A Woman’s Eye

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.

And yet it is still quite shocking, and everyone here is in an uproar over it.

You of course realize that the theft is not an isolated action but only the latest in a series of “terrorist acts” (I quote Peter Putter, the late poet’s husband) perpetrated on the grave, and most likely not totally unrelated to the unchecked rememorializing of London and surrounding areas. (Discreet plaquing is one thing, but I really could not condone the defacing of Jane Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral. Surely “In Memory of Jane Austen, youngest daughter of the late Reverend George Austen, formerly Rector of Steventon,” says everything necessary. There was no reason on earth to stencil onto the stone the words “Author of Pride and Prejudice and other novels.”)

These “terrorist acts” consisted of the last name, “Putter,” in raised lead lettering, being three times chipped off from the headstone. The headstone was repaired twice but the third time Mr. Putter removed the headstone indefinitely from the grave site. That was over a year ago and it has not been reerected, which, despite what you might think, has not made my life any easier. I cannot count the number of times that sincere young women have approached me as I stood pruning my roses and beseeched me, most often in fiat American accents, to show them the unmarked grave of Francine Crofts.

Never Francine Putter or Francine Crofts Putter.

For Francine Crofts was her name, you know, even if at one time she had been rather pathetically eager to be married to the upcoming young writer Peter Putter and had put aside her own poetry to type his manuscripts. Francine Crofts is the name the world knows her by. And, of course, that’s what Putter cannot stand.

I know him, you must realize. Although his boyhood was long, long over by the time I moved here (after the enormous financial success, you recall, of Murder at Greenham Common), his parents Margery and Andrew and sister Jane Fitzwater-the widow who runs the local tearoom, and who has a penchant for telling anyone who will listen what a shrew Francine was and what a saint dear Peter-still live in the large house down the road that Peter bought for them. This little village represents roots for Peter, and sometimes you’ll see him with one or another young girlfriend down at the pub getting pissed. When he’s really in his cups he’ll sometimes go all weepy, telling everyone what a raw deal he’s getting from the world about Francine, It wasn’t his fault she died. He really did love her. She wasn’t planning to get a divorce. They were soul mates.

It’s enough to make you vomit. Everybody knows what a cad he was, how it was his desertion of her that inspired Francine’s greatest poetry and the realization that he wasn’t coming back that led to her death. It’s hard to see now what she saw in Putter, but, after all, he was younger then, and so was she. So were we all.

But Cassandra, I’m rambling. You know all this, I’m sure, and I’m equally sure you take as large an interest in the disappearance of Francine’s bones as I do. Why not think about paying me a visit for a few days? Bring your translating work, I’ll cook you marvelous meals, and together we’ll see-for old times’ sake-whether we can get to the bottom of this.

When I arrived at Andrea’s cottage by car the next day, she was out in her front garden chatting with journalists. As usual she was wearing jeans and tall boots and a safari hat. In spite of her disdain for Americans, she was secretly flattered when anyone mentioned that she, rangy and weathered, looked a bit like the Marlboro man. At the moment she was busy giving quotes to the journos in her usual deep, measured tones:

“Peter Putter is an insecure, insignificant man and writer who has never produced anything of literary value himself, and could not stand the idea that his wife was a genius. He drove her to… Oh, hello, Cassandra.” She broke off and took my bag, waving good-bye to the newspaper hacks. “And don’t forget it’s AddlePOOT-not PATE, author of numerous thrillers… Come in, come in.” She opened the low front door and stooped to show me in. “Oh, the media rats. We love to hate them.”

I suspected that Andrea loved them more than she hated them. It was only since her career had slipped that she’d begun to speak of them in disparaging terms. During the years that the feminist thriller had been in fashion, Andrea’s name had shone brighter than anyone’s. “If Jane Austen were alive today and writing detective stories, she would be named Andrea Addlepoot,” gushed one reviewer. All of her early books-Murder at Greenham Common, Murder at the Small Feminist Press, Murder at the Anti-Apartheid Demonstration-had topped the City Limits Alternative Best Seller lists, and she was regularly interviewed on television and in print about the exciting new phenomenon of the feminist detective.

Alas, any new phenomenon is likely to be an old phenomenon soon and thus no phenomenon at all. It never occurred to Andrea that the feminist detective was a bit of a fad and that, like all fads in a consumer culture, its shelf life was limited. Oh, Andrea and her detective, London PI Philippa Fanthorpe, had tried. They had taken on new social topics-the animal rights movement, the leaky nuclear plants on the Irish Sea-but the reviews were no longer so positive. Too “rhetorical,” too “issue-oriented,” too “strident,” the critics wrote wearily, and Andrea Addlepoot’s fortunes declined. In the bookstores feminist mysteries were replaced with the latest best-selling genre: women’s erotica.

And Andrea, who had never written a sex scene in her life, retired for good to Dorset.

“Cassandra, it’s shocking how this is being reported,” she announced as we sat down in the tiny parlor. She took off her safari hat and her gray curls bristled. “Peter Putter is here giving interviews to the BBC news every few hours. And now the Americans have gotten in on it. Cable News Network is here and I’ve heard Diane Sawyer is arriving tomorrow.”

“Well, Francine Crofts was born in America,” I said. “And that’s where a lot of her papers are, aren’t they?”

“Yes, everything that Putter couldn’t get his hands on is there.”

“I read somewhere that he destroyed her last journal and the manuscript of a novel she was working on.”

“Oh, yes, it’s true. He couldn’t stand the idea of anything bad about himself coming to the public’s attention.”

“Any chance he could have removed the bones himself?” I asked.

Andrea nodded. “Oh, I would say there’s a very good chance indeed. All this rowing over her headstone has not been good publicity for our Peter Putter. It puts him in a bad light, it keeps bringing back the old allegations that he was responsible in great measure for Francine’s death. It’s quite possible, I think, that he began to read about the appearance of all these new blue plaques and thought to himself, ‘Right. I’ll get rid of the grave entirely, blame it on the radical feminists and there’ll be an end to it.’ I’m sure he’s sorry he ever thought to bury the body here in the first place and to put ‘Putter’ at the end of her name. But he can’t back down now, so the only solution was to arrange for the bones to disappear.”

“I don’t suppose we could go over to the graveyard and have a look?”

Andrea peered out her small-paned front window. “We’ll go when it’s quieter. Let’s have our tea first.”

We had our tea, lavish with Devonshire cream and fresh scones, and then Andrea went off for a brief lie-down, and I, left to my own resources in the parlor, went to the bookcase and found the volume of Crofts’s most celebrated poems.

They struck me with the same power now as they had when I read them twenty years ago, especially the poems written at the very end, when, translucent from rage and hunger, Francine had struck out repeatedly at the ties that bound her to this earth and that man. Even as she was starving herself to death in the most barbaric and self-punishing way, she still could write like an avenging angel.

Around five, when the autumn mists had drifted down over the small village in the valley, Andrea roused herself and we walked across the road to the tiny churchyard of St. Stephen’s. The small church was from the thirteenth century and no longer in use; its front door was chained and padlocked. The churchyard was desolate as well, under the purple twilight sky, and covered with leaves that were damp with rain. It was enclosed on all sides by a low stone wall and shielded by enormous oaks. We went in through the creaking gate. The ground was trampled with footprints, and many of the graves were untended.

I could barely see my feet in front of me through the cold, wet mist, but Andrea led the way unerringly to a roped-off hole. There had been no effort to cover the grave back over, and the dirt was heaped hastily by the side.

It had the effect of eerie loneliness and ruthless desecration, and even Andrea, creator of the cold-blooded Philippa Fanthorpe, seemed disturbed.

“You can see they didn’t have much time,” she murmured.

Suddenly we heard a noise. It was the gate creaking. Without a word Andrea pulled me away from the grave and around the side of the church. Someone was approaching the site of the theft, a woman with a scarf, heavy coat, and Wellington boots. She stood silently by the open grave a moment. And then we heard her begin to cry.

Ten minutes later we were warming ourselves in the local pub, The King’s Head. A few journos were there, soaking up the local color, the color in this case being the golden yellow of lager, Andrea bought me a half of bitter and a pint of Old Peculiar for herself, and we seated ourselves in a corner by the fireplace. The woman in the churchyard had left as quickly as she had come. We were debating who she could be when the door to the pub opened and a paunchy man in his fifties came in, wearing a tweed jacket and carrying a walking stick.

“That’s how he dresses in the country,” Andrea muttered. “Sodding old fart.”

It was Putter, I assumed, and I had to admit that there was a certain cragginess to his face that must have once been appealing. If I had been a young American working at a publishing house as a secretary in the early sixties, perhaps I, too, would have been flattered if Chatup and Windows’s rising male author had shown an interest in me and asked me if I’d like to do a spot of typing for him. Putter’s first novel, The Man in the Looking Glass, had been published to enormous acclaim, and he was working on his second. An authentic working-class writer (his father was actually a bank clerk, but he kept that quiet)-who would have guessed that this voice of the masses would eventually degenerate into a very minor novelist known mostly for his acerbic reviews of other people’s work in the Sunday Telegraph! Poor Francine. When she was deserted by her young husband, with just one book of poetry published to very little acclaim at all, she had no idea that within two years their roles would have completely reversed. Peter Putter would in the years to come be most famous for having been Francine Crofts’s husband.

“I wish it were possible to have a certain sympathy for him,” Andrea said gruffly, downing the last of her Old Peculiar. “After all, we both know what it is to experience the fickleness of public attention.”

I went up to the bar to order us another round and heard Putter explaining loudly to the journos, “It’s an outrage. Her married name was Francine Putter and that’s how I planned to have the stone engraved in the first place. I only added Crofts because I knew what she had brought off in that name, and I wished in some small way to honor it. But the radical feminists aren’t satisfied. Oh, no. It didn’t satisfy them to vandalize the headstone over and over, they had to actually violate a sanctified grave and steal Francine’s remains. No regard for me or her family, no regard for the church, no regard for her memory. God only knows what they plan to use her bones for. One shudders to think. Goddess rituals or some sort of black magic.”

“You’re suggesting a Satanic cult got hold of Francine?” a journo asked, and I could see the story in the Daily Mail already.

“Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” Putter said, and he bought a round for all the newspapermen.

I returned to Andrea. “If you were a radical feminist and/ or Satanic cultist, how would you have stolen the bones?”

She glowered at Putter. “It was probably dead easy. Drive over from London in a minivan, or even a car with a large boot. Maybe two of you. In the hours before dawn. One keeps watch and the other digs. The wooden casket has disintegrated in twenty years. You carefully lay the bones in a sheet-so they don’t rattle around too much-wrap the whole thing up in a plastic bag, and Bob’s your uncle!”

I shuddered. Blue plaques were one thing, but grave robbery and bone-snatching, even in the cause of justified historical revisionism, were quite another.

“Why not just another gravestone, this time with the words Francine Crofts?”

“Do you really think Putter”-Andrea shot him a vicious look-“would allow such a stone to stand? No, I’m sure whoever did it plans to rebury her.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked. “Maybe they’ll just chip off pieces of bone and sell them at American women’s studies conferences.”

“Don’t be medieval,” Andrea said absently. “No, I think it’s likely they might choose a site on the farm not far from here where Francine and Peter lived during the early days of their marriage. The poems from that period are the lyrical ones, the happy ones. A simple monument on the top of a hill: Francine Crofts, Poet.” Andrea looked up from her Old Peculiar and turned to me in excitement. “That’s it. We’ll stake the farm out, we’ll be the first to discover the monument. Maybe we’ll catch them in the act of putting it up.”

“What good would that do?”

“Don’t be daft,” she admonished me. “It’s publicity, isn’t it?”

Andrea wanted to rush right over to the farm, but when we came outside the pub the fog was so thick and close that we decided to settle in for the night instead. I went up to the guest room under the eaves with a hot-water bottle and Crofts’s Collected Poems. I’d forgotten she had been happy until Andrea reminded me. Her memory was so profoundly imbued with her manner of dying and with her violent despair that it was hard to think of her as celebrating life and love. But here were poems about marriage, about the farm, about animals and flowers. It made one pause: if she had married a faithful and loving man, perhaps her poetry would have stayed cheerful and light. Perhaps Putter did make her what she was, a poet of genius; perhaps it was right that he still claimed her by name. But no-here were the last poems in that first collection, the ones that had been called prefeminist, protofeminist and even Ur-feminist. Some critics now argued that if only Francine had lived to see the worn-en’s movement, her anger would have had a context; she wouldn’t have turned her fury at being abandoned against herself and seen herself a failure. But other critics argued that it was clear from certain poems, even early ones, that Francine understood her predicament quite well and was constantly searching for ways out. And they quoted the poem about Mary Anning, the early nineteenth-century fossil collector who was the first to discover the remains of an ichthyosaurus in Lyme Regis, not far from here, in 1811. It was called “Freeing the Bones.”

The next morning Andrea and I drove over to the farm and skirted the hedges around it looking for a spot that the unknown gravediggers might decide was suitable for a memorial of some sort.

“This is such a long shot,” I said. “I think it’s quite possible that some Americans were involved, and that they’ve taken the remains back to America. Wasn’t she from Iowa? They’ll bury them in Cedar Rapids.”

“Francine would hate that if she knew,” said Andrea. “She was such an anglophile she couldn’t wait to get out of Cedar Rapids. It was the pinnacle of happiness for her to study at Oxford and then to get a job afterward. No one, not even her family, tried to make a case for sending her bones back to Iowa.”

The farm was owned by an absentee landlord; it was solitary and lovely on this mid-autumn day. We broke through a weak hedge and tramped the land, settling on one or two likely little rises where the monument might go. Francine’s spirit seemed all about us that afternoon, or perhaps it was just because I’d been reading her poetry. It would be nice if she were reburied out here in the open, rather than in that dank little closed-in churchyard. I imagined picnics and poetry readings under the oak trees. With bowls of food left on the grave to feed her starved soul.

Late in the afternoon we returned to the village and decided to have tea in Francine’s sister-in-law’s tea shop. It had occurred to me that perhaps it had been Jane Fitzwater crying at Francine’s grave last night.

The Cozy Cup Tea Shop was packed with journalists, however, and one look at Jane was enough to convince me that it had not been she in the dowdy coat and Wellingtons. Jane, a bit younger than her brother, was less craggy but still imposing, with bleached blond hair and a strong jaw that gave her the look of a female impersonator. Her dress was royal blue and so was her eye shadow, coordinated, no doubt, for the cameras.

She barely gave Andrea and me a second glance when we entered, but consigned us to an out-of-the-way table and a waitress who looked to be only about twelve and who brought us very weak tea, stale scones, and whipped cream instead of clotted cream.

“Whipped cream?” said Andrea severely to the little waitress, who hunched her shoulders and scurried away.

Jane Fitzwater had seated herself at a table of journalists and was holding forth in quite loud tones on the absolutely undeserved amount of publicity that Francine had gotten through her death, “I say, if you’re unhappy, take a course in weaving or a holiday abroad. Don’t stew in your own self-pity. And I tried to tell Francine that. All marriages go through difficult times, but Peter would have come back to her eventually. Men will be men. Instead she had to hide away in that little flat of hers and stop eating. Oh, I tried to talk to her, I even brought her a casserole one day-I could see she’d gotten thinner-but it never occurred to me, I’m sure it never occurred to Peter, that she was deliberately trying to starve herself to death. And then he gets all the blame. It’s made a broken man of him, you know. Never recovered from the shock of it, he hasn’t. Ruined his career, his life, She should have thought of that when she did it, but no, always thinking of herself, that’s how she was right from the beginning, my mum and dad noticed it right off. ‘Seems a little full of herself,’ my dad said the first time Peter brought her to Dorset. Talks too much.’ My mum felt sorry for her, of course. Francine didn’t have a clue about life, really, her head was in the clouds. ‘It will end in tears,’ my mum said. And she was right.”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Andrea muttered to me. “Or it will end in something redder than tears.”

We left the tea shop and strolled through the village, which was scattered with posh cars and vans emblazoned with the logos of television stations, native and foreign. Peter Putter was over in the churchyard giving an interview to what appeared to be a German film crew.

“It’s enough to make one lose one’s appetite entirely,” Andrea said and slammed the door to her little cottage.

That night I was awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of a car driving down the road to the village. Normally it would not have been anything to wake up to, but I had a sudden odd feeling that it was my car. I staggered over to the little garret window, but saw nothing. I crept down the steep stairs and peeked into Andrea’s room.

She was not there.

I went out the back door and saw that my little Ford was gone.

Since Andrea didn’t have a car, I supposed she’d taken mine. Perhaps she’d decided to visit the farm by herself to stake out the gravediggers; perhaps she’d heard someone else’s car driving down the road and decided to follow it. Whatever my suppositions, my actions were limited. The farm was a good four miles away, it was raining, and-I finally looked at the clock-four in the morning. I got dressed just to keep warm and paced around a bit, then remembered that Andrea had a bicycle out in the shed behind the cottage. With the feeling that there was nothing else to do, I steeled myself for cold and rain and set off into the dark night.

With water streaming down my face, I pedaled furiously, wondering why roads that always seemed to be perfectly flat when you drove over them by car suddenly developed hills and valleys when you were traveling by bicycle. Still the cold rain gave me an incentive for speed, and I arrived at the farm in record time. There were no cars at the side road leading to the farmhouse, so I got off the bike and began to reconnoiter on foot around the hedges. There must be another road leading to the farm, but I would waste more time looking for it than going on foot.

By this time my clothes were soaked and my boots caked with mud. I tried to retrace the steps Andrea and I had taken the day before, but in the darkness it was hard to see the difference between land and sky, much less between a rise and a fall in the earth. Then, through the hedges, I saw a small light. I broke through and started staggering over the land toward it. It was joined by another small light.

The lights seemed to be dancing together, or were they struggling? One of the lights vanished. I began to hear voices. Had Andrea discovered the perpetrators; was she fighting with them?

But then I heard a voice I thought I recognized. “Put those bones down! I’ll have you in court for this. Grave robbing is a criminal offense as well as a sin!”

“What you did to Francine is a sin and a crime,” another even more familiar voice shot back. “Give me back my shovel. She deserves to have a better resting place than the one you gave her.”

“I was her husband, I have a right to decide where she’s buried.”

“You gave up your rights long ago.”

Then there was only the sound of grunts as they grappled again.

“Peter,” I said, “Andrea. Stop this, Stop this right now.”

I picked up one of the flashlights and shone it at each of their faces in turn, “What’s going on here?”

“I suspected her from the beginning,” said Peter, looking like a large wet muskrat in his brown oilskin jacket. “I’ve been keeping an eye on her. Lives right across from the churchyard; easy enough to break into the grave. Tonight I heard the car starting up and decided to follow her. Called the journalists first, they’ll be here in a minute. You’ll go to jail for this, Addlepoot!”

“Oh, Cassandra,” groaned Andrea. “I’m sorry. I had it planned so differently.”

But she didn’t have time to exonerate herself. The journalists were suddenly on us like a pack of hounds; there were bright lights everywhere, illuminating a stone marker that said, FRANCINE CROFTS, POET, and a muddy sheet piled, haphazardly, with thin white bones.

Some weeks after this, when I was back in London, Andrea came up to see me. If it hadn’t been for the surprising intercession of Mrs. Putter, Peter’s mother (for she had been the woman we’d seen crying at the grave), Andrea would have been on trial now. As it was, Francine’s bones were back in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s and Andrea had closed up her cottage and was thinking of moving back to London.

“I didn’t have completely ignoble motives,” she said. “I always did believe that Francine deserved better than a Putterized headstone or no headstone in a grim little grave under the eye of people who had hated her. But I have to admit that I saw an opportunity. When the blue plaques started to appear I thought, why not? Someone’s bound to do it, why not me? I wouldn’t say I was the one who’d done it, of course. I’d steal the bones, rebury them, erect a marker and then-with you as a witness-I’d discover the new site, and let the media know. It would have been the best kind of publicity, for me and for Francine. I would have solved a mystery, my name would be back in the news, my publisher might have decided to reissue my books… but instead…”

“Instead the newspapers called you a grave robber and filled the pages of the tabloids with photos that made you look like a refugee from Nightmare on Elm Street And they spelled your name wrong.”

Andrea shuddered. “I’m going to have to put all this behind me. Start over. Science fiction, perhaps. Or why not feminist horror? Skeletons that walk in the night, the ghosts of Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Bronte that haunt us still today…”

“I did read in the newspaper today,” I interrupted, “that the owner of the farm has decided to put up a marker to Francine himself, and to open the farm up to readings and poetry workshops. Apparently he’s something of an artist himself, in addition to being a stockbroker. He said he never knew that Francine had lived there. So something good came of it.”

Andrea cheered up. “And Putter didn’t look so terribly fabulous in those photographs either.”

We started to laugh, embarrassed at first, and then with gasping and teary amusement, recalling our wet night in the mud.

And then we went out for a walk to look at some of the blue plaques that had gone up recently. For, you see, the remembering and honoring hadn’t stopped. There were now more blue plaques to women than ever.