by Peter Hayes
Then again, staking bodies in England isn’t only some quaint neolithic rite. As late as 1826, a suicide and suspected murderer named Griffith was publicly buried at the intersection of Eton Street, Grosvenor Place and the King’s Road, London, with a stake through his heart. And if these were the ways of sophisticated Londoners, what might we expect from the good folk of country Dorset?
I recalled Tacitus’s observation regarding the rites of the northern tribes:
. . . the shirker and disreputable are drowned in miry swamps, covered with wattled hurdles.
So then was my Lady a murderess or adulteress?
It was eleven in the evening when I remembered the treasure. This may seem odd, but the golden trove did not overly excite me; what interested me most was what, if anything, it might tell us about her.
The country hospital was dreary at that hour. Light from bulbs of the weakest wattage coated the walls like a film of margarine—shine without illumination.
My colleague’s door was almost hidden at the end of a long hall. A sign declared:
Wooland Strugnell
HM Coroner
By Appointment
under which some droll had scrawled:
or chance!
I knocked, then gently tried the knob, not expecting it to turn, and was surprised when it did. Strugnell, too, was up and working.
I asked him about the treasure and was apprised it had been brought here, to the hospital, earlier that evening, still encased in a block of peat. To have “excavated it properly,” would have been “unworkable,” he said, and would have required constant surveillance. And who was about to sit in a bog twenty-four hours a day? Not he! Plus, whomever he hired to guard the treasure—for thirty pounds per diem— would steal as much of it as they could carry. No, it was locked in the hospital cellar, and only he had the key. He said this in a grand and boastful way that was tinged, nonetheless, with self-deprecation, as if all he’d attained in his forty-odd years was a key to a cage in a hospital basement.
I asked him for it. He gave it up without demur. I took the elevator down. The treasure was behind a wire partition. Boxes of generic tissue, mop heads, and rolls of paper toweling had been pushed to one side. It was a woefully inadequate barrier to theft. Maybe toilet paper was safe behind it, but golden torcs?
I unlocked the cage and examined it more closely. It reeked of bog. A few of its pieces were finely worked ornaments: armlets, bracteates and pins; while others were smelted gobs of hack silver, electrum filings, and thumb-size gold bars, all nestled together and gleaming dully, like fish in a bucket.
It was then something stopped me cold. From out of the vat of worked and ceaselessly curving precious metals protruded one right angle, which, if I wasn’t mistaken, was the corner of a book. It had not been visible when the hoard was uncovered; resettling, apparently, having brought it to light.
Every anthropologist in the world, I am sure, has had at one time a similar fantasy: to recover some amazing treasure rivaling the Rosetta Stone! In my mind, I had always seen it being lifted, dripping, from the pale waters of a desert lake!
Yet here in this musty English cellar, my fantasy was coming true—even if a book, or codex, as it is more properly called, was nothing one might expect to recover from an Iron Age or even Bronze Age grave.
I snapped several photos to record its provenance in the trove, then carefully withdrew it. Its damp leather cover was inset with a tree-of-life design of varicolored semiprecious stones, while its pages, made of skin or bark, were well-preserved by the bog’s brackish waters.
“Pinching the Queen’s treasures, are we? It’s good I keep an eye on you.” The coroner had come in without my knowledge, deceptively quiet for such a large-boned man.
“Look!” I said, holding out the book.
Strugnell studied it through his rimless specs. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears to be a book. Come from there, did it?” He eyed the peat suspiciously. “Read it?”
“No. Should we open it and see?”
“Not really,” he said dismissively. “You know as well as I we should have half a dozen scholars present, photographers, the BBC, a representative from the palace, and the grand rabbi of Jerusalem.” He thought for a moment. “Then again, ‘What the hell’ is always a good reason. Sod it. Let’s have a squint.”
I opened it. It was the color of a partridge: all soft browns and grays.
Writing flowed across the page, though in the wretched light, I couldn’t decipher the language it was written in. Then the characters I’d been trying to worry into a’s and s’s transformed themselves into something else. “The damn thing’s Indic!”
This was remarkable in itself. For what was an Eastern document like this doing in an old English grave? The only explanation was that book and body were far less ancient than I had believed, dating no earlier than the thirteenth century—when Indian goods and artifacts began to flow into the Isles.
I’ll admit I was disappointed. My Lady was growing younger with every revelation. And though it would still be interesting to know her, I was beginning to think she was a comparative youngster and not the grand old dam I had thought she was.
Chapter 3
It was well past midnight when my Range Rover’s tires crushed the white gravel drive leading up to my home. A full moon flooded the matchless Dorset countryside: blunt, undulating hills and downs like the towering crests and sinking troughs of a restless ocean frozen in midswell.
The village I live in, Droopiddle Bryant, is one of Dorset’s more ancient and quaint, consisting of half a dozen stony farms and thatched cottages. A ruined chapel, in the shadow of Bulbarrow, commands the valley as it once commanded the life of the town—until the mid-fourteenth century when plague had forced the villagers to shift to less polluted grounds, stranding the remaining huts and farms and leaving the chapel (which, after all, had not stopped the pestilence) marooned upon the heath.
For the New York-centric who haven’t the foggiest where Dorset is, it’s in southwest England. Its picture-perfect pastures are enclosed by hedgerows, with farms and hamlets scattered round; towns are few and tend to have been founded by the Romans. Along the coast, the fossils of extinct sea beasts are often recovered and Bronze Age hillforts claim the crests of hills. Dorset is the home of the novelist, Thomas Hardy; the grave of Jack Druitt (on everyone’s shortlist for the Ripper); and the winding road where Lawrence of Arabia crashed his bike and broke his neck. Indeed, if one were to cast a circle with a radius of thirty miles and its center at my Lady’s grave, it would pass through Stonehenge to the east;through Glastonbury Tor, legendary seat of King Arthur, to the west; and to the south on the English Channel, through Lyme Regis’s windswept quay, evoked so memorably in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Nor is Droopiddle Bryant, queer as it is, a name unusual for these parts. The towns all around are like words in a rhyme by Lewis Carroll: Duntish, Ansty, Dewlish, Long Burton, Ryme Intrinseca and Sixpenny Hanley. And often on the night drive home, when my mind was befogged with lager and fatigue, it would make up ridiculous automatic phrases: “The duntish slut was feeling ansty.” Or, “Donning his long burton, the captain looked positively dewlish!”
My cottage, per usual, was chilly and dark. I lit a fire, watching the kindling flare, then went to the kitchen and foraged in the refrigerator, returning with two cooked chops, a salt cellar and a stoppered bottle of the local ale. I threw a leg over the armchair’s upholstered arm, shook salt on the meat and wolfed it down. I was hungry. I chugged the ale and belched extravagantly. There are compensations that come with living alone, though, admittedly, they’re poor substitutes for company and affection.
Then I thought of my Lady and felt happy—like waking and remembering it was the last day of school. And I thought again of that night, as a child, I’d read a book on Peking Man. It described how a Canadian anatomy professor had gone to an herbalist’s shop in Beijing and purchased a remedy made from “dragon bones”—e
xcept that these “dragon bones,” to the professor’s trained eye, were hominid and older than any he’d ever seen. Returning to the pharmacy, he’d rifled its drawers and come across the bones of a mammoth and an ancient horse. How many other priceless relics had been ground to dust in the apothecary’s pestle? Then he’d bribed the druggist to show him where the bones were found. And there, washing out of a limestone hill, was the jawbone of an ancient man!
I can still recall looking up from the book that long ago New Jersey evening and feeling an inner acetylene flare. I was eight. To have found dragon bones in China that were really those of ancient men! Just thinking of it opened a dimension inside me I hadn’t known ’til then was there—as if I were kissing the lips of something.
I read every book I could find on the subject. I read with a sort of religious exultation as if they’d reveal, on the very next page, some essential fact or missing link that would make me feel complete and whole. So budded my love affair with the bones and bodies of ancient persons.
To this day, I don’t really know why the subject so compels me. An astrologer once told me I was born under Saturn, ruler of antiquities. She said it was also the ruler of nerds, a fate I like to think I escaped—if just. Still, I was a wonky kid, spending hours perusing scholarly papers and other scientific esoterica, and though I mixed socially, I enjoyed my own company as much, passing many a childhood Sunday digging holes alone in my backyard.
It was a vocation—or obsession—I brought with me to Phillips Academy, Andover, and then on to Columbia College and the study of anthropology. There, under the tutelage of the great Indic scholar, Dr. Jai Prasad, I had earned a master’s and copublished several well-received papers.
Based upon them and Jai’s strong recommendation, the University of Exeter had awarded me the prestigious Pitt Rivers Anthropological Fellowship, never given to an American before. And though my work had gone well enough, my career had gone nowhere. Radiographic analysis of Mesolithic skull fragments isn’t something, I’m afraid, that stirs the world soul. In another six months, the fellowship was ending, and the few job offers I’d received thus far were unappealing: instructorships for little pay at undistinguished institutions. Nonetheless, I knew an opportunity when I saw it, and one had just been dropped in my lap.
I threw the lamb bones on the fire, watching them char. Then I wiped my hands with care and took out the book. What book? Ah, you didn’t know I’d taken it! Not surprising, since I didn’t tell anyone—not even Strugnell, who, as he’d turned, had failed to see me slip it in my shirt.
Though admittedly covert, I certainly wasn’t stealing it. I simply wanted the proper time and light in which to study it. I fully intended to return it in the morning and would have, surely, if events had not intervened. And though I should have asked the coroner’s permission, frankly, I didn’t want to risk being turned down. And so, with the book’s damp cover pressing my chest, I’d relocked the cage and given him back the key—something he claims not to recall.
Now I looked the codex over. Fresh archeological items have what is termed a “stickiness”: sensory clues, the smell of woodsmoke, for example, if a codex such as this had been read around campfires. But the book only smelled of the bowels of the bog. And when I was done, I knew little more about it than when I’d started—other than it seemed to be authentic, and with my limited knowledge of Indic, incomprehensible! I did think I saw the word shah repeated several times, which seemed to imply a Persian as well as Indic venue. Still, how old the damn thing was I couldn’t say, though radiocarbon dating would. Then again, to be certain, we’d want to date the ink, as well as the parchment, as several recent forgeries have been done on sheets of ancient vellum.
Thinking these thoughts, I fell asleep on the couch.
At three fifteen, I came awake. I’d lived for a year and a half in the cottage but had never heard a sound like this. Some creature was hooting in a nearby shrub. I lay there alert, listening intently—for my cottage is remote, even for Dorset, and someone in the shrubbery at three in the morning would not have been a welcome presence. I listened to the strange chew hoo, choo wit and, though satisfied, at last, it wasn’t human, got off the couch and went to the window.
The valley seemed preternaturally lit, the moon’s candlepower far greater than I remembered it. Across the Blackmoor Vale, Bulbarrow Hill rose in the distance—and on its peak stood a great wooden tower! By then, the bird, or whatever it was, had ceased to call.
And that’s when I heard another sound—the rising cries of a wailing woman. I couldn’t imagine from where it was coming, as the nearest house is half a mile away. Which was when I saw her, suddenly, running through the open fields. She was dressed in white, her hands upraised in a gesture of horror. Transfixed, I watched her cross the downs, the sound of her wailing growing louder and shriller. I could not imagine who she was, or where in the name of God she was headed until, with a sudden influx of terror, I realized she was coming here!
No sooner did I have this thought than she passed through the unopened door of the cottage in a way that is unimaginable. Her white robes flared with a numinous splendor; a fluttering veil covered her face. Her screams had ceased and she stood before me in the cottage hall, holding open the codex before her, whose pages were riffled by a supernatural wind. And as I gaped upon her person, I saw she had the feet of a bird!
With a start and a shriek, I awoke. It was 3:27—almost the time it had been in my dream. I gazed out the window at Bulbarrow Hill. On its summit, there was no wooden tower.
When I woke again, it was half past nine. I got up, alarmed by the lateness of the hour, showered, dressed, then drove to the hospital, promising myself breakfast as soon as I’d replaced the book. But first I needed the key to the cage in the cellar. So I marched up the stairwell to the coroner’s office, realizing halfway there it was Sunday and he was unlikely to be in.
And yet he was—and at his desk. There was, in fact, no evidence he’d ever left it. A stale, not unpleasant odor spiked the air: some blend of ink and Stilton crumbs, of half-smoked fags and of some deep, damp unevictable rot that riddled the building’s bones. “And what’s brings you here,” he asked, looking up at me, “this lovely bloody Sunday?”
“I thought I’d have another go at my Lady.”
He gazed at me oddly over his specs. “Really! Must you speak of her that way? You make her sound like a cross between your mistress and the Blessed Virgin.” He fixed me with a look of pity. “I suppose it does get lonely living by yourself.”
I ignored the remark. “What brings you here?”
“Death. Per usual.”
“Anyone I know?” I inquired glibly, glancing round to see if the key was hanging, possibly, on the wall. (It wasn’t.)
“Believe you do—or did. The Constable Rory Dahl.”
I was taken aback. “But I was with him just . . . yesterday.”
“Yes? Well, obviously, your company does not prolong life. Complained of chest pains soon after off-loading your Lady. There! Now you’ve got me saying it! Doctors thought he might have had a coronary and not known it. Gave him a bed, wanted to observe him.”
“And?”
“They observed him, all right: have another—and die. Doubt he knew he had that one, either.”
“Well,” I said, sobered, “I’m sorry to hear that. It must have been the strain—of the excavation.”
“. . . yes.” He frowned and rubbed his brow. “Had the most unpleasant dream.”
“Really?” I said, remembering my own. “What was it?”
He looked up sharply. “Why would I be telling you?”
I shrugged. “Forget it, then.”
He looked disappointed, then paused and conceded, “Well, no harm in it, I suppose . . .”
In his dream, the coroner had been standing at the top of a long and winding marble stairwell. In the air there was an uneasy feeling, like that low-pressure heaviness preceding a storm. That’s when he’d heard a visitor enter
and footsteps slowly ascending the stairs. And though he couldn’t see her yet, he knew from the sound of her step it was a woman.
Then he was looking at the phone book from his village. His visitor’s name was circled in ink and when he’d read it, he had found himself terrified beyond description!
“What was it?”
“. . . Alba Marla. Or maybe, Albemarle. Odd . . . doesn’t seem so frightening now.”
“And who was the woman ascending the stairs? Did you see her?”
“No. All I saw was her bloody name. Albemarle.” He frowned. “Now tell me why that should scare me witless?”
Chapter 4
I couldn’t say. Only that the mystery surrounding my Lady seemed to have stirred something deep within us both. A moment later, we went our separate ways: I, to revisit my Lady, and Strugnell, to locate the key to the cage that housed the treasure.
I opened the door to the room where she lay. “Good morning,” I told her, “I hope you slept well. Actually, you’re looking bloody marvelous this morning.” And she was. Before I’d left her for the night, I’d covered her with a sheet, tucking it in just beneath her chin so that she looked like a woman asleep beneath covers—though the stakes disfigured the drape of the cloth, and her blind eyes continued to disturb me.
I studied her face and, as I did, I had the most vivid sense of her presence. This was a person—even if dead.
But our silent communion was rudely interrupted by the coroner throwing open the door so hard it banged against the wall. “Sod it!” he said. “Can’t find the key.”
“What does it matter? You could open that cage with a screwdriver and a hammer. Look,” I said, pointing at the stakes, “let’s pull these, shall we? They’re getting on my nerves.”