ONE
EDWARD Hall-Waddington, O.B.E., M.A., Ph.D., F.S.A., ran his hand nervously over a pink and liver-spotted pate, absently brushing back a lock of hair that had been gone for almost forty years.
“Oh, dear,” he said in tremulous distress. His white eyebrows knitted atop a beaky, jutting nose that was at odds with an otherwise frail and retiring face. “My word, Professor Oliver! Only an hour? But there’s so very much to see...” His words trailed sorrowfully off, and the hand moved from his brow to take up the burden of his message, gesturing vaguely at the dusty glass cases and musty corridors that lay beyond the door of his tiny, cluttered office.
“I wish I had time to see everything in the museum, sir,” Gideon Oliver said courteously. He sat, more than a little cramped, in a small side chair at the elderly archaeologist’s desk, his shoulders too wide for the narrow space between desk and wall, his long legs twisted out of the way off to the side. “Actually, Dorchester wasn’t on our itinerary at all, but I couldn’t imagine being in England without paying my respects.”
“To be sure, to be sure,” Professor Hall-Waddington said, pink cheeks showing his pleasure. “And to Pummy as well, no doubt?” The eyebrows went up, and cheerful blue eyes twinkled out from under them.
“Pummy, too,” Gideon said, smiling.
The prize possession of the Greater Dorchester Museum of History and Archaeology was a six-by-eight-inch piece of curving, darkened bone, most of the back of a thirty-thousand-year-old human skull that had been unearthed by a World War II bombing at nearby Poundbury and fortunately recognized for what it was by the amateur but competent Greater Dorchester Historical and Archaeological Society. Poundbury Man was of considerable anthropological significance because Britain, so rich in archaeological sites, was notably lacking in actual skeletal remnants of ancient man. From the first, the fragment had affectionately and quite naturally been dubbed “Pummy.” (With typical English disdain for the middle parts of names, Poundbury is pronounced “Pum’ry.”)
It was extraordinary to have such an object housed in a provincial museum run by an amateur antiquarian society, but Professor Hall-Waddington had lent his considerable weight to the society’s claims when the find had been made. In 1944 he had been one of England’s foremost archaeologists, a colleague of Grahame Clark, V. Gordon Childe, and Leonard Woolley, and Dorchester had gotten to keep its find. When the professor had retired from the British Museum more than thirty years later, after the death of his wife, the society had timidly invited him to become curator of the museum. He had accepted with gratitude, and the collection had become the love of his life.
“Well, let’s go and see him, shall we?” he said, rising with unexpected sprightliness. “We’ll follow the well-worn path to his case. Old fellow gets quite a lot of attention, you know. You’re the second American to pay him a visit this week, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh? Another anthropologist? Someone I might know?”
“No, no, I doubt it. I didn’t get his name. Student, from the look of him. Spent most of the morning slouching about.”
When they walked from the little office into the nearly deserted exhibit rooms, Gideon saw that the museum wasn’t dusty at all, and certainly not musty. It only looked as if it should be: a hodgepodge of waist-high glass cases with row upon dull-looking gray row of projectile points and stone flakes, each one painstakingly identified and cataloged on its own typewritten card. Improbable and seemingly inapposite objects stood in dark corners, leaned against the walls, and even lay unprotected on worn tables of dark wood. It was, Gideon admitted to himself, a look that he liked, for he was not a champion of the museum-asentertainment-center, with buttons to push, levers to pull, and slick, nonexplanatory placards. They taught little, and they attracted hordes of marginally interested kids who jumped from contrivance to contrivance, comprehending nothing worth knowing. No, this was the way a museum ought to look, as old-fashioned as it was. He even liked the smell: a chalky, flinty mixture of old, worked stone and floor polish.
Their progress toward the Poundbury exhibit was slow and halting. Professor Hall-Waddington paused at almost every object they passed to murmur a few words about it and, if it was not encased, to run a hand lovingly over it.
“Fragments of a bell mold. Cast in 1717. Don’t see many of these.”
“Ah,” said Gideon.
“Romano-British sarcophagus here. Found in 1925. Body’d been completely packed in chalk, except for the head. What do you make of that? Quite curious.”
“Huh,” Gideon said. “Interesting.”
“And these are the old borough stocks. Used to stand against the side of the town hall. They’d put their feet in the holes, of course. Do you have any idea when that all began?”
“Uh, no, I’m afraid I don’t,” Gideon said.
“Ha! Thought you wouldn’t. Have a guess.”
“Sixteenth century?”
“Sixteenth century!” cried Professor Hall-Waddington, delighted. “My word, no! It’s from Anglo-Saxon times. And in 1376, Parliament decreed every town had to have a set of them. Decree’s never been abolished, you know. This is ours.”
“Is that so?” Gideon breathed politely, looking with secret longing toward the case in which he knew the famous skullcap lay.
The old man shuffled a few steps on, but stopped rather firmly ten feet short of the goal. “Now here,” he said, placing his hand tenderly on a monstrous, grimy pair of bellows standing on end against the wall, as if some fifty-foot giant of a blacksmith had leaned it there for a few seconds while he had a sip from a bucket of water. “Now here are the actual bellows from the Downtown Forge.”
“Mm,” Gideon said. “Ah.”
“Most bellows authorities claim these were manufactured in 1792, you know, but I hold firmly with 1796 or even later. What would you say, Professor?”
The fact that there was such a thing as a bellows authority came as news to Gideon. “Well,” he said, “uh...I’d say 1796 or 1797.”
“Ah, and quite right you’d be. Quite right. No question about it in my mind. I’d be curious about your own rationale, however.” He turned his frank, clear, blue eyes expectantly on Gideon.
“Well,” said Gideon. He coughed gently and looked surprised. “Is that the Poundbury skull over there?”
“What?” Professor Hall-Waddington looked over his shoulder at the case with the golden fragment of bone in it. “Why, yes, of course it is. I keep forgetting you’re a physical anthropologist and not another fuddy-duddy old antiquary like me.” He chuckled pleasantly. “Here you are, come all this way to pay homage to old Pummy, and I’ve been prattling on about bellows.”
“Not at all,” Gideon said quickly. “It’s been fascinating.”
“Kind of you to say so, but now let’s have a look at him, shall we?”
There was, however, one obstacle still to be negotiated— an exhibit consisting of what seemed to be two vicious-looking pitchforks chained together scissors-fashion, and Professor Hall-Waddington was unable to ignore it in passing.
“Know what this is?” At the absence of Gideon’s usual courteous murmur, he spoke a little louder. “It’s an old hay-devil. Used for bringing hay from wagon to rick, you see...”
Gideon hardly heard him. He was staring at the Poundbury skull fragment only a few feet away. Something was wrong with it, so wildly wrong that it had him momentarily doubting his senses. “Poundbury Man,” he whispered, unaware that he was speaking aloud. “Isn’t it supposed to be an elderly man, long-headed...?”
“Supposed to be?” Professor Hall-Waddington echoed, bewildered. “Of course it is. Le Gros Clark himself aged it, and sexed it, and estimated the cranial index. Sir Arthur Keith verified it, and so did your own Hooton.”
Gideon was well aware of all this. He had himself studied photographs and casts of Poundbury Man and had never doubted the original analysis. “Professor,” he said, “would it be possible to take it from the case—to handle it?”
The curator used a key at his waist to unlock the small, ordinary padlock, and raised the glass lid of the case. He
turned aside four simple spring-clips that held down the black-velvet-covered block to which the time-stained bone was attached by two loops of wire. Looking oddly at Gideon, he stepped back and gestured politely at it. “Please,” he said.
Gideon picked up the block and turned it so that he could look at the back of the fragment more closely. He needed only a second to confirm his impression.
“It isn’t Poundbury Man, sir.”
“Not Poundbury Man?” The old archaeologist laughed tentatively. “Not Poundbury Man?”
“I’m afraid I don’t see how it can be.” Poundbury Woman, maybe, or Poundbury Girl, but not Poundbury Man. There was no doubt in Gideon’s mind that what lay in his hand was the left rear half of a woman’s skull—not elderly at all, but in her twenties. And clearly broad-headed, not long-headed.
“Look at the nuchal crest,” he said, “or rather, the absence of it—and the supra-auricular ridge. They’re not nearly pronounced enough to be male—”
“But Le Gros Clark himself stood right here, right where you are... Or was it in my office...?Yes, in my office—”
“And look, sir,” Gideon persisted gently, “you can see for yourself that none of the sutures show even incipient closure, so she’s probably no more than twenty-four or twenty-five—”
“But of course it’s Poundbury Man. It must be Pound-bury Man. Why, what else would it be?” His thin, brown-flecked hand made an uncertain movement toward his lips.
“Hard to say,” Gideon’s fingers brushed the fragment’s edges with seeming carelessness. “It’s old, all right. Not thirty thousand years, but a good two or three thousand anyway. On a guess I’d say she might be from one of the brachycephalic Beaker populations, one of the later groups, maybe 1400 or 1500 b.c.”
“No, no.” Professor Hall-Waddington shook his head querulously. “It’s quite impossible, I tell you. How could... how...?”
His voice sputtered to a stop as he took his first good look at the skull. “Why,” he said, pointing an accusatory finger at it, “that’s not Pummy.”
He snatched it from Gideon. “Do you know what this is? It’s from Sutton Bell—you know Sutton Bell? A later Beaker site near Avebury—1500 b.c. or thereabouts. Look here.” He hunted briefly along the skull’s jagged perimeter and found some faded, tiny numbers written in pen: SB J6-2. “You see? But how very odd! How did it get into Pummy’s case? And where’s Pummy?”
“This fragment—is it from the museum’s collection?”
“Yes, of course, but it ought to be in storage in the basement.” The tense skin around his eyes relaxed slightly. “Someone must have accidentally exchanged the two, don’t you think? Why, Pummy must be right downstairs in the basement.”
The run to the basement was made with a speed and directness of which Gideon had thought Professor Hall-Waddington incapable. Once there, the doors of a metal storage cabinet were thrown ajar, the contents hastily rummaged through, and finally the lid of a dusty cardboard box labeled SB J6-2 was flung heedlessly across the room. Professor Hall-Waddington thrust his face into the box.
“Empty! Pummy...Pummy appears to have been...” He held the box in trembling hands and looked up at Gideon with wondering eyes. “But why would anyone steal a thirty-thousand-year-old parieto-occipital calvareal fragment?”
TWO
“WHY would anyone steal a thirty-thousand-year-old whatzit?” Julie asked, her black eyes no less wondering.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Gideon said.
She stopped walking and tilted her face upward. “Ooh, that smells wonderful. Whatever it is, let’s get some.”
He agreed readily, delighted to see her healthy appetite returning. She had felt the lingering effects of jet lag through three wet and gloomy days in London, and their stay had left her a little dispirited, not a typical condition with her. He, too, had been depressed by the huge city— perceptibly grungier than the last time he’d seen it six years before—and was happy to get out of it.
Once they’d rented the little Ford Escort and driven west past the dormitory towns and through Hampshire, and then into the green and rolling hills of Dorset, they’d begun to cheer up, and now, guidebook in hand, they had just embarked on the agreeably small-scale adventure of exploring Dorchester.
The aroma that had caught their attention turned out to be coming from a bakery a few doors away on the High Street, and they went in and sat themselves down at a tiny wooden table, for two big wedges of warm Dorset apple cake and a pot of tea. They were both coffee drinkers, but this was England, after all, and what was the point of foreign travel if you carried your old tastes and prejudices around with you? Besides, they’d tried English coffee.
As they ate, Gideon took the opportunity to watch Julie and to congratulate himself on his good luck, both of which he’d been doing a lot of lately. And why not? Life was full and sweet, sweeter than he had any right to expect. When Nora had been killed four years before, he couldn’t imagine ever loving again; he could barely think about living. And now, astoundingly, he was married. There was Julie at his side, munching away; bouncy, pretty, bright, robust Julie, whom he hadn’t known a year ago, and who was now the center of his existence. She had left her ParkService job; he was on leave for the fall quarter; and they were spending a rambling, come-what-may honeymoon in England. And it was as if his life were starting over again.
“You know,” she said suddenly, putting down her fork and brushing back a tendril of dark, glossy hair, “you sure don’t look like a world-renowned anthropologist.” She’d been studying him too; the thought was absurdly pleasing.
“I’m not a world-renowned anthropologist.”
“Yes, you are. You told me; twice, at least. And you’re certainly the world’s best-known skeleton detective.” This referred to an unfortunate label that had appeared in a magazine article about his identification of some human remains that had been buried for thirty years. The sobriquet had clung, and Gideon spent considerable effort among his colleagues at Northern California State University trying to live it down.
“Bite your tongue,” he said. Then, after a moment:
“What’s a world-renowned anthropologist supposed to look like?”
“Not like you. He’s not supposed to be big and broad-shouldered, with a prizefighter’s nose and a beautiful, warm, hairy chest, and—”
“Hey, finish your tea,” he said, ridiculously happy. “I think we’d better do some sightseeing.”
They went back out into the venerable and bustling High Street with its pleasing jumble of old cottages, staid Georgian bow windows, ancient, lichen-stained church walls, and twentieth-century facades. Inside of an hour they’d visited the Thomas Hardy statue at Top o’Town, admired the remains of the Roman wall, crossed a stone bridge on which a notice informed them that it was off-limits to “locomotive traction engines and other ponderous carriages,” and looked at various sites purported to be models for the settings in Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge.
Docilely following the terse instructions in their guidebook, they turned left at the County Laboratory, walked down the narrow, high-walled passage to its end, and mounted the flight of steps. When they had done so, they found themselves in a parking lot.
This, their book informed them, is the site of No. 7 Shire Hall Place, where Hardy lived from June 1883 until June 1885—now, it added unnecessarily, a car park.
From there they were directed to a gray stone mansion called Colliton House, the prototype for Lucetta’s house, High Place Hall.
Gideon read aloud from the guidebook. “ ‘The arms over the front entry are extremely interesting: Sable, A Lion Rampant Argent, Debruised with a Bendlet Gules—’ Julie, are you really enjoying this?”
“Are you?”
It didn’t take them long to agree that they weren’t, and a quick skimming of the rest of the book gave them the happy information that nearby the river Frome, with its many Hardy associations, wends its peaceful way between shaded banks, followed closely by a rustic river path.
They decided to let the Hardy associations go for the moment and to stroll the bucolic, deserted path for its own pleasures. At their feet the tiny river babbled and purled, while a few yards beyond it rose the mossy base of the flat-topped mound on which Dorchester—or Durnovaria, as it was called in Roman times—had first been built. On the other side of the path were tidy little vegetable gardens, one after another, and beyond them, in the distance, lay lonely Durnover Moor, hazy in the pale afternoon light.
“I keep wondering why anybody would take that darn skull,” Julie announced abruptly, once they’d walked quietly for a while.
“Me, too.”
“It’s famous, isn’t it?”
“To physical anthropologists, yes.”
“Well, isn’t it worth money then? Couldn’t it have been stolen to be sold?”
“To another museum, you mean? Well, a museum would pay for something like that, sure—a lot of money. But Pummy wouldn’t be sellable. Any decent physical anthropologist who took a good hard look at it would know it’s Poundbury Man, and he’d know that Poundbury Man belongs in the Dorchester Museum. So even if some shady museum was willing to buy stolen materials, there’d be no point.”
“Do you mean there’s only one Poundbury Man? Aren’t there others from the same... the same population, that look more or less like him?”
“No,” Gideon said, pausing to watch some skinny children feed bread chunks to some fat ducks, “he’s one of a kind. He’s Homo sapiens, of course, but no one else from that time and that place has been found. And he is remarkably dolichocephalic—long-headed. Whether he was just an oddball that way, or whether all his people looked like that, no one knows, because he’s the only one we’ve got. There are even some anthropologists who want to dub him a separate subspecies—Homo sapiens poundburiensis, or some such.”
“Really? They want to postulate an entire subspecific population on the basis of a single fragmentary—” She burst into sudden laughter, startling the ducks. “Good gosh, I’m starting to talk like you!”
“That’s what happens to married people.”
“After five days?”
Gideon shrugged. “You must be a quick study.”
“I guess I am.” She reached out for his hand as they moved on over a low stone bridge. “Well, anyway, if not a museum, what about a private collector? Aren’t some fabulously rich eccentrics supposed to have their own collections of stolen Rembrandts or Vermeers, even though they can’t show them to anyone? Wouldn’t this thing be worth money to someone like that?”
“Rembrandts I can see, but a broken old piece of skull? He’d have to be pretty eccentric, all right.”
“Mmm,” Julie said, thinking. “Okay, could it be some kind of joke? Maybe Pummy’s just been hidden, not stolen, and the other skull was put in the case as a hoax.”
“The same thing’s occurred to me. But what for?”
“To make Professor Hall-Waddington look silly? Maybe you weren’t supposed to find it and tell him in your nice way. Maybe there was supposed to be a big scandal.”
“Possibly... This is all pretty conjectural, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but it’s fascinating.”
They crossed a final footbridge and found themselves
with surprising suddenness out of the dappled shade and back on the High Street, a few blocks from where they’d started.
Gideon looked at his watch. “Feel like walking some more?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Want to drop into a pub?”
“They don’t open for another hour.”
“That’s right. Well, let’s see, what can we do?”
She cocked her head at him. “Here you are on your honeymoon, with your beautiful young bride at your side, and your hotel less than two blocks away...and you can’t think of anything to do?”
“Nope,” he said blandly, “not a thing. But why don’t we go up to our room, take off our clothes, and lie down? Maybe something will occur to me.”
* * *
IT was two hours before they arrived for dinner at the Judge Jeffreys on the High Street, an ancient inn with a grim past, having been the lodging of Baron George Jeffreys, the presiding judge at the Bloody Assize of 1685, when seventy-four of Cromwell’s royalist opponents had been executed. Nevertheless, the dining room was cozy and country-pubbish, a centuries-old room with rough-beamed ceiling and stone-mullioned, multipaned windows of wavy, leaded glass.
“What would you think,” Gideon said as they settled into a black, gleaming wooden booth, “of spending the next day or two in Charmouth? Since we’re in the area anyway, I’d like to drop in on a dig near there—Stonebarrow Fell. I thought maybe I’d better stop in and see how Nate Marcus is doing.”
“Here we are then,” said their hurried waitress, and laid the pints of bitter they’d ordered on the table. Julie and Gideon clinked the heavy glass mugs in a wordless toast.
“Why ‘better stop in’?” Julie asked. “And who’s Nate Marcus? An old friend of yours?”
Gideon nodded. “I haven’t seen him a few years, but we were both graduate students at Wisconsin, under Abe Goldstein. He’s head of the anthro department at some place called Gelden College in Missouri. When Abe heard you and I were thinking of coming this way, he suggested I stop by and see if I couldn’t keep him out of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Gideon sipped the cool, soothing bitter. “The same as always,” he said. “Nate rubs a lot of people the wrong way. He can be pretty...well, abrasive.”
“Abrasive? You mean rude?”
“Yes, rude. And flip and sarcastic, and aggressive and thin-skinned. Know-it-all...arrogant...”
“This is one of your old friends? I’d love to hear you describe an enemy.”
Gideon laughed. “To tell the truth, I do like him—most of the time anyway—even if I’m not exactly sure why. He and I sat up a lot of nights, over a lot of pitchers of beer, at the old Student Union in Madison, arguing anthropological trivia until four in the morning. Those are good memories.”
“Well, he still sounds awful. What’s he doing in charge of a dig?”
“For one thing, his excavating technique is impeccable. For another, the Stonebarrow Fell site is his personal discovery. As I understand it, he took one sharp-eyed look at the place—undug, mind you; just a grassy hilltop—and announced there was a Bronze Age burial mound there, even though the mound itself had weathered away. And on top of that, he said it was Wessex culture, to be exact; circa 1700 b.c.”
“And was he right?”
“He was this time—which, as you can imagine, irritated a lot of people. You can guess how the Wessex Antiquarian Society, which is a very sober, professional group of archaeologists, feels about some brash, belligerent American—which Nate is, I’m afraid—stomping in and finding the mound in their backyard.”
Julie frowned as she sipped from her glass. “But if he was right, he was right. It doesn’t seem very professional to keep a grudge over it.”
Gideon laughed. “I hate to disillusion you, but anthropologists are people like anyone else. The thing is, you see, that the site’s now been radiocarbon-dated at 1700 to 1600 b.c., exactly as he predicted, which makes it the earliest accurately dated Bronze Age barrow in England; it’s a heck of a find, and it could answer a lot of questions.”
“Well, that’s good for all concerned, isn’t it? I still don’t see why this Wessex Antiquarian Society should hold a grudge.”
“They don’t. In fact they’re very honorably cosponsoring the dig, although the Horizon Foundation is putting up most of the money. But it still has to rankle, and Nate, as usual, is blowing his own horn, so the squabbling goes on and on.”
The waitress brought menus, and they ordered smoked mackerel followed by steak-and-kidney pie, with another round of bitters. The little room was filling up, and Gideon, for once, was enjoying the closeness of others. The soft British laughter and the polite, civil English speech created an agreeable, unintrusive ambience.
The mackerel was brought out immediately, a whole dusky fish on each plate, and they set silently to work, peeling back the golden skin and separating the tender flesh from rib and backbone. They were hungrier than they’d realized and didn’t speak again, except for murmurs of appreciation, until they’d turned the fish over and scraped the last shreds of meat free with their forks.
Julie wiped her lips and pushed away a fish skeleton so perfect it might have been dissected, then took a sip from the new glass. “Ah,” she said contentedly, “my mind is clear again. But I still don’t understand why they’re quarreling. If your friend was right about this Bronze Age thing, he was right. Right? What is there to fight about?”
“As usual, Nate’s found something.” Gideon absently fingered the smooth, round dimples in his beer mug. “From what I understand, he claims to have come up with incontrovertible evidence that Wessex culture is the direct result of Mycenaean diffusion, and—this is what’s got everyone excited—he’s not talking about plain old cultural diffusion, but actual, physical transmigration from the Peloponnese directly to England.”
“Incontrovertible evidence of Mycenaean diffusion!” Julie exclaimed, her eyes wide. “In direct transmigration! My goodness, no wonder everybody’s excited.”
“Yes—” He looked at her over the rim of his glass, one eyebrow raised. “Young woman, are you having sport with me?”
Julie laughed. “I wouldn’t dare. But what in the world are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that Nate is one of the few Bronze Age archaeologists who categorically reject parallelism as a mechanism for the transmission of cultural—”
“Gideon, dear, have mercy, please.”
Gideon groaned. “My gosh, weren’t you an anthro minor? What do they teach you in Washington? All right, let me try to make it simple; no theoretical stuff.”
“That would be nice.”
“In England, the main Bronze Age culture is called ‘Wessex,’ okay?”
“As in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex.”
“Right. Well, this Wessex culture appeared fairly suddenly and overran the earlier Beaker culture—the Beakers being the last of the Neolithic people, the ones who built Stonehenge. You’ve heard of Stonehenge?” Julie rightfully ignored this, and Gideon continued. “Now, the question is: Just how did this advanced Wessex culture, with its metal technology, get here? Where did it come from? Who brought it? Was it an actual migration of people, or was it simply the adoption by the Beakers of some of the technology and social customs of the Europeans they traded with? Nowadays, it’s the latter that’s generally accepted.”
Any teacher of even minimal perception knows the signs of lack of interest in an audience that does not wish to offend. There is an intense fixity of gaze; brows are knit with expectancy and concentration; chins are supported on hands, the better to permit leaning attentively forward. But the gazes are glassy and unwavering, the rapt expressions vaguely unfocused, the postures rigid rather than alert. So sat Julie across the table.
“As we all know,” Gideon went on, “the Wessex people were the inventors of the video game. They wore polyester pantsuits and lived in four-story houses made entirely from abandoned escargot shells.”
For a moment there was no slackening in her enthralled and unrelenting attention. Then she spluttered into laughter. “You rat! All right, you caught me. I’m afraid I go a little blank at words like ‘metal technology.’ But really, tell me about Nate Marcus. I’m interested, truly.” She blinked her eyes severely to demonstrate.
Gideon smiled. “Okay, in a nutshell: Nathan Marcus is probably the only anthropologist who believes that some seafaring bunch of Mycenaeans set out from Greece and settled in England, where they singlehandedly started the British Bronze Age in about 1700 b.c. Now, there isn’t too much doubt that the British Bronze Age had its roots in the Aegean, but the evidence points to its spreading to England slowly, over centuries, via Europe, possibly without any migration of people at all.”
“Without any migration? How could that be?”
“Well, just through cultural diffusion. The same way you find English rock music all over Russia today, or French wines in Kansas and New Mexico.”
The waitress brought their steak-and-kidney pies. It was the first time Julie had tried one. She broke the crust with a fork and gingerly sniffed the pungent steam.
“It smells all right,” she said doubtfully, and enlarged the hole to peer inside. “Which pieces are kidney?”
“The kidney sort of disappears in the cooking. All those chunks are beef.” A white lie, but she would thank him for it.
She speared a tiny piece of meat, put it in her mouth, and chewed tentatively. “It’s not bad.”
“Of course not.” He scooped up a forkful of his own thick pie. The English, he felt, were somewhat maligned in the matter of their food. There were, of course, grotesqueries like baked beans on toast and those unfortunate, unavoidable breakfast sausages, but he found the cuisine generally mild and inoffensive: plaice, hake, gammon, beef, and pile upon bland pile of peas and chips.
“So is that what the argument’s about?” Julie asked. “The dispute over the Bronze Age?”
“That’s it. Nate thinks that Wessex culture—and therefore the British Bronze Age—was personally introduced by the Mycenaeans, and everybody else says it came through slow diffusion.”
“It hardly seems like anything to get fighting mad about.”
“Anthropologists are funny people, as I’m sure you’re coming to realize, but where Nate is concerned, there’s more to it. Since the respectable journals won’t touch his theory, he’s been out pushing it anywhere he can— magazines, newspapers, talk shows—and that doesn’t help his credibility among anthropologists.”
“What about his theory? Do you think he could be right?”
“I doubt it, but I don’t know enough about it to have a legitimate opinion. To tell the truth, I can’t say I find the Bronze Age all that fascinating myself. Too recent.”
“Seventeen hundred b.c. is recent?”
“Sure, to an anthropologist. Didn’t you ever hear what Agatha Christie said about being married to one?”
“I didn’t know she was.”
“Yes, a famous one: Max Mallowan. She said it was wonderful—the older she got, the more interesting he found her.”
“I hope it’s true,” Julie said, laughing. She pushed aside her not-quite-finished pie. “That was good,” she said a little uncertainly, “but I think you have to acquire a taste for it.” She sipped her bitters and looked soberly at him. “Gideon, you’re not going to let yourself get involved in a theoretical argument, are you? It’s our honeymoon.”
He cupped his hand over hers on her glass. “Do you really think I’d rather get into an academic fracas than spend my time with you? I love you, Julie Tendler—”
“Oliver.”
“Oliver . . . I forget what I was going to say.”
“How much you love me.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, let’s see. On a scale of one to ten I’d say a, well, um, maybe a, well...”
“I’m going to hit him,” she muttered into her glass.
He took her hand from the glass and brushed the backs of her fingers over his lips. Her eyes glowed suddenly in the semidarkness of the restaurant, and he felt his own moisten. How extraordinary it was to be married to this marvelous woman. For a moment he held her hand against his cheek, then replaced it on the glass, recurving her fingers around the handle.
“Never mind how much I love you,” he said, “I’m not about to encourage complacency. Anyway, all I intend to do when we get to Charmouth is to pay an hour’s visit to the site and say hello to Nate. That’s it.”
“And after that we’re on our own? No more bones? Just cream teas and country walks and pub lunches?”
“No bones, no stones, and, thank God, no corpses. The skeleton detective is traveling incognito and nobody knows where to find him.” He put down his nearly empty mug with a thump. “And now, if you think steak-and-kidney pie is good, wait till you try treacle!”
THREE
THE walk from Charmouth to Stonebarrow Fell was so magnificent that Gideon almost went back to the Queen’s Armes Hotel to bring Julie along, but she had been adamant. He was making a professional visit, she had pointed out, and she wasn’t going to tag along to hang around like an ignoramus while everyone else was chattering on about Mycenaean transmigration and cultural diffusion.
“Besides,” she’d said, “we’ve been married six days and I have yet to perform a single wifely function.”
He grinned at her, but she laughed before he had a chance to say anything. “Fun things don’t count; I mean chores. Do you know, I have yet to do the laundry? We’ve been washing our stuff in sinks, and things are getting grubby. I want to go to an honest-to-goodness Laundromat.”
She seemed to mean it, and Gideon had let it go at that. After lunch he had left her to her wifely chores and walked out Lower Sea Lane, past the bright, clean bed-and-breakfast houses and private cottages of the village, to the sandy beach. There, in its grander days, the River Char had worn a soft, lush U-shaped valley down to the sea between the towering coastal cliffs. High up on those cliffs, reachable by a gentle but relentlessly ascending path, was the prettily if redundantly named Stonebarrow Fell—Stonehill Hill, in modern English.
He crossed the wooden footbridge over the now-tiny River Char and headed up the green, sweeping slope at a good, swinging pace, enjoying the crisp ocean air and the welcome sensation of muscles working. It was a cool, cloudy day, with an immense fog bank a few miles offshore, but the air was clear, and the sea was green and silvered, lit by narrow columns of sunlight that slid over its surface like spotlights. To the east, behind him, was Char-mouth in its picture-book valley, and a mile beyond it, down the curving coast, there was Lyme Regis, compact and pretty, with its famous stone breakwater—the Cobb— snaking out into the ocean. Ahead of him the green, round-shouldered hill rose to the top of the fell, and a few miles farther on, the aptly named Golden Cap loomed, solid and squarish, over the Dorset coast.
Near the top of the hill, the path swung out to the very edge of dizzyingly sheer cliffs and Gideon instinctively moved back. He was a good four hundred feet above the beach, and the land under him was obviously unstable. The rim of the path had crumbled away in places, and even while he looked, a few pebbles dropped free to start a small, slithering landslide. Still, he paused to take in the scene. These were famous cliffs to anyone who knew something about fossils. It had been here at the base of this wall of blue lias clay, about half a mile beyond Charmouth, that ten-year-old Mary Anning had chanced upon a twenty-five-foot icthyosaurus skeleton and set the scientific world of 1811 on its ear. Which was just what Nate Marcus hoped to do with his “incontrovertible evidence” of a Mycenaean landing. Well, good luck to him, but Gideon would be very surprised if he had that evidence, or if it existed.
A hundred feet from the crest of the hill, where the path cut through a dense thicket of gorse, was the last of four stiles. Here a ten-foot wire fence had been put up, and on it was a stenciled sign: Archaeological excavation in progress. Visitors admitted only with prior authorization. Wessex Antiquarian Society. A heavy padlock on a thick chain made good the warning.
There was no information on how to get authorized, and he was thinking about climbing the fence and taking his chances with the wrath of the Wessex Antiquarian Society when a puff of wind carried a few syllables of barely audible conversation down from above, from the far side of the summit.
“Hi!” Gideon shouted. “Anybody home?”
Within a few seconds a husky, pink-faced young man came trotting down the path and up to the other side of the fence.
“Hiya,” he said. “Want in?” He was an American in his mid twenties, thick-necked and slope-shouldered, with downy cheeks and a healthy farm boy’s smile. A scant blond mustache, painstakingly groomed, but obviously never going to amount to much, glistened on his upper lip.
“Yes,” Gideon said. “I’m an anthropologist; an old friend of Dr. Marcus’s.”
“Sure, no problem.” From the pocket of his jeans he produced a key. Once Gideon was through the gate, the young man closed and locked it again, shaking the lock to test it.
“I’m Barry Fusco,” he volunteered.
“Glad to know you, Barry. You’re a student at Gelden?”
“Uh-huh, all of us are. The workers, I mean: me, and Sandra, and Leon, and Randy. Dr. Marcus and Dr. Frawley are profs, of course.” He flashed his engaging smile. “Not that they don’t work. I just meant that the ones who do the real work—you know, the peon work—are the students. Not that I’m complaining...” He carried on in this affable if muzzy manner while they climbed to the crest.
Once there, Gideon saw that the summit of Stonebarrow Fell was a grassy, rounded meadow that seemed to be at the very top of a world of rolling green downs and endless sea, with cliff and hillside falling away in every direction. The dig itself was about a hundred feet from the edge of the cliff, and consisted of two wedge-shaped pits about twelve feet across at their widest points, situated like two great pieces of a pie that had been quartered.
There were three people in the shallower wedge, which had been dug down about a foot and a half: a young man and woman about Barry’s age who were on their knees scraping at the pit floor (peon work?), and an older man— not Nate Marcus—who leaned over them, watching closely.
“You just want to watch?” Barry asked.
“For a few minutes.”
While Barry climbed down into the trench and got to work, Gideon walked up to the single strand of rope that protected the excavation from a listless group of nine or ten schoolchildren and a glum-faced woman. The rope restraint was hardly necessary: the onlookers could not have been less enthusiastic.