Dreaming of the Bones

downstream from Grantchester, past the Mill. Rupert Brooke is reported to have convinced Virginia Woolf to swim naked there one summer night.

    Much love to you, and Nan ,
    from your sleepy— Lydia

    He had said half past six, Vic thought as she glanced at her watch and gave another frustrated push on the bell. She’d written the time down carefully in her calendar, and the place, although she knew the gray stone church in Trinity Street well. In fact, when Adam Lamb had first refused to see her, she’d thought of coming here to a Sunday service just so that she could see him from a distance.
    Would Nathan be pleased that his intervention had saved her from a spot of spying, she wondered, smiling. It was tempting to think of Nathan, even standing in the chill of the vicarage porch, but much too distracting. Instead she made an effort to prepare herself by picturing Adam Lamb as he’d looked in one of Lydia’s old photographs, a thinfaced boy with tight, dark curls, unsmiling—and now a hostile man who had agreed to her presence only at the request of an old friend.
    Vic licked her lips and rang the bell once more.
    The door opened when she’d half turned away. She hadn’t heard footsteps, or the lock turning, and she took a sharp, surprised breath.
    ”Hullo, I’m—”
    ”So sorry, so sorry,” said Adam Lamb breathlessly. ”A distraught parishioner on the telephone. It’s always something, isn’t it? And one can never get off when one needs to, not until they’re satisfied they’ve told you every detail three times over. Let me take your coat,” he added, and smiled at her.
    The vicarage hall was even colder than the porch, and Vic shivered as she felt a current of frigid air against her bare calves. She’d worn a tailored Laura Ashley suit in navy, a long double-breasted jacket over a short pleated skirt, in hopes both that she looked reassuringly businesslike and that Adam Lamb appreciated legs. Now it seemed that neither option was to do her much good. ”No, thank you,” she said regretfully. ”I think I’d better keep it.”
    ”Quite wise of you. If you think this old place is drafty now, you should feel it in midwinter. But I’ve got the gas fire lit in the sitting room, and I thought we could have some sherry, or Madeira if you prefer.”
    ”Sherry would be lovely,” Vic said as she hurried after his retreating back, trying to collect herself. He was taller than the photographs had shown, and still thin. The dark curling hair had gone mostly gray but was still abundant. The thin face was heavily lined, as if he’d not lived an easy life, and he wore a heavy gray cardigan over his clerical garb. All this she could fit over the image in her mind as one would lay a transparency over a diagram—even the gold-rimmed thick spectacles that gave his blue eyes an owlish look—but nothing had prepared her for the grave sweetness of his smile.
    She registered faded lino beneath her feet and dark mustard color on the walls, then he opened a door at the end of the passage and ushered her through. It was warm, amazingly enough, and she sat gratefully in the armchair he indicated.
    ”If you’ll just excuse me for a moment,” he said, ”I forgot to turn the answer phone on, and I’d better do it, else we’ll be interrupted.”
    His absence gave Vic a chance to examine the room, and she saw that this was where he had made his mark on the shabby anonymity of the vicarage. A colorful rag rug covered most of the fitted mustard-and-brown-patterned carpet, and deep red velvet curtains covered windows that she thought must overlook the narrow lane beside the church. A fine set of cut-crystal glasses stood on the low-table before her chair, and the jewel-like reds, greens, and blues winked at her in the light of the gas fire.
    Books lined every available bit of wall space, and that, at least, didn’t surprise her.
    She had just slipped out of her coat and stretched her feet towards the fire when Adam Lamb returned. He poured her a sherry from the crystal decanter, and when she sipped it she found it fine and very dry, just the way she liked it.
    He folded his long body onto the red Victorian love seat opposite her and raised his glass. ”Here’s to warmth,” he said with feeling. ”I spent five years out in Africa , and I don’t think my blood ever regained its good British fortitude. Sometimes I dream of the sun, and of nights under the mosquito netting. But you don’t want to hear about