Lessons in Solving the Wrong Problem - Charlie Cochrane Page 0,2

look after and wanted to put bread and mutton on the table, you’d choose the path that helped you to do so, surely?”

Jonty tipped his head from side to side, evidently also weighing up the argument. “My mother might well have taken that line, had she been the wife of a local chieftain.”

Orlando, certain that his partner was giving a diplomatic answer, rather than a strictly accurate one, refrained from pointing out that if Helena Stewart had been in that position of leadership, the Romans wouldn’t have had a snowball in a hypocaust’s chance of invading the country. They’d have been sent back across the channel with their tails between their legs and feel themselves damn lucky that they still had legs to put their tails between.

The Stewarts were a remarkable family and not simply for having produced such a notable youngest son. Mr Stewart had a title but refused to use it, Mrs Stewart had been one of the beauties of her generation and both of them had a reputation for putting up with no nonsense.

“Your mother,” Applecross said, “if I may be so bold, is a woman of great renown. Alas, I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting her, but the Master of St Thomas’s has, and he avers that she’s one of the most remarkable ladies of her generation.”

“Perhaps you should arrange for her to visit this excavation, Applecross,” Jonty suggested, with a roguish twinkle. “So you can measure her degree of remarkableness for yourself. Any parts of the building you’re unsure of or strange artefacts you’re struggling to identify, you could simply show them to her and she’d hit the proverbial nail on the head. That’s a Roman lady’s whatsit for curdling her doo-dahs.”

Jonty’s extraordinarily precise imitation of his mother’s tones produced guffaws of laughter all round. Before the show-off could launch into any other of his vocal impersonations, Orlando said he was desperate to see the hypocaust, so the party moved on to another trench.

“This is the system we’d like you to do your calculations about,” Applecross said, hand sweeping to take in a broad area, not all of which was yet exposed from its grassy covering.

Orlando studied each of the visible remains in turn. He had come across such things when they visited Italy and had felt then the stirrings of something within his blood. Hints, maybe of the Italian thread in his ancestry. He’d put it down then to being in the land of his great-great-grandfather, Baron Francisco Artigiano del Rame, and therefore simply a matter of absorbing the atmosphere. yet he felt it again now, for the first time in England, a tug of something that might just be familiarity.

Jonty, nudging Orlando’s elbow, gave him a smile, perhaps recognising where his thoughts might be straying.

“I’ve seen hypocausts before,” Orlando said, “but if someone could explain to me the exact workings of this one, that would help me in my calculations. I’ll also need all the measurements, flue diameters and the like, as exactly as possible.”

Kane, who showed more enthusiasm for his subject than many a student, began a detailed explanation of how the system worked, in a gratifyingly logical manner. He started with what they believed might be the site of the boiler house, although all that was too be seen were lumps and bumps in the turf, hardly visible to Orlando’s untutored eye. Kane indicated what was allegedly the line of the flue, then turned to where he had begun digging, an area which the team hoped might turn out to be a small bath house.

“It’s probably a reasonable guess, given its proximity to the small spring, now pretty well dry, which opens in the next but one field. It would have drained into what appears to be a culvert.”

As the student spoke, Orlando made some notes, despite Kane promising to put all the details onto paper and leave it in Orlando’s pigeonhole. Students’ promises weren’t always worth the breath they’d been spoken with. When all the details had been divulged, Orlando noticed that Jonty, evidently tired of heating systems, had gone off with Applecross to another field.

“They want to put in test pits there,” Kane said, gesturing in Jonty’s direction. “We think there may have been Iron Age occupation here, so we’d be looking for an enclosure ditch and possibly roundhouse.”

“That’s the Romans and the ancient British accounted for, so what about the Saxons?” Orlando asked. “Where did they do their eating, drinking and sleeping?”

“On that flat piece of land