The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps. Michel Faber
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All the skeletons, I mean. Sixty of them, I read somewhere.’ He nodded towards the East Cliff car park. ‘Enough to fill a tourist bus.’
Siân giggled, picturing a large party of skeletons driving away, taking their last glimpse of Whitby through steamy coach windows as they began their long trip home.
‘We’ve only found a few complete skeletons,’ she said. ‘Usually we find half-skeletons, or bits and pieces. Clay isn’t as kind to bones as people imagine; in fact, they’d last longer just about anywhere else. Stuck in the ground, they crumble, they soften, they dissolve. Sometimes we’ll find just a discoloration in the clay. A tell-tale shadow. That’s why we have to be so careful, and so slow.’
‘And these people you’ve dug up – who were they?’
A single word, Angles, sprang to Siân’s mind, which made her feel a pang of guilty sorrow. How ruthless History was, taking as raw material the fiercely independent lives of sixty human individuals – sixty souls who, in life, fought for their right to be appreciated as unique, to earn the pride of their parents, the gratitude of their children, the loyalty of their colleagues – blending them all into the dirt, reducing them to a single archaic word.
‘They were … Angles, probably,’ she sighed. ‘Difficult to be sure, until we do Carbon-14 dating on them. They lived after the Romans, anyway, and before the Norman Conquest.’
‘Any treasures?’
‘Treasures?’
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