spent most of his time trying to charm Lincoln Chancel into giving him a lot of money for his next book. Then there was Bill Tidy. Creeley respected Tidy, and he loved his book.
'And then there was the rising star of the gathering, Merrick Favor. Creeley was instantly attracted to him, but it was hopeless. I could see what was coming when he wrote that the first time he went to dinner in Main House and saw Favor talking to Katherine Mannheim in a corner, he thought he was seeing me!'
Suddenly Nora realized that the reason Mark Foil had seemed like a known quantity to her was that he was an older version of the handsome young writer in the famous photograph. She managed to say, 'Yes.'
'I suppose he really did look like me, but that was all we had in common. Favor was straight as a die and a compulsive womanizer to boot. He and Austryn Fain both flirted with Katherine Mannheim, but she wouldn't have either one of them. She made fun of them. Even Lincoln Chancel made some kind of crude pass at her, and she demolished him with a joke. But you know the lure of what you can't get. Creeley developed a hopeless crush on Favor. It drove him crazy, and he enjoyed every frustrating second of it.'
'You didn't mind?' Nora asked.
'If I'd minded that sort of thing, I couldn't have put up with Creeley for a week, much less all those years. He wasn't designed to be celibate. Do you know how the place was set up, how they lived, what their days were like?'
'Not in much detail,' Nora said. 'They lived in different houses, didn't they, and they had dinner together every night?'
Foil nodded. 'Georgina Weatherall lived in Main House, and the guests were assigned to cottages scattered through the woods around the gardens. These were one- and two-story affairs originally built for the staff, back when the family who owned the place had an army of servants. Creeley was in Honey House, one of the smallest cottages, all by itself on the far side of the pond. He had only two tiny rooms and a saggy single bed, which made him very grumpy. As the only woman guest, Katherine Mannheim was put by herself in the next-largest guest house, Gingerbread, stuck back in the woods past the gardens. Austryn Fain and Merrick Favor shared Pepper Pot, and Lincoln Chancel and Dank and Desperate were installed in the biggest cottage, Rapunzel, which had a stone tower on one side and was halfway between Gingerbread and Main House. Chancel had the tower for himself. I suppose he commandeered it.'
'I still don't really understand why Lincoln Chancel wanted to go there in the first place,' Nora said, having just realized this. 'He had his businesses to take care of, and he hardly had to spend a month in a kind of literary colony for the sake of Chancel House.'
Foil started to answer and checked himself. 'I always took his being there for granted, but he didn't have to subject himself to Georgina's selection of writers, did he? He wasn't there for the entire month, though, he showed up only for the last two weeks.'
'The answer's obvious,' Harwich said. The other two waited. 'Money.'
'Money?' Nora said.
'What else? The Weatheralls owned half of Boston. Lincoln Chancel was supposed to be richer than God, but didn't his whole empire turn belly-up pretty soon after all this? He was looking for cash to start up his publishing company.'
'Anyhow,' Foil said, 'to get back to Shorelands, even the normal guests had no formal daily schedule. During the day they could do as they pleased as long as they stayed on the estate. If they wanted to work, the maids carried box lunches to the cottages. If they wanted to socialize, Georgina held court on the terrace. You could swim in the pond or play tennis on the courts. The gardens were famous. Guests wandered around the different areas, or sat on the benches and read. At six everyone gathered in Main House for drinks, and at seven, they went into the dining room. Let me read you something. This is what Creeley wrote when he got back to Honey House on his first night.'
He opened the red book and flipped through pages until he found the entry he wanted.
'That bellwether is a Buster if I ever saw one,' said KM, and sharply we returned to the magnificence of all things Teutonic.'
Mark Foil looked up from the diary and gave Nora an almost apologetic glance. 'Creeley fell into this tone when he was rattled or insecure, and alcohol always encouraged his showy side. He mentions only one Wine Spo- dee-o-dee, something he only drank when he wanted to offend people he thought were being pretentious, but I'm pretty sure he had at least three of them. Of course he loved the girl's ordering a Top-and-Bottom, it proved they were two of a mind. They used to talk about their 'outsider drinks.''
'Outsider drinks,' Nora said, jolted by another reference to Paddi Mann.
'Creeley learned about them from the musicians who used to come to the family bar. But he also meant that the two of them were outsiders at Shorelands. The joke about Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer took care of
'What did Driver steal?' Nora asked.