Dying Fall, A (10 page)

‘But if you made a really big discovery . . .’ says Ruth.

‘Exactly.’ Clayton Henry looks up with almost painful eagerness. ‘If this did turn out to be the real thing, we’d be made. Press, TV, conferences. It’d put Pendle on the map all right. But if I went public with it and the bones turned out to be a hoax, I’d be a laughing stock. That’s why I wanted you to look at them.’ Now he does look at Ruth. His eyes are a very clear blue, almost childlike.

‘I’d be happy to look at them,’ says Ruth. In fact, she can hardly wait. This could be the biggest find of the decade and she is right there, the first archaeologist on the spot. After Dan, of course.

‘I can take you to the site now, if you like,’ says Henry. ‘The bones aren’t still there. We’ve moved them somewhere safer.’

Ruth wants to ask if the bones have been excavated with due care but realises that this would sound insulting. All the same, she wishes that she had been able to supervise. One false move, one mistake in recording and an entire excavation can be ruined. She would have taken days over this—cataloguing, examining the context, just looking. As Erik always said, ‘First, you look. Look as long as you like. You won’t get that first sight again.’

‘Did Dan send any samples for analysis?’ asks Ruth.

‘Yes, he sent samples off for carbon 14, isotopic testing and DNA. We haven’t had the results yet.’

Again, Ruth feels a thrill of excitement. Who knows what the results might show? And she will be the first to see them.

‘The temple,’ she says. ‘Who was it dedicated to?’

‘A strange deity,’ says Henry. ‘A version of the Celtic god Bran, which means . . .’

But Ruth knows what it means. Bran means Raven.

The Raven King.

Nelson, though he doesn’t know it, is only a few miles away from his youngest daughter. His mother has insisted on taking him and Michelle to Rook Hall, a nearby stately home. Nelson’s sister, Maeve, has accompanied them, along with her granddaughter, Charlie.

‘Charlie?’ Nelson had said, peering at the blonde moppet in a fairy dress. ‘I thought she was a girl.’

‘Of course she’s a girl, Harry,’ said Maeve, hoisting a nappy bag on her shoulder. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘Is it short for Charlotte?’ asked Michelle, crouching down to say hello to the baby.

Maeve had shrugged. ‘Not as far as I know.’

Nelson can never get used to these new androgynous names. He has a colleague with daughters called Georgie and Sidney. At least Judy had chosen a traditional name for her baby. Michael. But why does that name choice make him feel uneasy?

He also can’t get used to his sister being a grandmother. But since Maeve, at fifty-three, is ten years older than him, she’s not especially young to have grandchildren. Her daughter, Danielle, had married at twenty-three and had Charlie at twenty-five. All very respectable. It’s just that it makes Nelson feel old. He’s a great-uncle now. Jesus wept.

Maeve seems to do most of the childcare while Danielle is out at work. Nelson’s mother helps too, still fit at seventy-five. She now looks critically at Charlie’s uncovered head.

‘She needs a sun hat on her, Maeve.’

Maureen Nelson’s voice is still unashamedly Irish after five decades in England. Her daughter, on the other hand, is broad Lancashire. The first thing Maeve had said to Nelson was, ‘You’ve lost your accent.’

‘I haven’t!’ said Nelson, outraged. His colleagues in Norfolk think that he talks like a combination of Peter Kaye and Wallace from
Wallace and Gromit.
He’s heard them imitating him.

‘You have a bit, Harry,’ said Michelle. ‘So have I.’

And that’s always the pattern of visits to Blackpool. Michelle is continually shocked at the abuse directed at Harry by his ever-loving mother and sisters. She throws herself into the breach as a peacemaker, not realising that all four of them actually enjoy these exchanges.

Now Maeve snaps at her mother. ‘She’s fine, Mum. The sun’s not out anyway.’

‘It’s not the sun that gives you heatstroke,’ says Maureen unanswerably. Maeve rolls her eyes and wheels Charlie off in the direction of the gift shop.

Rook Hall is a perfect Georgian house, almost scarily symmetrical, set in beautiful landscaped grounds. Nelson doesn’t mind trudging round over-decorated rooms and oohing and aahing over dovecotes and lily ponds but he does wonder why, in her seventies, his mother has suddenly got into culture. When he was growing up, Maureen would have been actively suspicious of anyone whose idea of a good time was visiting National Trust properties. He still remembers what she said about their neighbour who listened to classical music. But now Maureen is actually a member of the National Trust as well as a friend of the local theatre and a frequent operagoer. Do you just get more interested in these things as you get older? Nelson, remembering a God-awful modern play Michelle made him see two years ago, doesn’t feel that the process has started with him.

In one aspect, though, Maureen hasn’t changed at all. She is determined to get her money’s worth and to see every inch of the house, even though she has visited many times before. Maeve soon gives up and takes Charlie out into the grounds but Nelson and Michelle follow Maureen’s indomitable figure through dining rooms laid for some invisible banquet, up and down ornate staircases (marvelling at the rococo ceilings), through kitchens complete with plastic meat that reminds Nelson of an autopsy, and into myriad rooms whose only function seems to be to display collections of eighteenth-century thimbles.

Nelson is soon tired of ancestral portraits and moulded cornices. His mind starts to wander, reliving his conversation with Sandy yesterday. Was Dan Golding murdered and, if so, what does Ruth expect him to do about it? Where is Ruth anyway? He rang her at home last night and there was no answer. He’ll have to try her mobile. He still has to be careful where Ruth is concerned. Michelle might have forgiven him for the affair (if two nights counts as an affair, which Michelle assures him it does) but the subject is still very raw. Michelle understands that he wants to see Katie (and few wives would understand as much, he knows) but any sign that he is interested in the mother rather than the baby would jeopardise the whole, fragile consensus.

He thinks they’ve finished but, at the last moment, Maureen leads them up another staircase into a green and white room that reminds Nelson of a Wedgewood vase he once impounded as stolen goods. Bored, he looks out of the window, wondering if he can catch sight of Grandma Maeve and Charlie.

As he scans the paths criss-crossing the lawn at the front of the house, his eye is immediately drawn to a figure with a pushchair. But it’s not Maeve. It’s a man in a flapping cloak-like jacket with long grey hair in a ponytail. Nelson rubs his eyes. He must be going mad because, for a moment, he thought that the man with the baby was Cathbad.

Ribchester is a picturesque town nestling in a bend in the river. Ruth is beginning to realise that Nelson was speaking the truth when he once told her that there were pretty places near Blackpool. Preston isn’t one of them but Lytham is certainly an attractive town and the Pendle Forest—well, if she had nightmares last night about Dame Alice and her familiar, that’s not the fault of the countryside, which was undeniably beautiful. Ribchester is cosier—grey stone houses looking as if they’ve grown there rather than been built, a church, pubs, the winding river—it’s all very English and tranquil.

Clayton Henry parks his car, a sporty red number, behind the church.

‘The church was actually built slap-bang on top of the Roman fort,’ he says, ‘You can see the remains of a granary in the graveyard. The baths are behind one of the pubs. The White Bull.’

As they walk around the town, Ruth begins to realise that the Romans are living side-by-side with modern-day Ribchester. The White Bull has ornate pillars at the front, said to be taken from the Roman fort. Terraced houses have Roman walls in their gardens and the church shares its graveyard with medieval tombs and more recent excavations showing floors and hypocausts.

‘The museum’s next door,’ says Henry, stepping carefully over a gravestone. ‘There are lots of wonderful things there.’

‘The Ribchester helmet?’ asks Ruth, remembering something she once read.

‘A replica,’ says Henry. ‘The original’s in the British Museum.’

He leads the way through a low gate and along a lane overhung with brambles and cow parsley. ‘Dan’s excavations centred on a spot further down the river,’ he says. ‘You don’t mind a short walk, do you?’

Ruth wonders how short a short walk is. She likes walking only in moderation. Something Max and Nelson have in common is that they are always striding off without looking back to see if she is following. One day she won’t be.

She is also worried about getting back to Kate. She rang Cathbad from the university, saying she was going to be longer than she’d thought and he’d been unconcerned. ‘I’ll take Kate out for a bit, explore Lytham,’ he’d said. ‘Take your time.’ Cathbad really is the king of the walkers, covering miles in a day, sometime walking all night, across dark fields and through shuttered towns. He used to be a postman, he explained once, and that taught him the value of exploring places on foot. ‘You see more,’ he says, ‘At eye level.’ Ruth hopes he won’t take Kate too far.

But Clayton Henry does not look like much of a rambler. He looks essentially urban, dressed in a pink shirt and freshly ironed chinos with distinctly unhikerish shoes, pointed and highly polished. Ruth doesn’t imagine that he will drag her miles over fields and stiles. In fact, he seems out of breath by the time they reach the river.

‘Not far now,’ he pants.

The river is obviously on its last lap before the sea, looping extravagantly across the fields, dotted with little islands and crescent-shaped pools. Sheep graze on the flat ground between the loops and, in the distance, Ruth can see a black shape, half lost in the clouds.

‘Is that Pendle Hill?’ she asks, thinking that she knows the answer.

‘Yes,’ says Henry. ‘Have you been up there? There’s a grand view, but it’s a bit spooky, to my mind.’

‘I went there yesterday. I’ve got a friend who lives near Fence.’ She hesitates, aware that ‘friend’ doesn’t really cover her tenuous connection with Pendragon.

‘Sooner him than me,’ says Henry. Ruth thinks it’s interesting that he assumes the friend must be male.

Birds swoop low over the water, reminding Ruth once again of the Saltmarsh. She wonders what this area was like in Roman times. The river would still have been here, though its course may well have changed; it would have been a valuable link in the supply chain, carrying goods inland, and back out to sea towards other parts of the great Empire. When the Roman troops left, the ships would no longer have come into port, laden with wine, olive oil and pottery—that distinctive orangey-red Samian ware found on the site at Swaffham. Was this where Arthur made his last stand, abandoned by Rome, beset on all sides by invading Picts and Celts?

‘Here we are,’ says Henry.

They are on slightly higher ground, a field just outside the wall of the church. The excavation, which is about ten feet across, includes walls and some tesserae, which could have formed part of a mosaic. In one corner a tarpaulin covers what is obviously a deeper hole. Ruth wonders how long ago it was that Dan dug here. The excavation has a lonely look, outside the city walls. Sheep are cropping the grass near the exposed stones.

‘The Roman Road was near here,’ says Henry. ‘Funny how place names survive. There’s a village nearby called Street and the road across the bridge is still called the Roman Road.’

Ruth knows that the word ‘street’ comes from the Latin ‘strata’, meaning layer, and refers to the many layers that went into constructing a Roman road, one of the wonders of that empire.

‘So the temple would have been on the road to the port?’ she says.

‘It looks like that, yes,’ says Henry. ‘There’s another temple at Ribchester with altars dedicated to Apollo and Victory. Just what you’d expect. But Dan thought this was later. Mid to late 400s, he reckoned.’

Ruth looks down at the ancient walls, exposed to the wind and the air. It is generally thought that the Romans left Britain between 383 and 410 AD, which would mean that this temple was built after the withdrawal, in the mysterious world of warring tribes, the battle for the soul of Britain, the beginning of the Dark Ages. It would also fit that, whoever lay in this tomb, he was buried rather than cremated. By the first century AD, cremation was already a thing of the past. Her heart beats faster. A temple, built in the Roman style, dedicated to an unknown god—even without King Arthur, this is a thrilling discovery.

‘The sarcophagus was here,’ says Henry, lifting a corner of the tarpaulin. ‘Buried about six feet down, under the central altar. The lid was broken, but the piece with the inscription remained almost intact.’

‘Where is it now?’ asks Ruth, peering into the trench. She can see the shape of a burial cut into the surrounding soil, a deep rectangular void, and some pieces of heavy stone. Nothing else.

‘At the university,’ says Henry. ‘We have a strong-room there. We would have used it for the bones but we felt they needed . . . well, special treatment.’ Ruth turns to look at him. She wonders why he is being so shifty about the excavation. Did something go wrong?

‘There were a few other significant finds,’ he says, rather hurriedly. ‘A carving of a raven with the words Bran and Corvus below it, and a great deal of skeletal matter.’

‘Human skeletal matter?’

‘No, avian. It looks as if a number of birds were sacrificed here.’

Offerings to the Raven King, thinks Ruth. She looks around her, at the marshy plain with the wide sky high above. Seagulls are hanging in the air, black against the clouds. If you had to invent a spot for a temple dedicated to a strange pagan bird-deity, this would be the place for it.

Clayton Henry is still looking slightly embarrassed. He stoops down to brush the mud off his cream trousers. Ruth wonders if he is going to change the subject, but even so she is surprised when what he actually says is, ‘Would you like to come to a barbeque at my house on Saturday?’