King Arthur's Bones

EPILOGUE

London, August 2004

The rescue dig at Bermondsey Abbey was coming to an end, as the contractors for the huge development project, which would bury the ancient foundations for ever, were itching to send in their piledrivers. Only two archaeologists remained, sitting in their Portacabin over mugs of instant coffee, while their solitary student volunteer was somewhere outside, grubbing through the basements with his metal detector.

‘Never gives up, does he!’ muttered Edward Asprey. ‘The last day and he still hopes to find a pot of gold with that thing.’

Gwen Arnold jumped to the defence of Philip Grainger, as she knew that Asprey, the rather depressive team leader, disliked the student, probably because he was unfailingly cheerful. ‘Come on, he’s harmless enough. And he has found a few coins and bits and pieces with that gadget of his.’

Gwen was a physical anthropologist on secondment from Cardiff University, an earnest woman of thirty drafted in to advise on the human remains found when they excavated the abbey cemetery, though some unexpected finds had been unearthed elsewhere in the dig.

Edward Asprey grunted and looked despondently around the cabin at the piles of papers, books and assorted debris that would have to be packed up and removed this weekend. He was a small man, with a wispy beard and a mop of black hair. ‘It’ll seem odd to be back in my office after months in this place,’ he observed. ‘Are you going straight back to Wales?’

‘No, I need to write up this project first. Then I must get back before term starts, as I’ve got to get my lectures sorted.’

She had plain but pleasant features, with rather lank brown hair pulled straight back and secured with an elastic band.

Abruptly the door was thrown open and Philip’s amiable face appeared around it. He had a pair of headphones pushed down around his neck and seemed excited, but he was always one to be enthusiastic about everything.

‘You’d best come and have a look at this, folks!’ he chanted, waving a gadget that looked like a walking stick with a black dinner plate stuck on the end.

‘Oh, God, not that bloody thing again?’ whined Asprey, but Gwen was more sympathetic. ‘What have you found this time, Phil?’ she asked.

‘Not actually found anything yet,’ he answered, rather crestfallen. ‘But I’ve had the strongest signal I’ve ever had with this.’ He waved the detector again. ‘Almost burst my eardrums. There must be a huge piece of ferrous metal there.’

‘And where’s that?’ asked Asprey wearily.

‘In the cellarer’s undercroft, against the north wall.’

The senior scientist groaned. ‘Not that bloody place again. It’s cursed!’

They had had several misfortunes there during the dig. It was the site of the storage vaults beneath the cellarer’s building of the original eleventh-century priory. First, a volunteer had fallen into the excavation and broken a leg, then a new JCB had crashed over the edge – and finally lightning had struck a bizarre discovery behind a false wall. [10]

The more sympathetic Gwen went out with Philip and followed him as he almost danced across to the ladder that went down into the long excavation. It was criss-crossed with the remains of walls from haphazard building over almost a millennium.

At the bottom he led her over to a ruinous patch of masonry about six feet high, which showed stones, bricks and crumbling mortar from many different periods. Philip brandished his detector again and fiddled with some of the control knobs.

‘I’ll put it on the speaker, rather than the headphones, so you can hear,’ he offered excitedly. Raising the dinner-plate end towards the wall, he moved it slowly along, just above ground level. The steady whine suddenly erupted into a rising shriek, which persisted for about six feet as he closely traversed the stonework. ‘Something big in there, Gwen!’ he said gleefully.

Next afternoon the three of them stood in a cluttered preparation room next to a laboratory in the Archaeology Department, just off Gower Street. A badly rusted metal coffin sat on the floor, its lid propped against a nearby wall, the corroded holding bolts cut off with an angle-grinder.

A spreading pool of rusty fluid seeped across the floor, even though a large volume of water had been drained out at the excavation site.

‘No doubt about it being early nineteenth century,’ said Edward Asprey. ‘It was from the time when there was this real fear of grave robbers – the “resurrection men” and all that.’

‘Stealing bodies to sell to anatomists, you mean?’ asked Philip. He was still on a high from being the finder of this strange contraption. When a section of the decayed wall had been pulled down, the iron coffin had been found under pile of waterlogged rubble and had to be hauled back to the laboratory before it could be opened by their technicians.

‘But what was left of that box inside certainly wasn’t nineteenth century,’ objected Gwen. ‘Nor are those bones, though God knows how old they are.’

They moved to a metal table against the wall, where at one end a pile of mouldering wood had been separated from a collection of fragmented bones at the other.

‘So what are you saying about these?’ asked Edward, pointing at the remains of a fragile, brownish skeleton. Gwen carefully picked up a length of thigh-bone, with the round knob of the hip joint at the top. ‘It’s a partial skeleton, very badly decayed – the bone is sodden and porous. Probably the last two centuries in that leaking metal box did it more damage that it suffered in all its previous history.’

‘Which is how long?’ demanded Edward Asprey.

The anthropologist shrugged. ‘Impossible to tell! Environment affects the appearance of bone far more than time itself. Without carbon dating, it would be sheer guesswork.’

‘What about the remains of the box?’ asked Philip. ‘Those bits of wood lying all around the heap of bones must be what’s left of some sort of container.’

Asprey claimed this as his expertise. ‘Again, impossible to date it, given the rotten state of the timber. It looks like oak and there seem to be some bits of rusty iron left, which were probably bands or hinges.’

‘What can you tell from the bones themselves?’ persisted the student. ‘Even I can tell that the remains of that skull are male.’

Gwen Arnold hefted the partial thigh-bone in her hand. ‘It’s a man, all right – and a big fellow too, judging by the diameter of this femoral head. But I’ll need some time to look at all this stuff properly.’

‘What about carbon dating?’ asked Asprey. ‘Can we afford it from what’s left of our budget?’

‘Probably, but if there’s a shortfall I’ll wangle it from the Cardiff grant. As soon as these have dried a bit, I’ll drill some samples and send them off to Oxford, together with some from the wood.’

‘When you write this up for publication, can you mention my name?’ asked Philip wistfully.

Three weeks later they met again in Asprey’s office, which was even smaller than the Portakabin he had had at Bermondsey.

Gwen Arnold held a few sheets of paper in her hands, the results of the tests carried out by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.

‘I can’t tell you much more about the skeleton, which is very incomplete and in a bad state of fragmentation and decay. He was a man probably between forty and fifty years of age. As I said before, he was a big chap, at least six feet tall, with no evidence of bone disease, but, although his skull is badly crumbled, it looks as if he had a severe head injury which didn’t have time to heal before he died.’

‘All that could apply to a million people over the last few hundred years,’ observed Edward cynically.

‘Make that fifteen hundred years,’ said Gwen, waving her papers at him. ‘The carbon dating on four bone samples all agree on a date of AD 530 plus or minus forty years!’

Philip whistled in surprise. ‘Dark Ages, be damned! We didn’t expect him to be that old.’

‘What the devil’s he doing in a nineteenth-century iron box in South London?’ exclaimed Asprey, for once too astonished to be cynical. ‘But what about that wooden case that he was in?’

Gwen again cast her eye at her papers. ‘That’s even more curious! Two samples both showed it was late twelfth century. So nothing ties up – a sixth-century skeleton in a twelfth-century box inside a metal coffin possibly contemporary with the Napoleonic Wars!’

They discussed the conundrum for a while, but concluded that there was no way in which the matter could be resolved more definitely.

‘So what are we going to do with them?’ asked Asprey finally, gesturing towards a brand-new plastic storage box that sat on a bench. ‘They obviously have no bearing at all on our medieval abbey. They must have been dumped there by some bloody antiquarian two hundred years ago.’

‘I’d like to do some more work on them back at our department,’ offered Gwen. ‘There are new techniques we’re developing about discovering what food people ate in ancient times. We might get some clue as to where they originated.’

‘Take them, then,’ said Asprey. ‘One less box of junk for us to store here.’

The little Ford crested the hill on the M4 motorway west of the Almondsbury interchange and began rolling down the incline towards the Severn Bridge. In the distance shone the river, and beyond it the hills of Wales came into sight. The back seat was piled high with her belongings, the boot being almost filled by the plastic box.

Happy to be going home after three months in London, Gwen began to sing softly, crooning an old folk melody in Welsh, as she was born and brought up in Carmarthen. Some of her contentment was also because, during her stay in Bermondsey, her divorce had finally come through and she intended reverting to her maiden name of Merrick.

As the car reached the approach to the huge bridge, a feeling of well-being crept over her and she was somehow suddenly aware of the anonymous bones sharing in her happiness, an extraordinary feeling that intensified as she neared the two huge towers at the centre of the bridge.

Sixty miles further west, at the top of the Vale of Neath, the remote rock of Craig y Ddinas reared above the little village of Pont Nedd Fechan. In a huge cave, deep within the crag, sixty armed warriors slept in a circle around another sleeping figure, a taller man dressed in finer clothes and armour reminiscent of the Roman legions.

As the Ford crossed the centre line of the bridge, he briefly opened his eyes and a beatific smile creased his strong face, before he turned over and contentedly went back to sleep.