Libby 
Libby
Libby and Rodri spent the rest of the afternoon sifting through the papers, working opposite each other at the old dining table, exchanging few words. Occasionally they drew one another’s attention to something, or got absorbed by a newspaper clipping or some other item, and occasionally Libby would look up and find that Rodri was watching her—
The other drawings that he had shown her had been equally fascinating. They were in the same hand and depicted a plan of the ruin with the centre cleared of fallen stones. It too had been carefully measured and annotated, and proved that the ruin had once been cleared. Might it be possible, she wondered, to persuade Rodri to let them clear it again and maybe, just maybe, put a test pit in the centre? She glanced across at him, head down again absorbed in one of the ledgers, and decided to bide her time.
The papers offered a treasure trove for a social historian, she thought as she waded through old household accounts, lists of game bagged on various shoots, badly written letters from tenants begging for leniency, and gilt-edged invitations from other gentry families. “Someone should catalogue this lot,” she said, as she pulled over another box. “It’s extraordinary. But what was your brother looking for?”
“Treasure.” She laughed, then saw that he was serious. “He was convinced there’d be something which would lead him to a hoard of Viking gold.”
“But no luck?”
He gave a twisted smile. “No. It kept him occupied, though. He was in bad shape, poor bugger, invalided home from Afghanistan with a massive hole in his leg, and his head messed up from things he’d witnessed there. My mother dragged out all this stuff to try to keep him off the booze.”
“Oh.” What else could she say?
He pushed his chair away from the table, crossing one leg over the other, and twirled his pen on the green cloth, staring down at it.
“When was this?” she asked, after a moment.
“Eleven years ago.” He went on staring at the table, still spinning his pen.
“But he’s made a full recovery—” she said.
“Has he?” Rodri’s tone was bleak, and she thought she’d blundered, but after a short silence he answered her. “His injuries healed up pretty well, but he started having periods of depression, interspersed with fits of riotous joy or reckless fury—and always the booze. And then Laila. The two constants in Hector’s life. Laila and the bottle.”
She opened the next box file, saying nothing, and began to sort through it. This was a troubled house— Then Rodri made an exasperated sound and rose, going over to stand by the window, hands deep in his pockets again, and stared out at the neglected garden. “I should have let her take the damn painting,” he said, as if to himself. “It’s a small price to keep her on board. God knows what she’ll tell Hector.” Still Libby said nothing—it felt too much like intruding. “Wretched woman. She never fails to get a rise out of me.”
He stood there for a long time, saying nothing; then, still with his back to her, he said: “So treasure was what Hector was looking for, but what he got was Laila and an addiction to whisky, despite my mother’s best endeavours.” He didn’t seem to expect an answer but continued to look out of the window where starlings jostled and bickered on the path. Then he swung round to her. “And what is it that you’re looking for, Liberty Snow?”
The sudden shift took her entirely by surprise.
He was looking intently at her, the frown back in place. “There’s something, isn’t there? More than just the dig. And I think it’s time I understood. So, let’s start with this.” He shunted a piece of paper across the table towards her. It was a page of the same yellowing paper as the diagrams of the ruin, and on it, drawn with the same meticulous care, was the chalice, and beside it the cross, drawn front and back and annotated: Discovered on the headland? No hallmark.
“That’s it, isn’t it? The one we found.”
It was and it wasn’t. “Not exactly,” she said, after a moment.
“Quite.”
She looked up and saw that his expression had darkened, and she felt her own face flush. “You saw the hallmark,” she said.
“You thought I hadn’t?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
The Sturrock frown deepened, but he looked perplexed rather than angry. “What sort of an answer is that! Twice now I’ve seen you go white as a sheet over those bones, and you a professional! And then your expression when you found that cross. Not thrilled, as you might well have been, but almost horrified. I know what Laila’s all about, but not you. And I’ve been wracking my brains to imagine.”
She knew then that she should have spoken earlier, not waited to be wrong-footed like this. She started to pack the papers back into the box, giving herself time to think. But where to begin? Then he straightened and went over to the mantelpiece and extracted an envelope from behind the clock and put it in front of her.
“And while we are at it—explain that.”
She picked it up, cursing herself for not having had the sense to talk to him before this, and pulled out a letter. It was dated March 13th, 1893.
Dear Lady Sturrock,
It is with the deepest regret that I write to inform you that I have once again failed in my endeavours. A passage was certainly booked and I thought that I had traced him, travelling with a woman, to this little township, but the trail has gone cold. Several couples from Scotland have settled here in recent years but none fit the description that you gave me, or bear your son’s name, and no one can cast any light on the matter. I will return to St. John’s and take a passage home, then come to see you, but unless you have new information I fear there is nothing more that I can do, but I remain your obedient servant,
John Robinson
Gosse Harbour, Newfoundland
Gosse Harbour. She lowered the letter.
“You mentioned that place the other day.” He came round to the end of the table, watching her face. “Yes?”
“Yes. I did.”
He nodded. “Right. Well, suppose we go and make some coffee, Liberty Snow, and you can explain to me why you’re here.”
She’d had no time to prepare, no time to shape her own thoughts into something which made sense. But then nothing ever had— She followed him into the kitchen, the letter still in her hand. There were too many trailing ends, too many unknowns, and now this letter— But central in her mind just now was the knowledge that she had priceless property belonging to the estate in a drawer back home in her flat. And she ought to have told him so.
Silently Rodri made the coffee, assembling mugs and milk which he set on the table. Then he gestured to a chair opposite and sat. “Gosse Harbour,” he said. “I looked it up, tiny little place.”
Libby sat and reached for one of the mugs. “And as good a place as any to begin, I suppose. Just four hundred people, and shrinking. Mostly old folk, but it was bigger once, before the fishing finished.”
“And you spent your summers there, you said.”
“Christmas too, a few times. It’s a special place, and my grandmother still lives there. She’s ninety-five.”
With a long memory, and a head full of stories. Still living in the small clapboard house where she had been born, supported by a community who revered her. A natural story-teller whose reminiscences had brought alive a vanished world of topsail schooners and dories, of seal hunts and hunger. She had seen bodies brought ashore from ill-fated Atlantic convoys, and watched the death of a fishery which had been the people’s lifeblood. And she had absorbed it all with the calm acceptance which defined her. The thought gave Libby strength.
Rodri’s eyes were still on her. “So she must have been born when? Nineteen-twenties?”
“1917.”
“At Gosse Harbour? Or somewhere else?”
“At Gosse Harbour. It was she who told me the story of Ulla and Odrhan, and of this place.”
“Really?” He sat back and hooked an arm around the back of the chair. “Go on.”
“And she learned it from her own grandmother, Ellen Macdonald.”
He gestured to her coffee mug. She drank half of it, and he filled it from the pot. “And so who then was Ellen Macdonald?”
A crazy lady, a mad crone, a demented old woman who had gripped her granddaughter’s hand and told her that she was Ulla and that murder had been done. Libby swallowed. “She used to live here, in a cottage beside the manse.”
She had his full attention, and he gestured to the letter Libby had placed on the table. “The woman who was travelling with a Sturrock son, I presume?”
“I suppose so. But I hadn’t known that bit.”
“Which bit?”
“The Sturrock bit.”
He glanced at her, as if deciding whether to believe her, then pulled the letter towards him and looked at it again. “Some time before 1893, it would seem.”
“Yes.”
“So what happened? What’s the story?”
“I don’t really know.” He looked sceptical. “But that sort of answers your question. I’m here to try and find out.”
“But for some reason you didn’t say? I wonder why— But go on.” And she found herself wondering too why she hadn’t. Was it only the cross, or had the way her grandmother spoken of Ellen’s later years somehow transmitted to her a sense of her own unease? “They presumably didn’t marry, this Ellen and the Sturrock man? Or was she Sturrock before she was Macdonald?”
“No— At least, I don’t know. As I said, the Sturrock connection is new—” And would take some absorbing.
“Did he leave her?” Rodri persisted.
“I don’t know that either. She was only ever Ellen Macdonald in my grandmother’s stories.” Libby looked down and traced the grain in the wooden table, noting the cuts and chips where knives had scored the surface over the years. Had Ellen once sat here, where she now sat? But even if Ellen’s avowal of murder was true, and that she had a part in it, the crime was long past having consequences. Her own possession of the cross, however, needed explaining, and now was the time.
She began in a rather disjointed way. “She simply told me that Ellen came from Scotland, from here where she’d been in service, and that she brought the legend with her. Nothing about who she came over with. As a child I loved the legend, but as I got older Nan told me other things too.” She hesitated, then continued, “She’d lived with Ellen when she was a child, you see, although it was her grandfather, John Macdonald, who really looked after her. He was the schoolmaster in Gosse Harbour.”
“A Scot too, I presume.”
“Yes, I think he was.”
“Go on.”
Libby got up and walked over to the window; if she was going to be anything like coherent, then she couldn’t be hurried. “Ellen was unstable, my grandmother told me, considered crazy by the standards of the day, and there were long periods when she never left the house. I suppose she had some form of dementia.” She paused again. “When I got the job on the dig here, I wrote to tell my grandmother, and she sent me some of the things that had once been Ellen’s. Amongst them was a sketchbook . . .” She hesitated again.
“Keep going.”
Rodri had brought the drawing of the cross and the chalice with him, and it lay on the table in front of him. Libby went and sat again and stared down at it. It had to be said: “. . . and with it, tucked inside, was the gold cross. That one. The real one.” His eyebrows went up at that, but it was easier now she’d started. “She said Ellen used to wear it on a chain around her neck, and when she died it was put away and everyone forgot about it. Nan thought I’d like to have it.” Thousands of pounds’ worth of eighth-century antiquity wrapped in bubble wrap and popped in the post. She could still remember the shock of opening it. “I don’t think she had a clue what it was.”
He was staring at her. “And where is it now?”
“In a drawer in my flat.”
“Good God!”
Then, to her astonishment, he gave a shout of laughter. “Was that it? And so, Liberty Snow, you’ve been concealing stolen property.” The tension had gone out of him and he rocked back on his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and contemplated her with an odd smile.
“I should have told you.”
“I’m still wondering why you didn’t.”
“Just as you said—it’s probably stolen property, and I didn’t understand how it got there. I’ve written and asked Nan if she knows more, but she’s not replied. Ellen must have taken it, I suppose. It’s very valuable, you see.”
“Then don’t tell Laila.”
His reaction was totally unexpected. He looked genuinely amused, and there was a new warmth in his eyes. “What are you planning to do with it?”
“That’s just it. I’m not sure what to do. It’s awkward—”
He gave another laugh, letting his chair come forward. “I’ll say! Imagine the headlines: ‘Archaeologist Hides Priceless Stolen Antiquity amongst Her Knickers.’ Not great, eh?” He leaned forward, elbows on the table and his chin on his hands, and contemplated her.
“There’s more,” she said.
“I thought there might be.”
“Go for it.”
In some ways this was just as difficult. “My grandmother said Ellen was always strange, prone to fits of wild anguish—panic attacks, I suppose we’d call them now—and increasingly so as she got older. Her husband had to fight off the authorities who wanted to put her in an institution, and by the end of her life he kept her virtually under house arrest, locked in for her own safety.”
“Poor woman.”
“My grandmother said she became obsessed by the legend, and believed that she was Ulla. I’d written it off as some sort of dementia, but one of the things she said was that she’d seen murder done, and was to blame. A man had been killed.”
His expression sharpened. “What man?”
“Harald, she said.”
“Harald!”
“But if she was telling the truth, I suppose it could have been—”
“—a well-shod gent with a gold filling in his tooth.”