A Baby's Bones

by Rebecca Alexander

  She turned her back on Sage to walk into the hall. Her shoulder-length hair was twisted up into a ragged bun, her pale neck emerging from a cardigan. It was covered with red marks that hadn’t quite breached the skin.

  Sage hesitated, but she felt compelled to say something. ‘Judith – you have some nasty scratches on your neck. Is everything OK?’

  Judith wrenched open the door. Her voice was colourless, and her eyes were fixed on Sage’s chest rather than her face. ‘Everything is fine. Thank you for stopping by.’

  The door clicked behind her, and a key grated in the lock.

  8

  31st July 1580

  Indenture made on the last day of July, in the seconde and twentieth yeare of the reign of our soveryne lady Queene Elizabeth, between Sir Solomon Seabourne of the county of Sussex, and Lord Anthonie Banstock, Baron of said manoir. Being the lease of the Well House, one garden, one orchard, six acres of good pasture in nine fields, let to Richard Arnesley of Newport, and fourteen acres of woods. The sum of thirty guineas per annum, to be paid upon the first day of July, each yeare. Signed by the hand of S. Seabourne and V. Garland on behalf of his lordship Anthonie Banstock.

  Accounts of Banstock Manor, 1576–1582

  The women make much of Viola since her betrothal, which is little to her liking. She is forbidden childish pursuits such as visiting the farms, or fishing in the river with her father. Instead, she must learn the arts of the kitchen, still room, scullery and the laundry, that she might command her servants. Not that Seabourne has a great household, merely three menservants and a few rooms in a house in London. But here he has arranged with Lord Banstock that he will rent the Well House until the marriage. Then the couple will take up residence in a wing of the manor itself, at least for part of the year. I am glad, for Viola is its heart, with her laughter and singing, and she lightens all our tasks.

  The harvest is going to be a poor one, and taxes are still heavy, but Viola turns account after account into people for me. ‘Ah, Master Collins, he has a bad leg,’ she tells me. ‘But his son is sending him money from his draper’s business in Southampton.’

  Another snippet. ‘Andrew Mattock,’ she says, with the wisdom of a matron, ‘has got Mary Fitton with child and must marry her. My father has promised a dowry.’ She pauses in her calculations, a frown upon her brow. I see that all the women’s potions have not prevented the sun bringing out her freckles. ‘Why does my father dower a poor girl?’ she asks.

  To sweeten the contract, thinks I, as the Fitton girl has been turned onto her back by half the scythemen and shepherds on the Island. Better she be wed before she bears another bastard child. At least her fertility is proven, unlike our sad mistress, who is now plagued by a rash that makes her tear at her skin. She also suffers sharp pains that send her attendants into a panic many times a day. But the babe at least kicks well.

  ‘In charity, as he does for other poor girls on occasions.’ I underline a total in my ledger and turn to the new page. ‘And a few pounds are nothing to a man like his lordship.’

  She turns to me. ‘Will you account my dowry, too, in your ledgers?’

  ‘Indeed.’ I look at her, sat suddenly quiet and shy on the high stool. ‘You shall have clothes as well as gold for your marriage. And my Lord Seabourne will settle monies upon you as his son’s wife.’

  ‘It is a good connection for us, isn’t it? The Seabournes are rich and have many ships and holdings.’ Viola’s voice is small, and she stares at her hands.

  ‘And we have friends at court. Indeed, your father has already introduced Lord Seabourne to a number of lords and merchants who might use his fleet of ships in their own enterprises.’ I look at her, seeing the childish fears. ‘And he will love you for your own sake, for who could not?’

  When Viola smiles it is as if the sun warms my old bones. People tell Viola things. They trust me, their steward. They will bow to me, answer my questions with a few words, but Viola opens their smiles, and they babble like children. All except her bridegroom. He is kind but talks to her as if she were a child, or a puppy. She is tongue-tied. I can see she is dazzled by him, his cleverness, his handsome face and good figure, but his eyes stray too much towards our reclusive seamstress for my liking.

  The embroideress grows pale, and whispers gather in the laundry and stables that she is not virtuous. I wish Viola was not so enamoured of her.

  Vincent Garland, Steward to Lord Banstock, His Memoir

  9

  Friday 29th March

  Sage brushed her wet hair out of her eyes. It was a bit drier under the awning they had put up, but not much. The wind fled from the sea and whistled between Bramble Cottage and the hedge. It fluttered papers and chased plastic pots across the two tables she had put up. They now had forty-six adult bones, including a skull, half a jaw and most of a shattered pelvis, arranged in one container. The baby’s bones fitted into the large sandwich box: half a femur, the arm bones, most of the skull, three ribs, a clavicle, a few fragments of one tibia and a number of vertebrae.

  Professor Yousuf Sayeed was looking through the finds with Steph. The forensic anthropologist had jumped at the chance to come to the Island, and Sage knew him well. He had been one of her lecturers a decade before.

  ‘These are remarkably well preserved,’ Yousuf said. His camera flashed. ‘So often we lose infant remains altogether. Do you know if they were dropped in the water itself, or just buried in the loose debris after it was filled in?’

  ‘We assumed they were covered along with the infill. The bodies were only a few metres down.’

  He turned a tiny vertebra over with forceps. ‘If the bodies were dropped in the bottom of the well the water may have allowed them to float up through what would be liquid mud. I’m surprised at the condition of the bones. Of course, the water is quite alkaline here, which would aid in preservation.’ He turned the arm bones over. ‘You saw the scratch on the left humerus, I suppose?’

  ‘No. Where?’ Sage and Steph leaned over the sandwich box, and Elliott looked up from his sieving and sorting.

  There was an incised line, deep into the tiny humerus, close to where it would have joined the shoulder. Sage felt her own baby flutter like a bird. ‘Why would someone injure an infant?’ She felt sick. It was bad enough to imagine the baby drowning, let alone wounded. She touched a hand to her bump.

  Yousuf glanced down at her belly before he answered. ‘It might not be ante-mortem. Maybe someone wanted to disarticulate the body to conceal it, and changed their mind. Dropped it down the well.’ He shrugged. ‘In forensic work we see quite a few concealed or discarded babies.’

  Elliott, who had come over to the table, pointed at a piece of the small jawbone. ‘We were wondering about the nick in the jaw. I thought I might have scratched it getting it out, but Sage thinks it could be a cut.’

  Sage pointed it out. ‘It could be deliberate, I suppose.’

  ‘It is very straight. And there’s something else,’ Yousuf said. ‘The bones of the skull aren’t completely fused, they are separate plates. Most of the bones are poorly ossified. This was a baby who died very soon after, or at birth. From the last month of pregnancy to a month after term, shall we say.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Steph pressed her hand to her mouth for a moment. ‘Was it even born, Professor? I mean, it might have been inside the mother. Could it be a coffin birth?’

  Yousuf went over to the adult’s bones. ‘That’s a reasonable idea; post-mortem foetal extrusions are incredibly rare, but possible. But I don’t think so in this case.’

  ‘Post-mortem whats?’ Elliott’s face was screwed up.

  Sage explained. ‘During decomposition, gas and fluid build-up in the abdomen can put pressure on an unborn foetus and force it out of the mother.’

  Elliott looked nauseated. ‘But that isn’t what happened here.’

  ‘The skeletons were found separately, the baby wasn’t close to the adult pelvis.’ Yousuf pointed to the adult bones. ‘This was unlikely to
be the mother of the child. If a woman had gone through a full, or almost full-term, pregnancy and birth, I would expect dorsal pubic pitting in this area. There are no grooves that I would associate with pregnancy or childbirth. This is probably a female skeleton, but I can’t be sure. And obviously I can’t guess at the gender of the baby.’ He sighed. ‘You possibly have a woman with someone else’s child buried here. I doubt if you would get useable DNA, and the cost would be prohibitive, but that would be the easiest way to confirm it.’

  Steph leaned forward. ‘Can’t we be certain of the adult’s gender?’

  He shrugged. ‘Eighty, ninety per cent maybe. It’s not a typical pelvis for a female, and we can only be sure in ninety-five per cent of cases anyway. The femur also suggests an unusual height for a female of the era. Maybe five nine or ten. It’s an anomalous picture.’

  Elliott, who towered over the group, brushed the dirt off another tiny bone and laid it on the table with the baby’s bones. ‘Here’s a collar bone – I mean a clavicle. Now we have both.’

  Yousuf gently arranged it into position, then leaned forward to look more closely. He picked up the dry clavicle already in place. ‘You know, I think there was a more extensive injury. Let me show you.’ He picked up a ruler used for scale. ‘You are a small baby. If I cut on this plane, in a slashing motion—’ He placed the edge of the ruler against Sage’s collar bone diagonally onto the top of her arm. ‘Here, we find a cut on the humerus, a deeper one in the clavicle, and another nick terminating at the jaw. A single slash.’

  The four stood under the flapping tarpaulin of the awning, taking in the awful implications of Yousuf’s words. Sage struggled with the image his words created, and looked at Steph and Elliott, who were both silent. She was the first to speak. ‘Thanks, Yousuf, I really appreciate this.’

  ‘Anything else while I’m here?’

  ‘Any estimate as to the woman’s age?’ Sage pointed to the skull. ‘I’m thinking mid-thirties.’

  Yousuf held up the skull for Steph to see, ever the professor. ‘This area, the spheno-occipital synchondrosis, is fused in ninety-five per cent of people by twenty-five.’ He traced the line with his finger. ‘How would we further examine the skull?’

  Elliott leaned over Steph’s shoulder. ‘We could score the sutures for the degree of fusion to get an estimate of the age.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s much easier to estimate the age of young adults but my feeling is this—’ he ran his finger down the lines wiggling across the skull, ‘suggests someone over thirty rather than under. See? These sutures are smoothing out altogether. Thirty to forty, maybe more.’ He looked again at the pelvis. ‘I think female, on balance, but it’s unusual. Maybe there’s something pathological. I have an idea. Send me photos of the bones and I’ll look into it. Anything else?’

  Sage shook her head. ‘No, we’re— actually, maybe there is something. What do you make of these?’ She scrolled through pictures on her phone. ‘They were carved into some of the stones at the top of the well.’ She handed the phone to Yousuf.

  ‘Interesting.’ Yousuf peered at the pictures. ‘I have no idea what they are. Probably superstitious or religious. But it’s not really my area.’

  ‘There are more carved into the beam over the fireplace in the cottage.’

  Yousuf looked intrigued. ‘I haven’t seen anything similar before; they are quite elaborate. And curves are harder to carve than straight lines. The man you need to talk to is Felix Guichard – that’s G-U-I-C-H-A-R-D. He’s a social anthropologist based in Exeter; I know him because we both work for the World Health Organization. He loves all these folk symbols, warding off bad luck and so on. Send the pictures to him, see if he recognises them.’

  Sage took the phone back and made a note. ‘Is he French?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. Nice guy, got divorced a couple of years ago if you’re interested.’ He laughed when she frowned at him. ‘OK, OK, back to your burial. Which is fascinating.’

  Sage couldn’t stop herself smiling. ‘Can you confirm a date?’

  ‘Looking at the degradation – although I’ll do a chemical analysis for you on my samples – I think you are safely in the historical area of 1400 to 1800, at first sight. Burial inside the well prevented animal scavenging, weathering, that sort of degradation. The midden may have been high in bacteria and insects, which would have stripped the bones quickly, if they are contemporary with the infill. The archaeology suggests 1500s, maybe a little later, but you know that already. Keep me informed. It’s an interesting case. I’ll inform the Home Office it’s definitely historical.’

  Sage followed him to his car. ‘Thank you, Yousuf. Don’t think I’m being completely hysterical, but this place creeps me out. It makes it difficult to be objective. We’re all behaving a bit strangely. Steph’s tearful, Elliott’s in a world of his own. I can’t be as objective as I’d like about the baby.’

  ‘Of course. It’s an occupational hazard of working with crime scenes, I’m afraid. I do two or three a year, this is your first.’

  ‘Crime scene? But it’s centuries old.’

  ‘Something evil was done to that child, and probably to that woman. It’s natural to be appalled, upset. But one thing is certain, and it should give you comfort.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘At least the killer is dead and buried.’

  * * *

  Sage decided to take a walk at lunchtime, to see if she could find the gravestone the pub landlord had mentioned. Steph and Elliott were full of morbid speculations about what had happened to the people in the well. It was understandable but unsupported by the evidence, and it was good to be on her own. Seeing Marcus near the church yesterday had shaken her a bit. She was still attracted to him, still flattered that he was interested, even at more than six months pregnant. She couldn’t shake the idea that he was checking up on her.

  She lengthened her stride, her work boots getting purchase on the wet grass of the common. A field left for Banstock village to use for recreation, it was bordered on two sides by a wall of dressed limestone blocks. The Victorian map had shown the site of the old abbey only half a mile away, now levelled, probably the source of the well stones. A low mound towards the south had a few trees on it, rabbit paths widened by dogs and walkers criss-crossing the slopes. Sage thought it was the right size and location for a plague burial. She shaded her eyes from the low sun, which lit up celandines peppering the grass, along with a few early daisies. An older woman marshalled four fluffy dogs on an assortment of extending leads, like a mobile maypole weaving some spring dance.

  A footpath sign led through a gateway in the wall from the High Street, and the landscape changed. The ground ran downhill, the scrub trees and bushes giving way to dense oak and beech coppicing maybe two or three hundred years old, a tiny pocket of ancient forest. The path forked into two, and Sage took the less worn one. It meandered, found a muddy patch that might become a stream in wet weather, and disappeared into brambles up the other side of the dip. She saw several fallen trees, one of which appeared solid enough to take her weight, and used it to get halfway over the mire, jumping the rest.

  The trees on the other side of the dried-up stream were closely packed, the undergrowth encroaching onto a rough path. The wood was strangely quiet. A few distant calls from robins and blackbirds staking out territory echoed from the common, but she could no longer hear the road.

  The crack of a twig underfoot made her jump. Something rustled through the brambles to her left, and she twisted around to follow the sound of scrabbling. It faded away and after a few moments of hearing her own heart beating uncomfortably in her ears, Sage took in her surroundings.

  She almost missed the stone. Partially obscured by a fallen bough, the limestone block was half jacketed with green moss. A straight edge caught her eye. She took her camera from her pocket, photographed the greenery in situ, and then started to tug at the branch. It was tied down with brambles and had been partly sucked into the muddy gro
und. She was sweating despite the cold in the shade, but finally she tore the bough loose and dragged it aside.

  The revealed marker leaned back about forty degrees, and she photographed it from different angles with her glove for scale. Then she took a flexible tool from her pocket and started scraping at the vegetation covering the stone. It was difficult to remove, mosses grown onto lichens, some of which could be as old as the carved inscription. Gentle scraping gave way to more vigorous work, and finally Sage could clear out the lines of the writing with a pick. D – A – M gradually emerged from the left-hand side, followed by an O or a C, then Z – E – L. Damozel, the word Dennis Lacey had used? More photographs, then she found a heap of dryish leaves to kneel on, to tackle the thinner words underneath. Isabeau. Finally Deschassee. There was no date, no cross. DAMOZEL ISABEAU DESCHASSEE. She explored the ground around the stone, looking for any other evidence of the burial, like a sunken area or a grave mound.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  Sage jumped to her feet, spun around at the voice and flinched at the sight of a shotgun. The man holding it was tall and heavy, his checked shirt falling in a curve over his waistband. He scowled from under thick white hair, some of it standing on end. He waved the gun in her direction.

  ‘Well?’ he snapped.

  ‘I came on the footpath.’ Sage put a hand up. ‘Don’t point the gun at me, please.’

  ‘Who are you and why are you trespassing? This side of the stream isn’t common land.’ The man dropped the tip of the gun towards the ground. ‘That’s criminal damage, right there, scraping at the stone.’

  Sage stood tall, though her heartbeat was thudding uncomfortably in her ears. ‘I’m Dr Sage Westfield, and I’m from the county archaeologist’s office. Did you know you have a gravestone here?’

  ‘Damozel? Certainly.’

  ‘Well, this might be what we call an irregular burial. Do you know anything about this Isabeau?’

  The man broke the gun open, and hooked it over his arm. ‘Bessie! Bessie, girl!’ He whistled loudly, which was answered by a bark somewhere in the scrub. ‘Bloody dog.’ He looked at the stone, and bent to read the rest of the cleaned-up inscription. ‘Isabeau. Funny name. I don’t even know what the word underneath means. We knew about the stone of course. My brother and I used to play here as children, dam up the stream, that sort of thing. We thought Damozel was either a suicide or a witch. We made up all sorts of stories about her and her ghost.’