He motioned them into a cave-like chamber. The roof was vaulted and studded with small stones. Massive stone benches ran along the sides and in the centre was an altar.

Grant said: “You know about the Mithraic cult. There’s no need for me-”

“Please! But please,” Implored the Baroness, “We would like so much! Everythink! Please!”

Alleyn heard Grant say “Oh God!” under his breath and saw him look, almost as if he asked for her support, at Sophy Jason.

And, for her part, Sophy received this appeal, with a ripple of warmth that bewildered her,

“Only if he wants to,” she said,

But Grant, momentarily shutting his eyes, embarked on his task. The Baroness, all eyes and teeth, hung upon his every word. Presently she reached out an imploring hand and whispered; “Excuse! Forgive me. But for my husband to miss this is too much, I call for him.” She did so with a voice that would have done credit to Brunnehilde. He came downstairs punctually and nimbly and in response to her finger on her lips fell at once into a receptive attitude.

Grant caught Sophy’s eye, scowled at her, momentarily shut his own eyes, and in an uneven voice told them about the cult of the god Mithras. It was, he said, a singularly noble religion and persisted, literally underground, after other pagan forms of worship had been abolished in Christian Rome.

“The god Mithras,” he said, and although at first he used formal, guidebook phrases, he spoke so directly to Sophy that they might have been alone together- “the god Mithras was born of a rock. He was worshiped in many parts of the ancient world including England and was, above all, a god of light. Hence his association with Apollo, who commanded him to kill the Bull which is the symbol of fertility. In this task he was helped by a Dog and a Snake but a Scorpion double-crossed him and spilled the Bull’s blood from which all life was created. And in that way evil was let loose upon mankind.”

“Yet another expulsion from Eden?” Sophy said,

“Sort of. Strange, isn’t it? As if blind fingers groped about some impenetrable, basic design.”

“Curse of mankind!” Major Sweet proclaimed.

He had rejoined the party unnoticed and startled them by this eruption. “Religion,” he announced, “Bally-hoo! The lot of them! Scoundrels!”

“Do you think so?” Grant asked mildly. “Mithras doesn’t seem so bad, on the whole. His was a gentle cult for those days. His worship was a Mystery and the initiates passed through seven degrees, It was tough going. They underwent lustral purification, long abstinence and most severe deprivation. Women had no part of it. You wouldn’t have been allowed,” he told Sophy, “to enter this place, still less to touch the altar. Come and look at it.”

“You make me feel I shouldn’t.”

“Ah, no!” cried the Baroness. “We must not be superstitious, Miss Jason. Let us look, because it is very beautiful, see, and most interestink.”

The altar was halfway down the Mithraeum. The slaughter of the Bull was indeed very beautifully carved on one face and the apotheosis of Mithras assisted by Apollo on another.

To Grant’s evident dismay Baron Van der Veghel had produced out of his vast canvas satchel a copy of Simon.

“We must,” he announced, “hear again the wonderful passage. See, Mr. Grant, here is the book. Will the author not read it for us? How this English Simon finds in himself some equivalent to the Mithraic powers. Yes?”

“Ah, no!” Grant ejaculated. “Please!” He looked quickly about and beyond the group of listeners as if to assure himself that there were no more. “That’s not in the bargain,” he said. “Really.” And Alleyn saw him redden. “In any case,” said Grant, “I read abominably. Come and look at Mithras himself.”

And at the far end of the chamber, there was the god in a grotto, being born out of a stony matrix: a sturdy person with a Phrygian cap on his long curls and a plumpish body: neither child nor man.

Alleyn said: “They made sacrifices, didn’t they? In here.”

“Of course, on the altar,” Grant said quickly. “Can you imagine! A torch-lit scene, it would be, and the light would flicker across those stone benches and across the faces of initiates, attenuated and wan from their ordeal. The altar fire raises a quivering column of heat, the sacrificial bull is lugged in: perhaps they hear it bellowing in the passages. There is a passage, you know, running right round the chamber. Probably the bull appears from a doorway behind Mithras. Perhaps it’s garlanded. The acolytes drag it in and the priest receives it. Its head is pulled back, the neck exposed and the knife plunged in. The reek of fresh blood and the stench of the burnt offering fills the Mithraeum. I suppose there are chanted hymns.”

Sophy said drily: “You gave us to understand that the Mithraic cult was a thoroughly nice and, did you say, gentle religion.”

“It was highly moral and comparatively gentle. Loyalty and fidelity were the ultimate virtues. Sacrifice was a necessary ingredient.”

“Same idea,” Major Sweet predictably announced, “behind the whole boiling. Sacrifice. Blood. Flesh. Cannibalism. More refinement in one lot, more brutality in another. Essentially the same.”

“You don’t think,” Alleyn mildly suggested, “that this might indicate pot-shots at some fundamental truth?”

“Only fundamental truth it indicates — humans are carnivores,” shouted the Major in triumph. “Yak-yak-yak,” he added and was understood to be laughing.

“It is so unfortunate,” said Baron Van der Veghel, “that Lady Braceley and Mr. Dorne are missing all this. And where is Mr. Mailer?”

“Did you see them?” Alleyn asked Major Sweet.

“I did not. I put her in the — what d’you call it? Garden? Courtyard?”

“Atrium?”

“Whatever it is. On a bench. She didn’t much like it, but still. Silly woman.”

“What about young Dorne?” Alleyn said.

“Didn’t see ’im. Frightful specimen.”

“And Mailer?”

“No. Damn casual treatment, I call it. What do we do now?”

Grant said with that air of disengagement that clung about him so persistently: “I understand it was thought that you might like to look round here under your own steam for a few minutes. We can meet here, or if you prefer it, up above in the atrium. I’ll stay here for ten minutes in case there’s anything you want to ask and then I’ll go up and wait in the atrium. We’ll probably meet on the way and in any case you can’t get lost. There are “out” notices everywhere. I’m sure Mailer—”

He broke off. Somebody was approaching down the iron stairway.

“Here he is,” Grant said.

But it was only Kenneth Dorne.

He had sounded as if he were in a hurry and made a precipitate entry, but when he came out of the shadows and saw the others he halted and slouched towards them. His camera dangled from his hand. It struck Sophy that he was in some unsatisfactory way assuaged and comforted.

“Hullo,” he said. “Where’s my aunt?”

Grant informed him. He said: “Oh dear!” and giggled.

“Hadn’t you better take a look at her?” Major Sweet asked.

“What?”

“Your aunt. She’s up top. In the garden.”

“May she flourish,” Kenneth said, “like the Green Bay Tree. Dear Major.”

Major Sweet contemplated him for one or two seconds. “Words,” he said, “fail me.”

“Well,” Kenneth rejoined. “Thank God for that.”

This produced a kind of verbal stalemate.

It was broken by the Van der Veghels. They had, they excitedly explained, hoped so much (ah, so much, interpolated the Baroness) that Mr. Grant would be persuaded to read aloud the Mithraic passage from Simon in its inspirational environment. As everybody saw, they had brought their copy — was it too much, even, to ask for a signature? — to that end. They understood, none better, the celebrated Anglo-Saxon reticence. But after all, the terms of the brochure, not of course to be insisted upon au pied de la lettre, had encouraged them to believe…