The doorbell chimed. “I’ll go,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you have Kit run up and tell Gemma and the little 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 which 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, no”—Gemma shook her head—“I mean, she’s telling a story about something that really happened. The beginning reminds me of the things I’ve been reading about Rupert Brooke and his friends swimming naked in Byron’s Pool—-the poets’ pool, do you see? There’s this feeling of tingling anticipation about it—but then something happens, something dark and unexpected—”
“Gemma, don’t you think that’s a bit far-fetched?”
“Is it? Lydia is dead. Vic is dead. And someone wanted these poems. Just because Nathan had them doesn’t mean that Vic’s killer wasn’t searching for them.” She stared at him, and after a moment he nodded.
“Go on, then.”
Slowly, speaking aloud as she thought, Gemma said, “Strip away the images. What does she tell us happens? Think like a policeman—find the bare bones.”
Kincaid frowned and ran a hand through his hair. “There’s a rape. A child’s rape.” He slid the page across the table, turning it his way up. “But she doesn’t actually say—”
“She only suggests it. But she tells us that a girl goes to a pool in the woods where the poets are waiting for her.” Gemma retrieved the page. “She’s naked—”
“Virginal—”
“They take her into the pool—”
“Rape her—”
“She’s lost, betrayed. What does Lydia mean?” Gemma asked as she skimmed the poem once more. “’Lost … in the mallow-tangles of the still black summer’?”
“Mallow grows round ponds,” said Kincaid. “Might she have drowned?”
Nodding, Gemma said, “But what has it to do with Lydia? Why is the girl waiting for Electra?”
“Who’s waiting for Electra?” asked Hazel, coming into the kitchen. She’d been settling the children in the sitting room with a video so the adults could have their dinner in peace. “It sounds like a play.”
“It’s the title of a poem,” said Gemma. “Who exactly was she, anyway? What we learned at school has gone a bit fuzzy.”
Hazel lifted the lid from a pot of chicken soup and gave it a stir. “Electra was the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who urged her brother Orestes to kill their mother in revenge for the murder of their father.” Tasting the soup, she said, “Just about ready,” then added, “I guess you could say that Electra was the voice of vengeance, although she herself was powerless to act.”
“The voice of vengeance,” Gemma repeated, rotating the page once more. “You see? It’s about women’s silence again, about the need to speak up … Does Lydia see
herself
as Electra here, telling the truth?” She closed her eyes for a moment and pinched her forehead. “What if the poets in the poem aren’t Rupert Brooke and his friends but Lydia’s poets? Adam, Nathan, Darcy, and Daphne? Do you remember what Daphne said this morning, about Lydia and Morgan? ‘Something happened that summer and she was never the same afterwards.’ It’s all here, the references to the long-ago summer. And if Lydia is Electra, who is the girl?”
“How can you be sure Lydia’s not talking about herself?” asked Kincaid, still sounding skeptical as he spun the page back towards him. “What if it was Lydia who was raped? Surely that’s trauma enough to make one change one’s patterns.”
But Gemma felt like a terrier with a rat in its teeth—she knew she’d caught hold of the truth, and she meant to shake it until it gave itself up to her. “No. If the poets are Lydia’s poets, it couldn’t have been that—she’d slept with them all already. But what else didn’t they want anyone to know? Something Alec Byrne said today made me think…” Frowning, she searched her memory. “A missing child … he was looking for a missing child. But there was a girl who disappeared a long time ago …” She blinked as the scrap of conversation in Ralph Peregrine’s office came back to her. “The daughter of Margery Lester’s friend. What was her name? Hope? Charity?”
“Verity,” said Kincaid, and she heard the sudden spike of excitement in his voice. “Verity Whitecliff. The daughter of Henry Whitecliff, the former head of the English Faculty.”
Spoon still in hand, Hazel had come to sit with them, and now she reached out and rotated the page with the tip of her finger. “The poem talks about ‘Truth unmourned, untold …’ What if Truth is a person here, as well as an abstract quality?
Verity
is an old word for truth.”
Kincaid said slowly, “What if Verity Whitecliff didn’t run away, after all? What if she was murdered?” He took his notebook from his pocket and entered a number into his cell phone.
“Hullo, Laura? It’s Duncan again. I’ve a question for you. Can
you tell me exactly when Verity Whitecliff disappeared?” He listened for a moment, then said, “Right. I’ll tell you what it’s all about when I know more, and in the meantime, I’d rather you didn’t mention this to anyone. Right. Thanks.” Disconnecting, he looked from Hazel to Gemma. “Verity Whitecliff slipped out of her house on Midsummer’s Eve 1963, and was never seen again. She was wearing a summer dress, and she took nothing with her. She was fifteen years old.”
“Dear God,” breathed Hazel. “The poor child. And her parents…”
“Lydia married Morgan in September of 1963.” Gemma felt a sense of the inevitable, as if she were powerless to stop the unfolding of the past. “Within weeks of Verity’s disappearance, she not only got herself dangerously involved with a man she’d refused to have anything to do with during the previous year—she gave up what had mattered to her above all else. She left university.” She met Kincaid’s eyes. “What could have been so terrible that it caused her to alter her life forever?” she asked, but even as she spoke, the truth felt cold and heavy inside her.
The gentle trill of Kincaid’s phone made them all jump. He fumbled for it, then barked, “Kincaid.” His mouth tightened as he listened. “We’ll be there as soon as we can,” he said, and rang off.
Gemma felt a jerk of fear. “What’s happened?”
“That was Adam Lamb. He says Father Denny rang him and said Nathan’s shotgun has disappeared from the vicarage. Then Adam tried to ring Nathan. There was no reply.”
CHAPTER
20
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
R
UPERT
B
ROOKE
,
from “The Old Vicarage,
Grantchester”
“What if we’re wrong?” Gemma felt a stab of doubt as she buckled herself into the passenger seat of her Escort. “What if Verity Whitecliff really did run away? We haven’t a smidgen of proof that she didn’t.”
Kincaid maneuvered out into the Liverpool Road traffic, heading north towards the Ring Road. Gemma had handed him the keys without protest, knowing he’d push the car harder than she dared. “It’s a bloody great assumption, all right,” he said. “But it’s the only thing we’ve come up with that makes sense out of what we
do
know. It wasn’t only Lydia’s life that changed after that summer. Nathan married Jean and apparently severed all but the occasional connection with the rest of the group. And Adam decided to go into the church.”
“What about Daphne and Darcy?” said Gemma. “They seem to have kept on pretty much as before.”
“Maybe they weren’t involved. I doubt Daphne would have mentioned that summer to us if she’d anything to hide.” He glanced at Gemma. “What’s wrong?”
“What if…” she began slowly. “You don’t suppose … What if it was Lydia who killed Verity? And she kept attempting suicide until she finally succeeded?”
“And Vic just happened to die from an overdose of a heart medication she didn’t take?” Kincaid raised an eyebrow. “That won’t wash. I think Lydia was silenced, and Vic as well when she got too close to the truth.”
“Then what really happened the night Verity disappeared?” Gemma thought of the time a boy had convinced her to climb out the window of her bedroom in the flat over the bakery. She’d been afraid to go farther than the corner, and her father had caught her sneaking back in the bakery door. All in all, it had hardly been worth a few furtive kisses. “Which of them enticed her out?” she wondered aloud.
“She might have known any of them,” said Kincaid. “Lydia and Darcy were reading English, but they were all interested in poetry and would surely have been acquainted with Henry Whitecliff.”
“They must have seemed glamorous to Verity—reciting poetry, all that sort of thing. She’d have felt flattered to be included. They were older, the boys were all good-looking—”
“And Lydia had the allure of sexual experience,” Kincaid finished for her. “I can understand why Verity might have found them irresistible, but what did they see in her?”
“Sophistication is never so much fun as when you’re impressing somebody with it. Verity would have provided an audience. Perhaps they planned a harmless prank that night to impress her … an initiation.” Gemma closed her eyes and thought of the lines of the poem. “They waited for her in the woods,” she said softly. “Maybe they even wore Edwardian costumes. When she came, they told her they were going to pretend to be Rupert Brooke and his friends. They undressed her and took her into the water … then somehow it all went wrong.”