Marrying Up by Wendy Holden

Author:Wendy Holden [Holden, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Contemporary Women, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780755352432
Google: 02l_Jme1DWcC
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2011-07-20T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 30

‘Come on, Poll.’ Marcus had squatted down beside her and was grinning into her face. The scent of marijuana drifted from his dreadlocks. ‘What is it? You can tell your Uncle Marcus. You know what they say about a trouble shared being a trouble doubled . . . Hang on, I’ve got that wrong, haven’t I?’

Polly forced a smile. Sam and Marcus were always trying to flirt with her and did not seem in the least to mind being given the cold shoulder. On the contrary, they appeared to enjoy it.

‘Well it can’t be a broken heart,’ Sam opined as he laid plastic over his hole. ‘She’s too pretty. What guy in his right mind would mess her about?’ He gave Polly a longing look.

‘You know,’ Marcus said teasingly, ‘I once dug up an ice maiden. Inuit princess, three thousand years old. Canadian Arctic, that was.’

Polly did not dignify this with an answer.

‘I’d leave her alone if I were you,’ Sam counselled his friend as he shook out a noisy length of thick plastic sheeting. ‘You’re dabbling in the stuff of other people’s souls.’

‘Do it all the time, mate.’ Marcus, standing up, squinted as he lit a roll-up behind a dirty cupped hand. ‘Check out the guy over there.’ He waved a tattooed arm at Polly’s skeleton. ‘Not much privacy for him, for all we’re preserving the dignity of his remains by not having him on general display.’

He shook the match and made as if to throw it on the ground. ‘Oops,’ he said, pulling a face and placing it carefully in the pocket of his filthy combat trousers. ‘Don’t want that ending up in the British Museum, do we? Remember that fag packet on Shetland, Samster?’

Sam, laying the plastic sheeting over his most recent area of digging, looked up and grinned. He had splendid straight white teeth. ‘You should have been there, Poll. Greatest archaeological mystery of modern times.’

‘What happened?’ Polly slipped her lunchbox into her rucksack. It was, as usual, only half empty.

Sam straightened up, unfolding to his full six foot four. ‘OK, so we were on Shetland, right. And we found a fag packet. So why was it a mystery?’

Sam’s eyes were laughing, but Polly knew she was being tested. Were Sam and Marcus, like Neil, beginning to wonder about her credentials?

She folded her arms defiantly. Part of her, the part that had, since Max’s departure, almost lost interest in archaeology altogether, didn’t care about the cigarette packet at all. But there yet remained a part that did. She forced herself to think. ‘It must,’ she said slowly, ‘be something to do with where you found it.’

‘You’re getting warm,’ Marcus said.

Polly returned her gaze to Sam. ‘You . . . found it in an unexpected place?’

‘Warmer,’ Sam told her.

‘Unexpected? Just a bit,’ Marcus said, puffing on his roll-up. ‘We found it under an Epipalaeolithic cairn. That’s—’

‘Eleven to thirteen thousand years old. I know,’ Polly grinned, feeling as if something within her that had been frozen was starting to move again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.