by Earl Nelson
The Princesses had clothing they and their mothers approved of. I was surprised about how normal the clothing looked that they ended up picking. It looked good but wasn’t over the top.
Nina had established social status in her school. She was the arbitrator of who would get to model Mary’s older girl collection. That seemed an odd phrase, ‘older girl.’ Well from Mary’s perspective they were older girls. I suspect the clothing company would come up with a better name.
Mary’s company had kicked off two new collections which would be money makers. There would be bonuses all around this year.
Mary herself now owned one of the strongest fashion brands in the world. No hungry puppies now. I was proud of my little sister for not forgetting her true mission, ‘Feed the Puppies’. Everything else was just a means to an end.
For myself, I had a happy sister and girlfriend. Even Mum smiled when she looked at me. What a great weekend!
I left Zurich in enough time to make it back to Oxford just as the last light was fading.
Monday started as a normal day but went to heck quickly. At 8:30 as I was leaving for class I had a call from Prettyman’s the people doing my prototype.
They had run into a snag and needed more money to proceed. They wanted another forty-eight hundred pounds. This would put me down to two hundred pounds on my class budget. I had no choice but to tell them to proceed.
I would be coming to London later in the week to get an update on the project.
My first class was economics one and of course, the Don wanted updates from everyone. I bit the bullet and told them that I was now all in on my project. It had to work or I was lost.
The Don rather snidely said, “Pride cometh before a fall. One should be careful about erring when one is human, as the divine may not forgive.”
So he was a friend of the Don that I had put down over the Wicked Wasp of Twickenham. I had been set up for a fall.
Rather than react I kept a straight face and ignored the comment. Let him think I didn’t get his allusion. The stakes in this game had just been upped.
I don’t know how I would win this contest but I would.
Tuesday was a normal day other than I took a different route on my morning run. I remained on our property but looped out into the woods without a trail.
I hadn’t gone very far when I stumbled on a rock, or what I thought at first was a rock. Since I was lying face down with it within an inch of my nose I got a good look.
It was a man-made material with some design in it. I pried it up and took it with me. I was curious as to what it might be. It was twelve inches tall and another five on the other dimensions. It weighed a good twenty pounds.
When I got back to the house I took it to the kitchen to wash it off. The cook wasn’t pleased. Mr. Hamilton came upon the scene as it was being explained to me that dirty great rocks weren’t welcome in her kitchen.
Since she was waving a meat cleaver as she talked I listened carefully and nodded my head in the right places. I agreed that I was a gormless idiot.
I’m not certain what gormless is, but I must be to get myself in this predicament.
Mr. Hamilton saved me by offering to take the miscreant off her hands and get what she described as, ‘the bloody great boulder’ out of her kitchen.
Whatever we paid him wasn’t enough.
He led me out to a shed near the greenhouse. The shed had a table and a sink with running water. Who knew?
I rinsed most of the dirt off with water, then scrubbed it out of the inscriptions with a worn-out brush from the horse barn.
Now that I could see what was inscribed I could tell that it was in Latin, and said, ‘Welcome to our house.’
Did we have an old Roman villa on our property? That was enough that I promptly ditched class to go back to the area with a shovel in hand.
I spent all morning there because there had been a villa there. All that was left was the outline of the foundation. Inside the foundation line, was the remains of the flooring. It consisted of multicolored tiles that formed a mosaic.
Leaving the shovel in place I returned home for lunch and picked up a stiff broom. Returning to the ruin I briskly swept the mosaic clean.
The complete mosaic didn’t look like what you would find in a normal house. The pictures were of Capricornus, Pegasus, and Mars. In an arc, over all of them, it read Home of the Second Augustian Legion.
It appeared that I had found a military headquarters. There would be many other buildings nearby. A quick search of the area confirmed my thoughts.
This was a major find. I would have to notify experts to have this place excavated carefully. How does one find experts to excavate old ruins?
I suspect someone at school would know the proper people. I went home and cleaned up and changed into more suitable clothes. I didn’t think a fedora and leather jacket were the proper clothing for Oxford, at least in the better offices. Maybe in a pub.
I started at the Bursar’s office with my inquiries. It turned out a good thing that I did, there was a huge archaeological department and like most organizations a lot of crossing of lines. If I started in the wrong department I would never get anywhere.
The Bursar wanted to know who owned the property. I told him that it was in my Mum’s name, Viscountess Jackson and that I didn’t see any problem getting her permission for a dig.
He suggested I call her, which I did from a separate office he provided. Mum was all for the dig, provided I paid for it. I thought they would do it for free. Silly me.
Also, I was to have a contract where the family retained all property rights and I specifically was to have title to any treasure trove found. She thought since I was paying I might recoup some of my cost.
She told me she would have her legal people in London draw up an agreement. After we said our goodbyes I relayed this to the Bursar. He was agreeable, especially when he found out I was willing to bear the costs.
He took me over to a faculty lounge in one of the colleges that specialized in British archaeology. We met with the department head there and they had an arcane discussion about who should get the project and all the associated glory.
While they were doing this I was looking around at what was going on in this den of higher learning. What I saw was a bunch of old men taking naps.
Chapter 11
There was one group in the corner having a meeting.
It must have been lively because the guy I thought was the leader pointed at one young man and told him, “Get out of here. I told you not to take any credit in that paper, it was all to go to me.”
The young man stood up and left the group. He had to pass right by me.
I asked, “Did I hear right, he was mad because you didn’t give him credit for your work?”
He looked at me dumbly and nodded yes.
“What does that mean to your career?”
“It means I’m done here at Oxford, I will be doing good to get a professorship at a second or third rate school.”
“What is your area of expertise?”
“The Romans in early Britain.”
“Ever hear of the Second Augustan Legion?”
“Of course, how do you know of it?”
“My family owns the land where their headquarters or at least one of them is located.”
“Where?”
“Near here, a few miles.”
He got an excited look and told me, “There have always been stories about one near here, but it has never been found.”
“Well, it has now.”
He looked excited but then slumped his shoulders. “I have been sacked, I have lost my stipend so it doesn’t matter.”
“Come with me.”
I took him over to the Department Head and the Bursar.
“Gentlemen I have found the man who will lead the dig.”
The Department Head got a horrified look on his face.
“That�
��s not how things are done here. We have rules.”
“I have a rule also: ‘He who has the gold makes the rules.’ This man will lead the project or I will find someone at Cambridge.”
I had heard the crude term, fart in an elevator, now I knew what it was in real life. He stuttered a bit but there was no doubt of the outcome.
The leader of the group who had just fired my young friend I had to learn his name, -spoke up and said,
“Well, Randel-MacIver, you can’t beg your way back into my graces or use any influence you think you may have with our Department Head.”
“I’m not. I have a new project and sponsor.”
“And what would that be excavating kitty litter?
“The headquarters of the Second Augustian Legion near here.”
“Nonsense! I would know about such a find. And how would you find a sponsor so quickly?”
I then spoke up, “He stumbled over me after you fired him. He has what I need so I hired him.”
The snotty Don, I wasn’t worried about his name anymore, came back with, “You’re just a kid! You can’t have that much money.”
The Bursar spoke up, “I’m afraid Sir Richard has more than enough money for this project.”
Snotty Don then tried to backtrack and convince me I needed someone with experience.
“The problem I have with you taking over is I heard you try to take the credit for someone else's work. How do I know you have any experience? That is not even considering your lack of ethics.”
The room got very quiet at that point. The Department Head told Snotty Don that they would have to have a private conversation.
Meanwhile, I learned that my new head of the dig was named David.
“David, would you like to go see the site?”
“I would love to! That will give me an idea of what we are facing in the size of the team and cost.”
After stopping at The Meadows for me to change clothes again, David didn’t have to change as he was wearing fieldwork clothing. That was a good sign; he wasn’t afraid to get dirty.
We went to the site. It took us over two hours to walk through it. It was enormous.
“Rick, this will take years and cost into the millions.”
“That’s fine, I want this done right.”
“You are wealthy aren’t you?”
“I never have understood it, but I’m one of the richest people in the world right now.”
“Oh, then we can do this right.”
“That’s what I want.”
After rambling around for several hours with David taking plenty of notes we headed back to school. After dropping him off I headed back to the site. I was intrigued, to say the least.
I wandered over to what we thought was the back end of the site when I realized there had been other buildings. I pottered around with my shovel seeing if I could get an idea of what was there.
I almost did myself in, my shovel broke through to an underground room. I managed to throw myself backward or I would have ended up down there. I couldn’t see a bottom but when I dropped a rock it didn’t fall very far, maybe ten feet or so.
I returned to the house and picked up a torch and the Americans call a flashlight and about fifty feet of three-eighths of an inch manila rope. Back at the site, I was able to shine the light in the hole, my guess of ten feet wasn’t off by much.
I tied one end of the rope off on a stout tree trunk and used the other end to walk down the wall into the hole.
Once down below I could see that it was manmade underground storage. In the opposite corner was a stairway but it was blocked at the top.
The room had storage shelves and on each shelf, there was a wooden chest. The chest was stout with bronze around each edge. They had a bronze lock. They were all locked, but keys were on hooks next to each strongbox. I tried to lift one of them but it was too much. It would take at least two men to carry one.
I couldn’t resist and used a key to open one of the chests. It was hard to turn but I was able to do it without breaking the key off in the lock.
Holding my breath I lifted the lid. Inside it was full of coins. They took my breath away they had the shine of real gold. They looked like they had been minted yesterday.
I went into a frenzy of opening chests. There was another with more gold, about a dozen with worn silver coins, and one chest of bronze.
After I calmed down and started thinking rationally I relocked each chest and kept the fifteen keys with me.
Using the rope I got out of the saferoom and then rewound my rope and did my best to cover the hole with deadwood branches. It wasn’t a very good job but the best I could do.
I went back to the house and called my new expert, David, who had left me his number. I told him I had been thinking, what if there were gold or silver coins on the site. He explained the Treasure Trove law to me. At this time anything found under the ground to be retrieved later, and whose owner couldn’t be identified, was considered a treasure trove and belonged to the Crown.
That told me who I had to work with. I made two phone calls, one to our legal people in London asking them to form a company, Treasure Trove, PUC. I chose this because of the limited reporting requirements and the low risk of insolvency.
My next call was to my mentor, Mr. Norman. I asked him who handled the treasure trove for the crown. His response was a groan.
“Rick, what have you found.”
“Roman coins, lots of Roman coins.”
“Oh that isn’t so bad, the bronze coins aren’t worth that much.”
“What about silver and gold?”
Another groan came over the phone.
“Tell me it was only a few of them.”
“It wasn’t that many, only two chests of gold and twelve of silver.”
It got quiet on the other end of the line, no more groans. Now all business Mr. Norman told me that the chests had to be taken in custody and given to the British Museum as soon as possible. When news of the find got out people would be all over the area looking for more.
We arranged to meet at the Museum tomorrow morning. I called David and invited him to come with me.
I then call Jackson House and talked to my parents. We agreed to play this one straight down the middle. The coins would all go to the Crown, and any reward would be returned to the British Museum in my British Grandfather's name. He had been an amateur coin collector and would have gotten a kick out of it.
The next day, the result of our meeting with the Museum was that I would get security on the site as soon as possible.
After talking about it for a while, it was decided that a road would be put in, scraped at first then graveled. It would circle the site. This would make access easy for later exploration.
Chapter 12
For security, Mr. Norman recommended Securitas AB a Swedish firm. David had seen them used on other projects so I agreed to go with them. A whirlwind meeting with them had me signing a contract.
While I had financial responsibility they were to work with David. He and I both signed a statement to this effect. These people knew what they were doing.
While money isn’t an object anymore I did choke up a bit while signing the papers. It was to be around the clock, seven days a week. There would be patrols with dogs, checkpoints, even a guard shack at the entrance, and towers at each corner.
The entire site would be fenced. They were able to justify this to me by past sites they had guarded. When the news of the find became public we could expect a full-out assault by both amateurs and professionals.
The most important arrangement was for an armored truck and escorts to be on site the next morning to take the chests with the coins to the British Museum.
SAB, as I thought of them, told me they would have local reporters there along with David and anyone he wanted there to witness the removal. That would reduce the danger somewhat, but there would be others hoping to find someth
ing we missed.
All of this would start tomorrow morning. I made a point of letting Grand Mum and Mr. Hamilton know what would be going on in their peaceful world.
Mr. Hamilton took it with his normal reserve. Grand Mum became excited, what an adventure. She was on the phone with her confidants in minutes. I suspect the news would be in the morning papers.
I called the US to keep Mum and Dad in the loop. I was informed that my sister Mary had already decided to do a fashion shoot on site.
In the morning it looked more like a military convoy rather than moving cash from a store to the bank.
I watched the start of the process but had other commitments to keep. I drove down to Pinewood Studios for the next step in preparing for the movie.
This trip was for a wardrobe. I had to try on everything to ensure it fitted. Then they would take pictures to see what the camera thought. If that all worked, I had to stand next to people wearing the costumes the other actors would be wearing to make certain they didn’t clash with each other, that is, if they weren’t intended to clash.
Of course, everything wasn’t perfect. Some items had to be changed which required a repeat of the process. Some had to have a nip or tuck taken. By the time it was done I had spent the whole day and the only food I had was a dry sandwich from the Pinewood canteen.
Their canteen could have some lessons from Warner Brothers. I didn’t tell them that though. I had to come back again.
When I got back to The Meadows the place was empty. I asked the lone gardener where everyone was and he told me they were at the dig.
I changed into some rough clothes and donned my leather jacket and old fedora and hiked back. I was stopped by guards twice and had to show identification. This was a good thing.
At the edge of the site, in a clearing, a huge tent had been set up. It was the sort you would see at a large garden party. This is where I found Grand Mum, the Queen Mum, Mr. Hamilton, and most of our staff. They had set up tables with refreshments of all sorts. These were intended for the guards and David’s staff.
It seems Grand Mum had decided to take care of all her visitors in style. Looking at the way David’s people were putting it away, you would think they were starving students. They would love to work on this site.