Aaron Elkins: Unnatural Selection

“Would you have wanted me to?”

“No!” he said with feeling. “I hate hearing this kind of stuff, you know that.”

“Well, that’s how come.”

“So why tell me now?”

“You asked me a question.”

“I did? I don’t remember-”

“You said ‘This time, as opposed to last time?’ That’s a question.”

“I guess it was. My mistake.”

“Anyway, now you know.”

“So I do,” he sighed, taking her hand again as they turned from the parapet to go back inside. “Now If only I could figure out a way to un-know.”

Vasily Kozlov had a well-deserved reputation as a glutton for work, and the schedule he had devised for the week confirmed it. The consortium would meet at nine every morning for a working breakfast, take a one-hour lunch break at one, then reconvene until 3:45, when tea would be served on the ramparts, weather permitting, or in the dungeon if not, and conclude with another working session from 4:15 to 6:00. Evening sessions would be held as needed. And Kozlov himself intended to chair every minute of them. The first day, Monday, would consist of a review of current issues and a fine-tuning of the agenda; presentation of participants’ papers and discussion of them would follow for the next five days; and there would be a free-wheeling wrap-up on Sunday.

Although Kozlov again charmingly urged Gideon to attend the breakfast session, Gideon had learned his lesson the day before. (He had learned another lesson later on that night, losing twelve and a half pounds at the poker table, mostly to the crafty Kozlov himself.) Thus, as the old clock in the castle’s entryway was striking nine, Gideon, having breakfasted on ham-and-egg-and-potato pasties and a double cappuccino at the bright little Kavorna Coffee House in town, was forking over his two pounds to enter the Isles of Scilly Museum on Church Street, the first visitor of the day. Madeleine Goodfellow, he was told by the volunteer behind the counter, would not be in until ten, which gave him a welcome hour to wander the halls.

It was, as Julie had said, his kind of museum. Well-done, but not too big, or ambitious, or flashy. Two floors of local archaeology and natural history, maritime life, shipwrecks, artifacts going back to the sixteenth century, and photographic displays of life on the island a hundred years ago. No high-tech gadgetry, not a single button to push, no ‘hands-on interactive learning experiences’; just well-mounted, down-to-earth exhibits with lucid explanatory plates. It even smelled like his kind of museum: floor polish, stone dust, and old things.

Naturally enough, one glass-encased wall exhibit in particular held his interest.

Puritan (Roundhead) uniform, circa 1648. These remarkably well-preserved objects, from the days when St. Mary’s was the last redoubt of Cavalier resistance to Parliamentarian forces, were discovered in a dry eighteenth-century well in 1946, clothing the remains of a Cromwellian footsoldier.

“Remarkably well-preserved” was stretching things a bit, but there was enough to give some idea of how the clothed, living man might have appeared: a few faded, darkened shreds of gray-and-white striped trousers, some sad fragments of once-bright-yellow ribbon that had probably been a jaunty waist-sash, and a few leather items-a sword holder and several unidentifiable straps-that were now a tarry black. There was no sign at all of the thigh-high boots he’d probably worn, which suggested that they’d been appropriated when he died. No one had needed his armor, however. There was a near-complete set, lovingly restored and buffed: separate back- and breastplates, a gorget to shield the throat, one of the two tarrets that would have protected the thighs, and a “lobster pot” helmet with a deep, round dent on the left side, a little back from the front. Everything had been tacked to an outline of a man that showed where they would have gone in life.

Gideon stepped back to take it in. Judging from the outline, this soldier of the soon-to-be Lord Protector of England would have been quite short by modern standards, but probably about average for the time. And that deep, round dent in the helmet… that was interesting. It looked as if it had been caused by a hammerlike weapon, or perhaps a nearly spent musket ball that hadn’t had the oomph left to penetrate the metal. Either way, it would likely have left a sizeable dent in the skull beneath it too, so it might well be that he was looking at evidence of the cause of death. Directly under that dent, beneath the unfashionably short-cropped hair (which was the reason they were called Roundheads), would have been the coronal suture, separating the frontal and left parietal. Too bad the skull didn’t survive. It would have been interesting-

“Yes, that’s our man,” Madeleine’s plummy, jolly voice announced, “waiting all these years-all these centuries-for you to come and tell us all about him.”

Gideon turned, smiling, to greet her. “Nice exhibit. You’ve already shown quite a lot about him.”

“Why, thank you,” she said, beaming. She wore a skirt-suit of violent green that did nothing to minimize her ample proportions. “Ready to go to work? Or would you care to chat for a while?”

“How about work first, chat later?”

“Very good. A true scientist.”

She unlocked an unmarked door between wall cases and they stepped into a typical museum storeroom, with racks of cheap metal shelving, some holding neatly stacked boxes specifically made for museum storage of specimens and artifacts, others holding cartons specifically made for grocery storage of applesauce or tomato paste. There were also objects large and small-Victorian schoolbooks; a well-worn millstone (how had they gotten that in here?); a cannonball; framed, pressed seaweed specimens-stowed willy-nilly in corners, on chairs and tables, and anyplace else they’d go. One of the two library tables in the room had been cleared, except for a serious-looking one-by-three-foot, lidded cardboard carton at one end, and a smaller Prince’s fish paste carton at the other. In the center, neatly arranged, were the materials and equipment he’d asked for.

“And here…” With a flourish, she removed the lid from the larger carton. “… lies our fallen hero.”

Inside the heavy cardboard box were some of the long bones lying loose, all of them brown and exfoliating, and only a few of them whole. When he picked up the left humerus, bits of bone flaked off and floated to the bottom of the carton.

“Madeleine, you’ll want to stabilize these if you exhibit them. Or even if you don’t. Otherwise they’ll just continue to degrade. Whoever cleaned them did it without preserving them, which didn’t help. Look at all the flakes and crumbs in the bottom.”

“It does look pretty bad,” she said, concerned. “I should have done something before this. What does one use for human bones? Alvar and acetone?”

“Sure, something like that. Whatever you’re used to using on pottery would work.” He looked down for a few seconds at the dry, dun-brown remnants that had once given form and strength to arms and legs. “Madeleine, I’m afraid your doctor may pretty much have said it all. He was human and he was male. As for going beyond that, ageing’s going to be difficult because the ends of most of the bones have been gnawed off…”

She waited for more, and when he didn’t go on, but simply stood gazing at the bones with his hands clasped behind him, she said a bit plaintively: “And that’s all you can tell me?”

But he was plunged in thought, looking at each bone, registering details, and oddities and anomalies, and visually moving on to the next, so that it took a few seconds for the question to penetrate.