Exclusive Excerpt | Bog Queen by Anna North | Sunny's Journal and Press

Anna North, the author of Outlawed, America Pacifica, and The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, shares an excerpt from her latest novel Bog Queen.

Bog Queen by Anna North | Sunny's Journal and Press

Synopsis

When a body is found in a bog in northwest England, Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is called to investigate. But this body is not like any she's ever seen. Though its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, it is almost completely preserved.

Soon Agnes is drawn into a mystery from the distant past, called to understand and avenge the death of an Iron Age woman more like her than she knows. Along the way, she must contend with peat-cutters who want to profit from the bog and activists who demand that the land be left undisturbed. Then there's the moss itself: a complex repository of artifacts and remains, with its own dark stories to tell.

As Agnes faces the deep history of what she has unearthed, she's also forced to question what she thought she knew about her talent, her self-reliance, and her place in the world. Flashing between the uncertainty of post-Brexit England and the druidic order of Celtic Europe at the dawn of the Roman era, Bog Queen brims with contemporary urgency and ancient wisdom as it connects across time two gifted, farsighted young women learning to harness their strange strengths in a landscape more mysterious and complex than either can imagine.

Time of ending and beginning

A colony of moss does not speak or think in language. But if such a colony could tell the story of its life, it might say this: Once, we flourished. Our capsules popped and our spores spread far and wide. We drank what we needed from the rain and stored the rest in our spongy depths. We made a rich home for ourselves, of ourselves. This time lasted many thousands of daylights and nighttimes, and it was good.

We knew, however, that our flourishing would end, and so it did. One day large wheels came rumbling across our body; iron claws reached down and yanked us up by our roots. In number we were much reduced; our home became dry and barren. This time also lasted many daylights and it, obviously, was not as good.

But our memory and foresight are long—so long, in fact, they are nearly infinite. We knew our time of struggle would end too, and indeed, one day the large wheels rolled to a stop.

A fine day. Wind out of the west. Above our surface, a great panicked scurrying-about. The people come and press their faces so close to us that we might, if we had hands, reach out and touch them.

We have had ample time to observe human behavior, and we can tell they have found something in our flesh, something they did not expect and do not understand. But, of course, we know whose head they draw so slowly from the mud, brushing our remaining tendrils from the temples. Whose shoulders, whose fine, well-protected hands.

A colony of moss does not experience emotions like fondness or intimacy, but if it did, it might say this: We held her. We kept her safe under the surface, in our bath of earth, for many times her lifespan. That we give her up now may seem to be purely random, an accident of excavation. In fact, the hour of her service is at hand.

April 2018

Agnes comes into the coroner’s office streaming with rainwater. Eight months in this country and you would think she would have learned to carry an umbrella, but no, she has not.

How must she look now, six feet tall and dripping on the carpet? She is still trying to understand it, the way she is perceived, the imprint her body makes on the world.

“I’m here,” she says.

Agnes is very late. She came in on the train, and her phone said you could walk to the office from the station, but somehow instead of shortening as she continued along the road, the distance between her and her destination seemed to dilate, as though the town was growing, new low brown-brick houses appearing in between the houses, new dark-green unfriendly shrubbery. Agnes remembered a story from her childhood: a fairy circle, a hex on the land to trap the unsuspecting. The brownies giggling in the brush as humans stumbled hopelessly, their paths curving ever backward on themselves, bringing them again and again to the beginning.

“Wonderful to meet you, can we get you anything,” they are saying, the people in the office, in a way that makes it clear they are annoyed with her. They introduce themselves: Kieran, the coroner, and the secretary, Melinda. Kieran is not much older than Agnes, maybe thirty, but he has all the solidity of adulthood about him—not just a wedding ring on his finger and a picture of a white-haired toddler on his desk, though he has those things, but also a settled calm, a stillness in his body.

Melinda is in her midforties, but with the weariness of someone older: a childhood illness, Agnes thinks, or she has lost someone. She has lived more than her share of life already. Agnes can always sense that quality, and it makes her feel a sympathy she cannot quite express. She apologizes as Melinda takes her sopping coat and her umbrella and hands her a folder.

“I know we sent you the report already,” she says, “but I always like to give a hard copy.”

Agnes read the report last night in her bad flat with the yellowy walls; she knows the husband’s story.

He and his wife were fighting, he says. They fought all the time, as he has never fought with anyone before or since. He believes she hated him. He knows it is not an excuse.

That night, he says, she came at him, trying to claw his face. She had done it before, he says, he has the scar beneath his eye to prove it. This time he stuck his arms out in front of him to try to keep her back. But she lost her footing and fell down the stone stairs to the basement of that house, their little house that used to stand on the edge of the moss, where the factory is now.

No, he says, it was not self-defense. Or, he doesn’t know. He does not ask for a lawyer. He is glad they finally found her, he says. When he buried her in the moss, he thought for sure she would be discovered in a day or two. That was in 1961. Ever since then her death has haunted him. She attacks him in his dreams, scratching and screaming. Now he is free.

It is not Agnes’s job to pass judgment on the husband. Her only job is to confirm that the woman lying here in the coroner’s office in Ludlow, England, is Isabela Navarro, born in 1940 in Málaga, Spain, and that she was killed by blunt trauma to the skull. The folder contains a photograph of Isabela, taken at her wedding in 1959. She is handsome, with a strong chin and high cheekbones, and looks forceful, her head held high. But her shoulders are narrow and rounded forward, a pronounced kyphosis that would surely have led to back pain in middle age, if she had lived long enough to see it.

“Would you like tea or anything before we—” Kieran begins.

“No, no thanks, no,” she says, which is the answer he is hoping for, but also the truth. She wants to get to the exam room.

Her sneakers squelch down the hallway. She must buy boots, but what kind, where? Anyway her Chuck Taylors comfort her, they remind her of home, even when their bright red has gone wine-dark in the wet.

In the elevator she and Kieran stand an awkward distance from one another, the quiet chatters in her ears. When they reach the basement he turns to her.

“I should warn you, the remains look”—he pauses—“unusual.”

“Unusual how?” Agnes asks.

Kieran shakes his head as he pushes open the exam room door. “You’ll see what I mean.”

If she believed in God or the supernatural she would call it sacred: the moment when she sees a body for the first time. She remembers, always, the day it came to her that this would be her life. In graduate school, her father had discouraged her from pursuing forensic work—too stressful, was his rationale, all the red tape, the interaction with law enforcement. But when the medical examiner in Las Minas needed an expert in dentition and her adviser recommended her, she felt a pull, not merely because she knew she was the best in the region, but also because she had never encountered a decedent like this before—lying out in the open air, the story of the death unwritten. Her subjects to that point had been in museum collections or computer databases, the questions of their lives all settled and hardened into history.

She drove out to the desert on a white-hot day in August. The remains were still at the find site, in the center of a parched square surrounded by caution tape. The medical examiner and two police officers stood aside for her as she came across the sand.

She can see it now, that first body. It was almost completely skeletonized, the skull whipped pale and clean by the desert wind, the long bones beginning to fissure in the heat. A polyester jacket hung limp over the ribs and shoulders, in color a sun-bleached dirty blue. Four teeth were missing from the maxilla, and this was why the medical examiner had called Agnes: He wanted to know if they had been lost premortem or knocked out at the time of death.

Eye to eye with the body, as she photographed his skull (the chin and brow ridge marked him out, more likely than not, as male), as she bent low to peer inside his mouth and saw the jagged edges where his incisors had snapped off, probably forced backward by a blunt object like the butt of a gun, what overtook her was a calm and tender feeling, a kind of love. This, she felt as she measured the maxilla and mandible, was a person who had been hurt and then abandoned out in the heat, and now he needed a particular kind of skillful care that only she could offer him. She spent hours there on the hard-packed sand, sweating into her coveralls, because she wanted to be sure to get it right, to understand and record his body’s story, to witness him. His feet were very long and narrow; he would have had a hard time finding shoes.

From then on it was different, her work, her life. She felt a sense of purpose that was larger than herself, like a voice calling to her across a distance. She feels it every time she works on a case, feels it even now—perhaps especially now, when she is alone and far from home, with nothing else to guide her.

Kieran is right: This body is unusual.

Like metal, is her first thought, a metal cast of a human being. That perfectly made, that detailed. The eyebrows, eyelashes. The tiny lines on the skin of the lips. Agnes is still accustomed to bones blown dry and crackling in the desert wind. This body is as though transformed into something precious—on the taut smooth skin of the forehead, the cheeks, an aureate dark-bright glow. Full fathom five, she lets herself think, she has never been a reader, but she likes that one, her father used to read it aloud to her. Rich and strange indeed.

She circles, taking her photographs. Joy and calm descending on her as they always do, her heartbeat growing regular.

The body lies in the fetal position, the hands folded beneath the head. The legs too are bent and drawn toward the chest. The left leg is skeletonized and the bones of the foot are mostly missing; she counts phalanges, metatarsals, and two cuneiforms lost to the bog.

And yet from the waist up the skin shows almost no sign of decay or degradation. Agnes can see a round scar on the skin of the left arm, perhaps from chicken pox or a childhood accident. Just under the ribs on the right side is a wound at least ten centimeters long, where something sharp has punctured the flesh. It might have been a branch during the body’s years in the bog, or perhaps her husband stabbed her before he pushed her down the stairs; “fighting,” after all, can mean many things.

The head is bare and shining, the hair rubbed or worn away. The forehead is high-domed, the chin pronounced. Parietal and occipital bones both appear undamaged, but that means little—an impact doesn’t have to break the skull open to be fatal. The neck is thin and delicate; Agnes can see the seventh cervical vertebra pushing up against the skin.

The face suggests a young person, the cheeks unlined, the skin smooth around the eyes. But the bones will tell a better story. Agnes is careful not to read too much into the expression—the pressure of the peat may have deformed the skin and facial muscles into new shapes. All the same, there’s a surprising animation to the features, the mouth open, a deep furrow in the brow. It does not look like fear—it looks, perhaps, like rage.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s look inside.”

Kieran lays the body out on the bed of the X-ray machine. His movements are careful but assured.

And then it appears on the monitor above the X-ray bed: the skull. The coroner whistles low. He must be looking at the brain, which is shrunken but extraordinarily well-preserved. You can see the transverse fissure and even the folds of the cerebrum, delicate gray lines against the white. But what excites Agnes is the bone. It has lost some of its calcium to the acid of the bog, as she expected, and it is hard to distinguish in places from the flesh—the effect is one of layers of gauze or spiderweb laid one on top of the other. But the basic structure is intact—now she can see the evidence of impact, a network of microfractures to the frontal bone.

“He said she fell backward, right?” Agnes asks.

“Yeah,” Kieran says. “But it was almost sixty years ago. Maybe he misremembered.”

Agnes nods. The blunt-force injury those fractures indicate could have been fatal, but Agnes wants a CT scan to be sure. For now she ticks the rest of the head and neck bones off her inventory, all undamaged: maxilla, mandible, cervical verts one, two, three. She flips to the odontogram.

Here she stops.

“We have the dental records?” she asks.

“The dentist in town burned down in 1967,” the coroner says. “We were able to get her records from Spain, but they’re from childhood. 1953. So there might be some discrepancies.”

Agnes pages through the papers in the folder. She looks again at the image on the screen. Something is wrong.

Isabela Navarro’s childhood dental records show early signs of decay to the right cuspid and bicuspid, which is not surprising. Drinking-water fluoridation wasn’t widespread in Spain until the 1960s, and dental hygiene at that time wasn’t what it is today. By the time Navarro disappeared, when she was in her early twenties, she would have had either fillings or severe cavities, perhaps both. But the image on the X-ray screen shows no sign of decay whatsoever—the teeth lie smooth in the cup of the jaw, like stones. And there’s something else, even more unusual: The molars are so deeply worn they are nearly flat on top, the cusps all sanded down to almost nothing. Sometimes you can see this level of abrasion in people in their sixties or seventies, but by that age, you’d expect fillings too, even crowns or bridges. It doesn’t make sense. Agnes has seen a jaw like this only once before, and it’s not in the records the coroner got from Málaga.

Agnes hands the folder back. She shakes her head. A moment of utter confidence, of pure cool clarity.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “This isn’t her.”