“Oh, Hermione, you’re not bothered in the least. I couldn’t have afforded to spend a penny on you for the next five years.”
“Mm, I confess the thought had occurred to me. And certainly I would have missed your, ah, most elegant presence in my humble, ah establishment.” Scrutton smirked.
“But then one has no difficulty placing the really rare items, does one? Mm?”
“Who outbid me? Do you know?”
She shook her head, once, her dewlaps flapping. “No one whose agent I recognized. I was seated behind you.
’Fraid I couldn’t see the bidder.”
“Anon was the bidder,” she informed her. “Represented by a young man named Blake Redfield.”
Scrutton’s eyebrows fluttered up and down rapidly.
“Ahh, Redfield. Mm, I say.” She turned away to fuss with the nearest shelf of books. “Redfield, eh? Indeed. Oh, yes.”
“Hermione, you’re toying with me”—the words came out of the back of her throat, a panther’s warning growl— “and I’ll have your artificially tanned hide for it.”
“That so?” The bookseller half turned, cocking a cantilevered eyebrow. “What’s it worth to you?”
“Lunch.” Sylvester said immediately.
“Not your local pub fare,” she warned.
“Wherever you choose. The Ritz, for God’s sake.”
“Done,” said Scrutton, rubbing her palms. “Mm.
Haven’t eaten since breakfast, at least.”
Somewhere between the butter lettuce and the prawns, encouraged by half a bottle of Moe¨t et Chandon, Scrutton revealed her suspicion that Redfield was representing none other than Vincent Darlington—at which Sylvester dropped her fork.
Scrutton, her eyebrows oscillating with alarm, gaped at her. In all the years she had known Sylvester she had never seen her like this: her beautiful face was darkening quite alarmingly, and Scrutton was not at all certain that she had not suffered a stroke. She glanced around, but to her relief no one in the airy dining room seemed to have noticed anything amiss, with the possible exception of a poised and anxious waiter.
Sylvester’s color improved. “What a surprise,” she whispered.
“Syl, dearest, I had no idea . . .”
“This is vendetta, of course. Never mind the language, never mind the period, sweet Vincent has not the least interest in literature. I doubt he could distinguish The Seven Pillars of Wisdom from Lady Chatterly’s Lover.”
“Hm, yes”—Scrutton’s cheek quivered, but she could not resist—”they are rather close in date . . .”
“Hermione,” Sylvester warned, fixing a cool eye upon her; chastened, Scrutton subsided. “Hermione, Vincent Darlington does not read. He did not buy that book because he knows its worth; he bought it to shame me, because I shamed him—in quite another arena.” Sylvester leaned back in her chair, dabbing at her lips with a heavy linen napkin.
“Really, my dear girl,” Scrutton murmured. “Understand perfectly.”
“No, not really, Hermione.” Sylvester said sharply. “But you mean well, I think. Therefore I am about to put my life, or at least my reputation, into your hands. If you ever need to blackmail me, remember this moment—the moment I swore I would revenge myself upon that worm Darlington.
If it costs me my fortune.”
“Mm, ah.” Scrutton sipped her champagne, then set it down carefully upon the linen. “Well, Syl, let us hope it doesn’t come to that.”
One ships an object worth a million and a half pounds discreetly, and with due regard for its physical well-being.
Fortunately The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had been printed in those long gone days when it was assumed as a matter of course that printed pages ought to last. Blake Redfield had only to place the book into a padded gray Styrene briefcase and find a shipper who could provide temperature-and humidity-controlled storage.
Lloyd’s register listed two suitable ships that would arrive at Port Hesperus within twenty-four hours of each other. Neither would get to Venus in much less than two months, but no one else would arrive sooner, and no other ships were scheduled for several more weeks; that was the nature of interplanetary travel. One of the two was a freighter, Star Queen, due to depart Earth orbit in three weeks. The other ship was a liner, Helios, scheduled to leave later on a faster crossing. Prudence suggested that Blake reserve space on both; the asterisk beside Star Queen’s name warned that the ship was undergoing repairs and had yet to be cleared for commerce by the Board of Space Control.
Blake was sealing the magnetic lock on the Styrene case when the door of Sotheby’s back room exploded with a loud bang.
A young woman was silhouetted against the brick hallway.
“Heavens, Blake, what have you been up to?” she inquired, waving a hand to dispel the acrid smoke.
“I’ve been up to a few grains of potassium chlorate and sulfur, actually. If you hadn’t been you, dear, this rather expensive object before me would have been whisked out of your sight and into the vault before you’d cleared the air in front of your cute nose.”
“Couldn’t you have used a little buzzer or something?
Did you have to destroy the doorknob?”
“I didn’t destroy the doorknob. More noise than punch.
Might have blistered the venerable paint. Regrets.”
The apple-cheeked young woman was modestly uniformed in a conservative metal skirt. She came to the desk and watched Blake lock the plastic case. “Didn’t you think it was too bad she lost the bidding? She had such good taste.”
“She?”
“She came up to you after the sale,” she said. “Very beautiful for someone her age. She asked you something that made you blush.”
“Blush? You have quite a vivid imagination.”
“You’re no good at pretending, Blake. Blame your Irish grandfather for your freckles.”
“Mrs. Sylvester is an attractive woman. . . .”
“She asked about you afterwards. I told her you were a genius.”
“I doubt she has any personal interest in me. And I certainly have no interest in her.”
“Oh? Do you have an interest in Vincent Darlington?”
“Oh yes, pure lust.” He laughed. “For his money.”
She leaned a mesh-covered hip against the back of his chair; he could feel her heat on his cheek. “Darlington’s an illiterate pig,” she announced. “He doesn’t deserve that thing.”
“ ‘ ’Tis a thing, devised by the enemy,’ “ he murmured, and he rose abruptly, moving away from her, to put the locked case into the vault. “Right.” He turned to face her across the cluttered yellow office. “Did you bring me the pamphlet?”
She smiled, her rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes signaling her frank interest. “I found a shelf full, but they’re still at my flat. Come home with me and I will introduce you to the secrets of the prophetae.”
He eyed her, a bit askance, then shrugged. “Sure.” After all, it was a subject that had long intrigued him.
VII
A discreet knocking at the door, repeated at intervals . . .
Sondra Sylvester came striding out of the bathroom, her blue silk nightgown clinging heavily to her long body. She unchained the door.
“Your tea, mu’m.”
“By the window, that will be fine.”
The uniformed young man picked his way through feminine litter and laid the heavy silver tray of tea things on the table. The windows of the spacious suite had a fine view of Hyde Park, but this morning they were heavily curtained against the light. Sylvester searched the dim room and spotted her velvet clutch purse on the floor beside a clothes-draped armchair. She found paper money inside and dug out a bill in time to thrust it into the young man’s hand.
“Thank you, mu’m.”
“You’ve been very good,” she said, slightly flustered.
She closed the door behind him. “God, how much did I give him?” she muttered. “I’m hardly awake.”
A rounded form stirred under the bedsheets. Nancybeth’s tousled dark hair and violet eyes peered from the sheets.
Sylvester watched as the rest of Nancybeth rose into view, graceful neck, slender shoulders, heavy breasts darkly nippled. “How becoming of you to wait until he left. And how novel.”
“What are you bitching about?” Nancybeth yawned, displaying perfect little teeth, a darting pink tongue.
Sylvester crossed to the videoplate on the wall and fiddled with the controls hidden in its carved and gilded frame. “You said you were awake. I asked you to turn on the news.”
“I went back to sleep.”
“You were into my purse again.”
Nancybeth glared at her with pale eyes that tended to cross when she was concentrating. “Syl, sometimes you act more like a mother . . .” She sprang from the bed and strode to the bathroom.
“Than like what?”
But Nancybeth ignored her, walking through the dressing room, leaving the door open, on into the shower stall.
Sylvester’s heart was thudding—God, that shelf, those majestic flanks, those vibrant calves. Part Italian, part Polynesian, she was a bronzed Galatea, sculpture made flesh.
Irritably Sylvester punched the controls of the video picture until the plastic mask of a BBC announcer appeared.
She set the volume just loud enough to hear the announcer talk about rising tensions in south central Asia as she went about picking clothes off the floor and hurling them onto the bed. From the bathroom came the hiss and dribble of the shower and Nancybeth’s husky, off-tune voice singing something torchy and unintelligible. Sylvester looked at the heavy silver teapot and the china cups with distaste. She went into the dressing room and pulled a bottle of Moe¨t et Chandon from the refrigerator under the counter. The videoplate mumbled words that caught her attention: “A secret unveiled: develops that the winning bid in yesterday’s spectacular auction at Sotheby’s . . .” Sylvester darted to the wall screen and boosted the volume. “. . . first-edition Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E Lawrence—the legendary Lawrence of Arabia—was placed by Mr. Vincent Darlington, director of the Hesperian Museum. Reached by radio-link, Mr. Darlington at first refused comment but later admitted that he had bought the extremely rare book on behalf of the Port Hesperus museum, an institution of which he is the proprietor —not, it might be said, an institution hitherto known for its collection of written works. In other news of the art world . . .”