Grave Consequences by Dana Cameron Page B

to where she and Greg had been talking earlier that morning.
    Jane was uncharacteristically hesitant when I arrived. Shestood beside a wide excavation area that was described by twelve nails that marked out the corners of six one-meter squares, three units over three. I noticed a faint, darker stain in the soil, about six feet by two, located just to the south of the middle set of nails. It was another burial.
    “I’d like you to work here,” Jane said abruptly. “It’s rather sensitive and…I think you’re the person I’d trust most with it.”
    I frowned. “What about you or Greg? What about Andrew? The rest of your crew have been here longer than I—”
    “I can’t do it myself, obviously, and oversee the rest of the site. I wish I could. Greg can’t, because he has to help me and supervise the lab work as well. Andrew can’t because generally he doesn’t focus on just one burial—the one you were working on was special, because it looks like it is a crime scene. He has to help with that as well as keep an eye on all the other skeletons that are exposed. Julia would have been the one…but she’s not to be found and I can’t wait any longer. This is burial nineteen…and it’s important. It’s important to Marchester and it’s important to me, personally, truth be told.”
    We were much closer to the last remaining wall of the abbey, closer to the river itself. I looked up and down the site, orienting myself, and guessed that we were well within the confines of the old abbey. The students were a ways off, definitely outside the building itself. If what I knew from my reading held true—
    “You think this is where the abbess, Beatrice, might have been buried, don’t you?” I said.
    Relief washed over Jane’s face. “Yes. The rest of the crew…well, they’re nowhere near as experienced as you, of course. Some of them I don’t want near it simply because I’m afraid that they are more susceptible to some of the new agey rubbish that some people have been propagating around town.”
    I nodded slowly, understanding. “You mean Morag.”
    Jane was amazed. “How do you know about her?”
    “Andrew and Sabine—the vicar?—told me a little when she stopped by.”
    My friend chewed her bottom lip. “I’m sorry to have missed Sabine, but I wasn’t about to take my eyes off that Morag. Well, yes, in any case, the more experienced ones are where I need them to be, and putting you here keeps them from being jealous of a fellow student getting the honor. And the less experienced ones just don’t get to cut their teeth on Beatrice.”
    “What is her story?”
    “She was a wealthy widow when she came to Marchester, where she had family connections. It wasn’t all that unusual for widows or young women to become vowesses—living a religious life of poverty and chastity without taking vows—but she actually became a nun. In a few years, she rose to the rank of abbess; this might have been because she was particularly holy, it might have been because her family in Marchester were powerful and able to exert a good deal of influence in the Church, or it might have been because it was her money that got the abbey out of debt and in good running order, through some rough times.”
    Jane smiled. “I, of course, like to think it was a combination of things, and it helps if you look at the historical context as well. It’s disputed, of course, but thinking these days suggests that the late medieval Church offered responsibilities and freedoms to women that they couldn’t get in secular life, especially since there was supposed to be a special kind of piety in women who were consecrated as the brides of Christ. I think Beatrice was an ambitious woman who saw an opportunity to be someone of power, of consequence, and took that opportunity.”
    I nodded. “Do you have any of her personal records? Is that what they suggest?”
    “No, we just have a fragment of a set of instructions, informing her