He hoped that the archaeological dig would provide a bit of ghoulish excitement. Surely they would find a few skeletons in the course of the excavation. Owen had read about the bog people, a prehistoric Norse tribe that had left ritually throttled sacrifices in tannin bogs, so perfectly preserved by the natural acids that, twenty centuries later, they were mistaken for recent murder victims. If there were any bogs on the isle of Banrigh, Owen would certainly search them. If not, perhaps the standing stones would yield a few bony offerings to the sun god; he heard of similar finds at Stonehenge in the south.
As inoffensive as Owen was, he had recently adopted one antisocial habit that he planned to perfect during the course of the dig. He hoped no one would object, but he vowed to make no concessions on this point to his fellow diggers. Owen had every intention of continuing his self-taught bagpipe lessons.
Gitte Dankert looked at her watch for the third time in as many minutes. "Please finish your salad, Alasdair," she urged. "You are going to make us late for the meeting."
Her companion, interrupted in a tale about his anatomy lecturer, scowled and set down his fork. "Don't be so bloody punctual! I suppose the trains run on time in Denmark?"
"We always try to arrive on schedule for a meeting," Gitte said seriously.
"Don't worry about it. I'm the medical man for the expedition, so I needn't follow all the petty little rules set down for the ditchdiggers."
"But, Alasdair, I'm one of those ditchdiggers," she said softly.
"Nonsense! You're with me. Don't take offense, love." He yanked one strand of her mousy fringe, and then he went back to his salad, spearing forkfuls of bean sprouts and nuts in the same leisurely fashion as before.
Gitte sighed, resigning herself to being late for the meeting. If she continued to press the point, they would only be that much later. She knew these moods of Alasdair's. He could be quite charming when he wanted, but his opinion of himself was very high. Her fiat-mates joked that he acted as if M.D. stood for medical deity, and they warned her that if he was this difficult as a third-year student, he would only become worse as he came closer to qualifying.
Gitte suspected that they were right, but she didn't seem to be able to help herself. When Alasdair was rude to everyone else but nice to her, she felt very special and privileged, and when he was brusque with her, it made her try all the harder to win his approval. She supposed she loved him—the fact that he was not particularly good-looking or passionate made her feel virtuous in her affection. Surely it could not be mere animal magnetism if he were so drab and serious; surely only true love would kindle with so little fuel. She wondered at times how he felt about her. She was not very pretty, with her dull brown hair and lashless green eyes, but she was small and thin and twenty-two, which counted for beauty in the everyday world. There was always an offer or two to buy her a shandy at the pub, and Alasdair seemed gratified by that, as if being her escort allowed him pride of ownership. But she wondered if that attractiveness counted enough—for a serious relationship, that is. "Buy British" seemed to apply to more than manufactured goods; often she felt that being a Dane made her somehow "not quite the article,'' a favorite expression of Alasdair's. Perhaps it explained the drink offers as well. Danes seemed to have earned a reputation for sexual liberation that Gitte did not live up to at all, but fortunately Alasdair did not seem to mind her shyness. He was a bit of a prude himself.
She had never met his family. He said he was estranged from them, but she wondered if that could be an excuse. Still, she knew that he wasn't seeing anyone else, and she supposed that being taken for granted could be interpreted as a kind of devotion.
British men were quite undemonstrative, and she thought that perhaps the language barrier could keep her from understanding the nuances of their relationship. It is one thing to be able to understand university courses taught in English, but quite another to pick up the shades of meaning in private life. Of course, Alasdair did not speak Danish, except for the simplest and most anglicized words, like farvel, for goodbye. He assumed that she would accommodate him—at great advantage to herself, he thought—by learning perfect English.
Sometimes Gitte bristled at her lover's condescending attitude toward her heritage, but mostly she didn't. If he thought himself such an altogether superior person, perhaps it was true, and in that case she was very lucky to have him.
She was pleased that he had asked her to go along on the archaeological dig. He would have gone without her, of course, and he hadn't consulted her about it beforehand, but at least he had permitted her to accompany him. She told herself that Alasdair was a lonely and troubled person, and that if only she loved him enough, all would be well.
Tom Leath rather liked Edinburgh, It was less crowded and noisy than his usual haunts in a suburb of London. He liked the look of the castle perched there over everything, never letting you forget for a moment that you were treading on history at every turn. He thought he might like to get assigned to a dig there sometime, perhaps more excavations of the Roman fort at Cramond. It was a yacht basin now, quite a picturesque village of whitewashed stone houses and a bit of nark overlooking the River Almond and the Firth of Forth. Trust the Romans to take the best property around.
Of course, the night life in Edinburgh was nil—not only compared to London; probably compared to downtown Brighton. What did you bloody do in Edinburgh after dark if you were under forty and on your own?
It would be good practice for the Isle of Banrigh, though. Dead deserted, that was, and not even any electricity for the telly. He'd bought a few bottles of moderately priced Scotch to take over in his rucksack; perhaps some of the other diggers would be sociable types, and they could have a camp fire after work and pass round the old bottle. He expected it to be cold and drizzling on Banrigh, summer or not; the Scottish islands were all the same, climates like basements. Leath thought, not for the first time, that being a specialist in Celtic culture could have its drawbacks. Had he specialized in Greek archaeology, he could be lounging on Delos right now, acquiring a healthy tan along with the potsherds.
Marchand should be all right as head of the expedition. He was ex-army. He'd be all right in terms of leniency, that is, toward the odd bit of drinking or high spirits. Leath wasn't so sure about his being all right in terms of archaeology, though. After all, the man was an engineer, and he wasn't much of an expert on Celtic culture in general—just that one bee in his bonnet about the standing stones.
Leath thought of Heinrich Schliemann, who troweled through half a dozen cities and threw the remains of Troy on the scrap heap because he thought that it should be a few meters deeper in the earth. Archaeology had tried to become more of a science since those days, but there were still enough contract archaeologists around to create problems. He'd heard of one extraordinary fellow in Wyoming in the United States who used the local Indian ruins to provide a sort of dude ranch for scholarly minded tourists. He had built a dormitory and conference center, and he charged people hefty sums to go and paw about in the foothills, pretending to be archaeologists. Probably made a fortune; Learn hoped there hadn't been anything there for him to destroy. If the world was lucky, the bugger was a complete crook who seeded the earth with newly made arrowheads before each new wave of diggers.