Chapter Twenty-One
Laurel
‘I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid,’ Laurel whispered into her hands. ‘So stupid.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Rebecca said, pacing by the long side of the table. The kids were watching the TV in the front room. ‘Nate Daley, the archaeologist, and Alex Woollard, the British Archaeological Society liaison for said Nate Daley, stole your essay when you were in university, published it and became famous as a result?’
‘That’s right,’ she said bitterly. Her head was starting to hurt.
‘And what happened then?’ Rebecca said, more gently this time.
‘What do you mean? I didn’t know that they’d stolen it, I thought Nate had just chucked it or something, after…’ she trailed off. ‘Then I came home from uni and that was the end of it. I put archaeology behind me, remember? I didn’t think of it again until I saw their paper today. Well, the first page of my paper.’ She rubbed shaky hands over her face. ‘I’m so stupid.’
‘You’re not stupid, not at all,’ Rebecca said, sitting next to her. ‘Tell me, what did you mean when you said “or something, after…”?’
Sometimes it sucked having a solicitor as a best friend, because she was intent on dragging every little detail out.
‘Alex humiliated me because Nate told him to.’
It was a whisper because she couldn’t seem to make her voice any louder.
‘What?’ Rebecca said coldly. ‘Alex Woollard did what?’
Laurel looked at Rebecca with wet eyes and told her everything. Told her how she had left the essay in Nate’s pigeonhole, how she had left a note on it asking him for a drink to discuss it. She talked about Alex and Nate arriving, laughing with Lucia and others at the bar. Laurel repeated every word that Alex had said to her, burned into her memory forever.
Some wounds, no matter how old, are still raw when you pick at them, and this was like taking a sledgehammer to her rebuilt confidence.
‘And then Nate turned up here,’ Rebecca was saying.
‘He turned up here and he was so charming, and he didn’t say anything about it, he just wanted to put it behind us, he wanted us to be us, and I…’ She stifled a sob. ‘I fell for it all.’
‘Oh Laurel.’
‘I wanted to,’ she carried on, throat burning. ‘I wanted to believe him, but he lied. He stole my work and passed it off as his own. Can you imagine what my life would have been like if he hadn’t betrayed me?’
‘Laurel, you can’t think like that,’ Rebecca said gently. ‘You would have still come back here, you would have, because this is your home, this is your life.’
‘But it didn’t have to be,’ Laurel said forcefully. ‘Can you imagine if my paper had been published by me, the person who actually wrote it? As an undergraduate? It would have changed everything.’
‘You would have still wanted to come home and help the farm. You can tell yourself that you wouldn’t, but I know you, Laurel Fletcher, and you would.’ Rebecca took a breath. ‘But that’s not the real issue here, is it?’
As much as she hated to admit it, Rebecca was right. Laurel could never have let her family farm go under, not her mother’s home, their family home, her home. Regardless of how many opportunities could have presented themselves, how many doors may have opened, she would never have walked through them. Laurel had been needed here, and she would never have turned her back on her family.
Laurel shook her head. No, it wasn’t the real issue at all.
‘I trusted him. He made me fall in love with him, and look, he’s just like everyone else,’ Laurel said bitterly, tears flowing freely down her blotchy face. ‘He’s a liar, a betrayer, a selfish manipulator. Everything he said about wanting a future with me, introducing me to his friends.’ Laurel shook her head again. ‘I believed him.’
‘Laurel,’ Rebecca said, as fresh sobs wrenched from Laurel’s chest. ‘Shh, shh, come here.’
Laurel lay her head on Rebecca’s shoulder. Something inside her was breaking, cracking, wilting and dying.
Rebecca shifted and picked up her phone that was vibrating on the table. Laurel didn’t let go of her.
‘Jack? Are you with him?’ she asked. ‘No. Absolutely not.’
There was a pause.
‘I’ll stop you there, Jack,’ Rebecca said, using her curt solicitor voice. ‘I don’t give a flying fuck whether Nate Daley has grown chicken feet and a teat that produces orange juice. There is no way he is coming in this house.’
God, she loved Rebecca.
‘Tell him to go to his own house, the pub, his precious hole in the ground, drown in the lake. I. Don’t. Give. A. Shit.’ There was a pause where Jack obviously debated whether to relay that to Nate or not. ‘Mmm hmm, when are you coming home? I need to take Laurel back to hers. I’ll be there a while.’
Another pause.
‘Okay, love you too,’ she said before putting the phone back on the table.
They sat for a long time, Rebecca stroking her hair and rocking her gently, as she would rock one of the kids.
‘Jack will be back soon, then I’ll take you home in your car. You don’t want to be here.’
Laurel nodded, exhausted and eminently grateful that Rebecca knew her so well.
But did she want to be at home? She’d been sleeping in one of Nate’s t-shirts (a threadbare blue Time Team Archaeologist one), his papers were spread across her dining table, his running trainers by the door. Her bedroom smelled of him.
But she could sanitise it, get rid of him from her flat. Rebecca would help.
And then, maybe it would be better.
Nate
Nate did the only thing he could think of. He worked. He was first at the site, he was last to leave, and it didn’t stop there. Sleep was evading him, so he catalogued everything, described everything in minute detail. When he finally fell, utterly exhausted, into bed, he had three or four hours of fitful dozing before he repeated the whole groundhog day again. He was dying inside, and Laurel wouldn’t talk to him. She didn’t believe him.
He had to work to get the anger out. To fill his mind with something else. Anger at Alex, mainly, but also angry at Laurel. How could she not even give him the chance to explain himself? She obviously believed Alex’s bullshit story and he had done the worst thing an academic could do. Plagiarism was punishable by death. Well, not exactly, but you wouldn’t work again in a historical academic environment. Ever.
It was career ending, and Alex had put them both in this position. There was no saving Alex from himself this time, and Nate had to hope he had enough academic clout to distance himself from this entire debacle. It was going to come out sooner or later. Surely, surely, someone would have overheard, and academics were notorious gossips, especially about something as juicy as this. He had to get in front of it, had to minimise damage for himself and for the dig site. But how? Whatever he did, he had to do it soon. It had been nearly a week.
Ivor wasn’t going to be much help. He could go to the Chair of the University, but was that overkill? He could throw Alex under the bus, but quite frankly, he had already done that to himself.
And Laurel wouldn’t talk to him.
It was such a mess, and he couldn’t work it out by himself. He needed her arms around him, her reassuring smile, her sharp mind. She obviously didn’t need him because if she had done, she wouldn’t have had Sylvie reply to his emails (both personal and business). She would have replied to his text asking to let him explain, his voicemail saying it wasn’t true, that he didn’t know what Alex had done.
Nate’s throat tightened again as he checked his phone (just in case) for the fourteenth time in half an hour. He put it back in his pocket and dragged his hands over his face. Nothing.
‘Dr Daley! Nate! You need to see this!’
Nate turned to see Anwar, who was waving wildly at him from trench one.
‘It’s a bone, Dr Daley. I think it’s a jawbone, I can see teeth.’
‘Good, Anwar.’ Nate jumped down into the trench and bent to examine what Anwar had found. Nate’s heart beat steadily as he assessed it. ‘Yes, and see here? That’s the zygomatic bone.’ Nate brushed away soft dirt just above. ‘Which one is that?’
‘The bottom outside corner bone of the eye socket.’ Anwar was hopeful.
‘Good, and what should we find next to it?’ Nate murmured, soft strokes of his soft brush pushing at the earth.
‘The maxilla along the bottom and the frontal along the top.’
‘Male or female?’
‘Too early to tell. We’ll need to get to the supraorbital margin first.’
‘Gut?’
‘Male. I think it’s a warrior burial.’
Nate thought so too, the jaw was square and it felt bulky, much more so than a female skull. ‘Why?’
‘We found a shield boss, it’s at the top of a mound... I don’t know, I’ve just got a feeling.’ Anwar flicked his fingers against his thighs quickly.
‘Female warrior?’ Nate pushed.
Anwar sucked in a breath. If it was, which Nate was pretty sure it wasn’t, it would change history. Anglo-Saxon female warriors were usually high status (for example, Aethelflaed of Mercia) and therefore buried with a lot more fanfare than this soul here. There was that burial in Norfolk of a woman with a sword-like instrument which was without doubt not high status, but that was Viking. This was Anglo-Saxon in the heart of the Kingdom of Wessex, so it was unlikely.
‘That would be amazing. Do you think it is?’
‘I don’t know, Anwar. You’ll have to find out.’ He knew it wasn’t, but he needed to let Anwar discover so for himself.
The student gaped at him. ‘Me? Don’t you want to… you want me to do it?’
‘You found it, didn’t you?’ Nate smiled benevolently. As much as he wanted to greedily uncover the bones, he was here to teach and to mentor. ‘You know your way around a skull. Just be careful and call me if you’re uncertain about anything. Anything, Anwar.’
Anwar nodded, his eyes locked on the jawbone and eye socket jutting out of the earth.
Nate climbed out of the trench and left Anwar excitedly pointing out the bones to the undergrads. He pulled out his phone and scrolled to Laurel, hesitating before he pressed the green call button. But she deserved to know, didn’t she? She had a right to know. It was her land, after all, and this was a massively significant find. It would mean at least another year of dig work, and another two, perhaps three, years of research analysis. Apart from the gold and other bits found, these bones would provide a central focal point for any visitor attraction. But more than that, he wanted to share the find with her. He wanted her excitement, her happiness.
He pressed call, and waited as the phone rang once, twice, heart in his mouth.
‘This is Laurel Fletcher. I’m sorry I’ve missed your call, please leave…’
Nate heart sagged. He left her a voicemail:
‘Hey, it’s Nate. I wanted to tell you that we’ve found a skull in trench one, it’s probably male and I would go as far as to say this could be quite a significant burial site.’ He swallowed. ‘I just wanted to tell you. I can show you, if you like?’
Was that too much? Well, he’d said it now.
‘Okay, bye.’
Nate stared at the phone, hoping Laurel would ring back. But she wouldn’t. She hadn’t returned any of his other messages.
The discovery of this skull meant that there would be more scrutiny on this dig, more interest. He had to do something about the whole plagiarism thing. Something like that could ruin this dig, and he was not going to let that happen. Not to his students, and certainly not to Laurel.
He would fix this. But how?
Laurel
Laurel saved the voicemail message after she’d listened to it, just like she’d saved the last two. She read his texts again and again. The ones where he had said he didn’t know that Alex had lied to him, that he would never have done what he was accused of doing. Every email was forwarded to Sylvie to deal with. Laurel had read them, of course. Nate sent dig site updates at the end of every day, a commentary on his professional life.
He’d sent one explanatory email after the disaster of the BAS endorsement conference, asking her to talk to him, let him explain, that he hadn’t known anything, that he would never ever deal with Alex again.
She missed him.
But how could he not have known? Had he been stupid enough to think that Alex had an interest in developing the historiography of the Picts? He had obviously known. And he had stood there, laughing with Lucia, whilst Alex… well. She wasn’t going to think about that again.
The conference had been a success, that is, until it had all imploded.
Little Willow had put on a good show. The cafe had excelled itself with the local produce and Sylvie had been the most amazing deputy she could ever wish for. After the buffet, she’d walked the entire conference up to the site, roped Anwar into giving a little talk about the trenches, and promised them more wine back at the conference centre. The English Heritage officer had been impressed, and Sylvie had formed a lovely relationship with her.
Sylvie’s damage control deserved more than a bottle of cheap wine, and Laurel made a note on the pad on her desk to talk to Barbara, the accountant, about a pay rise.
Even though it was in the university’s hands now, the advertising and promotion opportunities from the conference had been immense.
Laurel waited until six, until she knew that the students would have put down their tools for the day, and the site would be clear and quiet. She really wanted to see the skull. This was a success of all the work she had put into this dig, and she wanted to be part of it. Although, she wanted to be a part of it on her own terms, without a certain archaeologist whose fireworks and earth smell she wanted wrapped around her.
The last time she’d been up to the dig was when she’d done the first walking routes with the academics before the presentations. Sylvie had ended up taking over the last few. She had stepped into the large void left by Laurel and had been absolutely fantastic. She definitely needed a pay rise.
There was going to be one hell of a thunderstorm soon. She could feel it, as the sun settled over the fields, making the dig site shiny and golden. Laurel trudged her way up the slope to trench one and slid unceremoniously into the hole in the earth. It must be there, under the rectangular tarpaulin pinned to the ground in the top left of the trench. Careful not to disturb anything, Laurel picked her way through the trench and knelt in the earth. Her hands trembled as she unpinned two corners and peeled back the tarpaulin.
There it was, sitting proud against the earth; jawbone, cheekbone, eye socket, the curve of the top of the skull. She didn’t know much about facial bone structure (bones hadn’t really been her thing because she liked shiny things), but if Nate said it was male, it was male.
Laurel rocked back on her heels and closed her eyes against the dying sunlight. A weight lifted from her. This had English Heritage written all over it, and this find, this person, would bring in so many visitors to Little Willow Farm, visitors who would need somewhere to park, somewhere to eat, and perhaps a walk around the lake, exclaiming ‘Oh look, what a lovely place for a wedding/conference/birthday party!’ This was everything.
‘Oh, hey.’
Laurel’s eyes snapped open and a weight reappeared like a stone in the pit of her stomach. She pulled the tarp back over the skull, hurriedly pinning it back into place.
‘I thought everyone had gone,’ she muttered. Because she wouldn’t have come if she knew he was going to be here.
‘Yeah, no. I was just finishing up,’ Nate said, indicating the shiny new dig tent that the university had sprung for now they’d had BAS endorsement. He hopped down into the trench. ‘I can show you if you like?’
‘I’ve seen it.’
There was a moment of silence between them, and it was not comfortable. Not in the slightest. She pushed herself to her feet and headed back the way she’d came, away from his pleading face. Away from him.
‘Laurel, please stay. Please talk to me.’
She couldn’t stay, she couldn’t talk to him. She was too angry, and being too angry led her to make rash decisions. Like calling Ivor Rowlands at the university to tell him that his prize pupil was a lying, thieving, plagiarist. Like calling the British Archaeological Society and getting Nate and Alex disbarred or disavowed, or whatever it was. Excluded. Ruined. Like her.
‘I don’t want to.’ She didn’t look up at him as she sat on the edge of the trench and swung her legs up.
‘Stay? Or talk to me?’
There was a slight accusative tone to his voice that Laurel didn’t like one little bit. ‘Both.’
‘It hurts, you know.’
Laurel finally looked at him and raised her eyebrow sceptically. What? How had she hurt him? He didn’t have an archaeological career stolen, one that he’d never even known about.
‘That you don’t trust me. That you won’t even give me the chance to explain, to convince you,’ Nate said. He didn’t try to move towards her, didn’t try to touch her and for that she was grateful.
‘To convince me that Alex acted on his own accord? We both know that Alex Woollard couldn’t tie his own shoelaces without guidance, Nate,’ she scoffed.
‘Laurel, please.’
Nate’s voice broke and she watched his throat work into a long, heavy swallow. She couldn’t let him talk to her. If she did, he would use his pretty, perfect mouth to manipulate the situation, to control it just as he had ten years ago.
‘Nate, no.’
Laurel pushed herself to her feet and forced them forward. She needed to put some space between them, otherwise she would be tempted to scream and shout and cry and kiss and that wouldn’t do well for anybody, especially her.