Mackenzie Ford Read online

  He now looked from Natalie to Richard, to Eleanor, to Arnold Pryce, to Daniel, to Jonas, to Kees. Then he nodded at Richard, who got up from the table and walked away from the refectory area to his own tent.

  “Eleanor,” said Russell softly. “There’s something we were going to tell you all tonight, but since you’ve raised the question of timing now, we might as well discuss it now.”

  “Oh yes?” said Eleanor. “What is it?” She swallowed some water from a tumbler. Across the camp they all heard the radio stutter into life. It was kept in Eleanor’s tent, which was bigger than the others. The pilots of small planes were swapping information about the weather, or talking to air traffic control at Kilimanjaro, the nearest proper airport.

  Before going on, Russell turned in his seat. Richard was walking back from his tent carrying a towel wrapped around something. Back inside the refectory area, he approached the small serving sideboard across from the main table.

  Russell got up and went to stand next to Richard as Richard unwrapped the towel. Now that she had been here a little while, Natalie thought that the two men made an unlikely partnership, both physically and temperamentally. Both were self-confident—which she liked well enough in a man—but whereas Richard had a quiet self-confidence, Russell was far more assertive. Those blue eyes, she was sure, could turn very cold if he was crossed.

  Richard was rather theatrical about pulling back first one flap of the towel, then another, then another. With a final flourish, he pulled back the remaining flap.

  “Voilà!”

  Revealed on the towel were two long, thin bones.

  “What on earth—?” Eleanor put down her knife and fork with a clatter.

  “A tibia and a femur,” said Russell North, almost shouting. “A modern tibia and femur—”

  “Proving,” chimed in Richard, “that our find is as sensational as we thought.” He looked directly at Natalie. “We’ve addressed Natalie’s criticism. We can now say so in print, and can show that her objections, however proper they were, are unfounded.” He smiled down at Natalie to show that he wasn’t bullying her this time. “These are modern bones, and although they are bigger than the ancient ones they have exactly the same configuration as those Daniel discovered in the gorge.”

  All eyes were on the sideboard.

  “And where, may I ask, did you find these bones?” Eleanor had pushed her plate away from her.

  Richard went back to his place and sat down again. He lowered his voice. “You know that tribal burial ground—it’s about four miles from here, on a slope with lots of trees, where the goats play. We visited a grave last night. Very late.”

  “You did what?” Eleanor ripped off her spectacles. She spoke in barely a whisper.

  “Don’t worry. We didn’t do any damage. No one saw us.” Richard looked up at Russell and smiled. “We replaced all the earth we had dug up and smoothed it over. Now we can send the report to Nature from here, as Russell said. It will be very dramatic. And it cuts the chances of anyone beating us to the punch.”

  “The evidence is quite clear, Eleanor.” Russell had also returned to his place at the table, taking the tibia and the femur with him. He now held a bone in each hand and brought them slowly together. They interlocked neatly. “The arrangement of the joint is virtually identical in the ancient specimen and in the modern specimen. Hominids walked upright two million years ago.”

  There was silence around the table. All eyes were on Eleanor. She refitted her spectacles around her ears. Her own eyes flashed, the whites catching what light was going, her lenses magnifying the effect. The color had quite gone from her face, the corners of her mouth were turned down, her jaw was set forward, straining the skin on her neck. When, at length, she did speak, her voice had an icy edge to it. “Let me get this right … You stole some bones from a tribal burial ground. You sneaked into a sacred place, late at night, and just helped yourself to someone’s ancestors? You disturbed the peace of a tribal sanctuary that has been that way for generations?” She caught her breath. “Are you … are you … completely mad? Do you not realize what you have done?”

  Her eyes held Richard’s. She didn’t blink.

  “Come on, Eleanor, don’t exaggerate. Yes, it’s a burial ground but think what we can now do … It won’t take us more than a few days to complete the paper, and we can send it to London by the end of the week. We don’t have to say exactly where we found the bones—”

  “Shut up!” She snatched off her glasses again and all but mangled them in her fingers. “I won’t hear a word more of this—and don’t tell me I’m exaggerating.” Eleanor’s mouth was a mere line across her face, her lips had all but disappeared. The skin on her throat was again stretched tight as her chin jutted forward. She still didn’t blink. “Don’t show your ignorance like that—or your cockiness.” She breathed out through her nose. “Do you know how long it has taken me to negotiate excavation rights in this area? You don’t think I just need a government permit, do you? I need the consent, the agreement, the approval, of the local tribes: the Maasai, the Datoga, the Itesu. The Maasai are Mutevu Ndekei’s tribe—how do you think they are going to take this? What do you think his standing in his tribe will be now? If they find out? Did you think of that?”

  She rubbed her eyes with her fingers. “What gave you—? Who thought of—? No, I don’t want to know.” She shook her head. “I cannot believe that grown men, educated men, professors, could be so foolish, so wrong-headed, so insensitive.” She shifted her gaze from Richard to Russell, then back to Richard. “You are … you are …” A strand of hair had fallen from her chignon. She pushed it back up. “Words fail me.”

  “Now we know what we know,” said Russell, “and after we have taken some photographs, we can put the bones back—”

  “Don’t you dare!” hissed Eleanor. She leaned forward and pointed at him with her glasses. “Don’t even think about setting foot in that burial ground again. Desecrate the site a second time? Now I know you’re beyond the pale.” She put her spectacles back on. As she did so, they could all see that her hands were shaking. “Look, this is a potential disaster.” She pointed at the tibia and femur. “Hide those bones. Wrap them up and give them to me. Go on, hurry up.”

  As Russell moved to do as she said, Eleanor shook her head again and groaned. “I am beside myself with fury. Nothing like this has ever happened on one of my digs before. It’s disgraceful, barbaric. I feel sick.”

  “Eleanor, come on. You’re overreacting,” said Richard. He was lounging in his chair. One leg was crossed over the other and he gripped one ankle with his hand.

  “No, no. No! I am not overreacting.” Eleanor still didn’t raise her voice but her tone was vehement. She slapped the table with the flat of her hand. “What you have done is unforgivable. Sacrilegious, arrogant, and crass. If the Maasai find out about this, I hate to think what will happen. The dig might even be canceled. It was a condition of the government permit that we obtain the agreement of local tribes. How are the chiefs going to feel when they find out that their sacred burial ground has been interfered with?” She took the bundle of bones from Russell and pushed him away. “My God, I have never been so angry.”

  She stood up, held her head high, so that the full length of her long neck was exposed. “You are both very foolish men,” she said. “Monumentally foolish.” She took a deep breath. “I would make sure your careers were ruined but for the fact that our only hope now is to hush this up.” She picked up a spoon and pointed it at all the others, one by one. “This information, this … crime, goes no further than this table. It is not to be mentioned again. Ever. You will not talk about it even among yourselves. You will carry on as if nothing has happened. Is that clear?” She looked from one to the other. “I said … is that clear?”

  One by one they nodded, signaling their agreement.

  Eleanor lowered her voice to a whisper. “The paper will not now be published until we have all left here, until we have found another
modern tibia and femur with which to make the comparison, and can say so. We must put this behind us, and we must cover up.” She glared at Richard Sutton. “This is the worst example of vandalism I have ever encountered. You had better make as many discoveries as you can on this dig, Professor Sutton, because I will not have you or Professor North back again. If, that is, we are allowed to work here in the future.”

  She took the towel with the bones in it and scraped back her chair. She addressed herself to Richard and to Russell. “You have both made a serious error of judgment. Wholly unacceptable. In my eyes, you can never recover from this act of gross stupidity and insensitivity. The only way you can even begin to make amends is never to mention your foolishness, your insensitivity, your sacrilege, your sheer racial arrogance again, to stay as far away from the burial ground as possible, and to make another important discovery that will take everyone’s mind off this one.”

  Eleanor stood absolutely still, erect, her eyes on fire. Even her fingernails seemed to shine in the gloom.

  She turned and stalked off, back to her own tent.

  • • •

  In the deep distance a lion roared. Natalie, seated within the glow of her hurricane lamp, turned towards the sound. This, she decided, would be her abiding memory of Africa. Sitting by herself, in the dark, late at night, gazing up at the velvet sky and the stars and hearing a lion roar—oh, miles away.

  Other sounds of the night, less distinctive, formed a backdrop to the lion. The stutter of a nightjar, breaking wood as elephants sucked bark from nearby trees, the cackle of a hyena.

  The warmth and the dryness were part of the experience for her too. Lincolnshire, in contrast, was wet, very wet. Not that that bothered her too much either. She treasured the memory of an afternoon with her father on the beach near Chapel St. Leonard’s, on the Lincolnshire coast, when she had been eight or nine. It was during the war, one of the few times he had been home, and they were bathing when it had come on to rain. Everyone else had cleared the beach, but not Owen, her father, who had carried on swimming. He enjoyed rain, he said, just as much as he enjoyed sunshine. If you lived in Lincolnshire, he said, it helped. If you didn’t enjoy rain, life on England’s east coast could get pretty miserable. Natalie knew what he meant, even if she didn’t agree totally. Ever since, she had associated rain with her father.

  Both were a long way away now.

  Would her father ever come back from the locked-away place he now inhabited? She knew he still went through the motions as organist and choirmaster at Gainsborough. In fact, she had heard from the bishop that Owen Nelson “poured himself” into his playing, his grief at his wife’s death colored every note, modulated every key his fingers touched. But when he stepped away from the organ, when choir practices or performances were concluded, as Natalie knew all too well, the shutters came down, her father grew smaller. Did he imagine Violette still in the choir, did he still hear her mezzo soprano above all the others?

  He had rebuffed all attempts by Natalie to approach him, and she was secretly fearful that she knew exactly why. Natalie could barely put her fears into words, but when the sweat broke out on her throat, what went through her mind was the dreadful possibility that her mother’s death was no accident, that she had deliberately set fire to her camp bed because her daughter was having an affair with a married man, and that Owen Nelson knew it. Her father blamed Natalie, his daughter, for the death of his wife. How terrible was that? That was why he inhabited his locked-away world, locked away from his daughter in particular, and that was one reason why she had had to get away, far away.

  She had hoped that, being so distant, and in such different surroundings, she would have thought about her father—and her dead mother—less, but the sweats on her throat kept coming.

  “Natalie?”

  It was Russell.

  She was expecting him. He slipped into the other chair as he had done before.

  The flask of whiskey and its cup were where they always were at this time of night, on the small table, next to the ashtray Natalie used. She pushed the whiskey across and he took it.

  She smoked as he swallowed.

  They sat in silence for a while.

  “Not a good day,” he said at length.

  She didn’t look at him. “No.”

  Another pause. Insects buzzed at the glass of the hurricane lamp.

  “Are you as mad at us as Eleanor is?”

  She rubbed her tongue along her lips. “I’m upset, yes. How could you be so … so crude? Blundering into a burial ground, robbing graves. I don’t know whether it’s juvenile or like something out of a nineteenth-century horror story.”

  He slid the whiskey cup back across the table and massaged the back of his neck with his hand.

  “We didn’t think it was such a big deal.” He turned his gaze towards her. “Is it really? The tribal goats are always grazing on that burial ground, kicking up the soil with their hooves and snouts. With any luck, no one will notice.”

  She inhaled her cigarette once, twice.

  Go slow, she told herself.

  “Are your parents alive or dead, Russell?”

  “My mother’s dead.”

  “Buried or cremated?”

  “Cremated.”

  “Well, my mother is buried in Lincolnshire. In the local churchyard, next to the church where my father learned to play the organ. He is a very religious man, Russell. How do you think he would feel if someone dug up his wife’s bones, just to prove or disprove some … theory, something that could be settled in a few weeks anyway without … without doing that sort of damage?”

  “I know, I know. It was wrong.” He rubbed his neck again. “But Richard was so … so persuasive. He’s terrified someone else will beat us to the punch. He convinced me it was no big deal—”

  “Don’t hide behind him, Russell. You played your part. If you didn’t feel as strongly, you should have stopped him.”

  “I know … I know. I keep saying that. I’m not hiding. I’m doubly in the wrong, yes. I should have stopped Richard and I didn’t. I shouldn’t have gone, but I did.”

  They sat for a long time without speaking. Natalie finished her cigarette. The whiskey—that night’s ration, anyway—was gone. The noises of the bush carried on around them.

  After a while, Russell said, “All you hear is animals. You never hear the people of the bush, do you?”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re not there,” replied Natalie.

  Another long silence.

  Russell stood up. Natalie remained seated. He stood behind her chair, leaned down, and kissed the top of her head. “I’ve been wanting to do that since the moment I first saw you.”

  She didn’t move or respond. He put his hands on her shoulders but at this she squirmed free and stood up.

  They faced each other.

  He moved forward. In the darkness, the freckles on his face all ran into one another.

  “Good night, Russell,” she said firmly.

  • • •

  “Water?”

  Natalie straightened up, pressed her hands into her back, then wiped her forehead with her sleeve. It was four mornings later and every able-bodied member of the dig was in the korongo, trying to fulfill Eleanor Deacon’s aim of finishing this part of the excavation by the end of the week. This morning, at least, there was a wind getting up. Warm, but it helped ease things a little.

  Natalie took the bottle from Christopher Deacon. “Thank you.”

  In front of them, the wall of the gorge, all around where the tibia and femur had been found, was being attacked. The soil-sand, newly exposed, was darker than the surrounding surface, which had long been bleached by the sun. Everyone who was able to was picking away at the soil. Arnold Pryce was sifting soil through a sieve. A little further along, Kees and Jonas were stooped over another stretch of gorge. Today there were a few clouds beneath the sun, which occasionally provided shade. So far, however, there had been no new discoveries.

&n
bsp; “How are you settling in?” Christopher had hitherto kept his distance from Natalie. He was normally polite but … not formal exactly, but reserved. He had a slightly clipped accent, almost but not quite South African.

  “I’m loving it,” replied Natalie. “I didn’t enjoy all the excitement about the burial ground, of course. I hadn’t anticipated such … high drama. At Cambridge, when you study archaeology you also study anthropology. No one who’s studied anthropology could have done what Richard and Russell did.” She sighed. “But the discovery’s exciting, isn’t it?”

  “Very. What a pity it had to be marred by that silly prank. Though prank is hardly the word.”

  Natalie handed back the water bottle. “We’ll all get over it, I suppose. Especially if there’s another major discovery.”

  “It’s not us I’m worried about,” said Christopher. “As you say, we’ll get over it. Meals will be a bit sticky for a few more days but as we unearth other bones, if we do, we’ll gradually put this behind us.” He looked down the gorge, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand.

  “What are you worried about, then?”

  He breathed out. “The Maasai. They are very proud, very fierce when they want to be. Richard and Russell may think they covered their tracks, but it was dark when they raided the burial ground, so how they can be one hundred percent certain of that I don’t know. We can’t go back and inspect, that would just draw attention to the matter. My mother’s spent so long making friends with the Maasai—arranging medical help, educational scholarships, employing some of them, like Mutevu Ndekei … she’s very sensitive on their behalf.”

  “Maybe that will help, if the tribe is upset.”

  “Maybe. But they can be tricky, the Maasai. They’re supposed to be converts to Christianity but many of the men still worship their traditional gods, the fig trees, and the women give sacrifices at those local sand dunes that I showed you.” He turned towards her. “See what I mean? The Maasai are the Maasai. I wouldn’t like to predict how they will respond to this incident.”

  She had never known Christopher to say so much.