'Oh, my dear! They were quite, quite abnormal.'
'You destroyed the letter, I suppose.'
'You may be sure I did! Even if I had not, I would not dream of showing it to you. However, I retaliated in kind and - talk about killing two birds with one stone! - my novel suddenly took fire again and those two embarrassing and dangerous young women lost their nerve and spent no time at all in packing their bags and leaving. I told Miss Nutley what I had done and she undertook to see that they got the anonymous letter.'
'You were going to tell me what makes you write your novels.'
'Oh, that, yes. Well, for one thing, I want to leave the world a better place than it was when I entered it. I am a moral reformer, Mrs Farintosh.'
'A moral reformer?'
'My dearest wish is to do good.'
'Robert Louis Stevenson thought it was more necessary to be good.'
'Oh, well, I suppose one takes "being good" for granted. I am sure I have nothing with which to reproach myself.'
'Stevenson went further. Not only did he think he had to be good; he thought he had no duty to make his neighbour good, but to make him happy, if that were possible.'
'I have made thousands happy in my time,' said Constance complacently. 'It is my aim to brighten the drab lives of other women. Deprived of happiness myself, I also write by way of compensation, I suppose, for my unfulfilled, unsatisfactory married life.' The story of Constance Kent's unhappy, unsatisfactory married life lasted for the ensuing hour, but Dame Beatrice, listening patiently to the garbled and, she was sure, highly-exaggerated history of Constance Kent's wrongs, felt that the time had not been wasted. At least the author of one of the anonymous letters was now known, and the letter itself reason enough to explain, perhaps, the abrupt departure of Billie and Elysée. Later on, she decided, she would ask Constance Kent to reproduce the document.(4)
As though Constance Kent had set a fashion, two more invitations had been pushed under Dame Beatrice's sitting-room door while she was at lunch. One was from Mandrake Shard suggesting tea for two at a little place he knew not far from Weston Pipers. As the other invitation was for cocktails with Polly Hempseed and Cassie McHaig at six in the evening, she was able to accept both. She had expected, from Piper's written description, that Mandrake Shard would be a small man, but, even so, she was slightly taken aback when he knocked gently on her door at half-past three that afternoon. She was accustomed to be dwarfed by Laura and by Laura's husband and tall son, and by her own son, Sir Ferdinand Lestrange. She found it almost a unique experience to find herself playing giantess to a man whose height she estimated at well under five feet.
Mandrake Shard was not mis-shapen. Except that his head was rather too large for his body, he was quite well-proportioned.
'I often walk to this farm place for my tea,' he explained, 'but you won't want to do that in this wintry weather. I've brought my car round. I had to have a few adjustments made to accommodate my height, you know' - he spoke as though he were nine feet tall instead of about half that - 'but I'm a very good driver, I assure you - careful, you know, and courteous to other drivers and, of course, I do understand my car. We go everywhere together.' He gave a falsetto little giggle. 'Her name is Portia, because she's got gaskets. Do you see the joke? Portia of Belmont, Italy, had caskets. Portia of Weston Pipers, England, has gaskets. Clever, don't you think?'
Dame Beatrice, seating herself beside him in the front of the car, agreed that it was very clever. She added that it was also most amusing.
'Ah, now, talking about amusing,' said Shard, steering the car through the gateway and turning left on to a narrow road, 'I really must tell you of a most amusing thing I did - really one of my very best efforts. I get hold of a good deal of information by listening at doors, you know. I write rather good spy stories, as perhaps you know, so listening at doors and looking through keyholes is part of my stock-in-trade. Helps me to get the right atmosphere into my books, so I don't look upon it as common or garden snooping-'
'Although others might think there was a resemblance,' Dame Beatrice pointed out, as he seemed to expect some comment at this stage of his narrative.
'Oh, I've been assaulted, you know, punched and kicked. Once I was kicked from top to bottom of a long, steep staircase. But the way I look at it is that it's all in a secret service agent's life-cycle and it helps me to get the feel of things.' He gave his high-pitched little giggle again. 'Did you notice I said "feel"? I was black and blue for a week!'
'You appear to make real sacrifices to your art,' said Dame Beatrice.
'That's what art is for - to have sacrifices made to it. Art is a god, you know, and a god demands sacrifices, oh, dear me, yes.'
'You were going to tell me about one of your best jokes,' Dame Beatrice reminded him, certain that she was going to be told the origin of Nest of Vipers. So it proved. He had overheard a conversation between Piper and Niobe and had managed to exchange their order to the printer for one of his own.
'It was a perfectly simple matter,' he went on, with another falsetto giggle. 'Outgoing letters are placed on the hall table just as is the incoming mail, so all I had to do was to abstract the envelope addressed to the printers, substitute my own missive for Piper's order for the new stationery, and off the letters went as usual. Our excellent charwoman picks them up,
