The Five Bells and Bladebone Read Online Free PDF

his temples. It was mortifying, having sent the book out himself and having it returned with nothing but a printed rejection slip. They weren’t interested in art , these publishers; they only wanted Lewes-trash. He enjoyed reading trash, everyone needed a bit of trash in his life, but that didn’t excuse them for failing to recognize the Real Thing. The Last Race would walk away with the Booker if only he could land it on an intelligent editor’s desk. It was experimental, grand. One thing he could say for himself (amongst other things) was that he took chances. Not like so many other writers, who wrote to the same prescription — Joanna the Mad, for one; or that mystery-writing hack Polly Praed, whose books Melrose Plant was always snatching up. No, that wasn’t his way. He didn’t give a pile of beans for money.
    On the other hand, he wasn’t averse to making it. He’d been trying to run the Crisp woman out of her distressed-furniture business next door, again, to no avail. But he knew if he kept up this war of nerves, he could break her. Crisp didn’t have the pseudosoigné, laissez-faire attitude Trueblood affected. Tremors would shudder through Crisp’s wiry frame; her hands shook whenever he walked in the door of that dusty, Dickensian shop. But when he walked into Trueblood’s Antiques, the man merely raised one of those painted eyebrows and stuck another of those rainbow-colored cigarettes in his holder. What affectation! Rich affectation, to boot.
    He plugged a black cigarillo into an elegant ebony holder and continued musing. Diane Demorney might be on to something. Although her little bits of knowledge reminded him of a shabbily cut quilt, still, what she knew she appeared to know all of. It was quite damned clever, he thought; instead of attempting the Herculean task of boning up on history, one just chose a snippet of it and then cut it to even tinier bits. He’d heard her talk Richard the Third to smithereens and the other person would simplyhave to give up, especially when it came to that murder in the Tower. And Diane hadn’t even bothered cracking a history book. She’d simply read The Daughter of Time twice over, and it was certainly easier reading a mystery novel than dry-as-dust history. If only someone would write a mystery novel set in a bookshop! No, a bookshop and an antiques business, Theo thought. Trueblood, of course, had a speciality — all those floggers of old furniture did, or pretended they did. Trueblood probably really did know, he’d have to credit the man with that. He might be whirling through life with all his bright scarves flying like Millamant, but when it came to his business he was serious. Theo thought again, raising his eyes to the mouse-colored ceiling and stroking his throat. Millamant. Now, that was an idea. He could kill two birds with one stone — antiques and the theater — by reading up on William Congreve. No, reading The Way of the World several times over, the way Diane had read The Daughter of Time . God! The Way of the World he had tried to read and couldn’t: the dialogue was so brittle with wit, every line snapped like an icicle, every riposte cut the quick like a knife —
    He wiped his forehead again and went back to the book.
     • • • 
    Diane Demorney was indeed thinking at this moment of other worlds to conquer, having swept her sword over every battlefield of this one that she could find. She sat in the sumptuous sitting room of the house she had purchased from the Bister-Strachans in London, smoking a cigarette, drinking a martini, and plotting. She considered her greatest virtue to be her amorality; she was hardly dismayed by anything that had happened. A man who thought he could throw her over deserved what he got.
    Her present campaign had to do with her next husband; when she found herself getting bored (which was often), she usually ended up getting married, knowing that that would, after several months or a year, be more boring