Our man in Camelot

Mosby's first elation at having an area drawn for the Badon hunt began to cool. It must measure anything from fifty to seventy miles a side—maybe as much as five thousand square miles.

Sir Thomas continued: 'So what Tony is saying is that Badon was fought just where Arthur would have fought it, and just when Arthur would have fought it, only Arthur never existed, so someone else fought it… And all I'm saying is why not Arthur?'

He looked at Mosby expectantly.

' 'It's true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides',' quoted Mosby. The phrase had stuck in his mind.

'Ah, now that would be dear old Winston Churchill. A romantic, of course, but he could very often smell what he couldn't see.'

'And not the only romantic,' murmured Handforth-Jones.

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

'Meaning me?' Sir Thomas looked at him sidelong. 'Well, at my age I can afford to take that as a compliment. And there are times when my sense of smell sharpens too.' He smiled at Mosby. 'So why not come out with a straight question, Dr Sheldon?'

The attack caught Mosby by surprise. 'Sir?'

'A straight question. Something David is temperamentally incapable of asking. Or answering.'

Mosby frowned. 'I don't get you, Sir Thomas.'

'Tck, tck.' Sir Thomas clicked his tongue. 'Now it's you who is playing games.'

'I am?' Mosby looked at Audley for support. 'Are we?'

'I didn't say David was playing games,' said Sir Thomas quickly. 'Indeed, that's what makes this so interesting now: David may have his fun, but he doesn't really play games any more.'

'Except the 'great game', of course,' Handforth-Jones amended. 'But King Arthur's a bit long in the tooth for that, thank heavens.'

Mosby couldn't place the allusion accurately, but it didn't take a genius to guess its meaning as Sir Thomas nodded his agreement: they knew damn well how Audley was employed.

'True, very true.' Sir Thomas eyed Audley speculatively for a moment before coming back to Mosby.

'And it's that which makes it the more interesting, I'm thinking.'

If only you knew, buster, thought Mosby, some of his awe evaporating. The clever men at Oxford didn't know quite all that was to be knowed after all.

'I still don't get you,' he said.

'No? Well, perhaps we're doing you an injustice again… but it does rather look as though David is about to poach on our scholarly preserves. And that does make us a little cautious, because the last time he did that there was a certain amount of trouble and strife as a consequence.'

Mosby remembered what Schreiner had said: Audley had had an intelligence assignment in some northern university two or three years before.

'Huh?' Mosby fought for time behind his well-tried look of bewilderment: he was just an American dentist doing his time in the Service, knowing nothing of any of this— just an American dentist with an interest in Arthurian history.

But the knowledge within him was cold as a sliver of ice in his heart. He had been less than fair to the clever men who couldn't imagine Badon Hill as a security risk: to imagine anything else would be crazy, not clever.

Except it wasn't crazy at all. The reality wasn't this gracious well-polished room with its gracious well-polished people in their quiet little Cotswold valley: it was a body drifting in the Irish Sea.

He looked at Audley questioningly.

Audley returned the look calmly. 'I told you they were sharp this afternoon.'

'Well, I wish to hell I was. All I want to know is—'

'Mons Badonicus,' said Audley.

Mosby blinked at him in surprise, silenced by such a major script-change.

'Ye-ess,' Sir Thomas nodded slowly, 'yes, I think maybe Badon would fit the bill if anything did.'

'Badon?' Margaret Handforth-Jones stirred. 'What bill? What do you mean, Tom?'

Sir Thomas pointed at Audley. 'David's bill. Dr Sheldon there has caught him—seduced him, if you like, away from poor William Marshall. And he couldn't do that with Arthur.'

'Why not?'

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

'My dear—because he's just like your husband. Not a sentimentalist… Arthur, Camelot, Excalibur, the Round Table, the Holy Grail—he'd laugh at them. They aren't facts. But Badon—Mons Badonicus, Mons Badonis, call it what you will—Badon is different.'

Mosby's awe returned, tinged with worry. Sharp was right: the guy was too goddamn sharp for comfort—

altogether too damn explicit in putting his finger on what it had taken the psych, experts a whole day to come up with.

'Put it this way,' continued Sir Thomas smoothly, 'this is the so-called Dark Ages we're talking about, and the darkest hundred years or so of that. And what do we actually know about them—know as historians know, I mean?