Docketful of Poesy Page 13

  Sounding bored, she said, “I’m not talking about your book or why people back in the old days wrote poetry. I mean, why are you so interested in it?”

  And the weird thing is, for a moment I couldn’t think of a way to explain it to her. I was pretty sure she didn’t want a lecture on preservation of old culture versus fostering creation of new, and I knew I didn’t want to get into a rant about the subsidized subculture of modern poetry. I said finally, “That’s like asking why someone likes art or music. It’s interesting to me for many reasons. It’s beautiful. Language—just the words themselves. The richness and texture of them. We’ve lost that as a society. We communicate so…mechanically. So simplistically. The way we shy away from using adjectives or adverbs…”

  I thought she was probably sorry she’d asked, but she didn’t interrupt, and despite myself I warmed to my theme. “And it’s not just words. It’s how they’re used. The craft of saying something subtle and clever within the framework of rhythm and meter. The skill and discipline required to effectively use devices like rhyme, alliteration, consonance and dissonance. Poetry communicates in a way that nothing else does. Well, with the possible exception of song lyrics.”

  She continued to stare at me as though she couldn’t quite think what to file me under.

  “Do you write your own poetry?” Norton asked.

  “Yes, but it’s very bad,” I said.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” he said—to my surprise. “Art is art. Whether it’s painting or poetry or acting.”

  Guiltily, I reflected that I’d never really considered acting much of an art. I thought of it more like mimicry. Something a person might have a talent or aptitude for, but not really an art to be refined and polished. That was my own intellectual snobbery at work.

  “How long have you been in the business?” I asked them both.

  “I started out modeling,” Tracy said vaguely.

  “It’s in my blood,” Norton said. “My great-grandparents were in vaudeville. They were singers. Hope and Lester Springer. Their act was called Hope Springs Eternal.”

  Tracy laughed.

  “My grandparents, my parents: I guess my sister and I caught the showbiz bug from them.”

  “Is your sister an actress, too?” I asked.

  His face changed. “She was. She died years ago.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  He nodded.

  “Now I know who you are,” Tracy said. “You played that little kid on TV. That show about the witch who works as a housekeeper for the cop. And the oldest girl was your sister in real life.”

  “That’s right.”

  I knew the show Tracy was talking about—although in theory my brothers and I hadn’t been allowed to watch it. My mother had strong feelings about television sitcoms—let alone television sitcoms about women with magical powers and plastic breasts.

  “I loved that show,” I said, which was perfectly true. Norton smiled.

  And now I knew the sad story of what had happened to his sister. It was one of those Hollywood child star tragedies. A hugely successful youngster who wasn’t able to translate her preadolescent popularity into an adult career within the industry—and couldn’t be happy outside of it. I vaguely recalled that she had died of a drug overdose.

  Thinking of adolescents reminded me that I hadn’t seen Cordelia since Monday. I made a mental note to give her a call and arrange some kind of outing.

  “Looks like the rain is letting up,” Tracy said, and sure enough, the rain had stopped once more and watery sunlight was shining off the puddles and sparkling on the dripping leaves and funeral statuary.

  I spent the rest of Thursday afternoon watching Tracy, Norton, Mona, and Todd chase each other around the lake and the graveyard. White smoke drifted on the rainswept breeze, and the greenwoods rang with the echo of fake gunshots.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I’ve lost my flask again,” Mona sighed.

  “Subconscious, innit?” Todd inquired, setting an Irish coffee in front of her. “Your unconscious mind tellin’ you not to drink that wheatgrass swill.”

  Thursday evening we were crowded into the bar at the Hound and Harrier. I hadn’t spent so much time in a pub since college.

  “Swill?” Mona repeated thoughtfully. Then she picked up the cup and took a cautious sip. “Mmm. Who needs sleep anyway?”

  “Yummy. Though not as yummy as in the States,” Roberta remarked. “They do something different to them at home. Add brown sugar instead of white maybe?” Inferior to home the Irish coffee might be, but she was already on her third and we’d only settled in the bar forty-five minutes earlier.

  “You add a shot of Baileys,” Norton said, joining us. He squeezed in between Mona and Roberta and glanced around the bar. “No Tracy?”

  Mona shook her head.

  ”I’ll tell you ’ow real Irish coffee is made,” Todd said. “You add one shot of Bushmills and one teaspoon of brown sugar to a proper Irish coffee glass. Then you tilts the glass over a burner and roll it ’til the whisky starts to smoke. You straighten the glass and watch the whisky light, then you add the coffee and a dollop of heavy cream.”

  “And a shot of Baileys,” Norton said.

  Todd looked disgusted. “Nah, no Baileys, mate.”

  “And a sprinkle of cinnamon or chocolate on the whipped cream,” Roberta said.

  “No!” Todd shook his head. “None of that trash.”

  Todd and Norton began to argue about the merits of Baileys. I glanced at the doorway of the bar and spotted Cordelia. She caught sight of me waving, and wove her way through the tables.

  “How old is that child?” Mona inquired.

  “Old enough,” Todd said, and I gave him a look. He laughed and put his hands up as though trying to block my X-ray vision. “Joking, luv. I’m ’armless, I promise.”

  “If only that were true,” I remarked. “She’s not quite eighteen,” I said to Mona, still eyeing Todd. He grinned irrepressibly.

  “Older than Helen of Troy,” Mona remarked, which didn’t exactly settle my nerves.

  “Where’ve you been?” I asked as Cordelia dragged a chair over and dropped down in it. “I thought you were coming by the set yesterday?”

  She shuddered. “I thought I’d never get away! Auntie’s had me helping with preparations for the bloody church bazaar.” She combed back her blond mane with black-tipped fingers. “Two bloody days of sorting junk. Before I forget: you’re all invited to tea tomorrow.”

  The others expressed surprise and delight at the notion of formal tea at a genuine stately home with a real live Lady of the Realm. One would have thought the tour bus had just pulled up outside the Hound and Harrier.

  True, there was a time when I would have felt just the same. Not these days. Not when it came to Lady Vee anyway. “You’re kidding,” I said to Cordelia.

  She shook her head. “I think Auntie’s hoping someone will decide to make a film out of one of her books.” She looked across at Todd and winked.

  He gave me the sort of look you generally see in a grammar-school setting—usually accompanied by pointing fingers. I ignored him.

  Roberta graciously accepted the invitation of tea on behalf of the rest of us. Todd went to fetch Cordelia an Irish coffee minus the Irish, and the conversation flowed and eddied around us, as usual mostly centering on the day’s filming.

  Not looking at me, Cordelia said, “Grace, would you want to have lunch one day?”

  “Of course! I’d love to. We haven’t had a chance to talk since I got back.”

  She threw me a sideways look, and smiled. I smiled, too. Sometimes I forgot how young she really was. How it felt to be feeling your way through the rituals and routines of adulthood.

  I watched her flirting with Todd, inwardly shaking my head. When she excused herself to use the loo, Roberta gestured to me. I followed her out into the lobby anteroom.

  Roberta said, “That girl. Cordelia. She’s a student at RADA?”r />
  “She will be when she’s old enough—assuming she stays interested in the idea of acting. Right now she’s at the Arts Educational School.”

  “But that’s an acting school, right? Can she act?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Roberta bit her lip. “When you introduced her the other day you said she was the cousin of Jacinda?”

  “Who?”

  She looked a little impatient. “Jacinda Croydon. Your Allegra Brougham from the book.”

  Uneasily, I admitted Cordelia and Allegra were second cousins.

  “Do you think she might be interested in playing the role of Jacinda?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, although I did—only too well. “You could talk it over with Lady Vee tomorrow. She’s sort of Cordelia’s guardian.” Not that Lady Vee would object to any project that kept Cordelia out from underfoot. My own reluctance toward the idea surprised me. In some ways it would be excellent hands-on experience for Cordelia, and we’d get to spend a little time together—and while she occasionally drove me nuts, I was very fond of her.

  But there was something about the production of this film that made me uneasy. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Nothing had happened, really, other than Walter Christie’s death. Well, there had been the attack by gunmen, but that was apparently a case of mistaken identity. And I had every reason to believe that Walter’s death had been an accident. An accident that had happened overseas, so there was small reason to think there was any danger to any of us.

  And yet…with each day that passed I grew more certain that there was something…strange. Something bizarrely amateur and off-kilter about this whole setup. Just the fact that Roberta was suggesting on the spur of the moment that we replace a professional actress with an untrained, unauditioned student...

  I said, “Please don’t say anything to Cordelia until you’ve spoken to her great-aunt.”

  “Oh, no,” Roberta said quickly. “I realize there are certain protocols here.”

  Here? As though getting the consent of a minor’s legal guardian was the arcane custom of this tiny foreign land?

  We went back inside the bar. Cordelia had returned to the table—and changed her seat for one beside Todd. She giggled at my expression. I shook my head. Roberta took her seat on the other side of the table next to Cordelia.

  More Irish coffees were ordered. I’d never seen people put Irish coffee away like this crowd. Apparently they were under the impression that it was a traditional British pub beverage—or maybe it was just that they couldn’t bear to be without coffee in some form for more than a few minutes at a time.

  Miles arrived with Tracy, and Norton immediately took himself off. The bar grew noisier and more crowded. I thought about going upstairs and getting some work done. Peter had a dinner with his colleagues from the British Antique Dealers’ Association and didn’t plan on being home ’til quite late, so I was on my own for the evening.

  And then my thoughts were interrupted as Cordelia began to emit squeals of excitement. I looked across the table and Roberta gave me a sheepish smile. “Sorry!” she mouthed, the smoky lenses of her glasses winking in the mellow light. “It just…came up.”

  For a moment I was so angry with her I wasn’t sure I could conceal it. I only tried because Cordelia was absolutely thrilled, for once completely abandoning that blasé pose.

  “Grace, did you hear that? I’m going to be in this film!”

  “I heard,” I said mildly.

  “My first movie!”

  And on and on. A round of celebratory Irish coffee was ordered and drunk. Pammy called it a night. Miles and Tracy disappeared. Mona excused herself and went upstairs.

  There was no hope of my getting away to my room because I wasn’t about to leave Cordelia on her own with the remaining piranha.

  But finally Todd excused himself to make some transatlantic phone calls, and Cordelia glanced at her watch and exclaimed that she had to get home. She grabbed her purse—a cloth bag with a silk-screen photo of Humphrey Bogart and Laurel Bacall—and took off into the night leaving me alone at the table with Roberta.

  Roberta smiled. “Now, Grace, before you say anything —”

  She obviously didn’t know me well if she thought such a thing was even a possibility. I said, “I can’t for the life of me think why you would do something so irresponsible. You don’t even know whether she can act her way out of a paper bag.”

  “What does it matter?”

  That threw me for a second. “What do you mean, what does it matter? Even if her aunt gives her permission, you don’t know whether Cordelia can act —” I stopped short. “Is this film actually going to be completed?”

  Roberta’s expression was difficult to read. “Of course it is.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth or not, but once the suspicion had occurred to me, I couldn’t quite shake it.

  “How many films have you produced?”

  “What does that have to do with anything? How many scripts have you written? Who are you to question my qualifications?”

  I didn’t bother arguing with her. “How many films has Kismet produced?”

  “Oh for —! Look it up,” Roberta said. She rose. “I don’t have time for this. We’ve both got to be up at the crack of dawn.” She turned away from the table, then stopped and faced me. “Look, Grace. I apologize for telling the kid before I talked to her aunt. It just came up. She asked if we were hiring any extras. It seemed natural to mention it to her. There’s no point talking to her aunt if she wasn’t interested in the part, right?”

  I suppose it made sense from Roberta’s standpoint. Seeing my hesitation, she said, “For God’s sake, let’s not you and me argue. This project is tough enough without that. I made a mistake. It won’t happen again. We’ll treat the kid with—er—kid gloves, I promise.”

  “All right,” I said. “I don’t want to argue either.”

  “I think it’s all this caffeine we’re drinking,” Roberta offered. Her smile was wry. “They put something different in it here.”

  I nodded politely. I couldn’t shake the peculiar feeling, as I watched her on her way out of the bar, that beneath the anger—and then the sudden about-face and apology—Roberta was frightened.

  I awoke to find the lights on. I was lying in bed, my copy of Letty Landon lying open on my chest. I blinked up at the dark beams, listening, trying to remember what woke me.

  The muted bang of a closing door.

  Not my own door. Not next door either. Not…close by. Perhaps the sound came from downstairs?

  I glanced at the clock. Three-fifteen. I smothered a yawn. All was quiet—the heavy silence of late night. Not so much as a floorboard squeaked.

  The last thing I remembered, I’d been reading about Landon’s broken engagement to John Forster, the noted Dickens biographer. Landon’s enormous popularity, combined with her casual friendships with men—she had several male mentors—made her a target for jealous and slanderous tongues. And not all of them female. Her engagement to the much younger Forster had been the first casualty.

  I closed the book, set it on the night table, and turned out the lamp. Light from the lamppost in front of the inn cast a golden fan against the wall. I watched it quiver gently with the draft stirring the draperies.

  As often happens, once jarred awake, I couldn’t relax enough to fall back to sleep. I wondered how Peter’s BADA dinner had gone, and whether he was home and in bed by now. I wondered again about that funny feeling I’d had about Roberta. And I wondered about the timing of that stolen car bearing down on Peter, Walter Christie, and I as we happened to be standing on Highland Avenue.

  It had been so close. Even another second would have meant the difference between life and death.

  I tossed around in the blankets, fluffed the pillows, then rose and went to pull the drapes closed all the way.

  For a moment I lingered at the window gazing down at the cars in the car park below. Frost gilded the
grass and the roofs of the vehicles. All except one. The silver rental car that Tracy had been driving the night before. There was no frost on its roof.

  Interesting. Had the door I wasn’t sure I’d heard closing actually been the car-park entrance to the inn?

  Well, if Tracy had hoped to pay a surprise visit to Peter, tonight the surprise would have been on her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Chocolate chip scones,” I said. “If I didn’t love you before, I do now.”

  “I knew the secret lay somewhere near the top of the food pyramid,” Peter handed me a cup of tea.

  Friday morning found me sitting in the window seat of Craddock House watching the Kismet Productions cast and crew slowly assembling outside Rogue’s Gallery.

  “I’m supposed to ask you again whether you’ll consider letting us film inside Rogue’s Gallery,” I said.

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I’m not. They are. I promised I’d ask.”

  He was shaking his head.

  I said, “It’s not necessarily a bad thing—look at the other day. The film crew’s presence kept those goons from going after you—or at least, their mistaking Todd for you, did.”

  He smelled of aftershave and freshly laundered cotton as he stood there buttoning his shirt. His eyes were thoughtful. “Did your pet plod manage to bring in the Februarys?”

  “I didn’t hear from Brian yesterday, so I’m guessing no. And why do you both refer to each other as ‘mine’? I’m not in the slave trade.”

  “Bit touchy this morning, are we?”

  I sniffed. “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

  “No?” He picked up my scone, took a bite, and put it back on my plate. “That’s two of us.”