The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (6 page)

I heard footsteps in the corridor and hastily crawled under the bed. While I held my breath, the footsteps continued down the hall and disappeared. I scrambled out again. But my eye had been caught by a crumpled piece of paper in between the bed and the night stand. It looked as if it had been thrown there in a fit of anger. I smoothed it out and read:

POISON PEN

Some authors are sensitive about their secrets. I found that out the hard way during the most recent international feminist book fair in Vladivostok when Simone Jefferson tried to poison me with a quantity of strychnine placed on the tip of my pen. Like many people, Simone had noticed that I’m in the habit of sucking my pen when I’m thinking. So she substituted one that had poison in order to shut me up. The only reason I’m here today is that there was only enough of the substance to make me really ill, not enough to kill me. Otherwise I would have been murdered in cold blood in the very midst of the book fair, while selling this journal.

Lulu went on to detail the means by which Simone was caught. The bottle of rat poison in her hotel room. Her fingerprints on the pen. “All because,” Lulu wrote, “Simone was afraid I was going to finally expose the secret she’d hidden for so long. Her lesbianism.”

Again I heard footsteps in the corridor, but this time I wasn’t fast enough. I was on my hands and knees by the bed when Lulu came in. She immediately spotted the paper in my hand.

“I didn’t mean to kill Olga,” she said, edging toward me while she kept the door well blocked. “Nobody can accuse me of premeditated murder. That editorial is proof. The poison was meant for me. That’s not a crime, is it?”

“No,” I said. “Not if you really meant to commit suicide. But you miscalculated the dose; you only thought you’d get ill and that Simone would be blamed. It was a big risk to take, Lulu. And Olga took the consequences.”

I couldn’t see any way around her body to the door.

“No one’s going to know,” she said, coming closer to me. “I’ve still got some strychnine here and, as we both know, it doesn’t take much.”

“I’ve always thought,” I said calmly, “that all those scarves were a big fashion mistake.” I grabbed the ends of one of them and started twisting.

The door behind her burst open.

“KGB!” said Felicity Horsey-Smythe playfully, and then gasped. “Oh my, Cassandra dear, whatever are you doing to poor Lulu? She looks as if she can’t breathe very well like that.”

“Be a good girl, Felicity,” I said, still keeping a firm grip on Lulu, “and call the police, dear.”

A half hour later Simone had retrieved the bottle of rat poison Lulu had planted in her room, and we’d presented it together with Lulu’s editorial to the Soviet police. I had no idea what would happen to Lulu now; whether she’d be tried and punished, sent to Siberia, or locked up in the Lubyanka. Whatever her punishment, I suspected it would be milder than what some of Lulu’s victims would have meted out if they’d had the chance.

Still, I suppose some good did come out of it all. Felicity Horsey-Smythe had a wonderful subject for her next novel, and Darcy Joanne said she’d publish it in the States. They signed a contract at the Vladivostok Airport and agreed to move quickly on the project. They did want, after all, to get the book out in time for the next international feminist book fair.

“Tierra del Fuego!” said Dee when I told her. “I can hardly wait.”

I
T 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 noting 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 some of 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 travelled 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. 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 Boadicea, 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 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 re-erected, 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 flat 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 hat that suggested hunting big game rather than deadheading spent roses. 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 when 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,” one reviewer had gushed. 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 list, and she was regularly interviewed on television and in print about the exciting new phenomenon of the feminist detective.