The Whirling Girl by Barbara Lambert Page A

hair skinned back before it fell into a long braid, and clusters of gilded oak leaves on her ears.
    She laid her palms on either side of Luke Tindhall’s face, kissed him on each cheek, oblivious of the man with the white ponytail now frowning at her side.
    â€œAll Luke really does is throw money around,” she said to Clare. “We have to keep buttering him up, hoping he throws some in our direction. I’m Nikki Stockton.” She shook Clare’s hand. Her grip had crunch. “This is my husband William Sands.”
    The husband gave Clare a grave and attentive nod.
    â€œWilliam is the director of an excavation in the hills in Umbria,” the ballet woman said, “A hilltop fortress settlement that spans all the Etruscan centuries.”
    Her husband was shifting his feet. Luke Tindhall was shifting his too.
    â€œWe hope you will come up and see the dig,” the woman said, “even if Luke here has such a busy schedule. Right, William?”
    But the man with the white ponytail turned and walked away. Luke Tindhall stood back, sizing the woman up. “So Nikki, what do we have here tonight? In training for the Giro d’Italia, are we?” And Clare realized that the ballet costume was actually put together out of lycra bike shorts under cheesecloth-like panels, and a lycra muscle shirt.
    â€œIt’s a mood piece,” Nikki said. “To get you in the mood to pedal up to our dig.”
    She then turned an almost hungry intensity on Clare, and started to rave about how moved she’d been by Clare’s description of the dangers facing the biosphere of the Amazon basin, and how she had felt as if she were actually there with Clare on those travels.
    â€œBy the way,” she added, “I’m a sort of artist, too.”
    She pulled at one of her oak-leaf earrings. Bits came to pieces in her hand. She undid the drawstring of a little silk pouch she wore on a cord around her neck and tucked in the gilded fragments, all the while explaining that she worked in the conservation lab associated with her husband’s dig, where she did measured drawings of the archaeological finds. As she went on to describe the work, Luke started tapping his foot. “There is this really enlivening tension,” Nikki was saying, “between the detailed hours of measuring and recording, and the magic of reconstruction. How from a few recovered fragments it is possible to recreate what an artefact would have been when it was whole.” She pulled at her other earring, which also came to pieces in her hand. She stuffed these into the embroidered pouch.
    â€œThat’s so pretty,” Clare said, empathizing with this clearly nervous performance.
    â€œThis? It’s handy.” Nikki gave an elfin grin. “I keep little discarded things in it. Like thoughts.” Then she bent and peered at Clare’s waist. “I’ve always wanted a belt with a big silver buckle. Did you pick that up on your travels?” Clare noted the strands of grey in the long black braid as the woman then exclaimed, “Why it’s a goat’s head! Where did you find it?”
    â€œI won it, in a rodeo.”
    They all laughed. Clare excused herself to go and sponge her shirt.
    NIKKI STOCKTON WAS WAITING in the corridor when Clare came out of the powder room. She led Clare to a spot further along the terrace under a gnarled wisteria vine, where a round table had been set with bright pottery dishes, a clutch of wine bottles in the centre. Ralph Farnham was there. He said the wine had been sent along in Clare’s honour from the Sienese estate of Gianpaulo, the botanical brotherin-law, who was a bit delayed. He eased Clare into a chair where all the bottles had their labels turned in her direction: a mini-phalanx of rearing unicorns, symbol of the brother-in-law’s sanctuary for endangered species, he explained.
    The wine was so dark it was like sipping liquid garnets —