Docketful of Poesy Page 11

  “I just can’t imagine what they would have wanted,” Roberta said. “Other than Todd dead.” She eyed me speculatively, and I knew she had not forgotten Todd’s striking resemblance to Peter. I was relieved she didn’t comment on it.

  “Is the production insured?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “You’re not thinking this is somehow tied to the film?” Mona questioned.

  “Not really, no.”

  “Although we have had a string of bad luck,” Mona added.

  Roberta didn’t answer. I followed her gaze to a small table in the corner where Miles and Tracy were sitting together, their heads very close. True, the room was crowded and noisy, but there was something in their body language that indicated more than audio difficulties.

  Mona noticed the focus of our attention and turned as well. “Why am I not surprised? She’s just the type he likes.”

  I almost said, “Female?” but managed to bite my tongue in time.

  Roberta smirked. “You mean she looks like you a few years back?”

  “A few years? Don’t bother being tactful, dear. It doesn’t suit you.” Mona met my eyes and grinned. “That’s right; Tracy could almost pass for my kid sister.”

  “Or daughter,” Todd offered helpfully—not noticing the little blink Mona gave at this unsolicited candor. He pointed a finger at each of us, counting us off apparently. “Who’s ready for another?”

  “Me,” Pammy said. “I’m getting plastered tonight. Don’t anyone try to talk me out of it.”

  “I’ve had enough,” I said. “I need to get some work done tonight.” Although, frankly, the last thing I was in the mood for was to go upstairs and start reading about how Laetitia Landon had thrown away a successful writing career for a man who didn’t want her—and might have ultimately murdered her.

  Todd rose unsteadily, making his way through the crowd to the bar. I excused myself and left the taproom.

  In the lobby I spotted Norton Edam, the actor playing the Gerry Salt/Ferdy Sweet character, checking in. He caught sight of me and waved me over. He had the dazed and haggard look that comes from a transatlantic flight with efficient cocktail service.

  “I heard there was a shooting on the set today.” He fumbled his wallet over to the girl behind the front desk, spilling out credit cards and photographs on the counter. “Was anyone hurt?”

  I shook my head. “Fortunately, no. How was your trip?”

  He described it in exhaustive detail, shuffling his cards and photos back into his wallet. The girl pushed the room key to him, and he turned away.

  “You missed this one,” I said, picking up the snapshot that had slipped between the edge of the desk and Norton’s sleeve. I showed him the picture of a young woman. He glanced at it and nearly snatched it out of my hand—which made me look at it a little more closely. I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was a picture of Tracy. She did seem to have a powerful effect on the gentlemen. I didn’t understand it myself.

  Starting up the stairs, I was surprised to find Norton at my side. At my questioning look he said, “What I really want now is about eight hours of lying flat on my back without some kid screaming his lungs out two rows behind me.”

  I shuddered in sympathy.

  “The girl at the desk told me the bathroom is down the hall from my room.”

  “That’s not unusual in these older hotels,” I said guiltily.

  “This country!” he said, and that was his last comment until I paused to let myself into my room, whereupon he muttered, “Good evening,” and went along on his way, suitcases banging against the dark wooden paneling in the narrow hall.

  Locking the door, I switched on the light. The room was pretty and cozy—and about as lonely as the planet Venus, which I could see twinkling between through the drapes. I moved over to the window, gazing out at the blue-black night.

  Not exactly the way I’d planned it when I’d decided to return to England and Innisdale. I sighed and moved over to the little writing table where I’d stacked my books, picking up my notes on Laetitia Landon and thumbing through them.

  At sixteen, Landon had first come to the attention of the reading public as the anonymous author of a poem called “The Michaelmas Daisy” in the popular Literary Gazette. More poems followed by the mysterious lady L.E.L., and the Gazette’s subscriber list grew by leaps and bounds. The public couldn’t get enough of her, and Landon was in the first flush of creative fever. Her output was tremendous. In addition to her weekly appearances in the Gazette, she published in reviews, annuals, and periodicals. She produced numerous volumes of her own poems—as well as several novels. By the age of only twenty she was famous—considered one of the premier poets of her day.

  At thirty-six she was dead.

  And now she was virtually forgotten. Two dismissive fictionalized biographies and an enormous body of work no one remembered were all that remained of L.E.L.’s passionate literary legacy. And sadly, her story was not unique. Most of her female contemporaries, hailed in their own day, had suffered the same fate.

  I thought of the stanza from “Lines of Life” written at the height of Landon’s popularity when she was twenty-seven:

  I think on that eternal fame,

  The sun of earthly gloom,

  Which makes the gloriousness of death

  The future of the tomb —

  Chapter Eleven

  “The show must go on!” Miles announced with ruthless cheer Wednesday morning.

  He strolled among the crowded tables of the dining room where most of his morose cast sat hunched over their breakfasts, wincing at Miles’s booming greeting, coffee and teacups clutched in trembling hands.

  The Kismet Production Company had made quite a night of it, and when I had fallen asleep sometime after midnight their voices and laughter were still filtering up through the floorboards of my room.

  Needless to say, no one was particularly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning—and one or two faces actually lost their color at the offer of kidneys and black pudding along with more recognizable breakfast fare.

  I drank my tea and absently spooned up my hazelnut yogurt, reading over the day’s shooting script. Today we were filming scenes with Todd, Mona, Tracy, and Norton. The writer and collector Aeneas Sweet had been entirely eliminated from the screenplay. Roberta had explained to me that Lady Ree’s character was actually a composite of Lady Vee/Venetia Brougham and Aeneas Sweet, which I supposed sort of explained what Mona as Lady Ree was doing in some of the final scenes of the script. It didn’t explain why she was apparently going to be taking part in a shoot-out, but I was beginning to realize that unless I was prepared to rewrite Walter Christie’s screenplay front-to-back, I was going to have to accept a fair bit of poetic license. To put it politely.

  Once again we were going to be shooting outdoors, and I reminded myself to grab a sweater before we left the inn. It was what the Irish called a soft morning, silvery with dew, flowers and grass glistening, and a gentle white mist rolling across the fields and meadows.

  “Chop-chop, people,” Pammy called, briefly poking her head in. “We’ve got a movie to make!”

  A few rude comments were addressed to the empty doorway.

  “Has anyone seen my flask?” Mona asked.

  This was greeted by amusement.

  “Do you think someone’s after your secret ginseng and juniper berry elixir?” Roberta inquired, surfacing from behind a several day’s old issue of Variety.

  “I don’t know how you can drink that crap,” Tracy offered. In deference to the drop in temperature she was wearing a long-sleeved cotton shirt that still left her flat, goose-pimpled tummy bare to the elements. She was wearing quite a lovely belly-button ring, and I sincerely hoped that Cordelia would not immediately want one of her own.

  “The body is a temple, my child,” Mona retorted breezily.

  “Thank God I’m an atheist,” Tracy said, reaching for her coffee.

  “Is Pammy keeping
you up-to-date? Does the script look okay?” Roberta leaned across to ask me.

  “Uh…yes,” I replied, reflecting that “okay” was really relative. We talked briefly about the day’s schedule, then I got up to fetch my sweater, nearly bumping into Norton on his way into the dining room.

  “When are we leaving for location?” he asked.

  I peeked at my wristwatch. “I think we’re leaving now,” I told him. “But if you ask Mrs. Zinn, I’m sure she’ll wrap something up you can eat on the drive.”

  He nodded and continued through the doorway. I headed along the corridor. Lost in my own thoughts I noticed too late that I was about to walk in on an argument between Miles and someone else in the anteroom off the lobby.

  “What exactly are you insinuating?” Miles was saying in a dangerous voice.

  “’s not like you ’aven’t ’eard it all before, mate.” Todd. I’d recognize those dropped aitches anywhere. Though that was the first time he’d used that insolent tone.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard it,” Miles said. “But not from someone who wants to remain part of any project I’m directing.”

  I stopped outside the anteroom. I was actually trying to think of another way upstairs, because I really didn’t walk into the middle of that scene. But Todd chuckled, and something in that laugh raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I found myself listening closely.

  “I’m not worried, mate. We both know who’s callin’ the shots. Or rather, we both know who isn’t callin’ the shots. And that would be you.”

  He was coming my way. I backed up quickly, stepped into the nearby alcove, and picked up the phone as though I were making a call. And because Todd did indeed walk into the hallway, I started dialing.

  He walked past me and nodded pleasantly. I nodded back. A couple of numbers later, Miles strode past me with a curt inclination of his head. I bobbed my head in acknowledgment—but inattentively. I had automatically dialed Peter’s number, and the phone was ringing.

  And ringing.

  Four rings. He didn’t pick it up, the machine did—and I hung up softly.

  *****

  To everyone’s relief the day’s shooting was uneventful.

  Somehow Roberta had wrangled permission to shoot in the old graveyard outside Innisdale, and it actually made for a wonderfully eerie location—although I felt they were spoiling that ambiance by staging a shoot-out between Lady Ree, Gerry Salt, Faith, and David.

  I watched Tracy and Todd darting from behind headstone to headstone exchanging shots with Mona and Norton—there was a great deal of running and jumping and shooting. I told myself that it was better than listening to the dialogue Walter had cooked up, but a morning of watching Tracy play Charlie’s Angels was wearing on my nerves.

  In fairness, though, she did run well—and she handled a gun like she meant business. Mona also displayed a casual and convincing familiarity with firearms. Todd, on the other hand, seemed uncomfortable brandishing weapons, and Norton dropped his pistol several times, resulting in Miles repeatedly having to yell, “Cut!”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, Edam?” he bawled finally. “Do you think you could manage to run from point A to point B without your pants falling down?”

  “Not a line of discussion I’d open if I were Miles,” Roberta, sitting next to me on a folding chair, commented lightly.

  “Is Miles really that bad?”

  Roberta’s smile was definitely strange. “Miles is really that good.” Meeting my stare she said, “Very like your own Mr. Fox.”

  I considered this unemotionally. “But Miles was married at one time?”

  “According to Mona. And I suppose she’d know. She and Miles were together a long time—considering Miles’s record with relationships. And they’ve managed to stay friends, which is even more rare. Especially considering everything that happened between them.”

  Naturally, I wanted to ask about what that everything was, but I had a feeling Roberta would close up if I showed too much interest. I said instead—taking a shot in the dark, “You’ve stayed friends.”

  “For the most part. It hasn’t always been easy.” She glanced at me. “At least I never tried to kill him.”

  My jaw dropped. “Who tried to kill him? Not Mona?”

  She laughed. “It was before she started on the path to spiritual enlightenment.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She tried to shoot him. With one of his own hunting rifles.” The lenses of Roberta’s glasses were glinting; I couldn’t read her eyes, but she was smiling.

  Late morning, the rain began to fall. It was one of those fleeting Lake District showers. One minute the sun was shining; the next, low clouds seemed to catch on the tree branches and tear open. The daffodils around the lake bent and bobbed beneath the wet breeze while the water grew dark and choppy. Filming halted while we broke for an early lunch supplied by the Hound and Harrier.

  We crowded into the trailers for sandwiches made of ham and pickle or cheddar and chutney, crisps, apples or grapes, and spice cake—all washed down with strong, hot tea. I’m not sure why, but the tea is better in England. The quality of the tea doesn’t matter or how you prepare it, it just tastes different over here.

  About forty-five minutes later the rain stopped and filming resumed, the moors and dales ringing with the sound of gunfire.

  An hour later the rain started again.

  “How the hell long is this going to keep up?” Miles asked me.

  “All year,” I said. And I wasn’t completely joking. After all, the Lakes are the wettest part of England, with something like eighty inches of annual rainfall. March is one of the drier months, but even so, rarely a day passes without some precipitation.

  Cast and crew grew restless waiting for this shower to pass, which it did—only to resume twenty minutes later. It began to feel like Mother Nature was giving us a gentle raspberry. Miles, Pammy, and Roberta held another of their conferences, and we were all finally excused for the day, packing into cars and vans and driving back to the village.

  Not wanting to spend another afternoon in the bar of the Hound and Harrier, I walked down to the library, stopping in to say hello to Roy Blade, the librarian. I found him typing energetically away on a post to the popular Annoyed Librarian blog.

  “Are you causing trouble again?” I said, poking my head in the door to his rabbit warren of an office.

  Blade looked up, his piratical countenance lightening. “Librarians are trouble,” he informed me. “Just ask any Conservative.”

  Despite the Oxford accent, Blade certainly looked like trouble—black leather, tattoos, and an eye patch. Most of the librarians I knew were more careful about their camouflage.

  “So you’re back then?” he remarked. “For good?”

  “Or evil,” I agreed. Nodding at the computer screen, I said, “Still rousing the rabble?”

  “We wouldn’t want them oversleeping,” he said. “Well, Fox must be pleased. Are you staying at Craddock House?”

  “The Hound and the Harrier,” I admitted. “Perhaps he’s not as pleased as you might think.”

  His smile was twisted. “Now you’re fishing, Ms. Hollister.”

  “I know, but they don’t seem to be biting.” I sighed. “Any gossip you’d care to share?”

  He treated me to the news that the coppers had arrested some local hellions for drinking and vandalism, that my dear friend Sally Smithwick had soundly trounced all comers in the local flower show, and that MP Angela Hornsby—whom he strongly disapproved of for a number of reasons I got to hear in detail—was planning to marry. Same old, same old.

  “And there were the two shoot-em-ups at Craddock House,” he added as an afterthought.

  “Oh, yes. I’d heard.”

  “Once upon a time this was a quiet little village. Then you came along.”

  “Ah, memories. Speaking of which,” I said, inexplicably cheered by this attack, “have you got Swaab’s new collection of Sara Coleridge’
s poems?”

  Blade assured me the library did indeed own the latest collection of Coleridge’s work. For many decades Sara Coleridge, Samuel Coleridge’s daughter, was chiefly famous for her work as her father’s editor and archivist. A sensitive and complex woman, Coleridge wrote and published fairy tales, essays, and poems for children. It was widely believed that her addiction to opium—and the legend of her father—prevented her from realizing her own potential as a poet. But when going through Sara Coleridge’s papers, Dr. Peter Swaab, a professor at University College, London, discovered one hundred twenty previously unknown poems in a bound volume Coleridge had called “The Red Book.” The poems dealt with everything from love to nature and religion, and elevated Coleridge’s status to that of minor poet and an important link between the Romantics and the Victorians.

  I left Blade typing to his Internet cronies and spent the rest of the quiet, rainy afternoon reading Coleridge’s work. Especially fascinating were the poems to the young Irish poet Aubrey de Vere following the death of her husband, Henry. Sara’s guilty struggle to reconcile her attraction and liking for the much younger de Vere made for fascinating reading, but I wondered what she’d have thought of her private reflections—poems she had chosen not to publish—being puzzled over by future academics and scholars.

  It was after teatime and during one of the infrequent pauses in the rain that I started back to the inn, stopping off at the old vicarage where I had formerly rented the Gardener’s Cottage, and spent a few pleasant minutes chatting with Sally Smithwick.

  Naturally Sally wanted me to see the prize-winning roses, so we stepped out into the damp garden for a short time. I admired the roses—and they were truly lovely: old-fashioned cabbage roses in a pale, sugary pink—and I stared at the burnt ruins of the Gardener’s Cottage.

  Catching my gaze, Sally said, “Will you be moving in with Peter?”

  “As soon as he feels things have settled down.” I hoped that was true.

  Sally was too polite to comment one way or the other. She reminded me that the battered Citroen that Lady Vee had loaned me the previous summer was still sitting in the stable. We walked down the long garden, with the primroses just coming into bloom, and ducked into the stable.