Unnatural Selection Page 6

  “More than a little, I’m afraid. Edgar was like some kind of predator, as if he thought we were all his private harem. She was the only one who couldn’t see it.” Another shake of her head. “She couldn’t stop talking about him.”

  Until that Friday, at any rate, when it somehow came out—Julie didn’t remember how—that in addition to romancing Liz, he had been grabbing the occasional hour in the sack with Victor’s wife Kathie on the side. There had been an extremely uncomfortable scene at dinner that evening, and then later everyone had heard Victor and Kathie screaming at each other in their room. As for Liz, she’d pretty much laughed it off, keeping a stiff upper lip in public, but there had been a couple of long crying sessions with Julie, filled with guilt and self-recrimination.

  “Poor kid,” Gideon said. “Edgar was really a piece of work, wasn’t he? I knew I didn’t like him just from looking at him. Now I know why. I also understand why Liz was being so nasty about him on the ship. I wondered at the time. It didn’t seem like her.”

  “Well, now you know. The whole steamy, sordid story. Come on, let’s go back to the other side. I want to see the last of the sunset.”

  They were too late for that. The sun was gone, and the last of the sunset-watchers were plodding home with their blankets and picnic baskets. But the darkening western sky still showed faint layers of orange and rose at the horizon, and the Western Rocks, now jagged, black silhouettes, looked like the menacing maritime-disasters-waiting-to-happen that they were.

  “And what did Kozlov think of all the hanky-panky behind the scenes?” Gideon asked. “He couldn’t have been too pleased.”

  “I have no idea. I know he didn’t take to Edgar; you could see it on his face. There was always a kind of negative electricity between them, but I think it was what you get when you have a couple of rival superstars. Edgar was a born prima donna, and Em sure Vasily didn’t take kindly to playing second fiddle. I doubt if he was too awfully upset when Edgar decided not to come back.”

  “So far, I haven’t met anybody who was.” He turned to look at her. “Julie, how come you never told me about any of this before? The sexcapades stuff?”

  “Would you have wanted me to?”

  “No!” he said with feeling. “I hate hearing this kind of stuff, you know that.”

  “Well, that’s how come.”

  “So why tell me now?”

  “You asked me a question.”

  “I did? I don’t remember—”

  “You said ‘This time, as opposed to last time?” That’s a question.“

  “I guess it was. My mistake.”

  “Anyway, now you know.”

  “So I do,” he sighed, taking her hand again as they turned from the parapet to go back inside. “Now If only I could figure out a way to un-know.”

  FIVE

  VASILY Kozlov had a well-deserved reputation as a glutton for work, and the schedule he had devised for the week confirmed it. The consortium would meet at nine every morning for a working breakfast, take a one-hour lunch break at one, then reconvene until 3:45, when tea would be served on the ramparts, weather permitting, or in the dungeon if not, and conclude with another working session from 4:15 to 6:00. Evening sessions would be held as needed. And Kozlov himself intended to chair every minute of them. The first day, Monday, would consist of a review of current issues and a fine-tuning of the agenda; presentation of participants’ papers and discussion of them would follow for the next five days; and there would be a freewheeling wrap-up on Sunday.

  Although Kozlov again charmingly urged Gideon to attend the breakfast session, Gideon had learned his lesson the day before. (He had learned another lesson later on that night, losing twelve and a half pounds at the poker table, mostly to the crafty Kozlov himself.) Thus, as the old clock in the castle’s entryway was striking nine, Gideon, having breakfasted on ham-and-egg-and-potato pasties and a double cappuccino at the bright little Kavorna Coffee House in town, was forking over his two pounds to enter the Isles of Scilly Museum on Church Street, the first visitor of the day. Madeleine Good-fellow, he was told by the volunteer behind the counter, would not be in until ten, which gave him a welcome hour to wander the halls.

  It was, as Julie had said, his kind of museum. Well-done, but not too big, or ambitious, or flashy. Two floors of local archaeology and natural history, maritime life, shipwrecks, artifacts going back to the sixteenth century, and photographic displays of life on the island a hundred years ago. No high-tech gadgetry, not a single button to push, no ‘hands-on interactive learning experiences’; just well-mounted, down-to-earth exhibits with lucid explanatory plates. It even smelled like his kind of museum: floor polish, stone dust, and old things.

  Naturally enough, one glass-encased wall exhibit in particular held his interest.

  Puritan (Roundhead) uniform, circa 1648. These remarkably well-preserved objects, from the days when St. Mary’s was the last redoubt of Cavalier resistance to Parliamentarian forces, were discovered in a dry eighteenth-century well in 1946, clothing the remains of a Cromwellian footsoldier.

  “Remarkably well-preserved” was stretching things a bit, but there was enough to give some idea of how the clothed, living man might have appeared: a few faded, darkened shreds of gray-and-white striped trousers, some sad fragments of once-bright-yellow ribbon that had probably been a jaunty waist-sash, and a few leather items—a sword holder and several unidentifiable straps—that were now a tarry black. There was no sign at all of the thigh-high boots he’d probably worn, which suggested that they’d been appropriated when he died. No one had needed his armor, however. There was a near-complete set, lovingly restored and buffed: separate back- and breastplates, a gorget to shield the throat, one of the two tarrets that would have protected the thighs, and a “lobster pot” helmet with a deep, round dent on the left side, a little back from the front. Everything had been tacked to an outline of a man that showed where they would have gone in life.

  Gideon stepped back to take it in. Judging from the outline, this soldier of the soon-to-be Lord Protector of England would have been quite short by modern standards, but probably about average for the time. And that deep, round dent in the helmet… that was interesting. It looked as if it had been caused by a hammerlike weapon, or perhaps a nearly spent musket ball that hadn’t had the oomph left to penetrate the metal. Either way, it would likely have left a sizeable dent in the skull beneath it too, so it might well be that he was looking at evidence of the cause of death. Directly under that dent, beneath the unfashionably short-cropped hair (which was the reason they were called Roundheads), would have been the coronal suture, separating the frontal and left parietal. Too bad the skull didn’t survive. It would have been interesting—

  “Yes, that’s our man,” Madeleine’s plummy, jolly voice announced, “waiting all these years—all these centuries—for you to come and tell us all about him.”

  Gideon turned, smiling, to greet her. “Nice exhibit. You’ve already shown quite a lot about him.”

  “Why, thank you,” she said, beaming. She wore a skirt-suit of violent green that did nothing to minimize her ample proportions. “Ready to go to work? Or would you care to chat for a while?”

  “How about work first, chat later?”

  “Very good. A true scientist.”

  She unlocked an unmarked door between wall cases and they stepped into a typical museum storeroom, with racks of cheap metal shelving, some holding neatly stacked boxes specifically made for museum storage of specimens and artifacts, others holding cartons specifically made for grocery storage of applesauce or tomato paste. There were also objects large and small—Victorian schoolbooks; a well-worn millstone (how had they gotten that in here?); a cannon-ball; framed, pressed seaweed specimens—stowed willy-nilly in corners, on chairs and tables, and anyplace else they’d go. One of the two library tables in the room had been cleared, except for a serious-looking one-by-three-foot, lidded cardboard carton at one end, and a smaller Prince’s fish p
aste carton at the other. In the center, neatly arranged, were the materials and equipment he’d asked for.

  “And here…” With a flourish, she removed the lid from the larger carton. “… lies our fallen hero.”

  Inside the heavy cardboard box were some of the long bones lying loose, all of them brown and exfoliating, and only a few of them whole. When he picked up the left humerus, bits of the periosteum— the outermost layer of bone—flaked off and floated to the bottom of the carton.

  “Madeleine, you’ll want to stabilize these if you exhibit them. Or even if you don’t. Otherwise they’ll just continue to degrade. Whoever cleaned them did it without preserving them, which didn’t help. Look at all the flakes and crumbs in the bottom.”

  “It does look pretty bad,” she said, concerned. “I should have done something before this. What does one use for human bones? Alvar and acetone?”

  “Sure, something like that. Whatever you’re used to using on pottery would work.” He looked down for a few seconds at the dry, dun-brown remnants that had once given form and strength to arms and legs. “Madeleine, I’m afraid your doctor may pretty much have said it all. He was human and he was male. As for going beyond that, age-ing’s going to be difficult because the ends of most of the bones have been gnawed off…”

  She waited for more, and when he didn’t go on, but simply stood gazing at the bones with his hands clasped behind him, she said a bit plaintively: “And that’s all you can tell me?”

  But he was plunged in thought, looking at each bone, registering details, and oddities and anomalies, and visually moving on to the next, so that it took a few seconds for the question to penetrate.

  “Maybe a little more,” he said at last. “For instance, I can tell you he wasn’t a particularly beefy guy. The bones are relatively slender, with no heavy muscle markings.

  “Oh, yes?” she said politely. She’d been hoping for more.

  “I can also tell you that he had a rough life.” Gideon picked up the partial left femur, the thigh bone, and showed it to her. The upper third was gone, and the lower, or distal, end had been chewed off by rodent scavengers, but the shaft itself was distinguished by an unnatural bend in the middle, with an ugly, uneven excrescence of bone at the site of the bend.

  Madeleine looked at it and drew back a little, the corners of her mouth turned down. “It’s as if… as if it got broken, then somebody stuck it together again—not all that carefully, either—and then stuck all this…” She gestured at the roughened area. “… all this gunk on it to keep it from coming apart again.”

  Gideon nodded, smiling. “That’s a pretty good description of what happened, Madeleine. The femur was broken, all right, and then it healed on its own. This ‘gunk’ is the protective callus that forms around a break after a couple of months. If the ends of the pieces don’t quite match up, as they don’t here, it temporarily builds up even more to add strength. This is probably what your doctor thought was a sign of disease.”

  “What’s it made of?”

  “Bone. Lamellar bone, stronger than the original.” He fingered it. “I don’t think it happened too long before he died. The callus is still pretty big. Very little resorption. A year, maybe less.”

  Tentatively following his example, she touched it too and was surprised. “It’s jagged. It’s sharp. Wouldn’t that have been painful?”

  “Oh, no doubt about it. The musculature around it would have been inflamed and probably infected. He’d have been in constant pain, and he’d surely have had difficulty walking. This leg would have been a couple of inches shorter than the other. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on crutches.”

  “And yet here he was off in the Scillies, far from home, wherever home was. A soldier. Marching.” She shook her head. “The poor man.”

  “He had other problems. Look at this.” He proffered another bone.

  She complied. “How interesting. Er, what exactly am I looking at?”

  “This is a right forearm bone, the radius.” He laid his finger on a point halfway down the shaft. “Now look at this.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, peering at the spot near which he’d laid his finger. “That’s another callus, isn’t it? A smaller one, though. This is a healed fracture too, although it’s not as bad as the other.”

  “The callus isn’t as big, no, but the injury is worse. See how the bone below it has this sort of swollen look? That’s not normal.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Okay, see this hole?” He inserted the tip of a ballpoint pen into a small, smoothly rounded opening just below the callus.

  “Isn’t that a natural foramen of some kind? It doesn’t look like a puncture.”

  “No, it’s not, but it’s not exactly natural, either; that is, he wasn’t born with it. It’s a reaction to infection, to serious infection; an opening to let the pus drain from inside it. In other words, the fracture healed fine, yes, but the bone got infected—and stayed infected. I imagine this poor old guy was just one mass of infection and pain. That might well be what killed him.”

  She shivered. “I’m beginning to be sorry I asked you to do this.”

  “Well, you know, war isn’t—” Whatever homily had been on his tongue stopped in mid-sentence. “Oh, Lordy,” he said.

  Madeleine cringed. “What now, or don’t I want to know?”

  He had shifted his attention to the proximal end of the bone, the one near the elbow, and now, using the magnifying glass and holding bone and lens close to his face, he slowly rotated it beneath the magnifying glass.

  “The end of this one hasn’t been completely gnawed off,” he told her. “And it’s not completely ossified.”

  Madeleine frowned. “You’re talking about the, what is it, the epiphery, the diastysis…”

  “The epiphysis.”

  Long bones—arms, legs, ribs, clavicles—grew by depositing material at their ends: the epiphyses. At first this material was cartilaginous, but with time it ossified and fused permanently to the shaft of the bone, which was then done growing. And when the last epiphysis had fused to the last shaft, somewhere in the person’s mid-twenties— a bit later for the clavicle—the person was also done growing. The amount of time the process took, researchers had learned long ago, varied from bone to bone, but was highly predictable for each individual bone. So at least for the first quarter-century of life or so, one could fairly reliably estimate age from the skeleton by how much fusion had taken place on the various bones. If they were all completely fused, the person had been, physiologically, at least, an adult; if not, he or she hadn’t yet been fully grown.

  And this particular epiphysis on this particular person was not. A cleft, thin but plainly visible, still ran halfway around the base of the coinlike disk of bone that formed the top of the ulna; fusion had been incomplete at the time of death.

  “So how old was he?” Madeleine asked when he’d pointed this out.

  He shrugged. “For white males, it usually closes up anywhere from fourteen to eighteen. There’s some variability, of course, but—”

  “You mean he’s… he’s not even eighteen years old?”

  “Fifteen or sixteen would be my guess.”

  The grizzled, scarred old veteran that they’d been imagining had suddenly become a teenaged boy, a youth who had hardly lived, who had died wretchedly, in pain and misery, far away from home, probably weeping for his mother or his girl.

  He laid the bone back in the box with more tenderness than he’d picked it up. “Just a kid,” he said softly.

  “Now I’m depressed,” Madeleine said. “I could use some coffee. How about you?”

  “Same here. Thanks.”

  “Be back in a minute.”

  There wasn’t much more to be learned from the bones, and there were no pieces to be glued together, not that gluing would have been a good idea anyway until the bones had been stabilized. If he’d had some standardized tables with him, he could have come up with a formal stat
ure estimate from measurements of the long bones, but he didn’t. He did, however, have a pretty good feel for such things, and from eyeing and hefting the bones, he was able to arrive at an estimate that he’d hardly stake his reputation on, but in which he had confidence all the same. His estimate was five feet to five-feet-four inches, even shorter than he’d thought from the costume display.

  So it was not only a kid, it was a runty, probably ill-fed one at that. Gideon sighed as he fitted the lid back onto the carton.

  Now I’m depressed.

  He pulled up a stool and opened the other carton, the one that had once been home to two dozen jars of Prince’s Tuna and Mayo Paste. It now contained five small white paper bags, each crisply folded over precisely three times, and one larger sack from Porthmellon Store (Groceries, Fruit and Vegetables, Beers and Wines). There was place-and-date information printed on each one with a marking pen: Town Beach, nr Holgate’s Grn, 21 May 2002; Rat Island, nr quay, 4 Nov 2003; Woolpack Pt, 15 Jan 2004…

  Each bag contained a single bone or bony fragment, which he laid out on its own bag. He saw at once that his promise to Madeleine— “There’s always something to be learned”—was a bit exaggerated. The two smallest weren’t human; flattened and streamlined, like miniature paddles, they were probably metapodials, the fingerlike bones from seal flippers. The other four, while human, had little to offer. Two fragments of femur, one near-complete tibia, and half of an ulna. Not even enough to make respectable guesses as to age and sex. The two humeral fragments and the ulna were old, maybe as old as the kid in the other box. And they’d probably been in the sea for a long time, given the nematode encrustations. For them, Madeleine’s guess of old shipwreck remains was as good as any.

  The tibia—the shin bone—was newer: not brown and fragmenting like the others, but ivory-colored and dense. The proximal epiphysis— the one at the knee—was fused, so he knew at least that it had come from an adult. The distal end of the bone, the one near the ankle, had been snapped cleanly off. He lifted the broken end to his nostrils and sniffed. There was a faint, greasy smell of candle wax; the odor from the fat in the bone, which was always strong at first, then gradually faded with time and eventually disappeared. The fact that it was there at all told him the bone was in all probability no more than ten years old; the facts that it was relatively weak, and that the bone was completely devoid of soft tissue told him it was older than, say, a year, given the relatively warm (and thus decomposition-inducing) climate of the Scillies. Two or three years was his guess.