Dreaming Of The Bones

“And this”—she waved the sheaf of papers she still held—“this is all wrong.”

“What do you mean, wrong?” Kincaid asked, and in spite of his casual tone Gemma sensed his interest.

Coming back to sit on the edge of the armchair, Vic leaned towards them. “Nathan, for one thing. Why did Lydia call Nathan and tell him she wanted to see him?”

“I imagine they assumed she wanted him to find her rather than the cleaning lady or some unfortunate neighbor,” Kincaid offered.

“She would never have done that, don’t you see? Not to Nathan. They were very old friends, and he’d just lost his wife a few months earlier after a long battle with cancer. She wouldn’t have deliberately subjected him to such distress.”

“Sometimes when people are depressed they do un—”

Vic was shaking her head adamantly. “And what about her clothes? Lydia had style, damnit—you can’t possibly think she’d have set such an elaborate scene, then killed herself in old, grubby things?”

“I have to admit it seemed a bit queer to me,” Kincaid said cautiously. “But sometimes—”

“And the business about the poem is absurd,” Vic went on, unheeding. She started rifling through the pages. “Let me just—”

“Why?” The sharpness in his voice made Vic look up, hands stilled for a moment on the pages. “Why is it absurd?” he repeated.

“Because she didn’t write it,” Vic said flatly. “It’s an excerpt from a Rupert Brooke poem called ‘Choriambics.’”

“Could I see it?” asked Gemma. She took the page from Vic’s outstretched hand, and when she found they were both watching her, she began to read aloud slowly.

In the silence of death; then may I see dimly, and

know, a space,

Bending over me, last light in the dark, once, as of

old, your face.

Gemma looked up. “It does seem fitting, especially if she’d lost a great love.”

“And if she was obsessed with Rupert Brooke, what could have been more appropriate than to use one of his poems as her final message?” said Kincaid.

“Rather than her own voice?” Vic shook her head and took a breath, a calming effort. “Lydia was a poet first. That’s what made her who she was. That’s why I wanted to write about her. Women need those kinds of models—we need to hear the stories of women who have lived out their dreams, regardless of the cost. That way maybe we can get there, too, and without so much suffering along the way.”

“Then why would she have had an excerpt from a Brooke poem in her typewriter if it wasn’t meant for a suicide note?” Kincaid asked, raising a skeptical brow.

“I haven’t a clue. All I can tell you is that she would never have used someone else’s words.” Vic rubbed at her face, then said through splayed fingers, “Oh, how can I make you understand? Words were everything to her—her joy, her sorrow, her comfort. She would not have abandoned them in the final extreme. It would have been a betrayal beyond measure.”

The fire popped, and in the silence that followed, Gemma said, “I do. Understand, I mean. I think I understand what you’re saying.”

“You don’t think I’m daft?”

“No. Even if I don’t know much about poetry, I understand about not giving up who you are.”

Vic turned to Kincaid. “And have I convinced you?”

After a long moment he said a bit grudgingly, “Yes, I suppose so. But I still don’t see how—”

“There’s more,” Vic said. “Since I saw you last. Last week Nathan gave me a book he found among Lydia’s things, Edward Marsh’s memoir of Rupert Brooke. It was published in 1919, and included the first posthumous collection of Brooke’s poems. It was one of Lydia’s treasures—she found it in a secondhand bookshop her first year at Cambridge.

“I put it in the stack on my bedside table”—she flashed a smile at Kincaid, and Gemma wondered if Vic’s habit of taking books to bed had been a point of contention between them—“but it wasn’t until last night that I settled down to have a good look at it. You can’t imagine how I felt when I leafed through it and the manuscript pages fell out.” Vic smiled as if even the memory were delicious.

“What manuscript?” asked Kincaid, sounding thoroughly confused. “What did you say the author’s name was?”

“Edward Marsh,” Gemma said helpfully, but Vic was shaking her head.

“No, no, it was poems, drafts of Lydia’s poems. Let me show you.” She went quickly from the room, returning a moment later with some folded papers and wearing her tortoiseshell glasses. Sitting across from them again, she held the pages up for their inspection. “Lydia still used a typewriter rather than a computer. She was stubborn about it—she said she needed to feel some sort of physical connection between herself and the words and the paper. Sometimes she wrote first drafts in longhand, but when she typed she always made carbons.”

Gemma could see that the paper was tissue-thin copy paper, and the typescript had the smudgy look of carbon ink.

“Some of these poems were published in her last book,” Vic said, folding the pages in half again and smoothing them across her knees. “But there are others I’ve never even seen drafts of before.”

“Student poems she didn’t think worth saving?” suggested Kincaid. “If she’d had the book since she was at