Grey Dawn Read Online Free

it. How could she concentrate on a lesson plan when she might have information about a murder? No, she corrected herself as another of her students joined in the discussion. She could think about a book – just not
this
book. The text she’d been reading last night – now that seemed eerily relevant. One passage in particular kept coming into her mind.
    Fierce as the wind were the cries that rent the night.
That was how it had started, as those wolves – or whatever they were – had chased the carriage, driving the horses nearly mad with terror. There was nothing theoretical about that scene, nor the earlier bit, in which the heroine had been fleeing her pursuer and had run outdoors, into the storm.
    On her first reading of that passage, Dulcie had been taken by a reference to the heroine’s hair. Specifically to
her raven locks, ripp’d lose, tangled in the gale that swept the mountainous terrain.
The word ‘raven’ had been crossed out, and the scribble above it had not been improved by age or wear. Dulcie was pretty sure that the author had written ‘flame-haired,’ as if she were going to make the heroine a redhead as opposed to a brunette. To Thorpe, she knew, that would be a sign of something – the most basic kind of symbolism, with red hair as a mark of temper or some kind of witchery.
    Dulcie knew that authors made such choices, using standard devices like shorthand to clue the readers in. She wasn’t totally naive. But in truth it had interested her, at least in part, because of her own red – well, reddish – hair. Now that autumn was here, she was losing her copper highlights, but she’d grown up with her mother’s stories of all the redheads in the family, and she liked to think of herself as simply a more subtle auburn. Of course, the indecision about hair color continued later in the book, too. In the first excerpt that Dulcie had found, a young man had been found murdered. His hair, too, seemed to change from red to black in subsequent versions. Maybe it was a signifier, as Thorpe would say. Or maybe the author was simply trying out different images, looking for the most dramatic. Or maybe, Dulcie couldn’t help but wonder, something else was involved: a more personal choice, based on the real models for the fictional creation.
    It wasn’t a theory Dulcie could bring up with her adviser. Thorpe would tell her she was being unsophisticated. He’d already warned her against ‘falling into the common hermeneutic trap of the implied author,’ that is, confusing the writer with her fictional creation, and he’d dismissed Dulcie’s uncanny sense that in this case the anonymous author really was writing about an aspect of her life.
    This morning, the question of how close the author and her mysterious heroine were was moot. All that Dulcie could think about, to the detriment of her teaching, was what had happened next. The heroine, whatever her hair color or ‘symbolic presence,’ had been standing out in the rain, on a windswept mountain road. The wolves, or whatever they were, had been getting closer. And then a carriage had driven up and a stranger – or was it a Frenchman? – had opened the door and beckoned her in. The man in grey. If he hadn’t, well … Trista’s bombshell seemed a bit too real.
    â€˜Ms Schwartz?’
    Dulcie blinked.
    â€˜Are you okay?’
    â€˜Yes, yes.’ She shook her head to clear it, and saw that her students were standing. ‘Um, see you next week.’
    She saw a few of them exchange looks, but that was the least of her problems. The text – well, that was odd, and she was dying to get back to it. No matter what her quibbles with her adviser or her discipline were, however, she was first and foremost a member of the university community. And that meant telling the authorities what she knew. What she had seen and heard the night before.
    Luckily,