Afterward, I could have dined out on the story that Isabella Veryan, grande dame of the British crime novel, had uttered a vulgarity. After all, one doesn’t expect such language from the woman who is one of the world’s most revered mystery writers. Though on occasion one of her characters has used such a word, these instances are all the more shocking for their infrequency—something Dexter Harbaugh might consider.
With remarkable composure Miss Veryan faced Giles and me. “I do beg your pardon,” she said, her voice frosty.
“But of course, Miss Veryan,” I said in my smoothest tones, before she could launch into an explanation or a further apology. “What a pleasure it is to meet you! I’m a great admirer of your work, and I have been looking forward to telling you, in person, how many hours of pleasure your books have given me.”
“Thank you,” she said, the frost melting noticeably. “One never tires of hearing such words. But I fear you have the advantage of me.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I should have introduced myself properly. Simon Kirby-Jones, historian, at your service, Miss Veryan. And may I present my assistant, Giles Blitherington?”
Giles clasped the proffered hand and smiled with every ounce of his considerable charm as he murmured a greeting. She thawed even further.
Beside her, her diminutive companion was growing restive. Miss Veryan collected herself and released Giles’s hand. I’d have to tease him later about his latest conquest.
“George Austen-Hare,” said Miss Veryan’s companion, his voice booming out. “How d’ye do?” He shook hands in turn with Giles and me.
“Again, it’s a great pleasure, sir,” I said, gazing down into his eyes. “I have spent many an hour visiting one exotic locale after another in your company. Your books have an incredible sense of place.” Giles and I were batting a thousand in the charm department this afternoon. Austen-Hare beamed as widely as Miss Veryan had done, and I noted with amusement that he couldn’t resist casting her a triumphant glance.
They made an odd couple: she, tall and thin; he, short and chubby. He could have gotten steady work as a garden gnome if he ever got desperate, but a string of best-selling novels had made that unlikely. Under the name of Victoria Whitney-Stewart he wrote tales of romance and intrigue set all over the world. In his books intrepid young women, seeking their place in the world, encountered danger at every turn but somehow managed to survive, and in the end walked off into the sunset of Happily Ever After with a handsome man. Austen-Hare had only recently admitted to the pseudonym, and the news that a former London postman had penned these books had been a nine-days’ wonder in the literary world. His sales had shot up even further. Nina Yaknova, his agent and mine, had no doubt been delighted that her publicity campaign had paid off so handsomely.
“Delighted,” said Austen-Hare, his voice gruff with pleasure. He all but preened in front of us. “Great fun, writing those books, don’t ye know.”
“And they’re even more fun to read,” I assured him, and I swear his chest puffed up even further.
“Kirby-Jones,” Miss Veryan said in a reflective tone, examining me as one might a specimen under a microscope. “Ah, yes, that marvelous biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine. You write history, Dr. Kirby-Jones, as entertainingly as one writes fiction. Quite a knack you have.”
Now it was my turn to preen a bit. I’m not in the least immune to flattery, especially coming from so august a source. “Thank you, Miss Veryan. I’m delighted to know that you’ve read my work.”
“Tedious woman,” Austen-Hare sniffed, and I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to Miss Veryan or that long-dead queen. Either way, it was rude.
“I beg your pardon,” I said, my tone stiff with umbrage.
“Coming our way,” Austen-Hare muttered. “Down the hall.”
We turned as one, and approaching us from the other end of the hall, jerking along like a stork with sore feet, came a vision in iridescent silk. Her parti-colored dress dazzled our eyes, and a wave of cloying, overly sweet perfume reached us several feet ahead of the woman herself. She wormed her way in between Miss Veryan and Austen-Hare and stopped, beaming at each of us in turn. Not so tall as Miss Veryan, she yet loomed over Austen-Hare, on whom her gaze came to rest adoringly. “How lovely to find you all here—especially you, Mr. Austen-Hare. You are such an inspiration to us all, you know.”
Her voice, textbook nasal, had ambitions of Oxbridge, carefully layered over a bedrock of broad Yorkshire. The combination was disconcerting, and Miss Veryan winced.
“Norah, what a pleasure,” Austen-Hare said with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “Should have figured you’d be here. You always are.”
Giles and I waited for someone to do the polite thing, but Miss Veryan seemed overcome and had stepped away, while Austen-Hare continued to gaze balefully at the newcomer.
Suppressing a sigh, I stuck out my hand. “How do you do? I’m Simon Kirby-Jones, and this is Giles Blitherington.”
She wrenched her attention away from Austen-Hare and focused on me. “Norah Tattersall,” she said, grasping my hand in a firm grip. “Miss Norah Tattersall. Very pleased to make your acquaintance, I’m sure.” She batted her eyelashes at Giles. “And what do you write?”
I explained my presence at the conference, and Giles confessed, modestly for him, to being my assistant.
“I’m sure your lecture will be terribly interesting, Mr. Kirby-Jones,” Norah Tattersall said, beaming at me. “Dear Lady Hermione never asks anyone who isn’t absolutely top drawer. Perhaps you shall inspire me to try my hand at historical fiction. Deciding on a period is such a trial, though. There are so many fascinating times in history that one could explore, and I’m rather afraid I should have a hard time settling on just the right one.”
Miss Veryan suppressed a sound suspiciously like a snort, while Austen-Hare coughed. “That can indeed be a trial, Miss Tattersall,” I said.
“How is your novel these days, Norah?” Miss Veryan asked, her tone sugary sweet “Have you finished the first draft yet?” Without giving Miss Tattersall time to answer, Miss Veryan turned to me. “Dear Norah is such a perfectionist, Dr. Kirby-Jones. She’s been working on her crime novel for the past ten years or so, haven’t you, Norah, dear? And she’s so determined to get everything just right. I quite admire your fortitude.”
The sarcasm in Miss Veryan’s tone would have shriveled me, but Norah Tattersall appeared proof against it. “One learns so many things at these conferences, doesn’t one? I find myself looking back over what I’ve done, in the light of the wisdom of writers more experienced than I, and I can’t help but want to go back and fix things. I shall finish it, one of these days.”
“I’m sure we all look forward to that day, Norah,” Miss Veryan said. “If, indeed, such a day ever comes."
“If I should decide to write a historical novel,” Miss Tattersall said, facing Miss Veryan with a sweet smile, “perhaps I’ll write about England before the First World War. I’m sure, Dame Isabella, that you’d be happy to tell me what it was like back then, wouldn’t you?” Turning away from the outraged look on Miss Veryan’s face, Miss Tattersall addressed me. “After all, Mr. Kirby-Jones, isn’t it best, when researching such a period, to talk to those who have lived through it?”
I had to admire the cool effrontery of Miss Tattersall’s insult. Miss Veryan had been born nearly a decade after the end of that particular war, which fact Miss Tattersall no doubt knew very well. But how could I respond, with any tact, to such a question?
Miss Tattersall saved me the necessity of such an impossible task. “I do believe Lady Hermione is expecting us downstairs,” she said, tucking her hand into the crook of Austen-Hare’s arm and commencing to drag him toward the stairs. “We must go and greet the others.”
I offered my arm to Miss Veryan and pretended not to see the look of hatred she aimed at Miss Tattersall’s retreating back. I figured I’d best hold on to her, to keep her from pushing the younger woman down the stairs in view of us all. Being a witness at the ensuing trial would be so tedious.
“How unutterably common,” Miss Veryan commented, sotto voce, as she placed her hand lightly upon my arm. “But then, what more can one expect of the daughter of a man who made a fortune manufacturing toilet brushes?”
I recalled having read somewhere that Miss Veryan’s father had been the younger son of a duke.
As we descended the stairs, Giles trailing dutifully behind us, I kept Miss Veryan distracted by babbling on and on about one of her most famous novels, A Doubtful Joy, one of my all-time favorite crime novels. By the time we joined the others in the drawing room, Miss Veryan was practically purring, having told me twice how much she appreciated my astute analysis of her work. A little charm works wonders, all the more so when it’s based on sincere feelings.
Lady Hermione was holding court amidst a small crowd of milling conference-goers. George Austen-Hare had, none too gracefully, wiggled loose from Norah Tattersall’s tight grasp and gone off to accost several young women who had gathered together on one side of the room. Miss Tattersall, thus abandoned, cast about for a moment but quickly latched on to someone she evidently recognized.
Lady Hermione hailed us from across the room, and her voice, as usual, boomed out over the noise generated by the twenty or so people in the room with her. “Isabella, my dear! I see you’ve met Dr. Kirby-Jones and his assistant.” She motioned with her left hand while her right kept a tight grasp on the arm of her companion, a handsome man in his late twenties. “Do let me introduce you to another guest who’s here for his first visit with us.”
Our little threesome halted before Lady Hermione and her companion, whose identity I had already guessed. Ashford Dunn, Nina’s newest client, the new blazing star of the legal thriller genre, stood appraising us with a cool gaze. I could see at a glance why Nina had signed him. He had the chiseled good looks of the proverbial matinee idol, and from his stance, he also possessed the cockiness to go with them. He couldn’t write worth a damn, but when had that ever stopped someone from becoming a bestseller? Image these days seemed much more important than content, and Dunn had an image that could sell, and sell big. Nina was no fool.
Lady Hermione introduced us with the air of a general reviewing her troops, and I gave Dunn’s hand a quick shake. He couldn’t resist trying to turn it into a power contest, the silly man, and I exerted just enough pressure to make him wince. To him I might look a bit on the effete side, but then, he had no idea what I really was. To him I looked human. To me he looked intelligent.
After a startled, slightly resentful glance at me, he passed on to Giles. As he shook Giles’s hand and acknowledged his rather cool greeting, Dunn let his eyes wander back and forth between Giles and me, and I could see in his eyes that he had decided that we had something more than an employer-employee relationship. His lip curled slightly as he turned away to fawn over Miss Veryan, dismissing Giles and me as of no importance whatsoever.
“I’ve read all your books several times, Miss Veryan,” Dunn said, his voice silky, the mid-western flat tones very pronounced. “I can say without exaggerating that you’ve been a big influence on my own writing. For example, in my first book, Presumed Guilty, I set my murder during a production of Hamlet, like the brilliant way you did the same thing in The Skull Beneath the Skin. ”
Giles laughed aloud before he could stop himself, and I almost did the same thing. The look on Miss Veryan’s face would have frozen boiling water, but Dunn nattered on, totally oblivious. He was too caught up in regaling us with the ingenious way he had used the plot of a Shakespearean play in his novel to pay attention to Giles’s open mirth at his expense.
Miss Veryan, after a few moments of outraged silence, cut in on his smug blather. “If you’re going to try to suck up to someone, young man, you might at least make the effort to do so in an intelligent manner.” With that, she turned and swept off, leaving an open-mouthed Dunn in her wake. Lady Hermione cast a glare at her young guest as she went after Miss Veryan, leaving a bewildered Dunn to my tender mercies.
“What the hell did I say to make the old biddy so angry?” Dunn asked, his face twisted in a grimace of distaste.
“Miss Veryan didn’t write The Skull Beneath the Skin,” I informed him, trying not to smirk as his eyes grew wide with horror. “P. D. James did. And wasn’t the play Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi?”
“Damn!” Dunn said, adding several rather colorful vulgarities under his breath. “I can’t tell those old women apart. All their books are the same. Page after page after page of some detective brooding about life and wondering why the vicar forgot to put the dog out. I could never make it all the way through a single one of those books.”
“No one to help you with the big words?” Giles said, his tone oozing mock sympathy.
In a nasty tone, Dunn suggested that Giles do something physically impossible to accomplish—unless one is a freak of nature, that is—then stalked off.
“How utterly charming,” Giles said, not in the least bothered by Dunn’s behavior.
“You missed your chance to make a handsome new friend,” I said, smiling. “And here I thought he’d be just your type.”
He rolled his eyes at me. “You’re not going to foist me off on a prat like that, Simon. Never fear.”
“One can always hope,” I said. He rewarded me with a raised eyebrow.
Before the discussion could degenerate any further, Lady Hermione once again hailed me.
I turned to see her approaching with an attractive young woman in tow. “Let me introduce you,” Lady Hermione boomed, “to the final member of our staff for this week. Dr. Kirby-Jones, this is Dorinda Darlington, the mystery writer. Dorinda, my dear, Simon Kirby-Jones, our historical expert, and his assistant, Giles Blitherington.”
My senses went on high alert at hearing that name. Here was the impostor, in the too, too-solid flesh. Would she exude any guilt or nervousness at meeting me, whose identity she had appropriated?