My Lady of the Bog (3 page)

I can still recall looking up from the book that long ago New Jersey evening and feeling an inner acetylene flare. I was eight. To have found dragon bones in China that were really those of ancient men! Just thinking of it opened a dimension inside me I hadn’t known ’til then was there—as if I were kissing the lips of something.

I read every book I could find on the subject. I read with a sort of religious exultation as if they’d reveal, on the very next page, some essential fact or missing link that would make me feel complete and whole. So budded my love affair with the bones and bodies of ancient persons.

To this day, I don’t really know why the subject so compels me. An astrologer once told me I was born under Saturn, ruler of antiquities. She said it was also the ruler of nerds, a fate I like to think I escaped—if just. Still, I was a wonky kid, spending hours perusing scholarly papers and other scientific
esoterica
, and though I mixed socially, I enjoyed my own company as much, passing many a childhood Sunday digging holes alone in my backyard.

It was a vocation—or obsession—I brought with me to Phillips Academy, Andover, and then on to Columbia College and the study of anthropology. There, under the tutelage of the great Indic scholar, Dr. Jai Prasad, I had earned a master’s and copublished several well-received papers.

Based upon them and Jai’s strong recommendation, the University of Exeter had awarded me the prestigious Pitt Rivers Anthropological Fellowship, never given to an American before. And though my work had gone well enough, my career had gone nowhere. Radiographic analysis of Mesolithic skull fragments isn’t something, I’m afraid, that stirs the world soul. In another six months, the fellowship was ending, and the few job offers I’d received thus far were unappealing: instructorships for little pay at undistinguished institutions. Nonetheless, I knew an opportunity when I saw it, and one had just been dropped in my lap.

I threw the lamb bones on the fire, watching them char. Then I wiped my hands with care and took out the book.
What
book? Ah, you didn’t know I’d taken it! Not surprising, since I didn’t tell anyone—not even Strugnell, who, as he’d turned, had failed to see me slip it in my shirt.

Though admittedly covert, I certainly wasn’t stealing it. I simply wanted the proper time and light in which to study it. I fully intended to return it in the morning and would have, surely, if events had not intervened. And though I should have asked the coroner’s permission, frankly, I didn’t want to risk being turned down. And so, with the book’s damp cover pressing my chest, I’d relocked the cage and given him back the key—something he claims not to recall.

Now I looked the codex over. Fresh archeological items have what is termed a “stickiness”: sensory clues, the smell of woodsmoke, for example, if a codex such as this had been read around campfires. But the book only smelled of the bowels of the bog. And when I was done, I knew little more about it than when I’d started—other than it seemed to be authentic, and with my limited knowledge of Indic, incomprehensible! I did think I saw the word
shah
repeated several times, which seemed to imply a Persian as well as Indic venue. Still, how old the damn thing was I couldn’t say, though radiocarbon dating would. Then again, to be certain, we’d want to date the
ink
, as well as the parchment, as several recent forgeries have been done on sheets of ancient vellum.

Thinking these thoughts, I fell asleep on the couch.

At three fifteen, I came awake. I’d lived for a year and a half in the cottage but had never heard a sound like this. Some creature was hooting in a nearby shrub. I lay there alert, listening intently—for my cottage is remote, even for Dorset, and someone in the shrubbery at three in the morning would not have been a welcome presence. I listened to the strange
chew hoo, choo wit
and, though satisfied, at last, it wasn’t human, got off the couch and went to the window.

The valley seemed preternaturally lit, the moon’s candlepower far greater than I remembered it. Across the Blackmoor Vale, Bulbarrow Hill rose in the distance—and on its peak stood a great wooden tower! By then, the bird, or whatever it was, had ceased to call.

And that’s when I heard another sound—the rising cries of a wailing woman. I couldn’t imagine from where it was coming, as the nearest house is half a mile away. Which was when I saw her, suddenly, running through the open fields. She was dressed in white, her hands upraised in a gesture of horror. Transfixed, I watched her cross the downs, the sound of her wailing growing louder and shriller. I could not imagine who she was, or where in the name of God she was headed until, with a sudden influx of terror, I realized she was coming
here!

No sooner did I have this thought than she passed through the unopened door of the cottage in a way that is unimaginable. Her white robes flared with a numinous splendor; a fluttering veil covered her face. Her screams had ceased and she stood before me in the cottage hall, holding open the codex before her, whose pages were riffled by a supernatural wind. And as I gaped upon her person, I saw she had the feet of a bird!

With a start and a shriek, I awoke. It was 3:27—almost the time it had been in my dream. I gazed out the window at Bulbarrow Hill. On its summit, there was no wooden tower.

When I woke again, it was half past nine. I got up, alarmed by the lateness of the hour, showered, dressed, then drove to the hospital, promising myself breakfast as soon as I’d replaced the book. But first I needed the key to the cage in the cellar. So I marched up the stairwell to the coroner’s office, realizing halfway there it was Sunday and he was unlikely to be in.

And yet he was—and at his desk. There was, in fact, no evidence he’d ever left it. A stale, not unpleasant odor spiked the air: some blend of ink and Stilton crumbs, of half-smoked fags and of some deep, damp unevictable rot that riddled the building’s bones. “And what’s brings
you
here,” he asked, looking up at me, “this lovely bloody Sunday?”

“I thought I’d have another go at my Lady.”

He gazed at me oddly over his specs. “Really! Must you speak of her that way? You make her sound like a cross between your mistress and the Blessed Virgin.” He fixed me with a look of pity. “I suppose it does get lonely living by yourself.”

I ignored the remark. “What brings
you
here?”

“Death. Per usual.”

“Anyone I know?” I inquired glibly, glancing round to see if the key was hanging, possibly, on the wall. (It wasn’t.)

“Believe you do—or
did
. The Constable Rory Dahl.”

I was taken aback. “But I was with him just . . .
yesterday
.”

“Yes? Well, obviously, your company does not prolong life. Complained of chest pains soon after off-loading your Lady. There! Now you’ve got
me
saying it! Doctors thought he might have had a coronary and not known it. Gave him a bed, wanted to observe him.”

“And?”

“They observed him, all right: have another—and
die
. Doubt he knew he had that one, either.”

“Well,” I said, sobered, “I’m sorry to hear that. It must have been the strain—of the excavation.”

“. . . yes.” He frowned and rubbed his brow. “Had the most
unpleasant
dream.”

“Really?” I said, remembering my own. “What was it?”

He looked up sharply. “Why would I be telling you?”

I shrugged. “Forget it, then.”

He looked disappointed, then paused and conceded, “Well, no harm in it, I suppose . . .”

In his dream, the coroner had been standing at the top of a long and winding marble stairwell. In the air there was an uneasy feeling, like that low-pressure heaviness preceding a storm. That’s when he’d heard a visitor enter and footsteps slowly ascending the stairs. And though he couldn’t see her yet, he knew from the sound of her step it was a woman.

Then he was looking at the phone book from his village. His visitor’s name was circled in ink and when he’d read it, he had found himself terrified beyond description!

“What
was
it?”

“. . .
Alba Marla
. Or maybe,
Albemarle
. Odd . . . doesn’t seem so frightening now.”

“And who was the woman ascending the stairs? Did you see her?”

“No. All I saw was her bloody
name
.
Albemarle
.” He frowned. “Now tell me why that should scare me witless?”

Chapter 4

I
couldn’t say. Only that the mystery surrounding my Lady seemed to have stirred something deep within us both. A moment later, we went our separate ways: I, to revisit my Lady, and Strugnell, to locate the key to the cage that housed the treasure.

I opened the door to the room where she lay. “Good morning,” I told her, “I hope you slept well. Actually, you’re looking bloody marvelous this morning.” And she was. Before I’d left her for the night, I’d covered her with a sheet, tucking it in just beneath her chin so that she looked like a woman asleep beneath covers—though the stakes disfigured the drape of the cloth, and her blind eyes continued to disturb me.

I studied her face and, as I did, I had the most vivid sense of her presence. This was a
person
—even if dead.

But our silent communion was rudely interrupted by the coroner throwing open the door so hard it banged against the wall. “Sod it!” he said. “Can’t find the key.”

“What does it matter? You could open that cage with a screwdriver and a hammer. Look,” I said, pointing at the stakes, “let’s pull these, shall we? They’re getting on my nerves.”

The coroner shrugged and approached my Lady. I removed the sheet. He examined the stick forking her right knee. “Hello! There’s some sort of writing on it.” He squinted at the characters carved in the wood. “Well, it’s not English.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Just look at it, man!”

“I am. And, offhand, I don’t see how you can tell it’s not English.”

He was getting bothered. “Because there are no bloody English letters, are there?”

I looked at him. “There are no such things as bloody ‘English letters.’ What you mean, I suppose, is they’re not
Roman—a, b, c, d
. . . . But a language can be written in
any
alphabet. Look at
om
. Or
shalom
. You could write Churchill’s speeches using Arabic characters. I don’t mean
translating
them into Arabic—I mean writing Arabic in such a way that when it’s pronounced it sounds like Churchillian English!”

He looked confounded.

“Now this,” I continued, eyeing the markings, “could be
futhark
.”

“What . . . ?”

“Runes
. However, the
language
of the runes might be Middle English or Gothic, Norse or Norwegian. Who knows?”

“Who
does
?”

“Someone who can translate them. Not me. Ready?” We gripped the first stake. It came out with a sigh as the wet peat released. In a similar fashion, we removed the three others. I tagged each, indicating its position on the limb it had pinned. Then we tried to remove the blind. But I couldn’t undo the knot (it was cruelly tight) and I didn’t want to force it, fearing I would damage her face in the process, so I made do with moving it an inch above her eyes.

Unexpectedly, they were open; undeniably, they were blue; unbelievably, they were lifelike in the extreme—full of hurt and terror and some far-reaching ruined hope.

“My God,” the coroner said, stepping back a pace. For with her blue eyes open and the stakes removed, it almost seemed at any moment she might revive and speak to us.

Her face was broad; her nose had a certain hawk-like flare. Her body was at once long-limbed, slender and broad-shouldered. Her ears (and her right nostril) were pierced—details that, for some reason, moved me.

We turned to her effects. A small feathered purse found with her clothing contained a horn comb, a double oyster shell serving as tweezers (several short hairs still adhered to an edge), and three round lidded boxes, no larger than silver dollars, containing what smelled like traces of unguents. There were no coins that might have dated her death.

“Why does it feel so creepy,” he asked, “going through the dead’s effects? You almost expect her to sit up, bat at your hand and say, ‘Leave my bloody purse alone.’ What are those?” he wondered, indicating the wooden dishes. “Medicine?”

“Makeup. Some sort of lip gloss, probably. And kohl for the eyes.”

“They had makeup? Back
then
?”

“Where there were women . . .” I said, “. . . there was makeup.”

We went downstairs. The morning was warm, the elevator overheated. No sooner had it reached the bottom and its doors reopened than I saw a ring lying on the floor. This was not a happy sign—and stepping out I saw at once the wire cage had been broken into and the treasure taken.

The coroner stopped, as though straight-armed by an invisible hand. “Pinched!” he screamed. “
Bastards
!”

I stared at the hill of moldering peat from which the hoard had been removed. “What bastards?”

He looked at me, almost suspiciously. “How the hell should
I
know?”

I won’t dwell upon the sea of dreariness into which the morning descended: the police interviews, the coroner’s alternately defensive and apologetic mien, or the appearance of the national press, for the discovery and theft of such a priceless treasure trove was news of the first order. The coroner was roundly criticized for his having left it in such a spot—though in his defense, the hoard was delivered on a Saturday evening when no museum or bank vault was open to receive it, and was partially embedded in a quarter ton of peat, from which he’d been cautioned it could not be removed. This had left him few options. He couldn’t have kept it in his office—it wouldn’t have fit—and the cage in the hospital basement had not seemed like a bad idea at the time.

In retrospect, it was ludicrous. You don’t leave a treasure worth millions of pounds sterling overnight in a public building in a cage secured with a bicycle lock!

The police speculated that sometime after midnight, the thief had overridden the key that disabled the elevator’s descent to the cellar, clipped the lock, and carried the treasure out through the loading bay to a waiting vehicle. The theft’s childish ease moved one bobby to remark, “Whoever did this had to know
three
things:
one
, how to use a lift; two, how to clip a wire; and three,
how to drive a lorry.”
He grinned.
“Cunning.”