My Lady of the Bog

1551–1623

Part I

ALBEMARLE

I met a Lady in the Meads

Full beautiful, a faery’s child

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild—

—John Keats

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Chapter 1

A peat digger found her, three-and-a-half feet deep in the bog, lying on her back, staring up at the heavens; though this was not revealed until the peat was later stripped from her body . . .

What the digger—an excitable lad named Sam—struck first was a shoe. It was a peculiar shoe, shaped like a kayak. Still, he had thought little of it. Items like it were forever turning up in Holders Fen, as if the bog were that place where all lost things—the key to the garden shed, the clip-on shades someone swiped from your room—eventually resurface, sooner or later. Except with this shoe, a foot was still in it!

Frightened, the boy pitched the spade and ran, screaming bloody Murther! Aroused by his cry, and misunderstanding, his father and brothers came careening around the hedgerows, sickles in their fists, ready to do battle with the murderers, if any. But there was only the splendid late April morning spread out upon the bog, in the middle of which lay the corpse—or, more precisely, the foot: a woman’s shapely, well-turned member, which, though stained deep amber by the peat and water, looked almost as fresh as if it had tripped moments ago through the morning dew.

By the time I arrived, the village constable was there. A local girl had disappeared and it was feared at first it might be she. It was the constable who had directed the first partial disinterment—so that her face and the front of her body could be viewed. I gazed upon her. She was dressed in slippers, hide-side out. Otherwise, her corpse was nude. The red chevron of her pubic hair was visible, as were her rib cage and round, high breasts with surprisingly large areolas, the size and tint of old copper English pence.

But her face was the miracle: it was at once beautiful, wild and pained. A strip of cloth blinded her eyes, and her arms were drawn behind, as though bound. Her hair was rather stylishly done—braided to one side in a three-stranded plait—and over it was a delicate hairnet tied at the chin. Her clothes were neatly folded beside her. But the strangest part was the four forked sticks pinning her limbs.

The boy was right. This was not some girl who had lost her way and foundered in the fen. Someone had definitely buried her here. And whether dead or alive at the time of her planting, she was clearly meant never to get up again.

Because of the corpse’s nudity, the blindfold and bonds, a sex crimes unit of the West Dorset CID (Criminal Investigation Department) had been summoned. It was they who had called me on their way to the site. Not that I’m with British law enforcement. I’m an anthropologist and American, to boot, a visiting fellow at nearby Exeter University, where I’ve worked for over eighteen months beneath these lovely, lonely British skies. Not that I’m complaining; England is an archeologist’s heaven. Dotted with dolmens, barrows, henges and hoards, not a month goes by without some exceptional find.

By the time we arrived, the last day of April already was waning. Despite the nearness of the farm, the bog retained a certain primitive isolation. Still, it was an innocent wildness, and the only thing sinister, apart from the corpse, was the presence of some unruly rooks cawing in the trees that, unlike the spectators gathered below, looked on the body with a hunger that was more than lascivious curiosity.

We’re a-thinkin’ she’s one Mildred Carr, the constable averred.

Can you fall in love with a dead woman? For in that instant, with the evening light full on her, she looked like a goddess arisen from the earth.

Mildred Carr? I asked. And when did Mildred disappear?

Sunday week.

Then I doubt very much that this is she.

And why’s that, sir? the constable asked. He squinted at the corpse. Fresh as a daisy. Can’t be more’n a fortnight dead.

No, I’m afraid this body is considerably older.

Is it now? the constable asked in a voice that implied I was totally daft but that he was too well-bred to disagree. He peered at the body, stroking his chin.

And her name isn’t Mildred. I’ll guarantee you that.

Aye, sir? And how would you know that, sir?

I looked at the corpse; its freshness was an illusion. Because whoever she is and however she died, it was several thousand years ago.

Even before I’d laid eyes on the body I was almost certain it wasn’t modern, for such archaic corpses—wondrously preserved—have been turning up in fens throughout the British Isles for years. The physics behind their preservation is simple: the peat bog’s anaerobic waters inhibit bacteria, without which there is no decay.

Last fall I’d examined a similar cadaver. As it had a noose round its throat and a hammer of sorts embedded in its temple, there was relief bordering on jubilation when I pronounced it neolithic, and nothing the cops or anyone else need worry about that night. So it wasn’t surprising I’d been called in again.

Still, I had never seen one in such immaculate condition. Bending over her now, I could make out the down on her upper lip and count the pores in her cheeks and brow. As I gazed, the unhappy expression of her face worked upon me, so that something inside of me yearned to untie the biting blinder that had sealed her eyes so long—a demand I resisted, not wishing to disturb the evidence.

For evidence it was. Despite the body’s apparent antiquity, there is no statute of limitations on murder, and the case was thus a homicide first and only second, an archeological wonder.

However, my estimate of the body’s age was overruled and my suggestion that we impose a grid upon the scene and, with trowels and brushes, extract the body carefully from the surrounding peat was disregarded, and the phone calls I made to my colleagues at Exeter and to several respected scholars in the field went straight to their voicemails. And so I did what I could to lend a hand while attempting to minimize the archeological damage.

But even a modern corpse, as the CID believed she was, could not be simply wrenched from the muck. Evidence had to be collected, something which their forensics team now attempted, while I used my camera and iPhone video to document the scene. At the same time, exposure to the elements would quickly rekindle the body’s decomposition. So we had to work fast. I dug until I raised a blister, then donned some gloves and dug some more.

With the fall of night, we worked in the glare of flood lamps. While we labored, a blizzard of moths and other night-flying insects dazed themselves against the lights. The body was so entrenched that when the CID attempted to remove it, it threatened to come apart, forcing us to remove the surrounding peat. The corpse, in its raised platform of sod, now looked like a figure of inlaid gold. Finally, we took a crosscut saw and, with the blade pressed flat against the earth, cut through the peat, detaching the sod plateau.

We tried to move it. Impossible! Later, we found it weighed three-quarters of a ton, and it took another three hours, a large sheet of roofing tin driven beneath it, several thick chains, and the strength of a winch on the back of a lorry to lift it up . . . revealing in a hollow just below it . . . treasure!

For beneath the body was a cache of classical Celtic ornaments, curved and gleaming in the mackerel dawn, like so many gold and silver serpents.

At this point, I think, it did start to become clear that my estimate of the body’s age wasn’t wrong, as I have never heard of a modern murder victim buried atop an ancient treasure. No one on the crime team acknowledged this outright, though I did detect a shift in tone. When we were done, we left a bobby behind to guard the treasure, then drove the corpse to the local hospital, nine miles away. I sat in the back of the truck with the mummy, in the half light and open air. Dawn was a spreading gold stain in the east, yet in places the country road was so dark and overhung with branches that they threatened to sweep the both of us out.

In the hospital’s imposing Victorian shadow, we winched the corpse onto a widened gurney jerry-rigged for the occasion, wheeled her inside, took her up in the elevator, and in a vacant room, off-loaded her peat-encased body onto three dissecting tables pushed together. I thanked the farmer’s sons and the constable for their assistance, then breathed a sigh of relief and anticipation as they finally left me alone with my Lady, for that’s how I thought of her: my Lady of the Bog.

The room was overheated and stank of mold. She should have had a cooler storage area, climate-controlled and antiseptic. But there was nothing I could do about that now. So I continued taking pictures of her. In all, I filled two 4GB memory cards with her portrait. When I was finished, it was only seven a.m. I went to the canteen and bought a milky coffee. Then I spent the next three hours lovingly scraping away at the peat. I bagged the specimens for pollen analysis. Seeds and spores in the matrix would reveal a picture of the climate and flora of the prehistoric valley in which my Lady had died.

I plucked an insect from her hair. It was a winged ant, tightly cocooned in a dark, reddish strand.

Just then, the coroner came in. He was a well-fed monster with a certain charming vitality. He resembled a Neanderthal beatnik, I thought: beetle brow, large splayed hands, thick, wet lips, granny glasses, and a thinning dome with grayish-yellow hair drawn into a ponytail. He had evidently just finished breakfast, as his mouth was making clicking noises and his tongue still worrying particles of food. He greeted me in a bogus brogue: With all the damn murthers we’re after a-havin’, you’d think you’d be considerate enough not to be pilin’ onto me workload one more ten-thousand-year-old man.

"Girl, I rejoined. And I doubt she’s anywhere so old as that. Probably more like two or three thousand."

Fancy them a trifle younger myself. So why bring her here? To me?

A postmortem is in order, I believe.

Oh, is it now? And why, pray tell, is that, old son?

‘Treasure Trove.’

He looked surprised, then most displeased.

"You haven’t heard? A gold and silver treasure was recovered with the body. They’re digging it up as we speak. And, according to a very old and peculiar law you people have upon your books . . . ‘found objects of precious metals must be turned over to the local coroner, who will determine why the items were interred.’ "

"I know the bloody law. What I want to know is how I’m supposed to tell why some bloody thing was buried? Especially in the year aught bloody two. And what’s the point of a PM? There’s no one to punish or apprehend. Whoever done the poor darlin’ in has long since met his bloody end." He lifted his dripping hands from the sink. They were pale and white and slick and long like the bellies of somethings long ago drowned.

Still, I said, "if she was murdered—and there’s a good chance she was—you owe it to her to uncover how and why. You’re the coroner. She died in your district, after all. Even if several millennia ago. I studied the insect pinched in my tweezers. She died in the last week of July. Or, perhaps, the first week of August."

And how the hell do you know that? You find a certificate of death?

No. I found an ant, winged.

He fixed his ironic gaze upon me. And what did this wingéd insect say?

He said she died in late July.

And how, pray tell, did he do that?

"With his wings. Look, the males don’t hatch until midsummer, then die within a week or two. If one was wrapped up in her hair . . ."

He studied me with something approaching admiration. "What a clever little fuck you are, Donne," he said, lathering both hostility and affection onto the ancient Anglo-Saxon word. He approached the corpse with an air of bother.

It was just an act. I knew he was as interested in her as I was. We were more than acquaintances, less than friends. And what do you make of these? he asked, pointing at the strange forked sticks pinning her elbows and her knees.

"What do you make of them?"

He shrugged. Perhaps she wasn’t dead when buried. I mean, why else pin her to the ground?

Could be, I agreed. She may have been forcibly drowned. We’ll see. Then again . . .

"Then again . . . what?"

Then again, maybe whoever buried her there didn’t want her spirit walking again.

He looked at me with startled eyes. You mean . . . ? She was . . .

I thought for a moment. "I’m not sure exactly what I mean."

Chapter 2

So engrossed was I in the study of my Lady that I worked all day and straight into the evening. For such a find, combined with the treasure, was a rarity of the first order. Today, I knew, was a day of grace. Soon the mob would descend: reporters, scholars, officials, the public . . . all of whom would want a piece of my Lady—literally, if we’d allowed it. Also, the political wrangling would begin over who would conduct the investigation: scholars from all over would be vying for the honor. For this reason, I was intent on gathering all the data that I could before anyone knew enough to stop me. Having planted myself in the middle of the case, I was daring anyone to shoo me off it. Oh, afterward, I would be roundly scolded, told I had overstepped my bounds. That was for sure—but by then it would be too late, wouldn’t it? By then, I hoped, I would have already discovered a great deal about her and made myself so indispensable to the investigation, I could not be all that readily dislodged. And so I continued my preliminary examination.

Her hair had originally been black or brown, the iron in the water having turned it red. The band of cloth that blinded her eyes was in a tablet weave and measured one-and-one-half inches wide. The forked sticks pinning her limbs appeared to have some writing on them, though given their age and waterlogged condition it was difficult to make it out. And it was then I had my first suspicion that she wasn’t as old as I’d originally thought—for apart from some Egyptian Old Kingdom hieroglyphics, writing isn’t found in neolithic graves.

The hairnet’s tie beneath her chin had prevented the horrid mummy gape. Still, her lips were parted, as if she were about to speak—or scream! I introduced a flashlight. Her teeth were sound, save for a single shattered molar. Her fully erupted wisdom teeth suggested she was over eighteen. I made a note for the pathologist to check for primary arthritis which normally sets in around 40, as a way of bracketing her age at death.

I couldn’t weigh her, encased as she was in peat, but I measured her. She was 5 feet 5⅝ inches tall.

I tunneled into the peat at her back. As I’d feared, her wrists were bound with leather thongs; her hands were ringless, one wrist encircled by a silken thread. They were hands of privilege, unmarked by labor, and the nails, though stained, were intact and long, their uniform striae showing no signs of malnutrition. Her body, in fact, was so magnificently preserved, I could trace the whorls on the tips of her fingers! I took her prints on the off chance that she was modern and her prints were on file, though this seemed to me unlikely, especially given the stakes.

Then again, staking bodies in England isn’t only some quaint neolithic rite. As late as 1826, a suicide and suspected murderer named Griffith was publicly buried at the intersection of Eton Street, Grosvenor Place and the King’s Road, London, with a stake through his heart. And if these were the ways of sophisticated Londoners, what might we expect from the good folk of country Dorset?

I recalled Tacitus’s observation regarding the rites of the northern tribes:

. . . the shirker and disreputable are drowned in miry swamps, covered with wattled hurdles.

So then was my Lady a murderess or adulteress?

It was eleven in the evening when I remembered the treasure. This may seem odd, but the golden trove did not overly excite me; what interested me most was what, if anything, it might tell us about her.

The country hospital was dreary at that hour. Light from bulbs of the weakest wattage coated the walls like a film of margarine—shine without illumination.

My colleague’s door was almost hidden at the end of a long hall. A sign declared:

Wooland Strugnell

HM Coroner

By Appointment

under which some droll had scrawled:

or chance!

I knocked, then gently tried the knob, not expecting it to turn, and was surprised when it did. Strugnell, too, was up and working.

I asked him about the treasure and was apprised it had been brought here, to the hospital, earlier that evening, still encased in a block of peat. To have excavated it properly, would have been unworkable, he said, and would have required constant surveillance. And who was about to sit in a bog twenty-four hours a day? Not he! Plus, whomever he hired to guard the treasure—for thirty pounds per diem— would steal as much of it as they could carry. No, it was locked in the hospital cellar, and only he had the key. He said this in a grand and boastful way that was tinged, nonetheless, with self-deprecation, as if all he’d attained in his forty-odd years was a key to a cage in a hospital basement.

I asked him for it. He gave it up without demur. I took the elevator down. The treasure was behind a wire partition. Boxes of generic tissue, mop heads, and rolls of paper toweling had been pushed to one side. It was a woefully inadequate barrier to theft. Maybe toilet paper was safe behind it, but golden torcs?

I unlocked the cage and examined it more closely. It reeked of bog. A few of its pieces were finely worked ornaments: armlets, bracteates and pins; while others were smelted gobs of hack silver, electrum filings, and thumb-size gold bars, all nestled together and gleaming dully, like fish in a bucket.

It was then something stopped me cold. From out of the vat of worked and ceaselessly curving precious metals protruded one right angle, which, if I wasn’t mistaken, was the corner of a book. It had not been visible when the hoard was uncovered; resettling, apparently, having brought it to light.

Every anthropologist in the world, I am sure, has had at one time a similar fantasy: to recover some amazing treasure rivaling the Rosetta Stone! In my mind, I had always seen it being lifted, dripping, from the pale waters of a desert lake!

Yet here in this musty English cellar, my fantasy was coming true—even if a book, or codex, as it is more properly called, was nothing one might expect to recover from an Iron Age or even Bronze Age grave.

I snapped several photos to record its provenance in the trove, then carefully withdrew it. Its damp leather cover was inset with a tree-of-life design of varicolored semiprecious stones, while its pages, made of skin or bark, were well-preserved by the bog’s brackish waters.

Pinching the Queen’s treasures, are we? It’s good I keep an eye on you. The coroner had come in without my knowledge, deceptively quiet for such a large-boned man.

Look! I said, holding out the book.

Strugnell studied it through his rimless specs. "Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears to be