My dark Bowered Queen

Prologue

August 1994

The first time I saw someone dead I was nine years old, I was with my mom, and it was high Pennsylvania summer. Mom drove us into town in our old station wagon, the open windows blasting hot dust off the cornfields, the windshield splattered with bugs. We parked on the street and walked a few blazing blocks to the Carnegie Natural History Museum, my shorts and t-shirt tacky with sweat. We climbed the museum’s broad steps and pushed opened the weighty doors, coming into the icy cool of the grand hall.

“Isn’t this something, Nancy?” Mom said, as she always did. “How many columns do you think there are? The architect was inspired by the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world… Now I seem to remember the archaeology rooms are this way…”

Even though we both knew exactly where we were going. We’d been there many times. Mom had given me a child’s membership for my sixth birthday and renewed it every birthday after that. I always wore my blue member’s badge when we visited. It made me feel part of the arcane splendour of the museum, an insider like the guides and curators.

Our footsteps echoed down the long marble passages: the tap-tap of Mom’s sensible Kohl’s heels, the soft padding of my jelly sandals.

“And here we are,” Mom said.

We were there to see a special exhibition. The Mysterious Bog People had opened in London and was now touring a dozen glamorous world capitals. Somehow, the Carnegie had managed to convince the European organisers to shoehorn a stop in Pittsburgh between New York and Los Angeles.

Mom took my hand. “Ready?”

I gave a little hop. “Ready!”

Together, Mom and I read the introduction covering the first wall, which touched on the richness of Northern European peat bogs, their pivotal role in archaeology due to their almost uncanny properties of preservation, their importance as a natural habitat, and finally, the looming threats to their survival.

Then we split up. Mom was quick, while I lingered over the displays about Iron Age life and burial practices, carefully examining every cauldron, scabbard, and torc-– a collar-like Celtic neck ornament made of twisted gold. All the items were pristine, of course, but I knew each one must have been prised from mud and peat, cleaned and classified, before earning its place in a museum. I knew, because I’d read about archaeological digs. 

As a pre-exhibition treat, Mom had given me a copy of PV Glob’s The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved, now reissued, but then long out of print. Mom was my school’s librarian; bibliographies were her native country; there was nothing she couldn’t track down. She was fully fluent in books: their origins, editions, contents. More than just a keen reader, she was a literary adventurer. Although she never set foot on an airplane after I was born, she read wildly, exotically. Her taste ran to the Romantic, the Gothic, even the esoteric, and she shared her treasures with me. Between us, everything was books; books were our love language.

“How are you doing?” Mom asked. “There’s still a lot to see.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to the next room. Catch up with me in a minute?”

“Uh-huh.”

Glob’s The Bog People was one of Mom’s best finds: a then-little-known work that went on to inspire countless young archaeologists. The prose was a bit advanced for me as a fourth grader — I read at sixth-grade level, but even so — and that summer I mostly thrilled to Glob’s black-and-white photos of early bog digs and their grisly finds. I can still remember everything about that book: its plastic sleeve, its chalky smell, its caramel-coloured pages. I guess I remember it so vividly after all these years because it called to me and, ultimately, led me to my fate.

“You haven’t made much progress, honey.” Mom spoke from behind me. “Why don’t we just whizz through this room and then go get some lunch? I’m famished.”

“But I’m not hungry!”

“Maybe you aren’t right now, Nancy Connolly, but you will be soon. Come on. We can go to Friendly’s.”

“But can’t we see the big exhibit? Please?”

“Okay, just that one more. Then lunch.”

The final exhibit, the highlight of the show, was in a separate, darkened room. A crowd circled the single beam of light that illuminated the hushed space. I weaved my way through a forest of torsos to the front, until I was close enough to the central case for my breath to fog the glass.

A figure lay curled on a bed of reeds, her hands pillowing her head, her face turned sweetly toward me, her hair fanned out behind. If it hadn’t been for the glass, I could have stroked her cheek, untangled her long hair.

“It’s a girl,” I announced. “She has red hair like me.”

“Shhh,” Mom said, touching my back as she glanced apologetically at the people around us. “Indoor voice, please.” She nodded toward a sign. “We need to show respect for the dead.”

“She’s a real dead girl?” I whispered.

Mom nodded and placed a finger to her lips.

“Really dead,” I breathed. I studied her rosebud mouth, the curve of her dainty ear. “How did she die?”

“Didn’t you read the sign before we came in? You usually read everything--”

“—I was rushing,” I said pointedly.

“Well let’s go out and do it now.”

“One minute.” I stood square, staring at the dead girl. Her fine, tapering fingers entwined to make her pillow, the round of one cheek against the back of a hand, the petals of her nails just peeking out. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but her lips were half-open, as if she were in the very act of waking, about to yawn and stretch, lift her head and, blinking, turn to me. 

 Mom touched my elbow. “Come on. Let’s go read the sign.”

Outside, Mom leaned over me, her copper curls curtaining us both, and read aloud:

“Drumoira Girl was discovered in 1985 in a peat bog on the Drumoira Estate in County Cavan Ireland. Although her body has been preserved by the unique properties of the bog, she is believed to have died almost two thousand years ago, around 100 AD. A high-status individual sacrificed to an unknown god, she was strangled and stabbed in a ritual act called ‘overkill’, before her body was anchored in the waters of the bog, an Iron Age custom to prevent the dead from returning to haunt the living.”