Aaron Elkins: Murder In The Queen's armes

From there they were directed to a gray stone mansion called Colliton House, the prototype for Lucetta’s house, High Place Hall.

Gideon read aloud from the guidebook. " ‘The arms over the front entry are extremely interesting: Sable, A Lion Rampant Argent, Debruised with a Bendlet Gules-’ Julie, are you really enjoying this?"

"Are you?"

It didn’t take them long to agree that they weren’t, and a quick skimming of the rest of the book gave them the happy information that nearby the river Frome, with its many Hardy associations, wends its peaceful way between shaded banks, followed closely by a rustic river path.

They decided to let the Hardy associations go for the moment and to stroll the bucolic, deserted path for its own pleasures. At their feet the tiny river babbled and purled, while a few yards beyond it rose the mossy base of the flat-topped mound on which Dorchester-or Durnovaria, as it was called in Roman times-had first been built. On the other side of the path were tidy little vegetable gardens, one after another, and beyond them, in the distance, lay lonely Durnover Moor, hazy in the pale afternoon light.

"I keep wondering why anybody would take that darn skull," Julie announced abruptly, once they’d walked quietly for a while.

"Me, too."

"It’s famous, isn’t it?"

"To physical anthropologists, yes."

"Well, isn’t it worth money then? Couldn’t it have been stolen to be sold?"

"To another museum, you mean? Well, a museum would pay for something like that, sure-a lot of money. But Pummy wouldn’t be sellable. Any decent physical anthropologist who took a good hard look at it would know it’s Poundbury Man, and he’d know that Poundbury Man belongs in the Dorchester Museum. So even if some shady museum was willing to buy stolen materials, there’d be no point."

"Do you mean there’s only one Poundbury Man? Aren’t there others from the same… the same population, that look more or less like him?"

"No," Gideon said, pausing to watch some skinny children feed bread chunks to some fat ducks, "he’s one of a kind. He’s Homo sapiens, of course, but no one else from that time and that place has been found. And he is remarkably dolichocephalic-long-headed. Whether he was just an oddball that way, or whether all his people looked like that, no one knows, because he’s the only one we’ve got. There are even some anthropologists who want to dub him a separate subspecies-Homo sapiens poundburiensis, or some such."

"Really? They want to postulate an entire subspecific population on the basis of a single fragmentary-" She burst into sudden laughter, startling the ducks. "Good gosh, I’m starting to talk like you!"

"That’s what happens to married people."

"After five days?"

Gideon shrugged. "You must be a quick study."

"I guess I am." She reached out for his hand as they moved on over a low stone bridge. "Well, anyway, if not a museum, what about a private collector? Aren’t some fabulously rich eccentrics supposed to have their own collections of stolen Rembrandts or Vermeers, even though they can’t show them to anyone? Wouldn’t this thing be worth money to someone like that?"

"Rembrandts I can see, but a broken old piece of skull? He’d have to be pretty eccentric, all right."

"Mmm," Julie said, thinking. "Okay, could it be some kind of joke? Maybe Pummy’s just been hidden, not stolen, and the other skull was put in the case as a hoax."

"The same thing’s occurred to me. But what for?"

"To make Professor Hall-Waddington look silly? Maybe you weren’t supposed to find it and tell him in your nice way. Maybe there was supposed to be a big scandal."

"Possibly… This is all pretty conjectural, isn’t it?"

"Yes, but it’s fascinating."

They crossed a final footbridge and found themselves with surprising suddenness out of the dappled shade and back on the High Street, a few blocks from where they’d started.

Gideon looked at his watch. "Feel like walking some more?"

"Uh-uh."

"Want to drop into a pub?"

"They don’t open for another hour."

"That’s right. Well, let’s see, what can we do?"

She cocked her head at him. "Here you are on your honeymoon, with your beautiful young bride at your side, and your hotel less than two blocks away…and you can’t think of anything to do?"

"Nope," he said blandly, "not a thing. But why don’t we go up to our room, take off our clothes, and lie down? Maybe something will occur to me."

It was two hours before they arrived for dinner at the Judge Jeffreys on the High Street, an ancient inn with a grim past, having been the lodging of Baron George Jeffreys, the presiding judge at the Bloody Assize of 1685, when seventy-four of Cromwell’s royalist opponents had been executed. Nevertheless, the dining room was cozy and country-pubbish, a centuries-old room with rough-beamed ceiling and stone-mullioned, multipaned windows of wavy, leaded glass.

"What would you think," Gideon said as they settled into a black, gleaming wooden booth, "of spending the next day or two in Charmouth? Since we’re in the area anyway, I’d like to drop in on a dig near there-Stonebarrow Fell. I thought maybe I’d better stop in and see how Nate Marcus is doing."

"Here we are then," said their hurried waitress, and laid the pints of bitter they’d ordered on the table. Julie and Gideon clinked the heavy glass mugs in a wordless toast.

"Why ‘ better stop in’?" Julie asked. "And who’s Nate Marcus? An old friend of yours?"

Gideon nodded. "I haven’t seen him a few years, but we were both graduate students at Wisconsin, under Abe Goldstein. He’s head of the anthro department at some place called Gelden College in Missouri. When Abe heard you and I were thinking of coming this way, he suggested I stop by and see if I couldn’t keep him out of trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

Gideon sipped the cool, soothing bitter. "The same as always," he said. "Nate rubs a lot of people the wrong way. He can be pretty…well, abrasive."

"Abrasive? You mean rude?"

"Yes, rude. And flip and sarcastic, and aggressive and thin-skinned. Know-it-all…arrogant…"

"This is one of your old friends? I’d love to hear you describe an enemy."

Gideon laughed. "To tell the truth, I do like him-most of the time anyway-even if I’m not exactly sure why. He and I sat up a lot of nights, over a lot of pitchers of beer, at the old Student Union in Madison, arguing anthropological trivia until four in the morning. Those are good memories."

"Well, he still sounds awful. What’s he doing in charge of a dig?"

"For one thing, his excavating technique is impeccable. For another, the Stonebarrow Fell site is his personal discovery. As I understand it, he took one sharp-eyed look at the place-undug, mind you; just a grassy hilltop-and announced there was a Bronze Age burial mound there, even though the mound itself had weathered away. And on top of that, he said it was Wessex culture, to be exact; circa 1700 b.c."

"And was he right?"

"He was this time-which, as you can imagine, irritated a lot of people. You can guess how the Wessex Antiquarian Society, which is a very sober, professional group of archaeologists, feels about some brash, belligerent American-which Nate is, I’m afraid-stomping in and finding the mound in their backyard."

Julie frowned as she sipped from her glass. "But if he was right, he was right. It doesn’t seem very professional to keep a grudge over it."

Gideon laughed. "I hate to disillusion you, but anthropologists are people like anyone else. The thing is, you see, that the site’s now been radiocarbon-dated at 1700 to 1600 b.c., exactly as he predicted, which makes it the earliest accurately dated Bronze Age barrow in England; it’s a heck of a find, and it could answer a lot of questions."