The Digger's Rest (17 page)

The problem was, in 1956, little middle-class
English girls weren’t supposed to want that. She wanted to fly
planes and sail boats. She wanted to climb mountains and explore
valleys. Her favorite reading in those days weren’t fanciful tales
of romance, domestic magazines or even Jane Austin. She read her
idols Margaret Meade and Mary Leaky, mavericks in the field of
anthropology. She read Rudyard Kipling and his adventure tales on
India, and boys’ adventure magazines of safaris in Africa.

She had another problem too; she was tall and
grew shapely when she reached her teens. She was rather pretty as
well, with long, wavy, auburn hair bobbed just above the shoulders
and kept that way until she went to London. Never considered
beautiful in the traditional sense of a china doll, she did find
that she had a certain allure that made her attractive enough to
have boys bothering her all the time and, although she grew up
running away from marriage, if not men in general, she never let
them get in the way of her work.

She worked tirelessly to prove herself in a
world dominated by men bent on keeping her out of their field, but
she never gave up, and by the time she graduated college with a
degree in archaeology from the University of Yorkshire, she’d
landed herself a plum internship in the archives at the British
Museum. It may not have been exactly what she wanted at the time,
but it was the ‘where’ that was important.

To be working at the British Museum was more
than she ever thought she could achieve, so she took it and bided
her time until the opportunity arose for her to move out into the
field. It was where she would meet the two most influential men in
her life, the ones who would give her everything she ever wanted
out of life, the American archaeologist, Jack Edgeworth, her lover;
and his English equivalent and later her husband, Lord Neville
Cotswold.

As she looked in the mirror, just having
gotten home from having her hair done, Lady Madeline got lost in
wondering where that young girl had gone. Her hair would be mostly
gray now if she hadn’t kept up with her regular coloring
appointments, and her skin would have wrinkled considerably more if
she hadn’t spent the last ten years or so having regular facials
and various other rejuvenating skin treatments.

She might have thought that she was a
selfish, vain woman if in her heart she didn’t know that that the
reason she did it all was as much to keep Neville happy as to keep
herself young. He always told her how much he loved to look at her
and that was enough for her. It didn’t hurt that they were wealthy
enough to allow her to indulge both their desires to keep her as
young as possible for as long as possible.

Still staring in the mirror, lost in her
thoughts of her long-waning youth, Madeline was suddenly jarred out
of her haze by the slight squeak of a wheel chair as it came into
the room.

“
I’ve just had a call from Gerron
Hittisleigh from Devon, Maddie,” Neville said in his very upper
class tone. “He tells me that an old aristocrat named Crane just
died. Apparently Crane was the last of his line having held the
estate in the family for generations.” Madeline continued to fuss
with her hair as Neville spoke, finding herself hoping that he
hadn’t committed them to yet another tedious group.

“
Please, Neville, dear. I have to be at
a luncheon shortly. What did Gerron want?” she said, not turning
from the mirror but looking at him through his reflection from
behind her.

“
Well, the end of it is that they’ve
found an unrecorded castle ruin in an untamed wood on the estate,
just a few miles south of Exeter. I’ve already sent some men out to
photograph it.” Madeline instantly stopped fussing with her hair
and turned to face him.

“
You are joking, aren’t you,
dear?”

“
Not in the least, precious. Gerron
says from what he’s seen it looks to him to like the remains of a
Norman or possibly Saxon stronghold.” Madeline felt a flush of
excitement come up in her face as she walked over to Neville,
kneeling down to bring her down to his eye level.

“
And what does he want from you? You’ve
been retired for years and I haven’t worked in the field
since…well, since then either,” she said not wanting to remind him
that she decided on her own to give up working in the field to care
for him after the stroke that had put him in that
wheelchair.

“
He wanted to know if I would be
interested in buying it before the fish company that bought it from
the estate demolishes it to build a cannery or some such rot. He
said they want more than five hundred thousand pounds for the plot
where the ruins are situated.”

“
And what did you tell him?” she asked,
knowing that he was toying with her in some way, peeved because
she’d tried to rush his story.

“
I told him that I was not in good
health and could no longer afford to indulge myself in expensive
flights of fancy.” But knowing Neville for as long as she had and
as intimately as she had after being married to him for almost
thirty-five years, she knew he could never let an opportunity like
that just slip past him. He had been one of England’s top
archaeologists for decades and had sat on the board of directors at
the British Museum until his stroke almost five years
earlier.

She knew he had lived most of his life for
his work, and hers. “So what exactly did you do, Neville?” she
asked him with a mischievous gleam in her eye.

“
I can never fool you, now can I,
Maddie?”

“
No, my love, you can’t,” she said
smiling at him affectionately and waiting to hear what stunt he’d
pulled from his wheelchair while she was out having her hair
done.

“
I called Jack Edgeworth in America and
offered it to him on the condition that you be allowed to supervise
the technical aspects of the dig while his best period man puts it
all together. You must remember him darling, Jack’s favorite son,
the good-looking, long-haired fellow, Bayeux Bramson. We were at
the opening right before…I got ill. You must remember
him.”

Madeline was too stunned for words.

“
He’s agreed to give you second title
on any articles written by the two of you concerning anything you
find there. Jack says he’s a brilliant art historian and this is
his particular area, the Normans and all that, but he’s a little
green in the field and wants you to oversee the nuts and bolts of
the dig while he puts it all in context.”

Without warning, Madeline threw her arms
around Neville’s neck and gushed, “Oh, I do love you, old man.”

“
Now see here, old girl. It wouldn’t do
for you to get me too excited in my state. It just might kill me,”
he said laughing. Then his tone changed to serious as he pulled her
back to look in her eyes. “I know how much you’ve given up taking
care of me these last years, my love, and I want you to have this
for being such a good sport about it. It’ll probably be your last
chance to be published and would be a very nice touch to close your
career, especially if you find something…different, ” he said, his
eyes still locked on hers so she would know he meant what he
said.

Madeline started to speak, “But…”

“
But nothing…” Neville replied. “It’s
only Devon, my dear, not East Africa or Indonesia. And you can take
Sandrine with you. She’s been cooped up with us here long enough.
It’ll do both of you good to get out into the field. I’ll be fine.
I’ll still have the servants, and you know George would never let
anything happen to me.”

Madeline put her arms around him again, and
kissed him hard on the lips.

“
Dash it all, Maddie. Now look what
you’ve done,” he said, embarrassed by the unexpected rush of blood
to his lower body, but smiling nonetheless because it showed he
still could.

***

Back when she had first started at the
British Museum in 1967, she was really little more than a girl and
so serious about her work that the radical events taking place
around the world, and even in England, seemed to pass her by
without her even noticing. Yes, of course, she’d heard of the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithful, Twiggy and Jean
Shrimpton, but they were not part of her world, although she would
always confess a great weakness for anything sung by Petula Clark,
Lulu or Dusty Springfield, but she was never part of it. She spent
that time focused exclusively on trying to get ahead, sometimes
blurring the lines of propriety in how she did it. One particularly
memorable time was when an up-and-coming American came to work at
the Museum and collect a team of students for a dig he was planning
down the Nile, close to Ethiopia.

His name was Jack Edgeworth and the minute
she laid eyes on him she thought he was the most dashing man she’d
ever seen, a real life Alan Quartermain going on a quest to find
his version of King Solomon’s Mines. She was smitten on the spot,
as much by his looks as for what she believed he could do for her
career, and she became determined to convince him she should go
with him, whatever it took. In the end she got her way, both her
ways if the truth be told. She impressed him with both her tight
skirts and her abilities as a cartographer, documentarian and
researcher.

They became lovers for the first time in the
high heat of a dusty tent not far from the river, and remained so
for the duration of the expedition. She didn’t think that either of
them ever thought it was love. It was just the time and the place,
the heat and the tension, lain over with their energetic youth and
the excitement of what they were about to uncover, proof of the
Queen of Sheba’s journey to meet Solomon, actual physical proof
that the Bible story was true as it was told.

When the expedition was over and the team
returned to London, she found that the Museum had gotten a new
director in their absence. It seems that Lord Neville Cotswold,
England’s foremost expert on relics from the early Dynasties of
China, had recently returned from several years working in the East
and been named the new director. Much older than she by at least
fifteen years, Lord Neville was exactly like everything she had
ever read about him, mature, sophisticated and aristocratic in the
old Victorian sense. He was well-bred, well-mannered, extremely
well-educated and extraordinarily well-connected through
generations of Royal beneficence for duties performed for the Crown
by his family.

At the time, she liked to believe that what
she was feeling was love at first sight. But it wasn’t until later,
until she had worked closely with him and could appreciate the man
he was inside, his general air of kindness, his soft-spoken way of
making people of all classes feel valued as human beings. From the
Cockney charwomen who scrubbed the floors and emptied the waste
bins, to the Prime Minister, and even the Queen herself when she
bestowed her Royal presence on them at the Museum, Neville
connected with them on whatever level they could be connected by.
That was when she discovered what real love was, and that it was so
much more than a sweaty roll in a hot tent. It was the only thing
Jack and Neville had in common; the way they treated people.

In every other way they were complete
opposites. Neville was stiff upper lip and all that, never loosened
his tie or took off his jacket, even in the most ungodly of heat,
and would never be seen with a hair out of place or his moustache
untrimmed. He wasn’t as handsome or as dashing as Jack; it was his
eyes that made him seem that way to her…gray, with a deep, serious,
compelling look to them. He was everything an English gentleman
should be and she found that irresistible.

She worked in the Museum with Neville for
almost two years after she returned from Ethiopia. The first year
she spent helping Jack catalog and display their artifacts and
prepare the articles of their findings from the trip for
publication. All the while in her mind she was preparing herself,
training herself in the proper clothing, hairstyle, manners and
deportment, to be the kind of woman that Lord Neville Cotswold
could appreciate. With her looks and intelligence she accomplished
that handily, and when Jack went back to America and their articles
were well received, even applauded by the general archaeological
community, she finally got her chance.

Lord Neville Cotswold came to see her
personally in her office one day to congratulate her on her on her
work on the Nile, and she was ready. He proposed to her within a
year and they married shortly thereafter, not having slept together
until they were officially man and wife.

It was a risk, but it was a risk she was
willing to take because when she looked in his eyes, she knew that
she could look into those eyes for the rest of her life and be
quite happy with that, even if it was only that. As it turned out,
she considered herself quite lucky because, not only was he a true
gentleman out of bed, but he turned out to be a tender, caring,
selfless and passionate lover in bed, and she never looked
back.

In the ensuing years they became one of the
most noteworthy couples both in the academic community as well as
the highest social circles, going on expeditions together, making
discoveries and publishing article after article together; then
coming home to be received into the finest homes, private parties
and state events. She even had what some may call the dubious
distinction of being regularly invited to tea with Wallis Warfield
Simpson, the oft-maligned Duchess of Windsor, and although she
could naturally draw parallels between the old Duchess and the
newest one, Camilla Parker Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall, the
style just wasn’t there, and she declined those later
invitations.