by John Preston
From there I collected the probing iron. Five feet long and pointed at one end, the iron is similar in size and shape to a spear, albeit with a hooped handle at one end. Mr. Brown offered to carry it, but I told him I could manage quite well on my own. Plainly intrigued, he darted inquiring glances in my direction as we walked along. However, I did not enlighten him as to my purpose.
Rabbits ran for cover at our approach. There must have been hundreds of them, a mass of white tails bounding unhurriedly through the long grass and disappearing into Top Hat Wood. My gamekeeper, William Spooner, shoots as many as he can and gives them to Mr. Trim, the butcher in Woodbridge. But now Mr. Trim has said he cannot take any more. Apparently there is no longer the demand. He suggested we send them to the local kennels instead.
“Have you given any thought to which one you would like me to attack first, Mrs. Pretty?” Mr. Brown asked.
“Yes, I have,” I said, and indicated the largest mound. It was the one he had run up before.
Mr. Brown looked at me. Then he shook his head fractionally from side to side.
“I wouldn’t advise that, Mrs. Pretty. Not personally speaking.”
“You would not?”
“No,” he said. “No, I wouldn’t.”
“Why is that?”
“Because it’s all hobbly up the top, with a dip in the middle. That’s usually a sign that a mound has been robbed. In the eighteenth century, thieves used to sink shafts into the tops of the mounds — ‘robbers’ flutes,’ they’re known as — and hope to strike lucky in the middle. You might be better off with one of the smaller ones. Be quicker. Cheaper too,” he added.
“Which one would you advise, then, Mr. Brown?”
He walked over to the smallest mound of all. It was no more than five feet high, although crowned with an unusually thick clump of bracken. He patted the side of it with the flat of his hand.
“I could try this one.”
I needed a few moments to think through the implications of what Mr. Brown was suggesting. I had always assumed that we would start with the largest one. It was what Frank and I had always discussed. It was what we had set our hearts on.
“As you wish,” I said. “However, there is something I would like you to do first.”
I held out the probing iron towards him. “Would you mind pushing this into the mound, to see if you hit anything?”
He made an admirable job of concealing his surprise; his eyebrows hardly moved. All he said was, “From the top, Mrs. Pretty?”
“Please.”
He ran up the side of the mound. Standing at the center, he raised his hands over his head and plunged the probing iron into the ground. For the first three feet or so, it went in quite easily, then there was a muffled thud and Mr. Brown could go no further. He tried again, his face set even more determinedly than before. But again he hit the same obstruction.
“There’s something in there,” he said when he came back down. “No telling what, of course. But there’s something, all right.”
When his breathing had slowed, he examined the probing iron more closely. “I’ve never seen one of these before.”
“My late husband had the blacksmith in Bromeswell make it,” I told him. “To his own design.”
“To his own design?” repeated Mr. Brown, still turning the iron over in his hands. “Is that so?”
I could hear voices coming closer. Spooner and John Jacobs were walking towards us. Jacobs is a thick-set man with sprigs of gray whisker on his cheek. Spooner is a younger man with carefully tended black hair and a large beard. He seems rather shy, although my maid, Ellen, tells me that the local girls think very highly of him. I introduced the two men to Mr. Brown. After shaking hands, they stood about uncertainly, not saying anything. Aware that my presence was proving inhibiting, I left them to make a start.
I was quite wrong about Mr. Brown. He is not a kipper; he is a terrier. When I walked out to the mounds that afternoon, I saw a great spray of soil being thrown up into the air. The bracken had been cleared and a wedge-shaped gash cut in the side of the mound. There was something shocking and strangely moving about the sight, with the grass pulled away and the damp earth exposed. The mound looked naked, even violated.
In order that the men should have somewhere for their tea, I had suggested they use the shepherd’s hut — a corrugated-iron structure on wheels normally kept in the kitchen garden and used for storing tools. This hut had already been hauled across to a patch of flat ground by the edge of the trees. Seeing it in a new setting, I realized how decrepit it was. The sides, in particular, did not seem to be properly fixed to the frame.
The remains of a fire was smoking alongside. As I came closer, I could smell the sweet, resinous smoke of fir cones. Jacobs and Spooner were leaning on their shovels, talking to one another. They stopped talking as soon as they saw me. The three of us stood in a line as earth continued to fly between Mr. Brown’s legs — some, but by no means all of it, landing in a wheelbarrow that had been placed behind him.
Once the barrow was full, Jacobs wheeled it over to the edge of the wood and tipped out the contents onto an already substantial pile. The earth was to be kept in one place so that the mound could be restored to its original shape once the excavation was completed.
Mr. Brown carried on digging for several more minutes, oblivious to anything else. When he straightened up, his knees were shiny. Pieces of mud remained stuck to his cap.
“I just wanted to make sure you had everything you needed,” I said.
“We’re fine, thank you, Mrs. Pretty. Aren’t we, lads?”
Spooner and Jacobs both grinned. I could see they were as transfixed by Mr. Brown as Robert had been. No sooner had this thought crossed my mind than Robert himself came down the steps of the shepherd’s hut. He was swinging a piece of bamboo from side to side and would not meet my eye.
“There you are, Robbie.”
“I haven’t been here long, Mama,” he said abruptly. “Anyway, Mr. Brown has been telling me things.”
“What has he been telling you?”
“Well, for instance, do you know what the most important part of an archaeologist’s body is?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t believe I do.”
“His nose. Isn’t that right, Mr. Brown?”
Mr. Brown started laughing. So too, after a brief pause, did Jacobs and Spooner.
“I don’t want you being a nuisance, Robbie.”
“Oh, he’s no trouble at all,” said Mr. Brown. “Been giving us a hand, haven’t you, young man?”
Robert flushed with pride and embarrassment. “Mr. Brown says you have to smell things out. Also he has been explaining what he has been doing. First he cuts a trench right through the mound. And then he digs down. That’s in case there’s a pit underneath.”
“And is your nose telling you anything so far, Mr. Brown?” I asked.
Bending forward, he picked up a handful of earth and rubbed it between his fingers. “See how it’s all loose? Foamy, even? That’s the backfill from the original digging — a mixture of sand and soil. I’m going in horizontally to begin with. Then I’ll go down to the original level — just like Master Robert said. That could be anything from two to eight feet below the surface. I’ll be able to tell once I’ve reached it, as the soil will be a different color. Darker, probably, on account of the ground having never been disturbed. That’s where I hope to find any burial chamber. It should show up as a rectangle of lighter soil, just like a trapdoor.”
“Can you tell if the mound has already been robbed?”
He shook his head. “Much too early to say. Mind you, we’ve already found something.”
He walked over to where a long gray object lay on the grass and aimed a kick at it with his boot.
“What is that?”
“That’s a stone, Mrs. Pretty. It must be what I hit with your — your instrument. It’s a start, I suppose, but let’s hope we can do a little better than that, eh?”
> I started to walk back to the house. When I glanced over my shoulder, I could see no sign of Mr. Brown. He must have resumed digging. There was only the glint of his shovel blade and a dark smudge of soil hanging in the air.
At seven o’clock I went upstairs to change for dinner. Ellen was waiting in my bedroom. She is a big-boned girl with unusually pale fingers, the result, presumably, of poor circulation. In the winter she suffers from chilblains. When she started working for me two years ago, I was concerned that she might be clumsy. In fact, she has turned out to be far more attentive and nimble than I ever expected. My only criticism is that she has recently taken to wearing a particularly invasive scent which manages to be sharp and cloying at the same time.
She was standing beside the open cupboard. Rows of dresses were hanging inside, most of them still in their muslin dust-covers.
“What would you like to wear tonight, ma’am?”
I pointed at one of the dresses that was not in a cover. There seemed no point going to any more trouble than necessary.
“The green silk again, ma’am? That’s an old favorite, that one, isn’t it?”
As she was helping me to put the dress on, Ellen chattered away about members of the staff and what they had been up to. To begin with, I also feared that I might find her talkativeness trying. Instead, I have rather come to enjoy our conversations, even to look forward to them. Apart from anything else, I learn far more about the household from Ellen than I ever could on my own. Although she is not a gossip, she has a natural curiosity about people, as well as a keen ear for their idiosyncrasies. On the subject of her own circumstances, however, she is rather less forthcoming. For several months she was stepping out with a boy from Woodbridge. However, it has been some weeks now since she last mentioned him and so I suspect this is no longer the case.
Once we had finished, she asked if I wanted her to repin my hair. I said that would not be necessary.
“I could just give it a quick comb if you like, ma’am.”
“No, thank you, my dear.”
I wonder if Ellen has noticed that I am losing my hair. She can scarcely have failed to do so. But while she may be something of a chatterbox, there is a natural discretion about her too. It is another of her virtues.
At eight o’clock, Grateley knocked on the swing door that leads out from the dining room to the kitchen. For such a bony man, it never ceases to surprise me that he should have such a cushioned-sounding knock. It is as if he has little pillows on each of his knuckles. Silently, he brought the tureen into the dining room and carried it over to the table.
After Grateley had ladled out the soup, he asked me if I wanted to listen to the news. In anticipation of my saying yes, he had already moved over to the sideboard and was about to lift the lid of the wireless. However, I had no desire to listen to the news; it was certain to be alarming or depressing, or quite possibly both. Instead, I told him that tonight I would rather read.
When he had gone, I opened my copy of Howard Carter’s account of the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun and propped it against the tureen. Increasingly, I have found myself reading about the past. It is a retreat, of course. I know that. Nonetheless, there is something peculiarly comforting in reading about events that have already happened. This as opposed to those that seem to hang, half-formed, above one’s head.
Once again I read Carter’s description of the discovery of the king’s burial chamber:
For the moment, time as a factor in human life has lost its meaning. Three thousand, four thousand years maybe, have passed and gone since human feet last trod the floor on which you stand, and yet, as you note the signs of recent life around you — the half-filled bowl of mortar for the door, the blackened lamp, the finger-mark upon the freshly painted surface, the farewell garland dropped upon the threshold — you feel it might have been but yesterday.
Grateley brought in the main course: boiled beef with carrots. The smell rose from the plate. As it did so, my gorge rose with it. Partly to put off having to start eating, I asked after Grateley’s wife — she works as a nurse at the cottage hospital.
“She’s quite well, thank you, ma’am.”
“And you, Grateley, how are you?”
“I too am quite well,” he allowed.
“Is your lumbago any better?”
“Still playing up a little, ma’am. But nothing to complain about.”
When he had gone, I could only manage a few mouthfuls before I had to push the plate away. Afterwards, I started reading again, but I was unable to concentrate. All the while my thoughts kept returning to Frank. In one sense, I felt an enormous sense of relief at finally embarking on something that meant so much to him. In another, of course, doing so only made his absence more acute. Not for the first time, it struck me how this excavation was like a form of disinterment.
Yet even as these thoughts ran through my mind, I had a sense of everything fading. Memories fleeing as I attempted to clutch on to them. Still staring at the open book, I recalled how Carter had written that he could remember little or nothing of the actual moment when he had stood looking into the burial chamber. All these impressions had crowded in on him to such an extent that not one of them had lodged. Looking back several months afterwards, he found to his dismay that his mind was quite blank.
Grateley’s face was as impassive as always as he cleared my plate away. “Would you thank Mrs. Lyons for me?” I said. “The beef was delicious. It’s just that I don’t appear to have much of an appetite at the moment.”
“I expect it is this weather, ma’am.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I expect it is.”
“Will there be anything else?”
“No. That will be all, thank you.”
“I’ll wish you goodnight, then, ma’am.”
“Goodnight, Grateley.”
Upstairs, I looked in on Robert. Recently, for reasons that are still a mystery to me, he has become obsessed with making drawings of the Matterhorn. When I asked him why, he did not reply. Instead, his shoulders seemed to fold towards one another, as if he was shutting himself from my gaze. These drawings are identical, or nearly identical; I assume because they have been copied out of a book. A number of them had been pinned to the wall. They lifted in the breeze when I opened the door.
Robert was asleep and had thrown off most of the blankets. One of his feet was exposed, the white bulb of his heel sticking up in the air, the toes bent against the mattress.
I covered his foot with one of the blankets, then kissed him on the forehead. He gave a small grunt — it was almost a sigh — but did not stir.
On the following afternoon I was told that Mr. Maynard from Ipswich Museum had come to pay a visit — Mr. Maynard is the curator of the museum and effectively Mr. Reid Moir’s deputy. According to Grateley, he had gone straight out to the excavation rather than come to the house and risk disturbing me. I decided that I would also go and see how Mr. Brown was getting on.
During the night it had rained and the grass was still slippery. I had to be careful where I put my feet. Hearing a yell, I looked up to see Robert running towards me. Around his head he had what appeared to be an elastic garter with several feathers stuck in it. I watched him come closer, rooted to the spot. All the time I was waiting for him to stop. However, he just kept coming. His arms were outstretched, his mouth open wide and his cheeks full of air.
When he threw his arms around my legs, I reached down and gripped him by the tops of his arms.
“Darling, no,” I said.
I thought that I might fall backwards, that his weight might make me topple over. For a moment it seemed as if his legs were still spinning. As if he had not heard what I had said, or intended to ignore it.
“Darling, no, please,” I said, and pushed him away.
Abruptly, his legs stopped. He looked up at me in confusion, as if everything had just slipped out of true.
“You — you musn’t rush everywhere, Robbie. You could easily cause an ac
cident.”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said.
Turning round, he walked off towards one of the spoil heaps. Feeling wretched, I watched him go, trying to read his mood from the slope of his shoulders.
Mr. Maynard and Mr. Brown were standing on the far side of the mound. The first trench now reached all the way to the center. It was also wider than before; wide enough for two people to stand side by side. At right angles to it was a second trench, narrower than the first, but also reaching to the center.
Maynard is a bustling, fretful man with a kind of perpetual dampness about him — a result, in part, of his having unusually moist eyes. With the best will in the world, you could never describe him as scintillating company. But at times, when he is being especially literal-minded, there is a small, faraway smile on his face, as if in some private corner of his brain he relishes the effect he is having on others.
After I had greeted the two of them, Mr. Brown asked if I might like to see how they were getting along.
I told him I would like that very much.
“But your feet, Mrs. Pretty,” said Mr. Maynard unhappily. “I fear they will become muddy.”
“There’s no need to worry, Mr. Maynard. As you can see, I am wearing quite sturdy shoes.”
It was a strange feeling, stepping into the mound. A rich underground smell rose all around me, of roots, dankness and decay. The mud walls shone with moisture. The imprints of the shovel blades were clearly visible in the earth. So too were the layers of soil, these broad, perpendicular bands on either side. In some places, the walls had already started to crumble. Planks had been placed vertically on the ground to try to prevent them from doing so.
At the far end of the trench was a small pit. At the bottom of it, I could just make out a lighter-colored patch of soil with ragged, ill-defined edges. The outline had been marked with pegs and baling twine.