Crosetti and Rolly went to the rear door of the van, which opened to reveal an interior that included a steel table, tool racks, long steel pipes, ladders, rigging gear, electronic equipment, and two men, who introduced themselves as Nigel and Rob, Nigel owlish and bespectacled, Rob broad-shouldered and gap-toothed with a tan buzz cut. They handed out yellow coveralls and boots and yellow hard hats with lamps in them. Crosetti was not surprised to find that the boots and the coveralls fit him perfectly. Carolyn reported that hers did too.
“Osborne seems like a very efficient outfit. Does it make you nervous to learn that they have both our shoe sizes?”
“Nothing surprises me anymore,” she said. “What are they doing?”
“I have no idea,” said Crosetti.
They watched the two men roll a four-wheeled cart made of steel pipe out of the van, and Crosetti was conscripted into off-loading various pieces of heavy electronics and car batteries from the van and lifting them onto the cart.
“By the way, what is all this?” he asked Rob.
“It’s a ground-penetrating radar set, absolutely top drawer. It produces a picture of the subsurface from a few feet to a hundred feet down, depending on the soil. We should get good penetration here. It’s Triassic sandstone.”
Nigel said, “Unless there’s a clay intrusion.”
“What if there’s a clay intrusion?” asked Crosetti.
“Then we’re fucked, mate,” Rob answered. “We’ll have to go to resistivity, and we’ll be all week.”
“You both work for Osborne?”
“Not us,” said Nigel. “University of Hull geology. We’ve been corrupted by corporate gold, haven’t we, Robbie?”
“Utterly. What’re you lot after anyway? A Viking hoard?”
“Something like that,” said Crosetti. “We’ll have to kill you if we find it though.” They both laughed, but nervously, and both looked around for Brown, who seemed to have wandered off.
Rolly was poking at the ground some distance away and Crosetti walked over to see what she was doing.
“You don’t have to claw at the earth with your fingers,” he said. “We have all this high-tech equipment.”
“Look what I found,” she said and held out her hand. In it was a flat, roughly triangular white stone upon which had been incised a perfectly straight double line and below it what appeared to be the petal of a rose.
“It’s the priory,” she said. “This is the place. I’m getting chills.”
“So am I. You look terrific in coveralls and a hard hat. Would you whistle at me as I walk by?”
One of her stern looks followed this sally, and then Nigel and Rob called him over to help draw the cart. They heaved the thing through the wood, over ruts and roots, with Nigel leading the way, staring at a Global Positioning Receiver and Rolly trailing behind carrying several picks and spades across her shoulders.
“Let’s stop here and light up the radar, people. If that satellite view we had from you is correct, Mr. GPR says this is the place.” They were in a shallow dip of land thickly littered with golden beech leaves between three old gray trees, whose reaching limbs crisscrossed against the milky sky above. Nigel made some adjustments and switched on his set. It hummed, and a broad paper tape emerged from a slit in one of the metal boxes. Nigel shoved his glasses back up his nose and studied the colors printed on the paper. He hooted and cried out, “Well, I’ll be blowed. Got it in one. There’s the void and it’s full of what looks like chunks of cut stone. Clear as a bell. Take a look, Robbie.”
Rob did and confirmed the find. They cleared away the leaves and surface soil and began to dig, and before too long had uncovered the remains of what looked like the coping stones of a well, in the center of which was a mass of irregular pale stones.
“It’s dry,” said Crosetti.
“Well, yes,” said Rob, “the hydrology’s changed a good deal in the last four hundred years, what with digging canals and ornamental ponds for the gentry and public water schemes. Still, bit of a job, here,” he said, frowning down at the opening. “Some bastards have stuffed the thing with rocks. How deep did you need to go?”
Crosetti said, “Something like eight meters.”
“Oh fuck,” cried Rob. “We’ll be all fucking day.”
It was nasty, heavy work of the type that all their ancestors had done every day of their lives in the not too distant past, the movement by human hands of massy bits of the planet’s fabric from one place to another. Only one person could fit down in the hole at a time, and this man had either to lift a rock onto a canvas sling attached to chains that led to the steel pipe tripod and pulley that the two geologists had rigged above, or else, if the stone were too heavy to lift, he had to drill a hole, anchor an eyebolt into it, and secure it to a hook. An hour into the work it started to rain, a steady chilling drench from the greasy low clouds, just enough to cause slips and frequent painful injuries and the dull stupidity that comes from cold. Crosetti’s mind went dim as he worked. He forget Shakespeare and his fucking play. The world shrank to the problem of the next stone. Each of the three men worked half an hour and then clambered up an aluminum ladder to collapse exhausted on the bed of the van. Rolly had found a Primus stove and kept the kettle going and fed them all pints of thick, sweet tea. When she wasn’t doing that she stood at the head of the well with a steel tape measure and dropped it down after each layer of stone had been raised and called out the depth: five meters, twenty: six and eighteen; and made jokes and encouraging cheerful noises and laughed at the snarls and curses she got in return.
At half past noon they broke for lunch. Ever-efficient Mr. Brown had packed the Land Rover with plenty of groceries and Rolly had made soup and sandwiches and more tea, this time with rum in it. They ate in the van to be out of the rain and from this vantage could see Mr. Brown out in the distance, by the road, talking with a man in a Barbour jacket and tweed cap. The man was gesturing with a stick and seemed upset. After a few minutes he returned to his own Land Rover and drove off. Brown walked back across the squelching field to the van.
“That was the National Trust man,” said Brown. “He is much vexed. This field is a registered site and we are absolutely forbidden to disturb it. He’s gone off to fetch the authorities, who will call the water board and find out we are not who we say we are. How close are we?”
“Six point eighty-two,” said Rolly.
“Then we’re going to have to move a little over a meter and get the Item, if it’s there, and clear out in something like half an hour. Break’s over, gentlemen.”
They returned to the well and delved like demons for ten minutes, and here they finally caught a break, because the next layer of rubble consisted of small regular stones the size of cobbles that could be readily flung into the sling. Crosetti was at the bottom when the tape descended past his face and struck the rubble and Rolly called out, “Eight point sixteen.”
He crouched and directed his miner’s lamp at the east wall. At first he saw nothing, only the roughly rectangular stonework of the well shaft. He grabbed a short wrecking bar and pounded on each stone in turn, and on the fifth try one of the stones seemed to move. He forced the straight blade of the bar between that stone and its sister and heaved and the stone slid a little farther out of alignment. In two minutes of violent exertion he had pried it from its place and was looking into a void from which issued an odor of ancient damp earth. His lamp shone on a round shape, about the size of a number ten can.
Hardly breathing now, Crosetti inserted the curved end of the wrecking bar into the hole as far as it would go and wiggled it around until he felt it catch, and slowly pulled out what appeared to be a lead pipe a little over a foot in length and a hand span in diameter, closed at both ends by soldered sheets of lead. Crosetti carried it up the ladder, cradling it tenderly, like a rescued infant.