snorted. ‘You sound like a Jehovah’s Witness, on a follow-up visit.’
‘Never mind that. Have you read them?’ Be firm with him, she was thinking.
‘Of course,’ he smiled.
‘And?’
‘Very interesting,’ he said, watching her straighten her shapeless cagoule. ‘More interesting than my research, anyway.’
As they fell into step with each other towards the town, Siân rifled her memory for the subject of his paper. It took her a good fifteen seconds to realise she’d never actually asked him about it.
They’d reached the bench on the resting-place near the top of the hundred and ninety-nine steps, and he indicated with a wave of his hand that they should sit down. This they did, with Hadrian settled against Siân’s skirt, and Mack carefully lowering the plastic bag onto the ground between his lustrous shoes. Judging by the sharp corners bulging through the plastic, it contained a large cardboard box.
‘That’s not your research paper in there, is it?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘A surprise.’
Michael, one of Siân’s colleagues from the dig, walked past the bench where they were sitting. He nodded in greeting as he descended the steps, looking slightly sheepish, unsure whether to introduce himself to Siân’s new friend or pretend he hadn’t trespassed on their privacy. It was a gauche little encounter, lasting no more than a couple of seconds, but Siân was ashamed to note that it gave her a secret thrill; how sweet it was to be mistaken for a woman sharing intimacy with a man! Let the whole world pass by this bench, in an orderly procession, to witness proof incarnate that she wasn’t lonely!
For God’s sake, get a grip! she reproached herself.
‘My research,’ said Mack, smirking a little, ‘examines whether psittacosis is transferable from human to human.’ His smirk widened into a full grin as she stared back at him with a blank expression. Siân wondered if he’d make her ask, but, commendably, he didn’t. ‘Psittacosis,’ he explained, ‘is what’s popularly called parrot fever – if popular is the right word for a rare disease. It’s a virus, and you catch it by inhaling the powdered … uh … faeces of caged birds. In humans, it manifests as a kind of pneumonia that’s highly resistant to antibiotics. It used to be fatal, once upon a time.’
Siân wondered just how long ago, in his view, ‘once upon a time’ was. She, after all, had had to convince herself, after reading the ‘Health & Safety’ documents covering archaeological digs, that she wasn’t frightened of catching anthrax or the Black Death.
‘And this disease of yours,’ she said. ‘Is it transferable from human to human?’
‘The answer used to be “Maybe”. I’m aiming to change that to a definite “No”.’
‘Hmm,’ said Siân. Now that she’d been sitting for a minute, she was suddenly rather weary, and her left leg ached and felt swollen. ‘Well, I’m sure that’ll put some people’s minds at rest.’ It sounded condescending, and she had the uneasy feeling she was being a bitch. ‘No, really. With diseases, it’s always better to know, isn’t it?’ An inane comment, which reminded her of the lump in her thigh she was so determined to ignore. Irritably, she wiped her face. ‘Sorry, I’m tired.’
‘Another long day exhuming the dead?’
‘No, I just didn’t sleep so well last night.’
Again to his credit, he didn’t pry. Instead he asked, ‘Where do you keep them all, anyway? All the skeletons, I mean. Sixty of them, I read somewhere.’ He nodded towards the East Cliff car park. ‘Enough to fill a tourist bus.’
Siân giggled, picturing a large party of skeletons driving away, taking their last glimpse of Whitby through steamy coach windows as they began their long trip home.
‘We’ve only found a few complete skeletons,’ she said. ‘Usually we find half-skeletons, or bits and pieces. Clay isn’t as kind to bones as people imagine; in fact, they’d last longer just about anywhere else. Stuck in the ground, they crumble, they soften, they dissolve. Sometimes we’ll find just a discoloration in the clay. A tell-tale shadow. That’s why we have to be so careful, and so slow.’
‘And these people you’ve dug up – who were they?’
A single word, Angles, sprang to Siân’s mind, which made her feel a pang of guilty sorrow. How ruthless History was, taking as raw material the fiercely independent lives of sixty human individuals – sixty souls who, in life, fought for their right to be appreciated as unique, to earn the pride of their parents, the gratitude of their children, the loyalty of their colleagues – blending them all into the dirt, reducing them to a single archaic word.
‘They were … Angles, probably,’ she sighed. ‘Difficult to be sure, until we do Carbon-14 dating on them. They lived after the Romans, anyway, and before the Norman Conquest.’
‘Any treasures?’
‘Treasures?’
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