The Digger's Rest

by K. Patrick Malone

  Mitch took his time, having been there at least a half a dozen times before, and stopped at the concession stand. “Okay, I’ll take three tee shirts, one of each design, all mediums, one of each of the big posters, one of your best books on the subject, throw in a bunch of postcards too, and your biggest coffee mug, please,” Mitch said to the man behind the counter, resigned to the fact that he’d never be able to resist spoiling the kid. It was just too much fun, and way too rewarding, for both of them. Then, with his shopping bag in tow, he went and sat on the closest bench to watch Simon walk round and round the structure, soaking in every angle, every line and every nuance and shadow in the changing light as the sun began to shift from morning into afternoon.

  It took about an hour for Simon to completely exhaust himself and decide he was ready to go. They sat on the car for a while to breathe and recoup, finally getting a chance to eat the breakfast Madame Duvalier had made for them. The color in Simon’s face from the fresh air and the excitement of the event made him look healthier than he ever had as he chattered on and on, flipping through the pages of the book Mitch had bought him.

  When they stood up to get back in the car to go, Simon looked at him closely, affectionately, his blue eyes shining, and put out his hand for Mitch to shake. Mitch pushed it away and opened his arms. “Come on,” he said and put his arms around him, hugging him tightly.

  Simon fell into them naturally and hugged him back tightly saying with an emotional quiver in his voice, “Thank you, Dr. Bramson, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  Mitch pulled back sharply and looked at him, forcing his eyebrows and forehead into a false image of sternness and held up one finger. “Huh?”

  ‘Thank you…Mitch,” Simon said blushing.

  The next stop would be their final destination and Mitch took the opportunity offered by the remainder of the trip to give Simon a primer on the history of the area. Exeter was one of the oldest cities in England, pre-dating even Roman times. Named after the river Exe, which runs through it, for close to two thousand years it had been the center of civilization for the Southwest of England, primarily inhabited by the indigenous Saxons and the Celts from Ireland, Wales, French Normandy and Brittany from its earliest recorded times.

  It later became the Romans’ first real foothold on the isle then called Britannica. It was from its nearest neighboring county to the west, Cornwall, that the legend of Arthur Pendragon, the once and future King of England first sprang, with the castle ruins called Tintagel on the cliffs of the northwest coast overlooking the Irish Sea laying claim to being his birthplace.

  Scholars throughout the world disagreed about virtually every aspect of the Arthurian legend, from whether a man known as “Arthur” ever even existed, to whether, if he did exist, that he rose from the ranks of the Romans who stayed on in England after the Empire pulled out. Another theory was that, like the person known as Moses in the Hebrew Bible, he could not have been one single person, but an amalgamation of many different men, who, over time, became fused in the minds of those who passed on the oral tradition, into one man.

  At no time has any scholar, historian or archaeologist ever brought forth any hard evidence to support any one theory over the other. Then there was the connection to Glastonbury, the reputed burial place of this man called Arthur. Glastonbury, another medieval city located in Dorset, the county north of Devonshire.

  Logistically, Exeter, given its historical timeframe, created what might be called a “triangle” of medieval centers of civiliza-tion. So, following Jack’s logic, if Arthur was indeed born at Tintagel or its environs, and if he indeed succeeded in unifying the various native tribes of England into one nation, even if it was only limited to the modern area known as the West Country before dying and being buried in Glastonbury, then Exeter, being the heart of Devon, the county between Dorset and Cornwall, would have undoubtedly been subject to his influence, possibly even directly. So it would follow that if there were powerful nobles located in and around Exeter (and there most decidedly were) then Arthur would have most definitely had to have contact with them through alliances and treaties, even marriages, that would have brought forth the unified nation. That would have been a political certainty, and where there is political smoke, there most certainly have been political fire. The only question that remained was for them to find proof of it—if it existed.

  On the other hand, it was just as likely, if not more so, that their castle ruins were built sometime after the alleged time of Arthur in the fifth century, but sometime before the Norman Invasion brought William the Conqueror to England in the eleventh century. There was a whole area of over five hundred years to be taken into account, so to say it would be a crap shoot would be a monumental understatement, but in a world where a King Tut and the lost city of Troy could suddenly become un-lost through the faith and efforts of the Howard Carters and Heinrich Schliemanns of the world, the result of this particular expedition would certainly be anyone’s guess.

  In the end there was nothing to be lost, the ruins were undoubtedly over a thousand years old and even if they did turn out to be more William the Conqueror than Arthur Pendragon, it would still be a nice, long, showy feather for any art historian or archaeologist’s cap, particularly if you were Mitchell Bramson, America’s leading medieval scholar, because in his business, a thousand years of history is still a thousand years of history so whatever was buried underneath those ruins would be his ‘bread and butter.’

  ***

  The drive down to Exeter was a long one, made even longer by Mitch’s lack of familiarity with driving on the left side of the road, and by then, in the encroaching dark. Simon thought it was the craziest thing he’d ever seen and flinched whenever he saw a car that seemed to be coming directly for them.

  It helped that they had so much to talk about. Mitch gave a basic tutorial on what they were going to do, what they were going to look for and where. He gave Simon a laundry list of duties that were to be his primary responsibility including keeping a daily diary of everything they did during the day. Who did what; what was found where.

  Simon was to keep very specific charts of their activities, section by section, detailed graphs of the site including land measurements and grid locations, photographing everything they found, both in situ as well as after cleaning later, measurements, physical descriptions and cataloging. On top of that, he was to make accurate documentation of Mitch’s and Lady Madeline’s observations as they went along. He was to video everything from the perspective of a later showing at the Museum and possibly news coverage if whatever they found turned out to be big. But above all else, he was to understand that the truth about what they were really looking for was to be kept amongst themselves, which meant Mitch, Lady Madeline and himself, exclusively.

  Mitch explained that once they got there and got settled, they would need to get some local men, maybe two or three to start, to help with the lifting and carrying labor, the heavy digging and any building reconstruction they could manage. He explained that they would have to go out in the first few days and gather whatever supplies they couldn’t bring with them, shovels, spades, sifters, some run-of-the-mill garden tools and paint brushes for dusting off delicate artifacts, and a small tent to set up a daytime base of operations. Mitch had no idea what Lady Madeline might be bringing, so he thought it best to plan ahead and shift his plans later, if necessary.

  They stopped for a leisurely dinner along the way, so it was after seven in the evening before they hit the Exeter city limits. But they still needed to find their way to the site. According to the directions, they had another ten or so miles into the country to get to the small village called Exton St. Cyres where the work was to begin.

  It’d already been a long day, an especially exciting one for Simon, and they were both exhausted. Neither of them could wait to get to the comfortable beds at the inn Lord Cotswold had gotten for them. From what Jack had told them, he’d rented an entire cottage for them for the month, which w
as attached to the inn.

  Neither of them could remember the name of the inn they’d be looking for in the village and they were both too tired to go digging through their papers, but from Mitch’s experiences in small English villages, there’d probably only be one anyway, so he figured it really didn’t matter. They’d ask the first pedestrian they came across when they got into the village square.

  BOOK II

  THE DIGGER’S REST

  This ain't no party, This ain't no disco, This ain't no fooling around. This ain't no Mudd Club, or C. B. G. B.s. I ain't got time for that now.”

  Life During Wartime,

  ……..As performed by The Talking Heads

  “And there you is, awaitin’ fer him…jes’ like a spider.”

  ………Mammy to Scarlett O’Hara, referring to the unsuspecting Ashley Wilkes, From Gone

  With The Wind

  Chapter VIII

  LADY MADELINE AND SANDRINE

  Wishin' and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin' Plannin' and dreamin' each night of his charms That won't get you into his arms So if you're lookin' to find love you can share All you gotta do is hold him and kiss him and love him And show him that you care Show him that you care just for him Do the things he likes to do Wear your hair just for him, 'cause You won't get him Thinkin' and a-prayin', wishin' and a-hopin'

  Wishin' and Hopin'

  ……..As performed by Miss Dusty Springfield

  Lady Madeline Cotswold knew from her earliest memories as a girl that her life wasn’t to be one of frilly dresses and frivolous romance. Born Madeline Newbury to a moderately successful tobacco shop owner and a seamstress in Yorkshire, she knew, above all else, she wanted to be an academic but not just any kind of academic. She wanted to be a field researcher and explorer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You are joking, aren’t you, dear?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Madeline was too stunned for words.

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

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

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

  Madeline started to speak, “But…”

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

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

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

  ***

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