The Bog Page 3

  “Did you see that?” he shouted as he ran up the steep and rocky hill to get a better vantage. Brad had apparently not seen it, but followed him curiously.

  “See what?”

  “That bird. It was flying along when suddenly it veered off almost as if it hit something.”

  Brad looked up into the air, squinting to see the allegedly invisible obstruction. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Not now,” David said. “But I swear it looked like it hit something.” He surveyed the landscape beneath where the incident had happened. The first thing he noticed was the picturesque outline of Fenchurch St. Jude in the valley below. The now-bright sun gleamed refulgently off the whitewashed walls of the sprawling cluster of cottages, and here and there an automobile or a pickup truck provided the only clue that the village was indeed a part of the twentieth century. David observed that the church he had spied before was set off some distance from the village and was actually nearer to the bog. Here and there in the far distance other moorland cottages dotted the hills, but these too were few and far between, and their infrequency only added to the sense of isolation that hung over the place.

  David’s gaze moved to the portion of the valley nearer where the bittern had nearly fallen from its flight, and here another sight met his eyes. Some distance from the village and at least partially encircled by the black waters of the bog was a manor house. Like many English manor houses, the huge and rambling edifice was an eclectic hodgepodge of styles from different eras. David recognized part of the facade as late Elizabethan, but the main block of the structure was much older. A huge tower projected from the central core, ancient and crenellated, and heavy, mullioned windows dotted the walls. From the steep roofs set at different angles to one another sprouted innumerable chimneys, and the entire structure was encrusted with ivy and surrounded by great oaks and firs twisted into fantastic shapes by untold years of storms.

  Sc here was the bog lake, David thought to himself. And moreover, there was a house built upon its edge. How strange, he thought, that someone long ago should have chosen such a bleak location on which to build his home. He knew from the high acidity of the peat that the waters of the lake would be still and black and almost completely devoid of life. He knew also that the lake most assuredly had a false bottom, and the only thing that punctuated its dark and impenetrable surface would be again the semifloating mats of sphagnum and decaying vegetation.

  But he discerned nothing that explained why the bittern had behaved so strangely when its course had taken it over the perimeter of the grounds.

  “What’s that place?” he asked.

  “It’s known as Wythen Hall,” Brad replied. “It’s the home of the local gentry, the Marquis de L’Isle.”

  A small breeze rustled by them, and as David started back down he was struck once again by the oddness of someone building so stately a manse on a location so dominated by the bog. In fact, it occurred to him that in a way Fenchurch St. Jude and, indeed, the entire valley were dominated by the bog.

  The thought had lingered in his mind for but a moment when his attention returned to the matter at hand. “Now why don’t you show me that body?” he said.

  “Let me get you some boots to put on first,” Brad replied. He ran into his tent, then returned with a large pair of wading rubbers. David put them on and they strolled toward the excavation. As the land sloped downward it became wet and gushed beneath their feet. David looked at Brad worriedly.

  “It’s okay. I’ve checked the area out thoroughly. There are no sinks.”

  David nodded, grateful for the information, but he still walked carefully.

  Finally they reached the side of the excavation, and David looked down. The hole itself was about six feet square and maybe five feet deep. The first several feet of strata on the sides of the pit were composed of a dark-colored peat David recognized as wood-peat, and below this a reddish peat stratum of decomposed sphagnum known to peat cutters as “dog’s flesh.” A foot and a half into the dog’s flesh and resting peacefully on the reddish and muddy bottom of the pit was the body of a young girl.

  She lay on her back, her head twisted to one side and her left arm outstretched. Her right arm was bent up against her chest, as if defensively, and her legs were lightly drawn up, the left one over the right. She looked much like any young girl might have who had only recently settled down for a nap, except for the fact that her skin, once white, was now a shiny and resinous black. It was a jarring contrast, the perfect preservation of her features against the almost metallic and petroleum-like color of her skin. It was as if a talented sculptor had carved her out of coal and then polished the surface of his work to a high gloss. David was spellbound. Her every feature had been preserved, every pore in her skin, her nails, the whorls and lines of her fingerprints, and the gentle creasings of the skin at the bend of her wrists.

  The reason for her remarkable state of preservation was, of course, the tannin and other soil acids in the peat and the bog water that seeped through it. Not only did they tan the skin and turn it into leather, but they also combined with other proteins in the body and converted them to a form of synthetic plastic. They had been lucky in this instance, however, for if the acidity of the bog water had been too high it would have dissolved the young woman’s bones and left them with nothing but her skin. Fortunately, that had not happened.

  To some, David Macauley’s macabre interest in the bog bodies might have seemed ghoulish, but it was not morbidity that had drawn him to study such things. Again, it was his love of history, his voracious desire to know everything that was knowable about the past, and now, as he looked down at the body, he felt not horror, but a tremendous excitement. He could scarcely believe it. If she was indeed as old as they believed, she had lived and breathed and smelled flowers nearly a thousand years before the Norman invasion. She might possibly have even caught a glimpse of Caesar himself, and it took his breath away to think that here, he, David Macauley, was looking at the hair, the hands and flesh of the person who had actually done those things.

  He turned to Brad. “She’s magnificent,” he said in a hush.

  “Isn’t she,” the younger man said knowingly and in a tone of voice that revealed he shared David’s reverence.

  David looked at the young man, still shaking his head in disbelief. “You’ve really outdone yourself, Brad. This is more than I could have ever hoped for. I’m speechless.”

  Brad blushed uneasily. “You deserve the credit. It was you who found the site.”

  “But you’ve done the initial toil. At the very least you’ll share credit for the discovery.”

  Brad grew even more modest and uncomfortable and David looked at him, marveling at his reaction. It was true that picking the site gave him claim to the discovery, but doing the initial excavations and finding the body were no small achievement either. It was not that David thought he was taking advantage of the younger man. Meting out the more arduous tasks to one’s assistant was typical procedure in the archaeological field. What amazed him was that Brad could be so humble about it all. He remembered being in the same circumstances himself so many times before and gazing at his superior with gracious but only slightly concealed envy as he longed for the day when he would be the one in charge of the expedition.

  His thoughts were soon interrupted. “There’s something else you should see,” Brad said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Her face,” Brad finished simply.

  David continued to stare at him for a moment and then looked back down at the body. From his current vantage only the side of her head was visible, and he realized he was going to have to get down into the hole itself. Trying as best he could not to muddy himself, he lowered himself into the pit. He knelt down, craning his neck as he carefully leaned between the muddy wall of the pit and the body and for the first time caught a glimpse of her face.

  “My God,” he murmured.

  When viewed from above, the deceptively tranqui
l posture of the body had not prepared him for what he now confronted, for frozen in the young girl’s visage, as perfectly preserved as her skin and her nails, was a look of unspeakable terror. Her eyes were open, the white of them still preserved as it was in many of the bog bodies that had been discovered, and even the blue of her irises. And they were wide from the sight of some long-forgotten horror. Her mouth too was still agape in the rictus of a terrible death. Whatever had killed her had scared the soul out of her before it had done it.

  “Have you determined how she died?” David asked, bewildered and shaken by the sight of the awful countenance.

  Brad shook his head. “Not yet. Could be a knife wound or something on some part of her that’s still concealed by the peat.”

  David continued to stare at the reclining figure. “Where’s the comb you mentioned?”

  “In the tent.”

  David climbed out of the hole, wiped the mud from his hands, and followed Brad to the campsite. The younger man vanished through the flap of the tent and reappeared several moments later carrying a large hair comb in his hand.

  As Brad had said over the phone, the comb was carved out of horn. What he had failed to mention was that it was also inlaid with ivory and gold, an exquisite object to behold. Aside from that, David did not immediately see what identified the comb as Roman. He turned it over in his hands, examining it. He knew of only one other comb that had ever been found buried along with a bog body, and from his memory of that comb he perceived that this one did not precisely follow that Celtic design. However, he still did not know what was Roman about it. He looked closer, trying to find any distinguishing feature. And then he saw. Scratched lightly into the horn and so darkened by the bog water that it was almost invisible was a phrase scrawled in Latin: Ul tibi postremum donarem munus moriturae, accipe multum manantia fletu. He translated the inscription loosely: Bringing you this last gift for the dead, accept this offering wet with tears.

  “Do you think she was Roman?” Brad asked.

  “I don’t know. It was uncommon for Roman women to have blond hair, but it was not unheard of. Where’s the cloth that you said was found with her?”

  Again Brad vanished into the tent and this time reappeared with a large plastic bag containing several sizable remnants of a coarse and greatly discolored cloth. David took them and examined them closely. Even though rotted, he discerned a check design in the fragments that was clearly of Celtic origin. This posed a puzzle.

  “Well what do you think?” Hollister asked.

  “I think that there are two possibilities. The first is that she is a Roman and was buried in the bog by the Celts. That means that the comb belonged to her originally, but the cloth, which is Celtic, was placed over her by the Celts who interred her in the bog. But that would not explain why she was buried in the bog by the Celts, or how the Romans allowed one of their number to undergo a burial practice they most assuredly viewed as pagan.”

  “Or the inscription on the comb,” Brad added.

  David nodded.

  “And the other possibility?”

  “The other possibility is that she is Celtic, but somehow came into possession of a Roman comb.” David paused, once again gazing meditatively at the inscription. “You know, the inscription almost suggests that the comb was meant as some sort of votive or offering. Perhaps she was a sacrificial victim in some long-forgotten Celtic ritual and a Roman woman who happened to witness the event decided to give her a comb as a sort of oblation to the foreign god.”

  A diffident smile crossed Brad’s lips. “That was my conclusion. Obviously when we figure out how she died that will give us some further clue. But I wonder if we’ll ever figure out the second puzzle?”

  “The second puzzle?”

  “If the woman was a sacrificial victim in some sort of Celtic ritual and was given the comb by a Roman woman who witnessed the event and wanted to make some sort of offering, why was the comb wet with the Roman woman’s tears? She must have been very unhappy about something. I wonder if we’ll ever know the cause of her unhappiness.”

  David shrugged. It was an interesting notion, but he knew that their chances of answering the question were remote unless, of course, the bog contained still further clues to the mystery. His heart leaped at the hope, and he surveyed the landscape around them, wondering what else, if anything, lay hidden in the inky depths of Hovern Bog.

  Brad seemed to read his thoughts. “I have something else to show you,” he said, and David noticed that the younger man had an uncharacteristic sparkle in his eye. He gestured with his head in the direction of one of the other holes and David followed him.

  When they reached the second excavation David looked down and saw that it was almost as deep as the first, but narrowed toward the bottom and was, as yet, nowhere near as wide. At first, as he peered into the conical depression in the quagmire, he saw nothing. He shifted his weight, and his boots squished softly in the mud as he leaned closer. Finally his attention came to rest on an unusually sleek patch in the side of the hole. At first his mind only registered that the area possessed an anomalous texture. But as he continued to scrutinize it, the pieces finally fell into place and he realized what the object was. What he was looking at was the side of a human thigh, darkened by the bog water so that it was the same color as the surrounding peat, but a human thigh nonetheless. There was at least one other body buried in the bog.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he exclaimed.

  “I only found it this morning. I thought it would make a nice surprise.” Brad grinned proudly, but with a modesty not unlike a child who has just surprised a parent with a handmade valentine.

  David continued to just stare dumbly at the human thigh in the pit below. His mind was reeling. The remarkable state of preservation of the first body had itself been enough to persuade him that this was a spot that demanded further study. But the discovery of the second body clinched the matter. He found himself swept with two very different feelings. He was thrilled at the realization that he had at last found a site where he could vent his talents as an archaeologist to their limit. But he was also filled with misgiving, for he knew that he would now have to confront Melanie with the fact that the family would, indeed, be moving.

  He turned to Brad. “Have you checked out the housing situation in Fenchurch St. Jude?”

  “Not yet,” the younger man replied. “I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been into the village several times, but the locals are really weird about strangers.”

  “Well, that’s to be expected in a place as insular as this, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe so, but I mean really weird. It’s like they look at you like you’ve got the plague or something.”

  Great, David thought to himself, that would delight Melanie no end. “Well,” he said, “I’m sure their xenophobia is just due to their parochialism.”

  “Their what?”

  “Xenophobia, their fear of strangers. I’m sure it’s just because they’re not used to seeing unfamiliar faces in these parts. I bet they’re fine folks once you get to know them.”

  Brad shrugged.

  Both men were still staring at the second body when David suddenly had an uncanny feeling that there was something behind them.

  “Good God!” he exclaimed when he turned and abruptly found himself face to face with a well-dressed stranger. To his equal surprise, a short distance away, on the country lane that wound next to the camp, was an ancient but well-kept Rolls-Royce with a liveried chauffeur sitting behind the wheel. He was stunned, for all three, the well-dressed gentleman, the Rolls-Royce, and the chauffeur had appeared as suddenly and as silently as if they had coalesced out of the mists of the bog. He noticed that Brad was equally taken aback.

  “We didn’t hear you drive up,” he gasped.

  The man said absolutely nothing, but just continued to stare at them malevolently. He was tall, fully as tall as both David and Brad, with finely chiseled cheekbones and a mop of silver-gray hair. In cont
rast, his complexion was unusually dark, almost tanned in appearance, and his brown eyes were deeply set and penetrating. He was expensively dressed in a tweed jacket typical of the landed gentry, and his fingers were studded with rubies and garnets. In his hand he carried a Malacca cane, clouded and mottled with age. David estimated that he was in his fifties, but trim and very well preserved for his years.

  “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” the man demanded sternly.

  “Who are you?” David countered.

  The stranger continued to gaze at them smolderingly. “I am Grenville de L’Isle.”

  “The Marquis de L’Isle?” David asked.

  The older man nodded imperceptibly, still keeping his dark eyes trained on them, hawklike.

  David explained who they were and showed him the papers given to them by the government that allowed them to undertake their excavations.

  “Would you like to see the bodies?” he asked brightly when he had finished.

  The Marquis seemed only slightly interested. David considered offering him a pair of boots, but noticed that the brown, peat-colored water had already squished up over the Marquis’s fine Oxford Street shoes. In true stiff-upper-lip fashion, he scarcely seemed to notice. He glanced but briefly down at the body of the young woman in the pit, sniffed appreciatively, and then strolled back up the hill.

  “How long do you intend to be here?” the Marquis asked.

  “Quite some time. Six months to a year. You don’t know of any available living accommodations, do you?” The Marquis behaved as if he hadn’t heard a word of the question. “Do you have a wife, any children?”

  “Yes, I’m married and I have two children.”

  “Do you intend to have any more?”

  David found the question slightly presumptuous, but assumed that it had something to do in some oblique way with his inquiry about prospective living accommodations. “We have no plans to have a third.”

  The Marquis did not flinch, but just continued to stare blankly at him for a moment, and then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he turned and started to walk away.