My Lady of the Bog

by Peter Hayes

  Marl, according to the OED, was “an ancient word of unknown origin” denoting a type of lime-rich soil. A descriptor was often placed before it: as in blue marl or plenus marl, depending upon the soil’s color and composition.

  But while marl led nowhere, her name’s initial syllable, alb, was intriguing. While white remains the color of the British Goddess, due to the effects of “linguistic drift,” its original sense has been reversed and it has come to mean its polar opposite: “good,” as in the terms, “white witch, white magic.” And given my Lady’s line of work, such a term might fit quite well, especially if Albemarle were not my Lady’s name, but title.

  For the grave goods accompanying her (i.e., the golden hoard) would seem to indicate a person of the highest social status, not a hated, wicked witch. So that was a contradiction there.

  But if Albemarle were her title, its linkage to the British peerage seemed to me remote. English countesses weren’t condemned as witches and buried nude in unmarked graves.

  “You’ve read his famous monograph, I’m sure: Human Skulls from the River Thames: Their Dating and Significance.”

  “Uh, yes,” I said, almost afraid to shake the hand that had written such a grisly title—though it did appear to be normal enough, attached as it was to the white-coated arm of the eminent paleopathologist, Dr. Harvey Phelps Morton.

  A smaller coterie than I’d expected had gathered to witness my Lady’s postmortem. In addition to myself and Morton, there were Rumple, Strugnell, a photographer and a police representative.

  We began by removing the peat from the body. This was accomplished with hatchets and saws—the peat not in direct contact with the corpse being cut away and saved for further study.

  The procedure’s second phase was oddly intimate. We worked with wooden spatulas and trowels scraping away at the peat that remained, then using soft brushes and jets of cold water to remove the last vestiges clinging to her flesh. I had never bathed a naked woman, much less a dead one, and her skin was so soft and tender that I felt—you will laugh—like I was bathing a little child.

  Autopsying mummies is controversial. The “preservationists” maintain that mummies are “people” and should not be dissected. But to my way of thinking, mummies are corpses: if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have been buried in the first place. And who’s to decide that a knife is invasive but an endoscope is not?

  Nonetheless, I found the autopsy difficult to watch. I undid the pins that were holding it and let fall her wet dark hair.

  “Well, here’s something,” Morton observed, tweezing from her scalp a square piece of padding. “Probably from a horse’s mane. She was using it to give her hair lift. Stylish bird, isn’t she?”

  This detail, like her pierced ears, moved me out of all proportion to its importance. I wondered, had she pinned up her hair knowing she was going off to die, to expose her skull and tender nape to the shock of the knife or rope? Or had she pinned it up thinking of her lover, never suspecting such a thing would accompany her to her grave and that a millennium later, men whom she would never know on an afternoon she would never see would be studying it intently in the subbasement of a British hospital morgue?

  Morton unbound her hands, and as he did, I noticed again the thread on her wrist, whose meaning, I thought, would likely never be known.

  Morton sliced the blind that had closed her eyes and examined her scalp: “Perimortem fractures of the posterior fossa, both left and right sides.”

  “In other words,” I said, “she was hit on the head.”

  “And it didn’t kill her. Though it likely knocked her out.”

  I hoped so. I didn’t wish to think she had watched herself be murdered. As Morton moved from head to throat, he uncovered a rawhide noose cinched so tightly it had disappeared into her flesh. Just below it, the carotid was cut.

  “Well, look at this!” Thin strips of flesh had been removed from her breasts, arousing the fear that unauthorized samples already had been harvested. But if so, Morton said, it wasn’t by any modern researcher, as the wounds were contemporaneous with her death.

  Morton continued his external examination. “She has several fresh insect bites on her buttocks, received, it appears, just prior to death.”

  He probed. “No bruising of the inner thighs. Vagina appears . . . normal. No tearing, no evidence of sexual assault. Though we’ll take a swab and test for semen.”

  The external examination completed, I cringed at the sight of the first incision. She’d been preserved so well so long, it seemed like a desecration.

  “Well, here’s a surprise,” Morton exclaimed. “No heart.”

  “You mean it’s disintegrated?” Strugnell wondered.

  “Removed. The aorta and vena cava are cut.” He raised her arm, revealing below it the open lips of an incision. “So that’s how it was done.”

  “How macabre,” Sir August intoned.

  “Well,” Morton said, “she was long dead when it happened.” This was a comfort.

  He inspected her lungs. “The alveoli are charged with fluid.”

  Thus, it was no longer a question of finding the cause of her death, but determining which of three equally brutal means had killed her. For my Lady had suffered a triple death: she’d been strangled, drowned and bled, after first being clubbed.

  “Seems like a case of ‘overkill,’ ” Strugnell observed. “Why would anyone want to kill the poor Judy three ways to Sunday?”

  I suggested: “Perhaps as a sacrifice to three different gods. Odin liked blood and hanging. Teutates liked his victims drowned. And Thor threw ‘thunderbolts.’ If you look at the blows to the back of her head, I’ll wager they were made with a hammer. I would also bet she was struck three times.”

  There was a moment of suspense as the wounds to her head were reexamined in this light. Then Dr. Morton said, “I do believe Dr. Donne’s correct.”

  “Mr. Donne.” For I had no desire to claim degrees I didn’t hold.

  But Rumple had a major objection. (I’d have been disappointed if he hadn’t. Objections are the coin of academics; they pull them out when they want to do business.)

  “Interesting. Though there is one fact your theory overlooks. How could her executioners be pagans when the runes begin, ‘In Jesus’ name’?”

  The heads, which had swung in Rumple’s direction, now swung back in mine, like the audience at Wimbledon. My serve had been returned.

  “Dr. Rumple,” I said, using a technique I’d learned as an undergrad—always begin by quoting your opponent, for the human ego melts at the sound of its own words—”as you yourself wrote in Language and Pre-History in Early Britain, and I quote, ‘. . . there existed a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished in the English countryside, of which our many folk traditions are all that presently endure.’

  “I’m sure these people were nominally Christian. We’ll have to wait for the radiocarbon dating and for your own further analysis, Doctor, of the vocabulary and grammatical syntax of the runes. However, I have all but abandoned my initial opinion that our Lady is neolithic. I think it’s safe to say this is a medieval burial. Still, I would assert that the marks of a classic Celtic ritual death are so apparent in her execution, that if you hadn’t written that sentence, Doctor, I would have had to.”

  There was an uneasy silence. The arrhythmic precipitousness with which my thought ended, combined with the obscurity of what I had said, made a rejoinder nearly impossible. It was like one of those returns with so much backspin and “English” on them, they twirl and hover on the edge of the net, mesmerizing one’s opponent and appearing not about to make it over—until they do, plopping in for the point.

  Rumple subtly bowed.

  My Lady’s stomach was examined next. “She ate some hours before her death.”

  “Can you tell us what?” the coroner wondered.

  “Yes . . . from the looks of it . . . seems like . . . a Big Mac!” Morton grinned. “Kidding!” He probed with his scalpel. “
Gruel.” He removed her stomach for further study. “Well,” he said, opening her uterus, “she may have been a sacrifice, but she wasn’t a virgin. She’d borne a child.”

  He returned to her head: “Full eruption of the third molars.” Her groin: “The iliac crest of her pelvis is fused . . . .” Her back: “. . . while fusion in the vertebral spine of the sacral bodies is still somewhat incomplete.”

  “Meaning?” the coroner asked.

  “In her mid-or late-twenties to early thirties.”

  Meanwhile, the coroner had turned to my Lady’s clothing, and in the folds of her shift, found a small skin bladder with a primitive zipper: a bronze pin that could be inserted into a row of eyelets. He hefted it and something jingled inside.

  With much anticipation, we removed the pin, spilling the bladder’s contents on the gurney: flint flakes, several dried berries and shriveled fungi, a desiccated snake’s tail, a long curved claw, bronze tweezers, charcoal, and a small flint blade wound with gut.

  The coroner pushed at the claw with a surprisingly grimy nail.

  “Well,” Rumple said, “at least we know she wasn’t libeled.”

  “How’s that?”

  “As a sorceress. If this isn’t a witch’s bag of tricks, I don’t know what is.”

  And in truth, it did appear to be “eye of newt and toe of frog . . .” Unless one viewed it as the medicine pouch of a country healer: a claw to probe wounds and puncture abscesses, tweezers to remove thorns, flint and charcoal to kindle a fire, a knife for small surgeries, the gut for sutures, the withered sloe, rich in vitamin C, and the birch fungi for its bactericidal powers.

  When the autopsy was over, the coroner announced what was apparent to all: there was ample evidence to suggest that Albemarle’s death was “violent and unnatural,” because of which, it required an inquest.

  As it was past five and Strugnell was already late in picking up his children, he asked that I communicate the PM’s findings to the hospital’s secretarial pool. That way, he explained, he would be able to file his report with the Registrar of Deaths first thing in the morning.

  While Morton and Rumple conferred, I dialed the extension and got a young woman who put me through a litany of questions. “Victim’s name?”

  “Albemarle.”

  “Is that the first or last name, sir?”

  “It’s both. You know, like Sting or Diana.”

  “Gender?”

  “Female.”

  “Age?”

  “Oh . . . twenty-eight.”

  “Race?”

  “Caucasian. She has beautiful blue eyes.”

  “Religion?”

  “She was probably a worshipper of Thor—or Odin.”

  “Thor?”

  “Put, ‘Pagan.’ ”

  “Home address?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Date of death?”

  “End of July. Thirteenth century.” There was no sound of any input device. “Circa July 31, 1250.”

  “Time of death?”

  “Evening. The mosquitoes were out.”

  As I spoke, a videotape of her execution began playing inside me. Naked, led by a thong, she walks beneath the pearlescent sky while rooks shriek in the trees and grasses, ancestors perhaps of those very same birds we had seen the other evening. She feels the bath of evening sun, and the caress of the south wind’s boneless hand seems to her sweeter than the touch of her lover. A mosquito bites her inner thigh. She doesn’t feel it in her terror. Does she struggle, scream and beg for mercy? Doubtful. Not this lady. Her slippered feet strike the beaten earth as though driven by her destiny. Three priestesses accompany her. She is no victim of an angry mob. Hers is a sacrifice, a ritual killing, and apart from the gods and her executioners, the only witnesses are the gliding skylarks and hungry rooks who, through some sixth, carnivorous sense, know when blood is about to flow.

  Is she a willing victim? Maybe. It’s Lammas Eve. The crops are fair, the housewives pregnant, the wheat as thick and blonde as hair. The gods must be thanked—and appeased.

  Resigned, perhaps, if not wholly willing.

  At the peat cutting, she falls to her knees and bends over, her hands tied behind her back. For a moment it almost seems like a sexual position—that the bound woman will be taken from behind. Instead, three blows from a hammer fall as the thong is cinched around her throat.

  Senseless, she topples forward, even as her head is lifted up (loose strands of her hair stream down into the cutting) and her throat is stabbed. Blood geysers in the twilight and is caught in cups, spraying her killers and staining the bog. At once, her head is thrust beneath the water as her blood infuses the rank brown soup. Crimson bubbles blister the surface, when suddenly the body convulses and sits up, scaring the bejesus out of her killers, who quickly pin it down with stakes. Now all that can be seen above the bloody surface are her kneecaps and the tip of her nose. Forked sticks are pounded down upon her limbs. Then peat is laid over her and a boulder finally rolled on top.

  “Cause of death?”

  “Stabbed, strangled, beaten, drowned.”

  “Culpable party or parties, sir?”

  “As of now, ‘Unknown.’ ”

  Chapter 8

  I left the postmortem feeling drained and depleted, like a father who’s just viewed his daughter’s remains. It was odd. I’d examined any number of ancient bodies and never felt what I felt now. This one seemed so personal. What was my bond to this unknown woman, dead for nearly a thousand years? And why did I feel the need to defend her—and avenge her?

  The telephone rang. “Donne?”

  I lifted my head from the pillow. It was four fifteen a.m.

  “She just came again.”

  “Who?” I was still only half-awake.

  “You know who.”

  I sighed; I did.

  “In the dream,” (he was whispering; I imagined his wife asleep beside him) “I was lying beside her . . . in her grave! I knew what it was like being tortured like that, pinned to the bog for centuries. Imagine! Lying there, under the wet cold peat, while kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall! While the armada goes down, and the Roundheads and Jacobins fight over your head, and the wheel of the seasons turns . . . dead—but somehow still alive!”

  “Wooland . . .”

  “I felt her fury—and her rage! To be enchanted like that, held down by the stakes!

  “Then she was dancing in utter abandon, naked, around the circle of stones. Oh, she’s so happy to be released, to see the stars again, to taste the lovely English wind. She won’t go back. She wants to live. Then, just before I woke, she said, ‘If you won’t have me, I’ll go to Xan.’ ”

  “Xan?” I repeated, nonplussed. Finally, I asked him: “And what do you think she meant by that?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest. Thought, perhaps, it was a city somewhere. You know, Fez, Balt, Xan—don’t know. Listen, sorry to wake you. Jesus!” he added, by way of apology. “Look outside! How’s a body supposed to sleep when the sun comes up from the bleedin’ hills at four o’ bloody clock in the morning?”

  He rang off and I sat for some moments on the edge of my bed. So this, then, is how your madness begins: with a fact you neither can accept nor deny. Maybe it’s your rape in the childhood dark by a man you thought was your kindhearted Uncle Charlie, and the threat of your death if you breathe a word—or the sudden, sickening intuition that your beautiful and beloved Mummy, with her pills, her lipstick and her pearls, doesn’t give a shit about you, never has, never will.

  For Xan is not a foreign city, but a diminutive of Alexander and the pet name I was called as a boy. The only person to call me it since was Jai. So how then had this creature known it? But listen to me: this creature. There was no creature! And I watched my paranoia spread like a spider web of cracks in the ice of reality—the hard ice on which we stand.

  Eventually, I fell back to sleep and I, too, dreamt of Albemarle. She was seated beside me on a smooth wooden bench in the hospital basement. S
he was extremely quiet, simple and still, and we sat there, unmoving, reveling in each other’s company. The light that fell through the clerestory windows was the soft, worn gray of old, Indian Head nickels. Our knees were touching and between us was the sweetest sense of easy union. In my dream, she was just a girl—no witch, nymph or claw-footed harpy—just a sweet, young, innocent girl, who was counting on me to solve her murder.

  Chapter 9

  The inquest into my Lady’s death—at which I briefly testified—returned the verdict “unlawful killing.” There was no attempt to ascribe motive or guilt. That was up to the Royal Commission. As its junior member, I was assigned the task of coordinating the different parts and parties to the investigation, a chore I readily embraced. For there were any number of ways to study my Lady: through linguistic analysis of the codex and inscription; or from a cultural-textile direction, by examining the weave and fiber of her clothing; or genetically, through her DNA. There was paleobotany, entomology, and the results of the postmortem.

  The main thing was to accommodate the different specialties and not let any one discipline throw the study out of focus.

  As for the treasure—which might have told us so much—it was not recovered. It seemed to have dematerialized into thin air—or returned, as the locals claimed, to the elfin realms from whence it came.

  And so, my biggest hope for learning my Lady’s history remained the Indic book. Yet, eight weeks had passed since I’d mailed it to Jai without a reply. My half-dozen calls had been answered by a recorded greeting, informing me Jai was “out of station.” Though there was a record of the book’s delivery, I chided myself for not calling him first and I worried constantly, imagining the irreplaceable manuscript on the floor of the Oxford University mailroom, lost beneath a welter of mail-order catalogues.

  It wasn’t until mid-July that an e-mail from Jai informed me he had been in India where he had gotten married. Through his marriage, which had been arranged, Jai had acquired a wealthy young bride “of royal blood and heart-pounding beauty” who brought with her a rich dowry, while she had obtained “an old prof with a pot belly.”