Perfect Sins (3 page)

“I remember. He did history at Reading.”

“Archaeology,” said Byrfield, nodding so the correction seemed more like an elaboration. “Then he worked abroad for several years. I caught up with him last time he was home and asked him to come and do a survey for me.”

“Anything interesting turned up?”

Byrfield gave a self-deprecating grin. “It's
all
interesting. You know how I feel about this place. If you mean Saxon gold or Roman mosaics, then no, nothing like that. The footings of some walls we didn't know about. Some medieval pottery. Oh—and this.” He was rummaging in a drawer of the dresser, unfolded a cotton-wool parcel in front of her.

“What is it?”

“It's Romano-British—third, fourth century. It's bronze, probably the handle of a tankard. But look—it's a horse.”

Ash peered closer, too. “It's the Uffington White Horse.”

Hazel looked at him in surprise, Byrfield in approval. “Exactly. David thinks whoever made it must have been to Uffington.”

“It's a long way from here.”

“Where's Uffington?” asked Hazel.

“Oxfordshire, I think,” said Ash. “A hundred and fifty miles? It's a long way on foot.”

Byrfield shrugged. “People got around more than you'd think two thousand years ago. After all, the Romans came from Rome. Some of the artifacts we find came from farther afield. It would have taken a lot longer than a budget airline—well, a bit longer than a budget airline—but sailing ships only need wind, and horses can go long distances on not much more than grass. If you could plan for journeys lasting years rather than hours or days, you could travel until you met something you couldn't cross. The Atlantic Ocean, for instance. The Himalayas. The Sahara. Lots of people died doing it. But others got through, or at least completed one stage of the journey. Artifacts are durable. If needs be, they can lie half buried in the sand until the next caravan comes along to carry them another hundred miles.”

“Pete!” said Hazel, mischievous with delight. “You're a romantic!”

He looked bashful. “No, I'm a farmer. But I do find this stuff fascinating. Listen, stay for dinner. We'll prime David with half a bottle of burgundy and he'll talk till the cows come home. The places he's been, the things he's dug up.” Suddenly his face clouded. “I'm sorry. Just because I love this stuff doesn't mean everyone has to listen. There are probably better topics of conversation for a sophisticated dinner party.”

“Sophisticated?” echoed Hazel. “Us? I haven't even brought a posh frock.” She looked down at herself critically. “I've got this shirt and another one just like it.”

“You'll still be overdressed for my dinner table.” Byrfield chuckled, relieved. “David leaves his overalls on the boot room radiator, and I try to remember to kick my wellies off, but that's about it. My mother refuses to eat with us. She has a tray in her room. Short of some major disaster like the maid's day off, she still does the whole changing-for-dinner thing. Then she eats alone in her sitting room.”

“How the other half lives,” remarked Hazel, the note of wonder in her voice only slightly tempered by the desire not to appear rude.

“I
am
the other half,” said Pete Byrfield grimly, “and
I
think it's bizarre.”

 

CHAPTER 3

E
XCEPT AS A
paying visitor, Ash had never been in a country house. He had no idea what to expect. Five years ago, at the height of his career, he'd spent generously on good cars, on family holidays, on their London home. It had never occurred to him to employ a maid. At Byrfield, he discovered by trying to listen without appearing nosy, there was even in these straitened days a respectable staff—in addition to Lady Byrfield's maid and Fred Best, who was the handyman, there were a cook-housekeeper, a gardener, a groom, and a boy. Ash didn't know that boy was an official position, so when Byrfield made a passing reference to “my boy,” Ash thought he was being made privy to a personal confidence, and felt that it was too much information much too soon.

Hazel seemed to read his mind, or at least the faint, dark lowering of his brow, and gave a secret grin. “Derek's the hall boy,” she explained when Byrfield's attention was elsewhere. “That's his title—he does all the heavy stuff that isn't somebody else's job.”

Ash felt himself coloring. “I thought…”

“I know,” said Hazel. “But he's engaged to one of the farmers' daughters, so I don't think he's that way inclined. Actually, I don't think Pete is, either.”

Ash felt awkward and stupid and out of his depth. At least Hazel knew how the system worked. She had more in common with the earl of Byrfield, who was her father's employer, than Ash had. It was the difference between old money and new money. The rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate at least share the same world. Byrfield and his boy were probably equally puzzled by people like Ash—men in suits who appeared to run everything without ever making anything.

Across the table, David Sperrin barked a gruff laugh. He was a small, dark man a few years older than Byrfield, with a deep musical voice that nevertheless told of long hours in wet holes. There was a rattle in his chest when he laughed. “I think your ability to provide Byrfield with an heir is being questioned, Pete.”

Byrfield looked up from carving the lamb, apparently without rancor. “Yes? There's time yet. The Byrfields have always been better at breeding cattle and horses than sons—it took the aged parents three goes and twelve years to produce me. But we always seem to manage eventually. I expect I'll get the hang of it sooner or later.”

And that, thought Ash with quiet admiration, is what generations of good breeding buys you. Grace.

The Bests had, so far as anyone knew, no trace of blue blood anywhere in their veins—nothing but commoner back to the ark. Perhaps that was where Hazel got her fierce sense of loyalty. She turned on the archaeologist as if he'd kicked her spaniel. “How about you, then, David? Made Diana a granny yet, have you?”

Sperrin flashed her a wolfish grin, all teeth and no humor. “My mother doesn't really do children. She wishes she'd drowned me at birth.”

Wonderfully inoffensive, Byrfield murmured, “Don't we all?” and the tension left the air in pretend scowls and genuine laughter.

Ash steered the conversation onto safer ground. “How's the dig coming? Anything unexpected?”

“It isn't a dig yet,” explained Sperrin, “just a survey. I'm sticking ranging rods into interesting-looking humps to see if any of them are worth excavating.”

“I thought that was done with radar these days.”

“Geo-phys.” Sperrin nodded. “It is, when you've got it. If you haven't, it's amazing what you can learn by poking things with a stick.”

“David thinks I'm a cheapskate for not buying him everything in the toy shop,” said Byrfield cheerfully. “He doesn't understand that I'm not a government department. This is my hobby. I'm not going to impoverish the estate pursuing it.”

“We could be missing things,” warned Sperrin. “Important things.”

“They're not going anywhere,” said Byrfield with equanimity. “If I don't find them, my descendants will. Maybe
your
descendants will do the spadework.”

Sperrin acknowledged himself beaten with a gruff chuckle. “Pete thinks the feudal system is still alive and well and living in Burford. That because he's expected to follow in his father's footsteps, the same goes for everyone.”

“My father was a soldier and I'm a police officer,” volunteered Hazel. “It's not that different.”

Ash found curious eyes on him. “My father was a tax inspector. I worked for the government, too.”

“David?”

Sperrin grinned with the sheer pleasure of discomfiting people. “My father's a gypsy. He tarmacs drives. Maybe that's where I got my skill with a spade.”

“So it's not just the landowning gentry who follow the well-worn path,” observed Byrfield with quiet triumph. “You're all every bit as bound by your family history as I am. You're just more reluctant to admit it.”

Gabriel Ash looked down at the white dog curled at his feet. Patience met his eyes with a steady golden gaze. If anybody's interested, she said, my ancestors were all dogs, too.

From the absence of startled gasps around the table, Ash assumed that no one else had heard her.

*   *   *

Later, the remains of the meal replaced by an enormous, somewhat battered coffeepot, Sperrin turned to Hazel. “Will you still be here tomorrow?”

“Sure. We're driving back on Sunday. Why?”

“We're planning to take the top off a funny hump by the icehouse. I think it's probably a cist—a burial mound. If you've nothing better to do, you're welcome to watch.”

Hazel raised inquiring eyebrows at Ash. “Sounds like fun.”

It wasn't the word he'd have chosen, but you don't have to be a ghoul to be intrigued by the graves of people who lived thousands of years ago. “A cist—that's like a dolmen, is it?”

“Pretty much. Usually stone slabs rather than boulders, but the idea's the same—to create a void under the earth where your chief or whoever can rest undisturbed until they invent archaeologists.”

“What'll be inside?”

“Hard to say till we open it,” said Sperrin, taking more coffee. “Right now it's just a hump in the grass with something solid inside it. It could even be a boulder that's got covered with earth over the years. But it seems very regular—almost square. I think someone made it.”

“When?”

“Well, that's certainly the right question. If we find bones, or grave goods, or if—please God!—the stones are decorated, we can make a fair stab at dating it. But you can't date plain stone. You can look at the base layer and see what it was built on, but the lake has probably inundated the site at intervals, and that confuses the picture. Educated guess? Neolithic. But it could be later.”

“And Neolithic is…?” There were lots of things Hazel knew, and lots she didn't, and she had no qualms about asking when she came up against one of the latter.

“New Stone Age. Maybe five thousand years ago. Maybe more.”

In a time when a new car is old in eight years, and a new computer in three, five thousand years is an impressive span. Two hundred generations. The time of Stonehenge and the pyramids, when the cutting edge of cutting-edge technology was a stone. When you shaped the kind of stone you wanted by hitting it with another stone, and mostly what you did with it then was hit some more stones. That's why it's called the Stone Age. When someone got the bizarre idea—and you can imagine how his wife looked at him—that by heating some of those funny-colored stones in a really hot fire you could produce a metal knife, or a spearhead, or a needle, it was a leap in technology comparable with nothing since. The wheel was inspired by a log rolling down a hill; the steam engine was developed from the kettle; the jet aircraft was designed by people—clever people—putting together successive increments of engineering discovery. But whoever first thought there was something to be gained by burning rocks?

“Count me in,” said Hazel. “What time should we come over?”

“Actually,” suggested Byrfield, “I wondered if Ash fancied staying here tonight. Unless Fred's extended my gate lodge without telling me.”

Hazel had been resigned to sleeping on the sofa. But she hadn't expected to enjoy it, and if Byrfield was offering one of his guest rooms, she wasn't going to refuse. It would also be nice to have a little time alone with her father. “All right with you, Gabriel?”

“Yes, of course,” said Ash. “If we're not putting you out?”

“Not a bit,” said Byrfield graciously. “I'll send Derek down for your bag.” But when Ash was once more talking tumuli with David Sperrin, Byrfield murmured to Hazel, “We?”

She rolled her eyes. “Him and the dog. Get used to it.”

*   *   *

Around ten o'clock, still early enough to have supper with her father, Hazel excused herself. Sperrin volunteered to walk her to the gate lodge. It was a kind thought—an unexpectedly kind thought—and Hazel refrained from pointing out that (a) she'd been walking up and down this drive, alone and with company, in the daylight and in the dark, since she was a child, and (b) she was a police officer. If there
was
anyone lurking in the bushes, she could entirely ruin their evening.

She said none of this because she didn't think David Sperrin was a man to whom gallantry came easily. So she thanked him for the offer, and let him carry the torch, and tried not to notice when he tripped on rough ground and steadied himself against her.

When he'd recovered his poise, Sperrin said, in a half-jocular sort of way that suggested this was better than asking the question outright, “So what is it between you and dog boy?”

Hazel kept a rein on her patience. “He's a friend. A good friend, but nothing more. All right? And don't call him that. At least not in his hearing.”

Hazel could hear the cocky grin in his voice. “Why? Do you think he could take me?”

“I doubt it,” she said frankly. “But I'm pretty sure his dog could.”

As the lights of the gate lodge came into view around the sweep of the drive, she steered the conversation back toward something simpler than her relationship with Ash. “What happens if you
do
unearth a burial tomorrow?”

“Well,
if
is the critical word. Mostly what you find inside oddly-shaped mounds is oddly-shaped boulders. But if it is a cist, then there are some hoops to jump through. People to inform, approvals to seek, big boys' toys to whistle up. All the stuff we haven't got here. The days are long gone when archaeology was a kind of educational hobby for vicars and their daughters.