The Five Bells and Bladebone (5 page)

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 ever 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.

And the Sayers character was without conscience.

If one could be said to lack something in abundance, Diane Demorney’s lack of conscience was scandalous.

At least, she hoped so.

“R
ECOVERED COMPLETELY
, Alice,” said Lavinia Vine in answer to Miss Alice Broadstairs. The question was in regard to the health, not of Lavinia, but of her Blue Moon rosebush, which had been drooping by Lavinia’s door for days. “But isn’t that black spot I see?”

Miss Alice Broadstairs, games mistress of Sidbury School for Girls, looked shocked. “Not on
my
tea roses, I assure you!” In her huge sunhat, she resumed her snipping.

“I mean there and there,” said Lavinia smugly, pointing at a coral tea rose with the small antique spyglass she always carried in her pocket when she went for her walk past Miss Broadstairs’s gate.

 • • • 

Miss Broadstairs and Miss Vine had ridden every metaphorical horse in an attempt to beat each other to the ribbon, medal, and cup at the Sidbury flower show. In odd years, Miss Broadstairs won, in even, Lavinia Vine. And of course at the flower show each year they had gritted their teeth and shaken hands (both sun-brown and dry and with a trickle of liver spots) harder and harder across the years until Melrose was sure he had heard the sound of small bones breaking.

 • • • 

Having sighted Miss Broadstairs and Miss Vine, Melrose Plant was telling Richard Jury all of this as they walked slowly down Shoe Lane, the last little path curling off from the green and the duck pond. They were enjoying the sublimity of a fine spring morning, drenched in the scent of hundreds of roses — tea, musk, perpetual; bedding, climbing, hedging; claret, crimson, lavender, coral, yellow; climbers cascading down brick walls and climbing up them; floribunda hedging the walk.

The dogs and cats they had passed were all sprawled in various states of drunken delight, the effect of the roses, the sun, the glittering air, as if Melrose’s old dog Mindy were back there at Ardry End, beaming out signals to
sleep, sleep, sleep
. Miss Crisp’s Jack Russell, which usually took its naps on a weathered chair outside her secondhand furniture shop, had struck out on its own from the High Street, looking for action round the duck pond. But it was now collapsed by the small stone pillar atop which sat Miss Broadstair’s oafish gray cat, itself too lazy to do anything other than lie with its face against the warm stone, its paws dropped down the pillar. All dreaming of roses.

“Good morning, Miss Broadstairs, Miss Vine,” said Melrose.

The two rose-enthusiasts turned their deadly frowns on him, and then realized they were not looking at each other. They smiled brightly as Melrose introduced them to Jury, who commented on the marvel of the Broadstairs garden to the displeasure of Lavinia, who immediately invited the superintendent to take tea with her in
her
garden.

Jury thanked her, and then remarked on the several roses Miss Broadstairs had cut that now lay in her woven basket.

“
Souvenier d’un Ami,
” said Miss Broadstairs, proudly, holding out a glowing copper-colored rose.

Lavinia looked at them with disdain. “Coals to Newcastle, if you sent those to Watermeadows,” said Lavinia, immediately
shifting the subject to her own Blue Moon rosebush, and a lengthy discourse on aphids.

Plant flicked a crimson petal from his shoe with the cosher he had taken to carrying about and wished them a good morning, adding a good-bye for Desperado, the gray cat, still with his nose mashed on the stone, and still sleeping.

“That’s an appropriate name,” said Jury, yawning out the last word.

“
Desperado
is just another specie of rose.” They had turned the corner and were nearing the tiny village park (if one bench beneath a willow and a pond could be called that). It lay lush and green under the eye of the Church of St. Rules, situated on a rise of ground behind Betty Ball’s bakery. The ducks were motionless as decoys, wings folded, hemmed in by sleep.

Melrose yawned and checked his watch. “In another moment you’ll find me on the pavement with Miss Crisp’s terrier. The pub’s not open yet.” Melrose thought for a moment. “Speaking of falling asleep, why not get your obligatory visit to Agatha over with?”

 • • • 

Plague Alley lay at the other end of the High Street, a twisting little lane among a jumble of little lanes that spread off, vinelike, from the Sidbury Road. Cubes of white-daubed and dark-windowed cottages seemed to have landed among these narrow paths like tossed dice, with no particular plan or scheme to their arrangement. If Long Piddleton could be said to have social strata, this particular stratum was somewhere in the middle of the ladder, although Agatha was constantly upping it a rung or two.

Indeed, the only one who seemed concerned with Long Piddleton’s high and low society was Agatha herself. The lines she drew were constantly changing and shifting as she went about laying them out like someone making an ordnance map. Her line of demarcation was the Piddle
River. When Diane Demorney, and then Theo Wrenn Brown, had come to the village, she was actually less concerned with the contents of the removal vans than with deciding whether they were on the right or the wrong side of the river. Since the Piddle River was an extraordinarily egalitarian body of water that narrowed in some spots to a trickle, had a way of actually stopping midstream and then springing up again virtually at one’s feet, and another way of turning itself to mud and marsh (near Agatha’s cottage), she had her work cut out for her. Which was, of course, the way Agatha liked her work. Her study of the ebb and flow of the Piddle added nothing to her knowledge of its vegetable or marine life, but did assist her in putting people in their social places. Since the river disappeared after it shot the rapids under the humpbacked bridge, that more or less left the shopowners along the High Street out of the social swim. It also had an annoying way of twining in and around the Withersby enclave (of which Mrs. Withersby was materfamilias), all of whom lived in a little row of derelict cottages several hundred feet to the rear of Miss Crisp’s secondhand shop and Jurvis, the butcher’s. These were once almshouses (and still were, if one considered the principal employment of the inhabitants) with just the sort of mild historical interest that moneyed tourists loved to get their hands on and sink the kind of cash into that would have renovated Manderley.

Thus, Lady Ardry, fifteen minutes after her nephew’s and the superintendent’s arrival in her front parlor, was filling him in quick stroke by quick stroke on the new inhabitants of Long Piddleton, while Melrose, putting on his gold-rimmed spectacles, was scrutinizing the eclectic furnishings of the cottage. He came here only on duty visits — such as the one today — or whenever some small, valued bit of his personal junk had gone missing. There was such an overflow of bits and bobs that any little thing from Ardry End could have gone missing for decades. She
was living, Melrose had often told her, in a time capsule.