"It"s a fireguard, isn"t it?" said Mark. Nigel had cleaned a part of it, and he could see that there were flowers embossed on it, and bunches of grapes, and vine-tendrils. In the center of it was a lump that looked like a human face, although it was so encrusted with mud that it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman.
Mark peered at it closely. "An old Victorian fireguard, that"s all."
"I don"t think so," said Nigel. "I think it"s the top edge of a mirror. And a thirteenth century mirror, at that."
"Nigel...a mirror, as big as that, in 1275? They didn"t have gla.s.s mirrors in those days, remember. This would have to be solid silver, or silver-plated, at least."
"Exactly!" said Nigel. "A solid silver mirror-five feet across."
"That"s practically unheard of."
"Not if The Lady of Shalott was true. She had a mirror, didn"t she, not for looking at herself, but for looking at the world outside, so that she could weave a tapestry of life in Camelot, without having to look at it directly!"
And he began to sing: ""There she weaves by night and day A magic web with colors gay.
She has heard a whisper say A curse is on her if she stay To look down to Camelot.
But moving through a mirror clear That hangs before her all the year, Shadows of the world appear...""
Katie joined in: "And in her web she still delights To weave the mirror"s magic sights For often thro" the silent nights A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, went to Camelot."
"Top of the cla.s.s," said Mark. "Now, how long do you think it"s going to take to dig this out?"
"Oh...several weeks," said Nigel. "Months, even."
"I hope that"s one of your University of Ess.e.x jokes."
"No-well!-it has to be excavated properly. We don"t want to damage it, do we? And there could well be other valuable artifacts hidden in the soil all around it. Combs, b.u.t.tons, necklaces, who knows? We need to fence this area off, don"t we, and inform the police, and the British Museum?"
Mark said, "No, Nigel, we don"t."
Nigel slowly stood up, blinking with perplexity. "Mark-we have to! This tower, this mirror-well!-they could change the entire concept of Arthurian legend! They"re archeological proof that the Lady of Shalott wasn"t just a story, and that Camelot was really here!"
"Nigel, that"s a wonderful notion, but it"s not going to pay off our overdraft, is it?"
Katie said, "I don"t understand. If this is the Lady of Shalott"s mirror, and it"s genuine, it could be worth millions!"
"It could, yes. But not to us. Treasure trove belongs to HM Government. Not only that, this isn"t our land, and we"re working under contract for the county council. So our chances of getting a share of it are just about zero."
"So what are you suggesting?" said Nigel. "You want us to bury it again, and forget we ever found it? We can"t do that!"
"Oh, no," Mark told him, "I"m not suggesting that for a moment." He pointed to the perforated vines in the top of the frame. "We could run a couple of chains through here, though, couldn"t we, and use the Range Rover to pull it out?"
"What? That could cause irreparable damage!"
"Nigel-everything that happens in this world causes irreparable damage. That"s the whole definition of history."
The rain had stopped completely now and Katie pushed back her hood. "I hate to say it, Mark, but I think you"re right. We found this tower, we found this mirror. If we report it, we"ll get nothing at all. No money, no credit. Not even a mention in the papers."
Nigel stood over the metal frame for a long time, his hand thoughtfully covering the lower part of his face.
"Well?" Mark asked him, at last. It was already growing dark, and a chilly mist was rising between the k.n.o.bbly-topped willow-trees.
"All right, then, b.u.g.g.e.r it," said Nigel. "Let"s pull the b.u.g.g.e.r out."
Mark drove the Range Rover down the hill and jostled along the banks of the ditch until he reached the island of Shalott. He switched on all the floodlights, front and rear, and then he and Nigel fastened towing-chains to the metal frame, wrapping them in torn T-shirts to protect the moldings as much as they could. Mark slowly revved the Range Rover forward, its tires spinning in the fibrous brown mud. Nigel screamed, "Steady! Steady!" like a panicky hockey-mistress.
At first the metal frame wouldn"t move, but Mark tried pulling it, and then easing off the throttle, and then pulling it again. Gradually, it began to emerge from the peaty soil which covered it, and even before it was halfway out, he could see that Nigel was right, and that it was a mirror-or a large sheet of metal, anyway. He pulled it completely free, and Nigel screamed, "Stop!"
They hunkered down beside it and shone their flashlights on it. The decorative vine-tendrils had been badly bent by the towing-chains, but there was no other obvious damage. The surface of the mirror was black and mottled, like a serious bruise, but otherwise it seemed to have survived its seven hundred years with very little corrosion. It was over an inch thick and it was so heavy that they could barely lift it.
"What do we do now?" asked Katie.
"We take it back to the house, we clean it up, and we try to check out its provenance-where it was made, who made it, and what its history was. We have it a.s.sayed. Then we talk to one or two dealers who are interested in this kind of thing, and see how much we can get for it."
"And what about Shalott?" asked Nigel. In the upward beam of his flashlight, his face had become a theatrical mask.
"You can finish off your survey, Nigel. I think you ought to. But give me two versions. One for the county council, and one for posterity. As soon as you"re done, I"ll arrange for somebody to take all the stones away, and store them. Don"t worry. You"ll be able to publish your story in five or ten years" time, and you"ll probably make a fortune out of it."
"But the island-it"s all going to be lost."
"That"s the story of Britain, Nigel. Nothing you can do can change it."
They heaved the mirror into the back of the Range Rover and drove back into Wincanton. Mark had rented a small end-of-terrace house on the outskirts, because it was much cheaper than staying in a hotel for seven weeks. The house was plain, flat-fronted, with a scrubby front garden and a dilapidated wooden garage. In the back garden stood a single naked cherry-tree. Inside, the ground-level rooms had been knocked together to make a living room with a dining area at one end. The carpet was yellow with green Paisley swirls on it, and the furniture was reproduction, all chintz and dark varnish.
Between them, grunting, they maneuvered the mirror into the living room and propped it against the wall. Katie folded up two bath towels and they wedged them underneath the frame to stop it from marking the carpet.
"I feel like a criminal," said Nigel.
Mark lit the gas fire and briskly chafed his hands. "You shouldn"t. You should feel like an Englishman, protecting his heritage."
Katie said, "I still don"t know if we"ve done the right thing. I mean, there"s still time to declare it as a treasure trove."
"Well, go ahead, if you want the Historical Site a.s.sessment to go out of business and you don"t want a third share of whatever we can sell it for."
Katie went up to the mirror, licked the tip of her finger and cleaned some of the mud off it. As she did so, she suddenly recoiled, as if she had been stung. "Ow," she said, and stared at her fingertip. "It gave me a shock."
"A shock? What kind of a shock?"
"Like static, you know, when you get out of a car."
Mark approached the mirror and touched it with all five fingers of his left hand. "I can"t feel anything." He licked his fingers and tried again, and this time he lifted his hand away and said, "Ouch! You"re right! It"s like it"s charged."
"Silver"s very conductive," said Nigel, as if that explained everything. "Sir John Raseburne wore a silver helmet at Agincourt, and he was struck by lightning. He was thrown so far into the air that the French thought he could fly."
He touched the mirror himself. After a while, he said, "No, nothing. You must have earthed it, you two."
Mark looked at the black, diseased surface of the mirror and said nothing.
That evening, Mark ordered a takeaway curry from the Wincanton Tandoori in the High Street, and they ate chicken Madras and mushroom bhaji while they took it in turns to clean away seven centuries of tarnish.
Neil played The Best of Matt Monroe on his CD player. "I"m sorry...I didn"t bring any of my madrigals."
"Don"t apologize. This is almost medieval."
First, they washed down the mirror with warm soapy water and cellulose car-sponges, until all of the peaty soil was sluiced off it. Katie stood on a kitchen chair and cleaned all of the decorative detail at the top of the frame with a toothbrush and Q-tips. As she worried the mud out of the human head in the center of the mirror, it gradually emerged as a woman, with high cheekbones and slanted eyes and her hair looped up in elaborate braids. Underneath her chin there was a scroll with the single word Lamia.
"Lamia?" said Mark. "Is that Latin, or what?"
"No, no, Greek," said Nigel. "It"s the Greek name for Lilith, who was Adam"s first companion, before Eve. She insisted on having the same rights as Adam and so G.o.d threw her out of Eden. She married a demon and became the queen of demons."
He stepped closer to the mirror and touched the woman"s faintly-smiling lips. "Lamia was supposed to be the most incredibly beautiful woman you could imagine. She had white skin and black eyes and b.r.e.a.s.t.s that no man could resist fondling. Just one night with Lamia and-pfff!-you would never look at a human woman again."
"What was the catch?"
"She sucked all of the blood out of you-hah!-that"s all."
"You"re talking about my ex again."
Katie said, "I seem to remember that John Keats wrote a poem called Lamia, didn"t he?"
"That"s right," said Nigel. "A chap called Lycius met Lamia and fell madly in love with her. The trouble is, he didn"t realize that she was a blood-sucker and that she was cursed by G.o.d."
"Cursed?" said Katie.
"Yes, G.o.d had condemned her for her disobedience forever. "Some penanced lady-elf...some demon"s mistress, or the demon"s self.""
"Like the Lady of Shalott."
"Well, I suppose so, yes."
"Perhaps they were one and the same person...Lamia, and the Lady of Shalott."
They all looked at the woman"s face on top of the mirror. There was no question that she was beautiful; and even though the casting had a simplified, medieval style, the sculptor had managed to convey a sense of slyness, and of secrecy.
"She was a bit of a mystery, really," said Nigel. "She was supposed to be a virgin, d"you see, "yet in the lore of love deep learned to the red heart"s core." She was a blood-sucking enchantress, but at the same time she was capable of deep and genuine love. Men couldn"t resist her. Lycius said she gave him "a hundred thirsts.""
"Just like this b.l.o.o.d.y Madras chicken," said Mark. "Is there any more beer in the fridge?"
Katie carried on cleaning the mirror long after Mark and Nigel had grown tired of it. They sat in two reproduction armchairs drinking Stella Artois and eating cheese-and-onion crisps and heckling Question Time, while Katie applied 3M"s Tarni-Shield with a soft blue cloth and gradually exposed a circle of shining silver, large enough to see her own face.
"There," she said. "I reckon we can have it all cleaned up by tomorrow."
"I"ll give my friend a call," said Mark. "Maybe he can send somebody down to look at it."
"It"s amazing, isn"t it, to think that the last person to look into this mirror could have been the Lady of Shalott?"
"You blithering idiot," said Nigel.
"I beg your pardon?"
Nigel waved his can of lager at the television screen. "Not you. Him. He thinks that single mothers should get two votes."
They didn"t go to bed until well past 1 AM. Mark had the main bedroom because he was the boss, even though it wasn"t exactly luxurious. The double bed was lumpy and the white Regency-style wardrobe was crowded with wire hangers. Katie had the smaller bedroom at the back, with teddy-bear wallpaper, while Nigel had to sleep on the sofa in the living room.
Mark slept badly that night. He dreamed that he was walking at the rear of a long funeral procession, with a horse-drawn hea.r.s.e, and black-dyed ostrich plumes nodding in the wind. A woman"s voice was calling him from very far away, and he stopped, while the funeral procession carried on. For some reason he felt infinitely sad and lonely, the same way that he had felt when he was five, when his mother died.
"Mark!" she kept calling. "Mark!"
He woke up with a harsh intake of breath. It was still dark, although his travel clock said 07:26.
"Mark!" she repeated, and it wasn"t his mother but Katie, and she was calling him from downstairs.
He climbed out of bed, still stunned from sleeping. He dragged his toweling bathrobe from the hook on the back of the door and stumbled down the narrow staircase. In the living room the curtains were drawn back, although the gray November day was still dismal and dark, and it was raining. Katie was standing in the middle of the room in a pink cotton night shirt, her hair all messed up, her forearms raised like the figure in The Scream.
"Katie! What the h.e.l.l"s going on?"
"It"s Nigel. Look at him, Mark, he"s dead."
"What?" Mark switched the ceiling-light on. Nigel was lying on his back on the chintz-upholstered couch, wearing nothing but green woolen socks and a brown plaid shirt, which was pulled right up to his chin. His bony white chest had a crucifix of dark hair across it. His p.e.n.i.s looked like a dead fledgling.
But it was the expression on his face that horrified Mark the most. He was staring up at the ceiling, wide-eyed, his mouth stretched wide open, as if he were shouting at somebody. There was no doubt that he was dead. His throat had been torn open, in a stringy red mess of tendons and cartilage, and the cushion beneath his head was soaked black with blood.
"Jesus," said Mark. He took three or four very deep breaths. "Jesus."
Katie was almost as white as Nigel. "What could have done that? It looks like he was bitten by a dog."
Mark went through to the kitchen and rattled the back door handle. "Locked," he said, coming back into the living room. "There"s no dog anywhere."
"Then what-?" Katie promptly sat down, and lowered her head. "Oh G.o.d, I think I"m going to faint."
"I"ll have to call the police," said Mark. He couldn"t stop staring at Nigel"s face. Nigel didn"t look terrified. In fact, he looked almost exultant, as if having his throat ripped out had been the most thrilling experience of his whole life.
"But what did it?" asked Katie. "We didn"t do it, and Nigel couldn"t have done it himself."
Mark frowned down at the yellow swirly carpet. He could make out a blotchy trail of footprints leading from the side of the couch to the center of the room. He thought at first that they must be Nigel"s, but on closer examination they seemed to be far too small, and there was no blood on Nigel"s socks. Close to the coffee-table the footprints formed a pattern like a huge, petal-shedding rose, and then, much fainter, they made their way toward the mirror. Where they stopped.
"Look," he said. "What do you make of that?"
Katie approached the mirror and peered into the shiny circle that she had cleaned yesterday evening. "It"s almost as if...no."
"It"s almost as if what?"
"It"s almost as if somebody killed Nigel and then walked straight into the mirror."
"That"s insane. People can"t walk into mirrors."
"But these footprints...they don"t go anywhere else."