“Out here, and after two hundred years, the wood coffin will probably be gone.”
“And the bones?” Hugo pressed.
“Whether or not bones survive depends on the soil type and water drainage in the area. If you have an area that frequently floods or an area where the water table fluctuates, the bone would disintegrate faster. If the climate is relatively dry and/or the soil has good drainage, the bones could still be in great condition, you would be able to pick them up and they won’t fall apart in your hands. In fact, I’ve excavated burials that dated back to before Classical Greece — so around 550–500 BCE — and some were in great shape, while others turned to dust in your hands.”
“The copse is pretty elevated,” Georges Bassin said.
“It is,” Winkler agreed. “So I think we might be in luck, assuming we can find the right spot.”
“And the odds of that?” Lerens asked.
“Ah, yes. I apologize, I didn’t mean to toy with your hopes,” Winkler smiled. “But I think I already did. Shall we go dig?”
The procession behind the backhoe was slow and silent, but Hugo knew that everyone’s nerves were keyed high. Finding a skeleton, a little boy’s bones, would confirm his theory and add to the evidence supporting the idea that Alexandra Tourville had blackmailed Charles Lake.
But Hugo also knew that everyone in the group saw this mission as more than just a collecting of evidence. Rather, they were in search of a child abandoned to his grave by his parents, a mother and father who in simple terms had replaced him with the kidnapped heir to the throne of France.
As they started up the last rise to the stand of trees, Hugo looked over the fields and saw the lines of police officers holding back the throng of media. News trucks and reporters’ cars filled every available lay-by and field entrance, the tiny bodies of reporters milling around each other looking for the best angle, the best shot toward the woods.
Jennifer Winkler led them into the trees on a grassy path just wide enough for the backhoe. Dr. Alain Joust and two evidence technicians were in attendance; they’d help Winkler photograph and preserve whatever they found for analysis back in Paris. Marie and Georges Bassin had already given DNA samples, eager to help identify their long-dead ancestor if at all possible.
The site was near the eastern edge of the trees, the place with the best view of the Bassin house and the surrounding countryside. Winkler had cleared the area by hand and the depression in the soil was plain for them all to see. They stood to one side as the backhoe operator took off a layer of dirt, peeling it away like a strip of bark from a tree. Winkler stood closest, supervising and directing the operator with hand signals, having him strip out another inch-deep layer, and then another. She held up her hand for him to wait, then knelt to study the soil.
“Look, you can see,” she said to the group, who inched closer. “The soil here in the burial site is darker. Even after so much time, it’s less compact than the lighter soil around it.”
She stood and gestured for the operator to resume, and Hugo could see the concentration on his face as he took off more layers of soil, inch by inch. Winkler’s eyes were glued to the ground, and as the bucket of the hoe dipped into and out of the hole she held her arms in a cross, telling him to stop altogether.
She knelt by the grave and waved the investigation team over. “Look closely, see how the soil is slightly lighter?” A soft mumble as that fact was acknowledged. She leant in closer. “And look here, see the very faint red lines in the dirt?”
“That can’t be blood,” George said, “surely not after—”
“No, no,” Winkler said. “They must have used nails to hold the coffin together. I wondered if they’d still be here, and we might find some still. But what you’re seeing here are stains in the soil were the nails resided after the coffin disintegrated.
She was, Hugo saw, a teacher as well as a technician, enjoying her work and appreciating a good audience. But now she went to work in silence, Hugo and the others drifting away to give her space. She spread a square blanket of canvas by the hole, to lie on and to collect evidence, Hugo assumed. She began working by hand, at first kneeling beside the hole and then lying on her belly before finally stepping gingerly inside, digging and scraping with a hand-trowel and some other tools Hugo couldn’t name. She dug around like a surgeon, with gloved and careful hands, to find what she knew to be in there and Hugo continued to watch, fascinated. Beside him, though, Tom was getting antsy, and if he couldn’t do anything physical then he wanted to talk.
“So you think Lake knew he was a Frenchman?” he asked Hugo, keeping his voice low, as if they were in church.
“I doubt it. He thought he had native American blood, and I suppose he may have. But the French thing, no, his reaction was too extreme.”
“You mean, killing Alexie?”
“Right, killing Alexie. That makes me think it came as a shock, made him totally rethink who he was. Plus, if he’d known about his heritage I don’t think he’d have been so anti-Europe. Of all the bad things you can say about Lake, I never really saw him as a hypocrite.”
“Fair point.”
“So you tell me something.” Hugo watched his friend closely. “The Queen Mary’s captain told me you turned your voice recorder on, he saw you do it. Yet five minutes later, Lake confesses to everything and jumps from the ship. And somehow none of that is preserved.”
“Ah, Hugo.” Tom pursed his lips. “Everything that happened in that cabin, from his confession to his going overboard, all of that was his doing, one hundred percent voluntary.”
“And that’s all you can tell me?”
“Are you worried about his demise, or the state of my conscience?”
Hugo chuckled. “Well, let’s just say I’m glad to hear you acknowledge a conscience.”
Tom raised an eyebrow, then leaned in and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Fuck you, Marston. I’m a goddamn saint.”
They both looked up as Winkler pushed herself to her knees and called out, “I have something!”
The investigators moved in closer and two of the evidence technicians joined them, one firing up his video camera to record the actual excavation. The other held a stack of paper bags into which the bones would go, the paper absorbing any moisture and preventing formation of mold or fungi.
It took two hours, but one by one the bones of a little boy came out of the soil and into the light. Hugo found the scene bizarre, like a funeral in reverse; awed and respectful watchers gathered around the lip of the child’s grave, holding onto their emotions as his bones were freed from the muddy and anonymous hole that had held him in death as his fragile remains were raised from the dark and brought back into the light, into the land of the living. The last piece to come out caused Camille Lerens to utter a prayer and Tom to rest a hand on Hugo’s shoulder, the communion necessary to withstand the sight of a mud-encrusted skull lifted from the grave and placed like a holy relic on the canvas, where it sat looking at them in wide-eyed surprise before another set of gloved hands picked it up and gently placed it in a cardboard box.
Hugo, Tom, and Camille Lerens stopped on the way back to Paris at a restaurant that Tom had read about somewhere, an article declaring it world-beating for its champagne coq-au-vin.
“Don’t worry,” Tom said as they sat down, “the alcohol burns off in the pot.”
“I’m not worried,” Hugo said. “Just wondering which wine to order.”
“Hey, go for it. Be a good test, and you can’t go on martyring yourself forever.”
“Just for that, I’ll drink sparkling water.”
“You hate sparkling water.”
“That’s what martyrs do,” Hugo said. “Anyway, the stuff helps me think.”