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ALSO BY DEBORAH CROMBIE:

All Shall Be Well

A Share in Death

Leave the Grave Green

Mourn Not Your Dead

SCRIBNER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Carolyn Heilbrun and Ballantine Books for permission to reprint from the following previously published material:

Carolyn Heilbrun: Writing a Woman’s Life, copyright © 1988 by Carolyn G. Heilbrun. Reprinted by permission of Ballantine Books, Inc.

Copyright © 1997 by Deborah Crombie

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Text set in Bembo

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crombie, Deborah.

Dreaming of the bones: a Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James novel/Deborah Crombie.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PS3553.R5378D7     1997

813′.54—dc21       97-16336       CIP

ISBN 0-684-80141-8

ISBN 0-684-84720-5 (signed edition)

eISBN 978-1-4516-1765-8

This book is for TERRY,

with gratitude for her voice,

among many other things

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due: Dr. Mary Archer, for her gracious hospitality in inviting me to visit her home, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, and for allowing me to see her Rupert Brooke archives (complete with ghost stories); to Jane Williams, personal assistant to Dr. Archer, and to Mary Ann Marks, for their kindness in showing me around The Old Vicarage; to Dr. Karen Ross, M.D., of the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office, for her help with poisons and toxicology; to Betty Petkovsek, R.Ph., for her pharmaceutical advice; to Diane Sullivan, RN, BSN, for her help with other medical matters; to Paul Styles, retired Chief Inspector, Cambridgeshire Constabulary, for help with police procedures; to Terry Mayeux, Barbara Shapiro, and Carol Chase, for their reading of the manuscript; to the members of the EOTNWG, for the same; and to my husband, Rick Wilson, for his patient and continuing technical support.

DREAMING

OF

THE

BONES

PART I

There are four ways to write a woman’s life: the woman herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; she may tell it in what she chooses to call fiction; a biographer, woman or man, may write the woman’s life in what is called a biography; or the woman may write her own life, in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process.

CAROLYN HEILBRUN,

from Writing a Woman’s Life

CHAPTER

1

Where Beauty and Beauty meet

All naked, fair to fair,

The earth is crying-sweet,

And scattering bright the air,

Eddying, dizzying, closing round,

With soft and drunken laughter;

Veiling all that may befall

After—after

RUPERT BROOKE,

from “Beauty and Beauty”

The post slid through the letter box, cascading onto the tile floor of the entry hall with a sound like the wind rustling through bamboo. Lydia Brooke heard the sound from the breakfast room, where she sat with her hands wrapped round her teacup. With her morning tea long gone cold, she lingered, unable to choose between the small actions that would decide the direction of her day.