'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.
He took her hand from the glass and brushed the backs of her fingers over his lips. Her eyes glowed suddenly in the semidarkness of the restaurant, and he felt his own moisten. How extraordinary it was to be married to this marvelous woman. For a moment he held her hand against his cheek, then replaced it on the glass, recurving her fingers around the handle.
'Never mind how much I love you,” he said, “I'm not about to encourage complacency. Anyway, all I intend to do when we get to Charmouth is to pay an hour's visit to the site and say hello to Nate. That's it.'
'And after that we're on our own? No more bones? Just cream teas and country walks and pub lunches?'
'No bones, no stones, and, thank God, no corpses. The skeleton detective is traveling incognito and nobody knows where to find him.” He put down his nearly empty mug with a thump. “And now, if you think steak-and- kidney pie is good, wait till you try treacle!'
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THREE
* * * *
THE walk from Charmouth to Stonebarrow Fell was so magnificent that Gideon almost went back to the Queen's Armes Hotel to bring Julie along, but she had been adamant. He was making a professional visit, she had pointed out, and she wasn't going to tag along to hang around like an ignoramus while everyone else was chattering on about Mycenaean transmigration and cultural diffusion.
'Besides,” she'd said, “we've been married six days and I have yet to perform a single wifely function.'
He grinned at her, but she laughed before he had a chance to say anything. “Fun things don't count; I mean chores. Do you know, I have yet to do the laundry? We've been washing our stuff in sinks, and things are getting grubby. I want to go to an honest-to-goodness Laundromat.'
She seemed to mean it, and Gideon had let it go at that. After lunch he had left her to her wifely chores and walked out Lower Sea Lane, past the bright, clean bed-and-breakfast houses and private cottages of the village, to the sandy beach. There, in its grander days, the River Char had worn a soft, lush U-shaped valley down to the sea between the towering coastal cliffs. High up on those cliffs, reachable by a gentle but relentlessly ascending path, was the prettily if redundantly named Stonebarrow Fell—Stonehill Hill, in modern English.
He crossed the wooden footbridge over the now-tiny River Char and headed up the green, sweeping slope at a good, swinging pace, enjoying the crisp ocean air and the welcome sensation of muscles working. It was a cool, cloudy day, with an immense fog bank a few miles offshore, but the air was clear, and the sea was green and silvered, lit by narrow columns of sunlight that slid over its surface like spotlights. To the east, behind him, was
