asked about its original use, prompting Marcus to describe a theory regarding grain storage.
“But if grain were stored here, would it not have required better ventilation?” She asked.
He paused, considering the point.
“It would,” he admitted. “I had not considered that.”
Her brow furrowed in quiet concentration.
“Perhaps it held oil, or wine,” she mused. “Or something else less perishable.”
Marcus surveyed the ground with fresh eyes, a thoughtful frown touching his brow.
“Very possible,” he said at last. “I shall have to reconsider the cataloguing notes.”
Their shoulders brushed as they bent over a ring of smaller stones embedded in the soil. Marcus stilled. The contact was brief, innocent in its cause, yet his breath caught.
