But then the family tree on the far wall began to distract her. She started hearing an aristocratic gnat-like chorus, all those generations going back to valiant noble ancestors humming that she, Clare, was going to attend a historic re-enactment of a wedding in the company of one of their young ilk, and she had nothing remotely smart enough to wear. The yellow dress from the shop window on the main street drifted in, swishing around the room, skimming over the table, flaring in the dim mullion-windowed light, brushing against her then darting away. She glanced at her watch. Soon the shop would be closing for the long midday break.
SHE RAN DOWN THE narrow street towards the main piazza, shocked at herself for dashing away, for arranging to spend a small fortune, too, to have the contents of those volumes photocopied from the microfiche the museum had made, and all because of a dress that would almost surely be sold.
A voice hailed her. She caught that edge of upper-class and rough.
She knew who it was before she turned. “Clare Livingston! Halloooo!”
Luke Tindhall, standing with his arm raised, the ruby eye of the gold snake ring catching the light. He’d seen her stop. There was no use pretending she hadn’t seen him too.
No time now. Too bad.
CLARE LAID HER NEW purchases on the bed.
Imagine spending what amounted to two weeks’ salary at the lab for a linen dress so short there was barely room for it to wrinkle, a pair of spike-heeled sandals, a clutch of creamy silk panties that were little more than wisps, and a strapless bra, a marvel of Italian engineering, accented with tasty little butter-coloured flowers.
All that, and she’d blown the opportunity of helping Nikki Stockton as she’d planned, by snubbing Luke Tindhall. She flinched to think of how she’d left him standing in the middle of the piazza, with that foolish raised arm. What had her time in Italy actually been but a wrong step here, a wrong step there.
Clare Livingston, the great explorer, forever lost and scattering such a trail of bad karma that she never would be found.
AFTER A GOOD NUMBER of rings, the phone in Harold Plank’s Mayfair apartment was picked up to the rumbling of someone who might have been wakened from a siesta. Clare nearly clicked off, but when she identified herself he sounded pleased. She pulled herself together and thanked him warmly for the Brunello. She’d been meaning to write a note, she explained. She hoped he’d understand that during her first days in Italy she’d been so busy.
Good, he cut in. He certainly hoped that his man Tindhall had been helpful. He chuckled, said that as Tindhall had been ex communicado since Clare’s arrival, he’d taken that as a sign that his man had been satisfactorily showing Clare around.
The word Ankara had been on the tip of Clare’s tongue — as in, how helpful it had been for Luke Tindhall to drop off an envelope of her uncle’s newspaper articles before he flew off there. But what if Harold Plank didn’t know about his man’s trip to Ankara?
She went straight to the point instead, about the excavation at Poggio Selvaggio, the important work of Dr. William Sands, how fascinating it sounded, how she’d been invited to go up there.
Oh yes, that settlement site, Sir Harold Plank said, his tone implying, just as the Contessa Luisa di Varinieri had suggested, that this sort of project didn’t much spark his interest. But of course, he said, if Clare thought it was something Tindhall should take in, he would call Tindhall, immediately, and insist he go along.
When she’d hung up, Clare ran her finger along the phone cord, as if a clue might have settled among the coils. So what had Luke’s trip to Ankara been about? She couldn’t help an unfortunate little flip of fellow-feeling for someone who, like her, might have a slippery relationship with the truth.
The Orientalizing Bead
WHEN CLARE THOUGHT OF the trip to Poggio Selvaggio later, what flashed before her was a dreamlike picture of a group gathered round to peer at some small incongruous thing that had assumed mysterious importance. The plan, as it evolved after Clare let Nikki know that Luke was coming, was that Luke would pick Clare up en route, and the whole group would meet at a certain crossroads in Umbria at ten, after William had collected some students at the train station. He would also be picking up two women from the Middle Eastern Institute in London, scholars he’d met at a conference on “The Future of the Past” the year before, who were travelling on to Jordan after a whirl through Tuscany. Carl and Anders Piersen would be coming too, from Chiusi, where they had recently moved into an apartment. Vittorio Cerotti, the inspector, would be along although his wife the Contessa couldn’t make it.
Oh, and how dreadful about Clare’s pen, Nikki said. “That’s a bitch — but hey, it’s sure to turn up.”
LUKE WAS THREE QUARTERS of an hour late. His antique car looked freshly washed and waxed, and the bulky, lionish totality of him looked intensely washed and waxed as well, contradicting the sullen look he gave her. The scrubbing hadn’t dispersed the cloud of pheromones jittering around the inside of his car, as he manhandled it through curve after curve, the ruby snake eye glinting.
When they came to the intersection at the bottom of her hill, he turned west instead of east, saying that Harold Plank wanted her to see the great Orientalizing tombs, just up the valley.
“When exactly did Sir Harold suggest this?”
He shrugged. His resolute blockish silence started to eat up the air. But then a lake of poppies swung into view, blood-red against the surrounding green, and a huge mound rose out of a field, a hill covered in grass and bushes and trees. If the land had not been cleared around its base for ongoing excavation work, this gigantic “melon tomb” really could have been mistaken for a true hill, bigger by far than the hillocks in Clare’s meadow. Of course, this had been built for generations of princely families. But the old question nagged her, the one Marta had tossed aside: where had all the less princely people been buried?
What did archaeologists have to say about that? she asked Luke. He too tossed the question aside. The valley had been the bread basket of Tuscany for almost three thousand years. Any smaller tombs down here — and the Etruscans always placed their cemeteries on a lower level than their cities, he told her, in a superior tone — would have been ploughed under centuries ago. Or they would have been victims of the tombaroli.
“Do you mean professional tomb robbers? Who exactly would they be?”
He shot her a look. “They don’t fill out census forms.”
He turned the car, headed back onto the smaller road that would take them to their meeting place.
THEY WERE VERY LATE. But Luke’s arrival was greeted with delight by the two women from the Middle Eastern Institute, who turned out to be old Cambridge pals. The reunion sparked laughter and merry bursts of Arabic. William Sands looked grim. Nikki took Clare’s arm and thanked her again for getting Luke to come along. Nikki was wearing a black mad-hatter hat and cut-off overalls with a huge enameled poppy pinned to the bib. “Here,” she said, “I found this in the market. It’s for you.” Before Clare could protest, she’d taken the brooch off and was pinning it to Clare’s shirt. Clare noticed her fingers were stained black with a pearly gleam that looked like India ink.
They drove off in a convoy to the upland meadow where the excavation’s other vehicles were parked and the trail to the dig began. Vittorio Cerotti had fallen asleep waiting in his car. By then it was well past noon. Luke took charge of the tweed-skirted British women as if it were his expedition they were on. Clare followed, curious what she might learn from their barky voices ringing through the trees.
She heard them quizzing him about how on earth he had ended up working for “dear old Harry Plank.” Whatever was Luke doing diddling around with the Etruscans? “Darling, we know you’re a Stone Age man at heart! Last we heard, you’d finagled your way in with that team taking another look at Qal’Jalam, now that Iraq has settled down a bit.” Luke said too right, he’d signed on as field supervisor, and in fact he’d come up with one fucking earth-shattering piece of stuff.
Unfortunately, the director of that project was such a king-sized prick that the Iraqis had pulled their support and the finds got spirited off to Baghdad, likely never to reappear for another eight thousand years. But anyway, one did have to earn a living, and the Plank Foundation at least gave him a chance to get out of sodding Britain from time to time …
William Sands caught up with Clare. She struggled to keep one ear on the conversation up ahead. The women were trying to tease more information out of Luke about that earth-shattering find that had been spirited away. Had he really come on something dating from the Samarra period? At Qal’Jalam? Surely he was pulling a fast one …! He was teasing them right back: “Say no more, say no more — a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat …!” William Sands was explaining that when they got to the top Clare would find that only a couple of trenches had been reopened so far, but he’d been sure that she would like to get a glimpse of the operation from the get-go. Further up the trail, Luke Tindhall was clearly revelling in the stream of questions the women were firing at him, egging him on. They wondered if his secret might have anything to do with the way he’d recently been spotted snuffling around in Eastern Turkey? Surely he didn’t think word wouldn’t get around …? “Let’s just say the sands of Qal’Jalam offered up a small epiphany,” he finally said. “Meanwhile, in a sacrifice to British archaeology, I have taken on the assignment of minding that considerable stunner you saw getting out of my car, keeping the lollypop warm for Harry.”
Laughter. “Good old Tindhall, you never change …!”
The British voices bounded ahead and were lost in the trees. Clare turned her attention to William’s fine gravelly stream of words.
WHEN THEY REACHED THE top William led Clare to a spot on the re-excavated ramparts, enormous stones that had been first discovered beneath much over-growth by Luisa di Varinieri’s father. The toponym attributed to this hill, “Poggio Selvaggio,” had given Count di Varinieri the clue to start looking around.
“Poggio Selvaggio,” Clare said. “Wooded hill? Or could selvaggio also mean ‘savage’? As in ‘savage hill’? Is that what you think? That it was long ago named by the locals, when there were still a few startling remains of a temple up here, or even a kind of ancient racial memory of all those colossal pagan-seeming buildings before they crumbled into dust?”
William’s fine approving smile helped wipe out the ridiculous chatter she’d just overheard. He said her suggestion was right on. The buildings themselves would have been built of timber. Only the foundations remained of this fortress settlement that once loomed formidably over the plain.
Lake Trasimeno gleamed below, a flat green jewel. William went on to describe how the view over the plain would have changed over the centuries: the marshes of the valley drained by the Etruscans, becoming fertile, only to be let go wild again by the Romans, then the swampy flat land battled over again and again in medieval times. “One of my colleagues describes it as a dance; referring, that is, to the movement of the very landscape over the centuries. So you see,” he said, “that we are not entirely lacking in poetic fallacy in my profession.”
How attractive this quality of his was, so serious, almost without humour. But deep. She thought again how she might want to crack a man like that, and never succeed, never know that some deep unexpected fire was going on inside. She was conscious, too, of Nikki and Anders and Carl a little farther away. Nikki had hiked ahead with the two of them, and now she was making some joke that had them all laughing. What did it mean that Carl and Anders had moved on to Chiusi? Had she, Clare, allowed her imagination to go wild in the matter of William and Anders? Had she really even seen what she’d thought she’d seen?
William reached into the bag slung on his shoulder and pulled out a small clay pan pipe. Without change of expression he began to play, until the rest of the party had gathered around, the haunting mood broken only by a loud cough from Luke.
For the benefit of the newcomers, William then explained what this settlement would have been like during the Etruscan ages. He walked them through the area where the tile-roofed houses would have been, and the workshop where a weaving industry had been pursued and pot-making too, and the storerooms where ceramic vats had been discovered still containing residue of wine — so it was possible to conclude even what sort of grapes these people had grown. He pointed out the foundations of the great temple, and the temple altar — its location verified by the spring of water in the woods, very near. This would have been essential for washing away the sacrificial blood. Nearby, a year ago, they’d found evidence of a healing sanctuary, hundreds of votive offerings, small terracotta body parts, hands, feet, breasts, even uteri and other internal organs, offered by the sick in the hope of a cure. The significant thing about this excavation, he said, was how it was revealing to their team the story of both elite and humble lives, a story quite different — broader — than could be learned in the excavation of a tomb.
A lovely feeling took hold of Clare; to think that a living sense of the past could be recaptured from such small clues as a scattering of loom weights, or the deepened shade of earth where kilns would have been, or the alignment and shape of foundation stones. She watched Carl step into a newly opened trench and run his hands over a column base carved almost three thousand years before, as if conferring with a colleague. Then Anders spotted a sherd of pottery, which proved to hold a fragment of an inscription. Such writing could have had magical intent, he said. The belief was that if one wrote down a name, one was able to affect it.
He raised his voice. “We have in our national museum in
Copenhagen many spear points with words inscribed, to make sure they hit their mark.” Then, louder still, “But when I write the name of William Sands, it will have no effect at all.” He strode off towards that spring of water in the woods.
Clare glanced around, wondering how on earth Nikki had taken this.
Instead, she found Vittorio Cerotti, the archaeology inspector, looming at her side.
HE TOOK HER ARM, then dropped it as if this might have been an affront. His whole face flushed; Clare even imagined his pointed beard taking on a fiery reflection as she felt the heat of his discomfort. He started telling her about the vandals that had struck this site during the winter, how he believed some precious votive objects might have been carried off, things that could have imparted considerable understanding about the religious life here.
“Tombaroli?” Clare asked, trying out the word.
Then, remembering Marta’s warnings about Sicilians masquerading as telephone workers, she said, “Would they be gangs of criminals, maybe even Mafia, from the south?”
Vittorio lowered his voice, even though the rest of the group were
peering into a trench some distance away. He said that tombaroli could be almost anyone. They could be from among the local villagers or farmers, or even from the towns. “These can also be people who puff themselves up with a misplaced sense of honour,” he said. “People claiming to be liberating our precious things, rather than letting the bureaucracy seize all the cultural treasures and lock them up in museums.
“The hard truth, however, is that most pieces are smuggled out of the country — all context lost — often broken up to be sold for bigger profit. Bits of the same vase sold to museums or collectors around the world. Even though there are international treaties now to prevent this, the depredation goes on.”
He took hold of her arm again, his beard quivering with the urgency of the message. “I hope, Signora Livingston, that when you write you will make clear that this activity is not to be considered part of our quaint Italian ways.”
He leaned closer. He said that unfortunately he was also compelled to tell her something he hoped she would not write about.
She promised.
She suspected this was what every writer did.
Very recently, Vittorio Cerotti said, artefacts had been turning up that were clearly from this very inland area. Some had been given over t
o the police by an honest antiquities dealer, others had been discovered after finding their way to a dealer in Switzerland. These were principally pieces of black bucchero with designs distinctive of this region, yes, but slightly different than material from any previously known provenance.
“Therefore we are forced to think there must be current illicit digging going on.” He turned morose eyes on her. “I believe that your uncle may have stumbled on the source of this material and intended to write about it. I fear that after his death some other persons have followed his clues, persons unscrupulous but intelligent. If you could do anything to help such further dislocation of precious knowledge, it would be an enormous service —”
He broke off. Clare followed his glance to the trench where now, instead of peering into it, the whole group was down in the trench itself, examining something the diggers had just unearthed.
WILLIAM SANDS WAS HOLDING a single bead.
Yes it was a tiny object, he was explaining, but a rare one in this context. He called the new students to come close. “Such a find is particularly useful, because it is what archaeologists consider a diagnostic,” he said. “It tells a story.”
As Clare craned forward, she saw it was a brilliant blue. Amazing to think of it lying all those centuries in the earth, then blinking awake to catch the light, like a knowing blue eye.
The Whirling Girl Page 13