And offered all my gems to pawn
To buy him ships and sails.
'I didn't remember ever reading that Queen Isabella used cosmetics, but since nobody ever bathed in the fifteenth century she must have. I could also give you Numbers Three, Four, and Five, but after that they began to get tough, and by Number Ten I wasn't even bothering to read them. God knows what they were like by the time they got to Twenty--to give you an example, here's [Number Seven or Eight, I forget which:
'My eldest son became a peer
Although I couldn't write my name;
As Mr. Brown's son's fondest dear
/ earned enduring fame.
'I call that fudging. Considering how many Mr. Browns have had sons in the course of history, and how many of!the sons--'
'Pah.' Wolfe turned a page. 'Nell Gwynn, the English actress.'
I stared. 'Yeah, I've heard of her. How come? One of her boy friends may have been named Brown or Brownson, but that wasn't what made her famous. It was some king.'
'Charles the Second.' He was smug. 'He made his son by her a duke. His father, Charles the First, on a trip to Spain in his youth, had assumed the name of Mr. Brown. And of course Nell Gwynn was the mistress of Charles the Second.'
'I prefer paramour. Okay, so you've read ten thousand books. What about this one--I think it was Number Nine:
'By the law himself had earlier made
I could not be his legal wife;
The law he properly obeyed
And loved me all my life.'
I flipped a hand. 'Name her.'
'Archie.' His head turned to me. 'You have somewhere to go?'
'No, sir, not tonight. Lily Rowan has a table at the Flamingo Room and thought I might drop in for a dance, but I told her you might need me, and she knows how indispensable I--'
'Pfui.' He started to glare and decided it wasn't worth the trouble. 'You intended to go, and undertook to shift the responsibility for your absence by pestering me into suggesting it. You have succeeded. I suggest that you go somewhere at once.'
There were three or four things I could have said, but he sighed and went back to the magazine, so I skipped it. As I headed for the hall his voice told my back, 'You shaved and changed your clothes before dinner.'
That's the trouble with working for and living with a really great detective.
Chapter 2
Since I got home late that night and there was nothing urgent on, it was after nine Wednesday morning before I got down to the kitchen for my snack of grapefruit, oatmeal, griddle cakes, bacon, blackberry jam, and coffee. Wolfe had of course breakfasted in his room as usual and gone up to the plant rooms on the roof for his morning session with the orchids.
'It is a good thing, Archie,' Fritz remarked, spooning batter, his own batter, onto the griddle for my fourth cake, 'to see you break your fast with proper leisure. Disturbed by no interruptions.'
I finished a paragraph in the Times on the rack before me, swallowed, sipped some coffee, and spoke. 'Fritz, I'll be honest with you. There's no one else on earth I could stand in the same room while I'm eating breakfast and reading the morning paper. When you speak you leave it entirely up to me whether I reply, or even whether I listen. However, you should know that I understand you. Take what you just said. What you meant was that no interruptions means no clients and no cases, and you're wondering if the bank account is getting too low for comfort. Right?'
'Yes.' He flipped the thick golden-brown disc onto my plate. 'But if you think I am worried, no. It is never a question of worry here. With Mr. Wolfe and you--'
The phone rang. I took it there on the kitchen extension, and a deep baritone voice told me it was Rudolph Hansen and wanted to speak to Nero Wolfe. I said Mr. Wolfe wouldn't be available until eleven o'clock but I would take a message. He said he had to see him immediately and would be there in fifteen minutes. I said nothing doing before eleven unless he told me why it was so urgent. He said he would arrive in fifteen minutes and hung up.
Meanwhile Fritz had ditched the cake because it had been off the griddle too long, and started another one.
Ordinarily when a stranger has made an appointment I do a little research on him in advance, but I wouldn't have got very far in a quarter of an hour, and anyway I had another cake and cup of coffee coming. I had just finished and gone to the office with the Times to put it on my desk when the doorbell rang. When I went to the hall I saw out on the stoop, through the one-way glass panel in the door, not one stranger but four--three middle-
