My Lady of the Bog (6 page)

I studied the inscription and its transliteration, a copy of which Rumple had faxed:

INGESUNAMEN

RIVEN NAT ÞAS HALYRUNA

THAT YBONDEN ON HIRE BED

ÞA ILESAGALBEMARLE

With the assistance of an online runic translator and a Middle English dictionary, I went over every rune and letter, but could find no fault with Rumple’s work. In runic inscriptions, double letters are dropped, as if the effort of cutting the first discourages repetition. Thus, I could see in the final line how Rumple had gotten the reading: “illy saga Albemarle.” He had added what he assumed to be a second missing
l
and
a
. Based on their style, he dated both the runes and the Middle English to the thirteenth century.

Now it was my turn to look for reassurances. I rang the coroner.

“Ever study runes?”

“Runes?”

“I’m trying to clear up a bit of a mystery.”

“So are the police. Where is two hundred stone of missing treasure?”

“Look, there’s something you ought to know. You’ll be hearing it soon enough.”

“I’m under arrest.”

I ignored the remark. “Rumple translated the runes on the stakes. And . . . well, amazingly, our Lady’s name seems to be . . .
Albemarle
.”

Silence.

“I see . . .” he said guardedly. “And what precisely does it say?”

I read him a modern English rendition:

In Jesus’ name

Break not these holy runes

That bind to her bed [or grave]

The evil saga Albemarle

There was a longish pause. Then he said, in a childish whine, “I suppose, we could always put them back.”

“Put
what
back?”

“The stakes.”

I barked a laugh. “It’s a bit late for that.”

Chapter 7

T
he revelation of my Lady’s name I found at once disquieting and exciting; disquieting in that I still couldn’t figure out
how
in the world Strugnell had known it, even if I was thrilled to know it now. I turned it over on my tongue.
Albemarle
. It only made me feel that much closer to her.
Albemarle, my lovely; Albemarle, my sweet
. It was a handsome name: antique and good. It was the name, in short, of a girl I could get involved with.

Now that we knew what my Lady was called, discovering her identity seemed somehow less daunting and, booting my computer, I began to try to track her down. Was she someone historical? Someone well-known? Had there been an infamous enchantress, Albemarle the Fey, of whom, in my ignorance, I was unaware? For once she had been greatly feared. Not only was she staked, but her burial on a welter of political borders only reinforced the supposition that her murderer had buried her there in order to confuse her spirit. It was the same logic that buries criminals at crossroads—as it reduces to one in four the odds their vengeful ghosts will follow you home.

I googled “Albemarle.” But apart from the Honourable Rufus Keppel, the dashing, present Tenth Earl of, most of the British “Albemarles” were an odd assortment of dukes and countesses, the only “Lady Albemarle” of note being one Annie Lennox (
not
of the
Eurythmics
!) who’d died in 1789.

Nor was the normally instructive Oxford English Dictionary any more helpful. “Albemarle” was unlisted, and the closest I could come to it were
alb
and
marl
.

Alb
was a Latin prefix meaning “white” as in
album
, a book of white or blank pages. (I considered, briefly, a Moorish derivation, as in
al-gebra
and
al-cohol
, but it seemed farfetched.)

Marl
, according to the OED, was “an ancient word of unknown origin” denoting a type of lime-rich soil. A descriptor was often placed before it: as in
blue
marl or
plenus
marl, depending upon the soil’s color and composition.

But while
marl
led nowhere, her name’s initial syllable,
alb
, was intriguing. While
white
remains the color of the British Goddess, due to the effects of “linguistic drift,” its original sense has been reversed and it has come to mean its polar opposite: “good,” as in the terms, “white witch, white magic.” And given my Lady’s line of work, such a term might fit quite well, especially if Albemarle were not my Lady’s name, but
title
.

For the grave goods accompanying her (i.e., the golden hoard) would seem to indicate a person of the highest social status, not a hated, wicked witch. So that was a contradiction there.

But if Albemarle
were
her title, its linkage to the British peerage seemed to me remote. English countesses weren’t condemned as witches and buried nude in unmarked graves.

“You’ve read his famous monograph, I’m sure:
Human Skulls from the River Thames: Their Dating and Significance
.”

“Uh, yes,” I said, almost afraid to shake the hand that had written such a grisly title—though it did appear to be normal enough, attached as it was to the white-coated arm of the eminent paleopathologist, Dr. Harvey Phelps Morton.

A smaller coterie than I’d expected had gathered to witness my Lady’s postmortem. In addition to myself and Morton, there were Rumple, Strugnell, a photographer and a police representative.

We began by removing the peat from the body. This was accomplished with hatchets and saws—the peat not in direct contact with the corpse being cut away and saved for further study.

The procedure’s second phase was oddly intimate. We worked with wooden spatulas and trowels scraping away at the peat that remained, then using soft brushes and jets of cold water to remove the last vestiges clinging to her flesh. I had never bathed a naked woman, much less a dead one, and her skin was so soft and tender that I felt—you will laugh—like I was bathing a little child.

Autopsying mummies is controversial. The “preservationists” maintain that mummies are “people” and should not be dissected. But to my way of thinking, mummies are
corpses
: if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have been buried in the first place. And who’s to decide that a knife is invasive but an endoscope is not?

Nonetheless, I found the autopsy difficult to watch. I undid the pins that were holding it and let fall her wet dark hair.

“Well, here’s something,” Morton observed, tweezing from her scalp a square piece of padding. “Probably from a horse’s mane. She was using it to give her hair lift. Stylish bird, isn’t she?”

This detail, like her pierced ears, moved me out of all proportion to its importance. I wondered, had she pinned up her hair knowing she was going off to die, to expose her skull and tender nape to the shock of the knife or rope? Or had she pinned it up thinking of her lover, never suspecting such a thing would accompany her to her grave and that a millennium later, men whom she would never know on an afternoon she would never see would be studying it intently in the subbasement of a British hospital morgue?

Morton unbound her hands, and as he did, I noticed again the thread on her wrist, whose meaning, I thought, would likely never be known.

Morton sliced the blind that had closed her eyes and examined her scalp: “Perimortem fractures of the posterior fossa, both left and right sides.”

“In other words,” I said, “she was hit on the head.”

“And it didn’t kill her. Though it likely knocked her out.”

I hoped so. I didn’t wish to think she had watched herself be murdered. As Morton moved from head to throat, he uncovered a rawhide noose cinched so tightly it had disappeared into her flesh. Just below it, the carotid was cut.

“Well, look at this!” Thin strips of flesh had been removed from her breasts, arousing the fear that unauthorized samples already had been harvested. But if so, Morton said, it wasn’t by any modern researcher, as the wounds were contemporaneous with her death.

Morton continued his external examination. “She has several fresh insect bites on her buttocks, received, it appears, just prior to death.”

He probed. “No bruising of the inner thighs. Vagina appears . . . normal. No tearing, no evidence of sexual assault. Though we’ll take a swab and test for semen.”

The external examination completed, I cringed at the sight of the first incision. She’d been preserved so well so long, it seemed like a desecration.

“Well, here’s a surprise,” Morton exclaimed. “No heart.”

“You mean it’s disintegrated?” Strugnell wondered.

“Removed. The aorta and vena cava are cut.” He raised her arm, revealing below it the open lips of an incision. “So that’s how it was done.”

“How macabre,” Sir August intoned.

“Well,” Morton said, “she was long dead when it happened.” This was a comfort.

He inspected her lungs. “The alveoli are charged with fluid.”

Thus, it was no longer a question of finding the cause of her death, but determining which of three equally brutal means had killed her. For my Lady had suffered a triple death: she’d been strangled, drowned and bled, after first being clubbed.

“Seems like a case of ‘overkill,’ ” Strugnell observed. “Why would anyone want to kill the poor Judy three ways to Sunday?”

I suggested: “Perhaps as a sacrifice to three different gods. Odin liked blood and hanging. Teutates liked his victims drowned. And Thor threw ‘thunderbolts.’ If you look at the blows to the back of her head, I’ll wager they were made with a hammer. I would also bet she was struck three times.”

There was a moment of suspense as the wounds to her head were reexamined in this light. Then Dr. Morton said, “I do believe Dr. Donne’s correct.”

“Mr
. Donne.” For I had no desire to claim degrees I didn’t hold.

But Rumple had a major objection. (I’d have been disappointed if he hadn’t. Objections are the coin of academics; they pull them out when they want to do business.)

“Interesting. Though there is one fact your theory overlooks. How could her executioners be pagans when the runes begin, ‘In Jesus’ name’?”

The heads, which had swung in Rumple’s direction, now swung back in mine, like the audience at Wimbledon. My serve had been returned.