My Lady of the Bog (2 page)

“
Girl
,” I rejoined. “And I doubt she’s anywhere so old as that. Probably more like two or three thousand.”

“Fancy them a trifle younger myself. So why bring her here? To me?”

“A postmortem is in order, I believe.”

“Oh, is it now? And why, pray tell, is that, old son?”

“ ‘Treasure Trove.’ ”

He looked surprised, then most displeased.

“You haven’t heard? A gold and silver treasure was recovered with the body. They’re digging it up as we speak. And, according to a very old and peculiar law you people have upon your books . . . ‘found objects of precious metals must be turned over to the local coroner, who will determine
why
the items were interred.’ ”

“I know the bloody law. What I want to know is
how
I’m supposed to tell
why
some bloody thing was buried? Especially in the year aught bloody two. And what’s the point of a PM? There’s no one to punish or apprehend. Whoever done the poor darlin’ in has long since met his bloody end.” He lifted his dripping hands from the sink. They were pale and white and slick and long like the bellies of somethings long ago drowned.

“Still,” I said,
“if
she was murdered—and there’s a good chance she was—you owe it to her to uncover how and why. You’re the coroner. She died in your district, after all. Even if several millennia ago.” I studied the insect pinched in my tweezers. “She died in the last week of July. Or, perhaps, the first week of August.”

“And how the hell do you know that? You find a certificate of death?”

“No. I found an ant, winged.”

He fixed his ironic gaze upon me. “And what did this wingéd insect say?”

“He said she died in late July.”

“And how, pray tell, did he do that?”

“With his
wings
. Look, the males don’t hatch until midsummer, then die within a week or two. If one was wrapped up in her hair . . .”

He studied me with something approaching admiration. “What a clever little
fuck
you are, Donne,” he said, lathering both hostility and affection onto the ancient Anglo-Saxon word. He approached the corpse with an air of bother.

It was just an act. I knew he was as interested in her as I was. We were more than acquaintances, less than friends. “And what do you make of these?” he asked, pointing at the strange forked sticks pinning her elbows and her knees.

“What do
you
make of them?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps she wasn’t dead when buried. I mean, why else pin her to the ground?”

“Could be,” I agreed. “She may have been forcibly drowned. We’ll see. Then again . . .”

“Then again . . .
what
?”

“Then again, maybe whoever buried her there didn’t want her spirit walking again.”

He looked at me with startled eyes. “You mean . . . ? She was . . .”

I thought for a moment. “I’m not sure exactly
what
I mean.”

Chapter 2

S
o engrossed was I in the study of my Lady that I worked all day and straight into the evening. For such a find, combined with the treasure, was a rarity of the first order. Today, I knew, was a day of grace. Soon the mob would descend: reporters, scholars, officials, the public . . . all of whom would want a piece of my Lady—literally, if we’d allowed it. Also, the political wrangling would begin over who would conduct the investigation: scholars from all over would be vying for the honor. For this reason, I was intent on gathering all the data that I could before anyone knew enough to stop me. Having planted myself in the middle of the case, I was daring anyone to shoo me off it. Oh, afterward, I would be roundly scolded, told I had overstepped my bounds. That was for sure—but by then it would be too late, wouldn’t it? By then, I hoped, I would have already discovered a great deal about her and made myself so indispensable to the investigation, I could not be all that readily dislodged. And so I continued my preliminary examination.

Her hair had originally been black or brown, the iron in the water having turned it red. The band of cloth that blinded her eyes was in a tablet weave and measured one-and-one-half inches wide. The forked sticks pinning her limbs appeared to have some writing on them, though given their age and waterlogged condition it was difficult to make it out. And it was then I had my first suspicion that she wasn’t as old as I’d originally thought—for apart from some Egyptian Old Kingdom hieroglyphics, writing isn’t found in neolithic graves.

The hairnet’s tie beneath her chin had prevented the horrid “mummy gape.” Still, her lips were parted, as if she were about to speak—or
scream!
I introduced a flashlight. Her teeth were sound, save for a single shattered molar. Her fully erupted wisdom teeth suggested she was over eighteen. I made a note for the pathologist to check for primary arthritis which normally sets in around 40, as a way of bracketing her age at death.

I couldn’t weigh her, encased as she was in peat, but I measured her. She was 5 feet 5⅝ inches tall.

I tunneled into the peat at her back. As I’d feared, her wrists were bound with leather thongs; her hands were ringless, one wrist encircled by a silken thread. They were hands of privilege, unmarked by labor, and the nails, though stained, were intact and long, their uniform striae showing no signs of malnutrition. Her body, in fact, was so magnificently preserved, I could trace the whorls on the tips of her fingers! I took her prints on the off chance that she
was
modern and her prints were on file, though this seemed to me unlikely, especially given the stakes.

Then again, staking bodies in England isn’t only some quaint neolithic rite. As late as 1826, a suicide and suspected murderer named Griffith was publicly buried at the intersection of Eton Street, Grosvenor Place and the King’s Road, London, with a stake through his heart. And if these were the ways of sophisticated Londoners, what might we expect from the good folk of country Dorset?

I recalled Tacitus’s observation regarding the rites of the northern tribes:

. . .
the shirker and disreputable are drowned in miry swamps, covered with wattled hurdles
.

So then was my Lady a murderess or adulteress?

It was eleven in the evening when I remembered the treasure. This may seem odd, but the golden trove did not overly excite me; what interested me most was what, if anything, it might tell us about
her
.

The country hospital was dreary at that hour. Light from bulbs of the weakest wattage coated the walls like a film of margarine—shine without illumination.

My colleague’s door was almost hidden at the end of a long hall. A sign declared:

Wooland Strugnell

HM Coroner

By Appointment

under which some droll had scrawled:

or chance!

I knocked, then gently tried the knob, not expecting it to turn, and was surprised when it did. Strugnell, too, was up and working.

I asked him about the treasure and was apprised it had been brought here, to the hospital, earlier that evening, still encased in a block of peat. To have “excavated it properly,” would have been “unworkable,” he said, and would have required constant surveillance. And who was about to sit in a bog twenty-four hours a day? Not
he
! Plus, whomever he hired to guard the treasure—for thirty pounds
per diem—
would steal as much of it as they could carry. No, it was locked in the hospital cellar, and only
he
had the key. He said this in a grand and boastful way that was tinged, nonetheless, with self-deprecation, as if all he’d attained in his forty-odd years was a key to a cage in a hospital basement.

I asked him for it. He gave it up without demur. I took the elevator down. The treasure was behind a wire partition. Boxes of generic tissue, mop heads, and rolls of paper toweling had been pushed to one side. It was a woefully inadequate barrier to theft. Maybe toilet paper was safe behind it, but golden torcs?

I unlocked the cage and examined it more closely. It reeked of bog. A few of its pieces were finely worked ornaments: armlets, bracteates and pins; while others were smelted gobs of hack silver, electrum filings, and thumb-size gold bars, all nestled together and gleaming dully, like fish in a bucket.

It was then something stopped me cold. From out of the vat of worked and ceaselessly curving precious metals protruded one right angle, which, if I wasn’t mistaken, was the corner of a
book
. It had not been visible when the hoard was uncovered; resettling, apparently, having brought it to light.

Every anthropologist in the world, I am sure, has had at one time a similar fantasy: to recover some amazing treasure rivaling the Rosetta Stone! In my mind, I had always seen it being lifted, dripping, from the pale waters of a desert lake!

Yet here in this musty English cellar, my fantasy was coming true—even if a book, or codex, as it is more properly called, was nothing one might expect to recover from an Iron Age or even Bronze Age grave.

I snapped several photos to record its provenance in the trove, then carefully withdrew it. Its damp leather cover was inset with a tree-of-life design of varicolored semiprecious stones, while its pages, made of skin or bark, were well-preserved by the bog’s brackish waters.

“Pinching the Queen’s treasures, are we? It’s good I keep an eye on you.” The coroner had come in without my knowledge, deceptively quiet for such a large-boned man.

“Look!” I said, holding out the book.

Strugnell studied it through his rimless specs. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears to be a
book
. Come from there, did it?” He eyed the peat suspiciously. “Read it?”

“No. Should we open it and see?”

“Not really,” he said dismissively. “You know as well as I we should have half a dozen scholars present, photographers, the BBC, a representative from the palace, and the grand rabbi of Jerusalem.” He thought for a moment. “Then again, ‘What the hell’ is always a good reason. Sod it. Let’s have a squint.”

I opened it. It was the color of a partridge: all soft browns and grays.

Writing flowed across the page, though in the wretched light, I couldn’t decipher the language it was written in. Then the characters I’d been trying to worry into
a’s
and
s’s
transformed themselves into something else. “The damn thing’s
Indic!”

This was remarkable in itself. For what was an Eastern document like this doing in an old English grave? The only explanation was that book and body were far less ancient than I had believed, dating no earlier than the thirteenth century—when Indian goods and artifacts began to flow into the Isles.

I’ll admit I was disappointed. My Lady was growing younger with every revelation. And though it would still be interesting to know her, I was beginning to think she was a comparative youngster and not the grand old dam I had thought she was.

Chapter 3

I
t was well past midnight when my Range Rover’s tires crushed the white gravel drive leading up to my home. A full moon flooded the matchless Dorset countryside: blunt, undulating hills and downs like the towering crests and sinking troughs of a restless ocean frozen in midswell.

The village I live in, Droopiddle Bryant, is one of Dorset’s more ancient and quaint, consisting of half a dozen stony farms and thatched cottages. A ruined chapel, in the shadow of Bulbarrow, commands the valley as it once commanded the life of the town—until the mid-fourteenth century when plague had forced the villagers to shift to less polluted grounds, stranding the remaining huts and farms and leaving the chapel (which, after all, had
not
stopped the pestilence) marooned upon the heath.

For the New York-centric who haven’t the foggiest where Dorset
is
, it’s in southwest England. Its picture-perfect pastures are enclosed by hedgerows, with farms and hamlets scattered round; towns are few and tend to have been founded by the Romans. Along the coast, the fossils of extinct sea beasts are often recovered and Bronze Age hillforts claim the crests of hills. Dorset is the home of the novelist, Thomas Hardy; the grave of Jack Druitt (on everyone’s shortlist for the Ripper); and the winding road where Lawrence of Arabia crashed his bike and broke his neck. Indeed, if one were to cast a circle with a radius of thirty miles and its center at my Lady’s grave, it would pass through Stonehenge to the east;through Glastonbury Tor, legendary seat of King Arthur, to the west; and to the south on the English Channel, through Lyme Regis’s windswept quay, evoked so memorably in
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
.

Nor is Droopiddle Bryant, queer as it is, a name unusual for these parts. The towns all around are like words in a rhyme by Lewis Carroll: Duntish, Ansty, Dewlish, Long Burton, Ryme Intrinseca and Sixpenny Hanley. And often on the night drive home, when my mind was befogged with lager and fatigue, it would make up ridiculous automatic phrases: “The duntish slut was feeling ansty.” Or, “Donning his long burton, the captain looked positively
dewlish!
”

My cottage, per usual, was chilly and dark. I lit a fire, watching the kindling flare, then went to the kitchen and foraged in the refrigerator, returning with two cooked chops, a salt cellar and a stoppered bottle of the local ale. I threw a leg over the armchair’s upholstered arm, shook salt on the meat and wolfed it down. I was hungry. I chugged the ale and belched extravagantly. There are compensations that come with living alone, though, admittedly, they’re poor substitutes for company and affection.

Then I thought of my Lady and felt happy—like waking and remembering it was the last day of school. And I thought again of that night, as a child, I’d read a book on Peking Man. It described how a Canadian anatomy professor had gone to an herbalist’s shop in Beijing and purchased a remedy made from “dragon bones”—except that these “dragon bones,” to the professor’s trained eye, were
hominid
and older than any he’d ever seen. Returning to the pharmacy, he’d rifled its drawers and come across the bones of a mammoth and an ancient horse. How many other priceless relics had been ground to dust in the apothecary’s pestle? Then he’d bribed the druggist to show him where the bones were found. And there, washing out of a limestone hill, was the jawbone of an ancient man!