THE TAPESTRY OF TIME, by Eric Brown That spring, with winter well past and summer on the way, I decided that the time had come to visit Simon Cauldwell.
I had delayed our meeting for a number of reasons, some obvious but others hidden in the depths of my psyche: fear, of course, was dominant I didn’t want to confront Cauldwell with my findings for fear of what I might learn.
I was forty-five, happily married with a ten-year-old daughter, and I held a secure post as a senior lecturer in medieval archaeology at Oxford. I had reached the stage in my life at which I was confident that the future would hold no surprises. Perhaps I was complacent.
Fiona guessed that something was amiss. One evening in April she appeared at the door of my study. She must have been watching me for a while before I looked up and noticed her.
I smiled, tired.
“It’s that skull, isn’t it?”
I massaged my eyes. “What is?” I said, not for the first time amazed at my wife’s perspicacity.
“Dan, ever since you found the thing, you’ve been different. Morose withdrawn. If I believed in that kind of thing, I’d say it was cursed “
I managed to smile. “It’s not cursed,” I said. “Just misplaced. The skeleton was found with artefacts that date from a hundred years later. “
She pushed herself from the jamb of the door and kissed the top of my head.
I said, “The paper I’m writing, trying to explain the anomaly, just isn’t working.…”
“I’m sorry, Dan. Dinner in ten minutes, okay?” She kissed me again and left the room.
Whenever I lied to Fiona, which wasn’t often, I always wondered if she’d seen through me.
Misplaced artefacts, indeed.…
The truth was far more perplexing, and worrying, than that.
A few days later I e-mailed Cauldwell, telling him that I’d had second thoughts about his offer.
He phoned later that afternoon. “Dan, so persistence pays off! You’ve seen sense at last. Good man. Look, when’s convenient for you?”
“I’m free all this week.”
“Excellent. Come over to the research station and I’ll show you around the place. It’s all hush-hush, of course. Top secret and all that.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Tomorrow at one suit? Excellent, see you then.”
I replaced the phone, very aware of my thudding heartbeat. There was no turning back, now.
The headquarters of Sigma Research Inc. was buried away in the Oxfordshire countryside, miles away from the prying eyes of bustling Oxford.
I drove slowly through the tortuous, leafy lanes, considering my imminent meeting with Cauldwell and, despite myself, reviewing my dealings with the man. Despite the tone of bonhomie he had affected on the phone the day before, we had always been sworn rivals. Not to put too fine a point on if I detested him.
He had been one of those old-fashioned academics ensconced in a sinecure at Oxford’s richest and most conservative college. His resistance to theory, his inability to see the worth of research ideologically opposed to his own narrow views, had won him many enemies. Much to the surprise and envy of his colleagues, last year he had been headhunted by Sigma Research, a big American outfit with a lot of dollars and a market-led excavation theory.
A few months after Cauldwell left Oxford, I discovered the eleventh-century skull at a dig near the village of Sheppey, Herefordshire.
And a couple of days after that, Cauldwell himself phoned to invite me to join his team at Sigma Research. More than a little suspicious, I had told him I was quite happy at Oxford, thanks all the same.
Now I was following up his invitation—purely in the interests of research, of course.
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