‘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.
1 Snowdonia
2 Thursday 5 November 1321
3 Wednesday 19 June 1325
4 Thursday 20 June 1325
5 Friday 21 June 1325
6 1321
7 Saturday 22 June 1325
8 Tuesday 25 June 1325
9 Thursday 27 June 1325
10 See House of Shadows.
King Arthur's Bones Page 38
