More Bitter Than Death: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,67

of coupons for local establishments that we couldn’t visit until the snow had been plowed away.

Jay’s room was better than Scott’s, but only by degree. It wasn’t underwear, but pants and socks on the radiator, and a single tray was on the desk with the papers. A few more personal items—after all, Jay had his suitcase—but most of these were stashed away. One drawer was closed on a pair of underpants, tidy-whiteys. What one did learn from visiting one’s friends’ rooms, I thought. Mostly more than I wanted to know.

“I saw you hit the casinos in Connecticut on your way up,” Scott said, jerking his chin toward a couple of plastic bags with exuberant logos sitting under the desk.

“Oh, sure,” I said before Jay could answer. “There’s a really impressive museum and research center focusing on Native American culture associated with one of them. I stopped by myself, last time I visited my mother. It’s worth the trip.”

Scott laughed at me. “Yeah, that’s why Jay stopped at the casino, Em. For the museum.”

“Here.” Jay thrust a stapled sheaf of paper into Scott’s hand. “Now let’s get going, can we?”

The session we walked into was on migration and the effect it might have on the archaeological record. Meg was tackling it in the broadest sense, examining the politics of the period in which the Chandlers had moved to Massachusetts and comparing it with the situation in Matthew Chandler’s hometown of Woodbroke, near Norwich. She was attempting to build a correlation between a political fracas there, the Chandlers’ hasty marriage and departure, and what appeared to be a slight dip in their fortunes, based on the artifacts from the earliest strata of their house site in Stone Harbor, Massachusetts.

I was interested to see what Meg was going to do with this paper, as I knew she was nervous about it. Meg was developing her professional persona. She’d presented papers before, but in much less formal circumstances, and while there was no other limit I knew to Meg’s confidence and aggression, public speaking was the one thing I knew she was not comfortable with. That would come with time, I thought. Meg had the ability to overcome many things, including herself.

She’d dressed up for this, I was surprised to see; usually there was little difference between Meg in the field and Meg in class and Meg at a prom, for all I knew. But instead of baggy army surplus fatigues, a T-shirt, and boots, she was wearing wool dress pants, a silk shirt, and shoes: flat-heeled lace-ups, to be sure, but shoes nonetheless. It made me wonder what her wedding gown—if any—and the whole ceremony would look like.

Meg was all business from the get-go: curt nod of thanks to the moderator, a brief “lights, please,” and then she was off.

She was discussing an aspect of the Chandler house excavation that had particularly interested her, Justice Matthew Chandler’s reasons for leaving England to come to Massachusetts in the 1720s, a drastic decision for anyone, much less for someone with the means and family connections that he would have had. Meg, as far as I knew, had been corresponding with an archive in England, and they had sent her a copy of a letter that seemed to confirm her hypothesis: Matthew Chandler had left England because of county political controversies.

I never bought into this theory for several reasons. The first was that, having studied his wife Margaret’s journal, I never saw any indication that this was the case. She was an extraordinarily canny woman, and my brief introduction to her world, two hundred years and more after her death, led me to believe that she would have written something about this. The second was my sense that Margaret wrote about her husband with respect and growing affection. While she wasn’t happy with being forced to live in the Massachusetts wilderness—indeed, she’d come within a hair’s breadth of having been executed for murder—she never blamed Matthew for her situation. My impression was simply that there would have been more blame, or at least some reference to their plight, had they been forced to flee their home for the reasons that Meg was suggesting. Another was that I could find no indication that Matthew had been a part of the tempest in the local teapot. Not solidly conclusive reasons, just instinct.

Meg gave the overview of our two seasons in the field, with some of the gorgeous shots of the brick house that overlooked Stone Harbor itself. She