by Barbara Paul
She nodded absently as she lifted an armful of folders out of the file cabinet. Then as I started to leave, she said, ‘Oh—will we be back by ten?’
I lifted my shoulders. ‘I doubt it. Why?’
‘This is Thursday—LeFever’s on at ten. They’re into re-runs now—you did know the episode your son worked on is showing tonight, didn’t you?’
‘No, I didn’t know—and I would like to see it. Thank you for mentioning it.’
‘Did you miss it the first time?’
‘I don’t have a television set. We’ll watch at the Morrisseys.’ I saw her eyes grow large and hurried to cut her off. ‘When my set broke down a few years back, I somehow never got around to having it repaired. I’ll call you in time to get ready for dinner.’
I left before she could answer. I knew what she was thinking: Her son was a TV writer and she didn’t even bother to watch?
Roberta Morrissey had cooked her usual roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, although the weather was getting too warm for so heavy a meal. But Marian Larch loved it; she ate with gusto, murmuring compliments between bites that had Roberta beaming. Both the Morrisseys accepted her without question, although I think Drew had been expecting someone more glamorous.
Marian told them she did secretarial work for Nathan Pinking’s production company. ‘I read audience mail, type up script changes, things like that.’ She told how each new script change was typed on a different color paper to help keep them straight. Color-coded script changes! The kindergarten approach to records-keeping. I’m sure Marian was making it all up as she went along, but on the whole she told a convincing story.
After dinner Roberta took my guest off to show her where the bathroom was while Drew and I cleared the table. ‘When is your book due out?’ he asked.
‘Publication date is November fourteenth. But it will probably be available before then. You know how that goes.’
Drew nodded. His last book—about the Battle of Shiloh—had been published almost four years earlier, but he was through with all that now; he’d said at the time it would be his last book. Since then Drew had published a couple of short follow-up articles, unable to leave it alone—but that was all. Roberta liked to say Drew and I were both unabashedly drawn to violence, since we confined our efforts to military history. We were still talking publications when Roberta came back with Marian Larch, who wanted to know what my book was about.
‘It’s a biography of Lord Lucan,’ I told her, ‘not the present one but the Lord Lucan who fought in the Crimean War.’ Silence. ‘Nineteenth Century?’ I wasn’t particularly surprised at the blank look she gave me. ‘He was one of the four men responsible for that bloody mistake known as the Charge of the Light Brigade.’
‘Aha,’ Marian said, her face lighting up. ‘The raglan sleeve!’
‘Very good,’ Drew laughed. ‘And the cardigan sweater.’
She didn’t know that one, so I said, ‘Lord Raglan gave the order to charge and Lord Cardigan carried it out. Except that the order Raglan gave wasn’t the one Cardigan followed—it was so vaguely worded it was misunderstood. Lucan was the man in the middle. He was in a position to stop the slaughter but didn’t.’
‘Lord Look-on,’ Drew said.
‘That’s what his men called him,’ I told Marian, ‘even before that infamous charge. A very cautious, unimaginative man who would do nothing without direct orders.’
‘That makes three,’ Marian said. ‘You said four men were responsible.’
‘Primarily. The fourth was a young officer named Lewis Nolan. Undoubtedly the most intelligent of the four, but he behaved stupidly at the moment of crisis. He was an impatient young man—full of contempt for the slow-moving, incompetent type of British officer that infested Victoria’s army during the entire Crimean campaign. Men such as Lord Raglan, Lord Lucan, and Lord Cardigan.’
Marian smiled and shook her head. ‘How could Lucan have stopped it?’
‘Chain of command. Lord Raglan was up on a ridge overlooking a long valley, and he could see along the ridge to his right where some Russian troops were capturing the few British cannon lined up there. Raglan wanted the Light Brigade to charge up the slope and scatter the Russians. That’s what light cavalry was for—quick, darting action. So Raglan dictated an order saying the Light Brigade was to prevent the enemy from carrying away “the guns”. What he neglected to say was which guns. Raglan forgot that people down at the bottom of a hill can’t see the same things that people on top of a hill can see.’
‘Or read minds,’ Roberta smiled.
‘Lewis Nolan carried the message,’ I went on. ‘He delivered it to Lord Lucan, the commander of the Cavalry Division, who was to pass the order on to the commander of the Light Brigade under him. A confused Lucan asked what guns did Raglan mean. And hotheaded young Lewis Nolan flung out his arm and pointed down the valley to the Russian guns, the enemy cannon. “There are your guns!” he answered quite insolently.’
That was the crux of the whole affair—that moment between Lucan and Nolan. ‘It’s been well over a century since that young man flung out his arm and pointed to the wrong guns,’ I said, ‘and we’re still trying to figure out why he did it. But whatever the reason, Lord Lucan passed on the order that the Light Brigade, designed only for quick skirmishes, remember, was expected to charge Russian cannon. Lucan should have demanded a confirming order.’
‘Cardigan should have demanded a confirming order,’ Drew muttered. ‘What an ass. Leading his men into so obvious a death trap.’
‘Lord Cardigan was the commander of the Light Brigade,’ I told Marian Larch, who kept nodding her head through all this. ‘He was the one who actually had to carry out the order, and I don’t think there was a more stupid man in the whole British army than Lord Cardigan. The man had the brain of a bird.’
‘A peacock,’ Drew said.
‘So that birdbrain actually led men armed only with sabres in a charge against cannon. Nearly seven hundred men rode into that valley. Fewer than two hundred rode back out. Cardigan himself survived the charge, but the entire light cavalry was virtually wiped out in less than twenty minutes. And the whole thing was a mistake.’
‘Responsibility ultimately lies with the commanding officer,’ Drew said sententiously.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Besides, it was Raglan’s vague wording that caused the misunderstanding in the first place. But that’s the odd thing about this battle. Everyone who writes about it feels compelled to take sides—it’s intriguing the way so many reputable historians forget they are supposed to be disinterested analysts and instead become passionate partisans once they start writing about the Charge of the Light Brigade. Excepting Cecil Woodham-Smith, of course. She just states flatly they were all a passel of fools.’
‘Why do you write about English history?’ Marian Larch wanted to know.
I smiled. ‘Why not leave English history to the English, you mean? It used to be that way, but the invention of the airplane changed all that.’
‘And the foundations,’ Drew added. ‘Don’t forget the foundations.’
‘Lord, no,’ I said. ‘I’d never have been able to write my Life of Lucan without grants to pay for all those trips to London. But national origins aren’t important to historians, not really. The English have turned out to be the best French historians. And the Germans are doing good work in Soviet history.’
Roberta leaned toward Marian. ‘Did you know Fiona’s book is the first full biography of Lord Lucan ever written?’
Marian looked at me in surprise. ‘Really?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Millions and millions of words written about the Crimean War, and nobody ever got around to doing a study of Lucan’s life.’ I laughed. ‘Probably because he was such a stodgy, predictable man.’ I stopped; I’d been going to mention something Lucan had done in Ireland but an expression had appeared on Marian Larch’s face that I recognized. It was the glazed-eye look of those who don’t really care what happene
d before they were born.
We talked desultorily of other things until ten o’clock, the hour of LeFever. The Morrisseys had an elaborate, big-screen television console, purchased at Roberta’s insistence back when the BBC first announced plans to produce all of Shakespeare’s plays. The set tended to dominate the room.
Rudy was one of three writers listed in LeFever’s credits. I’d once thought that meant a big budget, but Rudy had told me the script fees were fixed by the Screen Writers’ Guild and more than one writer simply meant the money had to be split. I listened carefully, but I couldn’t hear any lines that sounded more like Rudy than any others. That was good from the show’s viewpoint, I suppose, that kind of homogeneity. But this episode was of the sort that had caused me to drift away from watching television in the first place.
It was the kind of story in which the viewer quickly learned to stop listening and just watch. The lines were dull, the plot slow and disconnected. There was no meaning to be found; the script discouraged active participation, it discouraged thinking. It was as bland as oatmeal. The people and the settings, on the other hand, were beautiful. Envy-arousing beautiful. The hero, LeFever, was a vain, muscular young man who posed his attractive body against a variety of luxurious backgrounds. No scenes took place on dirty streets or in slum buildings. The fad for picturing New York as a sewer must have passed; these things probably went in cycles.
And then there was Kelly Ingram. Her role was a lot smaller than LeFever’s, but when she was in a scene with the hero, she was the one you looked at. I wondered if the actor playing LeFever knew that; he didn’t strike me as being particularly bright.
‘What a beautiful woman,’ Roberta murmured. Drew, who’d been in danger of falling asleep, opened one eye.
‘That’s Kelly Ingram,’ Marian Larch said. ‘She’s even more beautiful in person.’
‘Oh, that’s right—you know all these people, don’t you? Do you know her, Fiona?’
I said I’d met her. There was something about Kelly Ingram; if appearance was all it took, she was bound to become a star. Her movements were graceful and unstudied. She walked like a dancer—no, that’s wrong; dancers waddle like ducks when they walk. Kelly Ingram walked as if she were dancing; that was better.
Her role was that of an adjective describing the noun hero. She was the sexually available but eternally fresh female, experienced innocence personified, the kind of woman whose virginity is renewable upon demand. We were supposed to think that if LeFever could have a woman like that gazing upon him adoringly, then he must be one hell of a man. The same little-boy notion of manhood that has always kept women prone in a male society. I wasn’t too surprised to find the Ingram woman helping perpetuate the notion.
The show came to its bland conclusion. Marian Larch and I thanked the Morrisseys and took our leave. On the way home my guest started to say something but stopped. I think she was going to ask me what I thought of the show but then changed her mind.
Marian winnowed a few letters out of Rudy’s business correspondence that she wanted to take back with her. They were all concerned with details about scripts Rudy had contracted to write and didn’t seem especially significant to me—but historians never give up papers without a fight, so I told Marian I’d take them to school with me and get them photocopied. That was agreeable to her.
She was making plans to leave early Saturday when I asked her to tell me honestly what progress had been made in finding Rudy’s killers. I told her I was considering hiring detectives.
‘That’s your privilege, of course,’ she said. ‘But it’s my opinion you’d just be wasting your money, Dr. Benedict. This isn’t one of those cases where a private operative can go in and do things the police can’t. In fact, we have resources private agencies don’t. It’s the lack of motive that has us stumped. We can’t find even a hint of a reason why anyone would want your son dead.’
‘Then you are stumped.’
A pause. ‘Yes. We are. I’m sorry. Rudy had the usual number of people in his life who didn’t particularly like him, but nobody hated him—which I’m told is unusual in television. Of all the people he knew, there’s not one you could call a real enemy. There was no woman in his life at the moment—he and Kelly Ingram were just beginning to get together. He wasn’t engaged in any illegal money-making scheme we could find out about. The medical examiner said he wasn’t a user. There’s nothing. That’s why Captain Michaels sent me here—in the hope there might be something to give us a lead.’
‘What about those letters I had photocopied? Anything there?’
She sighed. ‘Not really, just a sort of side issue. Look—you can help. There’s no way the Captain is going to let me sit in your attic for the next few months. You said you were going to give the summer over to reading Rudy’s papers?’
‘Yes, that’s what I plan to do.’
‘Then how about reading for anything specifically out of the ordinary? Help us out.’
‘But it’s all fiction, Marian—television scripts, plot outlines, something the industry calls story treatments …’
‘I know. But maybe one of those plot outlines will tell you something. Or maybe a letter got misfiled. You never know. Will you do it? Will you watch for anything the least bit unusual?’
‘Well, of course I’ll do it. It’s just that I don’t think anything will come of it.’
We left it at that. Friday had been a hectic day for me; I didn’t even have a chance to read my mail until breakfast early Saturday morning before Marian’s flight. Once again I had no premonition, no anticipation of disaster. The letter was from my publisher.
We have just learned that Walter Cullingham, Ltd., plans to publish Richard Ormsby’s biography of Lord Lucan on October tenth, a month before we will be ready to release your Life of Lucan. Cullingham plans simultaneous British and American editions; and our source informs us that while the book is not quite in the coffee-table mode, it is lavishly illustrated and written in Ormsby’s usual breezy style.
While Ormsby’s book will undoubtedly cut into our immediate sales, we feel there is no long-range need for concern. We expect your Life of Lucan to be a steady seller over the years that will outlast the initial impact of Ormsby’s version. We were surprised that no word of his work-in-progress had reached us; but we understand Ormsby had once planned a BBC television series about the Crimean War which he had to abandon as unfeasible. Then rather than waste the research he’d had done, he put together a hasty biography of one of the participants. The fact that Ormsby calls his book Lord Look-on should give us a fair indication of the profundity of his work.
These things happen, unfortunately. But let me repeat that we feel the long-range reception will be in our favor.
The next thing I knew I was on my knees on the floor fighting for breath. I heard Marian Larch’s voice as from a great distance, demanding to know what was wrong. She forced me to lie on the sofa, although I didn’t feel faint. It was just that breathing had suddenly become so difficult.
Some time evidently passed, because the next time I was fully aware of my surroundings, the Morrisseys were there; Marian must have called them. Drew stood around looking helpless, but Roberta was fussily taking over, apparently under the impression that lowering my body temperature was the thing to do: ice cubes on my wrists, cool wet wash cloths on the back of my neck. Oddly, it did seem to help.
I sat up and apologized for creating such a fuss. When they all wanted to know what had caused it, I just pointed to the letter I’d dropped on the floor.
The Morrisseys understood immediately. Marian Larch had some notion of what it meant; but not being a scholar herself, she couldn’t quite appreciate the way fourteen years’ work on my part had been neatly undercut by a pop historian whose specialty was providing simplistic explanations of complex matters. Through his use of television, Richard Ormsby had made his face and name familiar to people who hadn’t looked at a history book since high school. How could I compete with tha
t?
Drew, the eternal optimist, jumped on the one bright note in my publisher’s letter. ‘He doesn’t seem at all worried about the long-range sales, Fiona,’ he said. ‘You and Ormsby won’t be selling to the same market—he writes for the dabblers, the amateurs. Yours is the study that will become the standard—perhaps even the definitive work. In the long run you won’t have anything to worry about.’
‘Drew,’ I said, ‘I’m sixty-two years old. I may not be around for the long run.’
He didn’t have anything to say to that.
Marian Larch missed her flight because of my little fit; that meant she had to stay over until Monday, as there were only two flights a day out of Washburn—one eastward, one west—and none on Sundays. She kept watching me the whole weekend, trying to get me to eat when I didn’t want to eat, or talk when I wanted silence.
‘You just had an anxiety attack,’ she said kindly. ‘Like a pressure valve letting off steam. It’ll be all right.’
Anxiety attack—a fancy name for getting news so shocking it literally takes your breath away.
Richard Ormsby was a youngish, blond, upper-class Englishman who was carefully articulate and consciously charming. He was one of those ‘popularizers’ who have sprung up in just about every discipline lately. I’d watched him several times at the Morrisseys’, always on BBC mini-series (horrid neologism). At first Ormsby had won cautious praise from historians for creating a new interest in a subject that usually evoked nothing but groans from the non-readers around us. But then it became clear that Ormsby was marketing himself, and even that faint praise disappeared.
He’d followed the usual procedure in such matters—first the TV series, then the book based on it. All ballyhooed by means of press interviews and frequent appearances on television and radio talk shows. Ormsby was more a media personality than a historian, but his efforts were well-funded. He did virtually none of his own research, hiring professionals rather than depend upon graduate students whose work would have to be checked. Both television series and book were then written up in a chatty, informal style that reduced momentous decisions and actions to one-dimensional matters that could be understood with a minimum of effort. My publisher had said that Ormsby’s proposed series on the Crimean War hadn’t worked out and rather than waste the research, he’d tossed off a book about Lord Lucan. I was certain the only reason he’d chosen Lucan was the lack of competition. In well over a hundred years no one had yet published a biography of the man; maybe Ormsby had heard about the woman in Ohio who’d just finished a study of Lucan’s life, maybe he hadn’t. Somehow I didn’t think it would have made any difference.