Page 30 of The Forsaken (Echoes from the Past #4)

TWENTY-THREE

“I’ll never get used to this smell,” Quinn said as she followed Gabe down the corridor to the mortuary.

The usual stench of carbolic, decay, and desperation hung over the premises, making her wince.

She felt sorry for the poor people who had to come to the mortuary to identify the remains of their loved ones.

It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it was usually the result of either suicide or violence, and the sight wasn’t for the faint of heart, even when only the face of the victim was visible.

“You’re not meant to be used to it,” Gabe replied. “It’s revolting.”

Quinn knocked on the door and poked her head in. Sarita Dhawan was seated in front of the computer, typing rapidly. Her ebony hair was wound into a bun atop her head and her stylish glasses appeared to be sliding down her nose.

“Hello there,” Sarita called out. “Dr. Scott said you’d be stopping by. He’ll be back shortly. He just popped out to get a sandwich. Give me a moment to finish entering these autopsy results and I’ll walk you through to the lab.”

“Find anything interesting?” Gabe asked as they followed Sarita into an adjoining room where their skelly was laid out on a metal slab, completely reassembled and thoroughly cleaned.

“I’ll let Dr. Scott fill you in,” Sarita replied. “He’d have his nose out of joint if I stole his thunder.”

“Ooh, there’s thunder,” Quinn said, rubbing her hands in anticipation. “I can’t wait.”

“Did you work with Colin on this?” Gabe asked, standing over the bones gleaming beneath fluorescent lights.

“I ran tests on the fabric, leather, and hair,” Sarita replied. “Fascinating stuff. ”

“Sorry I’m late,” Colin called out as he walked into the lab. He shook hands with Gabe and kissed Quinn’s cheek before pulling on a pair of latex gloves and approaching the remains.

“So, what can you tell us about him?” Gabe asked.

Colin smiled happily, his eyes crinkling with good humor. “The first thing I can tell you about him is that he is a she,” he announced, looking gratified by Gabe’s shocked reaction.

“Are you sure?” Gabe asked. “I’ve never come across a Christian woman buried with a sword. Of course, there were Saxon women, and Celts, who were warriors, but women of the Middle Ages didn’t often go into battle.”

“It’s not her sword,” Colin replied, grinning as though he were thoroughly enjoying himself.

“How can you tell?” Gabe inched closer to the skeleton and stared down at the bones, as if they would suddenly reveal all to him. Of course, he already knew that the sword didn’t belong to the woman on the slab, but scientific proof was what counted in archeological circles.

“Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”

Quinn and Gabe nodded eagerly.

“What we have here is a female, aged between twenty and twenty-five.” Colin pointed to the bone at the base of the spine.

“The shape of the pelvic cavity, the angle of the greater sciatic notch, and the mandible shape and its ramus all prove that she was indeed female. I have determined her age by scoring the epiphyseal closure of the sacrum at the time of death. Her humerus bone is a maximum of thirty centimeters and the femur is a maximum of forty-three centimeters, which tells me that she was between four foot seven and five foot two.”

“Fascinating,” Gabe said as he studied the remains. “Go on. ”

“Based on carbon-14 dating, I’d say she lived in the mid-to-late fifteenth century.

And she was no warrior; she was a lady. If you look at her wrists, you’ll see that they are very delicate.

A person who routinely performs hard physical tasks, such as wielding a sword, develops ridges at the site where the muscle was attached to the bone and pulled over the years.

I see no such ridges here. I think this woman came from a wealthy family.

Her teeth are in excellent shape, which means she enjoyed a varied and plentiful diet.

The bits of fabric and leather support my theory.

The fabric is a fine velvet, which was dark blue in color originally.

There are tiny bits of gold thread, and the stiches, or what’s left of them, are very fine.

A woman who wasn’t well-to-do would be wearing homespun, dyed with basic dyes obtained locally.

The homespun would have disintegrated after all these centuries, being more loosely woven and much thinner in texture.

I would also venture to suggest that she had well-made shoes, not the coarse leather shoon worn by the poor, where both shoes were exactly the same and could go on either foot.

The leather is from a calf, not a fully grown cow. Also a luxury.”

“And her DNA?” Quinn asked. She’d seen strands of hair still clinging to parts of the scalp, which was now washed clean.

“Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a whole follicle, but we ran whatever tests we could on the hair strands themselves.

Our lass had auburn hair and light eyes—either blue or green.

She was fair-skinned, as people with her coloring tend to be.

Her DNA shows traces of Saxon, Norman, and Scottish ancestry, which, given the area where she was found, is very common. ”

“Did she have children?” Quinn asked as her hand automatically went to her stomach, where baby Russell was in the middle of a particularly exuberant somersault.

“I don’t believe so.”

“How did she die?” Gabe asked, fast forwarding to the most important question .

“I haven’t a bloody clue,” Colin replied, spreading his hands in a gesture of puzzlement.

“She was as healthy as a horse, from what I can see. Her skull is intact,” he added, caressing the gleaming skull tenderly.

“There are no nicks on her bones, which would indicate a knife or sword wound. There are no fractures, recent or well healed.”

“So, what would a very healthy young woman die of, if she didn’t die in childbirth?” Gabe persisted.

“A fever, perhaps. The plague wasn’t rampant in that area during the second half of the fifteenth century, so I don’t think that would have been the cause.

She might have drowned,” Colin added thoughtfully.

“A drowning would leave no visible traces after all this time. I can’t help wondering why she was buried with a sword though,” he continued, cradling his chin in speculation.

“My theory would be that someone wished to honor her. Perhaps it was her husband’s sword.

If he died in battle, it might have been the only thing she had left of him, so it was buried with her.

What I can’t figure out is why she was buried in the kitchen. ”

“I think we can answer that,” Gabe jumped in. “We believe the kitchen was, in fact, the chapel back in the fifteenth century.”

“Really? That would make sense then,” Colin said. “Was there just the one body?”

“As far as we know. We’d have to dig up that entire section of the ground floor to find out for sure.”

“I don’t think your mum would be too pleased with that plan,” Colin said with a chuckle. “My mum goes ballistic if you so much as move one knickknack out of place.”

“She refused to stay in the house until we removed the remains,” Gabe said.

“Understandable. It’s not pleasant knowing you’ve been walking over someone’s grave all these years. Well, do let me know when you have the sword back in your possession. I’m dying to see it. ”

“Will do,” Gabe replied.

“Perhaps you and Logan can come to our place for dinner,” Quinn suggested.

“That would be lovely. See you soon.”

Quinn and Gabe thanked Colin and left the mortuary, grateful to be out in the fresh air and sunshine after the windowless confines of the morgue. They had time for a quick bite before Gabe was due to return to work, so they found a Costa and placed their order.

“You didn’t seem surprised when Colin said the remains were those of a woman,” Gabe said as he unwrapped his sandwich and added sugar to his coffee.

He lowered his voice so the other patrons wouldn’t hear him discussing such a grim topic, but a woman at the next table threw him a look of pure venom nonetheless and moved her chair further away, scraping the floor loudly in the process.

“I didn’t know the skeleton was of a woman. I assumed it was Guy, just as you did.”

“Do you think it’s Kate?”

“I couldn’t say. I’ve seen very little of her story so far.”

Quinn felt reluctant to talk about Kate.

She supposed that after getting emotionally involved with Elise, Petra, and then Madeline, she’d tried to keep Kate at bay and look at her through a lens of professional detachment.

She had to avoid stress, for the sake of the baby, and she handled the rosary for brief periods and mostly during the early hours of the day, so as not to dream of what she’d seen when she went to bed. She had enough bad dreams as it was.

“Gabe, what do you know of Guy? ”

Gabe shrugged. “I know that he existed, and I know that he was the brother of William and Hugh, and the son of Armand and Marie de Rosel. Not much else is known about him.”

“Do you know when he died?” Quinn asked cautiously.

“Yes. Shall I tell you?”

“Not yet. And what do you know of William and Hugh?”

“Not a whole lot. William de Rosel died at the Battle of Towton, which you already know. He was thirty-two at the time, and left behind a son, Adam, from whom I’m descended. It was Adam de Rosel who changed the name to Russell in the sixteenth century.”

“Why?”

“Probably because he wished to anglicize it. De Rosel sounded very French, and given the ongoing animosity between France and England, it made sense to fit in, if he meant to remain in England. Previous generations of de Rosels had maintained their ties to France, but Adam put a stop to all that.”

“Did Guy or Hugh ever marry?” Quinn asked.

“I tried to research my family history when I was a teen, but only found information on Adam’s descendants. There’s a family tree that goes back to the Conquest, but it makes no mention of either Guy’s or Hugh’s nuptials. Perhaps they died before they had a chance to marry.”

“Interesting.”

“Do you think the woman might be Adam’s mother, Eleanor?

” Gabe speculated. “I know Colin said that she likely didn’t have children, but it’s possible that he’s mistaken, especially after all this time.

Perhaps she had a very easy labor that left no mark on her pelvis.

The child could have come early, and been very small. ”

“Surely, even a small child would leave its mark if it was nearly full term,” Quinn argued.

“What if she had a cesarean? The procedure would surely kill her, but since the child didn’t pass through the birth canal, there’d be no way to tell that she’d given birth.”

“I don’t think cesarean sections were very common in the fifteenth century, but I know for a fact that it isn’t Eleanor. She survived Adam’s birth and suffered a stillbirth just before William died. She bore two children, and Colin would spot that immediately.”

“I have to go,” Gabe said as he finished his lunch. “Will you be all right?”

“Of course. When do you think you’ll get the sword back from Dr. Edwards?”

“Today or tomorrow. I have to find a good hiding place for it, what with Emma nosing around for her birthday presents. Perhaps we can wrap it in a towel and hide it on top of the wardrobe. She can’t reach up there.”

“Neither can I,” Quinn replied with a chuckle. “It won’t be that easy to keep it away from me.”

“You can’t blame a bloke for trying,” Gabe replied with a sigh. “You won’t rest until you know what happened, will you?”

“Shall I stop now?” Quinn asked innocently and was rewarded with the reaction she’d hoped for. Gabe was desperate to know what happened. “You’re just as hooked as I am, Dr. Russell.”

“They’re my ancestors.”

“Exactly. You owe it to yourself to discover their story. Bring back that sword. ”

“All right,” Gabe capitulated. “I’ll see you both tonight.” He placed his hand on Quinn’s belly as he kissed her, then left for work.