Hinterland Issue 1 - Spring 2019

I stepped closer to get a better look. That’s when the hairs on my neck started to stir. There was just me and the framed brooch in that empty corridor, my reflection passing across the glass between us. Everyone else had gone. The brooch felt like a talisman: magical and far away, yet intimate.

Unsettling even under all that bright halogen lighting. There was something haunting about it.

Or rather about the Saxon woman who must have worn it, a second-generation immigrant looting among the ruins.

Archaeologists, of course, knew nothing about her. How could they? She had long slipped away into all that dark earth. All they – we – knew was that she had walked across the fallen roof tiles of an abandoned Roman bathhouse and dropped her brooch. Soft, silty, dark soil had closed over it.

And, except for the blind nuzzling of an occasional earthworm, mole or rat, the brooch had lain undisturbed for one thousand four hundred years, surfacing finally in 1968 when archaeologists found it amongst broken rooftiles and snail shells beneath the demolished Coal Exchange on Lower Thames Street. Now it was here, hanging on a wall in a corridor where no one stopped to look.

What I hadn’t told Roy in my email then was that the Billingsgate Girl was already up and walking in my head, that I’d given her a name – Isla – and that I’d seen Isla in my mind’s eye, more than once inside the ruined bathhouse within the ruined city.

She’d become a kind of ghost. I could hear her 42 Hinterland