Gold in the furrow

Text 1: The High Note, by Thea Rookwood

An original short story extract.

The detector had been silent for most of the afternoon, apart from the usual rubbish: a ring-pull, a horseshoe nail, a bottle cap. Ivo had stopped expecting anything. He swept the coil slowly over the furrows, side to side, the way his grandfather had shown him, more out of habit than hope, while the sun went down behind the church and turned the ploughed field the colour of strong tea.

Then, near the hedge, the headphones gave a sound he had never heard before.

It was not the flat grunt of iron or the stuttering chirp of a can. It was a clean, high note, steady and pure, like a wet finger run round the rim of a glass. He swept back over the spot. There it was again. And again, a little to the left. And again.

He knelt and began to dig with the trowel, carefully, a few centimetres at a time, sifting the soil through his fingers. Cold earth. Stones. A worm, protesting. Then something hard and flat and round, and he rubbed it with his thumb, and the dirt came away from a face.

A small face, in profile, with a crown. Gold.

Ivo stopped breathing. Around him the field was perfectly ordinary: rooks going home, a tractor somewhere grumbling down a lane, the first lights coming on in the farmhouse windows. Nobody was watching. Nobody knew. He held the coin up to the last of the light, and it did not shine so much as glow, softly, as if it had been storing up sunlight for a thousand years and was letting it out a little at a time.

He dug again. Another coin. Then three together, stuck in a lump. Then the edge of something curved and brown that might once have been a pot. The detector, lying in the furrow beside him, went on singing its high, pure note to nobody.

He should phone someone. He knew the rules: the landowner, the finds officer, the museum. His grandfather had made him recite them. Ivo sat back on his heels with the coins in his cupped hands and thought, for one long, dizzy moment, of not phoning anyone at all.

The church clock struck six. The sound came across the field slowly, one note after another, and with each note the thought grew smaller and more shameful, until it was gone. Ivo wiped his hands on his jeans and took out his phone.

Explore how Thea Rookwood uses language and structure to present Ivo’s discovery and his feelings about it.

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