Four Thousand Days Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by M.J. Trow

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Real Margaret Murray

  Also by M.J. Trow

  A Geoffrey Chaucer mystery

  THE KNIGHT’S TALE *

  The Kit Marlowe series

  DARK ENTRY *

  SILENT COURT *

  WITCH HAMMER *

  SCORPIONS’ NEST *

  CRIMSON ROSE *

  TRAITOR’S STORM *

  SECRET WORLD *

  ELEVENTH HOUR *

  QUEEN’S PROGRESS *

  BLACK DEATH *

  THE RECKONING *

  The Grand & Batchelor series

  THE BLUE AND THE GREY *

  THE CIRCLE *

  THE ANGEL *

  THE ISLAND *

  THE RING *

  THE BLACK HILLS *

  LAST NOCTURNE *

  The Peter Maxwell series

  MAXWELL’S CROSSING

  MAXWELL’S RETURN

  MAXWELL’S ACADEMY

  MAXWELL’S SUMMER

  * available from Severn House

  FOUR THOUSAND DAYS

  M.J. Trow

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published in Great Britain in 2021 and the USA in 2022

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

  Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  This eBook edition first published in 2022 by Severn House,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  severnhouse.com

  Copyright © M.J. Trow and Maryanne Coleman, 2021

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of M.J. Trow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-134-5 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0741-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0740-1 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  ONE

  ‘This is absolutely disgusting!’

  ‘I hoped you might like it.’

  ‘I don’t. And no, Veronica, it’s not going to “grow on me”, as you young people say. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never get used to this. What on earth is it?’

  ‘It’s called Syrup of Coca-Cola, Dr Murray and it’s all the rage in America.’

  ‘So is lynching, but I’d hate that to become a British custom. All in all, it’s rather worse than that ghastly Sarsaparilla concoction Signor Luigi keeps trying to press upon me in Market Street. Thomas!’

  Margaret Murray was not much taller than the ailing queen, but in the hallowed halls of University College and the cafes and bookshops of Gower Street, her word was law and her voice, never raised above what was acceptable, brought minions rushing from all directions. Such a one was Thomas, the proprietor of the Jeremy Bentham coffee house and he stood at the lady’s elbow now, hair carefully macassared, apron just so.

  ‘Is there a problem, Prof?’

  ‘This.’ She held up the bottle. ‘Quite an attractive shape, in an early Hittite sort of way, but its contents …’ She looked at it again, as if to make sure it was real, and smacked her lips to rid them of the lingering taste. ‘What’s it made from?’

  Thomas had come up the hard way, from a barrow boy in Smithfield, where the blood ran in the gutters, working his way upwards and westwards to the exalted heights of the Jeremy Bentham in darkest Bloomsbury. To certain clients, it was the Tea Rooms; to others, it was the Coffee House. What it was not, at least in Margaret Murray’s eyes, was an emporium of the undrinkable. What the Jeremy Bentham had in common with the Monster Hotels of the West End was opulence. Everywhere gleamed in brass and cut glass. Chandeliers sparkled from the ceilings and the chairs were padded with velvet of the deepest crimson. For all that, Thomas knew his clientele; most of them were students and he kept his prices low.

  ‘It says “Coca-Cola”,’ Thomas said solemnly, reading the bottle’s label.

  She smiled. ‘I see all those years at the Board School were not wasted. I hoped you could go further.’

  Clearly, Thomas couldn’t and Veronica helped him out. She was a beautiful girl, her copper-coloured hair swept up in the new Gibson style and this was her first term at university. She felt sorry for the man and leapt to his rescue. ‘I believe it contains the essence of the coca plant,’ she said.

  ‘As in cocaine?’ Margaret quizzed her. Margaret Murray had never visited an opium den in her life and now was probably not the best time to start. Her dirty secret, however, was an addiction to the yellow press and she knew of such places – and practices – from the murky pages of the Illustrated Police News.

  ‘As in cocaine.’

  ‘Well, take it away, Thomas and bring us something more acceptable; a pot of Tetley tea perhaps, which contains tannin and hot water. Oh, and two of those delicious little butterfly cakes … or are you watching your figure, Veronica?’

  The girl laughed. If she wasn’t, most of the men in the room were, even those sitting with other women. Not for her the nainsook camisoles and trimmed torchon lace of the Army & Navy Stores. With Veronica, all this beauty was of God.

  Thomas sighed. He had a soft spot for the Prof, as he called her, although she was not yet of that status. Margaret Murray was a kindly soul and it was impossible to guess her age. What with Thomas’s new-found gentility, he knew that gentlemen never posed such questions. All he knew was that the Prof had a mind like a razor and it was her own. She was a woman in a man’s world; but then, weren’t they all? She didn’t suffer fools gladly, if at all. And, rather like the pope, she knew what she liked.

  ‘Tea it is, Prof. And don’t worry, miss, my butterfly cakes are as light as … well … butterflies.’ Phrasemaker, that was Tom.

  When he had gone, Margaret leaned towards the girl. ‘Salt of the earth, that man,’ she said. ‘You can rely on him. Now, the drawings.’

  Veronica had been putting off this evil hour for as long as she could. Resting against the table leg und
er the lawn cloth and doilies was a large, flat case. She lifted it up while Margaret moved the sugar bowl and the little pot of flowers and she edged out a sheaf of papers. They were her first attempts at archaeological drawings, an arcane skill which very few had ever mastered. One by one, they passed under the practised eye of Margaret Murray, junior lecturer at University College, London. Veronica’s heart was pounding under her corset. She barely knew that she was gnawing her lower lip as though her life depended on it. Two or three minutes passed – or was it years? She didn’t hear the noise around her, the mindless gossip of students and booksellers and the collected academe of this particular part of London; bohemian Bloomsbury at its best. She didn’t see Thomas hovering in the background with his butterfly cakes until the table should become available again. All she could see was Margaret Murray’s face, inscrutable under the thatch of mousey hair, her grey eyes twinkling in the morning sun. Outside in the street, cab horses snorted and jinked their way through the crowds, the bustle and hum punctuated by the odd klaxon screech of a De Dion proclaiming its modernity. It was Thursday and there was a pause between the lectures in the Godless Institution that was University College. In the wider world still, the Boers were still being beastly to Lord Roberts and his staff, nearly six thousand miles away. There were rumours that the war was nearly over, that ‘Bobs’ was about to hand over his command to that objectionable boundah, Kitchener. And nobody had much confidence in him. The century was coming to an end, or it had come to an end, depending on how you measured it. The mathematics professors at University College and beyond argued long into the night as to quite what year would herald the twentieth century, but that was mathematicians for you. But none of this mattered in the Jeremy Bentham that Thursday. All that mattered was Margaret Murray and the judgement of Solomon.

  She leaned back in her chair. Her eyes flicked upwards and she smiled at the girl. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘For a first effort, not bad. The cross-hatching needs a heavier shade, to convey depth and … what’s this?’ She pointed to a series of black lines.

  Veronica tilted her head to see it properly. ‘My assumption of what the rest of the beaker would look like.’

  Margaret smiled. ‘Never assume, dear girl; it makes an ass out of you and me.’

  ‘Don’t you think, Dr Murray,’ Veronica ventured, her mentor’s kind words having boosted her confidence, ‘the “beaker folk” is rather a silly name for the people who made these pots?’

  ‘I do, as it happens – although “the pot people” is equally silly. Never lose sight of the fact that the artefacts themselves are by the way. The testimony of the spade only tells us so much about the people who made them, were buried in them, or with them, depending on the artefact itself. They had dreams, these people, hopes, loves and hates. Most of their children died before they could walk. A man was old at thirty. But at least they had one advantage over us.’

  ‘Really? What was that?’ Veronica never missed an opportunity to gather pearls of wisdom from her mentor.

  Margaret Murray looked under her eyebrows at the girl. ‘They didn’t have to drink Coca-Cola.’

  Veronica laughed as she gathered her drawings together and slipped them back into their folder. ‘Seriously, though,’ she said, ‘do you think Professor Petrie will like them?’

  ‘Flinders?’ Margaret smiled as Thomas finally could put his cakes down on the table. ‘Good Lord, no; he’ll hate them.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Halifax; I hate them.’

  Veronica’s mouth gaped. For all Margaret Murray had warned her, the blow, when it fell, was heavy. The only sound in the great man’s study was the ticking of the grandmother in the corner. William Flinders Petrie was a legend in his own lifetime, a man who looked to Veronica as old as Methuselah with a nearly white beard, a waxed moustache and a shock of greying hair. He wore a silk bow tie which was beginning to show signs of having been tied once too often and the shoulder of his gown had slipped to one side, making it easier for him to reach his pipe. The elegant churchwarden lay on its cradle among the debris on his desk, scrolls of hieroglyphs, potsherds, the odd bone and a curling sandwich.

  ‘What did Dr Murray think?’ He fixed his ferocious stare on to the girl.

  ‘I believe she rather liked them,’ Veronica said.

  ‘Hmm.’ Flinders Petrie was rarely that non-committal. ‘You see, this cross-hatching’ – he pointed to the offending article – ‘far too heavy-handed. In archaeology, Mr Gibbs, what do we need?’

  Piers Gibbs was as new to all this as Veronica Halifax. Product of Harrow he may have been, but men like Flinders Petrie had always put the fear of God into him. ‘Umm …’

  The grandmother’s voice held centre stage again.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Gibbs,’ Petrie said, when it was clear that nothing more would be forthcoming. ‘Tell him, Mr Rose.’

  Andrew Rose was not a product of Harrow. He had come to University College from Manchester Grammar School in the grim industrial North and had the flat Northern vowels to prove it. He also had a bachelor’s degree in archaeology, which gave him a definite edge over newcomers like Gibbs.

  ‘The light touch, sir,’ Rose beamed with the smugness of the class swot. ‘The finesse of the feather.’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ Petrie scowled. ‘Don’t overdo it. The Beaker Folk, Mr Crouch? Any thoughts?’

  Ben Crouch rarely had any thoughts that didn’t centre on food. All right, Mr and Mrs Crouch had not realized when they christened him that an earlier Ben Crouch had been the leader of a gang of body-snatchers right here in London in the not-that-distant past and the little baby who grew up to be an annoying slob could hardly be blamed for that. He could be blamed for almost everything else, however.

  ‘Er … an enigma, Professor.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Petrie murmured. ‘I seem to remember that was your response to earlier questions of mine relating to the Minoans, the Illyrians and the Second Punic War. Help him out, Miss Crossley.’

  Anthea Crossley was everything that Ben Crouch was not. She was tall, elegant, vivacious and attractive. Above all, she was a woman and therefore altogether preferable, in Petrie’s eyes, to the hapless Crouch. ‘I found Professor Flaxman’s arguments on them particularly compelling, Professor,’ she said, secretly longing for a cigarette to which she had recently become addicted.

  ‘Did you?’ Petrie raised an eyebrow. He might have to revise his views of Anthea Crossley.

  ‘Miss Friend?’ The great man swivelled in his chair to face the girl. She too was a graduate, articulate and intelligent, but with an air of calm and common sense that made her stand out from the others. The undergraduates in the room were mere children, after all; the graduates no better than they should be; but Angela Friend was rather different …

  ‘Puerile,’ she said, ‘the work of the Beaker Folk. In comparison, that is, with the treasures of the opisthodomos of the Parthenon.’

  ‘Quite.’ Petrie glowed with archaeological pride. ‘Quite. Now, who haven’t I asked?’

  All eyes swivelled to little Janet Bairnsfather, a girl of the Presbyterian persuasion from Abergeldy. No one quite knew what Janet was doing here, at London’s oldest college, so far from home, intending to matriculate one day in a subject that was so dominated by men.

  ‘Miss Featherbum,’ Petrie clasped his hands across his waistcoat. ‘You’ve not been with us long. Has Dr Murray introduced you to the delights of ancient Britain? I should have thought bogs and cairns and so on would appeal, in a Pictish sort of way.’

  ‘Well, I—’ but the Scots girl got no further because William Flinders Petrie was, after all, a middle-aged man in a hurry. He had a rendezvous to keep in Egypt and the sooner he could rid himself of these ghastly Thursday tutorials, the better.

  ‘Absolutely,’ the professor said. ‘Well,’ he sighed and hauled the half-hunter from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Dr Minton will be anxious to pass on his words of wisdom on the villas of the later empire and their place in the Aristotelian dialecti
c, so I won’t keep you.’

  They shambled to their feet, mumbling their goodbyes and he slipped his hip flask from his desk drawer. This bunch of no-hopers were Margaret Murray’s ‘gang’, as she called them, a motley crew if ever Petrie had seen one. Still, he valued Margaret’s judgement, in this as in all things. For instance, she thought that he was a genius; the woman was never wrong.

  The next day and a perfect Friday afternoon was nearly over as far as Angela Friend was concerned. Professor Flinders Petrie was in full flow at the bottom of the raked seats in the auditorium, holding up an amphora as if it were the only one in the world, tracing its whorls and loops with his experienced fingers.

  Angela had sat in this theatre and walked the corridors outside it for four years now. It was, after the real one in Berkshire, her second home. She loved the smell of the Godless Institution, the echo of its halls, the silent marble busts of its founders looking down at her. As an archaeologist, she even loved the living statue of Jeremy Bentham in his glass case. His thigh bones jutted through the canvas of his breeches and his carpals glowed ivory through his worn gloves. His head was a wax copy, the horsehair wig that was once his own hanging lankly down from the broad wideawake hat. Angela knew that the greatest of the college’s founders could see nothing through his glass eyes. But she also knew that he watched her nonetheless, because his actual head was in the hat box between his feet. And this was the point of it, after all; in his will, Bentham had expressed a wish to look out over his students – and somebody had taken him literally.

  ‘And the next time,’ Petrie said in his stentorian voice, ‘we’ll examine the ships that carried these beauties. In the meantime, all of you, have a look at my paper on Graeco-Roman commerce and its place in linguistic cosmography. Trust me, it knocks the stockings off anything written by Heinrich Schliemann.’

  There was raucous applause as there was at the end of all Flinders Petrie’s lectures, but Angela was yawning as she closed her writing pad and she wiped her nib. It was no disrespect to Petrie, but someone had noticed.