by Jo Bannister
And that was silly, too, because they hadn’t known each other very long and they didn’t know each other very well. She’d saved his life a couple of times, but apart from that … She didn’t owe him any confidences. The fact that he’d had to share most of his life story with her, including—no, especially—the grim bits, didn’t put her under the obligation to reciprocate.
The man in the apron raised a hand, and as soon as Hazel had parked she was out of the car and throwing her arms around him. He wasn’t a big man—Hazel was taller—and where she was fair, he was faintly ginger. But he radiated that quiet capability that doesn’t need to be shouted about. There are two kinds of soldier: those who yell “Charge!” and those who say “Follow me.” Alfred Best was the latter kind.
Hazel disengaged from the hug and introduced them. The two men shook hands. “Come inside,” said Best, “have a beer while dinner’s finishing off.”
Hazel went to the cupboard under the stairs. “Home brew or the real stuff?” she asked Ash.
Gabriel Ash wasn’t a serious drinker, but he knew there was only one answer to that which wouldn’t make a man an implacable enemy. “Can I try your home brew?”
During lunch—the cod, despite Hazel’s misgivings, had developed only a thin layer of crackling—Best asked how long the drive had taken. Hazel flicked Ash a glance before answering. “We came the scenic route. Gabriel had some business in Grantham.”
Best was too straightforward a man to pretend not to know what she was talking about. Of course Hazel had told her father about the events of the last two months. Of course both Gabriel Ash’s part in them and the history it sprang from were known to him.
He regarded Ash levelly. “I was sorry to hear about your family, Mr. Ash,” he said somberly. “Are you getting anywhere with your inquiries?”
Before he met Hazel, for years the only one who had spoken to Ash about his tragedy was his therapist. It still felt strange to have it discussed in the course of a normal conversation. Strange, but better.
“Thank you,” he said. “No, I don’t really think so. I’m not sure there’s anything new to find. I thought so—at least I thought there was a chance—but the harder I look, the more I feel Hazel was probably right. That what I thought was a clue was only a diversion, something to channel me in a way that suited the man who dropped it. I’m going through the motions mainly so that I don’t wonder later if I missed something.”
“If that’s all that comes of it,” said Best, “it’ll have been worth your time.”
Over what Ash thought was crème brûlée but turned out to be blancmange, Best said to his daughter, “Pete says will you drop by his place before you leave. I told him you were coming. He’s been digging again—got something to show you.”
Hazel saw the slightly puzzled look on Ash’s face and grinned. “Not vegetables—archaeology. He’s putting together a history of the big house.”
“Pete is,” Ash said carefully.
“Lord Byrfield. But if your name was Peregrine,” said Hazel, “wouldn’t you try to keep it a secret?”
“Nearly as much as if it was Gabriel,” said Ash glumly.
They walked up the long drive after lunch. In the June sunshine the white lurcher flashed among the giant trees like a ghost on speed.
“It’s the rabbits,” explained Ash. “It’s in her blood.”
As she passed them, the dog paused just long enough to give Hazel a slightly embarrassed look, as if she knew chasing rabbits was less than cool but she just couldn’t resist.
Ash said, “I hope your father doesn’t mind having me and Patience to stay. It’s asking a lot, when your daughter turns up for a visit with not only a strange man but also his dog in tow.”
Hazel chuckled. She was wearing her thick fair hair in a loose ponytail, which together with the jeans and oversized shirt gave her a casual look, in marked contrast to the police uniform she’d been wearing when they first met. He thought she was also more relaxed than she had been. She’d had a rough time. It had ended with her shooting someone dead. You don’t put that behind you with a stiff drink and an early night. But Ash thought she was finding her balance again. He was relieved. He’d felt guilty for what he’d involved her in. It hadn’t been his fault, but that hadn’t stopped him from feeling guilty. Guilty was his default position.
“He’s used to it. Not strange men so much,” she added hastily, “but friends staying over. When you live miles from anywhere and there’s no last bus for people to catch, you’re used to making up a spare bed on the sofa. I think the record was seven twenty-year-old undergraduates. There were bodies everywhere—on the kitchen table, in the bath, and two of them slept in the greenhouse.”
A bend in the drive brought the building Ash had glimpsed from the gate lodge into full view. The beauty of it made him catch his breath. Hazel, covertly watching for his reaction, gave a faint, satisfied smile.
It wasn’t what most people mean by a stately home. It was too small, too—if it isn’t an absurd way to describe a house with nine bedrooms—homely. It would be more helpful to think of it as a manor house, a two-story, plus attics, stone building, the severity of its classical Georgian lines softened by Virginia creeper. The stones glowed with two hundred sunny summers, the sixteen-pane windows sparkled because none of the glass squares lined up precisely with any of its neighbors, and at the top of a modest fan of stone steps one of the heavy double doors stood open because a man in washing-up gloves was polishing the brass knocker.
Hazel shouted, “Hi, Pete!” and Lord Byrfield shaded his eyes with one yellow hand and waved.
“Hi, Hazel. Come to help?”
“You think I don’t have brass work at home I could polish?” she said, grinning as they met. “If the urge took me. Pete, I want you to meet a friend of mine. Gabriel Ash, Peregrine Byrfield. And this is Patience.”
The earl and the lurcher regarded one another solemnly for a moment. “Delighted, I’m sure,” said Byrfield, and Patience waved her tail.
Ash saw a man taller than himself, and narrower, and maybe ten years younger; unremarkable-looking, with fair hair and blue-gray eyes and a rather weak chin. A man you could have ridden the 8:10 to Paddington with every weekday for a year and not recognized if you’d seen him in the supermarket on a Saturday. But he did have a nice smile. “Gabriel, hm?”
Ash nodded long-sufferingly. “Peregrine?”
“I know.” Byrfield sighed. “Still, I suppose there are worse things to be called after than either an angel or a hawk. I’d hate to be called after a nut.”
Hazel thumped his arm hard enough to make him wince.
Byrfield left the brasses half polished and took them inside.
As with most houses, big and small, life at Byrfield revolved around the kitchen. There was a collection of leather armchairs and an overstuffed sofa arranged around a low oak table, an oak dresser black with age, and a television on a chest in a corner. Hazel flung herself into one of the armchairs as if she’d been coming here all her life. Ash took the sofa, and hoped Byrfield wouldn’t notice that Patience had jumped up beside him, so that they were now sitting side by side like a married couple.
“Dad says you’re digging again.”
Byrfield brought the coffee over. You could tell he was aristocracy by the plainness of the biscuits. “David Sperrin’s working on the far side of the lake. You remember David? His mother’s the artist, she lives at Wool Row. He left for university while you were still a child, but he’s been back at intervals.”
“I remember. He did history at Reading.”
“Archaeology,” said Byrfield, nodding so the correction seemed more like an elaboration. “Then he worked abroad for several years. I caught up with him last time he was home and asked him to come and do a survey for me.”
“Anything interesting turned up?”
Byrfield gave a self-deprecating grin. “It’s all interesting. You know how I feel about this place. If you mean Saxon gold or Roman mos
aics, then no, nothing like that. The footings of some walls we didn’t know about. Some medieval pottery. Oh—and this.” He was rummaging in a drawer of the dresser, unfolded a cotton-wool parcel in front of her.
“What is it?”
“It’s Romano-British—third, fourth century. It’s bronze, probably the handle of a tankard. But look—it’s a horse.”
Ash peered closer, too. “It’s the Uffington White Horse.”
Hazel looked at him in surprise, Byrfield in approval. “Exactly. David thinks whoever made it must have been to Uffington.”
“It’s a long way from here.”
“Where’s Uffington?” asked Hazel.
“Oxfordshire, I think,” said Ash. “A hundred and fifty miles? It’s a long way on foot.”
Byrfield shrugged. “People got around more than you’d think two thousand years ago. After all, the Romans came from Rome. Some of the artifacts we find came from farther afield. It would have taken a lot longer than a budget airline—well, a bit longer than a budget airline—but sailing ships only need wind, and horses can go long distances on not much more than grass. If you could plan for journeys lasting years rather than hours or days, you could travel until you met something you couldn’t cross. The Atlantic Ocean, for instance. The Himalayas. The Sahara. Lots of people died doing it. But others got through, or at least completed one stage of the journey. Artifacts are durable. If needs be, they can lie half buried in the sand until the next caravan comes along to carry them another hundred miles.”
“Pete!” said Hazel, mischievous with delight. “You’re a romantic!”
He looked bashful. “No, I’m a farmer. But I do find this stuff fascinating. Listen, stay for dinner. We’ll prime David with half a bottle of burgundy and he’ll talk till the cows come home. The places he’s been, the things he’s dug up.” Suddenly his face clouded. “I’m sorry. Just because I love this stuff doesn’t mean everyone has to listen. There are probably better topics of conversation for a sophisticated dinner party.”
“Sophisticated?” echoed Hazel. “Us? I haven’t even brought a posh frock.” She looked down at herself critically. “I’ve got this shirt and another one just like it.”
“You’ll still be overdressed for my dinner table.” Byrfield chuckled, relieved. “David leaves his overalls on the boot room radiator, and I try to remember to kick my wellies off, but that’s about it. My mother refuses to eat with us. She has a tray in her room. Short of some major disaster like the maid’s day off, she still does the whole changing-for-dinner thing. Then she eats alone in her sitting room.”
“How the other half lives,” remarked Hazel, the note of wonder in her voice only slightly tempered by the desire not to appear rude.
“I am the other half,” said Pete Byrfield grimly, “and I think it’s bizarre.”
CHAPTER 3
EXCEPT AS A paying visitor, Ash had never been in a country house. He had no idea what to expect. Five years ago, at the height of his career, he’d spent generously on good cars, on family holidays, on their London home. It had never occurred to him to employ a maid. At Byrfield, he discovered by trying to listen without appearing nosy, there was even in these straitened days a respectable staff—in addition to Lady Byrfield’s maid and Fred Best, who was the handyman, there were a cook-housekeeper, a gardener, a groom, and a boy. Ash didn’t know that boy was an official position, so when Byrfield made a passing reference to “my boy,” Ash thought he was being made privy to a personal confidence, and felt that it was too much information much too soon.
Hazel seemed to read his mind, or at least the faint, dark lowering of his brow, and gave a secret grin. “Derek’s the hall boy,” she explained when Byrfield’s attention was elsewhere. “That’s his title—he does all the heavy stuff that isn’t somebody else’s job.”
Ash felt himself coloring. “I thought…”
“I know,” said Hazel. “But he’s engaged to one of the farmers’ daughters, so I don’t think he’s that way inclined. Actually, I don’t think Pete is, either.”
Ash felt awkward and stupid and out of his depth. At least Hazel knew how the system worked. She had more in common with the earl of Byrfield, who was her father’s employer, than Ash had. It was the difference between old money and new money. The rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate at least share the same world. Byrfield and his boy were probably equally puzzled by people like Ash—men in suits who appeared to run everything without ever making anything.
Across the table, David Sperrin barked a gruff laugh. He was a small, dark man a few years older than Byrfield, with a deep musical voice that nevertheless told of long hours in wet holes. There was a rattle in his chest when he laughed. “I think your ability to provide Byrfield with an heir is being questioned, Pete.”
Byrfield looked up from carving the lamb, apparently without rancor. “Yes? There’s time yet. The Byrfields have always been better at breeding cattle and horses than sons—it took the aged parents three goes and twelve years to produce me. But we always seem to manage eventually. I expect I’ll get the hang of it sooner or later.”
And that, thought Ash with quiet admiration, is what generations of good breeding buys you. Grace.
The Bests had, so far as anyone knew, no trace of blue blood anywhere in their veins—nothing but commoner back to the ark. Perhaps that was where Hazel got her fierce sense of loyalty. She turned on the archaeologist as if he’d kicked her spaniel. “How about you, then, David? Made Diana a granny yet, have you?”
Sperrin flashed her a wolfish grin, all teeth and no humor. “My mother doesn’t really do children. She wishes she’d drowned me at birth.”
Wonderfully inoffensive, Byrfield murmured, “Don’t we all?” and the tension left the air in pretend scowls and genuine laughter.
Ash steered the conversation onto safer ground. “How’s the dig coming? Anything unexpected?”
“It isn’t a dig yet,” explained Sperrin, “just a survey. I’m sticking ranging rods into interesting-looking humps to see if any of them are worth excavating.”
“I thought that was done with radar these days.”
“Geo-phys.” Sperrin nodded. “It is, when you’ve got it. If you haven’t, it’s amazing what you can learn by poking things with a stick.”
“David thinks I’m a cheapskate for not buying him everything in the toy shop,” said Byrfield cheerfully. “He doesn’t understand that I’m not a government department. This is my hobby. I’m not going to impoverish the estate pursuing it.”
“We could be missing things,” warned Sperrin. “Important things.”
“They’re not going anywhere,” said Byrfield with equanimity. “If I don’t find them, my descendants will. Maybe your descendants will do the spadework.”
Sperrin acknowledged himself beaten with a gruff chuckle. “Pete thinks the feudal system is still alive and well and living in Burford. That because he’s expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, the same goes for everyone.”
“My father was a soldier and I’m a police officer,” volunteered Hazel. “It’s not that different.”
Ash found curious eyes on him. “My father was a tax inspector. I worked for the government, too.”
“David?”
Sperrin grinned with the sheer pleasure of discomfiting people. “My father’s a gypsy. He tarmacs drives. Maybe that’s where I got my skill with a spade.”
“So it’s not just the landowning gentry who follow the well-worn path,” observed Byrfield with quiet triumph. “You’re all every bit as bound by your family history as I am. You’re just more reluctant to admit it.”
Gabriel Ash looked down at the white dog curled at his feet. Patience met his eyes with a steady golden gaze. If anybody’s interested, she said, my ancestors were all dogs, too.
From the absence of startled gasps around the table, Ash assumed that no one else had heard her.
* * *
Later, the remains of the meal replaced b
y an enormous, somewhat battered coffeepot, Sperrin turned to Hazel. “Will you still be here tomorrow?”
“Sure. We’re driving back on Sunday. Why?”
“We’re planning to take the top off a funny hump by the icehouse. I think it’s probably a cist—a burial mound. If you’ve nothing better to do, you’re welcome to watch.”
Hazel raised inquiring eyebrows at Ash. “Sounds like fun.”
It wasn’t the word he’d have chosen, but you don’t have to be a ghoul to be intrigued by the graves of people who lived thousands of years ago. “A cist—that’s like a dolmen, is it?”
“Pretty much. Usually stone slabs rather than boulders, but the idea’s the same—to create a void under the earth where your chief or whoever can rest undisturbed until they invent archaeologists.”
“What’ll be inside?”
“Hard to say till we open it,” said Sperrin, taking more coffee. “Right now it’s just a hump in the grass with something solid inside it. It could even be a boulder that’s got covered with earth over the years. But it seems very regular—almost square. I think someone made it.”
“When?”
“Well, that’s certainly the right question. If we find bones, or grave goods, or if—please God!—the stones are decorated, we can make a fair stab at dating it. But you can’t date plain stone. You can look at the base layer and see what it was built on, but the lake has probably inundated the site at intervals, and that confuses the picture. Educated guess? Neolithic. But it could be later.”
“And Neolithic is…?” There were lots of things Hazel knew, and lots she didn’t, and she had no qualms about asking when she came up against one of the latter.
“New Stone Age. Maybe five thousand years ago. Maybe more.”
In a time when a new car is old in eight years, and a new computer in three, five thousand years is an impressive span. Two hundred generations. The time of Stonehenge and the pyramids, when the cutting edge of cutting-edge technology was a stone. When you shaped the kind of stone you wanted by hitting it with another stone, and mostly what you did with it then was hit some more stones. That’s why it’s called the Stone Age. When someone got the bizarre idea—and you can imagine how his wife looked at him—that by heating some of those funny-colored stones in a really hot fire you could produce a metal knife, or a spearhead, or a needle, it was a leap in technology comparable with nothing since. The wheel was inspired by a log rolling down a hill; the steam engine was developed from the kettle; the jet aircraft was designed by people—clever people—putting together successive increments of engineering discovery. But whoever first thought there was something to be gained by burning rocks?