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.
Atwood and Ernest Murray were in the southwest corner of the cutting, cleaning the wall with trowels to take photographs of the section.
“This level here,” Atwood said, pointing to an irregular band of black soil running across the section, “see how it follows the top of the wall? There was a fire.”
“Accidental or deliberate?” Ernest asked.
Atwood sucked on his pipe. “Always difficult to say. It’s possible it was set deliberately as part of a ritual.”
Ernest furrowed his brow. “For what purpose? This wasn’t exactly a pagan site. It was contemporaneous with the abbey within the abbey perimeter!”
“Excellent point, Ernest. Are you sure you don’t want to pursue a career in archaeology after all?”
The younger man shrugged. “I dunno.”
“Well, while you’re pondering your fate, let’s snap these pictures and begin excavating down another half meter or so. We can’t be far off the floor.”
Atwood assigned the three undergraduates to the southwest corner to take the trench deeper. Beatrice sat at a portable table near the cutting, cataloguing pottery shards, and Atwood took Ernest and Reggie to the northwest corner of the site to start a small trench in an attempt to find the other end of the foundation wall. As the morning progressed it became noticeably warmer and the diggers started peeling off layers until they were down to their shirts.
At lunchtime Atwood wandered over to the deep trench and remarked, “What’s this? Is that another wall there?”
“I think so,” Dennis said eagerly. “We were going to fetch you.”
They had exposed the top of a thinner stone wall running parallel and about two meters from the main foundation.
“See? There’s a gap in it, Professor,” Timothy offered. “Could a door have been there?”
“Well, perhaps. Possibly so,” Atwood said, climbing down a ladder. “I wonder, could you take this area down a bit,” he said, pointing to some dirt. “If the interior wall extends to the outer wall in a perpendicular fashion, I would say we’ve got a small room. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
The three young men got on their knees to start troweling. Dennis worked near the outer wall, Martin near the interior wall, Timothy in the middle. Within a few minutes they had all made clinking contact with stone.
“You were right, Professor!” Martin said.
“Well, I have been at this for a few years. You get a feel for this type of thing.” He was pleased with himself and lit his pipe in celebration. “After lunch let’s dig down to the level of the floor and see if we can find what this little room was for?”
The young men rushed their lunch, eager to find the floor. They wolfed down cheese sandwiches and lemon squash and hopped back into the pit.
“You’re not impressing anyone, ya bloody brown-nosers!” Reggie shouted after them as he reclined on a mound of dirt and lit a roll-up.
“Shut your gob, Reg,” Beatrice said. “Leave ’em be. And roll us a fag too.”
An hour later the young men called to the others. The three undergrads were standing around the boundaries of the small room, looking impressed with themselves.
“We’ve found the floor, everyone!” Dennis exclaimed.
Exposed for view was a surface of smooth dark stones, expertly shaped to join to one another in a continuous surface. But Atwood’s eye was drawn to another feature. “What’s this?” he asked, and climbed down to take a closer look.
In the southwest corner of the small room was a larger stone, which appeared to be out of place. The floor stones were bluestone. This larger one was a large limestone block, about two meters by a meter and a half and quite thick. It protruded almost a foot higher than the level of the floor and had irregular edges.
“Any thoughts?” Atwood asked his people as he scraped around its edges with his trowel.
“Doesn’t look like it belongs, does it?” Beatrice said.
Ernest took some pictures. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to haul that in.”
“We should try to shift it,” Atwood said. “Reg, who would you say has the strongest back?”
“That would be Beatrice,” Reggie replied.
“Fuck off, Reg,” the woman said. “Let’s see some of that famous muscle power.”
Reggie got a crowbar and tried to get an edge under a lip of limestone. He used a rock as a fulcrum but the block still wouldn’t budge. Sweating, he declared, “Right! I’m getting the bloody digger.”
It took an hour for Reggie to use the mechanical digger to make its own ramp to get down low enough to safely reach the block.
When he was in position, close enough to reach the rock with the bucket and far enough from the edge of the cutting to avoid a cave-in, he called out from the cab to say he was ready. Over the sputter of the diesel engine, the bells were pealing for the None service.
Reggie nudged the teeth of the bucket against an edge of limestone and caught hold on his first pass. He curled the bucket toward its arm and the stone block lifted.
“Hang on!” Atwood shouted. Reggie froze the action. “Get a crowbar in there!”
Martin jumped in and slid the iron bar into the gap between the limestone and the flooring stones. He leaned into the bar but couldn’t lever it an inch. “Too heavy!” he shouted.
With Martin applying steady pressure, Reggie moved the bucket again and the stone slid a foot, then another. Martin guided it with the crowbar and when it shifted enough to be stable waved his arms like a crazy man. “Stop! Stop! Come here! Come here!”
Reggie killed the engine and all of them scrambled into the pit.
Dennis saw it first. “Bloody hell!”
Timothy shook his head. “Would you look at that!”
While the rest of them stared, agog, Reggie relit a dog end he had saved in his shirt pocket and took a deep drag of tobacco. “Fuck me. Is that supposed to be there, Prof?”
Atwood stroked his thinning head of hair in wonder and simply said, “We’re going to need some light.”
They were staring into a deep black hole, and the oblique rays of the afternoon sun were revealing what appeared to be stone stairs descending into the earth.
Dennis ran back to the camp to retrieve every battery-powered flashlight he could find. He returned, red-faced and huffing, and passed them around.
Reggie was feeling protective of his old boss so he insisted on going first. He’d cleared a few of Rommel’s underground bunkers in his day and knew his way around a tight space. The rest of them followed the big man in single file, with Beatrice, stripped of her usual bravado, timidly taking up the rear.
When they had all successfully navigated the tightly spiraled stairway that plunged, by Atwood’s estimate, an incredible forty to fifty feet straight into the earth, they found themselves huddled in a room not much larger than two London taxicabs. The air was stagnant, and Martin, who was prone to claustrophobia, immediately felt desperate. “It’s a bit close down here,” he whimpered.
They were all moving their flashlights around and the beams intersected like searchlights during the blitz.
Reggie was the first to realize there was a door. “Hallo! What’re you doing here?” He studied the worm-holed surface with his flashlight. A huge iron key protruded from a gaping key hole.
Atwood set his light on it and said, “In for a penny, in for a pound. You game?”
Young Dennis crept up close. “Absolutely!”
“All right then,” Atwood said. “Your honor, Reggie.”
From her squashed position in the rear, Beatrice couldn’t see what was happening. “What? What are we doing?” Her voice was strained.