you could have chosen otherwise? A different life, I mean.”
Audrey Williams seemed to regard the ear like some distant but not particularly captivating landmark, a dead tree on a knoll or a cow in a pasture. She paid it the slightest glance and looked back at Catherine.
“Something about this century encourages us to think we might. For all its volatility. Not that I would choose a different life myself, mind you—I know what I like and don’t much care how I came to like it—but it’s true enough I’ve managed to become what I wanted to be. Even fifty years ago you needed means and privilege to chart your destiny. Of course it helped as well to be a man. These days even a plain country girl can follow her nose.”
“But not a lady.”
Catherine meant this as a joke and Audrey Williams smiled but she didn’t pause a beat.
“I had a bit of luck, of course. Had timing on my side. I loved the mud it’s true, but I had a properly curious mind, right from the start. High marks in school, always, and that got me a scholarship at Oxford, exactly at the time it became possible for a female to earn a degree. Cultures evolve, you know. Mature. I myself benefited mightily from what others achieved before me. Women and men.
“Down in the south there’s a great tradition of barrow digging. Rich gentlemen, men of leisure, would tunnel into ancient earthworks after antiquities. In the early days the object was less to discover the past than to possess some outrageously old thing, but of course that evolved, too. How could it not? Think of it—treasure without context, without a timeline. But these were curious men, men of medicine and law and classical training.
“Then one man in particular. A military man, a Crimean veteran and a general. Augustus Henry Lane Fox. Inherited title and estate from a cousin and added the cousin’s name to his own. Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers.”
“A mouthful.”
“True. By all accounts an imposing figure in every other respect as well. He was a born organizer, a classifier par excellence. Collected and categorized all manner of things, from every corner of the empire. And then he inherited thirty thousand acres of unplowed Dorset countryside. Archaeological heaven.”
“Did you know him?” Catherine herself knew the answer before she asked the question.
“Oh no. The general was a Victorian, dead before I was born.” Mrs. Williams finished off another quarter of her stein’s contents and flashed two fingers at the publican. Catherine still had all but about three sips in her glass and realized she’d better get busy.
“Pitt-Rivers was the first person to excavate with a system, on a grid, by coordinates and with precision, to impose logic and order on to mere treasure hunting. He had a reputation as a stickler and a martinet and I’m sure he struck cold fear into the heart of every laborer to turn a spade on his estate. But he was the first to see stories in the fragments. That ear. Who carved it? Whose likeness was carved? Pitt-Rivers would have wondered. He would have recognized it as you termed it—part of a bigger thing. He would have gone hunting for the whole head, so to speak.”
Catherine drank more quickly now and she could feel the first, faint effect of alcohol at the edge of her brain. The lift of a breeze before a downpour. She wanted Audrey Williams to keep talking, wanted to know her story too, the fragments and pieces and the buried mysteries, wanted the whole vicarious treasure of it. She wanted what she couldn’t herself manage to possess. She said, “You must have a wonderful life.”
“Darling, what are you doing hovering on the edge of these digs?”
The question was pointed but not unkindly put. Still Catherine heard herself stammer. “It’s not what I intended when I came here. I’m not supposed to be an archaeologist. I’m supposed to train as a pianist. I’m supposed to perform with a city symphony for a few years, although
Audrey Williams seemed to regard the ear like some distant but not particularly captivating landmark, a dead tree on a knoll or a cow in a pasture. She paid it the slightest glance and looked back at Catherine.
“Something about this century encourages us to think we might. For all its volatility. Not that I would choose a different life myself, mind you—I know what I like and don’t much care how I came to like it—but it’s true enough I’ve managed to become what I wanted to be. Even fifty years ago you needed means and privilege to chart your destiny. Of course it helped as well to be a man. These days even a plain country girl can follow her nose.”
“But not a lady.”
Catherine meant this as a joke and Audrey Williams smiled but she didn’t pause a beat.
“I had a bit of luck, of course. Had timing on my side. I loved the mud it’s true, but I had a properly curious mind, right from the start. High marks in school, always, and that got me a scholarship at Oxford, exactly at the time it became possible for a female to earn a degree. Cultures evolve, you know. Mature. I myself benefited mightily from what others achieved before me. Women and men.
“Down in the south there’s a great tradition of barrow digging. Rich gentlemen, men of leisure, would tunnel into ancient earthworks after antiquities. In the early days the object was less to discover the past than to possess some outrageously old thing, but of course that evolved, too. How could it not? Think of it—treasure without context, without a timeline. But these were curious men, men of medicine and law and classical training.
“Then one man in particular. A military man, a Crimean veteran and a general. Augustus Henry Lane Fox. Inherited title and estate from a cousin and added the cousin’s name to his own. Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers.”
“A mouthful.”
“True. By all accounts an imposing figure in every other respect as well. He was a born organizer, a classifier par excellence. Collected and categorized all manner of things, from every corner of the empire. And then he inherited thirty thousand acres of unplowed Dorset countryside. Archaeological heaven.”
“Did you know him?” Catherine herself knew the answer before she asked the question.
“Oh no. The general was a Victorian, dead before I was born.” Mrs. Williams finished off another quarter of her stein’s contents and flashed two fingers at the publican. Catherine still had all but about three sips in her glass and realized she’d better get busy.
“Pitt-Rivers was the first person to excavate with a system, on a grid, by coordinates and with precision, to impose logic and order on to mere treasure hunting. He had a reputation as a stickler and a martinet and I’m sure he struck cold fear into the heart of every laborer to turn a spade on his estate. But he was the first to see stories in the fragments. That ear. Who carved it? Whose likeness was carved? Pitt-Rivers would have wondered. He would have recognized it as you termed it—part of a bigger thing. He would have gone hunting for the whole head, so to speak.”
Catherine drank more quickly now and she could feel the first, faint effect of alcohol at the edge of her brain. The lift of a breeze before a downpour. She wanted Audrey Williams to keep talking, wanted to know her story too, the fragments and pieces and the buried mysteries, wanted the whole vicarious treasure of it. She wanted what she couldn’t herself manage to possess. She said, “You must have a wonderful life.”
“Darling, what are you doing hovering on the edge of these digs?”
The question was pointed but not unkindly put. Still Catherine heard herself stammer. “It’s not what I intended when I came here. I’m not supposed to be an archaeologist. I’m supposed to train as a pianist. I’m supposed to perform with a city symphony for a few years, although
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