The inquest under the Treasure Act concluded the following spring. The objects were declared treasure, which meant they passed formally to the government, with the valuation committee assessing their worth and a reward. It was to be split equally between Gerald as finder and the landowner, who was also Gerald, and issued in due course. The Yorkshire Museum expressed a strong interest in acquiring the collection and keeping it in the region. Dr Okafor called it, with characteristic understatement, a significant find. The valuation figure, when it arrived, was substantial enough that Miriam sat down. Gerald looked at it for a moment, then put the letter in the kitchen drawer. He was not entirely sure what he felt. Something more complicated than pleased.
He went back to Ackerman’s in May—partly to update him, partly out of a sense that the man deserved to know what his careful estimation had set in motion. Ackerman listened to the full account without interruption, as he had the first time. “I thought it might be something,” he said. “That’s why I told you not to sell it. Some things—you can see it in the work. There’s an intention in it that doesn’t age. I’m glad you came back to tell me.”
Gerald walked home through Harrogate with his hands in his pockets. The garden, when he arrived, looked entirely ordinary—a strip of turned earth, some runner beans going over, mint escaping its pot. He stood at the back door and looked at the patch of ground where the excavation had been filled and levelled, already growing over with new grass. Someone had chosen this place. For reasons no one would ever fully recover, across a distance of more than two millennia, they had decided that this was where something precious should rest. Gerald thought that was, in its own way, enough to know.