Half an index card has been tucked into the spiral bound blank book I carry around, the one where I jot down Broadway shows I want to see and the dimensions of the dining room table and lists of colleges the girl might need to go visit and reminders to transfer money so that the mortgage payment is covered. The half index card says, in my handwriting: "after dining on swan". (The reverse has the address of a woman who lived in such a small town that she had no street address - just her name in Denmark, ME.) (Wait, that probably needs an additional aside: my mother ran a mailing list and index cards were part of the complicated process by which people were added to the mailing list and she couldn't toss an index card with one clean side and forever and ever I will have a stash of blank-on-one-side index cards harvested by Moky because they are both insanely useful and completely full of nostalgia.)
I, of course, couldn't remember WHY I'd written "after dining on swan" on an index card, but clearly it was from something I'd been reading. Oh hail Google Books! Lo and behold, it's a throwaway phrase from The Club (Takis Würger):
Funnily enough, I hated the book - the entirety of my Goodreads "review" is "Eh. I didn’t need to read that. It’s rather ugly."
But that phrase - especially as it sits in the whole sentence - is lovely and evocative. Did she just happen to die following a swan dinner? Or was she poisoned by the swan? What happened to Lady Margaret? And who eats swan anyway‽
My daughter's favorite description of how someone died is Henry I succumbing to a surfeit of lampreys
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