Elegy for a Queen

by Margaret James

  Susannah shuddered. Why had her mother had to die? She’d never understand why he had killed her mother, too.

  * * * *

  The security men on the site were all put on short time. ‘One of us’ll be here from ten ‘til six the following morning,’ Trevor told them. ‘That’s Mondays to Fridays only, mind.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Janet. ‘So if anyone wants to pinch a JCB, or vandalise the excavation, they should come over at the weekend, right?

  ‘You could always camp out here yourselves,’ said Trevor, shrugging. ‘Look, just get on with it. You find some buried treasure and make everybody happy, eh?’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t do miracles,’ said Janet.

  ‘Then find someone who does.’

  * * * *

  Mrs Fleming arrived at the Abbot’s Library early on Tuesday morning, and talked at David for an hour or more before Susannah finally rescued him.

  ‘Jan had to go to the bank,’ Susannah said. ‘She’s waiting for me in the van, so I’m not stopping, but she said to give you this.’

  ‘A miracle,’ said David, pocketing a fiver he’d lent Janet the previous week but had never expected to see again. ‘This is Mrs Fleming, by the way.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Susannah.

  ‘Good morning.’ Mrs Fleming eyed Susannah’s jeans and sweatshirt. ‘I have come to dowse.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I am a dowser.’ Mrs Fleming rose majestically from Dora’s chair, her scarves and capes and shawls billowing around. ‘You’re an archaeologist, I presume?’

  ‘Well, I work on the site.’

  ‘I read about your excavation in the Marbury Times. You seem to be getting nowhere.’

  ‘We’ve uncovered lots of Roman masonry,’ Susannah retorted, stung.

  ‘My dear child, almost everyone in Marbury uncovers Roman masonry at one time or another. The south side of the city’s built upon a Roman town, and there were military camps all round.’

  Mrs Fleming tweaked her serape. ‘Every weekend gardener turns up the odd denarius now and then. So if you’re actually digging holes in Little Wellesley, it would be remarkable if you didn’t find anything Roman there.’

  ‘But dowsers look for water, don’t they? said Susannah. ‘So I’m not sure what you could do for us.’

  ‘Obviously.’ Mrs Fleming picked up her shopping basket. ‘You’re going to the excavation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I shall come with you, if I may.’

  ‘Of course, you’re very welcome. But I don’t think – ‘

  ‘Susannah?’ The look in David’s eyes was comically beseeching. Please, it said, please take this heaving mound of shawls and draperies away.

  ‘The van’s outside,’ Susannah said.

  * * * *

  To Susannah’s great surprise, Janet was very nice to Mrs Fleming. She asked how long she’d been a dowser, and where in Marbury she had dowsed. She looked impressed when Mrs Fleming bragged of her successes.

  When they arrived at Little Wellesley, Mrs Fleming scuttled off at once, saying she had to find a hazel hedge.

  ‘But surely it’s all nonsense?’ asked Susannah, as the dowser examined one of the few bits of hedgerow that the men had spared, then snapped off a few twigs. ‘It’s only superstition, isn’t it? Or showing off?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Janet, watching the dowser closely. ‘But I’ve seen this done before.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the Middle East. I was on a dig in Syria. An Arab dowser found a wall for us.’

  ‘But he might have known the wall was there.’

  ‘Yeah, he might,’ said Janet.

  ‘So don’t you think – ‘

  ‘Oh, ye of little faith.’ Janet was still staring at Mrs Fleming, who was bobbing merrily across the muddy moonscape, twigs in hand and draperies flying wide. ‘Look here, sunshine. We don’t have the funds, equipment, knowledge, time or manpower to survey this site scientifically. The old girl might be crazy, but she’s harmless. Let’s see how she gets on.’

  Susannah had to admit that Mrs Fleming seemed to get on very well indeed. At any rate, she put on an impressive show, and all the diggers finally downed tools and stopped to watch.

  Throwing off her serape, the ducking and bobbing soon gave way to something more dramatic. Soon, she was being dragged along by some mysterious force – or some invisible dog. Guided by her hazel twigs, she danced through mud and puddles, criss-crossing the whole site.

  ‘What the fuck’s she doing now?’ asked Anna.

  ‘It looks like a fertility dance,’ grinned Mike. ‘Or perhaps she’s trying to make it rain. She must be menopausal, anyway.’

  ‘Shut up, Mike,’ said Janet. ‘Oh my God, she’s done it!’ Suddenly she was sprinting across the field to Mrs Fleming, who was bobbing and dancing on the spot. ‘What have you found?’ she cried.

  ‘Poor Jan,’ said Mike. ‘She’s lost it.’

  ‘No, I think she’s found it,’ grinned Susannah, then ran over to the dowser. Soon, everyone was running, leaving Mike to mutter to himself.

  ‘Lean on us.’ Slipping their arms round Mrs Fleming’s waist, Janet and Susannah held her up. The dowser was bright scarlet in the face and breathing hard.

  ‘I think she should sit down,’ said Anna.

  ‘Mike!’ cried Janet, ‘go and find a groundsheet! There’s one in the van.’

  The dowser sank on to the ground, wheezing and groaning like a pair of bellows, perspiration shining on her forehead. ‘There’s no hurry,’ Janet told her, ‘get your breath back properly before you try to talk. What about a glass of water?’

  ‘I’ll go and get one,’ Anna said.

  ‘Over there!’ Dramatically, Mrs Fleming pointed. ‘By that horrible, disgusting ditch. If you look there, you will find his grave.’

  ‘Whose grave is this?’ frowned Janet.

  ‘How could I know his name?’

  But then Mrs Fleming smiled at them. She looked much better now. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘that wall you found – it might have been a Roman temple once, but it became a Saxon church. There are ghosts of Christians all around.’

  Anna came back with a cup of water. ‘What’s been happening?’ she asked Susannah.

  ‘The lady’s found a grave,’ said Mike.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Anna, ‘and I’ve just won the Premium Bonds.’

  ‘Do you think you could take us to the spot?’ asked Janet, quelling Anna with a look. ‘That’s when you feel up to it, of course.’

  ‘No time like the present.’ Mrs Fleming struggled to her feet. Then, like the Pied Piper, she led the team of diggers across the sodden field.

  ‘It’s a Christian burial,’ she explained, ‘but he was a warrior, so his sword sleeps by his side.’

  ‘How can you know that?’ demanded Mike.

  ‘Belt up, Mike,’ said Janet. ‘God, you’re as bad as Suke and Anna.’

  Susannah looked at the dowser, but said nothing. She supposed there might be something in it, that it just might be possible to sense a resonance from a subterranean cavity. After all, she herself could tell if she was walking on a solid or a hollow floor.

  But then, as Mrs Fleming described the body, saying the man had been about thirty when he died, and stood about six feet tall, she shook her head.

  Mrs Fleming noticed. ‘Young woman, you have a lot to learn,’ she said, and Susannah blushed.

  ‘There are more things in heaven and hell, Horatio,’ went on Janet. ‘But I’ve forgotten what comes next. I wonder if Trev would let us borrow a little JCB?’

  ‘I dunno,’ muttered Mike, and threw his stub of Marlboro away. ‘But if she’s really found a grave, we don’t want a JCB to smash through everything. Let’s get some shovels, yeah?’

  So Janet organised a rota, sending most of the diggers back to the test pits or the wall, but promising everyone a go at finding the new grave. ‘You can stay here, Suke,’ she told Susannah. ‘You help Mike
and Jerry take off the topsoil, eh? Come on, guys, get on with it.’

  The turf and topsoil came off easily. So did jumpers, shirts and anoraks, for it was turning out to be a fine November day. Mrs Fleming watched for a while, but then excused herself, saying she had to take a little walk.

  ‘She means she needs a pee,’ said Anna, who had come across to see what lay beneath the turf. ‘She’s been hopping up and down for ages, but it’s not because she thinks she’s found another grave! Suke, go carefully now. You’re not digging a potato patch.’

  Anna trowelled into stiff, red clay. Susannah watched her shave away the layers of heavy mud. Suddenly, she pointed. ‘Anna, look!’ she cried, staring at the band of sand and gravel, ‘what’s that doing there?’

  Anna frowned. She scraped away a bit more clay, but as she did so she revealed more gravel. ‘Hey, guys!’ she cried, excitedly, ‘I think we might have found some backfill here!’

  ‘Hold it, everybody!’ Mike stared across the wasteland. ‘Where’s our glorious leader?’

  Janet soon came running. She hopped into the shallow excavation, trowelled for a moment, then stood up and punched the air. ‘Yes!’ she cried, and beamed. ‘A man-made pit!’

  ‘Sure is, boss,’ grinned Mike.

  ‘Right, you guys.’ Janet’s eyes were shining. ‘Suke, you take some levels. Anna, you do the pictures and record. You don’t need me to tell you we must take this very slowly. Jerry, tell the others to come and have a look.’

  They probed the full extent of sand and gravel backfill, finally locating all the edges of the pit. It was very large for one man’s grave. ‘But that doesn’t mean it isn’t one,’ said Janet, firmly.

  ‘It’ll be a rubbish dump,’ said Dan, one of Julius Greenwood’s little convoy.

  ‘I don’t want to be a party pooper,’ said another digger, ‘but I’ve seen this sort of thing a dozen times before. You think you’ve found a Saxon cemetery, you dig there for a week, and end up with a pile of broken bottles and some badger bones.’

  ‘Jerry, don’t be so defeatist.’ Janet looked at Anna’s detailed drawing of the section. ‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ she said. ‘Okay – if Mike is watching, you can use shovels now. But do go carefully.’

  So the groups of diggers worked on, into the afternoon. The autumn sun shone warm upon their backs. Suddenly, Susannah grabbed Mike’s arm. ‘Look down there!’ she cried.

  Mike crouched down and looked. He trowelled a curl of clay and gravel from the bottom of the shallow trench. Everyone heard the chink of metal hitting other metal, an intensely thrilling ring.

  Trowelling away the gritty earth, then carefully brushing with his fingers, Mike revealed – what? Susannah didn’t know, but felt it must be something special. She held her breath. Mike smoothed away more soil.

  Janet frowned and told Mike to be careful.

  Anna took some photographs, and scribbled furiously.

  Susannah merely stared into the trench.

  She realised the brooch itself was probably nothing special after all. An Anglo-Saxon cruciform, it would have fastened a light summer cloak or knee-length tunic. A dozen like it could be seen in any big museum. Now it lay there glinting in the sunshine.

  She thought she was imagining things at first. But then, as Mike’s long fingers brushed away more sand and gravel, she could see it was a grave. For beneath the brooch she saw the knobbed and rounded smoothness of a human collar bone.

  Chapter 14

  Mike and Susannah hugged each other, Janet couldn’t stop grinning, and even Mrs Fleming looked flushed and happy. Anna was especially thrilled because she’d recently done a course in human osteology, and now she could use all the stuff she’d learned.

  ‘Hang on to these,’ she said, dumping her camera, pens and files in Susannah’s arms. ‘I’ll go and get my brushes and dental stuff.’

  Janet’s eyes were sparkling, and two bright spots of colour burned her cheeks. As Mike and Anna worked methodically, she stood next to Susannah and stared down into the trench. ‘I suppose we’ll have to tell the police,’ she said. ‘We have to, if it’s human.’

  ‘I’ll go to the farmhouse,’ said Susannah. ‘I expect they’ll let me use their phone.’

  ‘Okay. But make it clear to the police that these are ancient bones. They don’t need to send a dozen cars, a little tent or miles of incident tape.’ Janet glanced up at the darkening sky, and shivered in the wind. ‘But come to think of it, a little tent, some decent lights…’

  Susannah walked to the farmhouse, where she found the farmer’s wife was making supper. When Mrs Searle had heard Susannah’s news, she shook her head, but didn’t seem surprised.

  ‘My Dad used to call that piece of land the Saxon’s Field,’ she said, as she fried onions in a pan. ‘When I was a girl comin’ home from school, we used to dare each other to run across that bit of meadow. But I would never do it, especially in winter, in the dark.’

  Mrs Searle began to chop tomatoes. ‘I never did like coming that way home from the Young Farmers,’ she continued, ‘even when I had some company, if you know what I mean. Fancy a cup of coffee and piece of chocolate cake? The phone’s out in the hall.’

  Susannah made her phone call, drank her coffee, and ate some chocolate cake. Then she walked back to the excavation.

  It was almost dark, and as she crossed the wasteland, she thought about the Saxon. She wondered if he minded that they’d found him, a thousand years or more after he’d first been laid to rest.

  So did he want his bones to be discovered? Did he want his story to be told, had his ghost in fact led Mrs Fleming to his grave?

  Or had the dowser known the grave was there?

  * * * *

  ‘The police will send a squad car in the morning,’ said Susannah, who found Janet sitting by the Saxon’s open grave. ‘They say we’re not to touch the body, or move anything.’

  ‘Dictatorial bastards.’ Janet scowled. ‘What do they think we’re going to do? ‘Perform black magic rituals, spirit away a ton of treasure, smuggle it to Brazil?’

  ‘They just want to call the shots, I reckon.’ Susannah hunkered down beside her friend. ‘They asked me if I knew about the – is it the Disused Burial Grounds Amendment Act or something? I said I’d never heard of it.’

  ‘I have,’ Janet said. ‘It means that if a burial site is going to be disturbed, we must take any human bones away. Then, they must be decently reburied.’

  ‘Why can’t we just leave our Saxon here?’

  ‘This site’s going to be churned up by bulldozers some day. So I think we ought to move any bodies.’ Janet stared into the shallow grave. ‘Sukey, we can’t leave him.’

  ‘No, we can’t,’ agreed Susannah. ‘Where have all the others gone?’

  ‘I sent them to the pub to have some supper. They should be back quite soon. Look, someone’s coming now.’

  But it wasn’t Mike or Anna who called out to them, but a grinning, red-faced countryman. He had a powerful torch in one hand, and a green tarpaulin under the other arm.

  ‘The wife’s just told me all about it,’ he began. ‘You lot must’ve had a busy day.’ He glanced up at the sky. ‘Do you know it’s going to rain tonight?’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ Janet said. She smiled charmingly at him. ‘Did you bring that plastic sheet for us?’

  ‘Yes, my dears, I did.’ The farmer spread the big, green sheet across the shallow trench, weighting it at the corners with great clods of blood-red clay. ‘Our Lizzie says you’ve found the Saxon’s grave.’

  ‘So you knew it was here?’ demanded Janet.

  ‘Well, I’ve heard the stories.’ The farmer shook his head. ‘There’s some old chaps round here, they gets you down the pub of a winter evening, you have to listen to all their nonsense about ghosts and things. You end up buying pints all round to shut the buggers up.’

  ‘So you don’t believe in ghosts yourself?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say I don’t believe, exactly
.’ The farmer nodded towards the pit. ‘You reckon there’s much down there? I mean treasure, like?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Janet told him. ‘It was a Christian burial, you see. So there’ll be no grave goods, apart from personal jewellery like some pins, or a brooch or two. He was probably buried in his best clothes – ‘

  ‘But not with all his worldly goods. Now that’s a crying shame.’ The farmer stared across the barren moonscape. ‘What a bloody mess,’ he sighed. ‘They reckon this business park won’t go ahead. There was me, hoping my older boys might get good jobs here, in a year or two.’

  ‘But don’t you want them to be farmers?’ asked Susannah.

  ‘No, sweetheart, I do not,’ said Mr Searle. ‘It’s a mug’s game, farming. Things was all right in the fifties an’ the early sixties, when my Dad worked the place. But then we went into the Common Market, an’ we got all this paperwork – you can’t do this, you can’t grow that, there’s an inspector coming round next Tuesday to check up on your pigs! My lads are well out of it. All right, ladies – I’ll be seeing you.’

  ‘That’s a fact then, is it?’ asked Susannah, as they watched the farmer walk back to his four wheel drive, which he’d parked next to the rubbish dump. ‘We’re not going to find any buried treasure?’

  ‘I don’t know what we’re going to find,’ admitted Janet. ‘Listen, Mr Searle is very kind, but I don’t want him interfering here, bringing along his metal detector, telling us he only wants to help. If good old Mrs Fleming does her stuff – ‘

  ‘Where is Mrs Fleming?’

  ‘Jerry took her back to Marbury. She looked dead on her feet.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ Susannah smiled. ‘I must admit, I was impressed by what I saw today.’

  ‘So you should be.’ Janet rubbed her eyes. ‘I don’t know how she did it. But she has a real gift, and she knows how to use it, so we should be grateful that she chose to use it here. Why don’t you go home? You look dead beat.’

  ‘So do you,’ Susannah said. ‘Come on, let’s get moving.’

  ‘I’m staying here,’ said Janet.