'WHY
'Beats the hell out of me,” Gideon said.
She stopped walking and tilted her face upward. “Ooh, that smells wonderful. Whatever it is, let's get some.'
He agreed readily, delighted to see her healthy appetite returning. She had felt the lingering effects of jet lag through three wet and gloomy days in London, and their stay had left her a little dispirited, not a typical condition with her. He, too, had been depressed by the huge city— perceptibly grungier than the last time he'd seen it six years before—and was happy to get out of it.
Once they'd rented the little Ford Escort and driven west past the dormitory towns and through Hampshire, and then into the green and rolling hills of Dorset, they'd begun to cheer up, and now, guidebook in hand, they had just embarked on the agreeably small-scale adventure of exploring Dorchester.
The aroma that had caught their attention turned out to be coming from a bakery a few doors away on the High Street, and they went in and sat themselves down at a tiny wooden table, for two big wedges of warm Dorset apple cake and a pot of tea. They were both coffee drinkers, but this was England, after all, and what was the point of foreign travel if you carried your old tastes and prejudices around with you? Besides, they'd tried English coffee.
As they ate, Gideon tookthe opportunity to watch Julie and to congratulate himself on his good luck, both of which he'd been doing a lot of lately. And why not? Life was full and sweet, sweeter than he had any right to expect. When Nora had been killed four years before, he couldn't imagine ever loving again; he could barely think about living. And now, astoundingly, he was married. There was Julie at his side, munching away; bouncy, pretty, bright, robust Julie, whom he hadn't known a year ago, and who was now the center of his existence. She had left her ParkService job; he was on leave for the fall quarter; and they were spending a rambling, come-what-may honeymoon in England. And it was as if his life were starting over again.
'You know,” she said suddenly, putting down her fork and brushing back a tendril of dark, glossy hair, “you sure don't look like a world-renowned anthropologist.” She'd been studying him too; the thought was absurdly pleasing.
'I'm not a world-renowned anthropologist.'
'Yes, you are. You told me; twice, at least. And you're certainly the world's best-known skeleton detective.” This referred to an unfortunate label that had appeared in a magazine article about his identification of some human remains that had been buried for thirty years. The sobriquet had clung, and Gideon spent considerable effort among his colleagues at Northern California State University trying to live it down.
'Bite your tongue,” he said. Then, after a moment:
'What's a world-renowned anthropologist supposed to look like?'
'Not like you. He's not supposed to be big and broad-shouldered, with a prizefighter's nose and a beautiful, warm, hairy chest, and—'
'Hey, finish your tea,” he said, ridiculously happy. “I think we'd better do some sightseeing.'
They went back out into the venerable and bustling High Street with its pleasing jumble of old cottages, staid Georgian bow windows, ancient, lichen-stained church walls, and twentieth-century facades. Inside of an hour they'd visited the Thomas Hardy statue at Top o'Town, admired the remains of the Roman wall, crossed a stone bridge on which a notice informed them that it was off-limits to “locomotive traction engines and other ponderous carriages,” and looked at various sites purported to be models for the settings in Hardy's
Docilely following the terse instructions in their guidebook, they turned left at the County Laboratory, walked down the narrow, high-walled passage to its end, and mounted the flight of steps. When they had done so, they found themselves in a parking lot.
From there they were directed to a gray stone mansion called Colliton House,
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
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.'
