Then he remembered: it was a bleeding automatic transmission, the first one in Britain! He pushed the accelerator and the transmission performed smoothly. The car sped forward, spraying gravel. In the rearview mirror he caught sight of an angry middle-aged man pumping his balled-up fists into the air. The engine drowned out whatever he was shouting.
"Same to you, mate," Reggie called out. "Thanks for your motor and thanks for your missus."
He ditched the Invicta at the pub in Fishbourne and fast-walked the final mile, whistling in the dark and rubbing his hands for warmth. A log fire supercharged with paraffin was blazing at the camp and it helped him find his way. A dense cloud cover diffused the moonlight, turning the night sky the color of gray flannel. The vapors from the fire hurtled upward thick and black like depraved harpies, and Reginald followed their ascendancy until he lost them against the looming spire of the cathedral of Vectis Abbey.
A door to one of the dilapidated caravans opened as Reggie was nearing the fire to warm himself. A lanky young man called out, "Gawd! Will you look who's come back! Reg's been booted!"
"I left of my own bloody accord, mate," Reggie replied curtly. "Any food about?"
"Tin of beans I should think."
"Well, toss one out then, I'm famished after me shag."
The young man guffawed but the word had a magical quality because every one of the four caravan doors opened and their inhabitants spilled out to hear more. Even Geoffrey Atwood emerged from the boss's caravan, wearing a heavy woolen turtleneck, thoughtfully puffing on a pipe. "Did someone say shag?"
"You lot aren't expecting me to kiss and tell?"
"Yes please," the lanky young man, Dennis Spencer, said salaciously. He was a pimply first-year at Cambridge, young enough to have skirted national service.
There were four others, three men and a woman, all of them from Atwood's department. Martin Bancroft and Timothy Brown, like Spencer, were undergraduates, albeit mature students who had returned from the war to complete their tolled degrees. Martin had never left England. He had been stationed in London as an intelligence officer. Timothy had been a radar man on a naval frigate operating mainly in the Baltic. Both of them were giddy to be back at Cambridge and over-the-moon at the prospect of a bit of fieldwork.
Ernest Murray was older, in his thirties, currently wrapping up his D. Phil. in Antiquities, which he hurriedly abandoned when the Germans invaded Poland. He had seen heavy action in Indochina, which left him painfully diffident. Somehow, Anglo-Saxon archaeology didn't seem as relevant to him anymore, and he couldn't fathom what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
The only woman in the party was Beatrice Slade, a lecturer in Medieval History and Atwood's academic confidante who had pretty much run his department during the war. She was a tough wisecracking fireplug of a lady, openly lesbian, famously so. She and Reggie were essentially incompatible human beings. When her back was turned he crudely mocked her sexuality, and when his was turned she did the same to him.
"Ah, we're all up and about," Atwood said, blinking at the stinging fire. "Shall we have a coffee while Reg tells us his tale?"
"I'll brew a pot, Prof," Timothy offered.
"So what happened then, Reg?" Martin asked. "Figured you'd be kippin' in a feather bed tonight, not back here in the rust bucket."
"Had a spot of bother, mate," he replied. "Nothing I couldn't handle." He rolled a cigarette and licked the paper.
"Nothing you couldn't handle?" Beatrice asked mockingly. "Stymied because she wanted to go again?" At that she swung her hips like a burlesque queen and all of them, even Atwood, began to howl at his expense.
"Very funny, very amusing," Reggie said. "Her husband came home on the early side and I had to remove my person from the premises forthwith to avoid an unpleasant encounter."
"I say, Mr. Saunders," Dennis said with mock respect to his elder, "was your arse clothed or unclothed during this removal?"
They erupted again. Atwood took a few puffs of his pipe and said pensively, "That's a rather unpleasant mental image."
The morning was wintry with a few flakes of snow; the ground looked like it had been lightly salted. Ernest was an excellent caterer and managed to do a full-cooked breakfast for seven on two gas rings. They sat around the fire on milk crates, bundled in layers of wool, fortifying themselves with steaming mugs of sweet tea. Crunching into a triangle of fired bread dipped into yolk, Atwood looked across the frigid field at the icy sea and remarked, "Who's idea was it to excavate in January?"
It would have been better if it were a warm summer morning or a crisp autumn one, but it was utterly fantastic to all of them to be here in any season, in any conditions. Only yesterday, it seemed, they were in the thick of war, dreaming about how blissful it would be to do a bit of archaeology on a peaceful island. So the instant Atwood received a PS300 grant from the British Museum to resume his excavations at Vectis, he hastily organized a dig, winter be damned.
Reggie was the pit boss. He checked his watch, stood up, and with his best sergeant major voice shouted, "All right, lads, let's get a move on! We've got a lot of dirt to shift today."
Timothy pointed at Beatrice in an exaggerated way and mouthed the question, Lads?
"You're right," Reggie said, gathering his gear, "I apologize. She's too bloody old for me to be calling her a lad."
"Sod off, you pathetic wanker," she said.
Atwood's dig was in a corner of the abbey grounds far from the main complex of buildings. The lord abbot, Dom William Scott Lawlor, a soft-spoken cleric with a passion for history, was kind enough to let the Cambridge party camp within the complex. In return, Atwood invited him to stroll by for progress reports, and on the previous Saturday, Lawlor had even appeared in blue jeans and anorak to spend an hour scraping a square meter with a trowel.
The diggers marched across the field from the campground while the cathedral bells chimed for 9:00 A.M. mass and Terce. Seagulls swooped and complained overhead, and in the distance the steel-blue waves of the Solent churned. To the east the cathedral spire looked magnificent against the bright sky. Across the fields, tiny figures, monks in dark robes, filed from their dorms to the church. Atwood watched them, squinting into the sunshine, marveling at their timelessness. If he had been standing on the same spot a thousand years earlier, would the scene have looked much different?
The excavation site was neatly laid out with pegs and twine. It covered an area of forty by thirty meters, rich brown earth with grass and topsoil peeled away. From a distance it was clear that the entire site was in a depression, about a meter lower than the surrounding field. It was this hollow that attracted Atwood's interest before the war when he surveyed the abbey grounds. Surely there had been an activity of some sort on this spot. But why so remote from the main abbey complex?
In two brief excavations in 1938 and 1939, Atwood had dug test trenches and found evidence of a stone foundation and bits of twelfth but mainly thirteenth century pottery. As the war raged on his thoughts often returned to Vectis. Why the blazes had a thirteenth century structure been built there, isolated as it was from the heart of the abbey? Was its purpose clerical or secular? The abbey library had no mention of the building in its archives. He was resigned to the fact that Hitler had to be defeated before he could tackle the mystery.
On the south side of the site, facing seaward, Atwood was digging his main trench, a cutting thirty meters long, four wide, and now three meters deep. Reggie, a good man with heavy machinery, had started the trench with a mechanical digger, and now the whole team was down in the deep cutting doing spade and bucket work. They were following what was left of the southern wall of the structure down to the foundation to see if they could find an occupation level.