What Time Devours (42 page)

“And local people might have helped?”

“I don’t have those records, I’m afraid, but yes, I believe so, if they were supervised.”

“Okay,” said Thomas. “Thanks.”

“Any other questions I can answer for you?”

“No, I don’t think so . . .” said Thomas. “Well, perhaps one. If someone was to . . . Let me put it another way. It’s not possible, is it, that anything could be buried on White Horse Hill? I mean, it’s solid rock, right? Chalk, yes, but still rock.”

“You aren’t planning to try digging up the ground, I hope,” said Anson, her voice stern. “That would be defacing a national monument . . .”

“No, of course not,” Thomas insisted. “I’m just wondering if there could be hollows in the rock. Tunnels, perhaps. Places where things could have been interred . . .”

“I doubt it, but you’d have to talk to an archaeologist about that,” said Mrs. Anson.

“Of course,” said Thomas. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

He hung up and immediately began to dial Deborah on her cell. It rang for a long time and when she answered she sounded harried. Thomas spoke quickly: Was there any archaeological record of hollows, passages, graves, or vaults under the Uffington white horse?

“Not really a good time, Thomas. Something has happened . . .”

“It’s urgent, Deborah. I wouldn’t call you, but . . .”

“Thomas, I’m standing on a wooden platform several hundred feet above the Mexican jungle. My site is in a state of chaos . . .”

“I could call back.”

She sighed.

“Okay, okay. I’ll do my best. What was it called again?”

“The Uffington white horse. Oxfordshire. It’s the exposed chalk of a hill shaped like a . . .”

“Horse,” she said. “Yes. If I can’t find anything online, I may have to make a call or two. I don’t think I have any current books on that area . . .”

“Okay,” said Thomas. “Just . . . quick as you can, okay?”

“I’ll do what I can.”

He gave her the number and hung up.

He spent the next twenty minutes staring at the phone, so that the pretty Polish girl sidled off looking uneasy and whispered to the landlady, who gave him a long, cautious look.

“I’m waiting for a call,” he said. “It won’t take long. I’ll pay . . .”

The phone rang.

He snatched it up.

“Deborah?”

“I can spare you one minute, so you need to pay attention.”

“Okay,” he said.

“This white horse of yours,” she said. “I skimmed some recent archaeological journals online, and I can’t find anything about any kind of space under it, but the white part isn’t the exposed chalk hill itself.”

“It’s not?”

“Well, think about it,” said Deborah. “Grass can’t grow right out of the chalk, can it? I checked. There’s dirt below the grass that goes several feet down before you hit the chalk bedrock.”

“So the white horse isn’t bedrock?”

“Absolutely not,” she said, insistent. “There were excavations in the mid-nineties that were trying to figure out how much the horse shape has changed over the centuries—hardly at all, incidentally—and they found that the outline is actually a series of interconnected trenches. Each trench is several feet deep. They were dug into the earth and then backfilled with chalk blocks from a neighboring site. Underneath is a little more earth,
then
the bedrock. The trenches were recently reinforced to prevent deterioration.”

Thomas stared at the bar.

“Okay,” she concluded. “I really have to go. We’ve found something here, Thomas. Something big. But it’s weird. I’ll tell you all about it later. I don’t know, but . . . Thomas?” said Deborah. “You still there?”

He said he was, but his mind was already up on the hills where, a quarter of a century ago, two grieving women had found what archaeologists would take another decade to discover.

The chalk horse was not solid. It was packed into the earth by hand. Which meant, of course, that it could be unpacked: dug out and then replaced, piled back in on top of what had been buried.

Thomas thought of the horse’s eye where he had stood only a couple of hours before, and he wondered if the book was still there.

CHAPTER 88

In the car Thomas replayed XTC’s languid and evocative “Chalkhills and Children,” Andy Partridge crooning about being anchored by family and the pale stone of the downs. But for Thomas the chalk was also the Dover cliffs and the fertile underpinnings of the Champagne region. Listening to the song was like soaring over the green fields, eagle-like, looking down on the white horse and what might lie beneath it.

It was nine o’clock by the time he had parked his rental car in the Ridgeway lot. His was not the only one. There was a green Toyota Corolla that was clean enough to be a rental, though he couldn’t see a company logo. It might just be some courting couple out for a night on the downs, looking to rediscover the horse’s legendary links to fertility. But there was also a familiar bicycle.

Thomas calculated the distance back to Elsbeth Church’s house. It was about sixteen miles. It had never occurred to him that she might be here, but it now seemed natural, even inevitable. She had probably been coming here for years, more than ever now that she knew people were searching for what she had hidden so long ago. And if he was right about what was buried under the horse, the women must have had to move it at least temporarily when those excavations were going on. Perhaps that was when it all started, Daniella seeing the little play once more and wondering if instead of re-burying it they might not make some money out of it. Elsbeth would have been insistent, of course, but maybe that’s when things started to unravel for the two writers.

Thomas left the parking lot at a run. It was getting dark in earnest now and the ground was uneven, but he pounded up the hill as best he could, retracing his steps from the afternoon with a nagging sense that he might already be too late.

He had almost reached the ridgeline when he saw headlights on the road far below him, inching their way through the vale of the white horse toward the parking lot.

Another of the hunters
, he thought.

What had looked to be a triumphant conclusion was starting to look like something entirely different, something hurried and dangerous. In desperation, he fished out his U.S. cell phone and powered it on, but there was no signal, and he turned it off again. If he got through the night, he thought, he’d buy a U.K. phone.

He remembered the electric fence just before he walked into it, and he had to force himself to slow down and climb over. He probably should have stuck to the path, but at least this way he knew he’d get there. He was hot and breathless by the time he reached the top, and the light was too low to see if anyone else was up there at the ancient fort. He ran heavily along the close-cropped turf of the ridge and down toward the horse.

A pale moon had risen and the lines of the great chalk figure were uncannily bright, clearer indeed than they had been in daylight. They fluoresced like something unearthly. He turned back, but the parking lot was lost in trees now, and though he strained to hear, there was no sound of an engine running. Perhaps whoever it was had gone somewhere else.

He hurried over to the horse’s sweeping head and squatted down. If he’d never been there before, he wouldn’t have known any difference, but he had, and he was sure. The chalk circle of the great eye was a little more powdery than it had been, a little more mounded. One good rain and it would go back to what it had been, but right now it was just different enough.

Someone had beaten him to it.

Thomas stared at the pale, bluish moon glare on the chalk, and he forced himself to think.

The car and the bike were still in the lot, and he had met no one on his way up. Even though he had missed a small part of the path by cutting across the field, he could be fairly sure they hadn’t returned that way.

So where had they gone?

The hill sloped steeply down: open, grassy country with nowhere to go. There was only one path from the top that went anywhere other than the parking lot, and that was the old Ridgeway that slanted west toward Wayland’s Smithy. Thomas hesitated, feeling blind and desperate, and then began to run.

CHAPTER 89

The Ridgeway path was broad and straight, a hard compacted earth surface impregnated with stone that had enough chalk in it to glow a little under the moon. To the sides the great irregular hedgerows rose up, shielding the path from dark fields and patches of pine forest. Beyond the sound of his thudding feet and increasingly labored breathing, the night was utterly silent.

He ran on, sweating, wheezing, but maintaining pace, until he figured he had covered about a mile. And then, quite suddenly, off in the open fields to his right was another path and a sign labeled WAYLAND’S SMITHY.

He paused, doubled up, sucking in the night air, and then set off at a jog down the path. A couple of hundred yards farther on was a stand of heavy trees, beeches, he thought, and among them were standing stones. They were not as large as he imagined those at Stonehenge and were less regular, but some were as big as a man, and they stuck upward like jagged teeth tracing what looked to be a long, uneven loop under the trees.

Thomas approached slowly, his eyes flashing around the ancient stone circle, trying to make sense of its shadows. As he got closer he could see that the circle was in fact an elongated oval, and at the near end the ground in the center rose up in a long mound with a stone mouth. Beside it, sitting on the ground, were two people.

One of them was Elsbeth Church, and the other was Randall Dagenhart.

They watched him approach in silence.

“When shall we three meet again?” said Dagenhart.

His voice seemed to unwind out of the darkness, drifting like smoke, and though he was being arch, Thomas found the quotation unsettling.

“What is this place?” he said.

“A barrow,” said Dagenhart. “A Neolithic burial mound.”

He spoke as if this were all quite normal, as if they had arranged to gather in this unearthly place at this ungodly hour. It was the first time since they had first met at the Drake that Dagenhart didn’t seem angry and dismissive of him. He seemed, in fact, quite calm.

“And what are you doing here?” Thomas said, taking a step toward them.

“Oh, I think you know that, Mr. Knight,” said the professor. “I’d introduce you to my friend, but I believe you have already met.”

Thomas said nothing. He considered Elsbeth, who was not looking at him, but was clutching something in her hands. It was a plastic bag, stained with dirt and the pale streakings of the chalk, wrapped tight upon itself. It was about the size of a slim paperback. By her side was a pickax or a mattock, one end of the head sharply pointed, the other flat, chisel-like, and bright from use.

“So you found it,” said Dagenhart to him. “I had a feeling it would be you. You always were too clever for your own good, even if it wasn’t the kind of intelligence that made a scholar. And you were determined. The moment you showed up I knew that while the academics were mulling the clues and turning them over and over for nuance, you’d get in there and start tearing at the earth with your teeth till you found it.”

“So what do you plan to do now?” Thomas said.

Church stirred and her gaze flashed past where Dagenhart sat, and Thomas saw for the first time a rusted metal can labeled PETROL. He stared.

“You’re going to burn it?!” he said. “That’s . . . that’s crazy!”

“Perhaps,” said Dagenhart. “I used to think so. A long time ago.”

He shot Elsbeth a look, but she remained blank.

“But this is Shakespeare!” said Thomas, aghast. “Isn’t it?”

Dagenhart just nodded.

“And you’ve built your life around Shakespeare!”

“Parts of it,” Dagenhart corrected. “But the key is in the other parts.”

“What are you talking about?” said Thomas, suddenly angry. “People died over this!”

“Exactly,” said Dagenhart, and his look at Church was longer this time.

Thomas continued to stare at him, fumbling for words he couldn’t find, and then he saw that Dagenhart was crying, silently, his body quite still, but the tears on his cheek undeniable. Thomas, who had been motionless since entering the barrow, felt suddenly exhausted, and he sat on the edge of a long narrow stone. His eyes never left Dagenhart, and once he was sitting he said, quietly,

“You set the school fire in ’82. You didn’t mean to kill anyone. You just wanted to scare them away and leave their copies of the play behind. You had been having an affair with Daniella Blackstone and she had mentioned what the kids were doing. She probably hadn’t thought much of it, may not even have known what Alice had found among her great-grandfather’s things, but as soon as you saw it you knew right away, didn’t you? Maybe she showed you a bit of it and . . .”

“Alice showed me,” he said, and his voice was empty like a barrel rolling through a cellar. “I asked her for it and she gave me one of the copies. And then I thought that if I could hide that away, say I lost it, and get rid of the other copies, I might make something of it. Of myself. They had written them out by hand, you know? These sixteen-year-old girls had transcribed every word, each word enough to generate an article, each sentence a book, each page a career . . .”

He spoke with awe in his voice as he remembered, and there was something almost like pleasure in the memory. It didn’t last.

“They were rehearsing in the school hall,” he said. “They left all their things—including the scripts—in a cupboard there every evening. I thought they were gone. Normally they would have been, but they decided to stay late and they were in the back room . . . I just thought that if I could destroy the others and keep the original, then that would be it . . . I could see the cupboard from the window. There was no one there, so I threw in a bottle of gas and a burning rag, but . . .”