Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  By the end of the war more than fifty acres within the old walled city were reduced to heaped rubble and strewn rock, the surface of London smashed like the shell of an egg. For years England had been at the vanguard of archaeology in her ports of empire around the world. The next great dig lay at her feet.

  Catherine arrived at exactly the right time. The first siftings following the war had given way to full-scale excavation. Not since the 1666 fire had the city needed to gather its wits for such a mammoth rebuilding, and now its wits were gathered. The developers were coming. A fevered effort to retrieve the clues of the past unfolded a half step ahead of bulldozers and cement mixers. Digging teams cleared debris and cut trenches year-round, in every variety of weather.

  Catherine went back to the Cripplegate site again and the men there directed her to other cuttings in the shattered blocks. Two streets over she watched while a laborer in a vest and tie and tall rubber boots cleared debris from a gate socket sunk into the earth. Roman without doubt, he told her. He also told her she might be able to enroll for volunteer work through the London Museum. Catherine walked to the nearest intact street and waved a cab.

  She signed on for the weekend to a groundwater-bedeviled site called Walbrook, where an exploratory trench had revealed a radiused fragment of buried stone wall. The trench promptly flooded and work halted until a mechanical pump could be found to get ahead of the seeping water. Even so the place remained a mud pit, hence not a favorite of the general corps of volunteers. Catherine jumped at it.

  Saturday she mostly observed while two professional excavators cleared around the lip of what appeared to be a stone-lined well a short way from the emergent wall. They told her the well was probably medieval, the wall certainly earlier. The men themselves were twice her age and more and they kept teasing her about her youth and her nationality, her indubitable preoccupation with movie stars and boys. But they also described what it was like to discern ancient wheel ruts in the packed metalling of lost Roman streets, the flush of wonder to find a coin with an emperor’s bust. On Sunday they let her scrape in the earth along with them.

  Monday she was scheduled to make her first trek to Cambridge to orient herself for the coming term. She never even made the train station, went instead like a homing pigeon for Walbrook’s muddy trenches.

  With the workweek under way the site now had a full crew on hand including the excavation supervisor, who surprisingly turned out to be a woman. She was hard to miss, moving through the mud and the mounds of rubble in ladies’ stockings and a woolen skirt, with a striking head of jet-black hair.

  No longer young but clearly competent, she ran her site and her male excavators like a cross between a brooding mother hen and a military field commander. Catherine stayed across the lot with her compatriots from the previous days, but still slyly watched the woman inspect trenching and measure coordinates and jot notes into a ledger. She came to something like envy before she even knew her name. She had a thousand questions but found she lacked the temerity to thread the maze of cuttings and workmen without a legitimate excuse.

  By the onset of evening she didn’t need one. While the men knocked the day’s clay from their shovels one younger bloke in suspenders and a racing cap conferred briefly with the supervisor, then trotted in his baggy pants and muddy brogues roughly into conversational distance.

  “Miss.”

  Catherine recognized him from the previous week, another site a block or two away. They had spoken then as well, albeit briefly. “Hi again,” she said.

  “Mrs. Williams would like to talk to you.”

  She widened her eyes.

  “Yes, you,” he said cheerily. “Come along now. Nothing to fear.”

  She followed him through the maze of the dig. The boy deposited her near the woman, who scribbled furiously in her ledger, before trotting away again to join his fellows. Catherine shifted on her feet.

  The woman still hadn’t looked at her. “The lads have spoken about you. The American girl, signed on to play in the dirt. They tell me you haven’t tried to keep anything, which I take for a good sign.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Hold out your hand.”

  Catherine tenuously did as she was told.

  “Palm up. A lovely mitt by the way. I’d think a violinist only no calluses.”

  Finally the woman looked at her eyes. She seized Catherine’s wrist with one hand, pressed something into her palm and forced her fingers closed. She wrapped Catherine’s fist in her own two hands.

  “What do you suppose it is.” She looked at Catherine intensely, all the more so for her muddy fingers and that shock of black hair. “Speculate. The first thing that comes to mind.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t try to be categorical. Be intuitive.”

  Catherine closed her own eyes. The object was not large, perhaps the size of a Zippo lighter only irregular, circular in places, jagged in others. “It’s a part of some bigger thing.”

  The lids of her eyes remained closed but somehow she felt the woman’s smile. Intuition. When she opened her eyes the woman was walking away. Catherine’s hand was still clenched in a ball.

  “I’m Audrey Williams,” the woman said across her shoulder. “The lads have had a good dig today and we’re going down the pub. Come along if you like.”

  Catherine nearly declined out of a powerful mix of intimidation and the rote caution of a dutiful child. Don’t pick up hitchers. Don’t talk to strangers. Stay out of bars and wear clean underwear. But it struck her then that she was not a child and nobody here expected her to behave like one. This was her adventure. “My name is Catherine Lemay,” she said. “I’d like that very much.”

  Audrey Williams and her lads walked up out of the rubble to the side of the street. The young man who first summoned her beckoned again, this time with a jerk of his head and a ferocious grin. He had a twill motorist’s cap at a cocky angle atop his head. Her father owned one very much like it, though she doubted this young Brit with the muddy boots and patched pants had a Morgan at home to match.

  Catherine opened the fingers of her fist. In her palm lay a marble ear, divorced from its head in some unknown age. She kept the ear in her hand and followed the others. They walked out of the damaged back street into the ongoing bustle of the financial district.

  On Fleet Street the war appeared never to have happened at all. They moved in a current of pedestrian traffic down a narrow sidewalk and into a row that could have been described by Dickens, with brick-and-mortar shops and wrought iron lampposts.

  The walls of the pub were brick and cut stone and the wide plank flooring ran scarred and polished and parallel to the bar. Fox-and-hound prints on the walls. A hunt master’s trumpet stood between a pair of empty riding boots and a saddle atop the mantel at one end of the room.

  “I myself am a country person at heart. I came up in Wales, had a bit of an idyllic childhood though of course I didn’t know that at the time. Lambs in spring, hunting parties in the fall. I used to drive game for the guns as a girl. Great fun, really. Life by the seasons.”

  Catherine listened politely and eyed the stein on the table. She had been told not to take a sip before four minutes had passed although no one had informed her of the reason for this. She half wondered if they weren’t merely having a bit of fun with the benighted American girl. Still, nobody else had taken a drink either. When in Londinium.

  The beer itself did not look like anything she had seen in the States. The American beer that came in bottles and cans was the color of vanilla soda pop, with the same effervescent bubbles but as far as she was concerned both a smell and a taste landing somewhere between stale sweat socks and pickled eggs. Her father drank Schlitz in a can on very humid summer days, waxing reminiscent the entire time over the ales he had encountered when he was in England. She supposed that’s what this was, with its coffee-like color and great layer of foam at the rim of the glass.

  Audrey Williams went on. “I
n that part of the country you find all manner of ancient things. Celtic henges, Iron Age burial mounds. Things old enough to make the Roman features downright recent by comparison. Farmers are always turning up some curious object. One giant reliquary, really. Now you may drink.”

  Audrey Williams blew a trough in the foam of her beer and raised her glass by the handle above the table and her excavators raised theirs as well. Catherine scrambled to catch up. She anticipated a toast of some sort but nobody spoke. They lowered their glasses and drank at once, knights-errant with their silent collective pact. Catherine blew her own little trough and drank as well.

  The flavor took a moment to settle but when it did startling hints and intimations surged up and over the simplified experience of a taste upon her tongue. The general, beery bitterness was of course present but beneath it lay a range of other things: mown barley brought from a field, fire smoke and bruised lavender and black soil turned to the air. A chemistry of the painstaking. She drank again.

  The young man in the cap caught her eye. He grinned across the table. “I think our tagalong has a taste for the local product.”

  “I think you’re right,” she said, and though she wasn’t sure this was yet the truth she did know she might eventually enjoy it. She said, “I like it in here,” and this she did mean. Despite its gauze of smoke the pub had a cheer she hadn’t anticipated, with clean glass in the windows and the burnish of oiled wood. In America by contrast the small workaday bars had an almost willful pall—dank, windowless ratholes with sticky floors and dirty bathrooms, venues devised far less for socializing than serious imbibing.

  Audrey Williams quaffed a good bit of her own pint in a steady draw, watching Catherine watch her from the corner of an eye. She said, “I forgot the American mania for temperance.”

  Catherine dipped her chin, as apologetically as she could. She didn’t know what else to do. Audrey Williams had eerie prescience. “We don’t have places like this over there. Not that I know of, anyway. I wish we did. Amazing what a difference an ocean makes.”

  Audrey Williams gave a tight little smile and drank again, this time not so deeply. She set her glass on the table and ran a finger idly around the rim.

  “Anyway. I decided a proper lady must be someone with a high tolerance for boredom and that was enough for me. I was a snake-and-polliwog chaser, a killer of butterflies and general bog dweller. I could birth a lamb or wring a cockbird’s neck with the best of them. My friends were all boys, spelunkers and treasure hunters, and we lived in the right place for such.” She shrugged a strong shoulder. “I suppose you become what you continue to be without even knowing it. Now it’s thirty-five years hence and here I am, still running with the boys. Still pulling things from the ground.”

  The ear in Catherine’s palm had become slick with heat and she set it on the table. “You don’t think you could have chosen otherwise? A different life, I mean.”

  Audrey Williams seemed to regard the ear like some distant but not particularly captivating landmark, a dead tree on a knoll or a cow in a pasture. She paid it the slightest glance and looked back at Catherine.

  “Something about this century encourages us to think we might. For all its volatility. Not that I would choose a different life myself, mind you—I know what I like and don’t much care how I came to like it—but it’s true enough I’ve managed to become what I wanted to be. Even fifty years ago you needed means and privilege to chart your destiny. Of course it helped as well to be a man. These days even a plain country girl can follow her nose.”

  “But not a lady.”

  Catherine meant this as a joke and Audrey Williams smiled but she didn’t pause a beat.

  “I had a bit of luck, of course. Had timing on my side. I loved the mud it’s true, but I had a properly curious mind, right from the start. High marks in school, always, and that got me a scholarship at Oxford, exactly at the time it became possible for a female to earn a degree. Cultures evolve, you know. Mature. I myself benefited mightily from what others achieved before me. Women and men.

  “Down in the south there’s a great tradition of barrow digging. Rich gentlemen, men of leisure, would tunnel into ancient earthworks after antiquities. In the early days the object was less to discover the past than to possess some outrageously old thing, but of course that evolved, too. How could it not? Think of it—treasure without context, without a timeline. But these were curious men, men of medicine and law and classical training.

  “Then one man in particular. A military man, a Crimean veteran and a general. Augustus Henry Lane Fox. Inherited title and estate from a cousin and added the cousin’s name to his own. Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers.”

  “A mouthful.”

  “True. By all accounts an imposing figure in every other respect as well. He was a born organizer, a classifier par excellence. Collected and categorized all manner of things, from every corner of the empire. And then he inherited thirty thousand acres of unplowed Dorset countryside. Archaeological heaven.”

  “Did you know him?” Catherine herself knew the answer before she asked the question.

  “Oh no. The general was a Victorian, dead before I was born.” Mrs. Williams finished off another quarter of her stein’s contents and flashed two fingers at the publican. Catherine still had all but about three sips in her glass and realized she’d better get busy.

  “Pitt-Rivers was the first person to excavate with a system, on a grid, by coordinates and with precision, to impose logic and order on to mere treasure hunting. He had a reputation as a stickler and a martinet and I’m sure he struck cold fear into the heart of every laborer to turn a spade on his estate. But he was the first to see stories in the fragments. That ear. Who carved it? Whose likeness was carved? Pitt-Rivers would have wondered. He would have recognized it as you termed it—part of a bigger thing. He would have gone hunting for the whole head, so to speak.”

  Catherine drank more quickly now and she could feel the first, faint effect of alcohol at the edge of her brain. The lift of a breeze before a downpour. She wanted Audrey Williams to keep talking, wanted to know her story too, the fragments and pieces and the buried mysteries, wanted the whole vicarious treasure of it. She wanted what she couldn’t herself manage to possess. She said, “You must have a wonderful life.”

  “Darling, what are you doing hovering on the edge of these digs?”

  The question was pointed but not unkindly put. Still Catherine heard herself stammer. “It’s not what I intended when I came here. I’m not supposed to be an archaeologist. I’m supposed to train as a pianist. I’m supposed to perform with a city symphony for a few years, although that’s not really even necessary because what I’m actually supposed to do is marry an upwardly mobile man, deliver two or three perfectly spaced children, and throw a party or host a dinner every season. Volunteer on a charity board, join a bridge club. That sort of thing. I’m not supposed to stumble onto archaeology sites, and I’m certainly not supposed to become swept away when I do.”

  “Have you?”

  Catherine took another drink, a big one. She wiped her mouth with her wrist. “Been swept away? It’s sort of looking that way. Not surprising, really. Not if you know me.”

  “Darling, you mustn’t take this the wrong way. In the long view this isn’t your parents’ life. It’s not even your culture’s life. It’s your own.”

  Catherine blew her bangs up from her forehead and looked through the current of smoke at the ceiling, like looking at the floor of a brook through water. The ceiling itself seemed to move. She said, “That’s a somewhat dangerous subject.”

  Audrey Williams shrugged. “If history’s taught me anything it’s that life is short, alarmingly so. There’s not enough of it to waste. Or to let others waste for you.”

  “Sometimes I think life would be simpler if I’d been born a man.”

  “Oh rubbish. Life is what it is. Your life’s work, on the other hand—that you might exercise some control over.”


  Catherine felt put in her place. The pub had filled with workingmen in the last few minutes and despite the accompanying din she knew with a sudden clarity that she could complain about her upbringing only so long because at some point the fault would simply become her own. “Did you find much resistance when you set out? Within the profession, I mean?”

  “Everyone encounters resistance. It makes you stronger. In his own day Pitt-Rivers was regarded as a crackpot. Thankfully it didn’t stop him. He’s admirable for that as much as anything.”

  Catherine’s beer stein had been taken away and replaced with another. She hadn’t noticed the switch. She was already tipsier than she’d ever been. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Whatever for?”

  “Actually I’m not sure. Taking me seriously, I suppose. General Pitt-Rivers may have been stoical, but I don’t quite know that I am. I think I crave approval.”

  “Everyone does that as well, to one end or another. Probably even the general himself.”

  “Well. I imagine he would have approved of you.”

  Audrey Williams gave her a look. “I like to think so.”

  Her courses began and she spent a week trying to channel her concentration, with limited success. She knew what the problem was.

  She took the train back to London on Saturday morning and made her way to Walbrook. Audrey Williams was there, and a pair of volunteers cutting a new trench with shovels. Most of the paid crew was gone for the weekend but in their place was a man she’d heard much about in the previous weeks. The man the crew called the Professor.

  Audrey Williams beckoned across the rubble. Her thick hair was disheveled and she wore a smudge of mud on one cheek, a slash like war paint. “Catherine Lemay, my American friend. This is Peter Grimes.” She winked. “The Professor.”

  Grimes wiped his right hand on his trousers and then held it toward Catherine. He had a quiet half smile and a full head of graying hair. His shoulders were slightly stooped, like one of the wounded buildings that allowed him to see beneath the surface of the city. Catherine could not imagine a less intimidating human being.