Monie waited. She was, it must be said, exceedingly nervous. She wasn’t at all certain this had a chance in Hades of working, but since Janet had become completely cooperative, it seemed to Monie that the all auguries were fair.
Monie produced a length of yarn. That it was insubstantial was, of course, the point. While Janet brought a down pillow from her carpet bag and a largish woolen scarf to keep herself warm, Monie fashioned from the yarn a slip-knotted loop. When all was ready, Janet lay on the blanket. She made a final check of the book’s relevant page, for it would hardly do to end up in the punting scene in which the heroine’s naked face tells the hero all he needs to know about her love for him. Quelle desastre, that would be! Something early, on the other hand, something that might stop that woman in her cold, unfeeling, and heartlessly independent tracks … That was just the ticket, Janet thought. Give her that and she would definitely take care of the rest. For this story’s hero was no Chadbourne Hinton-Glover. He was a gentleman and over eleven years, he’d not so much as pressed his lips against his lady love’s hand. Thus, although he might have been attracted to her—for reasons, let us face it, more cerebral than physical—there was no commitment or understanding or promise that existed between the two.
“Ready,” she said to Monie Reardon Pillerton. “You’ll be able to tell when my breathing changes.”
Monie nodded and Janet slowly said those words from her childhood, closing her eyes upon the cobwebbed ceiling of the potting shed and upon her old friend, and instead picturing herself at Shrewsbury College in the city of Oxford, within the New Quad, where the Presentation Clock was to be unveiled. The alumnae and resident professors—all of them in their ceremonial black gowns—were just gathering, exclaiming as they saw each other for the first time in years.
Have you seen Trimmer in that frightful frock like a canary lampshade?
That was Trimmer, was it? What’s she doing?
“Welcome me—”
Come and get some sandwiches. They’re quite good, strange to say.
“—welcome me—”
I saw the election announced somewhere or other, last Christmas or thereabouts.
I expect you saw it in the Shrewsbury Yearbook.
“—welcome me home,” Janet Shore murmured. And then she said those extra super magical words. And then she waited. As did Monie. Monie waited and listened and watched her old friend for the moment when her breathing altered.
The smile came first. Then the eyebrows lifted, in a movement that Monie might have missed had she not been concentrating on Janet’s face. And finally, the breathing, which began with a breath so deep it seemed to be something that could burst her lungs. Then she let it out in a slow and heartfelt sigh. Thirty seconds went by till she breathed again. Another thirty seconds and Monie was ready.
Gently she pulled the yarn from Janet’s wrist. The knot was so deliberately loose that only a very slight tug sufficed. For her part, Janet Shore felt nothing. She was surrounded by chatting black gowned women on the lawn of New Quad where, not too far away, a table laden with tea and sandwiches waited. To her infinite surprise, she overheard something that was not part of the book she’d chosen. It was a quiet exchange between two women whose sharp gazes were directed at a third, tall, angular graduate just coming across the lawn, a woman whose coolness of expression and dark bobbed hair and eyes filled with the desire of escape marked her identity as pellucidly as a placard hanging round her neck would have done. A graduate near Janet Shore was saying in a hushed tone, “My God. She’s here! She’s come!” as another declared, “I had no idea she would even … I mean, after the trial and all that” and a third pointed out, “He asked her to marry him, you know, but she turned him down. And more than once, if you can believe it.”
That, thought Janet Shore, as she finally and easily walked into the role of one of the college scouts with her tray at the ready and service her business, had been Harriet Vane’s crucial mistake. For as a result, it was open season on Lord Peter Wimsey, and Janet-who-had-been-Annapurna was just the woman who was going to bag him.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth George
Cover design by Neil Alexander Heacox
978-1-5040-1289-8
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Elizabeth George, The Mysterious Disappearance of the Reluctant Book Fairy
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