Feeling really bored with being poorly, I found a germ of an idea for a short story wandering into my head, so I wrote it down, and this is it.
The Gladstone Bag
Ruby squatted in the trench wondering what on earth could have gone wrong. So far it had been a textbook dig: the stratification had been perfect with small finds at every level giving excellent dating material. The film team had recorded Al and The Beard as they discussed the uncovering of the hypocaust – Al asking the usual inane questions – while she had hovered in the background, trowel in hand, getting scant acknowledgement for her discovery.
And it had been her discovery. The stars of History Hunters had bagged the known main buildings of the mansio for their own, while she, like the other lesser fry, had been sent to the peripheries of the site, and been rewarded with a previously unsuspected state of the art second century bath house.
It was Ruby’s third season with History Hunters – her first as a proper (if junior) member of the team; she had started as one of the crowd of archaeology students who provided the muscle for the programme, but had been picked out by the director as much for her Kate Humble type good looks and eagerness in front of the camera as for her scholarship to play a larger part this year, and Ruby was quite happy to go along with something which changed researching for her doctorate from something akin to starving in a garret to an altogether more comfortable process. She would cheerfully wear the T-shirts, fleeces, rain capes and even the baseball cap in their garish colours with the HH of the History Hunters logo writ large upon them in just such a design and typeface as to make it almost indistinguishable at a distance from that of the well-known pizza chain which sponsored the programme. If that was the price she paid for her share of the absurd amounts of money thrown at them by the American production company she would raise no objections, especially as most of the production team came from the English co-producers and the programme received its first British airing on BBC4 which was a certain guarantee of its academic integrity.
The format was a tried and trusted one: it was presented by Al, an American stand-up comedian who had studied at Cambridge (Cambridge Cambridgeshire, not Cambridge Massachusetts) and fallen in love with Britain and British comedy clubs. He had returned to America and wasted his talent, but made his name in a long running sit-com about a group of friends in Chicago in which he had a weekly one liner as ‘man in the coffee shop’ who was always just leaving as the central characters arrived making a pithy and vaguely topical comment as he did so. He actually has a first in some branch of political history, but nobody would guess it from some of the questions he has to put to the experts so that they can explain what they are doing to the television audience.
The other mainstay of the programme is the distinguished archaeologist known the English crew as The Beard and the Americans as Kris Kringle for reasons too obvious to explain, together with his sidekicks Parthenope, the Nigella Lawson of academe, and Ken, the man of the people, who can read a prehistoric site with greater accuracy than any other man alive. There are a lot more archivists, geo-physicists, landscape historians, forensic archaeologists etc. before one reaches Ruby, but there she was week by week in the programme credits, in the background of many shots and occasionally saying a word or two on camera. In reality she probably manages to get in more actual archaeology than the principals, but she fully understands that this must never be apparent in the programme.
This week had been an especially good one. The weather had been kind and the whole site – partially excavated by an amateur some half a century earlier – had yielded some good finds, while her own corner had produced the icing on the cake with its painted plaster, mosaic floor and well-preserved hypocaust.
Having filmed ‘the moment of discovery’ with Al and The Beard, she had been left more-or-less alone to clean up a corner of the hypocaust ready for the next day’s filming. It was here that a collapsed area of floor had revealed an intriguing hiding place built into the hypocaust. After carefully recording the collapse, Ruby had lifted the debris to reveal a good second century stoneware jar seemingly all there but crushed under the pressure of nearly two millennia’s build up of soil and rubble.
It was probably at this stage that she should have summoned The Beard or at least a senior member of the production team, but it was already late afternoon and the main crew was filming the last item of the day at the far side of the site while a good half of the team had already packed up and made its collective way to the excellent pub in the near-by village. At length she managed to raise Dave on the radio who came, grumbling that he would miss the best of the food and worse than that the chance to retain his unbeaten record in pub quizzes wherever the History Hunters leviathan had rested, with his hand held camera and trusty assistant Shell.
“This had better be good,” he said.
“It should be,” Ruby replied, and then used a phrase that most archaeologists despise to allow pass their lips, “I think we may have buried treasure here.”
He squatted, grumbling more and more about fading light, late dinners and missed quiz opportunities, while Ruby carefully drew the disposition of the visible pot shards and delicately lifted them into the finds tray. Dave filmed some of the process all the time muttering about ‘it won’t be good enough to use’. Shell adjusted the light, held the mike and made a list of the shots, her recording as precise as Ruby’s own.
At last the leather bag inside the jar was ready for lifting.
“You should wait for tomorrow,” said Dave, and ordinarily Ruby would have agreed, but already there had been little rumbles of thunder in the distance which could be something or nothing by the morning; besides – if it was treasure, and she admitted that she had only really used the word to arouse Dave’s interest – security on the site was not of the best . . .
“I’ve got to finish now I’ve started,” she replied. How gently she eased fingers and trowel beneath the remains of the pot, holding the decaying leather of the bag together as much by will power as by science. How cautiously she lifted it – soil and all – into the tray. How slowly she passed it to Shell, neither of them daring to breath.
“Well, let’s have a look inside,” demanded Dave, who should have known better.
“Now it’s safe we can leave that till the morning,” she replied.
“Not bloody likely! I’ve not missed my dinner and spent all evening kneeling in a muddy field to let that crowd steal my glory. Get that light adjusted, Shell, so we can have the big reveal.”
This did to an extent fadge with Ruby’s own feelings, but she protested that The Beard should at the very least be consulted.
When at last they managed to find someone whose mobile was switched on, it seemed that the quiz had been won without Dave’s help and that a celebration was in progress, but the director was eventually separated long enough from his beer to agree to Dave’s filming the opening of the bag. An anxious voice could be heard in the background “if she can do it without damaging the . . .” and another one cut in with “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”
Permission granted, Ruby nervously released the fragile leather from the surrounding soil. There was a split along the seam and inside a smaller bag was revealed to contain a small hoard of low denomination Roman coins such as one might imagine any trader carrying with him. It was the next bag which brought forth the real shock containing as it did gold coins which looked to Ruby suspiciously like sovereigns and half-sovereigns of the reign of Queen Victoria. She looked at them in silence as she squatted in the trench wondering what on earth could have gone wrong.
Caution fled as she plunged her hand further into the bag to reveal more and more gold – broken watch chains, brooches, single cuff links, hat-pins, small salts and miniature locks - a veritable pawnbroker’s hoard of late nineteenth century scrap which could be weighed and traded anywhere and anywhen. And then there was the bag itself, damaged and decayed by the best part of two millennia underground, there was no denying the unmistakeable design of a Gladstone Bag with its Bramah lock still intact.
