7

He woke with a start, and climbed to his feet. He leaned against the door frame, panting.

At least he was alone, with no one to see him like this. And at least he had not been sleepwalking. He slouched into the kitchen. He had left the light on. He switched it off, and the stillness of winter York lay before him. Frost had breathed on the slate roofs, and he found himself counting the chimneys he could see in the starlight. Fifty, and more.

The night went badly. He was afraid to sleep, but when he slept he was more afraid to dream. He woke several times, and listened to his Walkman, but there were no British stations that he could find, except one which played very much out-of-date pop tunes. He did find a German station, and listened to it, and a strange fluttering station he could not identify. Was it Farsi? He had learned a little of that elaborate tongue once, before the opportunity to conduct digs in Iran dwindled to nothing. The station was too far away, although it was more pleasant to stare into the dark listening for distant voices than it was to sleep.

He had not left it all behind.

It had come with him. Or, more correctly—she had come with him.

She was there, beside the lake, waiting.

Jane had the perfect voice, soft, very London, very BBC. So she did most of the talking.

They sat in a radio studio, not far from St. Andrews College. Jane was explaining that the Skeldergate Man would turn out to be a much more important find than any of the other bog men ever discovered. “Such a really marvelous opportunity to discover what, for example, the diet of the British people of that time period might have been.”

“And how, exactly, is this sort of information actually gathered?” The interviewer had a list of questions before him, and he ticked them off as they were answered.

“The gastrointestinal tract, of course,” said Jane, as though the question had been slightly rude.

“Very careful examinations of the seeds remnant in the lower intestine, Mr. Walker,” said Irene.

Davis smiled to himself. Irene’s accent was a sort of singsong, her words alternating very high or very low. He loved listening to her, and was lost for a moment when a question was directed to him.

“There are other ways,” Davis began, “to determine the age of the body, aside from carbon-fourteen dating, which is not all that precise. We can use follicle erosion as a test—how badly decayed the hair is. We can try to recapture blood from the body cavity, and judge the rate of its disintegration. The blood in such bog men is long since decayed into a sort of black glue.” This was certainly going to give the listeners of Yorkshire radio some meaty information to accompany their lunchtime toad-in-the-hole. “I’m not sure we can count on blood samples as a source of information in this case.”

In the engineer’s booth, a man with earphones sat with his eyes closed, drawing on a cigarette. The table at Davis’s fingers was carpeted. The host, a pale man with a sparse mustache, seemed at once eager to know everything and slightly horrified.

“Most such men are found in actual peat bogs,” said Jane, in answer to another question, which was, as she spoke, ticked. “But this particular body was deposited in a well lined with oak planks, much of it still having bark attached to it. The conditions had the same results, really, but in a way much superior to the usual peat-induced preservation.”

“Of course,” said Walker, “we all want to know everything about this man. How he lived, and how he died. We understand that you have a feeling this man may have been murdered.”

“Killed, certainly,” said Jane. “We can’t rule out human sacrifice, although I doubt that was quite as popular in late Anglo-Saxon Britain as it was in much earlier times.”

“But at the end of the day you do, I hope, intend to find out what exactly caused the Skeldergate Man to die.”

“Of course,” said Jane. “We should be able to find out everything there is to know about him, although it will take a good deal of time. And, of course, since our research is not government supported in any way, the public should be aware of the great costs involved.”

Clever Jane. She knew why Dr. Higg wanted as much publicity as possible. “Remember to mention donations from the public,” Langton pleaded in the waiting room.

“I think that we can very easily exaggerate the powers of science in the face of such mysteries,” said Irene in response to no question at all. “I think there are things we will never know about our friend. How he died, and who he was, may forever elude us.”

“But I think,” said Jane, “we can all agree that we will know a good deal more if the public can step forward—”

“Of course,” Irene smiled, “the public will respond with great interest. It is an opportunity to see someone from another age, but more important than that it is an opportunity to see the ultimate taboo set before their eyes, because the dead are the last secrets in our world, now that the vagina is no longer unseen in public life. It is not too facile to say that death is the most potent pornography, not, of course, for its sexual content, but because it is that which we are not supposed to see.”

“This is fascinating,” began Walker.

“I don’t think you can assign,” Jane responded with the sweetest of voices, “any degree of prurience to a public interest in such matters.”

“Nor could I suggest,” said Irene, plainly delighted with the discussion, “that any interest in the vagina is at all unhealthy, from any viewpoint. I was making a simple observation, quite aside from what anyone else might think.”

“A personal observation,” said Jane just slightly less sweetly, “not supported by any general view shared by the rest of the staff.”

“Of course it’s my own view,” laughed Irene. “We do not all sit around the Foundation discussing the vagina.”

Small points of red starred Jane’s cheeks. “Surely you have more important questions, Mr. Walker.”

Walker was concerned, plainly, at the turn the interview had taken, but was enough of a professional to know a potential debate when he heard it. “Let me see if I can reword Miss Saarni’s fascinating observations,” he said.

“Yes,” said Davis. “I think it’s a point well worth considering.”

Jane destroyed Walker with a glance, and carefully ignored Davis. “We hope to know to what class this gentleman belonged, and perhaps to even know more about the murder itself.”

“Yes,” said Walker, shakily. “But tell me, Miss Saarni, do you believe our interest in death is healthy or unhealthy?” He did not tick this question. He had set aside his list.

“Only quite human, Mr. Walker. It is the last mystery for so many of us, the one aspect of human life which we cannot fathom, and while I do not want to belabor the subject of pornography, with all its distasteful implications, particularly for women, I do believe there is something more than rational, or less, in our interest in such an old corpse as this.”

Davis listened, enchanted.

Jane folded her arms, and gazed straight ahead.

When they emerged into the waiting room, Langton was ashen.

“He will be calm after a few days,” said Irene. “You, Davis, should have more faith in people.”

They were walking the city walls. To their right was the great citadel of the Minster. Davis marveled at Irene’s confidence. “I wonder if you ever make a mistake,” he said.

“I do not concern myself with mistakes. Where people are concerned I am usually right.”

“Why not be sure of yourself? Why not say that you’re always right?”

“You, Davis, for example. You are so serious all the time. You think life is something for work and thinking. Sometimes you should rest. You should do something you enjoy.”

“I’m enjoying this,” said Davis, before he could stop himself. And then he was glad he had said it. It was true. He was enjoying walking here on the walls of York with this fascinating woman. He was holding her hand, to his surprise. He could not remember who had made the first move. It had happened as though the two hands had minds of their own, and had sought each other.

Walking the walls like this it was impossible to think that anything bad had ever happened. “Tonight,” said Davis, “will be an important night in the history of England.”

“Tell me what will happen.”

“Tonight we will explore the pubs of York. If you feel up to it.”

“If I feel up to it! Davis, you are such a silly man.”

That night, Davis and Irene started their pub exploration in The Hind, a pub on Blossom Street. Then they wandered farther, to Mount Vale, where there was a pub called Red Lion with loud music and bitter brewed in Tadcaster. Yet another pub was more quiet, with potted plants and a fire in the fireplace.

A man with red cheeks told them that a vixen had bit the leg off his cat.

“So they have foxes in Bolton Percy?” asked the man’s companion.

“Oh, aye, foxes at the very least.”

“What color foxes, I wonder,” said his companion.

“Oh, the usual color.”

“Pink, are they? Like the elephants.”

“But the poor cat,” said Irene. “To lose its leg.”

“It was five years ago, love,” said the red-faced man. “The cat runs better on three legs now than I do on two.”

“This is a sad story, then,” said the man’s companion.

When they were alone in a corner of the pub, Irene was radiant. “To frighten us with a story that happened five years ago. I thought it was something that happened yesterday.”

But she was not simply relieved about the cat’s good health. She had something in mind. “Do you want to see the foxes hunt rabbits, Davis?”

“Of course. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that.”

“I can show you where they hunt rabbits. Tonight, if you want to see.”

They drank another pint, and then ventured out into the cold.

It was a good chill. Davis put his arm around her, just slightly unsteady with the surprisingly strong beer.

“Are you sure,” said Davis, “that there are foxes at night?”

“Of course, Davis, and rabbits, too. You know so little.”

Davis admitted that this was true.

“You would rather stay inside, would you, and not see the rabbits and the foxes?”

Davis would go anywhere she went, and said so.

It was a long walk, and Davis, who had been partly refreshed by the cold wind, now found himself lost. The Terry chocolate factory loomed in the distance, far to the east. They walked purposefully across a field.

She held his hand and would not let him leave the path.

“Why not?” said Davis. “It’s just a field, isn’t it?”

“Bad things happen to people who wander,” said Irene cheerfully.

They reached a small hill, and sat.

“Here,” said Irene. “Here—if we sit still, we can hear them bark.”

They were warm together, when he held her. Then Davis heard them. Distant clicks, like small sticks breaking.

“Foxes,” breathed Irene.

“Really?” said Davis. He was amazed. He had never heard a fox before now.

But then there was silence.

A long silence. Davis turned his head one way, and then another, but he could hear nothing.

“I frightened them away,” said Davis.

She did not speak at once. “Davis, I have something terrible to tell you.”

“What?”

“I made it all up, about the foxes. I only wanted to get you out here, in the beautiful field, in the dark.”

“You mean—there are no foxes at all?”

“Of course there are foxes. But the ones I talked about were pretend.”

She was warm when he held her. “What made the clicks?” he asked at last.

“There was nothing, Davis. You heard them in your mind.”

Davis insisted. “I want to find out what made the noise.”

The night was very dark, and he collided with it before he could see it. It turned slowly and shook its head, violently, and he heard the clicks of its halter.

He led it back, and it followed, huge and warm in the dark.

For once Irene was surprised. “You found the biggest rabbit in the world,” she laughed.

“It’s a fox,” Davis replied.

The horse nuzzled him, with gusts of warm air from its nostrils.

Long after they had left it Irene was still laughing, and Davis was still stopping to look back toward the place where the horse stood, invisibly, in the darkness.