“That’s all the money you have in the world!” Skip noticed Tay-Tay had changed the subject, unable yet to face what had happened.
“Gina will help me. I know she will.”
She was getting a glazed look now. But Tay-Tay was snapping back to reality, taking it in.
“Adelle, murder. You did murder!”
“Poor little Heather-my heart just sank every time I saw that child in that tiny little crackerbox.” Her bland face wore a look Skip had seen in court: a judge pronouncing sentence. “Somebody had to get this family back on track.”
“But the wedding-why poor Aubrey’s wedding?”
For the first time Adelle smiled. “I thought we needed a ritual murder,”
Horror replaced the shock on Tay-Tay’s gentle face. She spoke as if explaining it to herself. “You’re crazy, Adelle. You’re really mad.”
“That’s right, little sister. I’m really mad. But not crazy-mad.” She paused and took a breath for maximum volume. “I’m furious!”
Skip thought little Heather probably heard her aunt up in Baton Rouge.
THEFT OF THE POET by Barbara Wilson
BARBARA WILSON is the author of several novels and a collection of short stories. In addition to the Pam Nilsen series, Murder in the Collective, Sisters of the Road, and The Dog Collar Murders, she has recently published Gaudi Afternoon, the first mystery to feature London-based translator Cassandra Reilly. Barbara Wilson is the cofounder of Seal Press in Seattle.
It started gradually. Here and there on London streets new blue plaques that might have been placed there by the authorities, if the authorities had been reasonably literate, and unreasonably feminist, began to appear. At 22 Hyde Park Gate the enamel plaque stating that Leslie Stephen, the noted biographer, had lived here was joined by a new metal plate, much the same size and much the same color, which informed the passerby that this was where writer Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell had spent their childhoods. Over in Primrose Hill the plaque that read that Yeats had once been resident in this house was joined by a shiny new medallion gravely informing us that Sylvia Plath had written the poems in Ariel here before committing suicide in 1963.
Above the blue plaque at 106 Hallam Street, the birthplace of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, another one appeared to emphasize that poet Christina Rossetti had lived here as well. The plate at 20 Maresfield Gardens, which recorded that Sigmund Freud had passed the last year of his life here, was joined by a new one telling us that Anna Freud had passed forty-two years at this address. A medallion to Jane Carlyle, letter writer, joined that of her famous husband Thomas at 24 Cheyne Row, and a plaque telling us about Fanny Burney, author of Evelina and other novels, appeared above that describing Sir Isaac Newton’s dates and accomplishments on the outside of a library in St. Martin’s Street.
The appearance of these blue plaques was at first noted sympathetically, if condescendingly, by the liberal newspapers and a certain brave editor at The Guardian was bold enough to suggest that it was high time more women writers who had clearly achieved “a certain stature” be recognized. The editor thus managed to give tacit approval to the choice of authors awarded blue plaques and to suggest that the perpetrators had gone quite far enough. “We wouldn’t want blue plaques on every house in London, after all.”
But the plaquing continued, heedless of The Guardian’s pointed admonition, to the growing excitement of many and the consternation of quite a few. Who was responsible and how long would it go on? Would the authorities leave the plaques up or bother to remove them? Apparently they had been manufactured out of a lighter metal than the original plaques, but instead of being bolted to the buildings, they had been affixed with Super Glue. Some residents of the buildings were delighted; other inhabitants, in a conservative rage, defaced the medallions immediately.
The next blue plaques to go up were placed on houses previously unrecognized as having been the homes of women worth remembering and honoring. A plaque appeared outside the house in Maida Vale where authors Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain had shared a flat for several years. A similar plaque commemorating the relationship of poets H.D. and Bryher appeared in Knightsbridge. Mary Seacole, a Victorian black woman who had traveled widely as a businesswoman, gold prospector, and nurse in the Crimean War and who had written an autobiography about her life, was honored on the wall of 26 Upper George Street off Portman Square, as was Constance Markievicz, many times imprisoned Irish Republican, who was the first woman elected as a member of the British Parliament (though she refused to take her seat in protest over the Irish situation), and who was born in Westminster on Buckingham Street. Of course, my friends in the progressive backwater of East Dulwich were delighted when Louise Michel, the French Revolutionary Socialist and Communard, was honored with a plaque, and those of us who are interested in printing and publishing were quite thrilled when a plaque appeared at 9 Great Coram Street, home in the 1860s to Victoria Printers, which Emily Faithfull set up in order to train women as printers and where she published Britain’s first feminist periodical.
The list could go on and on, and it did. You would have thought the authorities would be pleased. New tourists flocked to obscure neighborhoods, guidebooks to the new sites proliferated, tours were organized; handwritten notes appeared on walls suggesting plaques; letters to the editor demanded to know why certain women hadn’t been honored. Other letters criticized the manner in which only bourgeois individuals were elevated and suggested monuments to large historical events, such as Epping Forest, where Boudicca, the leader of the Celts, fought her last battle with the Romans in A.D. 62, or the Parliament Street Post Office, where Emily Wilding Davison set fire to a letter box in 1911, the first suffragist attempt at arson to draw attention to the struggle for women’s rights. One enterprising and radical artist even sent the newspapers a sketch for a “Monument of Glass” to be placed on a busy shopping street in Knightsbridge, to commemorate the day of March 4, 1912, when a hundred suffragists walked down the street, smashing every plate glass window they passed.
The Tory and gutter papers were naturally appalled by such ideas and called for Thatcher (whom no one had thought to plaquate) to put a stop to the desecration of London buildings and streets. Vigilant foot patrols were called for and severe penalties for vandalization were demanded.
This then was the atmosphere in which the news suddenly surfaced that the grave of a famous woman poet had been opened and her bones had gone missing.
As it happened, the small village in Dorset where the poet had been buried was also the home of a friend of mine, Andrea Addlepoot, once a writer of very successful feminist mysteries, back when feminist mysteries had been popular, and now an obsessive gardener and letter writer. It was she who first described the theft to me in detail, the theft that the London papers had hysterically headlined: POET’S GRAVE VANDALIZED.
My dear Cassandra,
By now you have no doubt heard that Francine Crofts “Putter” is no longer resting eternally in the small churchyard opposite my humble country cottage. My first thought, heretically, was that I would not miss her-meaning that I would not miss the hordes of visitors, primarily women, primarily Young American Women, who had made the pilgrimage to her grave since her death. I would not miss how they trampled over my tender flowers, nor pelted me with questions. As if I had known the woman- As if anyone in the village had known the woman.