Bone Idol (6 page)

Henry hadn’t spoken to Albert since their meeting on the train. He was angry with himself for kissing the young man. And he was angry with himself for pushing him away, for causing that welling up of hurt and rejection in those usually cheerful, honey-brown eyes.

He had meant what he’d said—he was a man of strong morals. He could not have allowed his affection and respect for the Reverend Arthur Boundry to stand in the way of higher scientific truths. So how could he allow the selfish demands of his own body—his desire for Albert—to stand in the way of his pursuit of those same goals?

Albert led their little party through the rugged, rocky terrain with his father, who looked hale and hearty, younger than his years and in his element out here in the wilderness.

Henry walked behind, escorting Maude Dawlish, his attention only half on her. He was looking at Albert.

The syrupy, saturated sunlight caught Albert’s hair, picking out strands of golden-blond in the brown curls. The younger man had shrugged off his jacket in the unbearable heat and a triangle of sweat stained the back of his waistcoat, tapering down to the waistband of his trousers.

Henry had to stop staring. He turned to Maude, whose husband was ignoring her, slouching along off to one side, louche and painfully out of place. She gave Henry a small, pitiful smile.

She was clearly struggling in tight corsets, a bustled skirt and a high-collared blouse with a long waist and tight sleeves to the wrists. It was a ridiculous outfit for the conditions, exquisitely fashionable though it might be.

“It’s so barren,” she said, in a low, melodious voice. “There’s no life here. We could be on the moon.” She sounded sad.

It was a strange, alien landscape through which they walked. There was red rock and red dust as far as the eye could see—odd, square outcroppings of rock, steppes and buttes, riverbeds that might have run dry thousands upon thousands of years ago. Spires and www.total-e-bound.com

pinnacles of red rock stood up against the horizon. The sky was a rich, saturated blue—a colour so deep and intense it seemed almost solid.

Henry offered her his arm and she took it gratefully, clinging to him for support.

He pointed out the prickly pear cactus with its flat, fleshy pads, its vicious spines and its red and purple flowers. A few of the delicate pink-white flowers known as prairie smoke were still apparent here and there, though they would soon be gone.

Maude, though, could not be distracted from her misery, and she continued to look pale and wan as they walked, the sweat standing out on her brow and dampening the satin beneath her arms. But she struggled on gamely—Henry admired her staying power if not her sense—and eventually they came within sight of the camp.

It consisted of a curious collection of makeshift dwellings. There were simple canvas tents that could presumably be moved around the camp as needed. Then there were more permanent structures, wooden huts nailed together from all sorts of odd bits and pieces of timber—panels from orange crates, sections of railway sleeper and even stranger and more unusual materials. Henry spotted a hut constructed partly from fossilised bones.

He had just pointed it out to his weary companion when a long, rolling rumble echoed across the desert, bouncing back from outcroppings of rock with a sound like the roar of a dinosaur. Maude gave a little yelp and clutched at Henry’s arm. She seemed nervous, perpetually on edge—and no wonder with a husband like Gideon Dawlish.

“What was that?” she asked, looking wildly about herself.

Henry quickly sought to reassure her. “It’s quite all right—it’s merely the workmen blasting one of the larger specimens from the rock.”

“Blasting…?” Maude sounded bewildered.

“Yes, with dynamite. It’s the quickest way to get the fossils out of the ground and into museums and private collections. Barbaric, really, but it’s how it’s done.”

“Doesn’t it do the most dreadful damage?” she asked, clearly aghast.

“Sometimes, of course, it does,” Henry replied. It wasn’t a practice he cared for himself.

“But bone hunting is a competitive business, and many men would rather waste specimens than time. From what I’m told, the foreman here is a careful, sober kind of man. He knows what he’s doing, and sets the blasts up with care. Most of the fossils are retrieved more or less intact.”

Their conversation was interrupted when the camp suddenly came alive. Grimy men in shirtsleeves came running up to greet them, hungry no doubt for news from the outside world, possibly hoping for messages from loved ones.

An enormous man with work-scarred hands stopped in front of Henry and offered him a tin mug, which he accepted gratefully. The man raised one huge hand to wipe sweat from his eyes, leaving a smear of red dust that made him look like a painted savage.

Henry took a brief swallow of the warm, slightly brackish water before passing the better part of it to Maude. Then he pulled from his pocket the letters, telegrams and messages, some of them months old and many of them creased or torn, which he had collected from the railway man at the outset of their journey. The men clustered eagerly around him, rough and dirty, but genial and touching in their gratitude.

As they read their messages, some of them following the words with their fingers as they puzzled them out, some of them appealing for help from their fellows, Henry glanced across at Maude.

She was drinking thirstily and was clearly distressed, taking rapid, shallow breaths against the constricting whalebone of her corsets. She wiped the back of her hand across her brow, and as her sleeve rode up slightly, he thought he saw the ugly, yellow-green of an old bruise on her delicate wrist. Had Gideon—?

His attention was suddenly taken by a commotion on the other side of the camp, where the reverend was remonstrating with one of the workmen about something, waving his arms, shouting and gesticulating wildly. Gideon Dawlish was looking on with an expression of amused contempt.

The source of the trouble was the man’s hut, the one Henry had pointed out to Maude as they approached the camp. It was mostly made from bits and pieces of wood—broken-down boxes and crates probably scavenged from the railway. But one of the uprights at the corner of the hut was a massive, black rock femur. A dinosaur bone.

As he got closer, Henry began to make out the reverend’s words. He was not the only one to have noticed the confrontation—a small cluster of workmen had gathered around them, watching the exchange with interest.

“You must tear it down. I insist!” The old man was so excitable and overwrought that his voice had risen by half an octave.

“I don’t understand, sir! What have I done wrong?” The man was clearly bewildered by the reverend’s anger, and seemed almost close to tears.

Arthur slapped the flat of his hand against the enormous dinosaur bone. “This, man!

This! It’s an important scientific artefact! It should be in a museum, not propping up your hovel like so much worthless junk!”

It was clear the bone had been there for some time. It wasn’t as though it was going to come to any further harm where it was. It seemed a strange battle to pick, when he should be eager to get to the dig site and show them all the earth-shattering new discovery he had promised. Was he stalling for time? Why on Earth would he do such a thing?

“Sir,” Henry said, as respectfully as he could. “The man has to sleep somewhere, and the bone is safe where it is for now. We are providing extra hands for the dig site, so for the next couple of days we will be able to pull a couple of the workmen away from their usual duties to build a replacement home for Mr…?”

“Smith, sir.”

“For Mr Smith. But now, I would suggest, is not the time.”

He took the still-sputtering reverend firmly by the arm and led him away. He spoke in a low voice to preserve the old man’s pride. “I apologise. I have no wish to question your authority. But we need the men here to welcome us, not to resent our presence.”

“It’s true,” said Albert’s voice behind him, and Henry turned. “Besides, what of this fantastic find you’ve brought us all halfway around the world to see? I’m surprised we aren’t being frog-marched to the dig site at this very moment!” His eyes twinkled but, to Henry’s puzzlement, the Reverend Arthur Boundry’s face locked at his son’s mention of the discovery. His eyes flicked from side to side. He opened his mouth as though to speak, and then closed it again. Finally, he spoke.

“We will not be at the main dig site today,” he said firmly. “We are tired and hot.

Tomorrow will be soon enough, when we are all fresh and rested and the light is good. Yes, let us make camp.”

He scuttled away looking flustered, almost panicked, leaving Henry and Albert to exchange puzzled glances. A few paces away, he stopped. “We will not go to the main dig site today,” he muttered again.

It was well into the evening by the time Albert and Henry set out for a nearby rock outcropping that Henry had spotted, within easy walking distance from the main dig. They had packed canvas bags with canteens of water, tools and compasses, and carried them slung over their shoulders. The thought that there might be fossils to be found made it easier for Albert not to think about what had happened on the train. Easier, but hardly easy.

“I wonder that your father wasn’t keener to show off his discovery.”

Albert glanced across at Henry, thinking. His remarkable eyes, the colour of the painfully blue sky, were fixed on the rock outcropping they were heading towards. Albert noticed again the high, well-defined cheekbones, the sensual swell of his lower lip that saved his often solemn face from hardness.

“I think he’s worried,” Albert said. “Your paper on
Streptosaurus boundrii
hit him hard.”

He held up a hand to forestall Henry’s response. “You have told me why you published, and I accept your reasons,” he said. “But it hurt his pride. He is getting old. I think he is worried that this discovery might be another disappointment. He is frightened that he has misjudged again.” He had no intention of telling Henry about his father’s ridiculous suspicions. He didn’t want to foster any more hurt between them, and he didn’t want his father to look foolish in Henry’s eyes.

“He is worried that I will expose another mistake?”

“Yes.”

“If I had to do so, I would be tactful and”—again he seemed to taste the word—“and
kind
.”

“Yes.”

They walked on for some time in a silence that was not exactly comfortable. Albert was aware, all the time, of Henry’s upright form striding confidently beside him, his closeness in the wild, wide-open land, the slight tension that always radiated from him. He flicked his eyes towards him again.

Henry must have sensed his eyes upon him, because he glanced across and favoured him with a subtle but quite genuine smile. Albert found himself smiling back. Henry pointed.

“See?” he said. “As we get closer you can begin to see the different strata in the rock. Do you see the pale, narrow band there, and the thicker, reddish stripe?” His eyes sparkled.

Indeed, as they got closer to the place where they intended to dig, Albert could make out horizontal bands in the rock, of subtly different colours, reds and oranges and golds, as though the rock had been laid down in layers. “I see it,” he said.

When they arrived at the rocks, they gratefully settled their packs on the ground. Henry rummaged in his, and pulled out two large squares of waxed canvas, which he arranged neatly on the ground at the base of the outcropping.

“We can kneel on these as we work,” Henry explained.

Albert thought it absurd and delightful—how had such a fastidious man been bitten by the bone-hunting bug? It seemed so incongruous. Henry was a complicated man.

“And they will double up, too,” he continued. “If we find anything worthwhile, we can secure the canvas over the site to protect it from the elements overnight, until we can return.”

The look he was giving Albert was rather peculiar. It had a measure of his usual assessing manner, his weighing up of people and of situations, but there was a spark of something else there as well. Amusement, perhaps. Henry smiled, and Albert felt thoroughly warmed through, even hot and flushed. He smiled back, and the moment seemed to stretch out. He found himself becoming lost in the endless depths of Henry’s eyes, like pansies with their blueness and their dark, dilated centres, and he had to force himself to look away.

He went to his knees on one of the squares of canvas and knelt forward to pretend to examine the surface of the rock—though by the time he half heard, half felt Henry settle down beside him, he really was quite absorbed in his task. Nevertheless, he felt a delicate prickle of awareness at the nape of his neck, and he suppressed a sensual shudder.

He tried to concentrate on running his fingers over the rough sandstone, absorbed by the sandy feel of it under his fingertips, the smooth planes of its surface where it had been eroded by the weather over many hundreds of millions of years.

He was searching for faults or changes of texture; discoloured patches that might indicate the presence of hidden bones. Henry was examining the upper surface of the rock, and Albert heard him give a muted grunt of satisfaction. Full of excitement and curiosity, he knelt up to see what Henry had found, and Henry turned his head to give him a grin full of pure, boyish delight. He was usually so inscrutable—Albert had never seen his face so open and alive.

“There’s something here,” he said. “See the difference in the texture of the stone?”

He held his hand out to Albert, who grasped his fingers to pull himself to his feet. Their eyes locked, with a weird sensation of awareness. Albert pulled his hand away and thought, briefly, that Henry tried to hold on to it. Then the moment had passed. Henry turned back to the rock he had been examining, and Albert leaned over him to see what he had found.

“Look here,” he said, caressing the surface of the rock with one long finger. “Fossilised bones are extremely hard,” he said. “The alchemy that changes them from living bone into rock makes them dense and black and smooth.”