London - Edward Rutherfurd [593]
And then, of course, there had also been young Dr Dogget. With his cheerful temper and the white flash in his hair, he was as popular as he was easily recognized. Rather curiously, he had webbed fingers. “Good for swimming and digging,” he had wryly informed her. He was always so busy, and she, as a new recruit, was of course so junior, but she was hoping that at this dig he might notice her for the first time. The question was, as well as Roman artefacts, did he also like blue-eyed blondes?
The trench was on a small site overlooking the Thames. It was not often that archaeologists got the chance to dig in the City of London, but when a building was demolished and another built in its place, arrangements could be made for an excavation. There had been so much building since the City and East End was devastated in the Blitz that its quality was uneven. Some of the work, like the huge developments of the docklands now that containers and huge vessels had taken the dock activity far down the estuary, Sarah thought was good. The building where they were excavating had, in her opinion, been inferior, so she was doubly glad to see it replaced. The owners of the new building had even agreed that, if the archaeologists uncovered anything really exciting, they would construct an atrium and build round it, so that the remains could be viewed by the public. They had already gone down ten feet below the old basement, which meant that, standing in the bottom of the trench, at her eye level she was looking at a layer of gravel that would have been the surface in the time of Julius Caesar.
It was mid-afternoon, and only a few puffy white clouds had appeared in the bright spring sky when the deputation headed by Sir Eugene Penny arrived. He inspected the place carefully, came into the trench, listened carefully while Dr Dogget explained to him exactly what they were doing, asked a few questions – Sarah had made sure that they were intelligent – and having thanked everybody, left. When he was introduced to Sarah he shook hands politely, then paid no further attention to her whatsoever.
No one at the museum had any idea that her family owned a large brewery, and certainly not that Sir Eugene Penny, alderman, was her cousin. She preferred it that way. But the museum, like all such institutions, was always short of funds for its ambitious projects and if anyone was likely to find a way of getting them, she thought it was probably her cousin.
After he had gone, for a few minutes Sarah allowed herself to walk by the quiet river. It was cleaner now than it had been for centuries. You could even catch fish in it again. It was also carefully managed. The gradual tilting of the island that had been raising the water level for so many centuries had been counteracted by an elegant flood barrier across the stream. London might have some things in common with Venice, but it certainly wasn’t going to sink under the water. Allowing herself a last look down to Tower Bridge and up to St Paul’s, Sarah returned to the trench.
It was amazing how quiet London could be. Not only in the big parks, but in great walled enclosures like the Temple, or in the old churches like St Bartholomew’s, there was a silence that seemed to take one back for centuries. Even here in the City the office buildings rising high over the narrow streets provided a screen so that the sounds of London’s busy traffic could scarcely be heard. She glanced up at the sky. Still blue.
Dr Dogget had gone. One other archaeologist was in the trench at the moment, scraping away patiently at the surface. Sarah went down to join her. As she did so, she remembered a talk she had heard John Dogget give to a party of older schoolchildren. He had outlined the work of the museum, and of the archaeologists too. And then, to put this work into focus, he said something she had