Voss Antiquities · Bath, England

A Lonely
Immortality

Georgia Dee

"What is a ruin but time made visible?" – Rose Macaulay

Lot 114 · Romano-British Fibula · Circa 3rd Century AD · Provenance Under Review
Read Chapter One
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Acquisition Record · Voss Antiquities · Bath
Accession No. VA – Lot 114
Object Romano-British fibula, circa 3rd century AD. Copper alloy, crossbow type. Pin mechanism repaired in antiquity. Secondary repair to bow identified – earlier than previously assessed.
Wear Consistent with daily use over an extended period. Someone wore this every single day until it broke, had it fixed, and wore it every single day again.
Provenance Under review. Acquisition notes exist. The man who wrote them is still here.

Rowan Calloway arrived at Voss Antiquities in Bath with a marked-up exhibition catalogue and three corrections to its fibula section. Her new employer had a fourth. He offered her the job before the hour was done and didn't answer the question she asked at the end of it. She's been working on that question ever since.

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Chapter One · Lucian · Bath, present day

The Catalogue Was Wrong Again

The catalogue was wrong again.

Lucian stood at the long oak table in the centre of the conservation room and stared at the entry with the particular stillness that his staff had learned, over time, to read as displeasure. Not the restless, visible kind. The other sort. The kind that had no temperature to it at all.

Lot 114. Romano-British fibula, circa 3rd century AD. Provenance unknown.

He knew the provenance. He had been standing in the mud of a Kentish hillside when the woman who owned it dropped it, and he had watched her scrabble for it in the dark without understanding why something so small mattered so much to her. He had been twenty-three years old. Or something that still resembled twenty-three. The year had been 286.

He closed the catalogue and set it flat on the table with the careful precision of a man who does not trust his own hands to be gentle.

The museum was quiet at this hour. It was always quiet at this hour because he set the opening times himself and had arranged them, entirely by design, so that the first two hours of every working day belonged to him alone. The building earned that much respect, he felt. Four storeys of Georgian townhouse on a wide, tree-lined street in Bath, its rooms filled with things that most people walked past in seven minutes and understood in none. He had purchased it in 1987, though the collection had been accumulating considerably longer than that.

He walked the ground floor the way he walked it every morning. Slowly. Hands behind his back, head slightly forward, the posture of a man thinking rather than looking. Past the Iron Age torcs in their lit cases, past the fragment of Roman mosaic mounted on the far wall, past the case of medieval pilgrim badges that he had started buying at source and never quite stopped.

He paused at the mosaic. He always paused at the mosaic.

A woman's face, tesserae of cream and terracotta and deep marine blue. She had no name now. Whatever name she had carried in life had not survived. He had tried, over the years, to find it through every channel available to him, and come away with nothing useful each time. She remained anonymous. Patient. Watching him back from the wall with her uneven, ancient eyes.

"I know," he said quietly. "The catalogue."

She offered no opinion. She never did. He moved on.

"The provenance of Lot 114 was not unknown to Lucian Voss."

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Roman mosaic of a woman's face – tesserae of cream, terracotta and marine blue. She has no name.
Permanent Collection · Ground Floor · Voss Antiquities

She has no name now.

A woman's face – tesserae of cream and terracotta and deep marine blue. Whatever name she had carried in life had not survived the centuries. He had tried to find it. Historians, archaeologists. Once, without much conviction, a psychic.

She remained anonymous. Patient. Watching him back from the wall with her uneven, ancient eyes.

He pauses at the mosaic every morning. He always has. Rowan has begun to notice.

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"Knowing what something costs doesn't make it cost less. It just means you're paying it with your eyes open."

A Lonely Immortality – Georgia Dee

"He has spent eleven centuries learning not to let people get close. She is twenty-eight years old, and she is not afraid of the arithmetic of his time."

A Lonely Immortality – Georgia Dee

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Some handwriting does not age.

In Chapter Six, Rowan pulls acquisition records from 1723, 1791, 1856, and 1934 and sets them side by side. The letterforms have adapted to their periods. But in the way the capital L is formed – a specific slight backward lean, not a convention of any era, simply a personal tic – she is not looking at four different people.

Acquisition records 1723 and 1934 – the same handwriting across two centuries
1723 · Bath
1934 · Bath

Drag across the records to compare

The capital L – in Lincoln Museum, in the custodian's signature across four centuries – leans backward with a slight rightward resistance, the pen lifting early at the foot. It is not a feature of any era's handwriting conventions. It is simply his.

She was not reading too much into things.
She was certain of that now.

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