The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps Read online

  It was Monday afternoon before Siân saw Magnus again. In the morning, she loitered around the town centre before work, in an irritable, shaky state. Her nightmare hadn’t yet receded, 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 not get too friendly,’ Mack remarked. ‘He might run off with one of your precious old bones.’

  It was such a feeble joke that Siân didn’t think anyone could possibly blame her for ignoring it. She heaved herself to her feet and, fancying she could feel his eyes on her dowdiness, she sobered up in a hurry.

  ‘H
ave you read any of the books and pamphlets?’ she said.

  He 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?’

  ‘Gold, precious jewels … Bracelets and swords that can be buffed up to a sheen for the English Heritage brochures …’

  Siân was determined not to be goaded by his tone. Be firm with him, she counselled herself. Firm but dignified.

  ‘These people were early Christians,’ she reminded him. ‘They didn’t believe in taking anything with them when they died. You know: “Naked came I into the world, and naked—”’

  ‘Ha!’ he scoffed, hoisting up a stiff index finger in a theatrical gesture of triumph. ‘I’ve read up on this stuff now, don’t forget! What about all those fancy trinkets they dug up in the 1920s, eh? Brooches, rings and whatever? Saint Hilda’s nuns were rolling in it, weren’t they?’

  Siân leaned down, scorning to look at him, but instead stroking Hadrian tenderly. She spoke directly into the dog’s furry, trusting face, as if she’d decided there was a great deal more point talking to Hadrian than to his master. ‘People nowadays would love to believe the nuns were as corrupt as Hell,’ she murmured. ‘Did you know that, Hadrian?’ She ruffled his ears, and nodded emphatically as though the shameless cynicism of humans was likely to beggar the belief of an innocent canine. ‘It makes people feel smug, you see. Gives them a warm glow, to think of those religious idealists betraying their vows of poverty and swanning around in fancy gowns and jewellery.’

  ‘And didn’t they?’

  Siân turned her attention to Magnus, looking him straight in the eyes while her hands carried on stroking. ‘I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. Abbeys weren’t just for monastic orders, you know; they were places of prayer and seclusion for … well, anybody really. All sorts of rich people ended up in them – unmarried princesses, widowed queens … They’d retire there, servants and all. I like to think it’s those powerful ladies that left behind the rings and brooches and buckles and whatnot.’

  ‘You’d like to think,’ he teased.

  ‘Yes, I’d like to think,’ she said, barely able to keep a sharp hiss of annoyance out of her voice. ‘If there’s no way of proving anything, why be cynical? Why not choose to think the best of people?’

  His eyes twinkled with mischief.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to do!’ he protested mock-innocently. ‘These old nuns sound as if they had a pretty dismal time. I want to cheer ’em up with a bit of the good life.’

  Siân was imagining the 12th-century ruins she knew so well, trying to reconstruct, in her mind, the lost 7th-century original that the Vikings had destroyed.

  ‘Funny what “the good life” means now …’ she said wistfully. ‘And what it used to mean …’

  ‘Back in the Middle Ages when you were a nun?’ he ribbed her. Then, sensing he’d gone too far, he hoisted up his plastic bag and carefully removed the cardboard box from it.

  ‘Anyway, I want to show you something. Something I’m sure you’ll appreciate more than anyone else, being a – what was it again? – a conservationist?’

  ‘Conservator,’ she said, intrigued despite herself as Mack opened the
box to reveal, in a nest of crumpled toilet paper, a glass liquor bottle without any label, discoloured and dull, clearly antique. Inside the bottle was a large candle – no, not a candle, a tight scroll of papers. Water damage, evidently followed by ill-managed drying, had fused the layers of the scroll together into a puckered cylinder. There was handwritten text on the outermost layer, and the few capital letters Siân could make out at a glance were unmistakably 19th-or even 18th-century.

  I want, I want, I want, she thought.

  Mack held the bottle up close to her face, turning it slowly so the scroll revealed its text like the beginning of a web-page stored in the world’s most ancient VDU.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You can still read it.’

  Confession of Thos. Peirson, in the Year of Our Lord 1788

  In the full and certain Knowledge that my Time is nigh, for my good Wife has even now

  That was as much of the text as was visible before it swallowed itself inside the roll.

  ‘Where did you find this?’ Too late, she heard the tremor of excitement in her voice, and – damn! – he noticed too, and grinned.

  ‘I didn’t find it, my dad did. It turned up in the foundations of Tin Ghaut when the town planners demolished it in 1959. He took it home before the bulldozers came back.’

  Siân watched him replace the bottle in its nest of toilet paper. She took a breath, priming her voice for what she hoped would be a casual, matter-of-fact tone.

  ‘That scroll – it could be unrolled, you know. We could find out what this man was confessing.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Mack, fingering the glass regretfully. ‘I’ve tried to get the papers out. With forceps, even. But the paper’s gone rigid, and it’s wider than the neck of the bottle. Of course I could just break it open, but the thing is, the glass never got broken all this time, even when it was dug up by bloody great earthmovers. My dad thought that was a miracle, and it is kind of cool, I must admit. Smashing it now would be … I don’t know … wrong somehow.’

  Siân was touched by this glimmer of rudimentary morality when it came to preserving ancient things, but also impatient with his ignorance.