Chapter 39
Chapter
We explored the cave for the first time that afternoon, once all the equipment was unloaded and our tents erected.
The cave wouldn’t fit all of our party, Buckland said, so we drew lots to divide into two groups.
I drew in the first round, but awful old William Conybeare—who never approved of women doing much of anything—didn’t think it proper for me to participate in the exploration.
Thankfully both Buckland and Henry came to my defense.
“Mary is my invited guest,” Buckland said, at the same time that Henry said, “Mary’s my assistant.”
The two rivals scowled, as if the agreement pained them, but I grinned.
“If you’re uncomfortable, perhaps you ought to wait for the second group,” I said innocently, as I tied up my dress so that my knees wouldn’t be caught in my skirts as I crawled.
Conybeare sputtered, and Henry barely covered his snort with a cough.
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, you’ve all seen a woman’s knees before.”
Conybeare’s eyes bulged, his face turning bright red. Henry laughed openly now, and Buckland scowled. “Don’t encourage her, Stanton.”
We entered the cave system through a natural, tear-shaped hole between several large boulders, the gap barely wide enough for my shoulders.
Buckland had a reliq-lamp strapped to his chest, but the light hardly reached me as we crawled deeper into the damp earth and were swallowed by the dark.
Everything inside the cave felt weighty.
The air itself had a heaviness from the moisture and stillness, and the sound of my own breath and our shuffling legs echoed in the tight quarters as we dragged them through thick mud.
The drip, drip, drip of distant water was nearly maddening.
Under the mud, the stone was rough with mineral deposits and budding stalagmites.
The short stalactites from the ceiling were like terrible teeth, scraping at the back of my head.
I grinned as I poked at one and came away with a drop of water on my fingertip.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed exploring the Kirtlington cave. Most of my finds back home were exposed by rock falling or sliding from the cliffside during storms. I had to race the wind and water for my fossils, hurrying to unearth them before the sea grew impatient and tried to claim us both.
The Lucy-carved cave from which I’d extracted Ajax was the only other cave I’d explored. This cave system went deeper, tunneling into the white limestone hills.
Before too long, the passage opened quickly to a height that I could walk hunched over, and, peering best I could around Henry’s rump—at least it was a nice arse—I saw Buckland straighten to almost full height.
A few moments later, I stood, too, looking around at the small cavern in breathless wonder.
Buckland held up the lantern, sweeping it around. The beam was weak by the time it hit the uneven, pocked walls, where shadows shrank back like devils from the light. The ceiling was just above our heads, and Henry had to hunch.
“One of the locals said witches used to hide here during the bloody reign, whenever Inquisitors swept through the countryside,” Henry said in hushed, almost reverent tones. The place seemed to demand it.
I shivered. It was almost too easy to picture those men and women, hundreds of years ago, hunched in the alcoves and hidden pockets of the cavern, curled in threadbare blankets, hoping they wouldn’t be hanged.
Buckland led our party to the far end of the chamber and swept his light across to reveal a roughly oblong shape, low in the wall—so pitch black that it looked less like a hole and more like a gap in reality.
There was a mound of cracked stone below it that must have fallen loose, probably worn away in the recent flood.
“This is it,” Buckland said. “One of the men sent his little boy in, and he came back and said there was something poking up from the ground, like a tooth. From his description, I feel sure it’s a tusk.”
I was listening, but I’d spotted something in the jumble of fallen rock.
I knelt and picked it up. Even in the darkness, I knew the feeling of a seashell.
And this one had a small hole through its center.
I ran my fingers over the round edge and then tucked it into the satchel on my belt.
Best to keep my suspicion to myself, for now. One shell did not a hypothesis prove.
Buckland took out a stack of reliqs and ran his hand over the edges of the black void as he did. The rock around the hole crumbled to a fine sand that dusted over our boots. It took him a few minutes and six reliqs, but soon enough, the gap was large enough to climb through.
We peered inside the small chamber that he’d opened. It was only about hip-high, and Buckland had to stay on his knees as he swept the beam of his reliq over the earth.
He caught his breath, and we craned our necks as Buckland took out a brush and swept away some of the dust and loose sediment—enough to reveal a foot-long stretch of smooth, yellowed ivory.
He grinned triumphantly. “Time to dig, my friends.”
That afternoon, during his shift in the cave, Gideon Mantell found evidence of two other mammoth tusks, which sent all of us into a frenzy: apparently, we had multiple mammoths on our hands.
It took three days just to uncover the whole of that first tusk, even with the aid of reliqs. Buckland expanded the entry to the chamber, but the crawl space was only big enough for two people at a time, working on their knees. We took turns in shifts, chipping and dusting.
My muscles were pleasantly sore that evening as Mantell and I collected our supper of fish stew from the camp cook. I fingered the bit of shell I’d taken from inside the cave, now in my pocket.
Ajax climbed down my sleeve and hopped to the ground, pecking around our chairs for any dropped crumbs.
Conybeare and Goldsmild joined us around the campfire.
“Did you hear? Goldsmild found a molar fragment,” Mantell said.
“Just now, as I was packing up,” Goldsmild said, grinning.
He was covered in drying mud—we all were, really—but pulled a clean white linen kerchief from his pocket and unfolded it reverently.
The piece of mammoth tooth was still half buried in rock, but the straight-edged, vertical plates of dentine were obvious in the browned bone.
We all gasped and cooed as he passed the tooth fragment around the circle for examination.
Even Lucy was impressed. “That’s just a piece of a tooth, you say? But it’s huge!” The shard lay the full length of her palm.
“Indeed,” Goldsmild said solemnly. “They were mighty beasts, the mammoths. Far larger even than their still-living cousins, the elephant.”
“Can you imagine trying to hunt an animal like that?” Lucy mused, passing it on to an almost-bouncing Elizabeth. “Like trying to take down a house.”
“Well, very few humans would have had the chance to hunt them,” Buckland said quickly. “The mammoths disa—I mean, went into flood-hibernation—long before Noah’s progeny repopulated the Earth. Perhaps he had room aboard for only the elephants.”
Henry made a dismissive noise in his throat. I hadn’t seen him join us, slipping from the shadows to sit casually beside Goldsmild.
“Don’t you ever tire of the knots you must tie yourself into, Professor?” Henry said.
Buckland’s lips pinched flat as his brow knit.
“See here, Stanton—”
Catherine set a hand on her husband’s arm. Some unspoken signal passed between them, and Buckland took a deep breath.
“On the subject of elephants,” Catherine said softly. “There are reports of elephant graveyards in Africa, are there not? Perhaps the mammoths demonstrated similar behavior, and we’ve stumbled upon one such graveyard.”
“Elephant graveyards are only legend,” Conybeare said.
“And we haven’t found any more of the skeletons, besides the tusks. And Goldsmild’s tooth,” Mantell noted.
“We have hardly begun the expedition,” Goldsmild said. “There could still be all manner of bone in there.”
“Well, we know the cave is prone to flooding,” Buckland said. “Perhaps the tusks, being the heavier ivory, remained while the rest of the skeletons were swept away.”
I bit my lip as they theorized, thinking of the seashell in my pocket. Ajax pressed against my knee, and I scratched the top of his head. I was already complicit in one lie about a flooded cave. I didn’t want to join another.
“Or…what if it’s a burial?” I said suddenly, before I could second-guess. “A…human burial?”
Even with the dancing fire, I could see the paired lines between Buckland’s eyes deepen.
Henry straightened, across the fire.
I swallowed. Maybe I was wrong. It would be perfectly fine if I was. But I needed to say my piece nonetheless.
I pulled out the seashell I’d found and unfurled my palm. “This was in the rubble of the passage. It has a hole, for a string.” I swallowed. “What if…what if it was a reliq?”