Murder In The Queen's armes

TWO

"Why would anyone steal a thirty-thousand-year-old whatzit?" Julie asked, her black eyes no less wondering.

"Beats the hell out of me," Gideon said.

She stopped walking and tilted her face upward. "Ooh, that smells wonderful. Whatever it is, let’s get some."

He agreed readily, delighted to see her healthy appetite returning. She had felt the lingering effects of jet lag through three wet and gloomy days in London, and their stay had left her a little dispirited, not a typical condition with her. He, too, had been depressed by the huge city- perceptibly grungier than the last time he’d seen it six years before-and was happy to get out of it.

Once they’d rented the little Ford Escort and driven west past the dormitory towns and through Hampshire, and then into the green and rolling hills of Dorset, they’d begun to cheer up, and now, guidebook in hand, they had just embarked on the agreeably small-scale adventure of exploring Dorchester.

The aroma that had caught their attention turned out to be coming from a bakery a few doors away on the High Street, and they went in and sat themselves down at a tiny wooden table, for two big wedges of warm Dorset apple cake and a pot of tea. They were both coffee drinkers, but this was England, after all, and what was the point of foreign travel if you carried your old tastes and prejudices around with you? Besides, they’d tried English coffee.

As they ate, Gideon tookthe opportunity to watch Julie and to congratulate himself on his good luck, both of which he’d been doing a lot of lately. And why not? Life was full and sweet, sweeter than he had any right to expect. When Nora had been killed four years before, he couldn’t imagine ever loving again; he could barely think about living. And now, astoundingly, he was married. There was Julie at his side, munching away; bouncy, pretty, bright, robust Julie, whom he hadn’t known a year ago, and who was now the center of his existence. She had left her ParkService job; he was on leave for the fall quarter; and they were spending a rambling, come-what-may honeymoon in England. And it was as if his life were starting over again.

"You know," she said suddenly, putting down her fork and brushing back a tendril of dark, glossy hair, "you sure don’t look like a world-renowned anthropologist." She’d been studying him too; the thought was absurdly pleasing.

"I’m not a world-renowned anthropologist."

"Yes, you are. You told me; twice, at least. And you’re certainly the world’s best-known skeleton detective." This referred to an unfortunate label that had appeared in a magazine article about his identification of some human remains that had been buried for thirty years. The sobriquet had clung, and Gideon spent considerable effort among his colleagues at Northern California State University trying to live it down.

"Bite your tongue," he said. Then, after a moment:

"What’s a world-renowned anthropologist supposed to look like?"

"Not like you. He’s not supposed to be big and broad-shouldered, with a prizefighter’s nose and a beautiful, warm, hairy chest, and-"

"Hey, finish your tea," he said, ridiculously happy. "I think we’d better do some sightseeing."

They went back out into the venerable and bustling High Street with its pleasing jumble of old cottages, staid Georgian bow windows, ancient, lichen-stained church walls, and twentieth-century facades. Inside of an hour they’d visited the Thomas Hardy statue at Top o’Town, admired the remains of the Roman wall, crossed a stone bridge on which a notice informed them that it was off-limits to "locomotive traction engines and other ponderous carriages," and looked at various sites purported to be models for the settings in Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge.

Docilely following the terse instructions in their guidebook, they turned left at the County Laboratory, walked down the narrow, high-walled passage to its end, and mounted the flight of steps. When they had done so, they found themselves in a parking lot.

This, their book informed them, is the site of No. 7 Shire Hall Place, where Hardy lived from June 1883 until June 1885-now, it added unnecessarily, a car park.

From there they were directed to a gray stone mansion called Colliton House, the prototype for Lucetta’s house, High Place Hall.

Gideon read aloud from the guidebook. " ‘The arms over the front entry are extremely interesting: Sable, A Lion Rampant Argent, Debruised with a Bendlet Gules-’ Julie, are you really enjoying this?"

"Are you?"

It didn’t take them long to agree that they weren’t, and a quick skimming of the rest of the book gave them the happy information that nearby the river Frome, with its many Hardy associations, wends its peaceful way between shaded banks, followed closely by a rustic river path.

They decided to let the Hardy associations go for the moment and to stroll the bucolic, deserted path for its own pleasures. At their feet the tiny river babbled and purled, while a few yards beyond it rose the mossy base of the flat-topped mound on which Dorchester-or Durnovaria, as it was called in Roman times-had first been built. On the other side of the path were tidy little vegetable gardens, one after another, and beyond them, in the distance, lay lonely Durnover Moor, hazy in the pale afternoon light.

"I keep wondering why anybody would take that darn skull," Julie announced abruptly, once they’d walked quietly for a while.

"Me, too."

"It’s famous, isn’t it?"

"To physical anthropologists, yes."

"Well, isn’t it worth money then? Couldn’t it have been stolen to be sold?"

"To another museum, you mean? Well, a museum would pay for something like that, sure-a lot of money. But Pummy wouldn’t be sellable. Any decent physical anthropologist who took a good hard look at it would know it’s Poundbury Man, and he’d know that Poundbury Man belongs in the Dorchester Museum. So even if some shady museum was willing to buy stolen materials, there’d be no point."

"Do you mean there’s only one Poundbury Man? Aren’t there others from the same… the same population, that look more or less like him?"

"No," Gideon said, pausing to watch some skinny children feed bread chunks to some fat ducks, "he’s one of a kind. He’s Homo sapiens, of course, but no one else from that time and that place has been found. And he is remarkably dolichocephalic-long-headed. Whether he was just an oddball that way, or whether all his people looked like that, no one knows, because he’s the only one we’ve got. There are even some anthropologists who want to dub him a separate subspecies-Homo sapiens poundburiensis, or some such."

"Really? They want to postulate an entire subspecific population on the basis of a single fragmentary-" She burst into sudden laughter, startling the ducks. "Good gosh, I’m starting to talk like you!"

"That’s what happens to married people."

"After five days?"

Gideon shrugged. "You must be a quick study."

"I guess I am." She reached out for his hand as they moved on over a low stone bridge. "Well, anyway, if not a museum, what about a private collector? Aren’t some fabulously rich eccentrics supposed to have their own collections of stolen Rembrandts or Vermeers, even though they can’t show them to anyone? Wouldn’t this thing be worth money to someone like that?"

"Rembrandts I can see, but a broken old piece of skull? He’d have to be pretty eccentric, all right."

"Mmm," Julie said, thinking. "Okay, could it be some kind of joke? Maybe Pummy’s just been hidden, not stolen, and the other skull was put in the case as a hoax."

"The same thing’s occurred to me. But what for?"

"To make Professor Hall-Waddington look silly? Maybe you weren’t supposed to find it and tell him in your nice way. Maybe there was supposed to be a big scandal."

"Possibly… This is all pretty conjectural, isn’t it?"

"Yes, but it’s fascinating."

They crossed a final footbridge and found themselves with surprising suddenness out of the dappled shade and back on the High Street, a few blocks from where they’d started.

Gideon looked at his watch. "Feel like walking some more?"

"Uh-uh."

"Want to drop into a pub?"

"They don’t open for another hour."

"That’s right. Well, let’s see, what can we do?"

She cocked her head at him. "Here you are on your honeymoon, with your beautiful young bride at your side, and your hotel less than two blocks away…and you can’t think of anything to do?"

"Nope," he said blandly, "not a thing. But why don’t we go up to our room, take off our clothes, and lie down? Maybe something will occur to me."

It was two hours before they arrived for dinner at the Judge Jeffreys on the High Street, an ancient inn with a grim past, having been the lodging of Baron George Jeffreys, the presiding judge at the Bloody Assize of 1685, when seventy-four of Cromwell’s royalist opponents had been executed. Nevertheless, the dining room was cozy and country-pubbish, a centuries-old room with rough-beamed ceiling and stone-mullioned, multipaned windows of wavy, leaded glass.

"What would you think," Gideon said as they settled into a black, gleaming wooden booth, "of spending the next day or two in Charmouth? Since we’re in the area anyway, I’d like to drop in on a dig near there-Stonebarrow Fell. I thought maybe I’d better stop in and see how Nate Marcus is doing."

"Here we are then," said their hurried waitress, and laid the pints of bitter they’d ordered on the table. Julie and Gideon clinked the heavy glass mugs in a wordless toast.

"Why ‘ better stop in’?" Julie asked. "And who’s Nate Marcus? An old friend of yours?"

Gideon nodded. "I haven’t seen him a few years, but we were both graduate students at Wisconsin, under Abe Goldstein. He’s head of the anthro department at some place called Gelden College in Missouri. When Abe heard you and I were thinking of coming this way, he suggested I stop by and see if I couldn’t keep him out of trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

Gideon sipped the cool, soothing bitter. "The same as always," he said. "Nate rubs a lot of people the wrong way. He can be pretty…well, abrasive."

"Abrasive? You mean rude?"

"Yes, rude. And flip and sarcastic, and aggressive and thin-skinned. Know-it-all…arrogant…"

"This is one of your old friends? I’d love to hear you describe an enemy."

Gideon laughed. "To tell the truth, I do like him-most of the time anyway-even if I’m not exactly sure why. He and I sat up a lot of nights, over a lot of pitchers of beer, at the old Student Union in Madison, arguing anthropological trivia until four in the morning. Those are good memories."

"Well, he still sounds awful. What’s he doing in charge of a dig?"

"For one thing, his excavating technique is impeccable. For another, the Stonebarrow Fell site is his personal discovery. As I understand it, he took one sharp-eyed look at the place-undug, mind you; just a grassy hilltop-and announced there was a Bronze Age burial mound there, even though the mound itself had weathered away. And on top of that, he said it was Wessex culture, to be exact; circa 1700 b.c."

"And was he right?"

"He was this time-which, as you can imagine, irritated a lot of people. You can guess how the Wessex Antiquarian Society, which is a very sober, professional group of archaeologists, feels about some brash, belligerent American-which Nate is, I’m afraid-stomping in and finding the mound in their backyard."

Julie frowned as she sipped from her glass. "But if he was right, he was right. It doesn’t seem very professional to keep a grudge over it."

Gideon laughed. "I hate to disillusion you, but anthropologists are people like anyone else. The thing is, you see, that the site’s now been radiocarbon-dated at 1700 to 1600 b.c., exactly as he predicted, which makes it the earliest accurately dated Bronze Age barrow in England; it’s a heck of a find, and it could answer a lot of questions."

"Well, that’s good for all concerned, isn’t it? I still don’t see why this Wessex Antiquarian Society should hold a grudge."

"They don’t. In fact they’re very honorably cosponsoring the dig, although the Horizon Foundation is putting up most of the money. But it still has to rankle, and Nate, as usual, is blowing his own horn, so the squabbling goes on and on."

The waitress brought menus, and they ordered smoked mackerel followed by steak-and-kidney pie, with another round of bitters. The little room was filling up, and Gideon, for once, was enjoying the closeness of others. The soft British laughter and the polite, civil English speech created an agreeable, unintrusive ambience.

The mackerel was brought out immediately, a whole dusky fish on each plate, and they set silently to work, peeling back the golden skin and separating the tender flesh from rib and backbone. They were hungrier than they’d realized and didn’t speak again, except for murmurs of appreciation, until they’d turned the fish over and scraped the last shreds of meat free with their forks.

Julie wiped her lips and pushed away a fish skeleton so perfect it might have been dissected, then took a sip from the new glass. "Ah," she said contentedly, "my mind is clear again. But I still don’t understand why they’re quarreling. If your friend was right about this Bronze Age thing, he was right. Right? What is there to fight about?"

"As usual, Nate’s found something." Gideon absently fingered the smooth, round dimples in his beer mug. "From what I understand, he claims to have come up with incontrovertible evidence that Wessex culture is the direct result of Mycenaean diffusion, and-this is what’s got everyone excited-he’s not talking about plain old cultural diffusion, but actual, physical transmigration from the Peloponnese directly to England."

"Incontrovertible evidence of Mycenaean diffusion!" Julie exclaimed, her eyes wide. "In direct transmigration! My goodness, no wonder everybody’s excited."

"Yes-" He looked at her over the rim of his glass, one eyebrow raised. "Young woman, are you having sport with me?"

Julie laughed. "I wouldn’t dare. But what in the world are you talking about?"

"I’m talking about the fact that Nate is one of the few Bronze Age archaeologists who categorically reject parallelism as a mechanism for the transmission of cultural-"

"Gideon, dear, have mercy, please."

Gideon groaned. "My gosh, weren’t you an anthro minor? What do they teach you in Washington? All right, let me try to make it simple; no theoretical stuff."

"That would be nice."

"In England, the main Bronze Age culture is called ‘Wessex,’ okay?"

"As in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex."

"Right. Well, this Wessex culture appeared fairly suddenly and overran the earlier Beaker culture-the Beakers being the last of the Neolithic people, the ones who built Stonehenge. You’ve heard of Stonehenge?" Julie rightfully ignored this, and Gideon continued. "Now, the question is: Just how did this advanced Wessex culture, with its metal technology, get here? Where did it come from? Who brought it? Was it an actual migration of people, or was it simply the adoption by the Beakers of some of the technology and social customs of the Europeans they traded with? Nowadays, it’s the latter that’s generally accepted."

Any teacher of even minimal perception knows the signs of lack of interest in an audience that does not wish to offend. There is an intense fixity of gaze; brows are knit with expectancy and concentration; chins are supported on hands, the better to permit leaning attentively forward. But the gazes are glassy and unwavering, the rapt expressions vaguely unfocused, the postures rigid rather than alert. So sat Julie across the table.

"As we all know," Gideon went on, "the Wessex people were the inventors of the video game. They wore polyester pantsuits and lived in four-story houses made entirely from abandoned escargot shells."

For a moment there was no slackening in her enthralled and unrelenting attention. Then she spluttered into laughter. "You rat! All right, you caught me. I’m afraid I go a little blank at words like ‘metal technology.’ But really, tell me about Nate Marcus. I’m interested, truly." She blinked her eyes severely to demonstrate.

Gideon smiled. "Okay, in a nutshell: Nathan Marcus is probably the only anthropologist who believes that some seafaring bunch of Mycenaeans set out from Greece and settled in England, where they singlehandedly started the British Bronze Age in about 1700 b.c. Now, there isn’t too much doubt that the British Bronze Age had its roots in the Aegean, but the evidence points to its spreading to England slowly, over centuries, via Europe, possibly without any migration of people at all."

"Without any migration? How could that be?"

"Well, just through cultural diffusion. The same way you find English rock music all over Russia today, or French wines in Kansas and New Mexico."

The waitress brought their steak-and-kidney pies. It was the first time Julie had tried one. She broke the crust with a fork and gingerly sniffed the pungent steam.

"It smells all right," she said doubtfully, and enlarged the hole to peer inside. "Which pieces are kidney?"

"The kidney sort of disappears in the cooking. All those chunks are beef." A white lie, but she would thank him for it.

She speared a tiny piece of meat, put it in her mouth, and chewed tentatively. "It’s not bad."

"Of course not." He scooped up a forkful of his own thick pie. The English, he felt, were somewhat maligned in the matter of their food. There were, of course, grotesqueries like baked beans on toast and those unfortunate, unavoidable breakfast sausages, but he found the cuisine generally mild and inoffensive: plaice, hake, gammon, beef, and pile upon bland pile of peas and chips.

"So is that what the argument’s about?" Julie asked. "The dispute over the Bronze Age?"

"That’s it. Nate thinks that Wessex culture-and therefore the British Bronze Age-was personally introduced by the Mycenaeans, and everybody else says it came through slow diffusion."

"It hardly seems like anything to get fighting mad about."

"Anthropologists are funny people, as I’m sure you’re coming to realize, but where Nate is concerned, there’s more to it. Since the respectable journals won’t touch his theory, he’s been out pushing it anywhere he can- magazines, newspapers, talk shows-and that doesn’t help his credibility among anthropologists."

"What about his theory? Do you think he could be right?"

"I doubt it, but I don’t know enough about it to have a legitimate opinion. To tell the truth, I can’t say I find the Bronze Age all that fascinating myself. Too recent."

"Seventeen hundred b.c. is recent?"

"Sure, to an anthropologist. Didn’t you ever hear what Agatha Christie said about being married to one?"

"I didn’t know she was."

"Yes, a famous one: Max Mallowan. She said it was wonderful-the older she got, the more interesting he found her."

"I hope it’s true," Julie said, laughing. She pushed aside her not-quite-finished pie. "That was good," she said a little uncertainly, "but I think you have to acquire a taste for it." She sipped her bitters and looked soberly at him. "Gideon, you’re not going to let yourself get involved in a theoretical argument, are you? It’s our honeymoon."

He cupped his hand over hers on her glass. "Do you really think I’d rather get into an academic fracas than spend my time with you? I love you, Julie Tendler-"

"Oliver."

"Oliver…I forget what I was going to say."

"How much you love me."

"Oh, yeah. Well, let’s see. On a scale of one to ten I’d say a, well, um, maybe a, well…"

"I’m going to hit him," she muttered into her glass.

He took her hand from the glass and brushed the backs of her fingers over his lips. Her eyes glowed suddenly in the semidarkness of the restaurant, and he felt his own moisten. How extraordinary it was to be married to this marvelous woman. For a moment he held her hand against his cheek, then replaced it on the glass, recurving her fingers around the handle.

"Never mind how much I love you," he said, "I’m not about to encourage complacency. Anyway, all I intend to do when we get to Charmouth is to pay an hour’s visit to the site and say hello to Nate. That’s it."

"And after that we’re on our own? No more bones? Just cream teas and country walks and pub lunches?"

"No bones, no stones, and, thank God, no corpses. The skeleton detective is traveling incognito and nobody knows where to find him." He put down his nearly empty mug with a thump. "And now, if you think steak-and-kidney pie is good, wait till you try treacle!"