My Lady of the Bog (15 page)

With Houlihan, we’d called his bluff, at least. Obviously, he had no hard evidence against us; all he could offer was intimidation and, this time, it had failed. Not that I thought we were out of the woods, but the fact that the CID wasn’t waiting to arrest us upon our arrival was a clear indication they didn’t yet have a case. Now, if we could just keep our heads down, they
had
to come up with better suspects than Vidya and I.

Until then, I decided, I was going to try to live and work as before. I’d be
damned
if I’d let my life be turned upside down by a crime I hadn’t even committed. The one caveat was that I was afraid of leaving Vidya alone. For Jai’s attacker was still unknown, and I had the recurring, uneasy feeling the intended target was Vidya, not Jai.

“Don’t worry, darling. I’ll be fine. I know you have things to do.” She had showered and was seated at the kitchen table, wrapped in a white terrycloth robe, her wet black hair shining as though oiled.

“What will you do?”

“Unpack. Get settled. I love Dorset.”

“Oh? Been here before?”

“Not really.”

I found her answer extremely annoying. What did that mean? Either you had been to Dorset or not. There really wasn’t some
third
option, was there?

Maybe she sensed my mood, for she looked up again and said, “I’m a frightful nuisance, aren’t I, darling?”

“Hardly.”

“Oh, I am.” She gestured at
The Dorset Echo
, folded open to another sensational account of the crime. She gazed out the window. “Perhaps I should go.”

“Go?”
I cried. “We just arrived. Go
where
?”

After some consideration, she swung her gaze back to mine. “Is it the servants’ day off?”

“Uh . . .” I lied. “That was yesterday. They’ll be in by noon.”

Taking my hand, she slipped something on my wrist. It was a torc, forged of reddish gold with terminals bearing Celtic-looking heads.

“What’s this?”

“Just a little gift. For your kindness. And devotion.”

“My, God,” I said. “It looks real!”

“Oh, I’m sure it is. Lakshmi Auntie said it had been in the family for generations.”

“But Vidya,” I protested, “do you know what this is worth?”

“Nonsense. It is a trinket only.” And with a quick kiss to both my cheeks, she disappeared into the bathroom.

On my way to the college, I stopped in the village to have the Mercedes’s window replaced, the gas gauge fixed, and the car cleaned inside and out. Henry Carlson Lewis Jones’s fingerprints were surely all throughout it. I also took the clothes we’d worn and dumped them. The bullet’s impact had surely sprayed us with his DNA. Finally, I stopped at Ruby O’Connell’s. Ruby had cooked and cleaned for me on occasion and I asked her now if I might hire her as housekeeper. She allowed I might, provided I took on Willie, her husband, “as the gardener, sir.”

Willie waved back from his seat by the telly where, at ten forty-five on a Tuesday morning he was sucking down a bottle of brown Badger Ale.

“Don’t have to pay ‘im much,” she winked. “But I wouldn’t trust ‘im on his own, I wouldn’t.”

“You have a shotgun, Willie?”

He nodded.

“Bring it.”

“Got something else,” he said, and responding to his whistle, a wolfhound appeared, the size of a small war pony.

I nodded. I felt good not leaving Vidya alone.

My inbox held a six-inch stack of anthropological reports pertaining to “Holders Woman,” as my Lady of the Bog was now officially known. I withdrew them with anticipation. Jones’s and Jai’s deaths still sat like great undigested lumps in my stomach, rising, at intervals, into my craw. So, it would be a relief to attend to tragedies other than my own.

The lab analysis of my Lady’s stomach indicated it was nearly empty, save for a thin gruel of grain and wild herbs. There were traces of ergot—a psychotropic growing naturally on rye—which meant that my Lady might have been high and hallucinating. The amount was small and the report didn’t state the clinical dosage, so she might just as well have been stone-cold sober. It was one of those facts open to diametrically opposed interpretations, of which there seemed to be so many.

Her intestines contained eggs of
Trichuris
and
Ascaris—
parasitic worms that had probably caused her some gastric discomfort—and the roots of her hair harbored nits, though no adult lice were found. Other than that, there was “a total absence of necrophiliac fauna on the skin.” In other words, my Lady had no flies on her, from which one could almost certainly deduce that she was buried immediately upon her murder.

One of the more interesting studies analyzed the pollen in her nasal cavities, lungs and hair. These tiny spores, borne on the wind, are practically indestructible and can paint a detailed picture of the climate, flora and precipitation for years and seasons long since gone. The data confirmed my wingéd surmise that my Lady had been buried in mid-to late-July. Spores of land clearance weeds and a noticeable absence of pine and oak indicated a landscape extensively farmed. Further, by correlating the pollen record with conditions reflected in the rings of ancient pines, the palynologists had arrived at a death year of 1327. This was in broad agreement with the language of both the book and the runes. Everything, so far, was lining up nicely—until we came to the radiocarbon dating.

Here, the findings were wildly at odds. Though my Lady’s body yielded dates of 1290, 1260 and 1222 ACE (± about 120 years), the wooden stakes and surrounding peat dated to the seventeenth century!

I sought out a copy of the runic tracings. One line of the inscription was carved upon each stake. However, on the reverse side of the third stake were four more runes:
and a group of three others:
or
D-O-M
.

I discovered Rumple in a temporary office down the hall.

He stiffly and kindly offered his condolences and—remembering my final conversation with Jai—I graciously accepted them. As I still had not found a historical reference, I asked: “Could it be that her name wasn’t Albemarle? That those runes say something else?”

“Unlikely. In binding runes, the name was all important. It
had
to be included.
‘Ic beshrew
,’ ‘I curse,’ had no effect.
‘Ic beshrew
, Donne.’ Ah, now
that’s
a rune of power.”

“I found several more. A sort of capital P.”

“Wunjo
. Stands for joy, bliss. In Spencer, it adorns the flag of fairyland . . . associations with the grail. But used alone, as it is here, it’s said to induce madness.”

“Madness? In whom? In Albemarle?”

“Oh, I think not. Albemarle was dead. Or about to be. Did you find three others?”

I nodded. “
D-O-M
.”

“A second
o
was likely dropped.”

“ ‘
Doom?
’ ”

He nodded. “The doom of madness, of
wunjo
. On whomever breaks the holy runes.”

“Breaks the runes . . . ?”

“Well . . . removes the stakes.”

I smiled grimly and soldiered on. “The stakes are a different age than the body. Could it be from anomalies in the C-14?”

“Unlikely. The fluctuation for that period was factored in. There’s still a three-hundred-year difference.”

This was baffling. For if both sets of dates were true, then Holders Woman had died around thirteen hundred. Three hundred years later, she’d been buried and staked. That didn’t make sense.

“I noticed,” I said, “that her blood is B negative. That’s uncommon here and, as I recall, is often found in gypsies. Since she has a pierced nose, I was wondering if perhaps she could be a gypsy girl, killed, you know, for telling fortunes.”

Rumple chuckled. “You surprise me, Donne. I’d have thought you more conversant with
basic
European history.”

I smiled.

“Gypsies—or
Roma
, as they prefer to be called—do not appear in Western Europe until the
mid-fifteenth
century. So she can’t be what you call a ‘gypsy,’ now can she?” He sniffed. “Another odd thing: the body was found in conjunction with a number of artifacts.”

“You mean the treasure?”

“No, no.
These
artifacts were found in strata
above
the body. Two hundred and seventy-seven coins, to be precise, dating from 1306 all the way up to 1937.”

“What kind of coins?” I asked, both excited and dismayed—for to do this job properly
you had to know everything:
bones, coins, blood, gypsies.

“The oldest is a groat from the reign of Edward I. Most everything else is farthings, pennies. One testoon. A gold unite from Charles I. Oh, yes, some shillings from the late nineteenth century. What does all this suggest to you?”

“It suggests,” I replied, “a devotional cult attracting monetary offerings, dating from the time of her burial onward, by people who were poor. Probably the peasantry offering up their ha’pennies in return for some blessing—except for the unite, which makes me think the lady of the house must have learned of the cult and made an offering of her own.”

There was a pause. Then Rumple admitted drily, “Yes. It suggested much the same to me.”

I saw her now, bundled in sable, flinging the bullion into the bog. The coin arcs in the wintry starlight—gold returning to its source. But who is she making her offering
to?
Who does she think is down there to claim it? What has moved her to sacrifice such a sizeable piece of wealth? Is her daughter hemorrhaging to death in childbirth? Or her beloved son wasting away, the victim of a troll wife’s enmity that only a more powerful sorceress can dispel?

“And if coins were deposited as late as the 1930s, the tradition that inspired it may still be known. It could be recorded somewhere,” I said, with some excitement, “or someone who knows it may still be
alive!”

What I didn’t share with Rumple was my hope that the book would throw some light upon these mysteries. Instead, I handed him the original codex, without happening to mention Jai’s English translation.

I left him poring over the rare manuscript, astonished, while I went back to my own office and printed out another chapter of Sikandar’s story.

Soon after crossing the river border, Sikandar’s war party had encountered Rajputs. In a pitched exchange, the enemy was routed—though only when the dust had settled did Sikandar learn what he had won:

“. . . not pearls or emeralds, gold or silks, but something far more precious and delicious. Their knights were escorting an enclosed palanquin in which were, apparently, ladies of the harem.”

Chapter 21

T
here are four things, Ghazil says, before which the wise are not bold: fire, kings, saints—and
women!

Remembering this, I advanced with a mien of the utmost restraint. For imagine the terror in the breasts of these ladies as strange, armed men approached their carriage!

I parted the palanquin’s curtains. Its compartment was black against the blindingly bright sunlit morning and so, with a bow, I invited its occupants out.

I don’t know what I expected next: the arched instep of a delicate foot, or the swan’s neck curve of a brown and many-braceleted arm? So I was caught completely by surprise when a shrieking Rajput, wielding a
katar
¹
, leapt at me from the darkened box—only to find himself, well before landing, impaled on ‘Abd al-Wali’s sword. For a moment he hung there, eyes bugging, looking down in stupefaction, as if he couldn’t imagine how such a long, sharp knife had found its way into his soft, fat belly. Then with a jerk, ‘Abd al-Wali withdrew the blade and, raising it up, brought it down with a
clang
that was heard in Kabul! My would-be assassin dropped in the dust and through the cleft in his skull, I watched his brains decant: a surprisingly delicate, blood-flecked gray. I looked away, discomfited. For I’ll admit, I was not used to such sights.

Instantly, however, came something that was. A furious presence invaded the air: some demon summoned by this sacrifice of blood and, under the vengeful spirit’s spell, my men threatened to run their prisoners through.