“Come, Maude, let’s go home,” Daddy said, flicking a cigarette butt into the grass.
Something flared in the corner of my eye. I looked across at the next hill toward Highgate and saw a huge bonfire burning, lighting up the trees around it. Among the dancing branches I thought I saw the cemetery’s cedar of Lebanon.
That fire was certainly no coincidence-someone had probably lit it for the King. I smiled. I love fire. I felt almost as if it had been lit for me as well.
Daddy disappeared down the hill into the darkness ahead of me, but I remained a little longer, my eyes flicking back and forth between the comet and the flames.
Simon Field
It takes a long time. We’re at it all night. He were right ‘bout the bones.
Afterward as the sun’s coming up we get some buckets and half fill ‘em with sand. We mix the ashes into it and we sprinkle it all over the meadow. Mr. Jackson has plans to let wildflowers grow there, like she wanted. That’ll make a change from all them flower beds and raked paths.
I still got a little left in a bucket and I goes to our granpa’s rosebush and dump the rest there. That way I’ll be sure of where some of her is, if ever Maude wants to know. ‘Sides, bone meal’s good for roses.
Acknowledgments
The acknowledgments is the only section of a novel that reveals an author’s “normal” voice. As a result I always read them looking for clues that will shed light on writers and their working methods and lives, as well as their connections with the real world. I suspect some of them are written in code. Alas, however, there are no hidden meanings in this one-just an everyday voice that wants to express gratitude for help in several forms.
Sometimes I wonder if acknowledgments are even necessary, or if they break the illusion that books emerge fully formed from a writer’s mind. But books don’t come out of nowhere. Other books and other people contribute to them in all sorts of ways. I used many books in the making of this one. The most helpful were The Victorian Celebration of Death by James Stevens Curl (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000), Death in the Victorian Family by Pat Jalland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), Death, Heaven and the Victorians by John Morley (London: Studio Vista, 1971), and, best of all, On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries, and on the Improvement of Churchyards by J. C. Loudon (1843; facsimile published Redhill, Surrey: Ivelet Books, 1981).
It is a novelist’s privilege to make up what she likes, even when real people and places enter the story. The cemetery in this book is made up of a lot of fact and a fair bit of fiction-concrete details and flights of fancy interwoven, with no need to untangle them. While a real cemetery exists where this book takes place, I have not tried to re-create it completely accurately; rather it is a state of mind, peopled with fictional characters, with no resemblances intended.
Similarly, I have toyed with a few details in the suffragettes’ history in order to bring them into the story. I have taken the liberty of putting a few words into Emmeline Pankhurst’s mouth that she did not actually say, but I trust I have kept to the spirit of her numerous speeches. Moreover, Joan of Arc and Robin Hood did march in a procession, dressed as I have described, but it was not the Hyde Park demonstration. Gail Cameron at the Suffragette Fellowship Collection of the Museum of London was very helpful in providing me with useful resources.
Finally, thanks go to my quartet of minders-Carole Baron, Jonny Geller, Deborah Schneider, and Susan Watt-who remained steady when I wobbled.
Tracy Chevalier
Tracy Chevalier grew up in Washington, DC. She moved to England in 1984, and worked for several years as a reference book editor. In 1994 she graduated from the MA course in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Her first novel, The Virgin Blue, was chosen by WH Smith for its Fresh Talent promotion in 1997. She lives in London with her husband and son.
