Chapter 11
The rest of the day passed with far less excitement. That would have been a good thing, but for the fact Saffron had gotten a look inside the vessels from the market stall.
Rather than the excitement she’d anticipated, she felt very little when she looked down at the preserved botanicals from the vessel that Clark carefully set down on the tray before her.
He’d been very nearly a perfect gentleman the entire time they had worked together alongside the fellow from Istanbul University.
Banks and Mr. Apak had both sat with them in the tent, anticipating a language barrier that proved not to be too significant.
The one time Clark had made a snide comment about her abilities, Banks had interrupted him, asking him to speak up so he could translate for the others.
Clark had shrugged it off, and Saffron had sent Banks an appreciative smile.
“Good work today,” Banks told her when they were finished, and the Turkish scholar had departed the dig site.
“And you,” she told him with genuine appreciation. “I’m terribly impressed you know the words for all those herbs. I can’t imagine cloves and coriander come up often in the historical texts you study.”
“They don’t, but they do come up often in cooking,” he said, ducking his head so he didn’t hit it on the tent’s flaps as they exited. “And I’m nothing if not serious about food.”
Saffron ended the day with a strange mixture of relief, disappointment, and the sort of pleasant exhaustion one experienced at the end of a long day of physical activity.
The evening, too, was unremarkable, apart from the crew’s seemingly collective decision to tease her about the snake. Not one, but three of the men pointed at the floor at her feet to warn her of a viper as she circulated the parlor after dinner that evening.
The jest continued into the morning, where one of the historians, a crony of Clark’s, had stopped her lifting the lid off the tray of eggs.
“Watch out!” he cautioned before pulling the lid away slowly. He let out a gusty sigh of relief and revealed the eggs to her. “Oh, I thought there might have been a snake under there!” He guffawed as he walked away, along with the others at the breakfast buffet.
It was a relief, then, to spend the day in the tent, organizing the materials from the urns.
She and Martin sorted the bits of preserved plants with tweezers until she had a neatly organized selection of leaves, flowers, stems, seeds, and even roots for seven different plants.
Even with Martin’s restless company, it was pleasant to sink into the sort of meditative menial work she was used to.
The day passed quickly, and the next, and she was almost disappointed when she came to the end of it the next morning.
She’d enjoyed keeping largely away from the rest of her team, except Alexander, of course.
They’d barely spoken, apart from greetings, farewells, and check-ins in his capacity as her team leader.
He was busy in the evenings, speaking to Dr. Henry about the day’s progress and difficulties, or being pressed for his company by the other men.
She didn’t want to hold him back from socializing, and her presence always seemed to put a damper on their conversations.
She understood. These men were used to being off on their own, outside the usual expectations. Free, in a sense.
She envied them their freedom. They walked about in their shirtsleeves, sweat on their brows and beards on their chins, uncaring of their appearances.
A fair number didn’t bother returning to the hotel for dinner, deciding instead to remain in the kemeralti after work concluded at the agora.
Saffron had not yet worked up the courage to do so herself, though her curiosity grew by the day.
As did the sense that she was wasting time, somehow.
That she was not getting all she could out of her first experience on an expedition.
She might have tempered her expectations while awaiting news of who would be going on the expedition, but once she’d learned she would be spending the autumn in the Mediterranean with her fiancé, she’d spent the summer in almost feverish anticipation.
There would be work—new and important and fascinating—but there would also be a new culture, and an entirely new city laid out before her.
Her romantic heart, more influential than ever with the promises of the marriage to come, dreamed of evening strolls through dusty streets, stolen kisses in the shadows, secret smiles across work tables, even a daring dip in the sea.
Not to mention a role reversal she’d rather looked forward to: as the one with experience in this area of the world, Alexander would be her guide in adventure.
She’d seen hints of the daring young man he must have been before the war and the injury that occasionally still bothered him in mind and body.
She was keen to draw him out. A man of discipline and routine Alexander may be, but his eyes lit up when he spoke of travel.
After just a few days in this new place, she’d seen him come alive in ways she’d never seen in the staid halls of the university.
It was magnetic, yet she never seemed to have the time to explore this new facet of attraction.
It made her quite tetchy, made worse by the fact she felt an idiot for expecting an expedition with a lot of scientists and historians to be a grand romantic adventure. She’d felt stupid often enough without her own brain’s betrayal.
The rest of the week passed in a mixture of boredom and dust as Saffron waited for more to be revealed in the agora.
She stepped in to help the other researchers when she could, usually by sketching, as she’d proven to be the most apt artist in the crew.
She liked to draw, but it occasionally felt like secretarial work.
Something assigned to her in the same manner she’d been told to make a tea tray, as if it were obviously her job.
But it was better than falling prey to the afternoon slump that many of the crew—local and from the university—fell into soon after lunch.
Autumn on the Aegean coast was a far cry from London in October.
It was more like summer when the heat of midday hit, when the sun baked the earth and the sky became as blue as she’d ever seen.
She’d squint down at her sketchpad, the white of the paper hurting her eyes, and draw out quick lines of carved stones or interesting layers of rock for whomever asked it while most of the workers and researchers retreated to the tent for tea and a sweet someone had purchased from the market, or a nap.
The rhythm of work was broken only by brief sparks of amazement.
Coins were found in the dirt, uneven rounded metal pieces with faces pressed into them.
They were passed around at lunch as the archaeologists and historians battled over whether they were minted in 655 BC or 675 BC.
A vase was unearthed, then a piece of a statue that Clark theorized was a sign the rest might be soon uncovered.
Even he was unable to pretend at ennui at the discoveries, even if he continued to be obnoxious.
Later in the week, the morning hum of the city and gentle tap-tapping of the excavation was broken by a cry from the pit. Alexander, who’d been sitting next to Saffron at a table in the tent to see her progress on the urn’s contents, rocketed from his seat and toward the pit. Saffron followed.
Shouts in Turkish and English collided in the dusty air, and the site went from mellow to chaotic in a minute. A line was forming between the pit and the field. Locals and crew alike began passing wooden poles down the line toward the pit.
Dr. Henry came barreling across the field from the south gate. When he drew near, he tore out of his jacket and tossed aside his hat. He was shouting instructions before he’d even gotten to the edge of the pit. “Move aside! Let me through.”
A moment later, Mr. Hayrettin came jogging over. “Dr. Henry, you must allow …” He, too, disappeared into the pit.
“Well, this is quite something,” said a low, arch voice.
Mrs. Henry had meandered to her side, Mrs. Demirel following.
Mrs. Henry wore a pristine white linen suit, smoked lenses, and a smirk, Mrs. Demirel wore a worried grimace and long-sleeved yellow frock that looked more appropriate for English spring than Turkish autumn.
At her side, her husband spoke to one of the local guides, and Mrs. Demirel seemed to be doing all in her power to avoid looking at the man.
“Er, yes,” Saffron said to Mrs. Henry, eyes drawn back to the men. The line had collapsed, and many of the men were edging toward the pit, looking unsure if they should, or could, go down to help or gawk at whatever had happened.
“We might as well get comfortable waiting,” Mrs. Henry said. “We won’t be allowed to miss anything truly important, I’m sure.” She turned to Saffron. “How is your own research progressing?”
“It’s going well, thank you,” she answered, and furnished a few details about the herbs she’d been examining.
Mr. Demirel stumped closer to the pit. Mrs. Demirel hurried after him, looking as if she would protest, but was waved away by her husband.
“Join us, Mrs. Demirel,” Mrs. Henry said. “Miss Everleigh, won’t you show us some of your own work? I trust we don’t have to descend into that madness to see it.”
Saffron obliged, feeling rather silly to be showing bits of dried leaves to the ladies when there was clearly something much more exciting afoot.
When Mrs. Henry noticed her sketches, she asked to see more, which led to her asking to see the spot from which Saffron had sketched a particularly good vista of the dig site.
“What exactly do you plan to do with the information you’ve discovered about the herbs?” Mrs. Henry asked as they trooped into the tall grass of the field.