The theft of the curse tablet transformed the farmhouse from a refuge into a fortress. By dawn, Thaddeus had nailed shut the loose shutter in the parlor and propped a chair against the kitchen door. Honoria had retrieved a small pistol from her luggage, a pearl-handled thing that looked more ornamental than functional, but which she handled with the practiced ease of a woman who had spent time in rough country. The weapon now lay on the mantelpiece where the tablet had rested, a substitution of one kind of dread for another.
The morning was spent in fruitless searching. The fog had frozen during the night, leaving a crust of white on the heather that crunched underfoot, and Thaddeus and the Groat brothers walked the perimeter of the farm in widening circles, looking for footprints, dropped objects, any sign of the intruder. They found nothing. The frost had preserved nothing. It was as though the thief had been made of the same mist that shrouded the moor.
“Whoever took it knew the house,” Jonas Groat observed, his breath pluming in the cold air. “Knew where the tablet was kept. Knew the door was unbarred. This was not a stranger.”
Thaddeus nodded grimly. The circle of suspicion, already uncomfortably small, had just tightened another notch.
Justice Creeke had returned to the farmhouse shortly after breakfast, his judicial robes exchanged for a heavy tweed coat that made him look smaller and more human. He examined the carving on the mantelpiece with a magnifying glass, his thin lips pursed in concentration.
“The hand is steady,” he said at last. “The letters are evenly spaced. This was not done in haste. The person who carved this wanted it to be seen, wanted it to be legible. ‘Silence is the verdict.’ It is a warning, certainly. But it is also a signature. Someone is telling us that the old tribunal is still in session.”
“The old tribunal sentenced forty-seven men to death,” Thaddeus said. “Is that what awaits us? A garrote and a shallow grave?”
Creeke folded his magnifying glass and slipped it into his pocket. “I do not know what awaits us, Mr. Mire. But I know that my great-grandfather spent the last thirty years of his life trying to atone for what he had done. He wrote letters to the Crown, petitions for posthumous pardon. Every one was rejected. The law, he was told, was the law. The ledgers could not be uncorrected.”
He paused, and his dark eyes settled on Thaddeus with an intensity that was almost uncomfortable. “Before he died, he wrote a final memorandum. It was sealed and placed in the family archive, with instructions that it be opened only if the site of the executions was ever found. I brought it with me. I think it is time we read it together.”
The memorandum was written on three sheets of vellum, yellowed and brittle, the ink faded to a pale brown. Judge Malcolm Creeke's handwriting was small and precise, the script of a man who had been trained to make every word count. The assembled company—Thaddeus, Honoria, Parkin, the Groat brothers, and Septimus Creach—gathered around the deal table as Justice Creeke began to read.
“‘I, Malcolm Creeke, being of sound mind but heavy heart, set down this account in the hope that the truth may one day be known. The men I condemned were not mutineers. They were not deserters. They were laborers who had been conscripted by the Crown to dig trenches and build fortifications during the Insurrection of the Western Shires. When the insurrectionists advanced upon the position, these men took up arms to defend themselves and their works. They fought bravely. They repelled the assault. And for this, they were condemned.’”
Justice Creeke looked up. “The Insurrection of the Western Shires was a rebellion of mill workers and tenant farmers against the enclosure of common lands. It was crushed with considerable brutality. My great-grandfather's tribunal was part of that suppression.”
He returned to the memorandum.
“‘The law under which they were condemned was the Statute of Divided Service, passed by the Crown in 1745 to prevent Jacobite sympathizers from infiltrating the militia. The statute held that no man could serve simultaneously in a civil and a military capacity. To do so was to create a confusion of loyalties, a division of allegiance that threatened the security of the realm. The penalty was death by strangulation, and the erasure of the condemned from all official records. Their families were to be dispossessed. Their names were to be forgotten.’”
Thaddeus felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold. The Statute of Divided Service. It was the same principle that had governed the Roman purge, the same logic that had reduced his own pension by two-thirds. A continuous chain of legal reasoning, stretching from the ancient empire to the modern bureaucracy, all of it designed to punish the blurring of boundaries.
“‘I knew that the law was unjust,’” Justice Creeke continued reading. “‘I knew that the men I condemned had acted honorably. But I was a judge, not a legislator. My duty was to apply the law as it was written, not as I wished it to be. I told myself this, night after night, as I signed the death warrants. I told myself this as the forty-seven were led to the bog and garroted. I tell myself this still, and it brings me no comfort.’”
The fire crackled. No one spoke.
“‘One of the condemned, a man named Silas Groat, asked to speak before the sentence was carried out. He said: “You kill us because we were two things at once. But every man is two things. Every man is more than his uniform. You have divided us in death, but the ground will remember what the ledgers forget.” These words have haunted me. I have set them down here so that they may haunt others.’”
Elias Groat made a sound, a low, strangled noise that was half gasp and half groan. “Silas Groat,” he said. “That was our grandfather. Our grandfather was one of the forty-seven.”
The silence that followed was broken only by the wind in the chimney. Jonas Groat put a hand on his brother's shoulder, a gesture of solidarity that was also, Thaddeus sensed, a gesture of restraint. The Groat brothers had known something of this, he realized. Perhaps not the full horror, but enough. Enough to explain why they had signed on to dig in a bog where their own ancestor had been murdered.
Septimus Creach, who had been silent throughout the reading, now spoke. “The memorandum mentions a statute. The Statute of Divided Service, passed in 1745. If that statute was the basis for the executions, then it must still exist in the legal archives. It may never have been repealed. It may, in theory, still be enforceable.”
“It is,” Justice Creeke said quietly. “The Windfall Exclusion Provision, under which Mr. Mire's annuity was reduced, is the direct descendant of that statute. The language has been softened, the penalty reduced. But the principle remains: a man who serves in two capacities is entitled to the protections of neither.”
Thaddeus felt the walls of the farmhouse closing in around him. He had come to this place seeking refuge from the bureaucratic cruelty of the state, and he had found instead the grave of men who had suffered a far greater cruelty under the same legal logic. The curse tablet had spoken of division. The mass grave was a monument to division. His own life, reduced to a cipher on a pension form, was a testament to the same remorseless principle.
“We must find the tablet,” he said. “The curse tablet was buried with the eagle of the Ninth Legion. It was the key to the Roman site. Whoever took it knows something we do not.”
“Or fears something we have not yet discovered,” Honoria said.
The afternoon was spent in the trenches. The work had taken on a new urgency, driven by the knowledge that the site was not merely an archaeological curiosity but a crime scene that spanned centuries. Parkin, his hands shaking only slightly less than before, set up his theodolite and began a new survey of the lower field, searching for any signs of additional burials. The Groat brothers dug with a grim, silent determination, their spades biting into the frozen peat with the force of men who were digging not for knowledge but for vindication.
Honoria continued her catalogue of the bones. She had now identified eighty-seven distinct individuals, all male, all of military age, all with the same precise fractures of the cervical vertebrae. But something was troubling her, something she had not yet shared with the others.
She found Thaddeus at the edge of the largest trench, staring down at the ordered rows of skeletons. The light was beginning to fail, and the bones seemed to glow faintly in the gathering dusk, pale against the black peat.
“There is an anomaly,” she said, kneeling beside him. “I have been over the site three times, and the count does not match the Roman record. The ledger you found in the archive said the Ninth Legion was destroyed. But a legion numbered over five thousand men. We have found eighty-seven. Where are the rest?”
Thaddeus frowned. “You think the mass grave is incomplete? That there are other burial sites?”
“Possibly. Or possibly—” She hesitated. “Possibly the eighty-seven were not the rank and file. Possibly they were the officers, or the specialists, or the men whose status was most ambiguous. The common soldiers may have been dispersed to other units, their records altered to erase any trace of the legion's existence. The eighty-seven may have been the ones whose service could not be reclassified, whose dual status was too deeply inscribed to be erased by a stroke of the pen. They were the irredeemably illegible, and so they were destroyed.”
Thaddeus thought of his own case. The pension board had not been able to erase his dual service either. They had acknowledged it and then penalized him for it. He was, in the eyes of the law, an illegible man.
“The cipher,” he said suddenly. “The cipher that appears on the 1783 list and on my pension rejection. ‘Non combatant in situ.’ It is a classification, but it is also a sentence. It means ‘not a combatant in place.’ It means a man who was in the place of a soldier but was not recognized as one. The Romans must have had an equivalent, a phrase that designated the men who were to be purged. If we can find that phrase, we may understand why these particular men were killed.”
He was about to say more when a shout echoed across the field. It was Parkin, standing beside his theodolite at the far end of the lower field, waving his arms frantically.
“There is something here!” Parkin shouted. “A depression in the ground, too regular to be natural. It may be another grave!”
The group converged on the spot. Parkin had cleared a patch of heather to reveal a shallow depression, roughly circular, about twenty feet in diameter. The ground within the depression was sunken, as though the soil beneath had settled into a cavity. Thaddeus knelt and pressed his hand against the frozen turf. It gave slightly, with a spongy resistance that suggested a void beneath.
“We will need to dig,” Honoria said. “But not today. The light is gone, and we are all exhausted. We will begin in the morning.”
The group dispersed reluctantly, casting glances over their shoulders at the sunken ground. The Groat brothers returned to their cottage in the village. Parkin and Creach walked back to the inn. Justice Creeke, pleading fatigue, retired to his room at the farmhouse, leaving Thaddeus and Honoria alone in the parlor.
That night, Thaddeus could not sleep. The revelations of the past days churned in his mind: the Roman purge, the 1783 tribunal, the curse tablet and its theft, the carving on the mantelpiece. The connections were there, but they refused to resolve into a coherent pattern. It was as though he were looking at a tapestry from the wrong side, seeing only knots and loose threads.
He rose from his bed and went to the table where the bronze eagle still sat. He had polished it, and the metal gleamed softly in the candlelight. The eagle of the Ninth Legion, the standard around which thousands of men had rallied, now reduced to an ornament on a retired clerk's table.
He picked up the eagle and turned it over in his hands. The inscription on the base—LEG IX HISP—was clear now, the scratches deeper than he had initially thought. But there was something else, something he had missed in his earlier examinations. A faint line, almost invisible, running around the base of the standard. He pressed his thumbnail against it, and the base shifted.
It was a compartment, cleverly concealed, the seam hidden by centuries of corrosion. He worked his thumbnail into the crack and pried it open. Inside was a small cylinder of lead, no larger than a thimble, sealed at both ends with wax.
His heart hammering, Thaddeus broke the seal. The cylinder contained a scroll of vellum, tightly wound and so fragile that it threatened to crumble at his touch. He unrolled it with the utmost care and spread it on the table.
The writing was in Latin, in a hand so small that he had to bend close to read it. It was a list of names, dozens of them, each one followed by a notation. And at the top of the list, the heading:
“Nomina Eorum Qui Propter Maculam Muneris Delendi Sunt.”
The Names of Those Who Are to Be Destroyed Because of the Stain of Service.
Thaddeus read down the list, his lips moving silently. The names were Roman, common legionary cognomina. But at the bottom of the list, separated from the others by a blank line, was a single name written in letters that were larger and more deliberate:
“THADDAEUS MIRUS.”
His own name, rendered into Latin. Thaddeus Mirus. Thaddeus the Wonderful, the name his grandfather had borne and passed down to his father and then to him. A name that had been written on a death list two thousand years before he was born.
The candle on the table flickered, though there was no draft. The flame bent sideways, as though pressed by an invisible hand, and for a moment the room was plunged into near-darkness. When the flame steadied, Thaddeus saw that the door to the parlor was open.
Standing in the doorway, his black coat dripping with moisture and his slate-colored eyes fixed on the scroll in Thaddeus's hands, was Septimus Creach.
“I see you have found the roll of the condemned,” Creach said, his voice soft and steady. “I have been looking for that for a very long time.”
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