Page 1 of The Love Position

1

JANUARY

Heart thumping, Sophia squinted at the coin in the half-light.

‘It’s Iceni, isn’t it?’ Maggie asked, the lines around her eyes creasing deeper.

Sophia nodded, running the pad of her thumb across the inscription. ‘Saenv. From the late denominational period.’ An excited giggle escaped her. ‘Maggie, this could be it.’

The older woman glanced around the empty landscape and lowered her voice. ‘You think?’

Sophia nodded again. ‘The walkover survey I did indicates a settlement might have been here, and the raised area at the edge of the field could be a burial mound. Is this the eighth coin you’ve found this weekend?’

Laying her metal detector on the ground, Maggie rummaged in a battered leather satchel around her neck, then handed Sophia another two. ‘Now it’s ten. I’ve logged the locations using my GPS tracker.’

‘Superstar. If it’s a hoard, it must have been scattered by ploughing, but it’s a sign we could find even more here.’

The two women gazed out at the view from the vantage point at the edge of the escarpment, high above the plain below. The cool January sun was sinking towards the horizon on their left, but Sophia faced east, her mind two thousand years in the past.

Are you here?

No-one knew what happened to Boudica, Queen of the Iceni tribe, after the Romans quelled her uprising in AD 60. She simply disappeared from the historical record.

I would have fled west.

‘Aren’t you meant to be at some fancy dinner in York this evening?’ Maggie asked, interrupting her thoughts.

Sophia pulled a face. ‘You know I’m not great with big groups of people. Especially ones I don’t really know.’

‘But aren’t you the guest of honour?’

‘I’m one of them.’

‘So, you bailed on the entire weekend and drove five hours just to meet me in a muddy field?’

Anxiety prickled in Sophia’s stomach, and she rubbed the coin for reassurance. It felt warm and alive.

‘My lecture was the first one this morning,’ she replied breezily. ‘I didn’t really need to stay after that. And anyway, this is more important.’

‘Searching for a needle in a haystack.’

‘Maybe…’ She shrugged. ‘But to find this amount of Iceni coinage so far from East Anglia? The only accounts we have of Boudica after the battle is one saying she died of injuries and the other that she took poison. If she came this way, either dying or already dead, then where would she have been buried?’

‘Stonehenge? Avebury? Silbury Hill? One of the countless barrows?’ Maggie gestured to the landscape below them. ‘They’re all in spitting distance.’

‘They’ve been dug already, and Iron age people didn’t have the same attachment to Neolithic sites. I don’t think she’s there.’

‘But you think she’s here?’

Sophia’s anxiety about skipping out of the conference turned to fizzing excitement. ‘I could say it’s an educated guess… But I also feel it in my gut.’

Maggie’s eyes twinkled. ‘Nowadays my guts just grumble. You know I’ve been a detectorist longer than you’ve been alive, and I’ve never found the motherlode when out fieldwalking. It’s always ring pulls and toy cars, not treasure.’

‘But what if it was? Just imagine!’

‘Oh, I do. It’s what gets me tramping fields on my own all day.’

‘You’re the best there is.’

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