Dreaming of the Bones

ones good-bye? I’ll show Ian into the sitting room.” She gave his elbow a squeeze and smiled. ”Trust your instincts. That’s a good bit of what parenting is about.”

    Gemma chewed on a pencil as she stared at the papers she’d spread out on Hazel’s kitchen table. As literary executor, Nathan had asked to keep the original poems found in the Marsh memoirs, but he’d made them copies before they left Grantchester, and Gemma had begun going over them as soon as they’d returned to London .
    She looked up as the corridor door swung open and Kincaid came in. ”Are they gone?” she asked as he sat down across from her. His tie hung loosely, and his hair stood on end where he’d absently run his hand through it.
    He nodded. ”Yes. I’ve just rung Laura Miller to say they’re on their way.”
    ”I thought it better not to add to the audience, so I had another go at this stuff,” she said, gesturing at the nest of books and papers she’d accumulated. ”How was Kit with Ian?”
    ”He barely spoke. Ian tried, I’ll give him that.”
    The children had thrown their soft, damp arms round Kit’s neck when he’d come up to say good-bye, and as she watched him cling to them, she’d sensed the precariousness of his emotional control. ”It was hard for Kit to leave. And you didn’t want to let him go,” she added softly as she saw the weariness in Kincaid’s face. He’d been through so much in the past week... but how could he begin to sort out his feelings for Kit until he found some resolution over Vic’s death? And how could she help him?
    Looking back at the poems spread before her, Gemma said hesitantly, ”You know I’m not a poet, and I haven’t been to university. But I’ve been reading Vic’s manuscript, and as many of Lydia’s poems as I could find, and I think Vic was right. These poems are different. There’s a feeling of urgency, and a directness to them that the earlier poems don’t have.” She frowned as she touched the sheets on the table, then separated one poem from the rest. ”They seem to begin with a more general feeling, a theme. Listen to this one.” Settling back in her chair, she began to read with careful diction.

    They have taken my voice
    severed tongue at the roots
    sucked anger away like breath
    stolen from the mouths of babes

    In the beginning was the word
    but it was not ours
    they left us only the
    whispers of our mingled blood.

    And yet we participate willingly
    in the conspiracy of our loss
    passing this mute legacy
    our gift to our daughters.

    Gemma looked up at him as she finished. Searching his face, she shook her head. ”It doesn’t mean anything to you, does it? But I feel it—here.” She pressed her fist to the center of her chest. ”It’s about women not speaking up, not having voices, and yet we teach our daughters the same behavior. Do you see?”
    ”I think so. But what has that to do—”
    ”Wait. As the poems go on the theme seems to become more specific, until you get to this one, the last. Listen. It’s called ‘Awaiting Electra.’

    Ancient laughter stirs in the deep
    heart of the dimly remembered green
    wood by the close and
    sacrificial Pool.

    The poets wait in uneasy slumber
    for her coming
    their feet whisper on the leaf-thick
    path and the old pulse
    quickens in the dappled light.
    Silver slides over the
    bell of her hair over
    the innocent landscape of
    her skin and she smiles as
    they ease her down into
    the dark water waiting.
    She feels the wild springing freedom
    then the old fear, the truth of it
    sudden and piercing as a child’s rape.
    Lost to years, she lies forgotten
    betrayed in the mallow-tangles
    of the still black summer.
    Who will speak for her now? Truth
    unmourned, untold in the ice heart
    of our memory?

    Gemma’s reading had grown more halting as she progressed through the poem, and now she stared at the page until the print blurred and the words began to shift and scramble. It was odd, she thought as she noticed the hair standing up on her forearms, that the words made her feel things that went beyond words. But there was something more here even than that, she was sure of it, if she could just sort it out... She looked up at Kincaid. ”She’s telling a story, isn’t she?”
    ”I suppose you could say all poems tell stories; they’re a way of assimilating our experiences.” He tapped the page. ”This one is probably a metaphor for coming of age, the loss of virginity—”
    ”No,