There was the delicate sound of a musical triangle being rung for attention, and they turned to see the pale, stately Mr. Moreton standing in front of one of the gun ports, delicately striking it with a metal rod that he held with pinky extended. Tink. Tink. Tink.
Kozlov, who had clambered onto the two stone steps leading up to the port, waved happily to his guests, arms high, like a feisty bantamweight entering the ring. The sun, setting directly behind him, turned his wild hair into a halo of steel wool.
“Here comes the speech,” Julie said. “Remember, you promised.”
But Kozlov uttered only four words, thoroughly garbled, but full of good cheer.
“Hawkay, evwerybawdyss… lat’s itt!”
“ What did the man say?” someone next to Gideon asked. “Was he speaking Russian?”
“No, English,” Gideon said. “He said, ‘Okay, everybody, let’s eat.’” And to Julie: “And I’m certainly not going to argue with that.”
The dungeon was indeed “pretty nice,” as dungeons went, with coves and niches that roughly corresponded to the castle’s star-shaped exterior, and a paramecium-shaped bar in the small, open central area. The rough-finished stone walls bore a clean coat of white paint and were adorned with eighteenth-century weaponry and navigational equipment. At one end of the bar, a bronze plate screwed to the top said: “African hardwood from the wreck of HMS Retort, sunk by French gunfire off the Stones in 1799.”
Because there was no single space large enough to hold all the guests at one table, people were seated in groups of three and four in the various niches. Gideon’s place was at a table also apparently made from the remains of the unfortunate Retort, along with Rudy Walker and Madeleine Goodfellow, the director of the Isles of Scilly Museum in Hugh Town. Earlier, Madeleine had announced that on Wednesday, the consortium’s midpoint, the museum would be pleased to host a picnic-dinner for the participants on Holgate’s Green, the pleasant little park at the other end of the village. Kozlov had graciously accepted on behalf of all.
The other person at the table, according to the place cards, was Cheryl Pinckney, Donald’s wife, to whom Gideon had been introduced at the reception. But her chair was empty.
Madeleine, a buxom, amiable woman in her fifties who wore her glasses on a lanyard and several rounds of jangling jewelry on her wrist, and who was given to knowledgeable if somewhat disjointed prattling, made conversation easy-or rather, unnecessary-at first by talking at some length about the history of the castle while the roasted-vegetable salads were served and eaten. Star Castle had been built in 1593 by order of Queen Elizabeth, as a defensive response to the “Spanish Menace,” and had often seen action through the centuries. As for the dungeon in which they presently sat, yes, it had been used as a prison for enemy sailors and soldiers early in the seventeenth century. Later, when the Scillies had become a sort of in-country exile for aristocrats who had gotten themselves in trouble of one kind or another with the crown, Star Castle had once again served as a prison. But this time its inhabitants, being of a higher class, were usually transferred directly from the Tower of London and lodged-often with their servants in attendance-in the “apartments” in which the consortium participants were now staying. In 1646, the future Charles II, on the run from the Roundheads, had taken refuge at the castle; and in 1847 Queen Victoria had taken tea in what had then been, and still was, the lounge on the second floor. In 1921, the Prince of Wales, later to become the Duke of Windsor, had lunched…
After a while, this subject, extensive as it was, petered out, and conversation slowed to a crawl, what with Cheryl’s being absent and Rudy as good as absent. He sat in silence, drawn in on himself like a bird in a pelting rain, moodily nursing his drink and no doubt brooding upon the vindictive consequences visited upon free thinkers who had the temerity to challenge the established orthodoxies of their field.
“And what is your field, Gideon?” Madeleine asked with a well-bred show of interest as the salads were cleared away. She had a fluty, mezzo-soprano voice that would have gone perfectly with a lorgnette, Gideon thought with a smile, suddenly realizing who it was she reminded him of. She could have doubled in looks, and even in manner, for Margaret Dumont, that grande-dame of the silver screen whom Groucho Marx had persecuted and punctured with such relentless glee in movie after movie. (“Captain, this leaves me speechless.” “Well, see that you remain that way.” “Mr. Hammer, you must leave my room. We must have regard for certain conventions.” “One guy isn’t enough, she’s gotta have a convention.”)
“I’m a physical anthropologist,” Gideon said. “I teach at the University of Washington.”
“No!” She put down her wineglass. “Do you mean you know about bones?”
Rudy surfaced. “Does he know about bones!” he muttered with a laugh. “Lady, you’re talking to the Skeleton Detective himself.”
“The, er, Skeleton…”
“I do a fair amount of forensic consulting,” Gideon explained. Not for the first time did he wish to hell the reporter who’d pasted that nickname-as impossible to peel off as a stuck-on label from a tomato-on him all those years ago. “Mostly on skeletal remains.”
“How totally fascinating.” Her interest now was genuine enough. She pulled her chair closer to the table and closer to Gideon. He caught a strong whiff of talcum powder. “I wonder-were you planning on visiting the museum?”
“Of course. I’m looking forward to it.”
Julie had told him about the place. “It’s your kind of museum,” she’d said. “Small, simple but thorough, nicely done. Nothing fancy. You’d like it.”
“Any skeletal material?” he’d asked Julie hopefully.
The answer had been no, not that she recalled, but still there’d seemed enough of interest to occupy him for an enjoyable hour or two sometime during the week.
Madeleine moved her wineglass over the table in coy, tentative circles. “Well, while you’re there, I wonder if you might… that is, I can’t help but wonder… Well, you see, we have some human skeletal remains in storage. There’s one set in particular that I was hoping might be of interest to you-a leftover casualty from the Civil War, one of Cromwell’s soldiers. They found it sixty years ago, all scrunched up at the bottom of a dried-up well here on Garrison Hill, near the outer walls, costume and all. Well, the costume’s been on display ever since the museum opened, but the bones have been stored in the basement all this time.”
“Are you asking me to look at them for you?” Gideon asked.
“Yes, if you’d be interested.”
Bless you, he thought. What he’d told Julie about visiting the local Bronze and Iron Age sites was certainly true-as an anthropologist specializing in prehistory, he couldn’t help but be interested in them. But the Scillies had hundreds of such sites, and, frankly, one visit to a “village” consisting of a few scars in the ground and two or three hearth or grinding stones still in place went a long way. If he were down in the dirt with a brush and trowel in his hands, digging away, uncovering the past himself, that would have been one thing; but seeing them as a tourist-just wandering around pretending to make sense of the plaques-would get old pretty fast, and he’d been wondering just what it was he was really going to do with his time.
“I’m interested, all right,” he said.
“There isn’t much left, of course; just some arm and leg bones. Still, I’d love to exhibit them with the costume, don’t you see, but what could I say about them? I don’t know enough about them to say anything interesting-you know, how old he was, or… or whatever it is that a person like you could deduce. I asked my doctor to tell us what he could about them, but he just took one look at them and laughed. They’re probably human and probably male; that was as far as he was willing to put himself out.”
Gideon smiled. “Pretty safe guess, considering that they were wearing a seventeenth-century soldier’s uniform.”