Silhouette in Scarlet - Elizabeth Peters [20]
Every large city has places like the Hansson Collection – small, privately endowed museums that are dedicated to a particular specialty and are visited only by experts in that specialty and by compulsive tourists who follow lists of ‘things to see.’ The building in which it was housed had once been a private residence – that of Mr Hansson, I assumed. It was a beautiful seventeenth-century mansion in the ornate Dutch Renaissance style, with rosy-red bricks and carved window frames. I lucked out on the schedule. It was open from one to five. I still had an hour.
I passed through room after stately room, my footsteps echoing, in spite of my efforts to tread lightly. The focus of the place was prehistory. I don’t think I saw more than six people, all of them frozen in rapt contemplation of shapeless stone axes and rotted copper tools. Prehistory is definitely not my field, and I have never had any trouble resisting exhibits of cracked pots, but I must confess to a certain morbid interest in graves. A goodly proportion of the objects displayed in archeological museums come from tombs, but that isn’t the reason why reconstructions of ancient burials are so popular with visitors. I suppose they remind us of the futility of material ambitions and the inevitability of death. ‘As I am now, so you shall be . . .’
Since I didn’t need reminders of mortality just then, I headed directly for the Treasure Room, where the most valuable pieces in the collection were housed – valuable, at least, in material terms. The arrangement had been made not so much for the convenience of tourists as for security. Like our treasure room in Munich, it was built like a vault, windowless and steel-walled.
Reaching the end of the wing, I turned a corner and came to a sudden, shocked halt. I’m sure the exhibit had been deliberately arranged to have that effect. Sensitive tourists of either sex probably shrieked.
She lay on her back, her head turned to one side and her limbs lightly flexed in an attitude of sleep. The brown ribs showed through the flattened chest wall, and one hand modestly covered the sexual area, but there was no doubt she was female; the rounded hips and slender arms had been petrified into a variety of tanned leather. Her head had been shaved. The delicate folds of her ear had been flattened by the earth that held her down, and a strip of woven cloth covered her eyes. They had at least had the decency to blindfold her before they drowned her in the bog and left her there.
I had read about the bodies found in peat bogs, incredibly preserved by natural chemicals. They aren’t mummies, for mummification implies a drying process. This is more like tanning. Some of the bog people, like the man from Tollund, are more lifelike than most Egyptian mummies. The majority of them come from Denmark. This girl – fourteen years old, according to the catalogue – had been found in Halland, on the west coast of Sweden. She had died sometime during the first century AD, a sacrifice to some unknown god, or an executed criminal. It was hard to think of a crime a fourteen-year-old would commit. The catalogue suggested adultery. Fourteen years old . . . Many of the women were married that young. And throughout the centuries, up to modern times, women convicted of adultery often had their hair cut off before they were killed. Only the women. Their male partners in ‘crime’ probably handed the barber his razors and then headed for the local pub to drink a few horns of mead with the boys.
As I went on into the next room, I heard a muffled shriek, as another unwary visitor came on the girl from Halland.
There were two people in the Treasure Room. One looked like a student – beard, jeans, T-shirt. He was leaning over a glass case containing coins and beads.
The other person was a woman, and for a startled second I felt as if I had come upon my doppelgänger, that image of oneself that is the harbinger