The Five Bells and Bladebone Read Online Free PDF Page A

door on this counterproductive line of thought; it was only leading to the real reason for her dilemma. She was painfully aware, as she tapped the keys,that her characters’ wrestling on the bed was small potatoes compared to her own inner writhing.
     • • • 
    Theo Wrenn Browne watched the single-knife guillotine descend, make a cut, and then return. He held his handkerchief to his head like a compress, soaking up beads of perspiration. At his bench press in the rear room of the Wrenn’s Nest, Theo Wrenn Browne, with a certain reverence, pulled over his latest acquisition, a volume that he was in the process of rebinding. He had glued up the sections. Now he was pasting the folds of an endpaper. Finishing that, he placed the endpapered book between boards and weighted it down.
    The work kept his mind off the previous night, at least for moments at a time. But still he could feel the cold sweat prickle as it ran between his shoulder blades, and he immediately turned to another book and started applying some edge-coloring.
    No one would suspect, not even Marshall Trueblood.
    Marshall Trueblood was a man he detested. He brushed aside the uncomfortable feeling that his dislike might arise from a hidden spring of totally different emotions. There was no doubt that Trueblood could easily stand him on his ear when it came to knowledge of antiques, but that the man would humiliate him in front of —
    Put it straight out of your mind, old boy , he told himself.
    He thought instead of Diane Demorney, who served wonderfully as friend, and as smokescreen, to boot. And adviser. “The trouble with you is, you try to learn too much,” Diane had told him. They’d been having drinks in her living room. “What you ought to do is simply stick with one period, no, not even a whole period, just part of it. Better still, part of the part. Say Victorian salt cellars or something easy. You’d make Marshall look a bit of a fool, wouldn’t you? He has to sell the damned stuff — all he knows he’s learned through being in the trade, and youcan’t stop and read great gobs of books if you’re working at the same time.”
    It made, he supposed, some sort of Demorney sense. Although Trueblood’s “being in the trade” was precisely the problem: Marshall Trueblood had gone from rags to riches by selling the stuff. It’s impossible (she had said, pouring another of her ten-to-one martini cocktails) to think of Marshall ever wearing rags. The way she’d laughed had unnerved him; one would think the exquisite Diane Demorney saw Marshall Trueblood as another world to conquer.
    Holding the cotton wool over the edge of the book, he stared into space and carried on with his mental dismemberment of Marshall Trueblood. He did not see how anyone in Long Piddleton could take the man, and consequently the man’s wares, seriously. Melrose Plant, for example, actually seemed to like him. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to intimate that Plant’s sexual persuasion was anything but normal. He clutched at the book, his knuckles whitening.
     • • • 
    He unpacked the box and then tore open another. These were current best-sellers, five of each, ten of the one that had won the Booker Prize. There were also two that he’d ordered, not to sell, but for himself to read. Theo pulled out the latest Lewes: Lisbon Lust . Odious titles these romances had, and he’d never lower himself to sell Joanna the Mad, an equally odious woman. But he enjoyed reading her; settling down in bed with a cup of tea and a box of chocolates was sheer heaven. Too bad they were warring, or he’d ask her to autograph it. Might be valuable some day, that. As he thought about her refusal to send his own novel to her editor, along with some sort of billet-doux recommending it strongly, he could feel the blood rise to his face. A perfectly wretched person. It was only decent to let your friends have a crack at your editor. Hishead started to throb; he rubbed