Despite the elegiac tone of his many portrayals in the popular and academic press, few people who knew Professor Crane actually liked him. He had, it was true, advanced the study of Anglo Saxon history further than anyone in the modern age. He had, it was also true, overseen the expansion and development of Welbeck College until it could hold its head–and indeed, raise its new brick tower–high over the more antique and established seats of leaning in Cambridge. His personal manner and appearance were also impeccable. It was often said that there was something of the medical man about him–a tang of formaldehyde, perhaps–and that he studied people through those heavy glasses much in the way a physician might study a patient. Because of his extreme slimness and height and the furled umbrella he often affected to carry with him he also, it was frequently muttered, although rarely within his earshot, possessed a remarkable resemblance to the bird with which he shared his name, right down to that patient yet predatory stoop.

Professor Matthias Crane was intent upon nothing other than the advancement of his college and his field of learning, and both of those objectives coincided conveniently with the advancement of Professor Crane himself. Students and post-graduates whose avenue of research looked particularly promising were invited up for tea and seed cake in his large and comfortable study, and then perhaps a little more Amontillado than they were used to drinking, although he himself always abstained. They would find themselves quizzed and encouraged and given tips and suggestions to advance their chosen project. Most often, these tips proved extraordinarily useful, or happened to link in with the work which another fellow was pursuing, which had also been discussed on some afternoon sat beside the crackling applewood of Professor Crane’s ever-convivial hearth. There would then be a subsequent period of dazzled excitement and discovery, which was always followed by dazed disbelief, and then a more permanent sense of betrayal. Professor Crane’s output of books, lectures, essays and pamphlets was legendary. It was often said that they issued forth with a profligacy which could scarcely be the work of just one man. In this, there was an element of truth.

The sponsors of Welbeck College’s new halls and exhibits found themselves similarly used and then discarded, although in ways about which it was impossible to complain. There was always that occasion when the professor had perhaps bent a rule, studiously ignored a small personal infraction or performed some other act of vaguely underhand generosity which at the time had seemed purely altruistic, but which was nevertheless mentioned once or twice afterwards with what came to be seen as chilling casualness. Many a night’s sleep–indeed, many a promising career and marriage–had been wrecked on the remembered cold appraisal of Professor Crane’s gaze.

No-one was at all surprised when the professor disappeared for a few months during the summer of 1928. It had always been his habit to head off alone on his researches with little if any word about where he was going, and usually to return burdened with some literal or figurative treasure. The Saltfleetby Codex which had brought a new understanding of the Christianisation of the Anglo Saxon kingdoms, and the reattribution of the previously ignored carvings in the Suffolk church of Beck, both owed their origins to such excursions. So did many of the finest items in the small but exquisite college museum. All, of course, came with full and detailed provenance. But there was always a sense with each new wonder of a conjurer producing a fresh rabbit out of a hat. Those who knew Professor Crane better than they probably wished speculated that he had some secret horde from which all of these discoveries somehow originated.

At any rate, his delayed return in the autumn of 1928 was taken as nothing more than the prelude to the announcement of a particularly dramatic breakthrough in Anglo Saxon studies. There was certainly no sense of any concern for the much esteemed professor. He was one of those people who were thought to be inextinguishable.

Richard Talbot, BA and MA (Hons), recently appointed Junior Assistant Tutor and Keeper of the Keys of the Welbeck Museum, was at least as unconcerned by Professor Crane’s absence as anyone. He had grown up with a love of history, and especially that vague yet glittering era between the fall of Classical Rome and the Norman Conquest, which bordered on obsession. It was a love which had absorbed his childhood and concerned his stolid parents back in Penge, and which had been fuelled in no small part by the works of Mathias Crane. To become an undergraduate at the great professor’s college and then to attend his famous lectures was the fulfilment of a dream. To be invited into the professor’s private confidence on the new method of indexing and cataloguing on which he was working for his master’s thesis was beyond his wildest imaginings. Also beyond imagining was how Professor Crane could then describe the same method to his fellow academics at a symposium held shortly after as if it was something entirely of his own invention.

Richard was livid. Richard was desolate. Richard felt totally betrayed. But who could he complain to, and where could he go? Specialists in the cataloguing of Anglo-Saxon artefacts were hardly in great demand. The only other obvious refuge lay in Oxford, where Professor Freethly-Chillmorn had long been reduced to academic impotence and chronic alcoholism by his shambling attempts to compete with Professor Crane. So the long and damning letter to The Journal Of Early English Studies, with copies to as many fellow academics as he could think of, and another to the Times, remained undrafted, and he found that he attracted many a sympathetic smile in the college library or the snug of the Eagle and Child. He had been–well, there was no real word for it because no one had ever spoken up… But whatever had been done to him by Professor Crane had been done before and would be done again. Meanwhile, he would have to swallow his pride and quietly put aside his stolen thesis and scrabble around for another less promising subject.

So it was that Richard Talbot gained his MA through wearily reworking the existing evidence regarding Saxon agricultural practice. He was then offered a junior tutorship for his pains. He of course had no choice but to accept, and–and this was the final insult–was granted a new role in reorganising the records, displays and artefacts at the college museum on the basis of a fabulous new system which was universally described as the Crane Method.

It was now almost three weeks into term, Cambridge was basking in the warmth of an Indian summer, and Professor Crane had still not returned. Welbeck College, it had to be admitted, was a somewhat happier, if rather more aimless, place without him. Meanwhile, Professor Meecham fulfilled the role of Acting Temporary Head of Department, although the man was far too good-natured to be anything more than a makeweight.

To Richard, this was all a matter of some frustration. What the college needed to apply itself to, he decided, was the careful grooming of a proper successor. After all, Professor Crane couldn’t carry on forever, even when he did make his inevitable and irritatingly discovery-laden return from wherever he had been hiding this long summer. The college should be looking for a younger man capable of publishing ground-breaking works of great technical brilliance, but also with a popular touch which could reach the best-seller lists. The sort of man who could be equally at home supervising a summer dig in some windy field in East Anglia (although not actually doing any digging) as dining in the finest clubs in London amongst the great and famous. The sort of man whose face would fit well in the national papers and whom the undergraduates would look up to as a paragon of erudition, elegance and self-effacing charm. The sort of man, indeed, whom Richard Talbot believed he saw gazing back at him as he shaved each morning. Still youthful by outward appearance, of course. But with those high cheekbones and darkly solemn eyes. A fine physique, as well; he was especially proud of his long-fingered hands, with nails which he kept well-manicured and pared despite the occasional demands of his curating work. A voice which was made for compelling command. He was even known to possess a fine light tenor which he occasionally employed for the singing of popular ballads in certain back bars.

It was most, most frustrating. All, however, was not lost. Fortune favoured the brave, and time the young. As Richard sat in his tiny office in the Welbeck Museum on a stiflingly warm afternoon in early October, he still firmly believed that, Professor Crane notwithstanding, his moment would come. Although this particular day, it had to be admitted, hadn’t been particularly propitious. You might have expected at least a few visitors to want to view the five high-ceilinged rooms which displayed the major items of the collection he curated, but today not a single one had appeared. Nor had he received any recent letters of enquiry from other researchers, or invitations to speak at some or other academic convention. Whilst the telephone remained frustratingly silent on his desk.

At about a quarter to four, he told his secretary Mrs Marbish–a wizened old bird–that she might as well go home. Then he slid the museum sign to CLOSED and locked in the main door with the key he kept on the chain of his watch fob. Of course, curating a museum certainly wasn’t merely about visitors. Work to be done, always work to be done… Beyond a door marked REPOSITORY, a near endless array of potshards laid in dusty boxes on even dustier shelves awaited his cataloguing according to the so-called Crane Method. But, he told himself as he wandered amid the glass cases in the sun-threaded gloom, there were consolations…

There it all was: gold and bronze and silver, gleaming. A woman’s locket found still with a strand of her auburn hair. A small iron blade, bereft of its bone handle, but nevertheless beautifully engraved. And here… One of his favourite objects: a particularly large and fine example of the broad-bladed weapon characteristic of the finest Saxon workmanship, with the hilt’s jewelling almost intact and the blade decorated in exquisite silver and gold pattern-weld. Nearly perfect. So nearly perfect, in fact, that Richard often took the sword out to execute a few parrying and stabbing motions.

He opened the cabinet with another of his keys. Holding this weapon, it wasn’t so very hard to imagine himself a brave Saxon warrior in full gear of battle. What foes would withstand me, he thought as the blade sliced the air like a thickened gleam of sunlight. What lands I might have conquered, what maidens bedded, what battles fought! He was about to the replace the sword in its cabinet when he noticed something which he had never noticed before. The pommel, sadly, had been missing since the item was first catalogued by one of Richard’s predecessors back in the 1700s, but now it seemed to him that there might actually be something curled inside the hilt’s hollowed metal core. Strange indeed, but Richard’s heart only started racing when he used a pair of fine tweezers to draw the object out.

That evening in the murmurous pipefug warmth of the college refectory, as he spooned out beer pie, soggy potatoes and boiled beetroot, Richard Talbot kept himself more than usually to himself. Then, he scurried up to his rooms. Only there, with his door locked and his hands slightly trembling, did he proceed to make a full and proper examination of his find. It was, as he had realised immediately, a scrap of extremely antique parchment, written in the kind of very early Old English which even the Venerable Bede would have struggled to understand.

The parchment referred to a warrior named Cynewald, who the authorities agreed had most probably been King of Mercia in the period between Cnebba and Creado in or around the year of Our Lord 550, although the documentation then current was thin to say the least. Confirmation of Cynewald’s existence in this hidden scrap of funerary prose was in itself a significant find. But the scrap then went on to refer to his burial in a place which it described as being at Fllotweyton, and beside a burna, or clear stream, near to the brym or surf, which presumably meant sea. A quick check of a modern atlas confirmed that a small village named Flotterton still existed in Lincolnshire, which would have been a significant part of the Kingdom of Mercia at this time, and also that the village was, indeed, very close to the sea. Richard barely needed to refer to the standard textbooks to know that the place had never been associated with the discovery of any significant Saxon remains. At least, not until now.

As to the final portion of text which could be deciphered before the partial document faded, the cursing of a burial site was, for the Saxons, fairly standard fare. Rather disappointingly, instead of some fearsome tomb-guarding dragon, this one mentioned a lesser creature from the Anglo-Saxon beasterie known as a ketta, which was basically little more than a shadowy cat. The actual curse seemed odd–at least, it did to Richard, who was no specialist in Anglo Saxon linguistics. It said that the first person to disturb the tomb would find that the ketta took gild nebbhad. Gild being their concept of value, and nebbhad meaning something like identity. Which struck Richard as a peculiarly abstract curse, considering how brutal the Saxons usually were.

He could, of course, have consulted several experts who had spent the larger parts of their lives studying such arcane threats merely by heading a few yards down the corridor from his rooms. Even the great and still absent Professor Crane had considerable expertise in this area–or at the very least had taken someone else’s expertise and made it his own. Richard remembered how the subject of burial curses had been raised at one of the professor’s famous public lectures when he was an undergraduate. A laughing voice at the back had suggested that such things were, of course, utter rubbish, no doubt expecting the professor, who was worldly as they come about most matters, to agree. But instead Professor Crane had bowed his long neck and looked momentarily grave, and said in a quiet voice that the wishes of our ancestors were not to be taken lightly.

It was a little odd, Richard had to admit, that this scrap of parchment had never been noticed. Odd, also, that it lay tucked within a sword of entirely different provenance at least two centuries less old. Even he, he might have thought, had studied and played with the thing more than enough to have spotted that faded yellow curl hidden within the hilt. But, plainly, he hadn’t. Neither had his many predecessor curators. Which to Richard, who had a generally poor view of his fellow toilers across the vast plains of Anglo Saxon study both previous and current, was less of a surprise. Things were as they were. And good luck was something he felt he hadn’t had anything like enough of during his short academic career. In fact, the opposite. But now, Dame Fortune, had tossed her tresses and beckoned…

Richard hardly slept that night, such was his excitement. The next morning, after cramming a few things into his suitcase, he called in briefly at the museum to inform Mrs Marbish about a sudden illness his father was suffering back in Penge, then headed for the railway station. Everyone else at Welbeck College could wonder where he was, for the little it mattered. In fact, they could all go to Hell. They would be looking at him very differently when he returned.

The journey involved several tediously slow trains, and several even more tedious waits on the platforms of otherwise empty stations. Meanwhile, the long Indian summer was finally fading. At first, the sun was merely obscured by a few skeins of cloud. Then an easterly wind began to stir the trees and the wires of the telegraphs. Scattershots of rain were striking the glass of Richard’s carriage from out of gloomy skies by the time he took the final leg of his journey across the wide, flat landscapes of Lincolnshire to Flotterton.

The village itself came as a disappointment. He’d imagined somewhere with a few crookedly ancient houses, a decent-sized manor house set amid a still discernable pattern of medieval fields, perhaps a charming pub. But Flotterton, for all its long history, looked as if it had never existed before the age of the railway, the kiss me quick hat, the bucket and spade. To call this desolate settlement a resort, he reflected as he struggled against the wind past a closed-for-the-season fish and chip shop and rock shop emporium which looked to have been abandoned, would be over-dignifying it. The place ran out, as if in shame, at a low straggle of dunes. Still, he told himself, as he espied through the rain a somewhat taller and yet even grimmer building with a sign announcing itself as a hotel, the name Flotterton would soon ring out in the halls of academia, and be writ large across the headlines of the daily papers. As, of course, would that of a certain Richard Talbot.

The hotel lived up to its external lack of promise. The proprietor was a scrawny man of late years in possession of the kind of beard which made you wonder whether its presence was intentional. He looked at Richard as he signed the address book much as one might study the arrival of an unwelcome household pest. The meal Richard ate in the otherwise empty restaurant had been re-heated so often that it was genuinely hard to tell what it might once have been, whilst the service wasn’t so much execrable as non-existent. But he smiled to himself as he climbed into his pyjamas and lay down in the damp grey sheets of his damp grey room. This grim experience would stand up well as a humorous prelude in the many talks he would soon be giving about his discovery. People would smile. They would laugh warmly but respectfully. Even Professor Crane…

There, in the darkness, as the sea boomed and rain and wind rattled his window, Richard’s smile briefly twitched into a grimace. He was remembering a small, embarrassing interlude which had occurred at the start of the summer recess, not long before the professor had set off on whatever mysterious quest had drawn him. It had been another of those long, slow, afternoons at the museum, and he had sent Mrs Marbish home and locked up early so he could occupy himself with a little sword practice. A few thrusts and parries, and his mind was so far off amid scenes of bloody battle that he hadn’t become immediately aware of a watching presence. What presence, in fact, could there have been, seeing as he, as curator, possessed one of the sole two sets of keys which gave admission to the museum and its precious cabinets?

When Richard had, sweating and breathless, finally finished his pursuit of an imagined Grendel and twirled toward the half-open door where a tall figure was standing, Professor Crane had simply stepped from the shadows and stooped his long neck and announced that he had a query regarding the ground plan of an excavation which had taken place under the college’s auspices back in the 1880s. He hadn’t even mentioned the fact that Richard had been twirling a near-priceless sword like a child playing at knights-in-armour. Richard, flustered, had at least managed to put the thing away as if he had merely been checking some detail of its making. Then he went to find the papers in question, and the professor pronounced himself much obliged and left. But there was always a sense with Professor Crane that any minor infraction or mistake was carefully noted, analysed and stored until the day that it might prove useful.

Next morning, despite a night of difficult sleep in which a predatory creature seemed to be circling from the shadow-edges of some interminable space, Richard made a hearty attempt at extracting his breakfast of shrivelled bacon and congealed scrambled egg from its pool of cold fat. After all, one must fortify oneself for the work ahead, much as Belzoni surely did before he invaded the pyramids, Schliemann when he discovered Troy, or Carter when he stumbled into the tomb of Tutankhamun. And, yes, the hotel proprietor did possess an Ordinance Survey map of the area, which Richard was allowed to borrow in exchange for an unnecessarily large deposit. There even proved to be a small shop along Flotterton’s single street which sold a few items of hardware in the long season when it wasn’t purveying buckets and spades. A decent spade, but of a larger and more practical kind, was exactly what Richard had in mind, along with a small lantern and a measuring tape.

The rain, at least, has ceased this morning, but it was nevertheless a particularly bitter and grey day. Wrestling with the map, then briefly consulting the precious scrap of parchment, Richard confirmed to himself that finding the burial mound shouldn’t be that difficult. A stream, near to the sea… He hunched north around the edge of the pitch and putt course, which somehow felt to be the more promising direction with which to begin.

Noontime passed without success. The packed lunch of grey bread and something resembling ham which the hotel proprietor had prepared for Richard, along with a few fragments of his beard, was so poor that he would have tossed it to the screeching gulls if he hadn’t been so hungry. North, it appeared, was not the direction he should have chosen. He retraced his steps toward the pitch and putt course as the wind stung into his face.

He knew exactly what an undisturbed Anglo-Saxon burial mound should look like, but the landscape around Flotterton was so uncertain that he was struggling to make proper sense of it. There were streams winding this way and that toward the shore, certainly. Some of them might even fit the description of being clear. There were also humps and mounds aplenty in the scrubby expanse of grazing land which abutted the dunes and the sea. But there were so many, and it was obvious that this whole coastline was forever shifting.

As he trudged past a few desolate bathing huts, then squelched on across a filthy stretch of mud using his shovel as a walking stick, Richard remembered the dreams of his childhood days back in Penge. Then he imagined himself seated in glory at the top table at the Welbeck College Annual Founders Dinner, and in a private first class carriage of a Great Northern express train on his way to collect some award. A plaque, perhaps, outside the museum to commemorate the brief time he had served there in undeserved obscurity? Or an entire new museum devoted to his name. For surely a king of Cynewald’s era would have been buried with great riches, which of course was confirmed by that odd little curse. He could expect at very least the man’s armour and ceremonial gear, along with–

Richard paused. Darkness was already settling and he would soon have to go back to that ghastly hotel, but for a moment he was almost convinced that he was being studied by a tall and oddly avian-seeming presence from the crest of yonder dune. An actual bird? A heron, most probably. Although it did seem unusually large. Were cranes at all common in this part of the world? Richard wondered, as he peered through the thickening gloom and the birdlike figure seemed to puff out in the swelling dusk like a doused candleflame.

Richard shivered. If he stood here any longer, he would probably find himself sinking irrevocably into the mud. Tired and disappointed, he dragged himself back toward the few lights of Flotterton. Taking in what remained of the view as he reascended the low rise beside the bathing huts, he was still determined not to give up. And there, over toward the low lands of Lincolnshire, the last of the westering sun flashed briefly toward him through a final gap in the clouds like a final signal of hope.

The effect was briefly beautiful. Richard could almost imagine why the great warriors of that distant and much misunderstood age might have chosen to inter their king here, where the incoming tide roared its grief–

His gaze caught on something. Such was the clarity of the light thrown by the setting sun that, like a lantern held at an acute angle to reveal the hidden indentations in a sheet of paper, the landscape spoke to him in a language as clear as modern English. In fact, to Richard, it was far clearer. It was suddenly obvious that the many mounds and hillocks which had so confused his day were lumped into their present irregular shapes by the simple forces of nature. But there was one mound which, although relatively small, was different. Astonishing, really, that no-one had ever noticed it before. Although the fact that it was now part of the pitch and putt course might have something to do with that.

The sun had vanished, but Richard was in no mood to return to his hotel. Like most things here, the course was closed for the winter, but its peeling picket fenced presented no obstacle. After some struggle with the wind, he lit his lantern and inspected the mound, which rose to something like twice head height, and was perhaps twenty yards across at its base. The makers of the course had used the mound as a hazard along the fairway of the 18th hole. But standing beside it, Richard was more certain than ever that he had found something ancient and extraordinary.

This was no time for measuring, for trial holes and exploratory trenches. This was his moment alone, and he was determined to take it. He glanced toward the few lights of Flotterton. He was close to what might loosely be termed civilisation, but he doubted if anyone would notice him at work here. Hefting his spade, he starting digging.

At first, he struck ordinary turf. Then, he came to a hard-packed aggregation of quartz stones laid in an approximate circle. This placing of an outline of stones being a common characteristic of Saxon burial mounds. Next, he began to encounter darker lumps amid the sandy soil. Indicative of burning–funerary incineration also being a common Saxon practice. Everything about this mound proclaimed its authenticity. His only fear was that some grave-robber had got to its treasure before him.

Richard laboured. The wind had stilled and a full moon had risen and the scene in which he worked, with the dark earth heaped across the silvered turf of the 18^th fairway, acquired the clarity of an old woodcut. The opening on which he was working, a rough trench about two feet wide and three deep cut into the seaward side, became a tunnel. Soon, he was crawling in and out, scooping earth with his hands instead of using the spade. A little dangerous, perhaps, but he felt sure he could manage to scurry out at the first signs of major slippage.

Unlike Neolithic tombs, he was not expecting to find any solid structure at the mound’s core. There would simply be more earth, and then the funerary remains themselves, surrounded perhaps by the bones of those who had been sacrificed in the deceased’s cause. So it was a surprise to Richard when his hands suddenly fell through into what felt like empty space. He gasped, and heard the sound re-echoed in a stuttering growl as he wriggled backwards to take hold of his lantern. Then, on elbows, knees and belly, and by now entirely coated in dirt, he wriggled back inside the mound and held the lantern out.

What Richard Talbot saw when light first spilled into the darkness of lost centuries must rank amid the great moments of modern archaeology. The many artefacts which comprised what became known as the Flotterton Horde would have surely have gleamed even in that loamy hole. The famous golden-bossed shield. That exquisite dragonfly brooch. The many fine daggers and swords. The great Saxon mailcoat. All in all, there was enough here to change the way the world viewed the pre-Christian kingdoms.

As to what else happened in those moments of discovery, there is much that is not entirely clear. Many residents of Flotterton reported being awakened by a ghastly howling, which one described a sounding like a huge, wounded cat. The hotel proprietor was, to his credit, one of the first to put on his boots and investigate the horrifying noise, which seemed to emanate from the pitch and putt course. There, he reported that he saw a man staggering about the hillock beside the 18^th fairway in the moonlight, seemingly struggling with something which he described as resembling a blur of shadows.

By the time the local doctor arrived, and then the police, and despite the horror of Richard’s condition, wiser councils were already starting to prevail. There was, it must be said, some ill-advised speculation that Richard had somehow triggered an ancient form of booby trap when he poked his head into that mound. But any amateur historian of the era would have confirmed that that was not the Saxon way. Nor could device so ancient conceivably have functioned to such terrible effect. No, the general consensus was and always will be that Richard Talbot, perhaps in a spate of madness caused by his excitement and near-asphyxia, somehow managed to claw off most of his own face.

In the circumstances, and with Richard incapable of anything but sobbing screams, it was some hours before the police were able to establish whom they should contact. By next day, however, the first of the dons from Welbeck College were arriving, and they immediately saw the immense value of the discovery their colleague had made. The press came soon after, and the sightseers from the Midland towns not long after that. For the residents of Flotterton–and the hotel proprietor especially, although the man remained strangely subdued–there can scarcely have been better times.

Richard Talbot survived whatever ordeal he had suffered, although he was never again whole or sane. After the immediate medical problems of his loss of flesh, sight and proper speech had been dealt with, he lived his remaining few years at a specialist nursing home at the grateful college’s expense. It was not, as it happens, so very far up the coast from Flotterton, at Sutton on Sea. Even there, though, his manner and what remained of countenance were such that he had to be kept well away from the other residents. Nor was he ever able to tolerate the presence of the establishment’s fat and amiable ginger cat. Occasionally, one of the more sympathetic dons would summon the will to visit him, and try to marshal their revulsion at his manner, appearance and continued gurgling screams. One, a junior professor who succeeded Richard as curator of the now much-expanded and enormously popular museum, and an up-and-coming expert in Anglo-Saxon linguistics, took the time to study the parchment of ever-mysterious provenance which had been found in the pocket of Richard’s coat. He was heard to comment how strange it was that the curse contained in the fragment could be best translated into modern English by the term loss of face, although this was hardly the type of speculation which would ever reach the academic press.

As for Professor Crane, he reappeared at Welbeck College a week or so after Richard’s discovery. For once, he had returned from his researches empty-handed, although his presence and experience was vital in dealing with all the popular and academic interest, which was at fever pitch by then.

Careers blossomed at Welbeck in the years that followed. There were several best-sellers, visits to the now-famous coastal excavations by Cabinet ministers, and an item on Pate News. If there was one discovery which forever cemented the college’s position in world academia, it was that of the Flotterton Horde. But, perhaps oddly given his reputation, this was the one advance in the science of archaeology for which the great Professor Crane, now Member of the Order of Merit and a Lord, would never take the slightest credit.