The Five Bells and Bladebone Read online

  Occasionally, she stopped. Not to think, but to light a cigarette, which she inhaled and then lay, coal-end out, on the edge of the desk. The edge was notched with a row of cigarette burns, like notches on a rifle for each dead body. Valerie and Matt were wrestling on the bed, Valerie with breasts halfway exposed. She wondered if she dared drag the neckline down just a wee bit farther. No, this was no time to deviate from Bennick’s requirements for the sake of sex. She still had three thousand words to go before the end of the day.

  One rule she always hewed to was that revision must be kept to an absolute minimum, generally an exercise in proofreading just to make sure Valerie and Matt kept to their Christian names throughout the book. As for polishing, forget it. Why dress a dog in diamonds?

  For the next two hours she tapped away, coming up with the requisite two thousand words and feeling quite pleased with herself. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure what she’d written, having put the plot on automatic pilot while her mind dealt with more pressing concerns.

  One of which was that self-appointed guardian of literary taste, Theo Wrenn Browne. She had not set foot inside his shop ever since he had refused to carry her books; that was nasty enough without his also discouraging his customers from reading them. Joanna had been enjoying a considerable reputation in the area. To be one of the first to have “the new Lewes” was a feather in one’s cap. After all, how many villages could boast a top-selling author, never mind the quality of what she wrote. Oh, she knew her books were mindless, and probably a number of people to whom she gave presentation copies found them a bit thin (to say the least), but when money talks, readers keep their mouths shut. Except for Theo Wrenn Browne.

  The trouble was that when you owned a bookshop, especially one that dealt not just in new, but in falling-apart, fox-paged first editions, customers tended to believe that you must have taste and discrimination. Joanna knew the reason for all of his carping criticism: when they had still been on speaking terms, he had asked her, casually, to “have a look at” his own novel. Naturally, he hadn’t asked outright that she send it along to her publisher, but that was clearly his intention.

  After she was twenty-five pages into it, she wouldn’t have sent it to her publisher on a bet. It was one of those terribly avant-garde antinovels, just the thing Theo Wrenn Browne would be expected to write, with no dialogue and no characters save for the narrator, a paranoid South African guerrilla whose life scrolled before him as he was watching the last race at Doncaster. That was the name of it: The Last Race. The title was the only intelligible thing about the book. The story had something to do with apartheid, but what it had to do with it was a mystery. Nor was it ever explained how the South African guerrilla had got to Doncaster. Add to that that the Afrikaner could not speak the Queen’s English and the reader was left to wallow in strange syntactical circles. The theme was the death of Africa and the death of the novel. Joanna had told him his book was abundant proof of at least one of those. Her own publisher, known for its intellectual clout despite its concupiscent sideline (romances with half-bare-breasted heroines published on the sly under another logo), would have dropped The Last Race in the dustbin like a dead mouse.

  There had been a distinct chill in the air when she had handed Theo Wrenn Browne’s manuscript back to him, saying that she doubted her publisher would be interested in a book about horse-racing. That of course had torn it. Theo Wrenn Browne had come down from the rarefied air of his intellectual mountain peak for as long as it took to tell her she was merely a hack. He had then made the mistake of submitting it himself. According to Mrs. Oilings, who charred for Joanna when she wasn’t leaning on her mop drinking tea, the manuscript had got shot back to Theo Wrenn Browne so fast she wondered who’d had time to lick the flap. So Theo Wrenn Browne had taken to establishing another persona when the Dedicated Artist one had fallen through. He wore seedy tweeds, smoked small black cigarettes, and made Miss Ada Crisp’s life hell. Miss Crisp was the unfortunate who owned a secondhand furniture shop next to his cutely christened bookshop, the Wrenn’s Nest. He was over at Miss Crisp’s whenever business was slack, trying to bully her into selling up so that he could have the premises to expand his own. So far she had withstood this onslaught, but she had become more palsied than ever, twitching down the High Street as if she were plugged into an electrical outlet.

  When he wasn’t deviling Miss Crisp, Theo Wrenn Browne was across the High Street, being quite open (especially when there were customers in Trueblood’s shop) in his criticism of the jacked-up prices and the so-called authenticity of a silversmith’s stamp. As if Marshall Trueblood had gone about stamping all of his silver himself. According to Mrs. Oilings, Theo Wrenn Browne had even taken to dipping into books about antiques. Trueblood, however, was made of sterner stuff than Ada Crisp; he’d have to be bludgeoned with one of his own antique coshers before he’d rise to the bait.

  When it came down to it, there wasn’t a person in Long Piddleton who had altogether escaped the waspish tongue of Theo Wrenn Browne . . . .

  Joanna slammed the door on this counterproductive line of thought; it was only leading to the real reason for her dilemma. She was painfully aware, as she tapped the keys, that her characters’ wrestling on the bed was small potatoes compared to her own inner writhing.

  • • •

  Theo Wrenn Browne watched the single-knife guillotine descend, make a cut, and then return. He held his handkerchief to his head like a compress, soaking up beads of perspiration. At his bench press in the rear room of the Wrenn’s Nest, Theo Wrenn Browne, with a certain reverence, pulled over his latest acquisition, a volume that he was in the process of rebinding. He had glued up the sections. Now he was pasting the folds of an endpaper. Finishing that, he placed the endpapered book between boards and weighted it down.

  The work kept his mind off the previous night, at least for moments at a time. But still he could feel the cold sweat prickle as it ran between his shoulder blades, and he immediately turned to another book and started applying some edge-coloring.

  No one would suspect, not even Marshall Trueblood.

  Marshall Trueblood was a man he detested. He brushed aside the uncomfortable feeling that his dislike might arise from a hidden spring of totally different emotions. There was no doubt that Trueblood could easily stand him on his ear when it came to knowledge of antiques, but that the man would humiliate him in front of —

  Put it straight out of your mind, old boy, he told himself.

  He thought instead of Diane Demorney, who served wonderfully as friend, and as smokescreen, to boot. And adviser. “The trouble with you is, you try to learn too much,” Diane had told him. They’d been having drinks in her living room. “What you ought to do is simply stick with one period, no, not even a whole period, just part of it. Better still, part of the part. Say Victorian salt cellars or something easy. You’d make Marshall look a bit of a fool, wouldn’t you? He has to sell the damned stuff — all he knows he’s learned through being in the trade, and you can’t stop and read great gobs of books if you’re working at the same time.”

  It made, he supposed, some sort of Demorney sense. Although Trueblood’s “being in the trade” was precisely the problem: Marshall Trueblood had gone from rags to riches by selling the stuff. It’s impossible (she had said, pouring another of her ten-to-one martini cocktails) to think of Marshall ever wearing rags. The way she’d laughed had unnerved him; one would think the exquisite Diane Demorney saw Marshall Trueblood as another world to conquer.

  Holding the cotton wool over the edge of the book, he stared into space and carried on with his mental dismemberment of Marshall Trueblood. He did not see how anyone in Long Piddleton could take the man, and consequently the man’s wares, seriously. Melrose Plant, for example, actually seemed to like him. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to intimate that Plant’s sexual persuasion was anything but normal. He clutched at the book, his knuckles whitening.

  • • •

  He unpac
ked the box and then tore open another. These were current best-sellers, five of each, ten of the one that had won the Booker Prize. There were also two that he’d ordered, not to sell, but for himself to read. Theo pulled out the latest Lewes: Lisbon Lust. Odious titles these romances had, and he’d never lower himself to sell Joanna the Mad, an equally odious woman. But he enjoyed reading her; settling down in bed with a cup of tea and a box of chocolates was sheer heaven. Too bad they were warring, or he’d ask her to autograph it. Might be valuable some day, that. As he thought about her refusal to send his own novel to her editor, along with some sort of billet-doux recommending it strongly, he could feel the blood rise to his face. A perfectly wretched person. It was only decent to let your friends have a crack at your editor. His head started to throb; he rubbed his temples. It was mortifying, having sent the book out himself and having it returned with nothing but a printed rejection slip. They weren’t interested in art, these publishers; they only wanted Lewes-trash. He enjoyed reading trash, everyone needed a bit of trash in his life, but that didn’t excuse them for failing to recognize the Real Thing. The Last Race would walk away with the Booker if only he could land it on an intelligent editor’s desk. It was experimental, grand. One thing he could say for himself (amongst other things) was that he took chances. Not like so many other writers, who wrote to the same prescription — Joanna the Mad, for one; or that mystery-writing hack Polly Praed, whose books Melrose Plant was always snatching up. No, that wasn’t his way. He didn’t give a pile of beans for money.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t averse to making it. He’d been trying to run the Crisp woman out of her distressed-furniture business next door, again, to no avail. But he knew if he kept up this war of nerves, he could break her. Crisp didn’t have the pseudosoigné, laissez-faire attitude Trueblood affected. Tremors would shudder through Crisp’s wiry frame; her hands shook whenever he walked in the door of that dusty, Dickensian shop. But when he walked into Trueblood’s Antiques, the man merely raised one of those painted eyebrows and stuck another of those rainbow-colored cigarettes in his holder. What affectation! Rich affectation, to boot.

  He plugged a black cigarillo into an elegant ebony holder and continued musing. Diane Demorney might be on to something. Although her little bits of knowledge reminded him of a shabbily cut quilt, still, what she knew she appeared to know all of. It was quite damned clever, he thought; instead of attempting the Herculean task of boning up on history, one just chose a snippet of it and then cut it to even tinier bits. He’d heard her talk Richard the Third to smithereens and the other person would simply have to give up, especially when it came to that murder in the Tower. And Diane hadn’t even bothered cracking a history book. She’d simply read The Daughter of Time twice over, and it was certainly easier reading a mystery novel than dry-as-dust history. If only someone would write a mystery novel set in a bookshop! No, a bookshop and an antiques business, Theo thought. Trueblood, of course, had a speciality — all those floggers of old furniture did, or pretended they did. Trueblood probably really did know, he’d have to credit the man with that. He might be whirling through life with all his bright scarves flying like Millamant, but when it came to his business he was serious. Theo thought again, raising his eyes to the mouse-colored ceiling and stroking his throat. Millamant. Now, that was an idea. He could kill two birds with one stone — antiques and the theater — by reading up on William Congreve. No, reading The Way of the World several times over, the way Diane had read The Daughter of Time. God! The Way of the World he had tried to read and couldn’t: the dialogue was so brittle with wit, every line snapped like an icicle, every riposte cut the quick like a knife —

  He wiped his forehead again and went back to the book.

  • • •

  Diane Demorney was indeed thinking at this moment of other worlds to conquer, having swept her sword over every battlefield of this one that she could find. She sat in the sumptuous sitting room of the house she had purchased from the Bister-Strachans in London, smoking a cigarette, drinking a martini, and plotting. She considered her greatest virtue to be her amorality; she was hardly dismayed by anything that had happened. A man who thought he could throw her over deserved what he got.

  Her present campaign had to do with her next husband; when she found herself getting bored (which was often), she usually ended up getting married, knowing that that would, after several months or a year, be more boring still.

  Diane Demorney had been married and divorced four times by the time she was thirty-five. Then there had been a five-year hiatus, when she settled for love affairs, but that too had begun to pall. Theo Wrenn Browne was amusing and acerbic to the point of viciousness, qualities that Diane Demorney had in abundance. It might be pleasant to marry someone who was like oneself, if not quite as clever. Unfortunately, he had little money. Not that Diane needed money, she had plenty. But she believed in excess. If one Mercedes coupe was sufficient to meet one’s needs, then why not have two? Consequently, Melrose Plant was odds-on favorite, for he had enough money to buy three without turning a foil of his checkbook. And then there were the titles. She thought it rather reckless of him to abandon them like so many babies (which would not have been reckless at all), but she imagined he could get them back. The Countess of Caverness suited her.

  The correct name was almost as important as the correct ensemble. Only her mother (wherever she was) knew that she was not Diane Demorney of Belgravia, Capri, and the Hamptons. She was actually Dotty Trump of Stoke-on-Trent, two names that made her sit up and pour herself a double martini. Especially when she remembered that Melrose Plant had commented on the character in the Sayers book and said the names were an odd coincidence and gone back to reading one of those wretched books by his friend, Polly-Something. The one with the remarkable amethyst eyes. Amethyst and emerald-green. Between the two of them they could beam all the traffic on the M-1 safely through a blizzard. She pushed the two sets of eyes from her mind and absently stroked her showy, copper-eyed, flour-white cat. The cat promptly gouged her hand and she slapped him on the rump.

  Her thoughts trailing like long skirts over the grounds of Ardry End once again, she frowned. The trouble with Melrose Plant was his tiresome generosity and humility. When her query about his expected guest brought her no information, she had tried the ploy of telling him that she knew who it was, favoring him with one of her most seductive smiles. He had also smiled (though not seductively) and said, Fine, then I needn’t tell you.

  Diane thumped the velvet pillow in her lap. She also had no use for that triumvirate that met every day in the Little Shop of Bores. Marshall Trueblood, Plant, and Vivian Rivington. The in-crowd of Long Piddleton. That Melrose Plant might be fonder of Vivian Rivington, or she of him, than was necessary, Diane put out of her mind. Vivian was, she supposed, pretty in a well-bred way; however, no woman had ever been able to compete with Diane.

  She turned the cloisonné cigarette lighter over and over in her hand, leaned her head back on the velvet sofa, and allowed part of her mind to drift to the music of Beethoven. It did not compel all of her mind to listen, any more than the music of Mozart or Bach. But she had forced herself to digest medium-sized portions of one famous and one nearly unknown name in music, art, and literature. She learned enough about the famous one to keep her head above water; about the less-known she knew everything. She also delved into one small chapter of other fields — history, antiques, the habitats of tropical birds. It was astonishing what only an hour in the library could do. To know everything about a minor poet about whom no one else knew anything soon established one as an intellectual giant. It was all really so simple. She had widened her scope to take in other fields that often came up in social intercourse — cocktail parties, theater evenings, Coronations. Diane knew the value of Time. Why go to Trinity College to study over the Book of Kells — when everyone knew a little about that — when one could pop round to the British Museum and take in one page of the Book of Dimma, which no one seemed e
ver to have heard of, except experts. Diane merely smiled and smoked silently when she came up against expert opinion. It unnerved them.

  She could speak with authority on the Crown Jewels (and had even humbled the guards in the Tower of London); on Richard the Third (holding to the theory that it was Edward who had done in the Princes); on haut couture (Remy Martinelli); on haute cuisine (cuisine minuet); on antique silver (neffs); on American football (Phil Simms, although she had to keep going back to find out what team he played for). And then there were what she called her trivial pursuits — a collection of arcane facts and Demorney theories that she could always trot out for those not interested in Richard the Third. There was the foolproof way of making lemon curd, which endeared her to her husbands’ mothers. There was her one paragraph of knowledge about Henry Fielding and the Bow Street Runners that she liked to toss in Constable Pluck’s direction. And she had once convinced a compulsive gambler that he cure his habit by attending Sotheby’s auctions. It had worked. Unfortunately, he had then become a bore with whom she had nothing in common, being a compulsive gambler herself.

  Her adopted name was the product of her pursuits. Leafing through Murder Must Advertise, she had read a few chapters dealing with the Dian de Momerie character, a woman she became so fond of she had actually read whole chapters of the book. She had time, after all, to do this. She wasn’t wasting it writing books like Dorothy L. Sayers. De Momerie was beautiful, drug-addicted, sharklike, and decadent. Diane had promptly adopted the name with a slight change.