By breakfast time on Saturday, the gloves were starting to come off.
As St. Just descended to the Orangery, anticipating a vast Scottish breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, black pudding, tomatoes, and mushrooms, he thought of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had declared that all epicures would choose to breakfast in Scotland. Life was probably happier, thought St. Just, before we knew the calorie and cholesterol counts for everything.
He carried with him a copy of that day's Edinburgh Herald. Yesterday's conference was featured prominently in the Life section.
Magretta Sincock, bellowing his name, waved him over to her table.
"You saw it then?" She snapped a napkin into her lap. "That cheeky little creep."
"What, in the paper? I haven't read it yet," said St. Just. "Is anything wrong?"
"Wrong? Wrong!" said Magretta, her voice throbbing with emotion. She fairly grabbed the paper out of St. Just's hands and vigorously shook it open at the fold, like a farmer wrestling a bit onto a stubborn horse.
"First the little pillock gives a synopsis of my latest book that reveals who the killer is." Magretta scanned the page columns until she found the relevant paragraph. "Here it is: 'Since the most inattentive reader will be able to guess it, anyway, I shall save you the trouble of reading this tedious rehash of the plot of her 1984 Mystic Murder in the Mirror.' Of all the bloody nerve."
St. Just looked to where she pointed, her finger trembling with outraged indignation.
"I say, Ms. Sincock, that is a rum deal. Quentin didn't directly reveal the killer by name, though-there's that to be grateful for, I suppose. Anyway, I'm sure your new book is completely different from any of the older ones."
A look crossed Magretta's face so fleetingly he might have missed it, but it told him she had indeed recycled an old, successful plot, quite possibly unaware she had done so. That possibility was the bete noire of any prolific writer who had been at the game a number of years, he supposed, and Magretta must have been churning them out for decades. However-and worse, from Magretta's point of view-Quentin Swope had gone on in his article to again sing the praises of "the enchanting Kimberlee Kalder."
"He didn't even mention he was going to interview her," sniffed Magretta.
"In all fairness, would you have expected him to mention it?" asked St. Just.
Magretta's look said all that needed to be said about her expectations. She sighed theatrically.
When St. Just later read the review more closely, he wondered what Magretta had done to the man to provoke such a response. It was even worse than the bits Magretta had been able to bring herself to read aloud. Swope had indulged himself in a lengthy harangue about the dying mystery market, a setup for subsequent paragraphs that cast Kimberlee Kalder in the role of publishing's darling, one who had come up with a "bright, fresh slant that threw open the mullioned doors and windows and let some much-needed air into the cloying atmosphere of the stately home murder, not to mention the tedious predictability of the woman-in-jeopardy novels of Magretta Sincock."
St. Just looked across the room to Kimberlee Kalder, that darling of publishing. She wore a low-cut blouse in her signature pink, this time with a white skirt so tight he could practically read the fabric care instructions through the material. At one point, Lord Easterbrook came over to offer obeisance. Kimberlee, nodding her elegant, narrow head, again seemed to take this as her due.
St. Just watched, thinking thoughts about absolute power and corruption.
A tour of Edinburgh Castle had been scheduled for that afternoon, mainly for the bored spouses of conference attendees. The writers quickly dubbed it the Desperate Spouses Tour. Nonetheless, during an endless session on "Where Have All the Profreaders (sic) Gone?" Portia had decided to sign on, and at the appointed hour she boarded the waiting coach.
She called Mrs. Elksworthy over as she came down the aisle, indicating the free seat next to her. Ninette was already seated opposite, fixing her makeup. It seemed many had the same plan of escape. Of the people from the castle, only Edith Brackett, technically a spouse, was not on the spouses' tour. St. Just also was missing, Portia noticed. Jay Fforde, walking down the aisle with Kimberlee, loudly informed the coach in general that he had had to get away from "those lunatics, springing at me from every corner"-one unpublished author, it seemed, had literally followed him into the men's room, waving a manuscript.
" And, it was a female author."
Mrs. Elksworthy, waiting until Jay and Kimberlee were safely past, asked Portia, "How old do you think Kimberlee Kalder is?"
"I'm never good with ages," said Portia, "especially when it's someone younger." She took her program from her purse and looked up Kimberlee's biography under "K."
"She can't be more than twenty-seven or -eight. It says here she wrote a column for the Sheffield Bugle before the column was picked up by the City-Central. I remember reading the City-Central column-a bad habit, like chewing gum. Anyway, somehow that led to a job with Belle de Jour magazine. It was there she began writing a book. She denies Latte is a roman a clef, but I don't know whom she thinks she's kidding. The rest, as they say, is history."
"Indeed," murmured Mrs. Elksworthy. "To be the golden girl. I wonder, though… is it a blessing or a curse?"
"I suppose I'd like to try it for a week and find out."
Flipping through the program, Portia next happened upon the biography of Magretta, accompanied by a photo easily twenty-five years out of date.
"This is interesting," she said. "Magretta worked for the Sheffield Bugle at the start of her career, the same as Kimberlee."
"Kimberlee must have come along years later, though," said Mrs. Elksworthy.
"Hmm."
Portia had stopped by the booksellers' stalls that morning and bought several books; one was by Magretta Sincock. She'd stood in line to have it signed, in a show of solidarity against the Quentin Swope interview. As the coach began its climb up Castle Hill, she flipped past Magretta's scrawling black signature to the last chapter of the book. After a few minutes, she dropped it in her lap. The secretary had committed the murder, and Portia realized Quentin was right-the secretary had been the culprit in an earlier Magretta book. Could she have deliberately set out to reproduce the success?
Portia had also given in to curiosity and bought Kimberlee Kalder's book. She began skimming, then reading it more slowly. The first chapter was lively, written in a captivating, rapid-fire, youthful voice. It was indeed full of text messaging and obsessive ponderings about weight and shoes and men, and was calculatedly aimed at the world's twenty-or-thirty-somethings. But it was polished and assured. Portia found it hard to believe it was Kimberlee's first novel.
She put the book aside as the coach neared Edinburgh Castle. The magnificent castle, like an enormous ship beached on a rock, was at the moment cast in bronze by the pale glow of the sun. It once had housed the muddle-headed Mary, who had given birth there to James VI before her life of bad choices was extinguished by the executioner's axe.
"You go on, dear," said Joan Elksworthy. "I should have realized-my legs won't be able to take that climb."
So Portia made her way alone up the Esplanade and to the Portcullis Gate, where she escaped for a moment the stinging wind that swirled around the Castle ramparts. Pausing at a small iron wall fountain identified as the Witches' Well where over three hundred women accused of witchcraft had been burned at the stake (plus ca change, thought Portia), she came eventually to the Upper Ward, the main part of the Castle in medieval times. It still housed the tiny, Norman St. Margaret's Chapel.
From the ramparts Portia gazed out on the magical view: New Town to the north, spread far below between the Castle and the Firth of Forth, and to the east, Old Town, a maze of winding streets below roofs that, from her eagle's nest, appeared no larger than postage stamps.
A somber tour of the War Memorial, and then Portia headed back to the coach, haunted by the photographs of too many too-young faces.
A sudden fall of shadow caused her to look up. The heavens were now threatening a storm, with swollen gray clouds rolling in against a darkening sky. The sun seemed to bob like a fluorescent orange ball on the horizon, and the wind whispered of either rain or snow. The grey-yellow sky was like a bruise. It put Portia in mind of paintings she'd seen of nuclear winter.
Thunder rumbled in the distance as she scurried back to the coach, just missing the first drops of what proved to be a major storm.
The night looked set for quite a bit of drama, thought Portia. She voiced the idea of skipping the awards dinner, thinking the time better used on writing or reading. But Mrs. Elksworthy persuaded her to go.
And the night was filled with drama, only of a kind Portia couldn't have imagined.