Lovers and Newcomers (17 page)

She meant
them, dead. Us, alive
.

In fact she felt almost supernaturally alive. The crepitation within her own ears sounded like snapping twigs, the whorls of skin at her finger ends seemed so sensitive that they tingled.

He looked at her. ‘In this job our aliveness, and the short span of our lives, confront us all the time.’

At the far end of the avenue of bones they came into a small room. A man was concentrating at a desk in front of a window.

Chris said, ‘Here’s Mrs Knight.’

‘It’s Katherine,’ she said.

The osteologist stood up, taking off his thick glasses. He was wearing thin surgical gloves; he didn’t try to shake her hand.

‘Here she is,’ he said, indicating what lay on his desk.

The bones had been cleaned and set in their proper sequence. Katherine studied the skull’s blank eye sockets, the hanging jaw with its stubborn teeth, the jagged break in the femur, the small bones of the feet and hands.

‘You’re certain of the sex now?’

‘There is never absolute certainty, but the signs are here.’

He took up the skull and the jawbone, and, placing them together, showed her how in a male the chin would have been more prominent. He ran his fingers over the cranium, indicating the smoother brow ridges. Then he exchanged the skull for two sections of the pelvis.

‘A female pelvis tends to be broader, like this one.’

Katherine gazed at the shallow cradle of bone.

‘How old was she? Did she have children?’

‘I’d say maybe thirty. Not a bad age, for the time. I don’t know about children. I’d expect to see some ridges or scars on the bone, here, but there are none. It’s not very easy to tell from skeletal remains.’

‘And the other one?’

David drew a box towards him and took off the lid. He showed her the child’s skull again and the splintered crater at the back of it.

‘He could have been her son?’

‘Perhaps, but given the massive head wound I think much more likely to have been an attendant or a slave. A ritual sacrifice, as we said, to accompany her into the afterlife. More clues may turn up as the excavation proceeds.’

Chris made a gesture of apology. ‘The local people were the Iceni. This site appears to be a Late Iron-Age rectangular enclosure with a dedicated ritual or funerary function. The richness of the grave goods suggests an important burial, and so it’s likely the associated settlement was a major tribal centre. Archaeologists have particular enthusiasms. It’s fascinating for us, but I do appreciate that for you and your husband the entire discovery may be more infuriating than exciting.’

Katherine followed the information through in her mind. ‘So where are the remains of this local settlement likely to be?’

‘We have some aerial photographs showing crop-marks that indicate earthworks to the north-east of your site. These may well have performed a defensive role around an early area of settlement, and it’s because of them that the county archaeologist ordered a watching brief as a condition of granting your planning permission. We were there to fulfil that brief when the digging began, and you know the rest of the story. But to answer your question, a little later on, which is when our burial seems to date from, that’s in the half-century or so before the Romans came, domestic sites in this area tended not to be enclosed by defences and so they don’t show up on the ground or from the air. But looking at the general topography, I’d guess that if there is an Iceni village settlement the remains would lie beneath the present house and its immediate surroundings.’

How far beneath our feet? Katherine wondered.

Chris’s dry, academic explanation contained no hint of fantasy but it still sliced the solid ground away from her. She thought of Mead: Miranda’s cushions and velvet curtains, the cement mixer, her clothes and Amos’s laptop, their books and bottles of wine and casual detritus now seemed perched only precariously on countless layers of remains. Broken pots, rotted fence posts, ashes, axe heads and hearth stones. Their own traces would decompose in their turn.

David had sat down and resumed his work. He used a paintbrush to clean dirt particles from the broken chain of vertebrae.

He explained, ‘I’ve removed a rib and sent it for radiocarbon dating. I hope that will give us a more precise date for when she lived. Chemical analysis of the bones will tell us about her diet, even the water she drank. Animal remains from the burial will indicate what herds were kept. Even the minute traces of pollen from the flowers that were buried with her will give us clues about the crops they grew. It adds up to a picture. Quite a vivid picture.’ He coughed, as if fearing that
vivid
might be judged too flowery in the context.

‘That’s extremely interesting,’ she said, in what she hoped was a suitably measured tone.

‘Katherine has come in to look at the treasure,’ Chris remarked. ‘She hasn’t seen it yet.’

She very much liked the way he pronounced her name, giving each syllable equal weight.

‘Of course,’ David nodded, politely but clearly conveying his opinion that the bones were the real treasure.

They said goodnight to him and went on into Chris’s office. It was tidy, with no personal possessions on view, although she checked for photographs. He unlocked a safe and took out the two pieces, unwrapped them and laid them out for Katherine to examine.

After a long moment she managed to say, ‘Yes. Yes, I do see.’

These ancient treasures were so brazenly beautiful. There was raw power in every twist of the ancient metal. The scale of the Mead discovery struck home to her as it hadn’t done before. Their house, Amos’s house, shrank by comparison to a bundle of tawdry steel and glass slabs.

Chris picked up the torc and held it out.

Katherine touched the golden twists and the elaborate ring terminals, but didn’t dare to take it from him. It was Chris who raised it to her throat, waiting until she nodded her head and then angling the weighty ornament to encircle her neck. It lay at the base of her throat, heavy and cold in contrast to the warmth of his hands.

Chris stood back and gazed at her.

‘Is it all right for me to have done that?’ In a much lower voice he added, ‘I so much wanted to.’

She stood up straight. The gold weighed her down, but she felt her bones spreading, her shoulders broadening and her head lifting as if it would float off the pivot of her spine. She caught sight of her reflection in the darkened window. Her eyes were wide.

With the great torc around her neck she looked primitive, like a barbarian.

In the reflected pane her eyes met Christopher Carr’s. He picked up the shield and gave her that too. There must have been a leather strap by which to hold it but that had long ago rotted away. She grasped the rim instead and held the piece before her, the oval of her pale face a smaller repeat of the shield’s smooth glimmer.

A shiver passed through her. She was conscious of Chris standing close, so close that the air-conditioned space between them seemed charged with electricity.

She laid the shield aside. She lifted her hands to the spirals of gold and twisted her neck free of its weight.

‘What will happen to these things?’ she asked.

Chris folded them in their wrappings once again. ‘They’ll be extensively studied. The academic archaeologists from Oxford are coming tomorrow to have a preliminary look, and then the specialist from the British Museum arrives. There will be papers prepared, lectures given. A big find like this is an opportunity for everybody. The excavation itself is only the beginning.’

‘And after that? Where will they end up?’

‘Well. The county authorities will try to acquire the treasure for the museum here. More probably they’ll go on national display at the British Museum. You and Mr Knight don’t have a claim on the actual pieces in law, but as the landowners you’ll get an appropriate payment.’

She lifted her head.

The shield and the torc were back in the safe and Chris stood in front of her, his hands loose at his sides. His expression was serious, but the air of dry detachment was gone. In fact he looked hesitant, uncertain of himself.

Out of the blue, she suddenly thought that he might be going to
kiss her
.

The notion was so startling, so completely foreign and unlikely, that she started to laugh.

Of course he wasn’t going to kiss her, what was she thinking of?

She started talking to head off the interior laughter, then under the pressure of too much to be said that was normally left unspoken she found herself unable to stop.

‘As for payment, I can’t speak for Amos, he would probably say different, but the money really doesn’t matter. The pieces belong to Mead. The history matters, the Warrior Princess, but not the money. There’s too much of that already. I often wonder what it would have been like for us if Amos hadn’t made such a lot of it. Better, probably. We’d have had to invest more in each other.’

She did stop at that, and they listened to the echo of her gabbled words.

Chris fumbled with his cuff and looked at his watch.

‘I wonder, would you like to come and have a drink with me?’

‘Now?’

‘That’s what I was hoping.’

‘I would like to. Yes. I would
love
to.’

Amos stood alone in the middle of the yard. A fine, soft rain was falling out of a black sky, and he took pleasure in ignoring it. A gust of wind blew fallen leaves over his ankles. The lights were on in the Mead kitchen, shining on the comfortable clutter of the dresser shelves, but he could see that the room was empty. Miranda would be reading in her drawing room, sitting on the sofa with her knees folded beneath her. She read a lot.

Amos hadn’t quite got used to the communal aspects of their life here, the way they all knew what each of the others did with their days, when for so many years only Katherine had had even a partial knowledge of his comings and goings. In the past, on the very rare evenings when she had gone out without him, he would have been content with the television or the latest political biography. Now solitude coupled with the proximity of company made him restless. He had been drawn out of the neat cottage and into the rain, just to see what might be going on.

There was a pale light showing in the barn windows, and the scrape and rattle of a shovel carried across to him. A silvery film of rain droplets glimmered in the fibres of his sweater. Amos ducked the few yards to Selwyn and Polly’s door and banged on the warped planks.

Selwyn bellowed, ‘Yeah, c’mon in,’ without stopping work.

An extension cable now snaked across the dirt-caked floor, and a naked bulb in a wire cage swung from a beam.

In the trenches lay new piping for drains. Copper standpipes rose where sinks and basins would finally be positioned. Selwyn was waist-deep in the trench at the point where the water company would bestow the mains feed. He threw aside a shovel and waved his fist in the air.

‘Amos. Check out my sewage outlets. Poetry, eh?’

Amos gritted his teeth.

It was almost unbearable, in fact actually intolerable, to witness the rapid progress that Selwyn was making while his own works were at a standstill.

‘Don’t you ever stop?’ he demanded.

‘Occasionally. But I have to force myself. I’m loving it.’ Selwyn insisted. He was enjoying the contrast in their situations, that was certain.

‘Bastard archaeologists,’ Amos muttered.

Selwyn stooped down and extracted something from the trench. He rubbed a thumb over it, squinted at the edge that was exposed and flung it aside. It fell with a faint clink. Selwyn levered himself out of the hole and arched to ease his back.

‘Right. Well, since you’re here, what about a beer?’

Amos would have preferred whisky, but he took the bottle that Selwyn passed to him. The ambient temperature in the barn kept the beer desirably chilled. They sat down at a trestle table pushed out of the way against an exposed stone wall.

‘Where’s Polly?’

‘Gone to the pub with Colin.’

‘They’re close, those two.’

Selwyn rubbed his stubbled chin. ‘They are. It’s good for them both. They talk a lot. You know, liberal use of the f-word.’

Amos raised an eyebrow.

‘Feelings.’

Both men laughed.

‘Katherine?’

‘Stopped off on her way back from London to look at the shield and the torc, curses be upon the things. A bloody long look, it turns out.’

‘What’s up? No dinner?’

‘I can cook a meal for myself,’ Amos said.

‘Sure.’ Selwyn shrugged. He delved in a carton and took out two foil trays, shook an old sheet off a box-shape that turned out to be a microwave oven balanced on a stool, slid in the trays and pressed the buttons. Like the light cable, the power for the oven also coiled over the floor, both of them connected via a hefty socket bar to a hole in the barn wall.

‘All mod cons, eh? Personally I rather liked the camping gas, but Polly wasn’t having any of it. So we’re on Miranda’s power for now, and the electrician’s coming next week to connect us to the mains. Serious progress.’

‘When do you expect to finish?’

The microwave pinged. Selwyn placed one tray and a fork in front of Amos and took the other for himself. Amos inspected the fork, wiped it on his handkerchief and began to eat the curry. He was hungry, and the truth was that although the fridge in the cottage had looked well stocked, he hadn’t immediately seen the ingredients that would add up to the sort of meal that Katherine would cook.

‘It’s the second week in October now. It’ll be looking a lot different in a couple of months’ time. By Christmas, anyway. Not the frills, maybe.’

‘Flush lavatories? Or do those count as frills?’

Selwyn snorted between mouthfuls of curry. ‘There’s nothing wrong with old Chemical Ali as far as I’m concerned.’ He nodded towards the chemical toilet that was decently housed behind closed doors in what had once been a feed store. ‘But Polly regards an operating flush as mandatory. She tends to go in the house, for the time being.’

‘You’d be happy with a shovel in the woods,’ Amos observed.