The garden had always been Gerald Hoff’s excuse to avoid his wife’s book club. Every Saturday morning, while Miriam entertained three other women who dissected novels, Gerald pulled on his rubber boots and disappeared into the narrow strip of earth behind their semi-detached in Harrogate. He grew nothing remarkable — some courgettes, a few rows of runner beans, and mint that kept escaping its pot. But the digging itself was the point—the resistance of clay soil, the clean smell of turned earth, and the satisfying thud of the spade.
It was the third Saturday of October when the spade hit something that wasn’t a stone. Gerald had learned to distinguish the sounds—the flat crack of flint, the dull thud of a buried root, the hollow clunk of an old clay pipe. This was none of those. It was a bright, almost musical ring that travelled up the handle into his palms, and it stopped him completely.
He crouched and worked the soil away with his fingers, the way he’d seen archaeologists do it on television. Six inches down, the dirt gave up a small oval object, dark with tarnish and compacted earth, hung on what appeared to be a chain so fine he nearly mistook it for a root filament. He wiped it on his trousers, held it up to the grey October light, and felt the first strange shiver of something he couldn’t yet name…