Chapter One
Thursday, June 19
Long Barston, Suffolk
The body was discovered on an afternoon in early May when the bluebells were in bloom and the sky was the color of sapphires. I read about it the next day in the East Anglian Daily Times. “Archaeological Discovery of the Century!” was the headline. Now, a little more than a month later, I pulled up that original article on my computer:
Last Wednesday, excavations beneath the ruins of St. Margaret’s Church, Egemere Close, revealed a previously unknown vault containing a lead coffin sealed with beeswax. Within the coffin, the team of archaeologists from the CMBA, the Centre for Medieval British Archaeology in Norwich, found the well-preserved body of a woman, entombed sometime in the early fourteenth century. Her remains had been wrapped in a fine linen shroud impregnated with a resinous substance, resulting in adipocere, or grave wax, a natural process that preserved the tissues and organs in such detail it was possible to determine the colour of her irises. They were blue.
I took a drink of my coffee, contemplating death and grief and the strange turns life sometimes takes. A woman dies and seven hundred years later I’m involved. The Centre for Medieval British Archaeology had asked us, meaning my colleague, Ivor, and me, to examine the grave goods, which consisted of two silver pennies; a collection of personal objects, including an unusual wrist cuff adorned with twelve small human heads of silver with blue glass eyes—the Twelve Apostles?—and a large, single pearl wrapped in a leather pouch, which had protected the nacre, the shiny, iridescent material known as mother-of-pearl, from deterioration.
The number and quality of grave goods indicated the woman had been wealthy, perhaps of noble birth, but the fact that items of such value had been interred with the young woman at all was unusual, as the practice had pretty much died out by the eleventh century. Were they mementos, like burying a child with a stuffed toy or a whisky lover with a bottle of his favorite single malt, or was there some deeper meaning?
The answer to that question wasn’t our concern. Our job would be to date the objects, assess their values, outline a plan for preservation, and suggest methods of display. Naturally, we’d jumped at the chance. Ivor had done similar work in the past, but nothing with the notoriety of a miraculously preserved body.
It was a quiet morning at The Cabinet of Curiosities. Through the multi-paned shop window I watched Mr. Cox, the greengrocer across the street, setting out heads of glossy green lettuces and bunches of what looked like round red radishes. Ivor Tweedy, owner of the fine antiques and antiquities shop on Long Barston’s High Street, hadn’t yet emerged from his flat above the showroom, although I could hear him moving about. I’d gotten an early start, leaving my husband, Tom, at home to finish his breakfast and log on for a video conference with DCI Annabelle Scott, his counterpart in the Norfolk Constabulary.
I took another sip of coffee, which was cooling, and clicked on the second article, a follow-up interview published several weeks later with Dr. Simon Sinclair, head of the CMBA and a professor in the archaeology department at the University of East Anglia. In the weeks following the initial discovery of the body, a consulting bioarchaeologist from University College London had made several stunning discoveries.
personal response to the discovery. “At first, we assumed the body must be relatively modern. The skin, where unstained by the resinous wrapping cloth, was still pink. Apart from the brain, the internal organs showed remarkably little deterioration. Liquid blood was found in her chest cavity.” When asked about the cause of death, Sinclair said, “CT scans and 3D reconstructions of the skeleton revealed deep cuts on the woman’s sternum, inflicted by a sharp object, most likely a knife or dagger. Her lungs and heart had been pierced, killing her quickly. And she’d been pregnant, the perfectly formed fetus having reached the point of viability.”
The article ended with the description of a small ceremony in which the bodies of the mother and child were reburied in the crypt beneath the south transept of the church, the place where they had originally lain.
I felt a pang of grief for this unknown woman, murdered with her unborn child. Someone had loved her. And someone had wanted her dead.
Sunlight streamed through the shop window, illuminating a collection of small Roman marbles, mostly busts of strikingly modern-looking individuals who’d lived during the Republican period when art was often startlingly realistic. Ivor had entered them in an upcoming auction of Roman antiquities. Who had they been, these long-ago luminaries, important enough to memorialize in stone? Their names had long been forgotten—like the woman in the grave. At least the village had a name—Egemere Close—although nothing was left of it now except the partial shell of the church and a few tumbledown stone walls. According to Ivor, the village had been abandoned in 1349 after the Black Death killed all but a handful of its citizens. The remains of Egemere Close lay in a field eighteen miles northwest of Long Barston, near the village of Hartwell, on the grounds of Ravenswyck Court, the estate of the commercial packaging entrepreneur Alex Belcourt.
“Good morning, Kate. Up and at ’em early, I see.”
I turned to see Ivor trotting down the stairs. He was wearing a natty gray suit and a red velvet smoking cap with an elaborate gold tassel, the kind worn by Victorian men to keep their hair from smelling of tobacco smoke.
I tried not to laugh. “What’s up with the hat?”
“Come the day, come the hat.”
What that meant, I hadn’t a clue.
Ivor Tweedy was a small man, not much more than five feet tall, with pink cheeks and sparse white hair frizzed out like a halo—straight out of a Victorian docudrama. He was also the most knowledgeable antiquities expert I’d ever encountered, with a lifetime’s experience in the trade. Somewhere in his mid-seventies, he hadn’t yet showed signs of slowing down. In fact, it seemed to me he was just reaching his stride. We’d become friends when I moved to Long Barston a year and a half ago. In that time, he’d become almost a second father to me. I loved him dearly, and I was sure he loved me, too, although given the English dis-ease with public expressions of emotion, this was never actually spoken. Ivor, who had no family of his own, had made me his business partner. One day, when he was gone, I would inherit the shop and everything he owned. I fervently hoped that day would be a very, very long way off.
“Tom had a video conference,” I said, “so I thought I might as well come in early.”
“Police business, I assume.”
“Assault outside a pub in Thetford last night.” I closed my laptop. “Witnesses say the attacker fled south in a white caravan. The Norfolk police have requested assistance in locating him—and a woman seen with him in the pub. She may be a hostage.”
“So what’s worrying you?” Ivor asked.
I swear that man could read my mind. Probably some telepathic technique he’d learned during his travels in the Merchant Navy—northern Mongolia, perhaps, or the rainforests of Ecuador.
“Tom won’t be confronting the suspect himself,” Ivor added, hitting the nail on the head, “now that he’s a detective chief inspector.”
“Probably not,” I said, although my words lacked conviction. Tom was having a hard time leaving fieldwork to his subordinates. Not that he’d said so. He knew his new role as DCI was primarily strategy and coordination rather than hands-on investigation, but I’d sensed his frustration. Tom never liked being away from the action.
“What do you think about our latest
commission?” Ivor asked.
“I’ve been rereading the original newspaper articles. One of them includes photographs of the grave goods. I’ll print it out for you.”
We had an appointment Monday morning to examine the grave goods, which were being stored at Ravenswyck Court, near where the body had been found.
“How were the archaeologists able to date the burial to the early fourteenth century?” I asked.
“The coins,” Ivor said, shuffling through a pile of auction catalogs. “They found two silver pennies covering the woman’s eyes, both struck near the end of Edward the First’s reign in 1307. So the woman was buried sometime between that date and the summer of 1349, when the plague reached Suffolk.”
“Where will the artifacts end up?” I asked.
“That is the question, my girl.” Ivor looked up from a catalog he’d been perusing. “A bit of rivalry there. Dr. Sinclair wants to display them at the art history museum in Norwich. Alex Belcourt has been lobbying the Crown to allow him to display the grave goods in an exhibit he’s set up at Ravenswyck. Something like the Egyptian exhibition at Highclere Castle but focused on the medieval plague village. Fancies himself an amateur archaeologist.” Ivor strode over to the door, unlocked it, and flipped the sign to Open. “Monday we’ll get our first peep at the artifacts. And tonight”—he waggled his eyebrows—“we’ll get our first peep at the archaeologists.”
Ivor and I had been invited to a dinner with the senior archaeologists at Finchley Hall, the historic stately home on the edge of Long Barston. Lady Barbara Finchley-fforde, the last of that once-influential family, knew one of them personally—Celia Whybrew, a university lecturer and the niece of one of Lady Barbara’s childhood friends.
“I hope they’ll tell us about finding the body,” I said. “What an amazing experience that must have been.”
“If they don’t, Lady Barbara will. She’s fascinated by the whole thing. The Finchleys were here in the fourteenth century, which, in her mind, makes the unfortunate young woman practically a neighbor.” Ivor opened his laptop and turned it on. “Tom will be joining us, I assume?”
“He’s meeting us there.” I
carried my mug of coffee to the small sink behind the sales counter and poured out the remains, then rinsed the mug and placed it upside down on the drainer. “Can you imagine the first glimpse of that preserved body? It must have been almost as exciting as Howard Carter peering for the first time into the tomb of Tutankhamun.”
Ivor gave me the side-eye. “And like that esteemed Egyptologist, our Dr. Sinclair has earned quite a reputation.”
“For what?”
“For brilliance, personal charm, and diplomacy as a cover for ambition, misogyny, and partisan academic politics. I hear he’s trampled on more than one career to get to the top.”
“Politics in academia?” I put a hand to my chest, feigning shock.
Ivor snorted. “You know what they say—the smaller the stakes, the more vicious the battle.”
I laughed. “Who told you about Dr. Sinclair?”
“An old friend at the university. Expert in medieval languages. He also told me there’s been some controversy at the dig.”
“Like what?”
“Protesters accusing the archaeologists of disturbing the dead.” Ivor tapped something into his computer. “Lots of people believe human bodies shouldn’t be exhumed. But one of the protesters is calling down curses on everyone involved, saying they’ve unleashed malign forces. And there’ve been a few minor incidents, including a small explosive device placed under the field office caravan. Fortunately, all it did was create a loud bang and give off a foul-smelling smoke.”
“That sounds serious.”
“My friend says they’re hoping the protestors will lose interest now the body’s been reinterred.” He pressed a key on his computer, and I heard the copy machine in the stockroom come to life. “Speaking of tonight’s dinner, did you know Vivian’s new lodger is one of the PhD students involved in the excavations?”
“She told me. She said the girl is brilliant but lacks confidence.” Vivian Bunn, the bossy, exasperating, but quite lovable seventy-something who’d been my landlady before I married Tom, was… opinionated might be the word for it. Often wrong. Never in doubt.
Ivor pulled off the smoking hat, finger-combed the tassel, and placed it on the counter.
“Come on, Ivor. What’s with the hat?”
’s daughter.”
“His daughter?” Oh, this was going to be good.
“Marriage within the clan was considered incest, and they were running low on outsiders.”
“You chose the hat.”
“A bit sticky, that. I had to tell her father I already had three wives back in England. Three is apparently the limit.”
I wanted to ask what a Victorian smoking hat was doing in a village in New Guinea, but I settled for, “And you’re wearing the hat for… nostalgia?”
“Certainly not. Jeff Swift is stopping by this week.” Jeff was one our reliable pickers—freelancers who purchase valuable items at estate sales, auctions, and street markets, and then sell them to dealers at a profit. “Jeff has a customer who collects vintage hats and antique rodent traps. Oh, and Victorian tooth extractors.”
I laughed. “Well, England has been called ‘the paradise of eccentrics.’ ”
“Eccentrics?” Ivor, looking slightly offended, plopped the hat on his head again, this time at a rakish angle. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” ...
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