Mackenzie Ford Read online

  Mutevu Ndekei had reached Eleanor’s place the second time round, with the vegetables. As she took some potatoes, she addressed herself to Richard Sutton and Russell North.

  North was a burly redhead with vivid blue eyes. He was taller than Sutton, taller than everyone else on the dig, with massive hands. He was Australian, Natalie had learned, though he lived in America too, as an associate professor at Berkeley in California. Freckles sprawled over his skin.

  “We’ll check tomorrow,” Eleanor went on, “but I agree the bones you found are hominid, human-like. On the small side, but you’d expect that. We’ll confirm the level of excavation tomorrow. I take it you photographed everything, and marked the site?” She sliced her potato.

  Richard colored. “Of course we did, Eleanor. We’re not novices, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Watch your language, Richard, please. I was just making sure you had everything covered. If this is as important as you say it is—and the champagne tonight means I think I agree with you—we are going to come under intense scrutiny from other colleagues. Our methods must be above suspicion. Don’t be so jumpy.”

  Richard was just draining his champagne glass and he wiped his lips with his napkin before replying. He shook his head. “Don’t worry, Eleanor. We made a sensational discovery, at the two million level. There’s no doubt about the date, the excavation itself was clean and neat, everything has been properly recorded and photographed. We fenced off the site with thorny acacia branches. We can build a proper fence tomorrow. Relax.” And he launched himself on his dinner.

  Eleanor nodded, watching him eat: his precise movements, his sharp features. One of the reasons she had selected Sutton for the dig was because he was a thorough, rigorous scientist, utterly competent, whose capacity for work matched her own. A New Yorker by birth, Sutton, she knew, was the son of a Manhattan lawyer, the right-hand man to a real estate millionaire, who had not been entirely happy when his son had shown academic leanings. But since he had, Richard Sutton Senior had done everything he could to ensure Richard Junior was the best paleontologist in the business, providing his son with the finest education money could buy, and then supporting important excavations financially so long as his son was part of the team. This did not make the Suttons friends with everyone, but most digs were so inadequately funded that many directors were only too happy to have Richard Junior along, if that meant the books would be balanced. And in any case, he did not really need his father’s support anymore; Richard Junior was an excellent excavator, with a good mind. As Eleanor knew, he already had several discoveries under his belt, including a hominid skull dating to 150,000 years ago, and a species of extinct hippopotamus.

  “The way that tibia and femur fit together strongly suggests an upright gait—we are agreed?” Eleanor set about her own dinner.

  “That’s the point,” said Russell North, worrying at his watch strap with his fingers. “It’s a knee joint like that which makes shopping and bowling possible.”

  Eleanor grinned. She liked North. Whereas Sutton, though ferociously efficient, was a shade on the automatic side, North was a warm human soul, with a sharp sense of humor. His size was daunting and he had a temper, she knew; he could be awkward, direct in the Australian way, but mostly he was fun on a dig, also with a number of discoveries to his name, and no one was perfect. Though he was from down under, he was an associate professor at Berkeley, California, and destined, she felt sure, for greater things. He was a year or two younger than Sutton. Having been brought up in the Australian outback, he was very practical minded and helped out Daniel in looking after the vehicles.

  “The way the two bones fit together,” North went on, “implies that some form of hominid was walking upright two million years ago. That is much earlier than we thought, much earlier than anyone thought, much earlier than the textbooks say. Richard and I have discussed it and we think we should write a paper on this and rush it to Nature.”

  Nature was the weekly science magazine, published in London, where most major scientific discoveries were announced.

  Eleanor nodded. She reached for the water jug and filled her own glass. Then she fixed her gaze on Natalie Nelson. “Natalie, let’s hear from you. You’ve just arrived, you have a fresh mind, how does the discovery strike you?”

  Since the Nelson woman had arrived only that day, Eleanor had yet to form an opinion of her. The newly minted Dr. Nelson came highly recommended. Her specialism was a very useful expertise to have on a dig like the one Eleanor ran, but the director had not anticipated Dr. Nelson being so attractive. She was tall, almost as tall as Eleanor herself, and had close-cropped dark hair, which curled forward under her ears, a longish face with cheekbones that stood out and cast their own shadows down her cheeks, long tapered fingers, and what the women’s magazines, the last time she had looked, called a full figure. Eleanor Deacon had already taken on board that both Russell North and her son Christopher had been immediately drawn to the newcomer and she hated that sort of emotion in the confined quarters of an excavation. Romance on a dig was not unknown—her own late husband had made a speciality of it—so she knew at firsthand that it could make life very difficult.

  Natalie swallowed some water. After a few hours’ sleep she had unpacked, showered, and changed into a blue shirt with khaki trousers. She wore no ring or necklace but had on a man’s watch. Her eyes were as dark as the night outside the tent.

  “I’m sorry to be a wet blanket,” she said, setting down her glass. “But I think you would be unwise to publish until you can check the tibia and femur you have found against a set of modern bones. If your dating is right, they’re two million years old, but you can’t be certain they prove bipedalism without a close comparison and … well, you have probably thought of it, but if you get such a simple thing wrong … it could be embarrassing.”

  “No!” breathed Sutton. “No—I won’t have that!” He slapped the table and looked hard at Eleanor. “How many digs has Natalie been on, how many hominid bones has Dr. Nelson seen close up, in the field?” He paused. “Very few, very few if any, that’s my bet. This is her first day here, for pity’s sake. What does she know? This creature was bipedal. It’s a straightforward piece of anatomy. I feel it! I’ve been excavating in Africa for ten years. Nature, here we come!” He thrust his chin forward and glared hard at Natalie, staring her down, his lower lip stuck out beyond his upper lip, daring her to contradict him.

  Natalie colored. As he had reminded everyone, she was the least experienced of those present. But she still thought he was being méchant, as the French said, cruel.

  Eleanor came to her defense. “Don’t be such a bully, Richard. Natalie is right. We have to be careful.”

  “But that means delay,” complained North, putting his knife and fork together. “Dick and I are here only until Christmas. After that, we disperse, back to the States, to teach. It will take much longer to write this paper when Richard is back in New York, I’m in California, and you are still here in Kenya, Eleanor.”

  “I agree, Russell.” Eleanor smiled. She paused as a great barking of baboons broke out nearby. But it quietened down as quickly as it had started. She laid her hands on the table, palms down. “But we are scientists, not journalists with a deadline to meet. Of course we need modern bones, to make the comparison Natalie suggests. I don’t know why none of us thought of it—perhaps the champagne has gone to our heads, clouding our minds. Natalie, coming from the outside world, has brought us some fresh air.”

  She sat back and transferred her gaze from Natalie to Richard, to Russell. “I understand your sense of urgency—both of you—but you must curb it. Richard, what would your father think if you published prematurely, and then got egg on your face—egg that might be plastered all over the New York Times?”

  Sutton said nothing but he worried at the watch strap on his wrist. Eleanor’s barb had hit home.

  Mutevu Ndekei came round again, clearing the dinner plates.

  Richard and Russell ex
changed glances.

  “Look,” said Eleanor, modifying her tone. “We’ll assume that the bones tell us what we think they tell us. We’ll write up the paper, here, now, in camp, while we’re all together, as if the comparison with modern bones has been done, so that we are all ready to go into print as soon as the comparison has actually been made. That way the delay will be minimized.” She looked around the table. “Don’t worry. No one else is going to find bones like this—Arnold here is more likely to find another wife.” She grinned and the others laughed. “You can afford to wait a few weeks—what Natalie suggests is a very simple piece of science craft, Richard. Very simple, but vital. And you know it in your heart.” She smiled at Natalie and then looked back to Richard. “Think how convincing a photograph of your bones would be alongside some modern bones.” She rested her elbows on the table. “You should thank our new arrival, Richard, not abuse her.”

  She raised her glass. “Now, enjoy what’s left of your champagne. Who knows when We’ll taste the next bottle?”

  • • •

  Natalie sat in the canvas chair outside her tent and looked out at the night. Everyone had their own quarters on Eleanor Deacon’s digs, each tent big enough to stand up in, and Natalie was grateful for that. All tents, she had discovered, had their own bucket shower and latrine, too—another real luxury—and were spaced far enough apart from the other tents for true privacy. No doubt because she had been the last to arrive, Natalie’s was in fact at the end of the line. The tents were laid out in a large T shape and hers was at the foot of the central line, so she was doubly fortunate. This was the first excavation she had been on since she was a student, and the first where she had full responsibility for one particular aspect of affairs. She was already finding the experience very intense: everyone else was so much more experienced than she was, and all were extremely motivated, as the exchanges at dinner that night had shown, and they took their responsibilities so very seriously. She didn’t mind. That’s how she liked it, in fact, but she was grateful, for tonight at least, that people hadn’t lingered over the dinner table, so she could return to her tent, sit outside, wind down, smoke a cigarette, and, her guilty secret, sip a late whiskey. The flask was on the table in front of her now. She knew alcohol was banned but she wasn’t an alcoholic—far from it. She liked one whiskey a day, late at night, when the busyness was all over and she was by herself. She was ready for bed—more than ready—but one nip settled her; it did no harm.

  She listened to the night. Barks from the baboons, shrieks from the chimpanzees. What did they find to shout about so much? There was also the odd roar from the lions, who always seemed so much closer than they actually were. Or so she hoped.

  Sitting with her back to her tent, she could see across the camp to where three of the men were still sitting talking. They had moved from the refectory table to near the campfire: Richard, Russell, and Christopher. Eleanor had already turned in for the night, as had the others. The kitchen tent and storeroom were also dark and silent: Ndekei was in bed too.

  Natalie smelled the whiskey she had poured into the small silver cap from her flask, and sipped the liquid. She had acquired the taste from her father, long before he had gone off into that private world he now inhabited alone, since Violette had died. Not surprisingly, being a choirmaster, Owen Nelson was a deeply religious man whose twin passions were the music of Bach—the greatest sacred composer in his view—and the single malts of the Scottish highlands, Scotland’s great gift to the world, as he liked to say. In Natalie’s early teens, immediately after the war, Owen had driven his wife and daughter, in his brand-new Hillman, on annual excursions to Scotland in search of distilleries he had never heard of. It was in the course of those holidays that Natalie had first encountered Loch Ness, and looked out of the car window in vain for the fabled, long-necked monster. The very next day, at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, she had stood underneath the never-ending skeleton of a diplodocus suspended from the ceiling of the museum’s main gallery, and to her young mind it had seemed all too obvious that the dinosaur and the mysterious creature in Loch Ness were pretty much the same beast. The museum had sold a jigsaw of the dinosaur, which Natalie’s mother hadn’t been able to resist, and the girl’s interest in extinct forms of life was kindled.

  She smelled the whiskey again and rolled another drop around her tongue, felt the liquid slip down her throat as she swallowed. Curious that no one ever remarked on how sensuous whiskey was. She looked across the camp to where the men were talking. Christopher had gone, but Richard and Russell sat close together. The campfire was almost dead.

  Although this was still her very first day in Kihara, she was aware of the effect she had produced in the camp. More than one of the younger men had looked at her in the way men looked at women they felt attracted to. She pulled on her cigarette. Even that carried a history, reminding her of the way her mother had met her end. Even so, a sense of well-being spread down through Natalie’s shoulders and chest, the nicotine plus the alcohol working their magic. She was dimly aware of some new studies that had linked tobacco smoking with lung cancer, but from what she knew about the design of the experiments, the evidence was far from conclusive. And, like her whiskey, she so enjoyed a smoke at the end of the day. What harm could one cigarette do?

  Richard Sutton Junior was, outwardly at least, the best looking of the younger men in the camp. But he was also the most cocky, and Natalie hated his overconfidence.

  Russell North wasn’t bad looking, not as striking as Richard, maybe, but judging by his performance at dinner, he was a damn sight more fun to be around.

  Kees van Schelde was different again. A Dutchman, as she had gathered from passing remarks, he was small—too small for her—with pointed features, a small nose, and a remarkably smooth skin, with hardly any beard showing. He was very tidy, bien rangeé, economical in his manner and movements. Natalie was sure his tent would be immaculate.

  Christopher Deacon was harder to read. He wasn’t bad looking either, but there was something … unformed about him, she felt. More than the others, he watched life from the sidelines; or he hadn’t yet grown in confidence enough to be wholly his own man. Of course, it couldn’t be easy, with Eleanor around all the time, but then he had chosen to stay close to her apron strings. He had an elder brother, she had heard, called Jack, who was away in Nairobi or London—she wasn’t sure which. Maybe Jack was more formed.

  She took another sip of whiskey. She was still smarting from the way Richard had snapped at her over dinner. She had been making a simple point, one that was obvious to any scientist who thought about the situation they found themselves in. And she had been grateful for Eleanor’s support. Eleanor, she knew, regarded her—not with suspicion, exactly, because Natalie was more than qualified for the job. No, it was a more personal reaction, having to do with the fact that she was a young woman surrounded by four young men. Well, that couldn’t be helped.

  In the light of the dying fire, she watched as Richard and Russell got to their feet and moved away from what was left of the logs. There would be an early start tomorrow, following up today’s momentous discovery, and she would for the very first time be able to explore the fabled gorge for herself. The two men dispersed and walked slowly back to their respective tents. The camp was dead for the night and it was not yet nine-thirty.

  Natalie looked up. The stars were so bright down here in Africa, they seemed so close. Amazing that there was a man-made satellite up there with them now and talk of sending men to the moon. She doubted it would ever happen.

  Another burst of barking shattered the peace out to her right, and she wondered if a fight had broken out among the baboons, or if a young animal had been snatched away by a predator. The skies looked so peaceful compared with life on earth.

  She was tired but she didn’t think about bed. However tired she was, these days sleep wouldn’t come. It wasn’t just that Dominic refused to go away, that he clogged her mind the way she had heard an anes
thetic could hide in the small vessels of the brain for months after an operation. She had left Cambridge without saying goodbye to her father and that had been hard. Natalie’s parents had been—her father still was—unsophisticated, unworldly, and in its way that’s where the problem lay.

  It had something to do with being an only child. It wasn’t just that she was overprotected as a young girl—though that was true enough—but her parents too had been very naive, inexperienced, unworldly. Her father had met her mother when he was a student at the Guildhall School of Music in London and she was a member of a French choir that had come to London for a competition. Owen Nelson spoke some French, Violette Royère spoke rather more English, so they had been able to explore London together. He knew where the best church choirs sang, where the best music shops were to be found. Violette came from a small town called Moirans-en-Montagne, Moirans in the mountains, west of Geneva. It could not have been more different from the pancake-flat fens of Lincolnshire, and when Owen had visited Violette a few weeks later he had loved the landscape almost as much as he had fallen for her. They had been married soon after and Violette had moved to Gainsborough early in 1932, Natalie being born just over a year later.

  In Gainsborough, music had been Owen and Violette’s life—a beautiful life, Natalie thought, a pure, straightforward, innocent, clear, clean life but closed. Music, she now knew, could be so fulfilling that it drowned out everything else. It hadn’t with Dominic but it had with her parents. They had remained married, and happily so—Owen Nelson the organist and choirmaster, Violette teaching music and her native French in a local school—until Natalie’s mother had died just months before when, on a camping holiday, she had fallen asleep in her tent with a lighted cigarette in her hand. The tent had caught fire—and Violette had been first asphyxiated and then burned.

  With Natalie’s father being so much a part of the church, and her mother a teacher, in provincial England, serving others, they had led relatively simple lives. Yes, her mother had stood out in Gainsborough, thanks to the fact that she smoked those strong-smelling French Gitanes cigarettes, which she had to order specially, and because she knew more about wine and makeup than the average Lincolnshire mother. Her haircuts, too, could be … well, daring. But, Natalie guessed, the most flamboyant thing Violette had ever done was marry a Protestant. It had caused a major rupture in the very Catholic Royère family, so Natalie had learned, but Owen and Violette had found that their passion for music was more than doubled when they were together and they had never looked back.