There was a sheepish grin on his face as he placed a plate of bacon and eggs on my lap.
“No standing on ceremony old chap,” he said. “Just tuck in.”
He still looked pale, but not in any imminent danger of keeling over.
“What about last night… What...?”
He didn't let me finish.
“Breakfast first, to set you up for the day ahead. I'll explain soon. I promise.”
He stoked the fire while I ate. The bacon was burnt and the eggs fried until I could have bounced them on the floor, but I do believe it was the most welcome breakfast of my life.
“Don't you have servants for that?” I mumbled through some soggy toast as he poked at the embers.
Once more he grinned as he stood away from the grate.
“They all left. The piano playing got too much for them,” he said, and laughed loudly, so much so that I could almost believe that last night's escape had been no more than the fevered dream of a tired man.
“Now finish that off,” he said. “I have something else to show you… something that only you can help me with.”
I wolfed down the last of the toast and followed him out of the room.
He was more animated this morning, more like the boy I knew at Oxford.
“This place is ancient,” he said as he led me through to a scullery that was piled high with unwashed dishes and pots. “The first of my line built it nigh on seven hundred years ago…. And there have always been stories told that he built it atop a far older settlement.”
He opened a door, revealing a set of steps leading down into what I took to be a cellar.
“I got bored in the summer and decided to do some impromptu archaeology.”
He lit a firebrand and led me down a winding staircase which opened out some twenty feet below into a large chamber.
It was immediately obvious that it was man made. The walls were built of large blocks of sandstone. I had visited several Neolithic tombs, in Carnac, in Orkney and on Salisbury Plain. This gave the same sense of age, of a time long past. What I hadn't expected, what was completely different, was the overwhelming feeling that this place was in use. The walls ran damp and there was a salt tang in the air but there was no sign of moss or lichen on the walls - only the damp glistening stone.
Roger moved over to one wall and held the firebrand closer.
“Here,” he said. “Here's why I called for you.”
The wall was covered in small, tightly packed carvings. At first I thought it might be a language, but it was none that I recognised from my studies, indeed, it bore no resemblance to anything I had ever seen before.
“I can't make head or tail of them,” Roger said. “But I believe they hold the secret.”
I followed him as he walked, lighting stone after stone covered in the densely packed markings.
“Whatever they are, it'll take weeks just to transcribe them.”
Roger smiled again, the red from the torchlight casting a demonic cast to his visage.
“Three months, two weeks and four days. Come, I'll show you.”
He bounded back up the stairway, leaving me momentarily alone there in the dark.
“Come on then,” he shouted. “You didn't come all this way for nothing did you?”
I followed the fading glow of his firebrand up the twists of the staircase, and eventually found Roger back in the hall by the fireplace.
He thrust a thick sheaf of papers at me.
“I've no idea what might be the start or end point,” he said as I took them from him and sat in the armchair. He hovered around me like an excited puppy until I was forced to admonish him.
“Roger, give me some time. This will not be easy. If you must do something, fetch my pipe from my overcoat.”
He grinned again, and I began to believe that my old friend wasn't so far beneath the surface after all.