“I say, Mr. Saunders,” Dennis said with mock respect to his elder, “was your arse clothed or unclothed during this removal?”
They erupted again. Atwood took a few puffs of his pipe and said pensively, “That’s a rather unpleasant mental image.”
The morning was wintry with a few flakes of snow; the ground looked like it had been lightly salted. Ernest was an excellent caterer and managed to do a full-cooked breakfast for seven on two gas rings. They sat around the fire on milk crates, bundled in layers of wool, fortifying themselves with steaming mugs of sweet tea. Crunching into a triangle of fired bread dipped into yolk, Atwood looked across the frigid field at the icy sea and remarked, “Who’s idea was it to excavate in January?”
It would have been better if it were a warm summer morning or a crisp autumn one, but it was utterly fantastic to all of them to be here in any season, in any conditions. Only yesterday, it seemed, they were in the thick of war, dreaming about how blissful it would be to do a bit of archaeology on a peaceful island. So the instant Atwood received a?300 grant from the British Museum to resume his excavations at Vectis, he hastily organized a dig, winter be damned.
Reggie was the pit boss. He checked his watch, stood up, and with his best sergeant major voice shouted, “All right, lads, let’s get a move on! We’ve got a lot of dirt to shift today.”
Timothy pointed at Beatrice in an exaggerated way and mouthed the question, Lads?
“You’re right,” Reggie said, gathering his gear, “I apologize. She’s too bloody old for me to be calling her a lad.”
“Sod off, you pathetic wanker,” she said.
Atwood’s dig was in a corner of the abbey grounds far from the main complex of buildings. The lord abbot, Dom William Scott Lawlor, a soft-spoken cleric with a passion for history, was kind enough to let the Cambridge party camp within the complex. In return, Atwood invited him to stroll by for progress reports, and on the previous Saturday, Lawlor had even appeared in blue jeans and anorak to spend an hour scraping a square meter with a trowel.
The diggers marched across the field from the campground while the cathedral bells chimed for 9:00 A.M. mass and Terce. Seagulls swooped and complained overhead, and in the distance the steel-blue waves of the Solent churned. To the east the cathedral spire looked magnificent against the bright sky. Across the fields, tiny figures, monks in dark robes, filed from their dorms to the church. Atwood watched them, squinting into the sunshine, marveling at their timelessness. If he had been standing on the same spot a thousand years earlier, would the scene have looked much different?
The excavation site was neatly laid out with pegs and twine. It covered an area of forty by thirty meters, rich brown earth with grass and topsoil peeled away. From a distance it was clear that the entire site was in a depression, about a meter lower than the surrounding field. It was this hollow that attracted Atwood’s interest before the war when he surveyed the abbey grounds. Surely there had been an activity of some sort on this spot. But why so remote from the main abbey complex?
In two brief excavations in 1938 and 1939, Atwood had dug test trenches and found evidence of a stone foundation and bits of twelfth but mainly thirteenth century pottery. As the war raged on his thoughts often returned to Vectis. Why the blazes had a thirteenth century structure been built there, isolated as it was from the heart of the abbey? Was its purpose clerical or secular? The abbey library had no mention of the building in its archives. He was resigned to the fact that Hitler had to be defeated before he could tackle the mystery.
On the south side of the site, facing seaward, Atwood was digging his main trench, a cutting thirty meters long, four wide, and now three meters deep. Reggie, a good man with heavy machinery, had started the trench with a mechanical digger, and now the whole team was down in the deep cutting doing spade and bucket work. They were following what was left of the southern wall of the structure down to the foundation to see if they could find an occupation level.
Atwood and Ernest Murray were in the southwest corner of the cutting, cleaning the wall with trowels to take photographs of the section.
“This level here,” Atwood said, pointing to an irregular band of black soil running across the section, “see how it follows the top of the wall? There was a fire.”
“Accidental or deliberate?” Ernest asked.
Atwood sucked on his pipe. “Always difficult to say. It’s possible it was set deliberately as part of a ritual.”
Ernest furrowed his brow. “For what purpose? This wasn’t exactly a pagan site. It was contemporaneous with the abbey within the abbey perimeter!”
“Excellent point, Ernest. Are you sure you don’t want to pursue a career in archaeology after all?”
The younger man shrugged. “I dunno.”
“Well, while you’re pondering your fate, let’s snap these pictures and begin excavating down another half meter or so. We can’t be far off the floor.”
Atwood assigned the three undergraduates to the southwest corner to take the trench deeper. Beatrice sat at a portable table near the cutting, cataloguing pottery shards, and Atwood took Ernest and Reggie to the northwest corner of the site to start a small trench in an attempt to find the other end of the foundation wall. As the morning progressed it became noticeably warmer and the diggers started peeling off layers until they were down to their shirts.
At lunchtime Atwood wandered over to the deep trench and remarked, “What’s this? Is that another wall there?”
“I think so,” Dennis said eagerly. “We were going to fetch you.”
They had exposed the top of a thinner stone wall running parallel and about two meters from the main foundation.
“See? There’s a gap in it, Professor,” Timothy offered. “Could a door have been there?”
“Well, perhaps. Possibly so,” Atwood said, climbing down a ladder. “I wonder, could you take this area down a bit,” he said, pointing to some dirt. “If the interior wall extends to the outer wall in a perpendicular fashion, I would say we’ve got a small room. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
The three young men got on their knees to start troweling. Dennis worked near the outer wall, Martin near the interior wall, Timothy in the middle. Within a few minutes they had all made clinking contact with stone.
“You were right, Professor!” Martin said.
“Well, I have been at this for a few years. You get a feel for this type of thing.” He was pleased with himself and lit his pipe in celebration. “After lunch let’s dig down to the level of the floor and see if we can find what this little room was for?”
The young men rushed their lunch, eager to find the floor. They wolfed down cheese sandwiches and lemon squash and hopped back into the pit.
“You’re not impressing anyone, ya bloody brown-nosers!” Reggie shouted after them as he reclined on a mound of dirt and lit a roll-up.
“Shut your gob, Reg,” Beatrice said. “Leave ’em be. And roll us a fag too.”
An hour later the young men called to the others. The three undergrads were standing around the boundaries of the small room, looking impressed with themselves.
“We’ve found the floor, everyone!” Dennis exclaimed.
Exposed for view was a surface of smooth dark stones, expertly shaped to join to one another in a continuous surface. But Atwood’s eye was drawn to another feature. “What’s this?” he asked, and climbed down to take a closer look.
In the southwest corner of the small room was a larger stone, which appeared to be out of place. The floor stones were bluestone. This larger one was a large limestone block, about two meters by a meter and a half and quite thick. It protruded almost a foot higher than the level of the floor and had irregular edges.
“Any thoughts?” Atwood asked his people as he scraped around its edges with his trowel.
“Doesn’t look like it belongs, does it?” Beatrice said.
Ernest took some pictures. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to haul that in.”
“We should try to shift it,” Atwood said. “Reg, who would you say has the strongest back?”
“That would be Beatrice,” Reggie replied.
“Fuck off, Reg,” the woman said. “Let’s see some of that famous muscle power.”
