No time like the present. “If you’re quite sure. . . .”
Della motioned him through the doorway.
Gareth stepped inside and left his boots in the entry. The house was stiflingly hot.
Della led him to a sitting room that was aggressively masculine, all dark leather and tweed, with a vague aroma of bay rum and cigars. A packed bookshelf stood against one wall. Against another stood a glass case containing polished stone, bronze, silver, and even a glint of gold.
“Would you care for tea?” Della asked.
What Gareth really wanted was beer, but he accepted the tea gratefully, and took advantage of her absence fetching it to look over the antiquities. Matilda would know what everything was, where it came from, and what its mother’s maiden name had been. To Gareth the display might as well have been a museum jumble sale. Tiny faces looked up at him from various bowls, platters, and figurines. That was a lamp, he reckoned, and that was a strainer. Sweeney had said half Reynolds’s things were fakes. Some of them looked bright and shiny enough to have been manufactured last week.
After the controversy over the Romano-British bronzes, Gareth had expected Reynolds to own large pieces of statuary. But everything here was small enough to fit into a rucksack. Easier to smuggle, he told himself.
Della returned carrying a tea-tray. Gareth cleared some magazines off a low table. He noted a Sotheby’s catalog and a booklet of instructions for a metal detector, as well as two issues of Treasure Trove, one with a cover story on a sunken Manila galleon and the headline, “Investment Opportunity!”
Perched on the edge of her chair, Della poured and served as punctiliously as the Queen at a garden party. Gareth sipped his tea and asked, “Are you also interested in antiquities, Mrs. Reynolds?”
“Della, please,” she said with a shy smile. “In a way—I taught history once, before my marriage, at a public school. . . . I like to collect ceramic pieces.”
“Dr. Gray was telling me about a shop in Borley Arcade that sells both ceramics and antiquities.”
“Oh yes, I bought a lovely Portmeirion vase there, only eight pounds. Celia was a schoolmistress of mine. She gave me a discount.”
Oh. All right then. Gareth ticked off one question answered, not that the answer wasn’t going to create more questions. “The murdered girl worked there, didn’t she? Did you know her?”
Della gaze fell so abruptly to her cup Gareth expected to hear a splash. “I met her, once, when she was here talking to Adrian about artifacts from Cornovium—the Roman fort. . . . Of course you know its name, you’re working there.”
“It must have been a terrible shock to you when she was found dead.”
“I remember the night. It was filthy weather. Adrian had planned to go to a town-planning session but decided to stay in. Clapper rang up with the news.”
“That would have been the night the victim was found, then, two days later.”
The color drained from Della’s face so quickly she went a sickly green. She fussed with the teapot. “Let me warm your cup for you, Mr. March. Gareth.”
He extended his cup. The spout of the teapot clattered against its edge as she poured. Had the time lag between the murder and its discovery never occurred to her when she was giving her and her husband’s alibi? He couldn’t ask her point-blank, though. He didn’t dare push her too hard.
Setting the teapot down, she clasped her hands in her lap, pressed her trousered knees together, and hunched as though avoiding a blow.
Gareth made a mental note to ask Watkins about the weather on the first of February and changed the subject. “You taught history? You have a brilliant library.” He nodded toward the shelf. Books leaned together across gaps. Many of the titles were about the Celts, others focused on the Romans. When he saw Antonia Fraser’s The Warrior Queens he felt a leap of inspiration worthy of Matilda herself. “Your horse, Bodie. Is she named for Boudicca?”
Again a blush rose in Della’s cheeks, and a furtive gleam touched her eyes. “Oh yes. How very clever of you. I’ve always admired Boudicca, she was quite the fighter, wasn’t she? She paid the Romans back good and proper.”
“And a lot of innocent people died for it,” Gareth pointed out.
“Is anyone really innocent? I mean, really?”
That was a good one. Gareth didn’t answer.
“Boudicca was a Druidess. The Celts didn’t stifle women like the Romans did. Like we do now. . . .” She leaned forward. The top of her blouse gaped open. Gareth kept his eyes on her face, but even so she gasped and quickly buttoning the top button. Her enthusiasm, her color, drained away again. “I’m sorry. I was speaking out of turn.”
“Not at all.” Gareth was sweating. He could hardly breathe in the hothouse atmosphere. He put down his empty cup and stood. “Thank you. I’m terribly sorry about the horse, if there are any vet’s bills. . . .”
“No, no,” Della murmured into her chest. “Not to worry.”
Gareth fled into the entryway, reclaimed his boots, and burst into the open air. He needed to talk to Watkins. The travelers had the means, Reynolds had the opportunity, and Della, perhaps, the motive. She seemed too timid to kill out of jealousy, though—assuming any woman in her right mind would be jealous of a git like Reynolds. The motive was greed—wasn’t it?
He must tell Matilda that he’d traced the receipt. That he still had no connection between the travelers and Linda Burkett. That Della might be desperate, but she was also pitiful.
He strode back to the hotel, shaking the mud of Fortuna Stud from his feet.
Chapter Ten
Her mother would be proud of her for attending church. Ashley wasn’t sure whether she felt virtuous or nauseated. She stifled a burp that tasted of her morning tomatoes and bacon and glanced at her watch. She was meeting Nick here at four. It was only eleven now. He wasn’t in the congregation, no surprise there.
Light streamed in multi-colored beams across the rows of faces and into the shadowy corners of the ancient building. Matilda sat beside Ashley with her hands folded in her lap. Her serene face was lifted toward the pulpit, listening to the minister speak about loving one’s neighbor as oneself. More than a few raised chins and tight lips in his audience—not least those of Watkins, Clapper, and Reynolds—suggested to Ashley that he was pleading for tolerance for the travelers.
Ashley tried to focus on the sacred rather than the profane. Not that Nick was profane. He was a scholar. If the local people only realized that, they wouldn’t be so frightened of him and his friends.
Gareth wouldn’t be so down on him. She’d hung around Gareth’s table in the bar last night, but he hadn’t asked her to sit down. He’d drunk three pints of ale and scribbled in his notebook, every now and then consulting with Matilda about something that’d happened while he’d been out riding. They were working on their book. Ashley didn’t interrupt. She drank a lager and daydreamed about being carried off into the sunset by Gareth, or by Nick, or by anyone who split the difference between Prince Charming and a movie star.
The bar had been almost empty. Caterina sat with Dr. Sweeney and Reynolds, ignoring Reynolds’s double meanings and holding her own with Sweeney in a conversation about, as far as Ashley could make out, the column of Trajan in Rome. For several moments Ashley had wished she’d gone with Bryan, Manfred, and Courtney into the Peak District to go hang-gliding. She had a date, though, with someone cooler than her fellow students.
“. . . and grant that this day we fall into no sin,” intoned the minister, “neither run into any sort of danger . . .”
Matilda repeated the words beneath her breath. Ashley burped again. The church was growing warm with the sunlight and the bodies. It had been chilly when she’d been here on Tuesday with Nick.
The congregation rose. Ashley leaped to her feet a beat behind. “. . . and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.”
“Amen,” everyone said. “Amen,” whispered Ashley.
A moment of genufl
ection and the congregation began to file out. It’d been a very nice, old-fashioned service. You could see the altar and the minister much better without TV cameras in the way.
“Look. There’s a green man.” Matilda put her prayer book in her purse and pointed to the carving on the end of their pew.
Ashley eyed the rough-hewn face surrounded by leaves, pretending she’d never seen it before. “Does it mean the medieval villagers were still secret pagans?”
“No. It means the early church was tolerant of the old ways. It could gain more converts with open arms than it could with closed doors—and minds.”
“You don’t see that much any more. I mean, people being broad-minded of other people’s beliefs.”
“The tolerant ones don’t make the headlines, unfortunately.”
They walked out into the sunshine and past the whispering fronds of the yew tree. Matilda, Ashley thought, was a tolerant person. It might not hurt to tell her she’d seen the green man before, and with whom. And yet it was risky to expose your feelings to another person. That gave the other person ammunition to belittle you with.
“Fine, thank you,” Matilda was saying to the Reynolds’, man and wife. “And you?”
“You can tell your chap March,” answered Adrian, “that if he wants to call on the travelers he can do it with his own property.”
Mrs. R—Della—inspected her shoes. Matilda said, “He’s not my chap,” and walked away.
Ashley hurried after Matilda. “Do you like being an archaeologist? I have to declare a major soon, so far I’m just taking what I’m interested in, but my mother says I’d better buckle down and get a teacher’s certificate so I can earn a living.”
“Earning a living is important,” said Matilda. “So is studying a variety of things. Making connections among different ideas and disciplines opens up a lot of opportunities. . . . Hello, Howard.”
Dr. Sweeney stopped in front of the hotel and waited for them to catch up. “I’m having a recce at the fort. Rather a Sunday ritual. Would you ladies care to join me?”
Ashley said, “Sure.”
“Certainly,” said Matilda.
They wended their way past the cottages and the bowling green to the fort. The paths up the slopes were still muddy, and the grass was wet—the heels of Ashley’s pumps sank into the ground. She found a bit of wall to stand on. Her cotton skirt billowed around her knees, sneaky little drafts teasing her thighs.
Matilda was wearing flats and a pleated wool skirt that wouldn’t have dared billow. “Those walls must belong to the bath house,” she said. “It’s on the lower part of the slope. And that surface is part of a later Saxon building. It’s looking good for a week’s work.”
“For a group of volunteers doing a quick and dirty survey,” Sweeney replied. “Maybe next year I can do a proper open area excavation with proper excavators. I have too many other commitments at present, my kind of expertise is much in demand.”
Ashley bit her lip. She’d thought she was doing all right, for an amateur. And Caterina was really strutting her stuff.
“The students are showing a lot of ability,” said Matilda. “Your assistant in Manchester, Ionescu, also seems very capable.”
“Within his limits, yes.”
“You will send me the official report on the bog body.”
“We academics will be arguing over that for years to come,” Sweeney told her. “The post-mortem, for example, showed the presence of burnt barley-cake in her stomach. Does that imply famine? A Beltane ritual?”
“Or sloppy cooking?” concluded Matilda. “It’d be helpful if you had the head as well.”
“Yes.” Sweeney adjusted his ascot and surveyed the field. He looked like Nelson atop his column in Trafalgar Square.
Ashley peered narrowly around the mound. Interesting as it was to know someone who saw ghosts, she really wasn’t up to seeing any herself. She crossed her arms and hugged herself, remembering the pitiful empty sack that had been a body like her own. Perhaps she had felt love, longing, and loneliness, too, but all you could dump on a laboratory table was the poor old slandered flesh.
Matilda almost seemed to be smothering a smile. “Howard, what are the old legends about Durslow and Shadow Moss?”
“Miller found the remains of an ancient timber causeway leading down into the bog,” Sweeney answered. “That might have given rise to stories of a god—who has different names in different versions of the story—Cernnunos, Taranis, Teutates—riding a white horse from Durslow down to the Moss. This has been horse country forever, and there’s that spring on Durslow—primitive people, mind you. Superstitious to a fault.”
“Primitive people,” said Matilda, “tended to be in much closer contact with the earth, the sky, the seasons.”
“In early medieval times, Durslow was supposedly the abode of some saint. I forget which one—the early saints were thick upon the ground. Later on, in the seventeenth century, the local people supposedly wiped out a coven there. The victims were several old widows going about their business. Villagers tended to be paranoid about anyone out of the social mainstream. You had the same problem in America.”
“At Salem? Yes, if I’d lived there then I’d have been in trouble, being both a widow and impatient with fools.”
Sweeney shot her a sideways glance but Matilda was gazing off toward the river, features bland.
Matilda’s a widow, Ashley thought. What a shame. The photo in her room was probably of her son. It must be really depressing to be middle-aged and alone, much more than being twenty and alone. Not that Matilda seemed particularly depressed.
When they returned to the lobby of the hotel they found Watkins and Clapper conferring over a notebook. “Scheduling the May Day festivities,” the innkeeper told Matilda and Sweeney. “We don’t want to have the Hobby Horse and the Maypole at the same time, they’re both big draws. Especially since May first is on a Saturday this year. We’ll have people from as far away as Liverpool and Birmingham. This here’s last year’s Queen of the May.” He showed Ashley a photo of a girl dressed in a snug bodice, flowing skirt, and gold-paper crown that owed more to Hollywood than to history. Her escort was a head taller than she was, a young man wearing the white shirt, knee breeches, and bells of a Morris dancer. “We’ve just chosen our new Queen. Has to be a local girl, you know.”
“No offense, Miss Walraven,” added Watkins.
“None taken,” Ashley told him. Of course they wouldn’t want a stranger to play the part. They didn’t need to apologize.
Matilda was staring at the photo. “So these two are local kids?”
“Used to be,” answered Clapper. “Emma there’s moved away—bit of a local scandal, nothing you’d want to hear about. Clive’s gone to live with relatives up north, no jobs here for a bright lad, more’s the pity.”
“Ah,” Matilda said faintly. Frowning, she handed back the picture.
Matilda might be seeing something unusual in the photo, but it looked thoroughly ordinary to Ashley. She glanced at her watch, murmured, “Excuse me,” and went to the room she had all to herself this weekend. There she changed into her good jeans and a sweater and picked up pencil and paper. Boy, was she going to be glad to get back to e-mail—not that her mother even had a computer.
She wrote about the dig, salting the letter with archaeological terms. What else would she write about—the murdered girl? Jason and Caterina? Gareth? Her mother probably wouldn’t have approved of Gareth, him being a reporter and all. Nick? Nick would have given her a nervous breakdown.
Ashley ate a protein bar, brushed her teeth, tucked the envelope in her pocket, and set out for the mailbox across from the church. The day was still sunny, almost warm in the lee of the buildings. Several people wandered around the square, but none of them were travelers. It wasn’t quite three o’clock. She could mail her letter and sit on a bench by the church. . . .
With a rush of adrenalin she recognized the red-haired man who was mailing a letter just ahead of
her. Her feet tried to pull her two ways at once, with the result that she stood still. “Oh, hello,” Gareth said as he turned from the pillar box.
“I write my mother every Sunday,” Ashley blurted, and edged past him to thrust her letter into the slot.
“I was writing my mum as well,” said Gareth.
“You’re Welsh, aren’t you? Is that where your mother lives?”
“We lived in Wales when I was young, yes. Now my mum lives in Brussels. Her husband’s a bureaucrat with the EU.”
So his parents had broken up, too. Ashley groped for something else to say. “It’s almost May Day.”
“Yes.”
“I read a book once where people in Wales jump over fires on May Day.”
“My grandmother did that as a child, but if you find anyone playing at it these days, it’s simply a game, a bit of a lark. Like the Eisteddfod, clinging to the past for the sake of clinging to the past.”
“Or because the future looks unsure?”
“Could be,” Gareth conceded with a slight smile.
“So you don’t believe in the old gods? You don’t think they have any power any more?”
He glanced sharply at her, making her wonder if she’d gone too far. “No. The old gods are gone. If you’ll excuse me. . . .” Gareth turned and walked off toward the hotel.
He was still treating her like a kid sister, wasn’t he? He’d disapprove of her date, no doubt about it. If she had Caterina’s self-confidence she’d throw Nick in Gareth’s face and dare him to respond. . . . With her luck she’d alienate both men and be back to—well, no, not back to square one. If she’d learned nothing else over the last couple of years, it was that attracting a guy wasn’t all that hard. It was keeping him that could be the problem.
Time Enough to Die Page 13
