Carolyn Kephart
Her Writing
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QUEEN OF TIME -
First Chapters

Classics professor Lucasta Hilary's
lackluster routine in Midwest academia
changes forever thanks to seeming quirks
of fate that bring her unexpected fame
and inexplicable beauty, but her good
fortune soon proves to be very far from
heaven sent. Two eternal adversaries
seek to alter Lucasta's destiny, in a
struggle that spans eons and ranges from
the bleak remains of Hadrian’s Wall to
the lush jungles of the Yucatan
highlands to the very edge of existence,
where temptation, damnation, and
redemption inextricably entwine.
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QUEEN OF TIME
Chapter One
Finca
Las Flores, Yucatán, December 2012.
The most difficult part of existence
was finding time and place to be alone, but for the
present moment Lucasta's chosen haven was a lush
parador on the Campeche coast. Today, as usual, after
a late lunch she wandered out to a secluded part of
the broad white beach to revel in her perfections
undisturbed. As she made herself comfortable in a
lounge chair under her favorite palm umbrella, a
handsome young servitor arrived as expected, bearing a
pitcher of sangria and a crystal goblet. Setting his
tray down on the nearby table as if presenting an
offering, he bowed and filled the glass.
“With hopes for your enjoyment, señora,” he
murmured in velvety Spanish, his dark eyes fixed on
his task.
He didn't dare steal a glance at her near-nakedness,
far less venture eye contact, because he knew that
either liberty would cost him his job. Contemplating
his dusky male beauty, Lucasta almost regretted that
she'd stipulated such deference from all the staff
when she'd arrived, but only almost. Glances exchanged
with delectable males tended to progress to much more,
and had been to blame for her last disastrous
indiscretion. Giving a nod of dismissal instantly
obeyed, she drank the glass down and refilled it,
donned her music player, turned the sound up loud, lit
a cigarette and gazed through her sunglasses and the
smoke out to the far horizon where cerulean met azure
and the glowing air throbbed with tropical heat and
the wings of birds. Taking a sip of the second drink,
she felt its buzz begin to mingle with the rush of the
pre-lunch hashish she'd smoked on the veranda of her caseta.
She could not recall the last time she'd spent a day
without drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. They provided no
real enjoyment, but without them life was unendurable.
I never thought it'd be this bad, Lucasta
managed to think despite the music's thumping din.
I should just get up and walk into the sea and get
it over with.
Bitterly she reflected that her last ten years would
have been considered heaven by most standards. A life
without effort, every whim instantly catered to; a
life without care, unencumbered by anything that might
prove remotely irksome. A life with too much money and
very little in the way of restraint, and absolutely
nothing in the way of thought. Ten years that she
never dreamed she'd ever get sick of; but now she was
sick to death.
Taking out her earbuds, she tossed the player onto the
sand and fixed her eyes on the distant division of sea
and sky, listening to the soft crashing of the waves
and the random shrieks of gulls. “Give me a sign,” she
said to the infinite. “One sign, or I end this. I
swear.”
Hardly had she finished speaking when
something—someone—jarred her chair from behind, but
Lucasta didn't turn around. The event was a cheap
coincidence, worthy only of idle speculation. Whoever
it was certainly couldn't be the handsome sangria
bringer, who valued his job. The resort routinely and
brusquely drove away vendors and beggars. Only adults
were permitted as guests, so it couldn't be someone's
obnoxious brat, and anyone with so much as a chance
resemblance to a paparazzo or a detective was
instantly evicted by discreetly inexorable guards.
None of the people who considered themselves her
friends knew she was here, far less her ex-husband.
The most likely possibility was either a prospective
admirer seeking her attention, or a spurned suitor
wishing either another chance or perhaps revenge.
She’d let a few of those down rather hard, in
retrospect.
Whoever it was spoke at last. “Hello, Lucy.”
Again Lucasta didn't turn around, because the voice
had called her by her old name, one she hadn’t used in
a decade. A mistake, certainly, but oddly coincidental
nonetheless. Her blood gave a little surge, something
she hadn't known in a very long time, but she didn't
reply.
The voice persisted. “Your cupbearer—or more
accurately, I suppose, your
sangriador—warned me that you'd be
standoffish.”
Lucasta reflected on the voice as she continued
looking out to sea. Its question had been uttered
good-humoredly, which was a relief. It was male and
British, its accent cultivated; and something about it
was oddly familiar. Stretching, Lucasta resettled in
her chair, musing on where she might have heard it
last. It was far too cultivated and clever-sounding to
be anyone she'd known in the last decade.
The voice had begun at standing height but now issued
almost at her ear, in a confiding whisper. “If you
don't turn around, I'm going to pour my drink down
your neck.”
With an exasperated sigh Lucasta took off her
sunglasses and leaned her head back, glancing upward.
Her glance turned into a stare, and she murmured an
expletive. “That can't be you.”
“But you know it is.”
“You've changed, Dunstan.”
“So have you—rather incredibly, I have to say.”
Lucasta stared until she realized her neck was
hurting. “You said you had a drink in your hand. I
don't see one.”
“I can’t afford to drink here. I planned on helping
myself to yours.”
Lucasta couldn't help smiling. “Come around here and
do that, and let's get a look at each other.”
As Dunstan sat in the sand next to her chair and
matter-of-factly helped himself to her glass, Lucasta
assessed him with as much concentration as she could
muster. She'd never have believed that Dunstan could
ever be presentable enough for a place like Las
Flores, but he astonished her. Up-to-date
sun-lightened hair, well-made beach clothes, a body
taut with muscle and a gold-tinged tan that
transformed his rainwater gray eyes into sexy smoky
topaz. He didn't look at all the age he had to be—the
same years as her own—and in no way resembled the
spindly dishwater entity she remembered from long ago.
Lucasta ran her tongue over her upper lip, savoring
the man's metamorphosis.
“Damn, you’re a knockout.”
He grinned. Christ, even his teeth were straight, now.
“So are you,” he replied. “That's the most
infinitesimal bikini I've ever seen.”
“You’re not supposed to notice it.” Lucasta gave him
one of her long impudent unmanning stares, but he only
smiled, and she felt a sting of pique at the calm way
he was enjoying a view some men would kill for. His
eyes ran over her intimately but without a trace of
desire, and she wasn't used to that.
After a sip, Dunstan set down the glass with a wince.
“Much too strong, and loaded with sugar.”
“Your looks may have changed, but you haven't. Still
lecturing.”
“On that subject, I saw you having lunch on the
terrace before you came out here, although of course
you never noticed me. It's simply atrocious that you
can stuff yourself to such a degree and still look
like that.”
“I agree. But at my age one can eat anything and get
away with it.”
Dunstan gave a half-laugh. “Lucky. But we both know
how old you really are.” He shifted his attention to
Lucasta's cigarette. Snatching it from her hand he
took a drag, blowing the smoke out reflectively.
“Nasty and lethal,” he said. “But I daresay you can
get away with these, too.” Dropping the cigarette into
the sand he carefully buried it, placing a little
shell over the grave. “What's that hideous noise I
keep hearing? Oh, this.” He picked up the discarded
music player and tried on the earbuds, removing them
with a wince after a few seconds. “What egregious
garbage. Don’t tell me you actually listen to that
stuff?”
“If sales are any indication, it's brilliant.”
“Poppycock. It’s monotonous, strident, and
adolescently foul.”
“The singer and I are great pals.”
“If you call that racket singing, I'd rather not know
further details. You really have changed.”
“I'd rather not discuss it.”
“I'm sure.” Dunstan turned off Lucasta’s music player
and set it aside. “So what brings you to this
revoltingly exclusive place?”
“Rest cure from a divorce. But more amazingly, what
brings you here?”
“I'm staying nearby at far less expensive lodgings
while I take the weekend off from a dig in the
interior.”
Lucasta stared at him. “Here? As in Mayan ruins?”
“Well, they'd hardly be Roman, would they?”
“That's what I meant. Rather out of your bailiwick,
I'd think.”
“A great many new interests have been taking up my
time since I last saw you.”
“I shouldn't be surprised. It's been a while, after
all.”
Dunstan sighed. “Lucy, I've thought of you at least
once a day for the past ten years. After you'd left
Marvel, you simply dropped out of sight—gave up your
tenure at Harding, your career, everything. I kept
checking out the journals in case you'd published
anything, but you hadn’t. And I searched for you all
over the Internet, fearing the worst. It finally
dawned on me that you might be using an alias. That
was my only comfort.”
“I took my grandmother’s name. If you recall, we
didn't exactly part friends, you and I.” In the
silence that followed those words, Lucasta watched the
scattered shifting pattern of sunlight on the horizon.
“How did you know it was me?”
“I had no idea whatsoever who you were. I just wanted
to look at you because you were so incredibly
beautiful.”
“Everyone does that.”
“I noticed. But what led me to recognize you were your
ears. They used to be the only pretty things about
you. You seem to have changed around them, clear down
to your voice.”
“I never thought you'd observed my ears.”
“They struck me all at once when you were standing on
Hadrian's Wall and the wind blew your hair back. But
you didn't wear diamonds back then.” He scrutinized
her lobes. “If those really are diamonds. They're much
too big to be real.”
“Wrong.”
“My word. It doesn't bother you to consume so
conspicuously?”
“Don't start with that, Dunstan. I earned them.”
“How?”
“I used to sleep with a very rich old man. Every time
I did, he'd give me a present—these earrings were
one—so I did it as often as I could. It was all
perfectly moral. I was married to him.”
“If he was so good to you, why'd you divorce him?”
“He became a very kinky and nasty rich old man after a
while. And I didn’t divorce him; he died. I married
his bodyguard after that, not one of my more brilliant
ideas.”
“A bit on the tawdry side, wouldn’t you say?”
“Everyone did. I came to my senses after a few months,
and chose this place to dodge the scandalmongers. It's
the perfect hideout, and has absolutely everything.”
“Indeed it does. Flagrant luxury in the midst of
grinding poverty. Those diamonds would feed everyone
in the village down the road from this place for at
least five years.”
Lucasta sighed with bored impatience. “I've heard
about that nasty little town. The people there are
dirty and diseased. They have nothing. They know
nothing. Why live at all, if you have to live like
that?”
Dunstan was silent awhile. When he next spoke, it was
softly. “You might show more mercy, Lucasta.”
“Perhaps I should, with Christmas less than a week
away. But I haven't been in the spirit for quite a
while.”
“That's all too evident, I'm sorry to say.”
She ignored the remark, as it deserved. “It should be
fairly obvious by now that the person you think you're
talking to vanished a long time ago.”
“I still recognized her.”
“Sure. Her ears.”
“So bitter. But yes, your ears. Even those vulgar
diamonds couldn't blind me to them.” He reached out,
examining the pendant that hung from her neck by a
thick antique chain of purest gold. “Speaking of
trinkets, I've never seen a finer Faustina coin. I
suppose I needn't ask where you got it.”
“Byron gave it to me, the night he died. I've worn it
ever since.” Lucasta felt tears catching in her lashes
that everyone always assumed were too thick and long
to be real. Never had her tears fallen, in ten
interminable years. “I'd give anything to see him
again. Anything.”
“Would you.” Dunstan was silent a long moment. “Let me
take you to dinner tonight.”
“At the restaurant here? You said you don't even have
the price of a drink. I'd bankrupt you.”
“Well, I was counting either on us going Dutch, or you
being generous.”
Lucasta didn't laugh. “Very well. Let's meet on the
bar veranda at eight.”
“Fine,” Dunstan said, standing up. “See you then.”
“But where are you going now?”
“To get ready for my run. The tide's going out, and
the sand will be perfect for miles. Care to join me?”
“You've got to be joking. I don't go in for that sort
of thing.”
“Odd. You look absolutely fit.”
“It just comes naturally, I guess.”
“Somehow I doubt that. Very much indeed.” Dunstan took
a step away. “Well, until eight.”
“Until.”
He returned. “Remember, we have a date. Make sure you
don't stand me up for someone else. All right?”
“I’d never be so treacherous.”
“That remains to be seen. You're capable of anything,
now.”
“As it happens, your surprise arrival kept me from
doing something very foolish. Thanks.” Lucasta took
off her sunglasses, and their eyes met deep and clear
for the first time, and they both smiled.
“Try to behave yourself until tonight.” Dunstan bent
near, and kissed her on the mouth, and went his way.
Lucasta lay back, a little bewildered. She felt
suffused with a warmth that the sun had no part of, a
radiance that filled her to her heart's core. She and
Dunstan had never kissed before, and this had been the
barest touch of lip upon lip, but it imbued her with
the first peace she'd known in many years. It was as
if he had set his seal upon her.
“Until tonight,” she said, her whisper lost in the
surge of the waves; but then she trembled as she
realized what night this was. Dunstan's appearance
hadn't been by chance, and the possible rival he'd
joked about was far from a laughing matter, even if
the name Byron Steele was hopelessly melodramatic.
She couldn't let herself think of what the future
held. Pouring the last of the sangria she drank it
down and closed her eyes, feeling her mind slide into
reaches of memory she had sealed over for a decade,
back to the life she'd fled; and the warm
flower-scented air seemed to grow cold as a grave
around her, reeking of dark earth and certain death.
Chapter
Two
Hadrian's Wall, June 2002.
All the beauty of the world was white and blue. White
sun on white marble, and pure white sand; white clouds
now and then but not often, in a sky as blue as the
sea. In this world where all was rooted in eternity,
everything shifted: the sun in the heavens, the clouds
in the sky, the sands moved by the swelling and ebbing
tide…
“Corpse alert.”
That joke was so old that no one laughed anymore.
Lucasta, wrenched from her Grecian reverie yet again,
barely examined the find, and spoke without
enthusiasm.
“Another pig bone. Mark the location and add it to the
pile.”
Lucasta looked up from the dirt to the world around
her. It would rain yet again, and soon. The wind blew
cold, straight from the north, compelling her to pull
up the hood of her sweatshirt. Unlike her pure
imaginings, this was a world of gray and green: gray
sky, gray stone, and thick weedy sheep-dunged grass.
Beneath the grass, dense earth clung hard to its
secrets, so unlike the kindly sands that had yielded
up treasure after treasure there on the holy isle of
Delos, that white and blue world that now seemed as
far away as the gods it cherished. This was Hadrian’s
Wall, the fixed boundary of the glory that had been
Rome, an admission of failure written in rock. Here
the great empire's northern surge had halted,
exhausted by overstretch, and Lucasta Hilary,
Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Warren G.
Harding University at Marvel, Indiana, was on hand to
record the remnants.
“Dang, got me a pecker!”
Conroy’s cornpone holler drew the attention of the
entire dig team. Lucasta had to break through the
snickering circle to assess the discovery.
It was a common little bronze phallus amulet, and a
damaged one. Still, it was the most notable find so
far. “Good work, Conroy,” Lucasta said, trying to
sound far more enthusiastic than she felt.
“Yeah.” Brent, Conroy’s workmate, nodded. “Just what
you needed, dude. Too bad it wasn’t bigger.”
Stacy grinned. “Now, now. Don’t make him jealous.”
Tammy gazed at the amulet with approving calculation.
“You know, that’s just the thing to wear to a club. I
want one.”
Lucasta listened to her crew’s comments with strained
patience. The Wall foray was her first time as a dig
director, and she held the position only because the
previously stipulated leader Irwin Unwin, head of
Lucasta's department, Irwin Unwin of the baggy socks
and equine chortle, was in the hospital righting the
damage wrought upon his person by an automobile in
front of which he'd stepped absent-mindedly back in
mid-May. Lucasta, who’d already made plans to join a
dig in a far sunnier clime, had protested that she was
a classicist, not an archaeologist. Only when it was
more than hinted that her involvement would enhance
her possibilities of tenure did she deem it best to
accept. All of the logistics had been worked out well
beforehand with the partnership of the University of
Newcastle, and Lucasta could consider herself lucky to
have everything in place ready to step into. Best of
all, she wasn’t handling the task alone, to her
immense relief.
She and her crew were excavating nearby the fort on
Hadrian’s Wall known as Vercovium to the Romans and
Housesteads now, close to which had sprung the vicus,
the camp town with its shops, taverns, inns, hovels
and brothels. Of the fort and the vicus little
survived but the foundations; the Wall still stood,
but much diminished from its Hadrianic height.
Housesteads was situated on striking terrain, and the
Wall leapt and snaked over crags and hills in a
breathtakingly photogenic fashion, looking very wild;
but as part of the National Trust the site was
provided with a modern visitor's center complete with
snack bar, as well as ample parking, bus service, and
close access to the main road. Lucasta, used to far
less comfortable conditions at other digs, considered
herself lucky.
The group’s mission was to continue the
already-established excavation of part of the vicus in
an attempt to learn more about civilian life on the
Wall. Lucasta well knew that the dig wasn’t a fevered
search for a Grail, or an exhumation of a mummy
gold-wrapped like fancy chocolate; it was what
archeology usually was, a meticulous sifting of
detritus. Still, there might be treasure of some
glittering kind among the rubbish, and Lucasta’s
students—Brent, Conroy, Stacy and Tammy, whom Lucasta
had privately monikered the Harding Four—often
speculated on the chances of finding some. Their
personalities, like their last names and private
histories, were of no great concern save where they
become troublesome, and they were seldom that. Brent
and Stacy were having a tepid relationship, perhaps
inspired by their mutual generic array of tattoos and
piercings. Conroy and Tammy weren’t amorously
involved, but shared a penchant for crude humor and
other social inappropriateness. This was the first
time abroad for all four, and homesickness led them to
spend a great deal of time on their mobile phones
talking and texting with relatives and friends, so
much so that Lucasta had to outlaw those activities
during work hours.
Lucasta appropriated the penile find and flicked away
the dirt that clung to it, her fingers briskly
workmanlike. “This used to have wings, but they’re
gone now,” she said, indicating the stumps of those
appendages to the crew. “Anyone want to guess why?”
She asked the question in a dutiful teacherly manner,
and got the silence she expected, but as she rolled
the little member around in her palm she gave the
matter more thought. The phallus—a truly cocky one,
impudently cute with its jaunty upturn—had not lost
its wings by wear and tear. Bronze required work to
snap. Whoever did this had intended vandalism.
A hand reached out—male, suntanned, tough but graceful
too—and took the phallus from Lucasta, casually
brushing her fingers in the act. “Kind of obvious,”
said Rik Vrys, whose hand it was. “Jilted lover. Some
guy gave this to a girl, and then dumped her, and she
busted his balls—I mean, his wings.”
Another hand, smooth and fine as ivory now that it was
freed from its glove, gently wrested the phallus from
his grip. Lucasta watched as Helena Bellfiore’s cool
evaluative eyes assessed the find.
“Magic,” Helena said at last, her soft voice
matter-of-fact. “A woman bought this, and named it
after her lover, and broke its wings to keep him
forever tied to her.” She smiled in her enthralling
way. “We can name him Marcus.”
“Okay, Marcus Erectus it is,” Rik said as his eyes met
Helena’s, which widened before glancing away.
Helena was a sea-nymph in cargo pants, tall and slim
and supple, perfectly shaped to a highly exacting
standard of artistic proportion. Her skin was matte
marble without a hint of color save for her rich coral
lips and the slightest touch of rose, just enough to
prove her human, on her cheeks. Masses of lustrous
dark tendrils fell nearly to her willowy waist, but
for work she clipped them up and out of the way in an
offhandedly ravishing chignon. Her smoky eyes held a
kind of shimmering gleam like light on water that you
could never really look into, and her voice was low
and soft with delicate modulations, a welcome contrast
to the flat small-town stridencies of Stacey and
Tammy. From earliest childhood Helena had toddled
around the stones and bones of the Roman past. Her
forebears had uncovered Pompeii, and her parents
continued the tradition there and at Herculaneum when
not lecturing at Princeton. Helena had joined the Wall
dig through the auspices of the Università di Roma,
which had ties to Newcastle. Not bad for barely
twenty-one, Lucasta thought. The gods were
kind to her.
Rik seemed to have been destined for Helena. He was
very light blond with a perfect tan, handsome in a
hard-bodied surfer way, and he dressed like Indiana
Jones save that he preferred ball caps to fedoras. No
one would ever guess he was South African; he barely
had an accent. The indulged only child of a
shipping-magnate father and concert-pianist mother,
Rik spent his time wandering the world from one dig to
another. His extensive field experience included most
recently Delos, where he'd been a close assistant to
the world-famous Caine Atwater, Lucasta’s dissertation
director in years gone by. Caine's recommendation
letter had sung Rik's praises to an extent that had
made Lucasta almost jealous, but she'd ended up liking
the lad.
As everyone else returned to work, Rik leaned toward
Helena as they continued to discuss the phallus,
trading it back and forth. Whatever he was saying to
her was making her smile in her serene unstudied
fashion.
Lucasta felt a nudge in her ribs, a mock-Cockney voice
at her side. “Wonder wot they’re sayin’. Oh to be a
fly on the wall, eh?”
She didn’t turn to the voice. She knew it too well.
But she smiled.
Dunstan Lightner was an unqualified godsend. He'd
joined the department at Harding two years before,
although why he’d done so baffled Lucasta no end;
surely he’d had better offers. He’d come to the
cornfields of Marvel, Indiana directly from Trinity
College in Cambridge, having excelled as a historian
of Roman and medieval Britain. He was thoroughly
trained in archaeological method and should have been
leading the dig instead of looking after the dogwork,
but he performed his endless array of thankless tasks
without complaint. Because he was indefatigably
affable the dig kids came to him with all their
problems, for which Lucasta was exceedingly grateful.
In the entire time she’d known Dunstan, Lucasta had
never seen him angry or even moderately ruffled, and
his unsinkable sense of humor had saved countless
situations.
Just as Lucasta was about to say something
appreciative to her friend—for Dunstan had been that
to her from the very start—rain began to fall in
earnest, putting an end to work. Lucasta bagged and
labeled the phallus, everything was locked down for
the night, and Dunstan, the only one able to reliably
drive the dig’s van, chauffeured everyone back to
their lodgings at the contiguous hamlet of Bycaster.
When the team had been dropped off, Dunstan turned to
Lucasta, and they asked each other the same question
they always asked each other at the end of the day.
“Fancy a pint?”
The dig kids had their favorite hangout where the
music blared loud, and avoided the Good Shepherd, a
low-ceilinged old-fashioned pub whose warren of little
rooms included a particularly cozy nook that Lucasta
had christened the Venting Parlor. Here in a snug
booth she and her associate discussed the events of
the day in no uncertain terms, over the Shepherd’s
stringent bitter.
“Have you noticed that everyone’s paired off like the
Ark?”
Lucasta blinked at Dunstan. They were into their
second ale. “What?”
“The crew. Every lad has his lass.”
“Tammy and Conroy aren’t exactly sweethearts.”
“True, but they’re still a match for each other in
their dumpy way. And of course there’s Brent and
Stacey, snogging during their smoke breaks like a
couple of randy badgers.”
“They smoke a lot more than they snog, unfortunately.”
“And then we have Rik and Helena in the full bloom of
fledgling passion.”
“Hm. I hadn’t noticed that.”
“Didn’t think you would. And here we are, the old
folks taking a doddering nice pint together. I wonder
if we’re being gossiped about.”
“We’re not. Trust me.” Lucasta regarded her friend,
cataloging what she saw as if recording remnants.
Height tallish, eyes bluish, hair reddish, face
longish. His shoulders stooped, his eyes tended to
water, and his hair always looked in need of a comb or
a wash or both. She let her mind wander.
Dunstan leaned his chin on his hand and noticed.
“You’re thinking of him again, aren’t you.”
Lucasta sighed. “Yep.”
Again she recalled Caine Atwater, now a robust
colossus of fifty, six feet four and god-shaped, his
skin bronzed by decades in the Hellenic sun, his eyes
sky-blue and brilliant, his virile mane gold-streaked
without a trace of silver. Caine Atwater, whose photo
had seemed to figure in every archeology magazine
she'd ever leafed through back in high school, Caine
the dashing treasure-hunter with the triumphant grin.
She’d dreamed of working with him ever since. He was
on the faculty at the University of Chicago, and to
prepare herself for the chance to work with him
Lucasta had studied classical languages as an
undergraduate in her native Virginia, because she knew
he’d always be able to use a translator. In addition
to learning Greek and Latin she’d become fluent in
French, because Caine’s work centered on the sacred
island of Delos, where the École Française d'Athènes
headed the excavations. She matriculated summa cum
laude, applied to the University of Chicago for
graduate school, and waited in agony until the letter
containing her fate arrived.
Lucasta never forgot the heart-stopping joy of the day
she got the news that she'd been accepted, nor the
miserable reality that followed. She had expected to
be her hero’s trusty sidekick but had ended up as a
drudge, left behind assembling and deciphering bits
and pieces of dead languages while Caine followed the
sun in search of ever more glory. She took the maximum
number of classes, audited even more, and toiled
constantly. Her social life was nonexistent, but that
didn’t matter. Caine was all she cared about, and the
only thing she longed for was to impress him somehow.
But he was so famous, so surrounded by fans and used
to adulation, that Lucasta despaired of ever getting
more of his attention than the equivalent of a pat on
the head.
Her menial status—and her entire life, she had thought
at the time—changed abruptly when she translated some
third-century Greek papyri that Caine had brought back
from one of his expeditions—documents without
provenance, found by chance. What she deciphered
ultimately led to the discovery of the Temple of the
Twins at Delos, in a part of the island remote from
the main center of worship, almost at the sea's
edge—an exquisite little megaron in near-perfect
condition, down to the altar-statue of Apollo and
Artemis standing hand in hand—the work of Phidias
himself, according to some art historians. The temple
had been deserted and left to the mercy of the sands
soon after its completion in the fourth century BC;
according to the papyri, it had been irredeemably
defiled by the rape and murder of its priestess. A
haunted place, it had been first shunned, then
forgotten until the tattered paper and faded ink
brought it back into the light.
Lucasta could still recall, as clear as now, the dazed
amazement she’d felt when she read the lines that
revealed the temple’s existence and location. She
could still recall the time and place: her crummy
apartment at 3 a.m. on a noisy Saturday night in
April, her eyes about to fall out of her head from the
glare of the magnifying lamp. How she couldn’t sleep
for thinking of what she’d read, and how long those
hours seemed before Caine finally answered her phone
calls. At first he’d been dismissive, which nearly
broke her heart, but expert papyrologists judged the
manuscript to be incontestably authentic. After that
Lucasta was at Delos, working side by side with
Atwater and the French team to unearth what became
known as one of the finds of the decade.
“It did indeed cause quite a stir,” Dunstan said,
entering Lucasta’s thoughts in a way he often did,
following the train of thought behind her silences.
“And Caine was splendidly photogenic during all the
press appearances. I think in one of them at least
you’re somewhere in the background, mostly obscured by
a potted ficus.”
Perhaps Dunstan was expecting a different reaction
from the smile he got. “So much the better. Photogenic
is the last thing I am,” Lucasta said. “Caine’s
welcome to the notoriety—you have to admit it looks
good on him.”
“You’re still as starry-eyed as a teenager.
Unbelievable.”
Lucasta picked up her almost-empty pint glass and
knocked back the last of its contents. “Returning to
our original subject, I don’t think Rik and Helena are
an item. They certainly don’t act like it.”
“Rik’s rather a playboy. I could tell tales, but I
shan’t.”
“Thanks. I think he simply isn’t interested. Helena’s
not exactly vivacious.”
“She’s too deep for vivacity.”
“I’d say she was too pretty for depth, but that would
sound catty.”
“I’d say you had a right to be catty, but that would
sound boorish. Care for a bit of a walk?”
*****
“I love graveyards,” Dunstan said some minutes later.
“Don’t you?”
The air was wet, clean, and chill, heavy with the
smell of stone. Bycaster was built almost entirely of
stone, much of it robbed from the Wall centuries ago.
The village’s church owed its existence to that stone,
but Lucasta doubted that Hadrian’s soldiers would have
minded. They’d have considered the Christian deity one
more god to the good, otherworld insurance in case
Cybele, Jupiter, Epona, Mithras, Mars and Isis failed.
No one else was out walking in the miserable drizzly
weather, and she and Dunstan had the graveyard all to
themselves with the accommodating dead. Progressive
Victorians had installed lampposts around the church,
and Lucasta and Dunstan strolled among the tombs,
bending now and then to read one in the sickly
yellowish light.
“Lavinia Crutcher, 1804-1826. That’s so young,”
Lucasta said. “I wonder what she died of.”
“Childbirth, more than likely,” Dunstan replied.
“Those four little stones stand for baby Crutchers,
none of whom lived beyond the age of two, and the
smallest is dated 1826. I can’t read the rest.”
“Poor woman. Where’s her husband?”
“Over there with his second wife Margaret, who was
twenty years younger and outlived him handily.”
Dunstan surveyed the stones. “You know, we’re in an
interesting line of work. If we were to tear up one of
these graves to plunder a fresh corpse—relatively
fresh, that is—we’d be thrown either into jail or a
madhouse. But as it is, we’re allowed to dig for old
bones as much as we please.”
Lucasta shrugged. “The only bones we’ve uncovered so
far belonged to pigs.”
“That could always change, you know, but I’d rather it
didn’t.”
“Why? The kids would love it.”
Dunstan seemed not to hear. “Look, here’s the best
monument so far—Colonel Preston and his lady side by
side. Don’t they look Roman in those Empire styles?
Even their hair’s right.”
Lucasta examined the carving and sighed. “That’s
because they desecrated a Roman gravestone. I can see
traces of a Latin inscription on the base at either
side of the epitaph. Some lazy thieving botcher
altered the features of the original Roman soldier and
his wife, and chiseled a high cravat over the armor.
The faces are much more sharp and clear than the rest
of the stone. Clever, but real history got erased.”
“History’s always being eradicated,” Dunstan said in
his irritatingly even voice. “It took thousands of men
to build the Wall, while often it requires only a
single individual to destroy a piece of it. But people
die and the Wall stands.”
“I hate seeing things messed up. Especially
idiotically.”
Dunstan shrugged. “Vandals are part of the master
plan. They’re far more integrated into the order of
things than we are. Their destructive impulses allows
Nature to rebuild with raw materials. Nature loves
termites and smashers.”
“So you’re calling us unnatural.”
“Indeed we are. The lads who built this wall had the
army discipline and the building routine to keep them
behaved. And the routine was important. The whole
business of building the Wall and adding to it and
tearing parts of it down again to rebuild was simply a
means of keeping the troops in line. There wasn’t an
enemy to fight until the Picts got rowdy in the third
century. Young men nowadays could use a Wall.”
Lucasta sighed. “I’d prefer something a bit more
meaningful.”
“Clever people do meaningful things. For the average
youth, a wall will do nicely. If you paid them just a
little more money than they could get on the dole,
most would be more than happy to put the Wall back to
its state of original Hadrianic perfection. You could
even arrange it the way the centurions did in the old
days, with rival gangs working side by side on
different sections, seeing who could do the best job
and finish first for the free beer.”
Lucasta looked around at the huddled graves. “As if it
mattered. Most life is wasted. And too often, worse
than wasted.”
“You’re just tired, Lucy. You look it.”
“Thanks. Scintillating though this conversation has
been, I admit I could use some sleep. Tomorrow’s bound
to happen.”
Lucasta didn’t sleep, though. Not right away, as she
lay between the flimsy sheets of her narrow bed. Her
mind roamed far into the past, back to the day that
had brought her here.
Chapter
Three
Tidewater Virginia, June
1976.
Lucy always knew who was coming down the home road on
a dry day. Dad’s truck churned a broader swath of dust
than Unk’s. Mom and Aunt Bim’s shared Chevy station
wagon puffed a low grudging trail. Rev Kline’s Jeep
tossed up all kinds of ragged grit like the chariot of
King Jehu, who droveth furiously. Gramma’s Cadillac,
the last vestige of her lottery win seven years ago,
barely raised a trace because she went slow to keep it
clean. Cuz Otis tried hard to make his motorbike spray
a roostertail, but he was so fat that it could only
manage a limp little dribble of dirt.
This one was different. Standing on the front porch,
squinting from the shimmering midday heat, Lucy
watched as whoever it was started out as an abrupt
squall turning off the main highway onto the home
road, then changed to a long steady towering line of
pure white as the automobile’s dark body grew ever
more visible and loud. It was a strange-looking car,
and its radio was playing music Lucy had never ever
heard before, sweet and mighty as it poured out of the
wide-open windows. It made her remember Wordsworth,
and his poem about trailing clouds of glory.
The car jolted to a stop right at the front steps, and
the driver shut off the engine, silencing the music.
It was a boxy odd car, dark blue—Volvo, it said on the
grill. It seemed more like a name for a tornado than a
car, a whirlwind like Elijah’s.
The driver got out, slamming the dusty door and
talking to the air. “What a mess. You’d think they’d
have paved the damned road by now, but no.”
Lucy blinked at the swear word, and thought fast. The
family gun was just inside the house, in the drawer
below the Bible, an easy reach. She took a step toward
the screen door. “What are you?”
Sharp eyes darted to stare her up and down. “Shouldn’t
you be using the word ‘who,’ Missy?”
Lucy studied the driver’s strange clothes,
short-cropped hair, and indeterminate figure. “Nope.
Not yet.”
The driver laughed, and Lucy finally relaxed a little.
It was a woman’s laugh, rich and resonant. A woman who
laughed like that couldn’t mean harm.
“Oh well,” the woman said. She gave Lucy a long look.
“So you’re Lucasta Hilary.”
Lucy felt a vague surge of panic. “ “How’d you know my
name? You from the school board?”
“No.” The woman looked her over. “What’s that stuff
you’re mixing up?”
Relieved and reminded, Lucy went back to her task.
“Slaw dressin’.”
“You’re helping with dinner, then?”
“Nope. Making it myself.”
“You’re only eleven years old, for God’s sake.”
Lucy bristled, but quietly. “Going on twelve.”
“You’re small for your age. Where’s everyone else?”
Lucy pushed up her glasses and gave the woman a
straight look. “Why do you want to know?”
“Relax. I’m not here to do you any harm, child. Far
from it.”
“Then why are you here?”
“God knows. For my sins, I think.”
The woman sounded as if she meant it, and Lucy
relented. “Dad and Unk’s out in the back field. Mom
and Aunt Bim’s at church.”
“Your mother and aunt must certainly be pious if
they’re at church on a Wednesday afternoon.”
“They’re plenty pious, but right now they’re playing
Bingo.”
“What church is it? Methodist, Baptist, Catholic?”
Lucy reflected. “Don’t know. I just call it Hellfire
Bingo Church. Rest of the time they’re in town at
Gramma’s.”
“And what do they do at Gramma’s?”
“Watch soap operas and gossip and stuff.” Lucasta
wiped a line of sweat from her upper lip. “Gramma’s
got air conditioning.”
“Wonderful. And they expect you to have dinner on the
table when they get home?”
Lucy smushed her wooden spoon around in the dressing
and made no reply. Her face felt hot, and it wasn’t
just the weather. What was happening felt like
something she’d only read about, and never expected to
live. The old woman looked almost magical in her
strange clothes—a long white shirt under a loose
wide-sleeved jacket of smooth beautiful dark purple
patterned with gold fans, and black trousers
close-fitting around the calf and baggy above the
knee, and flat shoes made of black cloth. She wore no
jewelry. Her hair was silvery gray, man-short and
raked back like Andrew Jackson’s on the money, and she
stood up straight as a soldier. She had a crisp way of
talking, every word sharp like a radio announcer, with
an accent that was probably Northern.
And right now she was standing very close. Another
instant and Lucy felt the woman’s hand under her chin,
forcing her face up.
“That beak of a nose isn’t from my side of the
family…and it isn’t Hilary either.” The sharp eyes
grew edged. “And you’re gap-toothed. My God. Don’t
tell me there’s Lovell blood in you.”
Lucy knew it’d be useless to try to get away. “Mom and
Aunt Bim’s Lovells. And they’re twins too, like Dad
and Unk.”
“That’s so preposterous I’ll believe you.” The eyes
narrowed. “Please don’t tell me your Gramma is Serena
Lou Lovell.”
“That’s her.”
The woman made a noise rife with disgust. “The Lovells
are the most shiftless, degenerate people in all of
the Tidewater. What a ghastly curse for you to have
their genes. In England, Lovell’s a gypsy name. Did
you know that?”
Lucy struck the woman’s hand away in an action that
astonished them both. “The Lovells used to be rich.
They owned half the county, once.”
“Only in Serena’s demented mind. I remember her people
being little better than trash long before you were
born, and I doubt that status has improved.”
“Quit talking so mean. How do you know my grandma?”
“Too well, but ever mind that. How bad are your eyes
without those Coke-bottle specs?”
Lucy shrugged again. “They’re okay.”
“Let me see.” In another instant the woman had taken
Lucy’s glasses and was looking through them. “My God.
You are a little bat, aren’t you?”
All the world had become a blur. Lucy reached out in
groping panic. “Give those back!”
Perhaps moved by the terror in Lucy’s voice, the woman
complied. “Where’d you get that Moe haircut?”
Lucy hurried on her glasses, breathlessly relieved,
and got back to work. “Dad.”
“It’s awful.”
Lucy stared down at the dressing, which she’d slopped
over the edge of the bowl, and didn’t reply.
The horrible woman didn't shut up. “You look like a
grubby street urchin, dressed in cheap hand-me-downs.
Doesn't anyone bother looking after you?”
That tore it. Lucy slammed the bowl down hard on the
porch rail and clenched her hands. “Tell you what. Why
don't you just get back in your ugly car with the
stupid name and drive away and be snotty someplace
else?” Without waiting for an answer she went back
indoors, slamming the screen door and hooking it
locked. Once she was back in the kitchen she waited
for the sound of the old woman's driving away, but it
didn't happen. After a short time she heard rustlings
outside. Climbing up the step-stool at the sink, she
hollered out the window.
“Go away or I'll call the cops. You're a public
nuisance.”
The woman only laughed. “It’d take the cops an hour to
get here. I see the dairy shed’s still standing.
Hasn't been used in ages, from the looks of it.”
The dairy shed was a cinderblock tin-roofed building
some twelve feet by twenty-five, a stone’s throw from
the back porch. “It ain’t been used since Great-Gramma
was young,” Lucasta said. “Back when there were cows
and pigs and chickens. Now it’s all brightleaf.”
The woman made a face. “Tobacco. I should have known
the family death industry would be going strong.” She
looked over the lawn that separated the house from the
shed. “What happened to the garden?”
Lucasta shrugged. “Never knew there was one.”
“It used to fill this whole space with fruit and
flowers and vegetables, a little Eden. Now there’s not
even a single home-grown tomato or ear of corn.
Pathetic. What in God's name do you people live on?”
“You ain't eatin' any of it. Quit taking the Lord’s
name in vain and go away.”
The woman ignored her and continued to inspect the
dairy shed's outside. “It's big enough, and has
plumbing. I could fix it up, and still start a garden.
Thing is, would it be worth it?” The woman turned
around and looked at Lucy. “Or would it be hopeless,
like everything else?”
Ever since the stranger had appeared Lucy had felt
confused and at a loss, but now she was more angry
than anything, angry in a hurt way that twisted her up
inside and lumped in her throat. She wanted the woman
to simply vanish, but felt that if that happened,
she'd lose a chance that would never come again.
“I don’t know why I bothered,” the woman said at last.
“All I got was my car dirty.” She moved away, rounding
the corner to the front of the house, and something in
her walk meant that she was going away forever. Lucy
ran out of the kitchen and raced through the house to
the front porch. Past the screen door she saw the
woman opening her car door. The last thing Lucy would
ever see of her would be a towering white cyclone like
the one that took Elijah.
Lucy thought fast and spoke loud. “Success is counted
sweetest by those who ne’er succeed.”
The woman halted with her car door half-open, but she
didn’t turn around. Lucy tried again.
“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste
its sweetness on the desert air.” She heard her voice
squeak and fall over itself as she said the words, and
felt ridiculous.
The woman didn’t laugh, though. She turned around and
stared at Lucy, hard. “What’d you say, Missy?”
Lucy thought faster. “She dwelt among the untrodden
ways, beside the springs of Dove, a maid whom there
were none to praise, and very few to love.”
The woman stared even harder. “Damn. Where’d you learn
all that, child?”
“From the books in the attic trunk,” Lucy said. “They
all had a name written inside. Celeste Bayard.” Lucy
drew a deep breath. “That’s you, I reckon.”
“You could be right. I might just stick around after
all.”
Lucy felt her heart pounding. She couldn’t remember
ever feeling this happy before. “Want a glass of
water?”
“I’d rather have a nice cold beer.”
“No one drinks here. It’s against their religion.”
The woman made that noise of hers like a growl, then
entered the kitchen and accepted the jelly glass of
tap water Lucasta held out, then assessed the room’s
worn red linoleum countertops and gray-green linoleum
floor, the old Sears appliances, the rusting chrome
dinette set, the yellowing wallpaper. “I must be in a
time warp. Even the same pots and pans.”
Lucasta felt her mouth falling open. “You were here
before? When?”
“A long time ago, child—ages ago.” She sniffed the
glass and made a face. “And the water still reeks of
sulphur from that ghastly well. I can smell it even
past the tobacco stink. Who smokes here?”
“All of ‘em.”
“Christ. No wonder you’re stunted, having to breathe
in that filthy fug day in and day out.” She set the
glass aside. “I wonder what's happened to the parlor.
The place where all the nasty little knickknacks were,
along with the horsehair sofa and the creaky chairs
and the candy dish with the orange gumdrop slices.
Always dark and cold as a grave.”
“It ain't changed.” Lucasta understood all at once.
“You're her. The grandma that ran away and never came
back when Dad and Unk were babies.”
“I am.”
“Why’d you run away?”
“That’s none of your concern.” The woman said the
words calmly and quietly, but Lucasta knew enough
never to ask again. After a tight little silence,
Lucasta's grandmother spoke once more. “How'd you ever
get a name as poetic as Lucasta?”
“They wanted to name me Luke, but I turned out to be a
girl.”
“I suppose you know just how wonderful the name
Lucasta is, even if they don’t.”
Lucy smiled. “Yep. ‘I could not love thee, dear, so
much, Loved I not honor more.’”
“You really did read the books I left. Are you the
only child here?”
“Yeah. They all wanted more but didn’t get ‘em.”
“Not surprising. Smoking causes infertility. How much
do they hit you?”
Lucasta looked down at her bare feet, which suddenly
felt very naked and dirty, with monkey toes. “Ain’t
your business, is it?”
“You’re talking to your grandmother, and you’d better
believe it’s my business. How’d you get that welt on
your arm?”
“Back-sassed Aunt Bim.”
“What the devil kind of name is Bim?”
“Her real name’s Kimberly. I called her Bimberly once
and she hated it. Called her that ever since.”
The woman gave a laugh. “So why’d you back-sass her?”
“She said I was dumb and ugly. I ain’t dumb.”
The woman reached out and very lightly raised
Lucasta’s chin once more. “You aren’t quite a monster,
either. I’ll have a talk with Bim.”
The gentleness of the touch made Lucasta warm all
over. “Can I call you Grandma?”
“No, for heaven's sake.” Noting Lucasta's
consternation, she hastened to clarify. “I’m only in
my fifties. Call me Gann. That’s what I called my own
grandmother, back when I was little.” The woman’s
eyes, which were the blue of gun metal, held Lucasta’s
almost sternly. “I’m going to ask you a question, and
I want a straight answer. Has anything really bad ever
happened to you? Anything that’s marked you for life?”
Lucasta felt her face going blank. “Huh?”
“You know what I mean. Answer me.”
Lucasta remembered, in a tearing flash, tales she had
heard in school, and snickering vile jokes, and
stories from the supermarket tabloids Mom and Aunt Bim
preferred to newspapers…horrible things that made her
sicken inside.
“No,” she said, but she couldn’t keep the quiver out
of her voice.
“The truth, child. That’s all I want.”
“I’m telling it.” Lucasta hesitated just an instant.
“Cuz Otis tried to mess with me once, but I called him
an anthropoid and kneed him in the ta-tas. He’s never
tried it again.”
Gann laughed long and loud, and seemed very relieved.
“Smarty-pants. But thank heaven.” She gave Lucasta’s
cheek a pat. “I was so afraid of what you might say.”
Much as she loved that gentle contact, Lucasta broke
away from it, startled by a noise from outside. From
the screen door she saw a low threatening cloud on the
home road, and heard the crunch of Chevy wheels.
“Cripes. They’re back and dinner ain’t near ready. I’m
gonna catch it because of you.”
Gann just laughed again. It was a deep, lovely sound
that Lucasta would never hear often enough. “The hell
you are, Missy. The hell you are.”
*****
Gann’s return excited no great emotion in her sons.
Dad and Unk were respectful, but scarcely effusive.
Upon introduction they had shaken hands in a brief
constrained way, and barely alluded to having been
abandoned shortly after their birth. Mom and Aunt Bim
were, as expected, sourly judgmental, but Gann shut
them up with a few well-chosen words about their
shiftless welfare kin.
When Gann proposed moving into the dairy shed, she was
asked few questions save those relating to money. Gann
curtly assured her sons and her daughters-in-law that
she was quite well provided, and to Lucasta’s deep
embarrassment everyone brightened entirely too
noticeably, and murmured that maybe she’d be happier
in the house; to which Gann replied that she had no
intention of staying in such a tobacco-fouled
atmosphere—she used the word mephitic, which confused
them—and thought her granddaughter had quite enough
work preparing and cleaning up after the evening meal
for five people, let alone six, even if the food
wasn’t that hard to cook or particularly fit to eat.
Life became so much better after that. The windows of
the house were unstuck and opened. Mom and Aunt Bim
started helping out more and spending less time at
their mother’s house, thanks to an unforgettable
confrontation between Gann and Grandma Serena. No one
dared hit Lucasta any more, lest Gann change her
will—a document she frequently alluded to, in which
her sons would naturally be named as heirs to what was
quite possibly a fortune, if they and their wives
proved themselves worthy.
With Lucasta’s help, Gann made a garden. She put in
fruit trees, and grew strawberries and roses and
tomatoes and yellow wax beans and a lovely plant she
called Honesty, that dried into stalks of little flat
silver moons. Lucasta never forgot the smell of the
fresh earth, and the delicious taste of the gifts it
yielded; and all her life afterward she kept a bunch
of Honesty in a vase, wherever she lived.
When school started again in the fall, Gann surprised
Lucasta the first day by arriving in the Volvo to pick
her up and take her home. She came every day after
that, causing a stir among Lucasta’s schoolmates, who
at first made fun of what they called Lucy's hippie
granny. But Gann had a way of commanding respect, and
Lucasta soon found herself being a bit more accepted
if not exactly popular. Gann had Lucasta fitted with
new, less clunky glasses, and took her to a salon to
have her bowl-cut hair more acceptably styled. Under
Gann's escort Lucasta visited the dentist for the
first time in her life, a harrowing ordeal that made
Lucasta stubbornly reject any suggestion of braces to
correct what Gann termed her Ghastly Lovell Gap.
Gann was in Lucasta's life for five years. The two of
them developed a bond at once close and loose, and
while Lucasta knew she could come to her grandmother
with any of her problems, she was well aware that Gann
fiercely valued her privacy. Only now and then would
she talk about herself, usually to complain about her
work, which to Lucasta's eyes involved marking piles
of typewritten paper with arcane symbols and
margin-scrawls.
“It's called copy editing and I loathe it, but it pays
well and I can work at home, if this hovel can be
considered that,” Gann said once early on, in the
August of that first summer. She and Lucasta were
sitting on the little front porch of the diary shed,
with Lucasta lounging on the double swing and Gann on
a folding chair at a card table, laboring over
someone's book. “What utter dreck this story is. I
can't believe crap like this ever finds a publisher.”
Lucasta was puzzled. “If you're got money like you say
you do, why are you working at something you hate?”
Gann grimaced. “Masochism. Anyway, I'm not as rich as
all that. I just want your parents to believe I am, so
don't tell them about this. Not a word, or I swear
I'll—”
“Okay, okay. I promise. What's the book about?”
“I call it Hysterical Friction, since it's riddled
with anachronisms of the silliest kind and its
by-the-numbers plot centers on indiscriminate and
interminable bed-hopping, but the author considers it
historical fiction.” Gann leaned back. “I need a
drink.”
“You mean another drink.”
“Hush.” Reaching for the bottle of wine at her elbow,
Gann filled her glass again. “I can't be expected to
slave away on this nonsense sober.”
“Why don't you write your own books? I'll bet they'd
be good.”
The question elicited a snort, but then, to Lucasta's
surprise, an answer too. “I've been told they were
good often enough.”
“Cripes, Gann, you're an author?”
“Don't get excited. I was just another deluded soul
thinking that I could write the Great American Novel.
After a few tries that got some good reviews but
scarcely any readers, I had the sense to quit.”
“Aw. Do you have some of 'em here, and can I read 'em?
”
“No, and no.”
“I'll find them in the Lookout library, then.”
Gann laughed. Not in her good way, but the bad bitter
one. “Even if that pitiful little place had my stuff,
you'd not know how to find it. I published under a
pseudonym. A fake name that I'll never tell you. Now
go look up what an anachronism is, and give me some
space.”
Lucasta wandered off to her hideaway. Years ago she'd
created a summer retreat in the shrubs that shaded
part of the big backyard, making it comfortable with
old blankets that she lay on as she read during the
long afternoons when it was too hot to do anything
else and the trapped air of the house was too rackety
with television and rank with cigarette smoke. As a
child she used to play or daydream, but after Gann's
arrival she studied the rudiments of ancient Greek and
Latin under the green cool leaves, or read about art
and symbolism and iconography and anthropology and
ethnography from books acquired by interlibrary loan
or Gann's own collection. She poured beautiful,
wonderful things into her head as if filling up a
bucket, and the bucket always held more. It seemed to
her that she was equipping her brain in the same way
that Jason and Odysseus had outfitted their
high-prowed ships. Like those heroes, she intended a
journey.
As time passed Lucasta had gone through a series of
mythic infatuations. At thirteen she had her Aztec
fixation; at fourteen, her Egyptian obsession; at
fifteen, her Norse mania and Arthurian fling. Gann
helped her through all of these ailments—for ailments
they were, passionate crises of obsession that
excluded all other thought—but she did so with
distaste.
“All savages,” she inveighed as she and Lucasta sat
together in the Trees one muggy summer evening full of
fireflies. The Trees were the five or so acres of
woods that divided the house and its grounds from the
brightleaf field, where Gann escaped when the dairy
shed became too confining. A deep swift creek flowed
through the Trees and made a looping bend that created
almost an island, and this little spot of ground was
Gann's particular sanctuary. She had built a lean-to
and a firepit there, and used an old trunk as a table.
Since the water was too wide to jump over, Gann got to
her haven using a rope line and a raft, and once there
she was unreachable unless she chose not to be. As
evening fell Lucasta would thread her way through the
path among the Trees, stealthy as an Indian, until she
reached the water’s edge. Gann would be sitting there
cross-legged, either listening to the night noises or
adding to them with the notes of a wooden flute she
called a recorder, and often she didn’t notice Lucasta
until she was called to.
“Gann ma’am?”
“Come on over.”
Once Lucasta had made the short but always slightly
perilous trip across, she would sit like Gann,
cross-legged on old rag rugs. They would sit side by
side so they didn't look into each other’s faces when
they talked, and they kept their distance. While it
was still light they studied the flow of the brook,
and when it grew dark they gazed into the fire Gann
built from twigs that Lucasta was sent to gather.
“Savages,” Gann repeated. “Fortunately every religion
becomes mythology eventually. Or it used to, before
the cult of personality and the rise of literacy. The
biggest belief systems just now are named after human
beings, not gods; that's a sign the whole business is
ending, and about time.”
“Confucius. Mohammed. Buddha. Jesus.” Lucasta thought
about the King James Bible in the house, and its grand
beautiful language that had comforted her so often in
a way no flat modern translation ever could. “You
don’t believe in anything?”
“No. It’s saved me an untold amount of time.”
Lucasta considered. At that time her Arthurian mania
was strong upon her. “I still like knights in shining
armor.”
Gann snorted. “Those are the absolute worst. Trust me
on that.”
“What makes you so sure?”
It was a bold question, but Lucasta had known Gann
long enough to ask. Gann took her time replying, until
it surprised Lucasta that she replied at all.
“Long ago,” she said, “a foolish young woman with too
much time on her hands drove out from Washington, D.
C. one hot summer day to explore the countryside.
She'd just graduated from college, and felt like
celebrating. By unlucky chance she got lost on a dirt
road and had to stop at a farm for directions—a
dilapidated old house where a handsome suntanned young
rustic was working on an equally decrepit car. He was
wearing overalls without a shirt, which showed off his
suntanned muscles, and when he spoke, his
buccaneer-tinged Tidewater accent enthralled her so
much that it didn't matter what he said. Readily
deducing that she was a free-spirited lass, after
providing directions he rolled some remarkably good
homegrown and they got high together, and then he gave
her a huge ripe peach, the most delicious fruit she
had ever tasted, and after that they wandered off to
the barn and...well, never mind. A life of sheltered
privilege had made the luckless girl at once arrogant
and pitiably naïve, so she actually believed the
enchanting hayseed when he said that his principal
residence was a mansion that out-Tara'd Tara, and that
his people were kin to ancient English nobility. When
she married that clodhopper Lancelot her family
finally disowned her, and I don’t blame them.”
Lucasta listened carefully, and replied solemnly.
“Sounds like you were pretty wild back then, Gann.”
“Well, karma caught up with me. I expect you to read
about karma.”
“I have, a little. I don’t remember Grandpa very
good.”
“You don’t remember him at all. He died when you were
three years old.”
Lucasta had read the newspaper clippings saved in the
parlor Bible, about how Grandpa had gotten drunk for
the last time and driven his truck into the river by
accident. She retained a memory, just a blip of one,
in which a man who looked like Dad only older, with a
sour bad smell on his breath and beard-stubble like
splinters, bounced her on his knee so hard that her
teeth crunched and she cried and was rescued by a
shrill angry woman who had to have been Mom.
“Where’d he get the peach?” she asked.
“From a tree,” Gann said, with the taut patience she
might have used with an idiot. “A very fine tree that
I chopped down when I was pregnant with your father
and uncle. It put me into premature labor, but the
fault was my husband’s and those little trash trollops
he was always chasing. Anyway, enough of that sordid
business. We were discussing gods.”
“Knights. You just said Grandpa was like Lancelot.”
“Keep talking about him and I’ll pitch you into the
water, I swear.”
And with that Gann discoursed again about what
benighted barbarians the Indians and Aztecs and the
Norse were, and how the Arthurian period had probably
never existed, and how the Egyptians were admittedly
an advanced civilization, but empty at the core.
“They were all civilizations built upon death, and the
fear of death,” she said. “But the Greeks celebrated
life. They lived in the sunlight, with the blue sea
all around and blue sky above, and pure white sand,
and the gods dwelling among them.”
Lucasta thought of the beach not far distant with its
khaki sand, gray-green water and knee-deep seaweed.
Her parents and uncle and aunt had no interest it, but
Lucasta and Gann went there at least once a week. They
usually had it to themselves, except for a few
fishermen and people with metal detectors, and they
always came home with their hair blown into tangles, a
bit tired from talking above the noise of the surf. “I
wish the sea here was wine-dark, like Homer's.”
“Homer's wonderful, of course, but there's also
Thucidydes, Sappho, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Hesiod,
Sophocles…you’ve got a lot of reading ahead of you
when you get to college.”
“Mom and Dad say I don’t need college.”
“They’re wrong, as always.”
“They ain't got money to send me.”
“You're smart enough to get scholarships.”
Lucasta winced from a sting of rancor. “The other kids
aren't going to college. They live in town and have
fun. I'm stuck out here with my nose to the
grindstone.”
“They're not lucky, they're damned. None of them will
ever leave this wretched little backwater. And please
remember that I've always let you hang out with them
at the drugstore before picking you up.”
Lucasta snorted,. “Yeah. A whole half hour.”
“Any more than that and you'd just be wasting time and
getting into trouble. I even give you money for sodas,
you ingrate.”
“Because you know boys won't buy me any. None of the
cool ones, anyway.”
“At least you're halfway accepted now. When I met you,
no one seemed to have taught you the rudiments of
hygiene. Your teeth were a mess and your hair was
close to lousy and you wore the same cheap nasty
clothes days in a row. You had the table manners of a
peasant. Be glad I changed all that.”
“Thanks, boss.”
“Go ahead and roll your eyes in self-pity. I suppose
you'd rather end up like Darcy Hauck.”
Lucasta shuddered. Darcy, the head cheerleader, had
dropped out of school to get married. Now she was
raising a baby girl that had birth defects, living
with her shiftless and resentful teenage husband in a
tar-paper shack. “Her life's nothing but hell.”
“I'm glad you noticed. Now let's hear some poetry to
clear the air. Recite something you love.”
Lucasta drew a long breath and looked out at the
firefly-spangled sunset, and the words came as
naturally as if she were making them up on the spot.
“The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming
in purple and gold….”
*****
Whenever Lucasta visited Gann in the dairy shed, she
always had to bring some bit of writing that Gann had
stipulated beforehand, usually a poem—“and not just a
bunch of word-slobber that’d make a crappy dull
paragraph if written tight,” Gann would admonish. But
one day early in the spring of her junior year,
Lucasta arrived out of breath from running, banging on
the screen door until it rattled like bones.
After a long moment, a sharp voice. “Go away.”
Lucasta knew Gann’s work voice, but banged again. She
heard faint cursing from the depths of the little
building, then Gann yanked the door open, glaring.
“What?”
Lucasta took an involuntary step backward, but held
out a grubby fist. “Found this.” Opening her hand, she
revealed a big white quartz arrowhead. “Last week’s
rains turned it up.”
“Bah,” Gann said, barely glancing at it. “There’s a
whole jar full of those in the tractor barn.” It was
common to find arrowheads tossed up into the furrows
during plowing time, and in their younger days Dad and
Unk had collected the ones Gann spoke of, until they
quit bothering. “I didn’t want a silly piece of rock.
I wanted a sestina.”
“I ain’t writing a sestina,” Lucasta replied. “I’ve
got better things to do.”
Stirred by Lucasta’s quiet rebellion, Gann opened the
screen door and came out. “Give me that.” She rolled
the arrowhead around in her hand, studying it. “What a
crude bit of butchery this is compared to a Hohokam
point. And I expect you to look that up.” She then
fixed her gaze on Lucasta, far more keenly. “Tell me
what else is going on. I can see that you’re bursting
with some secret or other.”
Lucasta hesitated, but only for a moment before
replying in a blurt. “I think I found a body.”
Gann’s eyebrows shot up. “A what?”
“A body. Human. Part of one, anyway.”
“Good God. Where?”
“Edge of the brightleaf field, near the Trees.”
“You’d better be joking.”
“Nope.” Seeing that Gann was shocked, Lucasta hastened
to explain. “I think it’s a grave. An Indian one.”
“How do you know it isn’t a murder? All sorts of
ghastly things happen in godforsaken places like
this.”
“I just know. It ain’t fresh dead. Doesn’t smell or
anything. I need an arkapologist to look at it.”
“Archaeologist, you sillybilly. If what you’re telling
me is true, what you probably need is a coroner. Show
me.”
Lucasta led the way to the place, explaining how she’d
noticed something in the dirt that had turned out to
be the top of a skull once she’d given it a kick. She
blushed at the memory. “I didn’t mean to. Thought it
was a clamshell. I didn’t touch a thing else, and I
put it back where I found it.”
Gann nodded approval, but said nothing further until
they arrived at the place. Kneeling down, she gently
took up the domed piece of bone.
“So fragile. So white and clean.” She replaced it with
delicate care, her quick eyes busy. “More arrowheads,
and some beads.” Standing up, she brushed the dirt
from her hands and looked away, not speaking again for
a long time.
“Child.”
Lucasta knew that tone, and felt her excitement
shrivel up. “Gann ma'am?”
“What you've found is obviously a grave. Let the dead
rest.”
“But I don't want to. I want to find out everything
about whoever it was. Or is.”
“Doing that will take you away from the path you were
meant to follow. I know it will.”
“But Gann...”
Her grandmother rounded on her with piercing bitter
fury. “Damn it, I made sure you had the best education
possible in this benighted place. Your school is next
to worthless. Without me you'd have spent your time
watching junk television and reading trash and
listening to hillbilly music. Without me you'd never
have learned French and Latin. You'd never have read
Lord Byron. You'd—”
“I'm grateful for everything, honest. But this is
just...” Lucasta hesitated, feeling her stomach cramp.
“I have to do this, Gann.”
“Christ. If I'd known you wanted to waste your life
grubbing in the dirt looking for old bones and broken
junk, I'd never have come to this accursed wasteland.”
Lucasta matched Gann glare for glare. “You don't have
any idea what I'm going to do with my life.” The knot
in her stomach was burning now. “But I sure as hell
wasn't ever going to write the next great American
novel, any more than you ever will.” She caught her
breath, horrified. “Oh, cripes. I didn't want to say
that, Gann. I'm sorry.”
Gann didn't answer, and her face didn't move a muscle.
Then she turned away for a long terrible moment,
toward the Trees, and her soldier-straight posture
seemed to bow under a great weight. But then she
turned back looking as if nothing had ever happened
even though everything had changed forever, and amazed
Lucasta by patting her shoulder. “You're right, Lucy.
Righter than you know. I'll help you with this, and
I'll do the best I can. The die is cast.”
Gann’s efforts brought a member of the faculty at the
University of Virginia to check out the find. He was a
pleasant skinny tall man in his fifties, and Lucasta
could tell that Gann liked him. With a practiced eye
he assessed the site, determined it was indeed a
Native American burial and not a crime scene, and
began taking notes. Early the next week he returned
with a couple of colleagues, and they went quietly to
work. Lucasta was there for every instant, watching
their precise, deft, expert movements as they laid
bare the grave and recorded the finds; and Gann was at
her side, taking snapshots. One of the professor's
assistants was an undergraduate, a quiet, capable
red-headed girl who filled Lucasta with a burning
desire to be just like her.
The report noted that the grave was isolated in the
field, not part of a burial ground as would have been
customary. It held the typical goods usually interred
with a Chesapeake warrior, but the soil suggested the
unusual presence of a wood coffin long since vanished.
The date of the burial was determined to be somewhere
in the early 1700s. The skeleton was very slender and
slight, and its gender was difficult to determine. Age
was estimated to be somewhere in the late teens. The
skull was symmetrically formed in a manner more
typical of Europe than Native America, and its
dentition was even and perfect. The cause of death was
uncertain; the skeleton displayed no visible injuries
or malformations, suggesting that illness may have led
to demise. What signalized the find was the large
amount of wampum beads found on the skeleton,
apparently wrapped about the body as a ceremonial
belt. Time had dissolved the stringing and there was
no way to determine what the design had been, but
there were many more purple beads than white,
indicating wealth and high status.
The find was published in the journal of the Virginia
Archaeological Association, and Lucasta found herself
famous at school as a result. She donated the burial
to the college for research, and to her happiness was
allowed to keep the wampum, since the beads were
judged to have little historical value in their loose
form. Gann was proud of her and framed the journal
article, but Mom and Aunt Bim had been against the
excavation from the outset for various superstitious
reasons, and Dad and Unk glumly predicted that their
fields would be overrun with intruders looking for
more bones. But no ghosts materialized, and no one
took the trouble to trespass. A brief flurry of
letters to the local papers argued as to whether or
not the remains belonged to a descendant of Virginia
Dare, a controversy Lucasta chose to stay out of. But
she insisted on marking off the site of the grave and
having Gann order her sons to leave it alone at
plowing time, and she often visited the place when she
needed to think quietly.
Lucasta began to study the tribes of tidewater
Virginia and Delaware, as well as archaeological
method. She found instructions on how to string
wampum, and formed her beads into a sash after
determining which designs were possible given the
ratio of white beads to purple. She made the belt
three feet long with a design of open diamonds,
feeling as if her fingers were directed by the past.
After that she always kept it near her.
*****
The memories faded into the darkness like the wake of
a high-prowed ship. And here I am at the end of the
world, Lucasta thought. Many miles and many
years down the road, lying in a bed that won't let
me sleep.
As she had many times in her life, she reached out and
groped around the bedside table until she found her
wampum, that gleamed in her mind’s eye: small
cylinders of dark purple and pure white, buffed to a
sheen from being long worn and handled. When she
wasn’t wearing them looped about her neck they became
something between worry beads and a rosary…as now.
She ran the cool smooth strings through her fingers,
hearing the soft clicking of shell upon shell in the
night. No sound comforted her more. In another moment
she was asleep, the beads in her hand.
Home
©
Carolyn Kephart, 2020
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