Gideon stepped back to take it in. Judging from the outline, this soldier of the soon-to-be Lord Protector of England would have been quite short by modern standards, but probably about average for the time. And that deep, round dent in the helmet… that was interesting. It looked as if it had been caused by a hammerlike weapon, or perhaps a nearly spent musket ball that hadn’t had the oomph left to penetrate the metal. Either way, it would likely have left a sizeable dent in the skull beneath it too, so it might well be that he was looking at evidence of the cause of death. Directly under that dent, beneath the unfashionably short-cropped hair (which was the reason they were called Roundheads), would have been the coronal suture, separating the frontal and left parietal. Too bad the skull didn’t survive. It would have been interesting-
“Yes, that’s our man,” Madeleine’s plummy, jolly voice announced, “waiting all these years-all these centuries-for you to come and tell us all about him.”
Gideon turned, smiling, to greet her. “Nice exhibit. You’ve already shown quite a lot about him.”
“Why, thank you,” she said, beaming. She wore a skirt-suit of violent green that did nothing to minimize her ample proportions. “Ready to go to work? Or would you care to chat for a while?”
“How about work first, chat later?”
“Very good. A true scientist.”
She unlocked an unmarked door between wall cases and they stepped into a typical museum storeroom, with racks of cheap metal shelving, some holding neatly stacked boxes specifically made for museum storage of specimens and artifacts, others holding cartons specifically made for grocery storage of applesauce or tomato paste. There were also objects large and small-Victorian schoolbooks; a well-worn millstone (how had they gotten that in here?); a cannonball; framed, pressed seaweed specimens-stowed willy-nilly in corners, on chairs and tables, and anyplace else they’d go. One of the two library tables in the room had been cleared, except for a serious-looking one-by-three-foot, lidded cardboard carton at one end, and a smaller Prince’s fish paste carton at the other. In the center, neatly arranged, were the materials and equipment he’d asked for.
“And here…” With a flourish, she removed the lid from the larger carton. “… lies our fallen hero.”
Inside the heavy cardboard box were some of the long bones lying loose, all of them brown and exfoliating, and only a few of them whole. When he picked up the left humerus, bits of bone flaked off and floated to the bottom of the carton.
“Madeleine, you’ll want to stabilize these if you exhibit them. Or even if you don’t. Otherwise they’ll just continue to degrade. Whoever cleaned them did it without preserving them, which didn’t help. Look at all the flakes and crumbs in the bottom.”
“It does look pretty bad,” she said, concerned. “I should have done something before this. What does one use for human bones? Alvar and acetone?”
“Sure, something like that. Whatever you’re used to using on pottery would work.” He looked down for a few seconds at the dry, dun-brown remnants that had once given form and strength to arms and legs. “Madeleine, I’m afraid your doctor may pretty much have said it all. He was human and he was male. As for going beyond that, ageing’s going to be difficult because the ends of most of the bones have been gnawed off…”
She waited for more, and when he didn’t go on, but simply stood gazing at the bones with his hands clasped behind him, she said a bit plaintively: “And that’s all you can tell me?”
But he was plunged in thought, looking at each bone, registering details, and oddities and anomalies, and visually moving on to the next, so that it took a few seconds for the question to penetrate.
“Maybe a little more,” he said at last. “For instance, I can tell you he wasn’t a particularly beefy guy. The bones are relatively slender, with no heavy muscle markings.
“Oh, yes?” she said politely. She’d been hoping for more.
“I can also tell you that he had a rough life.” Gideon picked up the partial left femur, the thigh bone, and showed it to her. The upper third was gone, and the lower, or distal, end had been chewed off by rodent scavengers, but the shaft itself was distinguished by an unnatural bend in the middle, with an ugly, uneven excrescence of bone at the site of the bend.
Madeleine looked at it and drew back a little, the corners of her mouth turned down. “It’s as if… as if it got broken, then somebody stuck it together again-not all that carefully, either-and then stuck all this…” She gestured at the roughened area. “… all this gunk on it to keep it from coming apart again.”
Gideon nodded, smiling. “That’s a pretty good description of what happened, Madeleine. The femur was broken, all right, and then it healed on its own. This ‘gunk’ is the protective callus that forms around a break after a couple of months. If the ends of the pieces don’t quite match up, as they don’t here, it temporarily builds up even more to add strength. This is probably what your doctor thought was a sign of disease.”
“What’s it made of?”
“Bone. Lamellar bone, stronger than the original.” He fingered it. “I don’t think it happened too long before he died. The callus is still pretty big. Very little resorption. A year, maybe less.”
Tentatively following his example, she touched it too and was surprised. “It’s jagged. It’s sharp. Wouldn’t that have been painful?”
“Oh, no doubt about it. The musculature around it would have been inflamed and probably infected. He’d have been in constant pain, and he’d surely have had difficulty walking. This leg would have been a couple of inches shorter than the other. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on crutches.”
“And yet here he was off in the Scillies, far from home, wherever home was. A soldier. Marching.” She shook her head. “The poor man.”
“He had other problems. Look at this.” He proffered another bone.
She complied. “How interesting. Er, what exactly am I looking at?”
“This is a right forearm bone, the radius.” He laid his finger on a point halfway down the shaft. “Now look at this.”
“Oh, I see,” she said, peering at the spot near which he’d laid his finger. “That’s another callus, isn’t it? A smaller one, though. This is a healed fracture too, although it’s not as bad as the other.”
“The callus isn’t as big, no, but the injury is worse. See how the bone below it has this sort of swollen look? That’s not normal.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Okay, see this hole?” He inserted the tip of a ballpoint pen into a small, smoothly rounded opening just below the callus.
“Isn’t that a natural foramen of some kind? It doesn’t look like a puncture.”
“No, it’s not, but it’s not exactly natural, either; that is, he wasn’t born with it. It’s a reaction to infection, to serious infection; an opening to let the pus drain from inside it. In other words, the fracture healed fine, yes, but the bone got infected-and stayed infected. I imagine this poor old guy was just one mass of infection and pain. That might well be what killed him.”
She shivered. “I’m beginning to be sorry I asked you to do this.”
“Well, you know, war isn’t-” Whatever homily had been on his tongue stopped in mid-sentence. “Oh, Lordy,” he said.
Madeleine cringed. “What now, or don’t I want to know?”