Oh no, Rebecca said to herself. They wouldn’t take credit for… . Oh yes, they would. Hell. She looked around for the spade she’d laid down before elevenses, considering whacking Jerry with it.
Jerry accepted a trowel from Elaine, sprinkled dirt artistically over the artifact and posed. “Like this?”
“Posh,” said Sheila. She buffed her nails, the scarlet claws of a lioness disemboweling her prey. She tucked her lipstick into a pocket and tied up the bottom of her blouse, an expensive Banana Republic drugstore safari number. “Tony! Move your bum! The light’s too good to waste!”
Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, your majesty.” He brushed by Rebecca, muttering something under his breath that sounded like, “… your effing dogsbody, thank you very much.”
Rebecca wondered if Tony was prone to headaches at bedtime—not tonight, honey. Unless, like some men, he thought bedtime was a chance to do some domineering of his own.
Dennis sat down, the bag on his lap, and dispensed bits of equipment. Mark leaned on the edge of his trench to watch. Michael bent over Hilary’s shoulder and made some comment which must have been inappropriate to what she was drawing, judging by her puzzled look upward. Adele walked by with her bucket of dirt and collided with Tony as he stepped backward, eye fixed to the camera. “Oh,” he said, looking around. “Sorry, luv.”
Rebecca found her spade. She scooped some mud clods from the edge of the trench. Sheila summoned Jerry, took his glasses from his face and wiped them with a tissue. “We must look presentable, mustn’t we?”
“Anything you say,” Jerry returned. His oddly naked eyes fixed on her butterfly wing lashes. Half his mouth curved beneath his moustache in a smug, self-satisfied leer. Sheila simpered and replaced his glasses.
Behind Rebecca, Elaine spat a four-letter word. She stabbed her remaining trowels into the earth at the edge of the trench and stamped into the church. Tony’s eye followed her with casual bemusement.
Enjoying the soap opera? Rebecca asked him silently, and gathered her harvest of dirt clods into a bucket. Maybe the knees of Jerry’s jeans had, beneath the dirt, grass stains corresponding to those on the seat of Sheila’s habit. Rebecca felt sure Mark’s knees hadn’t bent to Sheila’s blandishments, but she’d bet her next paycheck that Jerry’s had. Well, it wasn’t as if they weren’t already using one another.
She hoisted spade and bucket. How about that—Tony really did think it was all a soap opera; now he was aiming his camera and scanning Jerry’s and Sheila’s little tete a tete with no expression on his face except amused calculation. Men! Rebecca thought. It must be nice to be so detached.
She took her bucket of dirt to the dump site behind the chapter house and emptied it through the fine mesh screen. A tiny pottery shard. Big deal.
Just as she returned, Sheila called, “Quiet, everyone.” And to the camera she purred, “When an important feature is uncovered, the amateur diggers must stand aside for the expert.” With exaggerated concentration worthy of the best silent screen comedians, Jerry bent and scraped a layer of dirt from the alembic. “It’s very difficult,” Sheila went on, gazing sincerely into the lens, “to safely remove a ceramic piece such as this bit of distilling equipment. Notice how carefully the archeologist must work.” Jerry blew away a few grains of dust, waggled the alembic, and sucked in his gut.
Muttering Scots and Gaelic curses indiscriminately, Michael picked up a trowel, bounded down into Mark’s trench and with short, angry strokes started scraping at the surface. Mark shied, then looked doubtfully up at Rebecca. She shook her head. Leave him alone. It’ll blow over.
“Dirty trick,” whispered Hilary. “Poor Michael.”
“Thanks. But for God’s sake don’t act as if you’re sorry for him.” Rebecca wiped dirt and sweat off her forehead, climbed into the second trench, and with her spade poked at what promised to be a row of paving stones.
Sheila’s voice droned on. Adele carried off another bucket of dirt. Rebecca’s spade scraped something lodged in a gutter between the stones. Was that a rust stain? She raised her head to shout and bit her tongue as Jerry’s left hand made a frantic shushing gesture out of camera range. His broad grin never wavered as his right hand held the alembic up for the camera.
Rebecca caught Mark’s eye. “Bring me your trowel,” she mouthed. He brought the trowel.
“Well look at that,” she said a few moments later, and Mark’s face on the edge of the trench was joined first by Hilary’s, then Dennis’s. “It’s a rondel, a sixteenth century dagger. See, the iron blade has almost rusted away, but there’s the grip—ivory, probably. Soldier’s dagger, maybe left here when Henry VIII’s soldiers sacked the place.”
Now Tony was looking into the trench; good, that bit of film had been executed and could be given proper burial. The shade of the row of bodies emphasized the cool dampness of the ground. Rebecca broke out in gooseflesh.
“What is it?” Michael asked, clambering down beside her. He took her trowel, scraped at the lump between the stones, then tested it with his forefinger. “Ah, lass, that’s no dagger. Can you no see, it’s a thirteenth century wooden spoon and a sort of iron fork called a flesh hook.” He stood, futilely trying to wipe his hands on his jeans.
His mouth was a narrow fissure; he was still quivering with rage. She swallowed her disappointment at not only her mistake but at his slightly cavalier tone. “Sorry, I guess I blew it.”
“Well,” Michael said comfortingly, “you have to expect that. I mean, you’ve studied the place, but I grew up here—naething like personal experience. And the thirteenth century’s no your field. Just ask me the next time—no need to mislead the students.”
The air went out of Rebecca’s stomach as though he’d punched her. She had only enough breath to articulate, “I see, Dr. Campbell. Thank you.”
That pierced his hide. His brows went lopsided with bewilderment. His eyes blazed indignation. He leaped out of the trench and strode away.
Mark’s and Hilary’s carefully blank faces disappeared. Dennis’s open mouth vanished so suddenly one of the others must have yanked him away. Tony inspected his camera as if suspecting it of imminent collapse. Rebecca sat down hard on the dirty stones, bringing her stunned expression below ground level and out of public scrutiny.
It was only fair, she thought, that she and Michael should contribute to the soap opera. He’d been wounded and had lashed out blindly. She understood and could easily sympathize. What she wanted to say was, “You jerk, who the hell do you think you are to talk to me like that, especially in front of my students!”
Rebecca picked up the trowel, inched further along the trench, and started scraping another paving stone. Her eyes burned—too much sunlight and shadow and dust, no doubt. I said I wanted something to break, Michael, but I didn’t intend for it to be us.
1
Chapter Eight
By lunch time, Rebecca felt as if her trowel were imbedded in her skull. The cottage was stifling and the open windows admitted nothing but flies. The sunshine was too bright, the conscientiously neutral voices of the students set her teeth on edge, and her soup burned her tongue. Every time Michael spoke some cool, correct phrase and avoided her eye, her head throbbed. She choked down a few bites of food and started clearing the table the second the others were done.
Through the window of the dining room she saw Tony enviously inspecting Jerry’s Jaguar. Sheila sat on the back step of the Plantagenet van, feeding bits of something out of a greasy newspaper—a fish and chips lunch, probably—to the two cats. Honestly, cats had no dignity at all when it came to food. They’d accept it from anyone.
In the kitchen Rebecca discovered her designated scullery person, Hilary, throwing away the half-pot of leftover soup. “Don’t do that!” Rebecca gasped. “That’s perfectly good food!”
Hilary’s eyes widened. “But it’s only—I mean, I didn’t think…”
Rebecca put the soup in the refrigerator. She could tell Hilary had never had to live on a
budget. “Sorry for yelling.”
“No problem,” returned Hilary, who didn’t speak again.
Dennis walked out the back door singing and collided with Michael on the step. “Do you mind?” Michael snarled. Dennis, with the same surprised expression as Hilary’s said he didn’t, and shut up.
It wasn’t so much that it was hot, Mark assured them when they gathered back at the dig. “It’s the humidity. Out in West Texas you can stroll around in hundred-degree heat and not feel a thing.”
Hilary wadded her hair into a bun. Michael’s face registered horror at the very idea of a hundred degrees and disappeared into the third trench. Rebecca went into the second trench, Adele ready to hand her the bottles and brushes of the conservation kit. Not that Rebecca really wanted to conserve the sneaky spoon and flesh hook. The sisters had no business cooking in the cloister anyway.
“No!” said Sheila’s voice. She and Tony came around the corner. “You’re not going to waste your time and my film chasing that woman’s stupid fantasies!”
Beside Rebecca, Adele stiffened.
“Just a few shots,” Tony responded. “Adele says she’s seen the ghost in the…”
“I don’t care if she thinks she’s seen it at Brighton Beach. The woman’s bonkers, Tony—all that codswallop about messages from the dead and revenge from the grave and little green men from Mars.”
“We need ghost pictures, Sheila.”
“That we do. And I’ll arrange them. Right?”
“Right,” Tony snapped. Rebecca peeked over the edge of the trench to see Tony, his expression more exasperated than angry, raise his camera and target Michael’s back as he cleaned the tile floor.
Adele said, as tightly as Rebecca had ever heard her, “It’s always the disbelievers who are caught out, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Rebecca replied, as noncommittal as possible, and turned back to the spoon. Not that Sheila hadn’t just said what they all believed. But only she would’ve said it so loudly and carelessly. Sheila was enough of a hypocrite to do a film about a haunted priory and stage the haunting herself.
Jerry and Sheila would drive a saint to distraction, Rebecca told herself, let alone Michael. Tonight at quitting time she’d have it out with him. He’d apologize, she’d apologize, and it would all be over.
Rebecca stabilized the wood and iron with a thin coating of latex. Then she and Adele dug out the entire block of dirt and slipped it onto a board. They maneuvered it out of the trench and into the church, where Jerry inspected their find and gave it his seal of approval. “Okay, fine.”
Adele walked away as if she hadn’t heard him. Still pondering Sheila’s heresy, Rebecca thought. She, too, turned. No point in waiting for Jerry to say something equally heretical like, “Good job, thanks.”
Elaine sat hunched over her lap-top computer, typing in the information from the artifact sheets. Her face was as dispassionate as a robot’s.
Rebecca paused in the doorway. The countryside drowsed in the heat, the sunlight hazy as the sky inhaled moisture from the earth. Normally the peaceful beauty would have soothed her, but not now. With Michael turned against her it seemed entirely possible that the hedgerows bristled with knights ready to chase her down and cut out her heart.
Dennis walked backward through the slype, the passage between chapter house and nun’s dormitory, focusing the Nikon. Sheila was posing for him, first leaning against the wall, then propping a knee suggestively on a stone. The boy’s face was as red as the tomato Rebecca had cut up for lunch. God, Sheila, she thought, have you no pride?
Something brushed by Rebecca, and she staggered. Jerry walked toward Sheila and Dennis, his moustache at full alert. “Hey you, Tucker, go do your work. Stop bothering her.”
“He’s not bothering me,” Sheila trilled. Laughing, she planted a tiny fluttering kiss on Dennis’s cheek. Rebecca thought the boy would melt on the spot, but he pulled himself together, handed over the camera, and with a resentful look at Jerry went to where Tony was now shooting Hilary and her drawing board.
“Sheila,” Jerry said, “don’t you have any taste?”
Sheila shrugged prettily, tickled Jerry’s chest, and strolled away.
Rebecca, slightly nauseous, went back to work. It was a century later that Jerry looked at his watch and bellowed, “Quitting time! Clear up your loose! Clean and stow your tools!”
Dennis went into the cottage, Hilary behind him. Michael collected Mark’s and Adele’s trowels. Rebecca considered throwing herself fully clothed into the burn. Her head hurt so badly her eyes bulged from their sockets. She could scream, or pound her head against a stone wall, or against Michael’s skull, to the same effect.
What she did was shower. Oddly, the water didn’t sizzle on her body like on a hot skillet. In the bedroom she found Michael rooting in his sock drawer. He asked, “Have you seen my sgian dubh?”
“Not recently,” she replied, caring not at all about his knife. She closed the door and set down her bag of toiletries. His T-shirt lay in a heap on the floor. She’d already put her dirty clothes in the laundry basket. Normally she’d pick up his things, too. Normally she’d admire his lean body, all sinew and synapses, clad only in jeans. Not now.
“Must’ve left it somewhere,” he said. And, with the first direct look he’d given her since the morning, he added, “Rebecca, I never thought you capable of professional jealousy.”
She heard skirling pipes and voices shouting clan slogans. So he was charging at last, and at her. “I’d say professional jealousy was your problem, making such a big deal out of a misidentification.”
“You’re the one went all sarkey—‘Thank you, Dr. Campbell.’”
“You put me down in front of my students.”
“I corrected your mistake. It’s my job.” He slammed the drawer and picked up some clean clothes.
She put her back to the door, arms crossed. “Rubbing my nose in it isn’t your job. I’m painfully aware I didn’t grow up here.”
“Granted. So what the hell is all this in aid of?” Michael leaned against the wall, leaving a damp handprint on the wallpaper. His eyes were the same blistering blue as the sky.
“I told you, the way you spoke to me, with that bemused contempt husbands always use with their wives.”
“We’re no married yet, lass.”
“Colin gets married so you have to play follow the leader? You expect me to fall dutifully into line?” Her voice arched higher, words rolling off her tongue like lemmings throwing themselves over a cliff. This wasn’t going right; the apologies were being trampled in the berserk rush of feet. “Thank God I found out now you’re just like all the rest. A man takes a perfectly intelligent, capable woman and whittles away at her until she’s a pathetic wreck who says ‘yes, master’ every time he snaps his fingers.”
“Come off it, woman. Are you daft?”
“I must have been daft to even consider marrying you.”
His mouth crimped with annoyance. His brows drew down like thunderclouds. “Will you move aside? I have tae bathe sae I can cook the dinner.”
“I’m standing here with my guts strung out on the floor and all you care about is dinner!” Rebecca threw open the door. Its edge barely missed Michael’s face. She shot into the hall. “Damn, damn, damn!”
Her teeth were clenched so tightly that her jaw writhed. The pain in her head was so intense she couldn’t focus her eyes. The dining room was skewed, the table hovering off the floor. The overstuffed chairs in the sitting room were malevolent chintz toadstools. The door to the vestibule bowed toward her. Behind it Mark burrowed frantically through the wellies, his face averted as though from a gruesome accident.
Rebecca leaped toward the boots. Mark dodged. She pulled on the first pair she came to, slammed through the front door, and ran. Gravel spattered, grass squashed, and the boards of the footbridge rang beneath her feet. She didn’t stop until she was at the west door of the church, where she leaned her forehead against the cold grit of st
one and gasped for air. Any prowling knights were welcome to the numb weight in her chest that was her heart.
Tears condensed from her pain and anger and trickled down her cheeks. She pressed a sob back into her mouth. A hand appeared in her peripheral vision, offering a tissue. She took it, mopped, and sniffed.
Through the moisture in her eyes she saw the late afternoon lying as softly across Gowandale as though photographed through a gauzed lens. A tour bus was parked in front of the hotel, and a dozen or so blurred shapes walked up and down the street.
Mark sat solemnly cleaning his fingernails with his Swiss Army knife. His short, damp hair was as appealing as the fuzz on a hedgehog. He’d changed into a blue T-shirt emblazoned with a mallard in a tuxedo and the words, “Tall, duck, and handsome.” Not that he was as tall as Jerry, as dark as Tony, or as handsome as Michael… . Different types, Rebecca thought. Mark was solid, Michael spare and elegant. Like Chippendale and Danish Modern, they were both attractive. In spite of herself, she smiled.
“I’m sorry,” Mark said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
“You could hardly avoid it. We’ve all been in each others’ pockets the last three weeks.”
“Yeah. Exactly. Ah—can I barge in even farther?”
“Go ahead.”
Mark folded his knife. “It’s no surprise Michael’s more interested in marriage than you are. The way he talks about his parents and his sister and her family, he has good examples in front of him.”
“Yes,” Rebecca said, and hiccupped. “He does.”
“But you’ve said you feel like a changeling.”
His soft drawl was sympathetic, almost as soothing as Michael’s fingertips on her neck. It was nice to talk American. With a sigh Rebecca sat down. “Yeah, my mother married my father right out of high school. All she’s ever done is serve him and my brothers. The oldest, Kevin, he’s all right. But the other two saw baby sister as a punching bag. A girl, you know. Inferior creature. You ought to hear the way they talk to their wives.”
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