STEPHANIE BARRON is the author of eleven bestselling Jane Austen mysteries, including Jane and the Canterbury Tale. She has also written the stand-alone historical suspense novels A Flaw in the Blood and The White Garden. As Francine Mathews, she is the author of several thrillers, including The Alibi Club. She lives near Denver, Colorado.
www.stephaniebarron.com
Nicola Scott crashed into her husband’s restaurant.
“Charlie? Can you get me out of this thing? The damn pin is caught.”
“Oops,” he said.
“Be careful. It’s Loro Piana.”
“Poor Loro.”
“Be serious. It’s pulling at my jacket. My arm is caught too.”
Charles Scott waved a flattened “calm down” hand until Nicola stood before him, patient as a dog on a grooming bench. She knew how to stand still; she asked people to do it all day. Her husband, with careful method in every finger, worked backwards. He found the point; the catch on the vintage brooch had snared a tangle of cashmere threads.
“Easy. That’s my David Webb.”
“Well, he’s lost this battle, poor old Davey … ye-es, I think he has.… Nobody hurt.”
He tapped her cheek. There it was again; the calm on which she so depended, the natural authority that she loved. She stood on high tiptoe and kissed his cheek.
“Why,” he said, “do you wear things that imprison you?”
“I know.” She heaved off the shawl. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve limited my colors to black, white, gray, and navy. I’ve no extraneous pockets—no flaps, no ruffles—and I still sabotage myself. The other day at the Tiffany meeting, I looked down and I had on one black and one navy Belgian loafer. Mortifying.”
“This is a grave matter.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“This needs a Freudian. Five days a week.”
“Well, it needs my camera bag to be lighter, for one thing.”
He took the bag from her and winced.
“What in God’s name is in here? Furniture? A spare toilet?”
“The crew always load me with extra lenses. And then we forget to take them out.”
“Yell at them.”
“I don’t yell at my crew—I allow them to be creative. That’s why they love me.”
“I love to yell at my crew,” he laughed. “They allow me to be creative.” He changed the subject. “So how was ‘The Star’?”
“Surprising.”
“She knew how to use a knife and fork?”
“I didn’t realize she’d be so nice. And so rich. My God, Charlie.”
“Come on, Nic, you knew she was rich.”
“Not this rich. I mean—planes and yachts. She owns a train in Hungary. A train, Charlie.”
“Why didn’t you bring her here?”
“I needed to meet her before the shoot. And you have nothing nice to say about her.”
He let it pass. “You look excellent. Coffee? Dessert?”
Nicola Scott shook her head. “Nope. I’ve got to get home. It’s”—she raised a brow at him—“Tuesday.”
“I know what day it is,” Charles looked bleak. “You should have let me bring Nora here.”
“And the health inspectors?”
“I’d keep her in the office.”
“Wouldn’t it be smarter if we could find a houseman who would take off weekends instead of Tuesdays?”
“But it wouldn’t be Uncle Julius. And Tuesday’s his lucky day.”
“Oh, right.” Nicola, like all who handle clients, had developed the gift of heavy sarcasm. “So how much lucky money did he make last Tuesday?”
“You don’t make money at Belmont if it rains.”
“He never makes money. Charlie, we employ someone who doesn’t iron, and doesn’t cook, and can’t even order in. Unless it’s liquor.” Nicola was building steam. “He can’t get a phone message straight, he has stinky friends in at weekends when we’re not there. And he doesn’t work Tuesdays.”
“Change the tape. He was there when I needed him. How did La Diva like your plans for Arden?”
Nicola beamed.
“Oh, Pop—do I have a story for you.”
He leaned back and folded his arms. “I’m a blank page, write on me.”
“Big secret. Not even the bloggers know. She’s in love.”
“Whose husband is it this time?”
“You’ll have tears in your eyes. He’s even posher than you. And ten years younger. She says he looks like a young Rupert Everett.”
“Rupert Everett looks like a young Rupert Everett.”
“And his father’s just died, so he’s Lord Something-or-other. Complete with ancestral pile.”
“It is a fact universally acknowledged that a single female in possession of a vast amount of money must be in want of an English lord.”
“That’s such a cheap shot.” She changed her tone to sharp inquisitiveness. “But why did you say that?”
“I like cheap shots.”
“No. That particular mangled quote?”
“Because it’s true, kid.” He shook his head to rid himself of the nonsense.
“That’s not what I’m asking. Why that particular quote?”
Charles Scott smiled a measuring look at his wife. He reached out and took her hand. “Come on. Shell it.”
“You know something, Charlie, don’t you?”
“I know many things, I’m a gnome, I’m a wizard.” He pinched her hand.
“But you know something”—she began to whisper—“about my star and Jane Austen?”
“I know that the Austen movie made her a star …”
“Well …” Nicola paused, delighting in her secret. “Get this. She’s just paid one million dollars for a signed first edition of Pride and Prejudice.”
Charles hooted. “Then she’s an idiot!”
“Because she overpaid?”
“Because there’s no such thing!”
“Of course there is.”
“No. Absolument non. Nyet.”
“Charlie, don’t be silly. There must be.”
“Nope, nope, no-diddly-ope.”
“But Jane Austen’s books were printed, weren’t they? By printers? And bound? By binders. And they’re on paper. They’re not illuminated manuscripts.”
“Look, Nic. I’m telling you. There is no such thing as a Jane Austen signed first edition. They didn’t do that in Jane’s day. The books were badly made. Not valuable. And most of all—she didn’t do it.”
“You don’t know that, Charlie.”
“Your actress has bought a pup. She’s been royally taken.”
“You’re just being negative,” Nicola said, confused and building a pout. “She says she’s also been offered a signed first edition of Persuasion.”
Charles snorted this time.
“That’s not nice, Charlie.”
“Sweetmeat, Persuasion was published posthumously. When Janey was dead. When she was an ex-author. A former novelist. Dead, don’t you know. Dead women sign no books.”
“I’m going home to walk Nora.”
“I’m telling you, kid. Your artiste has been set up.”
“Don’t gloat.” Nicola punched his arm. “You’re not a nice man.”
“Okay. Where did she get it? Who sold it to her? Because it couldn’t have been anyone with credentials.”
“Oh, Charlie, I might have missed something. She talks so fast and she’s so—you know, dramatic. If you’re so sure about it, we should tell her.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“She’s a trailer-trash movie star who wouldn’t know Jane Austen from Austin, Texas, if she hadn’t been cast in that film.”
“Charlie, she’s in love. Love brings out the best in people. She bought it for this Lord—Lord Pigpen or something.”
“And she was conned because of her greed. She wants the one thing her money can’t buy—a title and a manor house in England.
I’ll bet you anything that she wasn’t the least bit interested in little Lord Thingymajig until she saw his house. Very Elizabeth Bennet, by the way.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is. Our Lizzie had no interest in Mister Stiff-Britches Darcy until she saw the estate in Derbyshire. The world and his auntie know that.”
“Come on, Pop—we can’t just stand by.”
“What is it they say? ‘Yes, we can.’ ”
“Charlie, we help people, don’t we?”
Charles straightened up. “People, yes. But not spoiled little actresses.”
“But are we going to sit here and let someone we know fork over a million dollars for a fake?”
“As Mamma would say, she’s not someone we know.”
“She’s someone I know. And I’m telling you—there’s something very genuine about her.”
“Yes, kid, and—there’s such a thing as a genuine fake. And that is something Jane Austen knew so well.”
“Oh, blast. Look at the time. Nora will be crossing her little legs. Pop, will you bring my bag home with you?”
“Uncle Julius said he might be home early.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she waved the air with her hand. “Who hires an uncle, Charlie?”
No other New York restaurateur, safe bet, had such a knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature. Charles Berkeley Scott, of Hotchkiss, Vassar, and Balliol College, Oxford, could quote Defoe, had memorized chunks of Smollett, knew what passages to jump over in Richardson—“Always skip in Pamela, never in Clarissa”—and did a passable imitation of the Great Bear, Dr. Samuel Johnson. But if those gentlemen of letters occupied his imagination, Jane Austen owned his heart.
“Would I?” he had answered Nicola on their first date. “You bet I would. She was so hot I don’t even have to think about it. The brain’s the most erogenous zone. She was smart. Like you. Yeah, I’d have given her one.”
“Yech,” said his wife. “I hate that expression.” But she loved his passion for the woman Samuel Beckett called “the divine Jane.”
Not even their closest friends, though, knew a deeper reason why Charles Scott and Nicola Foreman so suited each other—lowlife. He mixed with them, and she fell in thrall to the dichotomy—a man whom everyone saw as “posh,” yet who knew how to navigate the sewers and occasionally swim in them.
Charles Scott had been considered a “catch” most of his adult life. Adored by the Zagateers for the refined contemporary cuisine of his high-end-ambience restaurant, ASTA, he had a Gramercy Park townhouse profiled in Architectural Digest, a restored American Empire farmhouse in Connecticut, and a flat in London overlooking Saint James’s Park.
His English grande-dame mother had pampered but not spoiled him, and he’d returned the favor, acting as her escort since he was eighteen years old. Her many admirers schooled Charlie in the best sartorials—the suits, the shoes, the stunning long overcoats—and when Nicola was sent to photograph him for a Movers ’n Shakers spread in Vanity Fair, they went to bed that night and forever after.
He’d have been a superb father—baseball stats coming out of his ears; a mountain biker; stroke oar for his school; playful as a puppy. Then Life kicked these gilded people in the stomach—one, two, three pregnancies that failed, among them a difficult stillbirth, ensuring that Nicola would not conceive again. And Charlie wouldn’t adopt, summing up his refusal by saying, “I know what people are like.” Nicola went back to work each time, and then for good. Nora became their baby, a sweet but neurotic dachshund with allergies and the silkiest ears on earth.
On the night he heard about what he called “Faux Jane,” Charles Scott strolled home from ASTA around ten o’clock. From the hall, he heard Uncle Julius talking to Nicola.
“They don’t call ’em forgers,” Julius said. “They’re ‘spoofers.’ Ask Charlie about Prickles—Charlie’s dad gave him that name. D’ja actually see this book—with your own two eyes?”
Nicola shook her head.
Uncle Julius, excited now, surged onward. “If it looks good enough to be worth a million bucks, I’m telling ya, Prickles did it.”
Uncle Julius petted Nora on his lap, and leaned back in a kind of reverie, remembering something beautiful.
“He’s a Picasso. His special gift was the autograph. Churchill, Roosevelt. Jefferson was real special to him. And, yeah, he did English writers too; he did that fella, what was his name, Oliver Twist. Jeez, they oughta cost a million. The guy’s a genius.”
Nicola sat wide-eyed. Nora heard Charles arriving. A squealing, squirming sausage, she wriggled out of Julius’s embrace, dropped like a pod from a tree and skidded across the black and white marble floor. She tried to jump into Charles’s arms, but once again, not a chance. He bent to pick her up.
“Ooooh, you think you’re a Jack Russell, don’t you? But you are a hotdog, you little frankfurter. Yes—you’re a leetle hot dog, aren’t you? You weren’t meant to jump in the air—you were meant to be tucked into a lovely, cozy bun. And. Just. Eaten. Up.”
Charles held Nora close and tickled her pink dog tummy with his free hand, his face awash with her kisses.
Nicola called out, “I was telling Uncle Julius about the Jane Austen. And he’s been telling me about his friend Prickles, the best forger—”
“Spoofer,” corrected Uncle Julius. “I told her your dad knew him.”
In a chopped voice, Charles said, “Is he still out?”
“Don’t know,” shrugged Uncle Julius. “Your father’ll know—”
Charles interrupted with a curt question, “Anyone want food?”
A plate of crisped bacon sat next to the stove near a bowl of waiting eggs.
“I still can’t get over how nice she is,” said Nicola.
“Nic, this is none of our business,” said Charlie, tying his apron with vicious knots. “There’s no thanks in this. Let Miz Elliott pursue her lord.”
“Elliott? Anne Elliott?” asked Uncle Julius. “Wowee zowee. That’s some tomato.”
Charles, clearly annoyed that he had to explain, said, “She’s being conned. Nic wants us to step in and save the day—and we’re not going to lift a finger. End of story.”
Too little too late, because Uncle Julius said, gleaming with interest, “I wonder who the con is?”
“Julius—no!” said Charles.
And Nicola said, “Come on, Charlie, we can’t just do nothing, can we?”
“No?” asked Charles. “Watch me.” He fed Nora some defiant bacon.
On Friday, with the ASTA phone ringing off the hook, Nicola’s assistant called from the studio to hold a table for eight o’clock. Number 42, the round table in the far right corner, was held for VIPs—socialites and pop stars, who rarely called ahead of time, assuming that there would always be room for them. Charles Scott turned them away if he didn’t like them, thereby rendering ASTA even more desirable.
Anne Elliott arrived first, fresh from the set, still in Elizabeth Arden’s hair and makeup. The glamorous Jackie O dark glasses, worn even at night, made her even more recognizable. In a world where celebrity had been reduced to the fodder of smartphones, she was holding up well. Oklahoma trailer trash she might have been, but she now had an image as powerful and fragile as the anklebone of a thoroughbred. And protected accordingly; many futures depended on that image’s ability to win, place, or show.
Charles watched as she slipped off her glasses and eyed the banquette and then went arrow-straight for the spot where the light fell. When she sat down, she seemed to collect all the wattage in the room, and when she laughed, it cut like a diamond through the creamy din.
The restaurant began to behave as it always did when a star alit. No one wanted to talk or laugh too loud. No one wanted to miss a thing. Every moment was harvested, to be fed to the world as a personal trophy.
Like most movie stars, she had a large face on a head fractionally too big for her long, thin body. Her neck, though, worked as perfectly as a swan’
s; the shoulders were small and delicate; the ivory hands beautifully groomed. Teeth large and unnaturally white, lips plumped and rosy, nose sculpted to a perfect little point—Charles’s surprise hit him with a sudden intake of breath.
Nicola, arriving minutes later, sat down and gasped—for a different reason: Charlie’s sitting at the table, she thought. My God! She’s nailed him. He’s smitten. Eyelashes fluttering in the breeze, the actress was touching Charlie’s arm, making eye contact closer than an oculist.
“Why is it so difficult to find great bread? I mean, it’s just flour and water. And—yeast, isn’t it? I mean, where is the magic that happens in France? Is it the water? I hear it’s the water, Mr. Scott—but of course, you must have these gorgeous little rolls flown in from—where? Dijon? I bet I know just the boulangerie.”
“Please. It’s Charles.”
Of course it is, and you’re dead, sister. Out loud, though, Nicola said with a clip, “They’re made downstairs. In the basement. The cellar, actually.” Her previous sympathy for the star of the show vanished like a wrinkle under an airbrush.
The diva barely acknowledged Nicola’s presence; she didn’t need the photographer’s attention this evening. They’d had a good day. The pictures would be glorious; even the clients said so. Science and surgery, diet and pampering—and great good fortune—had given Anne Elliott, at forty-three, a face any twenty-something might have envied. If the world believed that Elizabeth Arden’s products played a part in all that, then Ms. Elliott had earned her two million. Making forty look twenty—Nicola had thought about spoofers more than once through the day.
Nicola’s irritation surged. She could foresee difficulties in bringing up the subject of “the book.” The waitstaff were waiting in groups. Diners who had never spoken to him before began stopping by to greet Charles, so they could say tomorrow, “Guess who I met last night?”
Anne reclaimed his attention. She flicked the pouf of silk foaming from Charles’s jacket.
“Tell me about your pocket square.”
Nicola watched him blush: He never blushes. Never. Only around his mother. Charles, usually silvery of speech, stumbled and coughed. “It’s, ah’m, you know, evening. The restaurant, I mean. Well, if not quite tuxedo, then—well, you have to put on a show. You know about these things.”
Jane Austen Made Me Do It Page 9