A story of archaeology, of war and romance, retold from true events.
Having worked for the gifted and much-loved the Reverend James Joyce excavating the Roman town at Silchester in the 1870s, George Maple later joins the Rifles regiment and fights in wars in South Africa, where he is badly wounded. Now reunited with an earlier employer – Lord Selborne, the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain – at his grand house in the Hampshire village of Blackmoor, he finds himself increasingly haunted not only by his own past but by the distant Romans too, whose usurping emperor Allectus is said to have fought a great battle at a site somewhere close by.
Past and present become increasingly mixed in George’s mind, endangering his own future and that of his ever-loyal girlfriend, Ivy.