The letter from Donald Morphew, proprietor of the White Boar in the village of Stayly, was handed to one of several researchers. She started with Google and went on to the Ordnance Survey Map of Sussex, located Stayly in the Weald district on the edge of Ashdown Forest, and then made a few phone calls. “So it’s not impossible that what they dug up is, in fact, part of what was once a dam built to create a mill pond,” she wrote in her report. “Whether for a foundry (as they suggest) or for a flour mill is another matter. They’ve no date, of course, just a few feet of buried stonework. What is certain, though, is the soggy ground that they’d hoped to drain. I gather an attempt was made to till it during the war, but it was never fit to plant. It’s the right part of the world for an early iron foundry, though—could be Tudor or Jacobean, most likely.”

“What do you think?” Mick Aston asked the producer, Tim Taylor. “We can’t just dig the big places, even if everyone and his dog wants Time Team to get them on Channel 4. Castles and abbeys are all very well in their way—spectacular, sometimes—but we started with farmers’ fields and cottage terraces; and there’s a type of viewer who likes that down-to-earth, common-or-garden—”

“Literally common, literally garden,” Tim put in.

Mick nodded. “—‘might be my rose garden they’re digging’ sort of episode.” After a moment, he added, “Also we’ve not picked anything else from the south coast yet, nor last season either.”

So Stayly made the long list. It did not, however, get short-listed until another researcher had gone down to chat to the local historical society, who proved to be mostly incomers; stayed at the White Boar and heard a fair bit of local lore from its landlord; snooped round the old parts of the village; and been taken to see their museum. It was, not surprisingly, mostly odd bits of Victoriana saved from the rubbish bin. Nevertheless, there were a number of iron domestic and agricultural tools that took his eye, considering the nature of the proposed dig.

This report was made, at least partly, in person. “First of all, the name of the place. The village was recorded in Domesday under the name Staglye. It lies just inside the pale—or what remains of the pale—surrounding the medieval royal park. There are several old buildings that at least partly date from maybe the Tudor period. The church is Early English, with a rather nice little window.” Rupert Seton stopped, looking a bit embarrassed. “I didn’t get into the church,” he said apologetically. “Stayly shares its vicar with three or four other local parishes. Norbridge was one, if I recall—I can check my notes, if it’s important. Anyway, it’s kept locked up nowadays—” (Mick nodded.) “—and the neighbour who keeps the key has gone on holiday. I’m told there’s a tomb inside.”

“Local landowner,” said Mick, with a slight query in his tone.

“A manor called Emmas, apparently. It doesn’t exist anymore, doesn’t appear on maps of the area, so no one knows where the site was. The inscription is apparently illegible; but there’s a Victorian transcription. The tomb may have been vandalized?” said Rupert a bit uncertainly. “Or maybe it was the church. I’m told there was a lot of damage done during the Civil War.”

“The area was heavily fought over,” said Mick. “Iron foundries in the Weald supplied a lot of weapons—to both sides.”

“Well, they’ve no weapons in their little museum.” Rupert laughed. “The sort of thing you’d expect: scythes and ladles, and such. Here, take a look at this.” He whipped out his phone, tapped for a bit, and handed it over. “Looks a proper witch’s cauldron, doesn’t it?”

Mick looked down at the photograph of a large iron kettle. “Mended at least twice,” he commented.

“No saying how old any of it is, of course.”

Mick, who had been studying the photograph, looked up sharply. “Now, there you’re wrong. You want to look for the maker’s mark or foundry mark. For instance, if you’d looked underneath that kettle—wrought iron, to my eyes—you’d probably have found an initial or symbol. Maybe date and pattern number if it’s recent.” At Rupert’s blank look, he snapped, “Think china, man. And don’t tell me you haven’t watched The Antiques Roadshow.” He handed the phone back.

“Actually, I did spot pictures on a lot of them,” Rupert admitted. “Mostly the same thing. A flower. I assumed it was decorative.”

“A Tudor rose?” Mick raised a brow. “That might place it well back. Any of your snaps show the mark?”

“No, it was a lily,” said Rupert, “and not a fleur-de-lys, either. A bit stylized, but fairly realistic.”

“On most of them, you say?” Mick leaned forward, with obvious interest.

“Well, almost half, I guess.” There was a pause, before Rupert added uncertainly, “You’re not wanting me to drive back down there?”

“No,” said Mick briskly. “Get back to the locals; find someone there to e-mail you pictures of the foundry mark. Then find an expert—Tudor period—and see what they have to say.”

It was “what they had to say” that landed Stayly high on the short list.

“I think,” said Tim, “we can have a bit of a reconstruction to brighten things up, just in case. Some old-style smelting, maybe—or, how about a blacksmith doing some wrought iron? A copy of one of those pieces in the museum, how about that?”

And so it was set.

When Time Team comes to town, a small army descends. Fifty or more people is fine if the prospective dig is in a decent-sized town. In a place the size of Stayly, it’s no joke. While the senior people were put up at the White Boar, campers and tents had to be brought in to house the lesser lights. A contingent of students from the University of Sussex, augmented by local volunteers, would help at the actual dig. Aerial survey maps had been studied; ancient maps of the Weald had been identified and copied; documents from the local Records Office had been hunted down.

Mick wandered down the main street, such as it was, noting the antiquity of several of the buildings. A couple, he reckoned, dated wholly from Tudor and Jacobean times; others had foundations of that age, or new wings on old, or what might be the original house relegated to the role of garage or garden shed. What intrigued him was the uniformity of much of the oldest stone: well shaped, mason-cut, and much of a size. Somewhere round here, he thought to himself, there used to be a priory or the like that was robbed out. Probably after the Reformation, when the monasteries were closed. He debated trying to get into the church: there was a car parked; and he suspected the vicar was as susceptible to the magnetic power of Time Team as any of the locals who would soon be thronging round the temporary fencing at the dig site. Instead, he turned back, went into the White Boar, and ordered a pint at the bar. There were several familiar faces already seated; but he turned instead to the man who slid his glass to him.

“Are you the proprietor?” he asked.

“Donald Morphew, at your service. And you’re Mick Aston, of course. We’re proud to have you all here.”

It was, if Mick recalled correctly, one Donald Morphew who had written the letter to Time Team.

“I’m a member of the Stayly Historical Society,” Morphew explained. “Also, it’s my cousin Walter owns the field you’re digging in. Plashets Farm—been in the family since time immemorial. I suppose, from your point of view, old villages are a dime a dozen in England; but we’re proud of ours.”

“And so you should be,” said Mick automatically. “I noticed a lot of old stone houses in the village—dressed stone very similar in all of them. Do you know—? Did it come originally from some other building round here?”

Morphew laughed. “Well, there’s supposed to have been a royal palace here once upon a time. Up the ridge.”

Mentally, Mick changed “palace” to “hunting lodge”; but, in the gist, it seemed not unlikely. “Our researchers told me of a manor house. Emmas Manor?”

“Oh, the inscription on the tomb in the church? The Mallory family; that’s not a name found hereabouts nowadays. You know,” Morphew said thoughtfully, “you missed the man who really knew a lot of the history around here. William Verrell was his name. He could have told you a lot; but he died about ten years back. Lived with his sister: she died a few years ago herself.” He lit up. “That was a big to-do, that was. Court case, even. There were cousins, you see, who’d always assumed they’d inherit. Well, of course, she might have left it all to a cat’s home or the like; and there’d be nothing to say if she did, for they weren’t close cousins or anything. But instead she left it all to an American. Insisted the two of them were related in some way, way way back; but there’s those who doubt it.”

“Really,” said Mick, feigning an interest he didn’t feel.

“Celia Gray. She’s over here at the moment, actually,” Morphew said. “If you call and ask, she might have some of Mr. Verrell’s papers still. Or you could drive out. It’s not far. She lives towards the forest. You can’t miss it.”

Mick nodded his thanks but, when he left the inn in the morning, took his car the other way, heading to Plashets Farm. John Gater and his team had been up at dawn with their equipment, walking in gumboots across the hayfield below the site of the presumed dam. Phil Harding had broken ground on the initial trench. It was high time Mick himself put in an appearance. He found the film crew getting ready to film the crucial opening scene.

“So,” said Tony Robinson into the camera, “here we are in the Sussex Weald, at the village of Stayly on the edge of Ashdown Forest. In medieval times this was a royal game park, but in Tudor times it became one of the most important iron-producing areas of England. Time Team is here today to search for a lost foundry that, for about a hundred years, made cannon for English wars here and overseas, as well as smaller items like skillets and ploughshares—and even nails! We’ve been asked to investigate what looks like a silted up mill pond that we hope powered the foundry back in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. It’s a field now—a pretty soggy field, to tell the truth—and local archeologists excavating the site found what looks like the remains of an old dam. We’re going to try to find that. Also, we’ll be looking for traces of the foundry itself and any associated buildings, such as workshops and smithies.”

“And cut!” said the director.

The morning passed, as it usually does on the first day, with very little to show for the effort put in; but, as Mick said to Tim at lunch in the White Boar, it was always thus.

“Well, it’s a wall all right,” said Phil at the dig site that afternoon. He pointed out the heavy stones that had been uncovered in the bottom of the trench. “No saying how far down it go. Early days, Mick, you know that.”

“You think it’s the remains of a dam?”

“Could be,” was all Phil would allow.

As for John Gater, the young geophysicists doing the actual work had half completed the survey of the field. “We’re using ground-penetrating radar,” he said to Mick and the camera. “We could try electrical resistivity; but I suspect all we’ll get around here is interference from the local ironstone. Assuming, of course, that it wasn’t mined out entirely; but there’ll be residual traces everywhere, if you ask me.”

“Have you any results you can show us?”

John stifled a certain ennui: the question was always asked; the audience expected it. Still, everyone already knew what he was going to say. “I’ll have results for you when we’ve finished the analysis, and not before.”

By that evening, the Finds trays were still nearly empty. There was one coin, a very blackened silver penny dating to Henry the Eighth’s reign. Some shards of pottery had been found. “Jugs or mugs,” said Paul Blinkhorn, the pottery expert. “Probably used by thirsty workers downing a pint.”

“I could murder a pint myself,” put in Phil.

The second day belied the weather forecast and dawned sunny, to everyone’s relief. As Phil and Carenza drove down together to the dig site and John perused the latest geophys results, Tim and Mick put their heads together on the best next move.

“What about these things in the local museum?” Tony asked them. “We need to make clear why we think this lost foundry is important. When’s the expert due?”

“Wennock, that’s his name,” said Mick. He looked at Tim.

“Zerlina says he’ll be here this afternoon around two.”

In fact, Andrew Wennock arrived somewhat after two, having been held up by traffic on the M4. Raising a sickle to show the foundry mark, he duly explained for the camera that historians were familiar with the lily-stamped ironwork, for it had travelled all across the country (“sold by pedlars and in market towns”); however, the mark was best known from cannon. “There’s a demi-culverin in Winchester,” he said, “and a saker in Lincoln that both bear this distinctive lily. Yet no one has ever been able to identify the foundry they came from. What is interesting here in the museum at Stayly is the sheer number of such pieces. It does suggest that it was locally produced, made by the smiths at the foundry for their own use and the use of their neighbours.”

“So that means,” said Tony to drive the point home, “that we are excavating the foundry of the Lost Lily.”

It was an absurdly romantical way of phrasing it. “More or less,” said Wennock with faint distaste, “assuming, of course, that what you are digging turns out to be a foundry at all.”

No one said anything; but that last bit, would, of course, be nipped out neatly in post-production.

Meanwhile, Stewart Ainsworth—who had spent the previous day, map and GPS in hand, tramping round the local countryside—had decided to start the afternoon by visiting the church. He stopped briefly in the porch to scan the notices and spotted mention of the key; but, when he tried the door, he found that it was open. Inside was a typical small English church, with white-washed walls and simple traceried windows, except for the one over the altar. It would have cast a multi-coloured wash of light over the chancel had the sun been in that quarter; but the glass was Victorian. If, he thought, there had ever been a medieval window, it had probably been destroyed by Puritans—possibly during the Civil War. There were always tales of Roundhead troops stabling their horses in churches. Certainly, as he cast his eyes round, he could see signs of damage: heads knocked off small cherubs, that sort of thing.

“Can I help you?”

He turned to see a man of seventy-odd in a surplice, who introduced himself as Charles Dalloway. “And you, of course, are Stewart Ainsworth,” Dalloway said. “I did hear that Time Team had descended upon us. May I say it’s an honour to meet you?” He proferred a hand, which Stewart shook automatically.

“Not at all. I thought I’d—” Stewart waved a hand round the church.

“Yes, of course. Well, I’m yet another member of our local Historical Society. (I’m sure you’ve met several of us already.) Ex officio, really; it was started by my old friend Willie Verrell. If you continue down this way when you leave, you’ll pass his house. Owned by an American now. He was a sad loss; I still miss our talks. However, I truly am interested in the history of the area. Have been for years.”

Stewart was duly shown the highlights, such as they were. The tour climaxed with a flat-topped, anonymous-looking stone tomb bearing a worn, illegible inscription. Dalloway handed him the old Victorian transcription in its cracked wooden frame; and Stewart read it with mild interest. The most useful point was the name of the lost manor that had probably supplied the robbed-out stone in the old part of the village. Not “Emmas”, apparently, but “M’mass”. He wondered what the abbreviation had stood for.

“No one really knows,” replied Dalloway. “There are speculations, of course; but no proof.”

Stewart nodded, and handed back the yellowed card.

“I gather you’re here because of Plashets,” Dalloway ventured. To Stewart’s nod, he added, “You know, there are those round here who think the name is a corruption of ‘Plantagenet’.”

Of course they do, thought Stewart. “Could be, I suppose,” was what he said. But then he felt compelled to add, “Of course, the word does mean ‘a marshy pond’, which would be a fair description of the old mill pond before the dam was built to deepen it. On the other hand,” he added with belated tact, “it was the Plantagenet kings who enclosed the forest preserve.”

“Oh, I doubt the story myself,” said Dalloway hastily. “I mean, there’s no account of their palace being anywhere that close to the village.” After a hesitant pause, in which Stewart betrayed evident signs of departure, he added, “Have you seen our museum?”

“Yes,” said Stewart. “I think we all have. They’re filming there this afternoon, in fact.”

“We’re lucky really to still have those old pieces, you know,” said Dalloway, escorting him to the door. “Before my time, of course; but I gather during the war they were nearly all donated to one of the scrap drives. It was the vicar of those days, another—” He gave a self-deprecating smile. “—amateur antiquarian, so to speak, who saved them. Gave quite a speech, I gather. From the pulpit, no less. Something along the lines of ‘We fight to save England, our heritage and history; but that doesn’t just mean our castles and cathedrals. We fight for our grandfathers and our great-grandmothers; and they were only ordinary folk like us. They handed these things down to us; and we are morally responsible for their preservation—the heritage of Old England.’”

“English Heritage, in fact,” said Stewart. They were, by now, lingering in the porch.

“Well, there’s not much around here to interest them,” admitted Dalloway, and finally let Stewart go. As he walked down the path to the gate, he could only think that somewhere the old vicar of yesteryear must have written down that sermon, for Dalloway did seem to have it by heart.

Stewart made his way out of the village and up a moderate hill that led into one of the surviving groves of the ancient forest. Once, the road must have been a track; at some point it had been metalled, but was still no more than one car’s width, with hedges close on either side. He came suddenly upon a house and garden. A fiftyish woman was kneeling by a flowerbed, weeding. She looked up at the sound of his footfall and—his heart fell—also clearly recognized him. The flip side of a hit TV show. When she got up and greeted him, her accent immediately placed her as the new American owner of William Verrell’s cottage. The house was, to Stewart, rather more interesting: partly in brick, partly in the local stone. In what looked the older part, he could see some of the dressed stone that marked so many of the cottages in the village.

“I always watch the show when I’m over here,” the woman said eagerly. “I suppose you’re doing that landscape analysis? Would you like a cup of coffee—no, I mean tea?”

“That’s quite all right,” said Stewart. He had learned long ago that, if he took fans up on hospitality, he’d never get the job done.

“I do wish Ursula were here to meet you,” the woman said. “I’m Celia Gray, by the way—Celia Medley as was. Ursula was a distant cousin of mine, very passionate about history, especially family history. We’re connected in some way with the Mallorys, you know.”

Now how could I know? Stewart thought.  “You mean the Mallorys from the tomb in the church,” he said.  “I thought the family had died out or something.  The manor house has long gone.  They don’t even know its full name.”

“Oh, it was Mantlemass,” said Celia cheerily. “I know the local historical society doesn’t believe me; but I know. My ancestors emigrated to America, you see, back in the seventeenth century. We know who they were and where they came from because the ship’s manifest survives, and it gives the names of all the passengers and where they came from. It’s in a museum back in Vermont.”

“Perhaps I will have that cup of tea,” Stewart heard himself say. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Oh, no trouble at all!” She was delighted.

Over breakfast, John Gater had produced the first geophysics results. “It’s mostly the field below the dam,” he said, pointing out where the first trench had gone in. “We’ll start pushing further out to the west today; got permission to have a look-see.”

Phil looked over Mick’s shoulder at the black-and-white image. “There’s something there, right enough,” he said, pointing to a roughly rectangular shape at the upper part of the field. “Reckon that’s the foundry? Be in the right place.”

“Could be,” Mick agreed.

“I’d like to put in a test trench here,” said Phil, sketching out a line with his finger. “Across that corner, see?”

The presumptive foundry was clearly a priority, Mick agreed. However, there were fainter, smaller marks in several other places, as well as a curious anomaly on the far side into the forest. The former might be the foundations of workshops or smithies. The latter was a mystery; and Tony pitched hard for a trench to find out what it might be.

“It’s a strong response,” said John.

“But an odd location,” said Mick. “Could be a waste pit. Could be anything.”

In the end, it was decided to give the foundry to Phil. Carenza would start a third trench to investigate one of the clearer of the smaller signatures. (“That bit there might be a sign of burning.”) A test pit would, at Tony’s urging, be dug over the anomaly. (“Just our luck, it’ll turn out to be a drainage pipe.”) Soon thereafter, jeeps headed to the dig; Phil was directing Ian Barclay as he skillfully scraped off the top layers of earth with the backhoe; and Carenza was marking the ground for a smaller team standing ready with shovels.

By lunch, the volunteers in Phil’s trench had begun delicately troweling free the top of stone foundations, though, as Phil pointed out for the camera, “We won’t know what we’ve got till we’ve cleared it all properly.” Meanwhile, in her trench, Carenza was finding only traces. “Mostly, these would have been temporary structures—wood, probably—so we can’t expect to find more than postholes. However, we picked this particular site because of traces of burning—well, we think it may be burning—suggesting a central fire, perhaps for a smithy.”

As for their own smithy, it was being set up outside the village. Acting as assistant, Matt Williams was wheezing away with the bellows. “This is harder than I thought,” he admitted, with a glance up at the camera. “It’s one thing to do it for a couple of minutes; but a blacksmith’s apprentice in real life had to keep it up for hours. And mostly they were just kids.”

“Why is the bellows necessary?” put in Tony to start the technical discussion. This was answered by the smith as he thrust an iron bar into the flames to heat it, and talked about oxygen. The end result would be a copy of a strap hinge from the museum.

Stewart followed Celia Gray up a steep bank. “I hope you know where we’re going,” he said, surreptitiously checking his map.

“Ursula showed me. Years ago,” Celia said, “but I’ve been back several times. She always insisted this was the site of Mantlemass.”

They came to the top of the rise, and the trees parted. Ahead of them was an open space of rough ground. Stewart looked at it with an expert eye. It would be, he thought, a good place for a manor: in its day, it would look out over the gill; there would be a source of water as well as wood; and the area was certainly large enough for not only the house itself, but the necessary outbuildings: barn, stable, and such. His only reservation was the south-facing prospect since this, in Tudor times, had been considered unhealthful.

Celia darted forward and bent to the clumps of heather, apparently searching for something. Over her shoulder, she explained, “Ursula showed me … apparently her sister found it. Well, there was also a burnt piece of wood; but I never found it again, so who knows? But—ah!” She straightened, heaving up a piece of stone. “You see?”

Stewart came over and examined it. Roughly rectangular, save on one side where it had been broken; there were signs of burning. It seemed, to his eye, pretty well the same as those he had seen elsewhere. He looked up thoughtfully, and then turned in a circle, again scanning the site.

Later, at the evening round-up of the day’s activities (filmed as it went, to be cut down hard in editing later), he brought the matter of the putative manor site up—a bit tentatively, since it lay outside the purpose of the dig, but in the certain knowledge that the lie of the land often did raise matters that might or might not prove to bear on the reason they were there. “I had thought I’d get as far as Gillsedge Farm,” he began, “but got side-tracked.” He expounded on his discoveries.

“It’s the end of the second day,” observed Mick quietly when he was done.

“Oh, no time to investigate properly,” Stewart agreed quickly, “but I was wondering…?” And he looked down the table at John Gater, who looked heavenwards with a sigh.

Mick saw this. “Do you think you can spare a couple of people to do a quick survey?”

“I don’t even know what the ground there is like,” said John. “As for ‘quick’—it takes as long as it takes. You know that.” He sighed. “Yes, I suppose so. We’ve gone west into the woods; and there’s not much point in trying to do more in that direction.” He considered for a moment, and then nodded. “Yes, all right. Give me the map coordinates, Stewart, okay?”

“The lost manor of Emmas,” mused Mick. “I wonder whether they were the owners of the foundry.”

“That would tie into the dig,” said Tony, putting in his two cents worth.

“We can try to spin it that way,” Tim agreed. “At least that would make sense of extending the survey to the manor site.”

“Maybe manor site,” stressed Mick.

“And it’s not ‘Emmas’ apparently,” added Stewart. “I saw the inscription from the tomb in the church. It’s actually written ‘M’mass’.” He clearly enunciated each syllable. “With a pothook in between. It’s short for ‘Mantlemass’. Or at least that’s what Mrs. Gray says … the woman who showed me the site.”

Up till now, Carenza had remained silent. On hearing Stewart’s exposition, however, she looked so suddenly shocked that Mick turned to her questioningly.

“Probably nothing,” she said quickly. “It’s just … the name ‘Mantlemass’. Took me back to when I was a grad student. A chap I knew had a plum summer job working on the Digby papers. It’s not exactly the Paston letters, not as well known—and a sort of side branch of the family, anyway—but there were some interesting finds. Apparently, one of the Digby daughters married a man named Thomas Jolland. A bit of a chancer, if you ask me. He had to flee to France at one point. Anyway, in the letter, he was asking his wife’s family to take in his daughter Cecily for a protracted visit. Interpolated was a lengthy complaint about his widowed sister, who was childless. Her husband’s estates had escheated to the Crown; but she was offered a choice between two of his manors, basically as her dower rights, I suppose. Her brother had been well into making the arrangements when suddenly she changed her mind and wanted the other one. Hence the complaint.”

“And Mantlemass?”

“Was one of the manors. God—” She rolled her eyes. “Chris bored our ears off about it, talked all the time. I can’t remember if Mantlemass was the one the sister did or didn’t get; but I do recall that Chris looked through the surviving royal deeds—it was Edward IV’s reign—and found the gift. And there were also maps, or more like sketches, of both the manors. How those came into the Digbys’ hands is anyone’s guess—something to do with Jolland fleeing to France is my bet. No indication where either manor was; but Chris did manage to track one of them down. It was a pretty piece of research; and he got a paper out of it in the end.”

Mick gave her a clear, level look.

“And yes,” she said, “I’ll give him a call.”

It was still early enough that she could reasonably telephone after the meal; and, such is the glamour of Time Team, Chris Burkhill (now of the University of Northumbria) promptly looked out his research, including the map of the manor, and faxed it all to the White Boar. Mid morning the next day, therefore, Carenza got a phone call at the dig site telling her it had arrived, and promptly passed the whole lot over to Mick before getting back to Trench Three.

“Elizabeth Jolland married Bertram FitzEdmund,” Mick told Stewart, who had got a lift back to the pub when he heard the news. “Mantlemass is the name of the manor she was granted, with a later deed transferring the property to Lewis Mallory; and he’ll be the chap in the church. The dates would fit. Did you say his wife’s name was Cecily?” At Stewart’s nod, he finished, “She might even be the girl mentioned in the letter to the Digbys.”

“Neat,” said Tim, who—as director—was in on the discussion. “A little too neat, if you ask me.”

“Not really,” said Mick. “A confluence of research, really. Burkhill got one end of the story; we’ve got the other end here. Up till now, no one made the connection, that’s all. Not that it’s proved, of course.”

“But that won’t stop us hinting broadly in the sum-up at the end,” said Tony.

It was past ten when the small team at the test pit struck iron.

Everyone crowded round to look; but, as far as appearances went, it was just a patch of slightly curved, corroded metal still embedded in the earth. “Could be a drainage pipe after all,” someone commented. Carenza noticed a man hanging back a bit, then being brought forward to have the metal pointed out. She’d seen him around the site once or twice before, usually but not always under escort, and assumed he was likely the landowner. That had been confirmed the previous day. Some relation of the landlord at the inn, she remembered. Akehurst, that was the name. She returned to extending Trench Three, and shortly afterwards saw the man walk across the field towards the foundry site, accompanied by Phil and Mick, as well as a cameraman. Trench One was pretty well finished: it would probably be shut down before day’s end. At the foundry, which had had a full team at work since yesterday morning, the last brushing clear was almost complete, and details were being noted and photographed. She was not surprised when, later, she looked up to find that Phil had taken over the excavation of whatever-it-was that was lying at the bottom of what now was rapidly being extended into Trench Four.

Walter Akehurst hung around the foundry site for a little longer, occasionally posing a question that some interrupted junior would raise a head to answer before getting back to work. He then drifted via Carenza’s trench, where there was really not much to see unless one was a field archeologist, over to stand by Phil.

“I reckon,” he said tentatively after a while, “I should maybe show you the lily.”

Phil looked up. “If you mean the foundry mark, we know that. It’s what got us here, you know.”

Akehurst was silent for a while. Then he said again, “No, maybe I should show you The Lily.” This time the capital letters were clear. Phil put down his shovel.

“I reckon,” said Akehurst slowly, “I maybe should go and get it.”

“You do that,” Phil said, in a gentle voice. “What sort of a lily is it?”

“Show you,” said Akehurst, mind made up. He turned and headed straight off the field in the direction of the farmhouse. Phil looked after him for a few moments, shook his head, and got back to digging.

In the estimate of the historians, the ancient map of Mantlemass manor was not atypical. It had been drawn from eye without surveying instruments, and marked the location of the buildings with crudely sketched pictures rather than outlines of their footprints. There was no telling what the interior of the manor house might have looked like, though one might make an educated guess that there would be a great hall, a parlour, and kitchens; but the exterior view showed a central two-storey building with two ells making a courtyard. It looked to be stone-built, with many large mullioned windows. About it were farm buildings: most were unidentifiable; but the biggest was surely a huge barn. These looked thatched, if the sketch were accurately interpreted; but the manor house itself had a high roof that seemed to be tiled, with tall chimneys.

“I’d say there’d be enough room up here,” said Stewart, sweeping an arm broadly around the open area at the top of the rise, “taking into account possible encroachment of the forest round the periphery.”

“I’ll draw my own conclusions from the data,” said John, who was supervising the geophysical survey. “But,“ and he peered at the monitor, “preliminary results are promising.” He looked round at Stewart, “End of the day. We’ll at least be able to tell you then if there really is something here.”

Stewart nodded, and headed back along the irregular path downslope, which fell, almost in terraces, to the river in the valley. It was more or less the route that he had taken with Celia Gray; but, instead of cutting across to her cottage and the metalled road, he continued to follow the stream. Eventually, it flowed over a low rocky fall to a deep pool below. Good fishing maybe, he thought, making his way carefully down, where he stopped—not just to catch his breath, but to admire the view. There was a tumble of boulders of the local ironstone, honey-coloured with dark streaks, the same stone used for the buildings round the village. The water ran with a russet tint from the ore.

He knelt, and dipped his hand in the water. It lifted out clear: only the depths of the pond brought the colour to the eye. There was a layer of silt, no doubt deepening to mud further out. He poked in a finger, stirring up a haze. Finally, knowing time to be passing fast, he began to get up. Then something caught his eye. Bending down, peering through the water as the silt settled, he thought he saw a pebble—a curious-looking pebble. Reaching in, groping a little, he brought it out. A quick rinse got it reasonably clean, though there were dark accretions. Probably, he thought, from the iron in the water. Getting to his feet, he stuck it in his pocket.

The lily that Walter Akehurst brought back was wrought iron. Phil turned it over in his hand, but could find no foundry mark.

“This is the original lily,” said Akehurst, with shy pride. “Come down in my family from … dunno how long, actually; but, once upon a time, so the story goes, it was the model for the lily that you see on the things in the museum.”

Made in the round, almost naturalistic in appearance, the iron lily did look—if one were to flatten it—very much like the foundry mark.

“Used to hang above the door in my grandfather’s day,” Akehurst added. “Black-leaded daily, it was, to keep it fresh. Nowadays, it’s indoors.”

“Don’t know what Finds tray this should go in,” Stewart said, pulling the pebble out of his pocket, “but I’m pretty sure it’s got carving on it. Found it in a pond up there.” And he pointed.

It was getting into the afternoon when Phil finally cleared most of the way along the metal object. “That’s no drain pipe,” he said for the camera. He ran one hand along the curve. “That’s a cannon if I ever saw one. Some corrosion, of course. But excellent preservation, all things considered, given how long it’s been buried. It’s this waterlogged clay, I reckon.” The camera operator pulled back as Phil pulled himself out of the hole. “Take a look, Tony.”

Tony Robinson peered over, but made no attempt to hop in. “Can we get it up in the time?” he asked. “I mean, we aren’t going to just cover it back up and leave it there, are we?”

“No, we’ve got a crane coming,” said Mick. “How big would you say it is, Phil?”

“Ooh, maybe a meter and a half or so. Say five feet in old money. We’re talking four hundred pounds or so dead weight.”

“Well,” said Mick cheerfully, “get the rest of the dirt off, and we’ll have the experts look at it later, when it’s all spit-and-polished. Is there a foundry mark?”

“Underneath, maybe.” Phil looked down at the gun. “Maybe see it when we lift it, eh? Nice bit of casting, this.” For the camera’s benefit, he added, “Cast iron cannon were very typical of the foundries in the Weald district.”

As the others walked off, though, Mick commented to Tony, “Odd place to put it, down in the ground. They’d’ve surely had a gun store somewhere. I wonder if it was maybe buried to keep it from being looted by a raiding party during the Civil War—both sides were desperate for weapons.”

At the end of the day, when all digging had wrapped (with backfill scheduled for the fourth, unfilmed day, when everything would be returned to normal), the Time Team crew gathered with a crowd of people from Stayly to make their usual presentation of their finds and conclusions.

“Well, we can tell you with certainty that there was a foundry here,” Phil started. “Obviously, we can’t say for absolutely certain that it used the lily mark; but the balance of probability is that, yes, this is the lost foundry we were looking for. Mr. Akehurst kindly showed us the wrought iron lily that has been in his family, and it certainly looks very similar; and there’s no doubt that the Tudor and Jacobean pieces in the museum all bear the mark. What is more, the cannon that you saw us trundle through the village an hour ago seems to have the same lily; and we dug that up straight from the bottom of the trench; and I can’t see any way it could be there if it hadn’t been cast here in Stayly.”

The camera panned across the fascinated faces of the assembled crowd.

“Now, about the manor,” said Mick. “Honestly, we weren’t expecting that at all. We won’t have time to dig there; but everything we have found has been passed over to the county archeologists. There are definitely traces of the foundations of buildings up in that open area on the ridge. They show up clearly in the geophysical survey results. The largest of them is much the same layout as a contemporary sketch of Mantlemass manor, which was granted to Lewis Mallory by Edward IV. Lewis Mallory, as you all know, is buried in your church. We can’t say for sure who owned the foundry at Plashets, but the Mallory family are a good possibility.”

In the audience, Celia Gray beamed broadly with the pleasure of finding that Ursula Verrell had, indeed, been right about the location of Mantlemass.

“What is more,” Stewart went on, “we’ve got a signet stone that was found in the water downstream from the manor. How the stone got in the pond we can’t possibly say. Maybe Lewis Mallory lost it; maybe it was one of his descendants. It’s the kind of thing that gets passed down in the family. But we do know it was his. Cleaned up, the stone is carved with the Mallory coat of arms. That’s a symbol known as “the lark and the laurel”—that’s a bird with a branch in its mouth, basically—”

Celia burst out, “The coat of arms! Aunt Mall had it on an embroidered screen: a little bird with a twig in its mouth.” She stared around their startled faces and added, “Do you think maybe the stone you found fits in the ring that Ursula Verrell picked out of the pond? She showed it to me years ago. Black and tarnished, but carved with gold.”

“Gold doesn’t tarnish,” said Carenza automatically.

The interruption shocked everyone else into silence. Finally, politely, Mick said, “Well, that’s interesting, of course, ma’am. But I think it’s a matter for another day. We’re here to do the dig round-up.” Then, under his breath, he muttered, “Who the hell is she?” to Phil, who gave a slight shake of his head.

Stewart—the only one who had met her—stirred slightly, coughed, and then said in a slightly apologetic tone, “Mrs. Gray….”

“Oh, that’s Mrs. Gray,” Mick murmured.

“—maybe afterwards you could show us this ring you say you have. But I think, right now, if you don’t mind…?”

Celia nodded. Then, without waiting to hear the rest of the Time Team report, she quickly returned to her cottage, fetched a screwdriver, and went into the coat cupboard in the hall. There she shifted the clothes aside and felt along the wall until she found the little recess that Ursula had sealed up. This she chipped at until the plaster came away, and she could reach inside.

It must be left for someone who comes here later, that’s what Ursula told me, she thought as she drew out the ring. And they’ve come, and it’s later; so it’s time.

After the dig comes post-production, from belated analysis of samples that can’t possibly be handled in a mere three days to consultation with experts and, of course, pictorial reconstruction of potsherds and the like. Celia Gray’s ring, filthy as it was with iron deposited by the rich red water of the pond, had to be thoroughly cleaned before it could be matched with the signet stone. Also (for Time Team can be thorough when there is time to spare), some trans-Atlantic consultation took place, most especially including a photocopy of the old ship’s manifest. The Medley cousins who had inherited the embroidered screen when Great-Aunt Mallory died were persuaded to allow it to be photographed; and there was no doubt about both its antiquity and its design.

Sooner or later, someone was definitely going to get a paper out of all this.

In the meantime, there was a show to assemble from the mass of footage taken during the dig. Tony had to record voiceover; Victor Ambrus had to finish his sketches; and the signet ring, its separate parts now clean, had to be reassembled.

Ultimately, its fate lay, at least partly, in the hand of Celia. The ring had been well and truly lost: its location at the bottom of a pond made that clear. Though gold, it did not qualify as treasure trove. So Ursula Verrell, who had found it, had by that act become the owner of the setting. Celia, who had inherited all the contents of her house, thereby had right of ownership today. On the other hand, the signet stone had been found by Stewart.

In the end, Celia decided to cede her right to the ring. If it had been meant to be hers, she reasoned, then Ursula would have given it to her directly instead of leaving it sealed away to wait for the right day. The setting belonged with its stone; and her right to neither was any better than that of any other distant descendent of the Medleys and Mallories of yesteryear.

In the end, therefore, it found a new home in the museum.