and her throat was sore where, in a befuddled attempt to deflect the knife, she had hit herself with her own hand. The lump in her thigh throbbed like hell.
In the town’s deserted market square, on a bench, someone had discarded a copy of the current Whitby Gazette. With half an hour still to kill before 8 a.m., Siân settled down to read it. For some reason though, every single article in the Gazette struck her as monumentally depressing. Not just the sad stories, like the one about the much-loved local janitor dying of cancer (‘He never moaned about his illness and was always cheerful’, according to a colleague – a chip off Saint Hilda’s block, then). No, even the stories about a holidaymaker being struck by lightning and surviving, or a charity snail-eating contest, or the long-overdue restoration of Egton Bridge, brought Siân closer and closer to irrational tears. She flipped the pages faster, through the property section, until she was on the back page, staring at an advertisement for a beauty clinic on the West Cliff. ‘Sun-dome with facial and leg boosters’ it said, and to Siân this seemed like the most heartbreakingly sad phrase she’d ever read this side of the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Get a grip, she counselled herself, and laid the paper aside. She noticed that someone had joined her on the bench: an obese, spiky-haired punkette, an unusual sight in Whitby – almost as unusual as a monk. Siân goggled just a few seconds too long at the infestation of silver piercings on the girl’s brow, nose and ears, and was given a warning scowl in return. Chastened, she looked down. At the punkette’s feet sat a dog, to help the girl beg perhaps. Apart from the pictogram for ‘anarchy’ doodled on his wheat-coloured flank in black felt-tip, he was a very ordinary-looking dog, a Labrador maybe – nowhere near as beautiful as Hadrian.
Face it: compared to Hadrian, every other dog was plain.
At ten to eight, Siân began to climb the hundred and ninety-nine steps and, gazing for a moment across the harbour, she suddenly spotted Hadrian and Magnus on the other side, two tiny figures sprinting along Marine Parade. Her melancholy turned at once to a sort of indignant excitement. Why would they choose there to run instead of here on her side? They must be avoiding her! Surely nobody could prefer the stink of raw fish and the pierside’s dismal panorama of amusement parlours and pubs to what lay at the foot of the church steps …
Her sudden, fervid impulse to jump up and down and wave to Mack, despite the fact that there was no chance of him noticing, alarmed her – clearly, she was farther gone than she’d thought, and should make an immediate start on restoring her sanity before it was too late.
I am here, she reminded herself, to work. I am not here to be torn apart. I am not here to be treated like dirt.
She imagined her emotions embodied in the form of a hysterical novice nun, and her judgement as the wise and kindly abbess, counselling restraint. She visualised the bare interior of one of Saint Hilda’s prayer-cells lit up gold and amber with sunbeams, a merciful ebbing away of confusion, a soul at peace.
* * *
When Siân reached the burial site, Pru was already lifting off the blue tarpaulins, exposing the damp soil. Towards the edges of the excavation, the clay was somewhat soggier than it needed to be, having absorbed some rainfall over the weekend in addition to its ritual hosing last thing Friday afternoon. Siân was glad her appointed rectangle was towards the middle of the quarter acre. All right, maybe Saint Hilda wouldn’t have approved of her desire to keep her knees dry at the expense of her fellow toilers, but the sheath of Tubigrip under her tights lost some of its elastic every time she washed it, so she’d rather it stayed clean, thank you very much.
‘Sleep well?’ asked Pru, rolling up another tarpaulin, exposing Siân’s own appointed shallow grave.
‘No, not really,’ said Siân.
‘Lemme guess – you stayed up to watch that movie about the robbery that goes wrong. The one with … oh, what’s-her-name?’ Regurgitation of facts was not Pru’s forte. ‘The one who’s gained so much weight recently.’
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue,’ said Siân.
Jeff was next to arrive, a wizened old hippy who seemed to have been on every significant dig in Britain since the war. Then Keira and Trevor, a husband-and-wife team who were due to lay down their trowels and mattocks tomorrow and flee to the warmer and better-paid climes of a National Geographic dig in the Middle East. Who would replace them? Very nice people, according to Nina, the supervisor. Coming all the way from north Wales.
By ten past, everyone was on site and working, distributed like medieval potato harvesters over the sub-divided ground. Fourteen living bodies, scratching in the ground for the subtle remains of dead ones, peering at gradations in soil colour that could signal the vanished presence of a coffin or a pelvis, winkling pale fragments into the light which could, please God, be teeth.
The skeletons exhumed so far had all been buried facing east, the direction of Jerusalem, to help Judgement Day run more smoothly. Four years from now, when the research would be completed and the bones re-buried with the aid of a JCB and vicar to bless them, they’d have to sort out their direction for themselves.
Today, one of the girls was in a bad mood, her mouth clownishly downturned, her eyes avoiding contact with the young man working next to her. Yesterday, they’d been exchanging secret smiles, winks, sotto voce consultations. Today, they did their best to pretend they weren’t kneeling side by side; separated by mere inches, they cast expectant glances not at each other but at Nina, as if hoping she might assign them to different plots farther apart. A cautionary spectacle, thought Siân. A living parable (as Saint Hilda might call it) of the fickleness of human love.
‘I think I may’ve found something,’ said someone several hours later, holding up an encrusted talon which might, once it was X-rayed, prove to be a coffin pin.
At four-thirty, as Siân was walking past Saint Mary’s churchyard on her way down to the hundred and ninety-nine steps, she spotted Hadrian’s head poking up over the topmost one.
‘Hush!’ he barked in greeting. ‘Hush, hush!’
Siân hesitated, then waved. Magnus was nowhere to be seen.
Hadrian ran towards her, pausing only to scale the church’s stone boundary and sniff the base of Caedmon’s Cross. Deciding not to piss on England’s premier Anglo-Saxon poet, he bounded back onto the path and had an exuberant reunion with Siân.
By the time Magnus joined them, she was on one knee, her hands buried deep in the dog’s mane, and Hadrian was jumping up and down to lick her face.
‘Excuse me, I’m just going overboard here,’ she said, too delighted with the dog’s affection to care what a fool she must look.
Mack wasn’t wearing his running gear this afternoon; instead, his powerful frame was disguised in a button-down shirt, Chinos and some sort of expensive suede-y jacket. He was carrying a large plastic bag, but apart from that he looked like a young doctor who’d answered his beeper at a London brasserie and been persuaded to make a house call. Siân had trouble accepting he could look like this; she’d imagined him (she realised now) permanently dressed in shorts and T-shirt, running around Whitby in endless circles. She laughed at the thought, her inhibitions loosened by the excesses she was indulging with Hadrian. Casting her eyes down in an effort to reassure Mack that she wasn’t laughing at him, she caught sight of his black leather shoes, huge things too polished to be true. She giggled even more. Her own steel-capped boots were slathered in mud, and her long bedraggled skirt was filthy at the knees.
‘You and Hadrian better
