Missing Susan by Sharyn McCrumb

let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings …”
    —R ICHARD
II , iii, 2

CHAPTER 6

    THE NEW FOREST
    R OWAN R OVER ABSENTED himself from the morning tour of Winchester, leaving his charges in the capable hands of one of the cathedral’s volunteer guides, a tall silver-haired gentleman who identified himself as a retired physician. He began by telling them that they were standing in the longest church in Europe, except for St. Peter’s in Rome. “When Winchester was the capital of England, kings were crowned here in this cathedral, not in Westminster Abbey,” he said, in tones suggesting that he considered the move to London a recent bureaucratic whim.
    “Isn’t it beautiful?” whispered Frances Coles, gazing up at the graceful succession of carved Gothic arches high above their heads.
    Alice MacKenzie wasn’t ready to forgive the Conqueror for his destruction of the original church. “It’s a bit showy. What did the Saxon cathedral look like, Emma?” she whispered.
    “Not so upscale,” Emma whispered back. “Based on what we found on the dig, I’d say it was a lot smaller, and the architecture was simpler. Besides, even before Williamtrashed it, it had been damaged by the Danes during the tenth-century Viking raids.”
    “Go, Vikings!” whispered Susan, who had heard only the last few words of the conversation and had assumed they were talking about her hometown football team.
    Emma pretended not to have heard. “When we were excavating the ruins of the old cathedral, we found a few Viking graves. You could always tell when you’d found one who had converted to Christianity late in life. The deceased would have a cross on his chest, but just in case Odin was the right god after all, the bones would be lying in a layer of charcoal—symbolizing the flaming ship burials of the Norse religion.”
    “Did you find any treasure?” asked Frances. “My pupils love stories about buried treasure.”
    Emma shook her head. “Nothing much. A few Roman coins. It’s the knowledge of Saxon Britain that we valued.”
    “It hardly seems worth the bother of excavating for a few lousy coins,” said Susan. “I’d want to work on a dig where there was a chance of finding treasure. Like Egypt. I’ll bet you could smuggle a lot of stuff out of the country without the authorities ever knowing. If your dig didn’t find anything worth selling, how could they afford to pay you diggers?”
    “We only got four shillings a day,” Emma admitted. “That was lunch money.”
    Susan hooted. “Boy, talk about your migrant workers!”
    Her fellow tourists glanced at each other, but no one said anything in reply.
    They walked on in silence, reading the grave markers that made up the flooring of the cathedral and listening to the explanations provided by their distinguished guide. Charles Warren, armed with a complex-looking 35 mm. camera, was taking light readings and discreetly photographing the points of interest.
    They admired the nave, built in 1079 by Bishop Walkelyn,a kinsman of William the Conqueror. (“Two hundred fifty feet long and seventy-seven feet high at the ridge rib,” the guide informed them.)
    After that, Elizabeth’s attention began to flag. She followed the group dutifully through the south aisle, thinking about the gift shop and the hour of free time before the one o’clock departure of the coach. She only half listened to the details of Bishop Wykeham’s transformation of the nave from three tiers to two; her admiration of the elaborately carved choir stalls of Norwegian oak was only perfunctory. She came back to full alert when the guide stopped before a collection of decorated wooden chests balanced on top of the stone side screens of the choir. “Boxes of bones,” the guide repeated.
    “Bones?” echoed Elizabeth with renewed ardor.
    “That is correct. In 1524 Bishop Fox placed the bones in these chests. Kings, queens, and bishops are all collected together in the