Aaron Elkins: Murder In The Queen's armes

"Well, that’s good for all concerned, isn’t it? I still don’t see why this Wessex Antiquarian Society should hold a grudge."

"They don’t. In fact they’re very honorably cosponsoring the dig, although the Horizon Foundation is putting up most of the money. But it still has to rankle, and Nate, as usual, is blowing his own horn, so the squabbling goes on and on."

The waitress brought menus, and they ordered smoked mackerel followed by steak-and-kidney pie, with another round of bitters. The little room was filling up, and Gideon, for once, was enjoying the closeness of others. The soft British laughter and the polite, civil English speech created an agreeable, unintrusive ambience.

The mackerel was brought out immediately, a whole dusky fish on each plate, and they set silently to work, peeling back the golden skin and separating the tender flesh from rib and backbone. They were hungrier than they’d realized and didn’t speak again, except for murmurs of appreciation, until they’d turned the fish over and scraped the last shreds of meat free with their forks.

Julie wiped her lips and pushed away a fish skeleton so perfect it might have been dissected, then took a sip from the new glass. "Ah," she said contentedly, "my mind is clear again. But I still don’t understand why they’re quarreling. If your friend was right about this Bronze Age thing, he was right. Right? What is there to fight about?"

"As usual, Nate’s found something." Gideon absently fingered the smooth, round dimples in his beer mug. "From what I understand, he claims to have come up with incontrovertible evidence that Wessex culture is the direct result of Mycenaean diffusion, and-this is what’s got everyone excited-he’s not talking about plain old cultural diffusion, but actual, physical transmigration from the Peloponnese directly to England."

"Incontrovertible evidence of Mycenaean diffusion!" Julie exclaimed, her eyes wide. "In direct transmigration! My goodness, no wonder everybody’s excited."

"Yes-" He looked at her over the rim of his glass, one eyebrow raised. "Young woman, are you having sport with me?"

Julie laughed. "I wouldn’t dare. But what in the world are you talking about?"

"I’m talking about the fact that Nate is one of the few Bronze Age archaeologists who categorically reject parallelism as a mechanism for the transmission of cultural-"

"Gideon, dear, have mercy, please."

Gideon groaned. "My gosh, weren’t you an anthro minor? What do they teach you in Washington? All right, let me try to make it simple; no theoretical stuff."

"That would be nice."

"In England, the main Bronze Age culture is called ‘Wessex,’ okay?"

"As in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex."

"Right. Well, this Wessex culture appeared fairly suddenly and overran the earlier Beaker culture-the Beakers being the last of the Neolithic people, the ones who built Stonehenge. You’ve heard of Stonehenge?" Julie rightfully ignored this, and Gideon continued. "Now, the question is: Just how did this advanced Wessex culture, with its metal technology, get here? Where did it come from? Who brought it? Was it an actual migration of people, or was it simply the adoption by the Beakers of some of the technology and social customs of the Europeans they traded with? Nowadays, it’s the latter that’s generally accepted."

Any teacher of even minimal perception knows the signs of lack of interest in an audience that does not wish to offend. There is an intense fixity of gaze; brows are knit with expectancy and concentration; chins are supported on hands, the better to permit leaning attentively forward. But the gazes are glassy and unwavering, the rapt expressions vaguely unfocused, the postures rigid rather than alert. So sat Julie across the table.

"As we all know," Gideon went on, "the Wessex people were the inventors of the video game. They wore polyester pantsuits and lived in four-story houses made entirely from abandoned escargot shells."

For a moment there was no slackening in her enthralled and unrelenting attention. Then she spluttered into laughter. "You rat! All right, you caught me. I’m afraid I go a little blank at words like ‘metal technology.’ But really, tell me about Nate Marcus. I’m interested, truly." She blinked her eyes severely to demonstrate.

Gideon smiled. "Okay, in a nutshell: Nathan Marcus is probably the only anthropologist who believes that some seafaring bunch of Mycenaeans set out from Greece and settled in England, where they singlehandedly started the British Bronze Age in about 1700 b.c. Now, there isn’t too much doubt that the British Bronze Age had its roots in the Aegean, but the evidence points to its spreading to England slowly, over centuries, via Europe, possibly without any migration of people at all."

"Without any migration? How could that be?"

"Well, just through cultural diffusion. The same way you find English rock music all over Russia today, or French wines in Kansas and New Mexico."

The waitress brought their steak-and-kidney pies. It was the first time Julie had tried one. She broke the crust with a fork and gingerly sniffed the pungent steam.

"It smells all right," she said doubtfully, and enlarged the hole to peer inside. "Which pieces are kidney?"

"The kidney sort of disappears in the cooking. All those chunks are beef." A white lie, but she would thank him for it.

She speared a tiny piece of meat, put it in her mouth, and chewed tentatively. "It’s not bad."

"Of course not." He scooped up a forkful of his own thick pie. The English, he felt, were somewhat maligned in the matter of their food. There were, of course, grotesqueries like baked beans on toast and those unfortunate, unavoidable breakfast sausages, but he found the cuisine generally mild and inoffensive: plaice, hake, gammon, beef, and pile upon bland pile of peas and chips.

"So is that what the argument’s about?" Julie asked. "The dispute over the Bronze Age?"

"That’s it. Nate thinks that Wessex culture-and therefore the British Bronze Age-was personally introduced by the Mycenaeans, and everybody else says it came through slow diffusion."

"It hardly seems like anything to get fighting mad about."

"Anthropologists are funny people, as I’m sure you’re coming to realize, but where Nate is concerned, there’s more to it. Since the respectable journals won’t touch his theory, he’s been out pushing it anywhere he can- magazines, newspapers, talk shows-and that doesn’t help his credibility among anthropologists."

"What about his theory? Do you think he could be right?"

"I doubt it, but I don’t know enough about it to have a legitimate opinion. To tell the truth, I can’t say I find the Bronze Age all that fascinating myself. Too recent."

"Seventeen hundred b.c. is recent?"

"Sure, to an anthropologist. Didn’t you ever hear what Agatha Christie said about being married to one?"

"I didn’t know she was."

"Yes, a famous one: Max Mallowan. She said it was wonderful-the older she got, the more interesting he found her."

"I hope it’s true," Julie said, laughing. She pushed aside her not-quite-finished pie. "That was good," she said a little uncertainly, "but I think you have to acquire a taste for it." She sipped her bitters and looked soberly at him. "Gideon, you’re not going to let yourself get involved in a theoretical argument, are you? It’s our honeymoon."

He cupped his hand over hers on her glass. "Do you really think I’d rather get into an academic fracas than spend my time with you? I love you, Julie Tendler-"

"Oliver."

"Oliver…I forget what I was going to say."

"How much you love me."

"Oh, yeah. Well, let’s see. On a scale of one to ten I’d say a, well, um, maybe a, well…"

"I’m going to hit him," she muttered into her glass.