“You mean other than demand more mineral water?” I got the feeling Dempster hadn’t exactly made himself popular with Cate. “And not that brand of mineral water, the other kind.”
Her English accent was even worse than mine, but I got the point.
“It’s not like he really even needs to be here,” she said, warming to her theme. “They mostly hired him to go over the script and make sure the historical—whatever—was right.”
As someone who was a professional whatever-er, I decided to just nod rather than to take offense.
“But he insisted that he had to be here, on set, from day one. Forget day one. Day zero. The bigwigs aren’t getting here until tonight. But, no, Mr. Mineral Water had to be here early.”
“So that’s not normal practice, then,” I said. “Having the historical consultant on set.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Cate hastily. She flashed me a guilty grin. “And it’s not like I’d really know. I’m not really a movie person. I just got this job because—”
“Right,” I filled in for her. “I remember. The cousin who knew someone.”
“I’m starting at Columbia journalism school in the fall,” she said proudly. “I’m doing their broadcast program. They’re the only Ivy to have one.”
“Congrats!” I channeled extra enthusiasm into it to hide the fact that my mind was decidedly elsewhere. “So your sense, though, is that the historical consultant wouldn’t usually need to be around at this point.”
“That’s what I heard one of the guys on the crew saying.” She shook back her brown curls. “I wasn’t the only one he was trying to treat like his personal minion.”
“He does do that,” I murmured.
Dempster was the head archivist at a choice art collection in central London. Snooty, but not exactly lucrative. Dempster, as Cate had so aptly noted, did like the finer things in life. His cunning plan? To make his fortune by writing a muckraking, best-selling work of nonfiction about England’s greatest, undiscovered spy, the Pink Carnation. His efforts in that direction had been less than scrupulous, including dating Colin’s sister, Serena, in an attempt to worm his way into the family archives via Serena’s affections.
Needless to say, that plan hadn’t gone very well.
The last time I’d had the misfortune to meet Nigel Dempster was back in November. I had hoped—if I thought of him at all—that the intervening six months would have produced new get-rich-quick schemes. Ones without a Selwick component. His presence at Selwick Hall did not bode well.
With a sick feeling, I remembered my disordered papers. Dempster had tried to steal my notes before. He had a very all’s-fair approach to scholarship, at least when it worked to his advantage.
“Oh.” Cate drew back, looking alarmed. “Do you know him? I didn’t mean— That is, if you’re friends— I’d heard he knew someone connected to the family, but I didn’t realize…”
“No!” I said quickly. “I mean, I do know him, but we’re not friends. I had to do some research in his archive a few months ago, that’s all.”
Plus, he had screwed over my boyfriend’s sister, but it didn’t seem politic to mention that bit.
“Phew.” Cate visibly relaxed. “I was afraid I’d really put my foot in it. Someone said he had a thing going with someone connected to the family, and when you said…But you’re dating the cute, grumpy guy, so that wouldn’t make sense. Sorry.”
The cute, grumpy guy. I liked that. I’d have to tell Colin later. And my friend Pammy, who had been watching the progress of the Colin affair from day one. We could call Colin CGG for short. Pammy was very big on the code names. Yes, we were secretly still fifth graders when it came to dealing with boys. I mean, men.
Colin’s study was empty, the computer monitor tilted to the side. I held open the study door for Cate and waved her to precede me. “Someone connected to the family?”
Cate lifted her hands in a gesture indicative of the mysterious ways of the office gossip chain. “The crew guys said that was how he got the job, through his girlfriend.”
What was the screen doing tilted? Colin liked it facing dead ahead. It was one of the small things that drove him batty. He was also very picky about his paper-clip collection.
I moved to draw the monitor back into place and saw something that made me pause.
“Weird,” I said.
“What is it?” Cate’s bouncy brown curls brushed my cheek as she leaned over my shoulder. “Is the Internet down?”
“No. No worries.” I pushed abruptly away from the screen, nearly slamming into Cate. “I thought I’d closed out of my e-mail, but I guess I didn’t.”
There was my webmail, open on the screen, maximized to its largest size. There was a smattering of new e-mails, distinguished by their darker font, including two with the heading “Re: 10B?”
To anyone else, that wouldn’t mean anything at all. It might be an apartment number or a Chinese food entrée or a new address for Sherlock Holmes. Only Harvard history department cognoscenti would automatically translate that to Western Civ, Part II. Besides, Colin and I had an honor system. I didn’t go through his files—well, not after that last time—and he didn’t read my e-mail. It was all about trust.
Okay, it was mostly about trust and a little bit about fear of getting caught.
“Anyway, this is the computer.” Shaking off my unease, I turned back to Cate. “As long as the study is empty, please feel free to come in and use it. Just make sure not to move anything around on the desk. And Colin likes the computer monitor facing forward, so if you move it, move it back. Oh, and there are biscuits in the tin over there. Please feel free.”
“This is so nice of you.” Cate clutched her clipboard to her chest. “I can’t tell you.”
“Just knock before you come in, okay? I’ll let Colin know that you might be in and out.”
“Thanks.” Cate glanced back over her shoulder. Even on the second floor, we could hear the sound of cars on the gravel of the drive, and voices from downstairs, steadily rising in volume. Either this was the catering crew, or some of the guests were arriving early. “I’d better get back down there. But I might sneak up later?”
“Any time,” I said, sliding into Colin’s desk chair. “We’ll be at the dinner, so the computer is all yours. You can ward off invaders for us.”
Cate brandished her clipboard. “Will do.”
“Don’t mind about the door. It”—there was a horrible squawking sound as she yanked at it—“sticks.”
“Sorry!” Cate’s voice floated back through the door panels.
My smile faded as I turned back to my e-mail. My open and maximized e-mail.
I might have just been careless and left the box open. But I didn’t think so. I was paranoid enough about Colin stumbling on that stupid 10B e-mail—not that it was really a secret, and I’d have to tell him eventually, anyway, but I’d rather tell him in my own time, once I’d figured out what I wanted to do.
Well, if Dempster had looked through my e-mails, he wouldn’t find anything of use to him, just details for my friend Alex’s engagement party, a few amusing forwards from Pammy, and those 10B e-mails.
I scrolled down the page. There were two new e-mails, one after the other. I’d shot off an SOS to two history department friends that morning, asking for advice. This wasn’t exactly the sort of dilemma with which I could go to my advisor. Archival issues, yes. Boy issues, no. Admittedly, this was a mixed issue of archive and boy, but it still smacked too much of the personal intruding onto the professional for me to share with anyone I wanted to take me seriously. So I’d appealed to Liz and Jenny instead.
Liz was my year in the history department, Jenny a year ahead of me. We had been dubbed the Triumvirate of Terror, not by the hapless undergrads to whom we had attempted to teach western civ, but by a colleague in the history department who had made the cardinal mistake of attempting to ask us each out, one after the other.
Our specialties were very different—Jenny did Charlemagne, Liz was all about madness in Renaissance Florence, and I had my thing for British spies—but we had formed a fast friendship that went well beyond complaining about undergrad essays and the lousy coffee in Robinson Hall. They were my favorite outlet shopping buddies.
They had both chimed in, Jenny from Cambridge, Liz from Florence, where she was on her research year. I checked the time stamp on Jenny’s e-mail. Wow. She really needed to stop getting up so early. Surely, Charlemagne could wait until a more civilized hour. He’d been dead about twelve hundred years, after all.
She wrote:
