The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (8 page)

Carefully Ford lifted it out of the hole. He got to his feet, and stood wiping
the soil away from it, turning it over and over in his hands. There was nothing
much to see, for the whole surface was crusted over with a thick layer of a
hard greenish-blue substance. But he knew that it was an enormous plate or dish
of great weight and thickness. It weighed about eighteen pounds!

Ford stood in the field of yellow barley stubble and gazed at the huge plate.
His hands began to shake. A tremendous and almost unbearable excitement started
boiling up inside him and it was not easy for him to hide it. But he did his
best.

"Some sort of a dish," he said.

Butcher was kneeling on the ground beside the hole. "Must be pretty
old," he said.

"Could be old," Ford said. "But it's all rusted up and eaten
away."

"That don't look like rust to me," Butcher said. "That greenish
stuff isn't rust. It's something else. . ."

"
It's
green rust," Ford said rather
superbly, and that ended the discussion.

Butcher, still on his knees, was poking about casually in the now
three-feet-wide hole with his gloved hands. "There's another one down
here," he said.

Instantly, Ford laid the great dish on the ground. He knelt beside Butcher, and
within minutes they had unearthed a second large green-encrusted plate. This
one was a shade smaller than the first, and deeper.
More of a
bowl than a dish.

Ford stood up and held the new find in his hands.

Another heavy one.
And now he knew for certain they
were on to something absolutely tremendous. They were on to Roman Treasure, and
almost without question it was pure silver. Two things pointed to its being
pure silver. First the weight, and second, the particular type of green crust
caused by oxidation.

How often is a piece of Roman silver discovered in the world?

Almost never any more.
And had pieces as large as this
ever
been unearthed before?

Ford wasn't sure, but he very much doubted it.

Worth millions it must be.

Worth literally millions of pounds.

His breath, coming fast, was making little white clouds in the freezing
atmosphere.

"There's still more down here,
Mr
Ford,"
Butcher was saying. "I can feel bits of it all over the place. You'll need
the spade again."

The third piece they got out was another large plate, somewhat similar to the
first. Ford placed it in the barley stubble with the other two.

When Butcher felt the first flake of snow upon his cheek he looked up and saw
over to the north-east a great white curtain drawn across the sky, a solid wall
of snow flying forward on the wings of the wind.

"Here she comes!" he said, and Ford looked round and saw the snow
moving upon them and he said, "It's a blizzard. It's a filthy stinking
blizzard!"

The two men stared at the blizzard as it raced across the fens towards them.
Then it was on them, and all around was snow and snowflakes in the eyes and
ears and mouth and down the neck and all around. And when Butcher glanced down
at the ground a few seconds later it was already white.

"That's all we want," Ford said. "A filthy rotten stinking
blizzard,"
and he shivered and sunk his sharp and foxy
face deeper into the collar of his coat. "Come on," he said.
"See if there's any more."

Butcher knelt down again and poked around in the soil,
then
in the slow and casual manner of a man having a lucky dip in a barrel of
sawdust, he pulled out another plate and held it out to Ford. Ford took it and
placed it with the other three. Now Ford knelt down beside Butcher and began to
dip into the soil with him.

For a whole hour the two men stayed out there digging and scratching in that
little three-foot patch of soil. And during that hour they found and laid upon
the ground beside them
no less than
thirty-four separate pieces!
There were dishes, bowls, goblets, spoons,
ladles and several other things, all of them crusted over but each one
recognizable for what it was. And all the while the blizzard swirled around
them and the snow gathered in little mounds upon their caps and on their
shoulders and the flakes melted on their faces so that rivers of icy water
trickled down their necks. A large globule of half-frozen liquid dangled
continually, like a snow drop, from the end of Ford's pointed nose.

They worked in silence. It was too cold to speak. And as one precious article
after the other was unearthed, Ford laid them carefully on the ground in rows,
pausing every now and then to wipe the snow away from a dish or a spoon which
was in danger of being completely covered.

At last Ford said, "That's the lot, I think."

"Yes."

Ford stood up and stamped his feet on the ground. "Got a sack in the
tractor?" he said, and while Butcher walked over to fetch the sack, he
turned and gazed upon the four-and-thirty pieces lying in the snow at his feet.
He counted them again. If they were silver, which they surely must be, and if
they were Roman, which they undoubtedly were, then this was a discovery that
would rock the world.

Butcher called to him from the tractor, "It's only a dirty old sack."

"It'll do."

Butcher brought the sack over and held it open while Ford carefully put the
articles into it. They all went in except one. The massive two-foot plate was
too large for the neck of the sack.

The two men were really cold now. For over an hour they had knelt and scratched
about out there in the open field with the blizzard swirling around them.
Already, nearly six inches of snow had fallen. Butcher was half-frozen. His
cheeks were dead-white, blotched with blue, his feet were numb like wood, and
when he moved his legs he could not feel the ground beneath his feet. He was
much colder than Ford. His coat and clothes were not so thick, and ever since
early morning he had been sitting high up on the seat of the tractor, exposed
to the bitter wind. His blue-white face was tight and unmoving. All he wanted
was to get home to his family and to the fire that he knew would be burning in
the grate.

Ford, on the other hand, was not thinking about the cold. His mind was
concentrated solely upon one thing -- how to get possession for himself of this
fabulous treasure. His position, as he knew very well, was not a strong one.

In England there is a very curious law about finding any kind of gold or silver
treasure. This law goes back hundreds of years, and is still strictly enforced
today. The law states that if a person digs up out of the ground, even out of
his own garden, a piece of metal that is either
gold or
silver,
it automatically becomes
what is known as Treasure Trove and is the property of the Crown. The Crown
doesn't in these days mean the actual King or Queen. It means the country or
the government. The law also states that it is a criminal offence to conceal
such a find. You are simply not allowed to hide the stuff and keep it for
yourself. You must report it at once, preferably to the police. And if you do
report it at once, you as the finder will be entitled to receive from the
government in money the full amount of the market value of the article. You are
not required to report the digging up of other metals. You are allowed to find
as much valuable pewter, bronze, copper or even platinum as you wish, and you
can keep it all, but not gold or silver.

The other curious part of this curious law is this: it is the person who
discovers
the treasure in the first
place who gets the reward from the government. The owner of the land gets
nothing -- unless of course the finder is trespassing on the land when he makes
the discovery. But if the finder of the treasure has been hired by the owner to
do a job on his land, then he, the finder, gets all the reward.

In this case, the finder was Gordon Butcher. Furthermore, he was not
trespassing. He was performing a job which he had been hired to do. This treasure
therefore belonged to Butcher and to no one else. All he had to do was to take
it and show it to an expert who would immediately identify it as silver,
then
turn it in to the police. In time, he would receive
from the government one hundred per cent of its value -- perhaps a million
pounds.

All this left Ford out in the cold and Ford knew it. He had no rights
whatsoever to the treasure by law. Thus, as he must have told himself at the
time, his only chance of getting hold of the stuff for himself lay in the fact
that Butcher was an ignorant man who didn't know the law and who did not anyway
have the faintest idea of the value of the find. The probability was that in a
few days Butcher would forget all about it. He was too simple-minded a fellow,
too artless, too trusting, too unselfish to give the matter much thought.

Now, out there in the desolate
snowswept
field, Ford
bent down and took hold of the huge dish with one hand. He raised it but he did
not lift it. The lower rim remained resting on the snow. With his other hand,
he grasped the top of the sack. He didn't lift that either. He just held it.
And there he stooped amid the swirling snowflakes, both hands embracing, as it
were, the treasure, but not actually taking it. It was a subtle and a canny
gesture. It managed somehow to signify ownership before ownership had been
discussed. A child plays the same game when he reaches out and closes his
fingers over the biggest chocolate
eclair
on the
plate and then says, "Can I have this one, Mummy?" He's already got
it.

"Well, Gordon," Ford said, stooping over, holding the sack and the
great dish in his gloved fingers. "I don't suppose you want any of this
old stuff."

It was not a question. It was a statement of fact framed as a question.

The blizzard was still raging. The snow was falling so densely the two men
could hardly see one another.

"You ought to get along home and warm yourself up," Ford went on.
"You look frozen to death."

"I
feel
frozen to death,"
Butcher said.

"Then you get on that tractor quick and hurry home," said the
thoughtful, kind-hearted Ford. "Leave the plough here and leave your bike
at my place. The important thing is to get back and warm yourself up before you
catch pneumonia."

"I think that's just what I will do,
Mr
Ford," Butcher said. "Can you manage all right with that sack? It's
mighty heavy."

"I might not even bother about it today," Ford said casually. "I
just might leave it here and come back for it another time.
Rusty
old stuff."

"So long then,
Mr
Ford."

" 'Bye
, Gordon."

Gordon Butcher mounted the tractor and drove away into the blizzard.

Ford hoisted the sack on to his shoulder, and then, not without difficulty, he
lifted the massive dish with his other hand and tucked it under his arm.

"I am carrying," he told himself, as he trudged through the snow,
"I am now carrying what is probably the biggest treasure ever dug up in
the whole history of England."

When Gordon Butcher came stamping and blowing through the back door of his
small brick house late that afternoon, his wife was ironing by the fire. She
looked up and saw his blue-white face and snow-encrusted clothes.

"My goodness, Gordon, you look froze to death!" she cried.

"I am," he said. "Help me off with these clothes, love. My
fingers
aren't hardly
working at all."

She took off his gloves, his coat, his jacket, his wet shirt. She pulled off
his boots and socks. She fetched a towel and rubbed his chest and shoulders
vigorously all over to restore the circulation. She rubbed his feet.

"Sit down there by the fire," she said, "and I'll get you a hot
cup of tea."

Later, when he was settled comfortably in the warmth with dry clothes on his
back and the mug of tea in his hand, he told her what had happened that
afternoon.

"He's a foxy one, that
Mr
Ford," she said,
not looking up from her ironing. "I never did like him."

"He got pretty excited about it all, I can tell you that," Gordon
Butcher said. "Jumpy as a jack-rabbit he was."

"That may be," she said. "But you ought to have had more sense
than to go crawling about on your hands and knees in a freezing blizzard just
because
Mr
Ford said to do it."

"I'm all right," Gordon Butcher said, "I'm warming up nicely
now."

And that, believe it or not, was about the last time the subject of the
treasure was discussed in the Butcher household for some years.

The reader should be reminded that this was wartime, 1942. Britain was totally
absorbed in the desperate war against Hitler and Mussolini. Germany was bombing
England, and England was bombing Germany, and nearly every night Gordon Butcher
heard the roar of motors from the big aerodrome at nearby
Mildenhall
as the bombers took off for Hamburg, Berlin, Kiel,
Wilhelmshaven
or Frankfurt. Sometimes he would wake in the early hours and hear them coming
home, and sometimes the Germans flew over to bomb the aerodrome, and the
Butcher house would shake with the
crumph
and crash
of bombs not far away.