‘Sir Jocelyn has a fine collection of anatomies, indeed,’ I concurred. Could she really have slept with my Din? She seemed so prim. I didn’t want to believe it. ‘I wish my Peter had had the chance to peruse them,’ I said, to shake my thoughts off their coupling. ‘Peter bound some of the great anatomies, but the Galen, and the Bourgery, why, he had not seen the like.’ I could see Sir Jocelyn’s shelves in front of me as I spoke.
‘Jossie loves his books. He loves me too, Dora.’
‘Of course he does,’ I reassured her. She couldn’t have done it, could she? Something was awry, here.
She had started to hug herself, and stroke her shoulders as if imagining his caresses. ‘He always loved my shoulders so, my back.’
I could see the title of Sir Jocelyn’s finest anatomical tract, Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem.
‘I miss his kisses, Dora. I miss being loved.’
Something was tapping at my brain. Vesalius. Anatomies. What was it? Or was it just Din?
‘How do you cope without it, Dora?’
Without what? Without Peter? Or without Din? What was she saying? Anatomies, weren’t we talking about?
Then suddenly the fog lifted. I riffled on the bench for the paper on which I had scribbled my musings about the anagram. De humani corporis fabrica. It was a perfect fit.
‘The things he used to say when he touched me. He could have been a poet.’
I felt as if some invisible hand were strangling me as I struggled to make sense of it. The casing could not have been a binding for an anatomy text, could it?
De humani corporis fabrica.
‘Le peau de ma femme,’ Sylvia said softly, and my blood froze.
‘What?’
‘Le peau de ma femme,’ she repeated. I remembered the words in amongst some letters I had bound, in Glidewell’s hand. Glidewell to Knightley.
De humanis corporis fabrica. Literally, on the fabric of the human body. Bodies. Mine, Din’s, Sylvia’s. I went back to the Latin, but I knew enough of how the brains of these gentlemen worked now to sidestep logic and accuracy. I knew what the inscription was trying to say about the binding. I turned to Sylvia, and said softly, ‘Tell me about the peau de ma femme.’ Don’t talk to me about Din, now. Something more horrific is afoot.
‘My shoulders, Dora. I was telling you. Jossie used to kiss them and tell me that no woman had finer skin. My skin was the nonpareil of everything. He even corresponded with Valentine about the smoothness of my skin: this Dutch paper, he would write, is smoother than the peau de ma femme. This perfume smells like the peau de ma femme. These flower petals are as soft as the peau de ma femme.’
‘To be so prized . . .’ I murmured. Comprehension was a painful thing. My suspicions about Din and Sylvia were only that – suspicions. Here, I was facing something more indisputable about her husband, something I knew to be true. De humani corporis fabrica.
‘Oh, how he would kiss them!’ She giggled. ‘Oh, Dora, he would say, oh, he would say, that he wanted to bind a volume of the finest love poetry in the skin from my shoulders after my death, so he would never have to be parted from their smoothness. Never be parted! He never wanted us to be parted, Dora. Dora!’
De humani corporis fabrica.
The defiance I had been feeling no longer supported me, and I finally crumbled.
‘Dora!’ I heard Sylvia scream. ‘Dora!’
The sobs heaved out of my chest, and I lurched and stumbled into Sylvia’s horrified, outstretched arms. She held me close, but her thin arms offered little succour, and besides they might have wrapped around Din once upon a time. It was my mother’s arms I wanted, and my sobs were tearless. I felt my supper rise in my throat, my body revolting at myself, and at the world to which I was so inescapably chained.
De humani corporis fabrica.
I tore myself away from Sylvia, and, shaking with anger and grief, I grabbed the book she had put down and threw it at the wall, as if it stood for all the ignoble books for which I had been responsible. I strode up and down, grasping my hair, and wrenched my face from side to side as if searching for a way out.
‘Dora!’ I heard Sylvia scream again. I saw her as if through a veil; she reached out for me again, but I could not stand her or myself any more. I wanted to bathe myself, to scrub myself with the toughest brush from head to foot, but the water would not run again until tomorrow morning, and even then I knew I would never feel clean again, not until I had ripped every inch of skin off my sinful flesh.
And then, in the far recesses of my troubled soul, I heard a distant knocking, and I was dragged up from the depths of my misery into the present moment and to the awareness of a call from behind the outside door of the bindery. I stared like a horrified animal at Sylvia, and watched as she made to open it, but I flew to it before her, and threw the door open.