Rook (18 page)

‘Quarr stone, first used in the late Anglo-Saxon period,’ Robert said. He was no ignoramus but he held the chunks and chips of rock and stone aloft like jewels, with a foolish look on his face.

The puzzle for her was in the missing detail. None of the men would answer this, how the stone coffin had been hewn, and where. The sides were marked, chipped into shape with a tool like a chisel, Brian said. Ada wondered about the drowned girl’s body, where she had lain before burial, whether her warrior father carried her in his arms to the open tomb which awaited her, a chill bed with the covers drawn back. The way Harry carried her up from the creek, the warmth of his body a comfort; the taste of silt in her throat.

Ada shifts on the mattress.

A drowned child, buried under the chancel arch in the position reserved for those of high standing, yet the tomb was simple, without decoration. The result of an illegitimate liaison, Brian had said, by way of explanation, in that bored, dismissive way he had.
Don’t let your imagination run away with itself, Ada. Don’t get carried away
. The lack of decoration might have been due to haste, a need to bury the child quickly. Perhaps she died at this time of year, in the height of summer.

Ada shivers, remembering the smothering weight of the wet cloth which dragged her body down. Harry strode up the slope to the house with her in his arms. Nora peeled off her clothes, wrapped her in a bath towel and rubbed her dry as if she was a child, while Harry fetched wood and laid up the fire in her bedroom. A fire lit upstairs, in June!

The Saxon princess was laid in a coffin hewn from Quarr stone, which has another name –
featherbed –
and this is the name Ada prefers, the name she will give the young man from the television when he returns. As she knows he will.

Strange name for a grown man, Jonny; a diminutive more suited to a child.

No matter what opinion her daughter holds, Ada will not be taken for a fool. She will gain pleasure from mentioning Robert’s name when she next speaks with the young man, and advises him to add Robert Flatholm to his list:
Dr Flatholm –
airily –
a geologist I knew quite well at the time
.

She has the facts at her fingertips. Featherbed stone was used in Bosham before the Norman conquest. Ada smiles to herself, gives a shrug of her shoulders, a demure shake of the head. The quarry was worked out by the fourteenth century.

She can speak this language Robert spoke because she taught herself at the time, to be able to converse with him. Robert took pride in his area of expertise, pride in being able to date the different parts of the church through the stone used as building material.

Ada hasn’t thought of the piece of featherbed stone in years but here it has been all this time, nestled in one of the silky inner pockets of the suitcase. Jonny’s questions about the little princess’s grave brought everything back. He’d love to have a look at Brian’s photographs, he’d said, and so she invited him to call again. Yet on the appointed day, he hadn’t so much as crossed the threshold of Creek House, thanks to Nora’s appearance.        

Robert’s blond head is bent to his diagrams. The renowned chancel arch, built in Quarr stone and stitched on to the Bayeux Tapestry, he coloured purple. How simple to slip a piece from the rubble in the griddle into the pocket of her new cashmere cardigan, to nod and tilt her cheek towards Robert when he pointed with his pencil to the purple and yellow blocks of shading, to nod a second time when he spoke in another language about nodules and limestone, her mind on other things – the blond hair at the base of his throat, the way his Adam’s apple moved, prominent as a boy’s – as her fingers closed around a piece of featherbed stone from the thousand-year-old tomb of a princess.        

Ada is not certain which of Brian’s books contains, folded between the pages, Robert’s diagram of Bosham church, a book with Robert’s signature and the date, April 1954, in the bottom right-hand corner. When she’s back on her feet she will go into Brian’s study and make sure she can lay her hands on it.

Strictly speaking, opined that white-haired busybody on a bicycle – whose name Ada forgets – the 1954 excavation of the tomb was performed unlawfully; Brian and the others chose to disregard the fact. The Reverend, tubby little man with his white goatee beard and half-moon spectacles, the churchwardens, someone from the Ministry of Works – they all had their own petty rules and observances, the archaeologists, geologists and historians. The Reverend Jones – that’s his name – referred constantly to the copious notes of one of his predecessors. He had several notebooks detailing the original excavation of the child’s tomb in 1865, plus a dusty tome a previous incumbent had written on the traditions of Bosham.

Since the mother of the little princess who drowned is unknown, Ada feels a sense of responsibility. Though several experts were gathered together to take measurements and notes, no women were invited to visit the opened grave. She was there merely as Brian’s wife, her name not mentioned in the newspaper reports of the time. She will be an invaluable asset to Jonny’s television programme. She must tell Nora to book an appointment for her at the hairdresser’s as a matter of urgency.

Ada neatens a pile of photographs. Fifty years ago, near as damn it. Dust in the back of her throat from the sifted rubble. Her new cardigan was powder-blue cashmere, snug across the bust. Pearl buttons. She can feel them, the way each button rolled hard as an acid drop between her fingers as she fastened them.

A mere trifle, in the grand scheme of things, to smuggle a tiny piece of another life, another time, Cnut’s time, a man whose sons were warriors who felt the pulse of daring.

She will appear on Jonny’s programme to talk about the various types of stone: the Archaeologist’s Wife, widowed for almost two decades. The piece of Quarr stone will captivate him, Jonny, with his practised look. Doubtless some woman has made him her pet, told him he is adorable, some woman made foolish by those puppy-dog eyes, the treacle of his voice; an older woman, most likely, or a girl.

She will call him Jonathan, the young man with an appetite, if she’s not mistaken, but – she recalls the disappointment of his handshake – likely to be lacking in staying power.

20

Creek house at first seems empty. Nora leans her cello against the wall in the hallway and slips off her shoes. She hears her mother’s laugh and muted voices from upstairs, followed by a thud and the sound of something moving across floorboards. Rook hasn’t come swaggering down the hallway to greet her, so he must be shut in the kitchen.

In her bedroom, Ada kneels by a suitcase, one Nora doesn’t recognise, old fashioned and boxy, a pattern tooled in leather around the edges. Beside the suitcase, Jonny’s long form is stretched out on the floor, his head propped on one hand. From the stairs, only his back and the rolled-up shirtsleeve of the arm supporting his head is visible, but he must know she’s there because, without turning his attention from Ada, he lifts the other arm and beckons her into the room.

Nora hesitates before stepping forward. Though she must be aware of her daughter in the doorway, Ada doesn’t look up. Her hair is loose, damp on her forehead. She’s flushed. This is the first day, since the accident, she has got up and dressed. Hefty at her neck is an ornate necklace of red glass stones. Although a window is open, the air is stale with cigarette smoke and liberally sprayed perfume.

‘Brian was thrilled at the opportunity, of course,’ Ada is saying. ‘Some regular repair work was being carried out, paving stones being renewed to the west of the chancel steps, I believe, which necessitated the lifting of slabs. They knew the child’s coffin existed, of course, that was found in the eighteen hundreds, but the memorial tablet is in completely the wrong place so they were not expecting to uncover it. The second, larger coffin was a complete surprise to all and sundry, despite the fact it had been vandalised on some previous occasion.’

‘How could they tell?’

‘The skull was missing. Other body parts were absent, if I remember rightly.’

Ada talks on. Jonny pats the floor beside him and puts a finger to his lips. Nora sits cross-legged beside him. The room is hot so she unfolds her legs, stretching them out in front of her on the floor. Jonny glances down, the flick of his eyes tracing the length of her thighs, her calves and ankles. Glittering through her limbs, Nora’s blood responds. Ada’s chin lifts; she tosses her hair.

‘The vicar sent for Brian straight away. It was fortunate he was at home, he was so often away. They called in other experts too – someone from the Ministry of works, Dr Langhorne from the village, and a second archaeologist and a geologist came down from London. One or two of the churchwardens were there too, I believe.’

Ada runs her fingertips over the photographs, fanned in her hand like a pack of cards. She tips her head, glancing at Jonny over the top of them, focused on him in such a way Nora is cut from her field of vision. Nora is left with a sense of not being entirely present. She decides to say something, to take more control of the situation. ‘So sorry not to be here when you arrived, Jonny. Mum, has Jonny had something to drink? It’s so hot today and he’s had a long journey from London.’

‘At the time the national press were terribly taken with the little princess and the story of her drowning in the millstream,’ Ada continues, as though Nora has not spoken. Clearly, her arrival is an unwelcome disruption.

‘The larger coffin was quite magnificent.’ Ada selects several more photos and, with a flourish, leans over the open suitcase to hand them to Jonny. ‘Horsham stone. See the apsidal head, and the way the stone is tooled? Brian said it must have been someone of great importance not only to be coffined, but to also be buried beside a king’s daughter.’

‘Any theories?’

Ada kneels over the suitcase. She shakes her head. ‘Only some talk at the time it was Earl Godwin.’

Ada’s gaze shifts from Jonny to the window above and behind his head, where poplar leaves stipple the sunlight. Her eyes are dreamy. ‘One of the London men stayed here with us for a few days, at Creek House.’ She glances at Nora and down at the photographs in her hand before passing them over. ‘Quite a gathering, as you can see.’

Jonny hands Nora a photograph in which three men in suits bend over the pit of an open coffin. The stone lid has been prised open and leans against the church wall, broken. The coffin is empty. No skeleton, just rubble heaped together in the centre. A few sticks.        

In the next photograph two men stand near an opened coffin, one looking on, a splay-bristled garden broom in his hands, while the other stoops astride the pit and holds, between thumb and forefinger as if ready to cast it to one side, a length of bone. The camera’s flash has caught the gleam of his shoes. To one side, stands a third man, tall and angular, a mop of fair hair falling forward as he bends over a garden griddle filled with rubble.                

‘The vandals had left so few bones – a frightful disappointment. The pelvis was there, I held it myself.’ Ada shivers. ‘All such a shambles, just bits and pieces.’

Nora shivers, looking again at the photograph: not sticks lying in the tomb, but a bundle of bones.

‘So, even though it was not a new discovery, the smaller grave made the nationals for obvious reasons.’ Jonny runs a hand through his hair, nodding. ‘King Canute has mythic status, everyone’s heard of him, and the death of a child always draws sympathy.’

Nora pulls in her feet, preparing to stand. She will have lunch and feed Rook.

Though it’s late in the day, she might go for a run, and leave these two to it. Before she can get up, Jonny passes her a piece of paper, a charcoal drawing, the edges softened with age, the paper stained with damp. An illegible signature and a date, 1865, beside the sketch of a skeleton, marked out with pencil lines and numbers, measurements. The breadth of the ribcage is eight inches. Nora stretches her fingers wide. The ribcage is little more than the span of one of her large hands.

Sweat slicks behind Nora’s knees, but she can’t stop herself from lifting the paper closer to examine the drawing, the mess of what looks like horse-hair surrounding the leer of a skull-face. The hand, all bones visible, looks unnaturally elongated. This can’t have been what they saw when the child’s coffin was first opened, not after eight centuries. Her stomach crawls. The paper falls to the floor.

‘For pity’s sake, Nora!’ Ada has snatched up the drawing. ‘This is well over a hundred years old!’