Site Unseen (10 page)

Like I said, he's no good at concealment. When it finally
dawned on Alan that he was staring at me, the barely checked emotion--what was it? anger? frustration? jealousy?--shifted immediately into fear.

I figured I would get some explanation at least, but he all but ran past me.

I looked into the room and saw Neal. He was standing and caught in the grips of some violent passion, fists clenched and feet apart. He looked up and caught my eye and swallowed. "Care to clue me in?" I asked. "What's going on here?" I took an authoritative tone, to startle him into telling me what had just transpired. Maybe it wasn't fair of me to try and get it out of Neal, but I knew I had a better chance of finding out from him.

"I can't." Simple as that. Behind Neal's eyes, doors slammed shut, shades were pulled down, and the phone was taken off the hook.

"I beg your pardon?" I said in my best arched-eyebrow, skeptical professor voice. "What do you mean you can't?"

"It wouldn't do any good," he said after a moment's consideration. "Trust me."

I shifted tack a little, added a little soupcon of guilt. "Neal, I do trust you. I'm sure if I needed to know about it, you'd tell me, right?"

He only nodded, and I knew right then and there that I could ask all night and I still wouldn't find out what was making him look so miserable and Alan look so scared. So I went back to my room and tried without luck not to stay up wondering about the reappearance of Billy Griggs at this unfortunate juncture in my life.

Chapter 6

I WAS FACE TO FACE WITH THE DIRT, LYING ON MY BELLY with my legs stretched out behind me, something you only do with the closest of close work, when something begs your attention and you wonder whether that something will suddenly transform itself from the merely curious into the important. It was the Thursday after my discovery of the body on the beach, my run-in with Grahame Tichnor, who was only a shadow hovering at the edge of my thoughts. I occasionally flinched at unexpected noises, but eventually I had to stop simply because I didn't have the time to pay attention to them all. My drink with Tony, Billy's appearance, and my interruption of Neal and Alan's argument, all of these events were banished from memory in the light of our most recent finds.

The smell of the sun-warmed earth and parched grass enveloped me, even down inside the cool of the unit. As I studied the posthole, Meg hovered anxiously behind me. Anxious despite herself, her protective shell of cool cracked and tossed away in the face of what she was working on. This was Meg's second posthole, bringing the total number to
three on the site including her first one. The other two postholes were even better preserved and the really big news was that all three appeared to be in a line, better yet. There's the old archaeological saw that if you have two postholes, no matter where they are on a site, you can make them line up into anything you want, but if you have three, and they are in a line, well, that is starting to look something like real evidence.

That line could mean a wall of a building, and that would mean that we had a seventeenth-century English building in New England almost fifteen years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, a settlement that was abandoned a year before Jamestown was established in 1607. It hadn't lasted, so no one knew of it like they knew Plymouth and Jamestown, not the history books, not the scholars, not the specialists. And those who had done work in the area didn't believe the fort could be found, without a map or better proof, or if it did, it might have eroded into the river or been destroyed, robbed out, built over, or any of the myriad disastrous fates a fragile site can suffer. So what we were in the process of uncovering was going to change those history books, inform those scholars, and make the specialists reconsider their specialty in a whole new way. My heart had been beating so fast for so long since we'd found the first posthole that I was slightly giddy, over-oxygenated, atingle with the possibility of what we'd been revealing.

So I was glad Meg looked anxious. I might have shaken her otherwise.

I used my abdominal muscles to pull my head and torso out of the unit, trying not to touch the edges of it lest I collapse the drying soil of the walls that Meg had worked so hard to keep straight and clean. Looking back into the unit, the hole that had been dug nearly four hundred years ago to accommodate the post had been neatly reexcavated by Meg, who had carefully followed the soil distinctions to reveal the exact shape of the original hole. Imagine a perfectly square hole like a telephone booth cut into the soil--our unit--with a rough circle of mottled earth--the original, filled-in posthole--appearing in the bottom of that. Meg had brought down half of the unit deeper than the other and bisected the posthole, so that for a while we could see a neat profile of the hole itself, with a stain where the post had been and small rocks that had been thrown in to prop up the post while its hole was being refilled. We had drawn that and photographed it to within an inch of its existence. It was perfectly defined and distinct, the sort of thing you never find.

But nothing that good ever comes without complications: The unit was not directly lit by the sun, it was overhung with branches and so was dappled with shadows, making photography difficult. We'd used a white sheet to block out most of the shadows, then tried long exposures and a flash to add an even light, and prayed like mad that some of it would be preserved clearly on film. You never know until you get it back whether your work--now destroyed, excavated, filled in, and gone forever--will show up, so you also do measured drawings and verbal descriptions in notes. Triple, extra, super-redundancy, whatever you can think of, to preserve this vital information.

After we had recorded the excavated half of the bisected posthole in relation to the other stratigraphy, Meg had removed the remaining part of the posthole as well, in the hopes of recovering an artifact--a hand-wrought nail perhaps, or even better, a button or piece of pottery that could be more closely dated--but had come up with nothing. Since we had even found a tiny, precious sliver of the original post, worn down and disintegrating from a huge structural member to a splinter the size of a cigar, another dateable artifact would have been too much to ask for, in light of the perfect preservation of this most recent trace of Fort Providence.

I dusted off my hands and then, out of habit, automatically brushed at my chest. A crew of women doing close, nose-to-the-soil archaeology can end up looking like a Wagnerian chorus, perfectly round, brown-colored breast shields
imprinted on T-shirts, pressed into the soil by the flesh beneath the fabric.

"Yeah, that's it," I said at last, "but it's a real pain in the butt to see in this light. Good job, though; I think you got it all out of there."

"Thanks, Em." She was pleased with herself and the find and me too, I thought. She knew how big a deal this was.

Something suddenly caught my eye. "There is a little dark stain over there. I thought it was a stain from a disintegrating rock in the subsoil when I was down there." I gestured with my trowel to the far side of the posthole, now in shadow. "Can you see that dark patch in the very bottom, by the south wall over there?"

Meg squinted, a small frown quickly replacing her smile. "I can't see."

I lowered myself down again, balancing so that I could see and still not obscure her view. "The light down here stinks. Just now, I thought it looked different. Probably nothing .. ."

Letting my eyes adjust to the gloom of the small hole again, I scraped gingerly at the area I wondered about. The disintegrating rock theory seemed to be confirmed when the soft, dry sound of the trowel against loose soil suddenly changed to a metallic rasp. A dark shape fell out of the wall to the bottom of the hole.

I reached for it, and when my fingers closed around a thin flat object instead of a small, spherical one, my breath caught. Holy shit, I thought.

Twenty times a day on a site when you might be getting down to what you're looking for, you pause, and your heart stops. Then your breath catches because your brain has been tricked into seeing something that might be
something,
but turns out to be a rock, or a twig, or just another piece of modern brick. That's always what happens, and you feel silly and a little disappointed and you carry on.

Except this time, even without seeing it, I instinctively knew it was a coin I held in my hand.

I pulled myself out of the unit, heart pounding, trying to
keep my cool until I could be absolutely sure, but trying also to prolong the moment in case it was indeed what I thought it was. These moments come seldom in the course of a career, and sometimes they never come. Seating myself by the edge of the unit, I closed my eyes briefly, collecting myself before I turned my closed fist over and opened it. Forget buried treasure, if this was what I thought it was .. .

This could change everything, I thought. My God. It could be the cover of the book. It could be the front page of the
New York Times.

"What is it?" Meg said. She walked around the unit to my side, the better to see.

Carefully I opened my fingers, and there in my palm was a small, gray, flat circle, a crust of dirt discolored with dark, almost purple flecks of corrosion still sticking to it. I brushed at it carefully, so carefully, holding my breath lest even that gentle action destroy some vital evidence. A date, I thought, what is the date? My eyes strained to focus, to read what was on the side of the disc, and I thought I'd burst with anticipation. I couldn't see a date, couldn't even remember whether there should be a date on the coin, the one thing that would provide incontrovertible proof of what I'd been working on. But then there in my hand, I thought I saw the faint outline of a minute flower to one side of a face--

"Emma, what
is
it?"

It was a rose. A Tudor rose.

"Holy shit," I whispered. I looked up at Meg and held my opened hand for her to see. "Holy--"

"Oh my God," Meg whispered back. Her voice rose in excitement. "Is that a ... is that what I think it is ... ?"

"Yeah." I stared at the thing. "My God, it is. I can't... I don't believe it!"

"Turn it over, quick!" I wouldn't have believed that Meg could squeal.

I shook myself, tried to concentrate, turned it over, and again brushed carefully. The other side of the silver coin was worn smooth, but the faint outline of a crown was still visible. The edges were worn as well, and though the lettering had long ago been worn by acts of everyday commerce, changing hand to hand, traveling in a pouch, being hoarded in a wooden casket, I knew from the rest of the imprint that the letters would have spelled out "ELIZABETH D. G. ANG FRA ET HIB REGINA": "Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, France, and Ireland."

"It's Elizabeth," I said, starting to stand. "I can't remember the issue date of this coin, but it's--"

"It's definitely early enough," Meg finished for me. Her eyes were shining and her voice was getting higher and higher with excitement. "More than early enough, it's just too perfect. I mean, they draw stuff like this for a textbook, right? Guy comes along, digs a hole to set his post in, ooops! accidentally, conveniently for us, drops in a coin with a date to tell us the date after which the house was built, fills it in, builds the house around the post, leaves it, and voila! We come along after a couple of centuries and--"

She was really starting to babble. "Yeah, Meg I know," I said. "I
know"
The last word was a little strangled and I realized that I wasn't breathing evenly. In fact, I found myself having to sit down again; the sky was starting to close in on me.

"Are you okay?" Meg asked.

I shook my head, trying to clear it, and then tried to nod at the same time, lest I further worry Meg. "Yeah, just a little ... we need to get a box or something rigid we can pad. I don't want this to get any more damaged than it already is."

The student rummaged around frantically in her kit and handed me a small cardboard box.

"Poke a couple of small holes in it, so the condensation can escape," I added, and when she had done so and put a piece of paper towel in the bottom of the box--the best we could do for field conservation--I gingerly slid an envelope into the box for added protection. Coins from the early part of the seventeenth century or earlier are very rare, but it was valuable to me for far more than its numismatic worth. It
confirmed that what we'd been finding was the early fort beyond a shadow of a doubt.

"Shouldn't we . . . ?" Meg gestured with her head down the slope to where the rest of the students were working.

"Yeah, we should. Just give me a sec, okay?" I stared at the coin a moment longer, as if burning it into memory, and then nodded. "You go ahead. It's your posthole."

She shook her head. "You found it. You at least get their attention."

I gave one of my piercing pinkie whistles and as the heads turned around, Meg cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted the call that every dig member hopes they'll get to make someday. "Hey, guys! Look what we've got!"

And then, suddenly, later that morning, there was the "click." I was sitting down to review my notes with the whole site spread out before me, as the river below continued its endless rush to the ocean, when it came. It's not like Tennessee Williams or anything; I certainly hadn't been drinking, though with the click, there always comes a mighty buzz. The click was how I described it when, suddenly, I understood my site entirely.

Sure, every site, every season is full of discoveries, but for everything to snap into place so completely? One all-encompassing, road-to-Damascus insight? It's the stuff dreams and careers are made on. And every minute longer we spent on this site proved conclusively that we were on the actual site of Fort Providence, the site that was going to rewrite history and make my career, not necessarily in that order.