A Novel Seduction (26 page)

Feeling a frisson of excitement, Ellery approached the stairs leading to the rise. This was where Jemmie had
first met Cara, and for a reason she couldn’t explain, she was as nervous as if she were about to meet Nabokov or Hemingway. She’d never fallen so deeply into a book before. It was like the story kept one hand on her heart and the other on her gut and alternated which one it would squeeze. In the part she’d been reading on the train, Jemmie and Cara were confronting the possible end of their relationship as Jemmie led her back to Cairnpapple so that she might return to the life she’d left behind.

Axel was already snapping pictures. As always, he turned and snapped one of her, and she flushed.

She walked to the bottom of the stone steps dug into the side of this squat, almost flat-topped hill and looked up. There were perhaps a couple hundred paces between her and the highest point, which was supposedly the tallest thing for miles. At the top, a grass-covered burial mound marked the summit. It was not visible from where she stood, but she knew it was there because she’d seen it as they drove up. Moreover, she carried two different descriptions of it in her head: one from Cara as she arrived, panicked to find herself in a world she didn’t recognize; and one from Jemmie as he led her back, heartsick at having to say good-bye.

When Ellery’s train had pulled into Edinburgh’s station and she’d closed the book, Jemmie and Cara had been within sight of the place. Ellery didn’t know what choice Cara would make or even if she’d have a choice. There was no guarantee that the magic of the place would allow her to go in the opposite direction.

Poor Jemmie. He’d be devastated to lose her.

Ellery remembered Ginger’s words: “There’s more to a
happily-ever-after than ‘happy,’ and you’ve just got to get there on your own.”

Well, the women had certainly been right about the other parts of the book. That had, in fact, been a very fine spanking. She felt warmth spread across her face.

“Red cheeks,” Axel said. “A sign of the devil within. At least, that’s what my dad used to say.”

Cara’s red cheeks had been caused by a different sort of devil, and she hadn’t spoken to Jemmie for two days after it had happened.

“I, um…”

“Going up?”

He wanted her in some of the shots. He always liked people in his pictures to give what he was shooting human scale.

“Yeah. Sure.” She hurried up the path to the clicks of his shutter.

She reached the long, flat summit and saw the mound, rising like a wide nipple from the hill below. The mound had to be ten feet tall and fifty feet across. A gravel-topped ridge surrounded the base. In a wider circle sat a line of stone, and beyond that a grass-lined ditch perhaps six feet deep was visible. Whatever rituals had been performed here had been massive, indeed.

But Ellery could feel none of the power of the place, which distressed her. In the distance was the town, crossed with vehicle-lined streets, and the motorway beyond that. She could see the smokestacks of a factory, several water towers and, when she turned in the other direction, a cell tower that bisected the sky.

Whatever magic Cara had felt when Jemmie scooped her off the ground at their first meeting was missing for
Ellery. She felt such a rush of self-pity for this absence, she turned and started back, running directly into Axel.

“Whoa,” he said, catching her so she didn’t fall. “What’s up?”

“I’m going to wait in the car. Take your time.” She hurried down to the parking lot and plopped onto the passenger seat, betrayed by an excitement that now felt silly and unworthy. The ancient current was something only true lovers felt.

Well, if that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is.

She picked up the phone. She’d put this off long enough. She needed to come clean with Carlton Purdy.

He answered on the first ring. “My goodness, you’re up with the songbirds.”

“I’m in the U.K.”

“On the Irving interview?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” She cringed, knowing what would come next.

“Talk away, sister.”

“Do you think the board would be very disappointed if my next article was on something else? You know, the requirements of commercial magazines sometimes mean that writers—”

“Oh, gosh, of course not. Don’t sound so glum. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to tell me it’s on Stephen King, are you?” He laughed.

“Stephen King?”

“Sorry. It’s a bit of an inside joke here. The publisher before me pitched the board the idea of doing an issue each year on genre writing. He wanted to have Stephen King be a guest editor. It was the only board meeting
where the publisher was asked to step outside. We still call getting fired ‘getting Kinged’ around here. What’s the article going to be about?”

“Um…” Her mind was a blank. She could hardly say romance novels now. “Let’s say the impact evolving forms of writing have on readers.”

He made a snoring noise. “Sorry, I fell asleep. Time to jump ship, darling. Well, it’s too bad about Irving, but the board will have your DeLillo piece to chew on. Is that all you were worried about?”

“Ah… yes.”

“Tally-ho, then.”

“Tally-ho.” Ellery ended the call more depressed than she’d started it. She couldn’t write the article as Black wanted it. Her chances of landing that spot at Lark & Ives would be reduced to zero.

Axel opened the driver’s door and swung into his seat. “You’re sure you’re okay?” He leaned into the back to drop his camera into his bag.

“Yes. Listen, I’m going to tell Black I can’t write this.”

“Seriously?” He started the car.

“Axel, a literary critic and her discovery of romance novels? I’ll be a punch line.”

He sighed. “El, I understand why you don’t want to do this, but I really think if you just wrote the damned thing you’d do a fantastic job. Black thinks you have the power to change readers’ minds. So do I. Lark & Ives will see that.”

“I appreciate you saying that. I do, really. But I just have to handle it my way, okay?”

“Of course.” He dropped the clutch and hit the gas, leaving only the disapproving rumble of gravel to fill the silence.

Thistle Bed & Breakfast, Bathgate, Scotland

“Romance novels are artifacts,” Dr. Albrecht said, her iron-gray bob framing incisive blue eyes and dimpled cheeks. “They capture and document the evolving mind-set of late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century vimen.” The diminutive German scholar, perched on a stool in her equally diminutive kitchen, was chopping vegetables for pea soup with the ferocity of a battling Highlander.

“Exactly,” Ellery said, carefully dodging the carrot shrapnel. “They’re not literature.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Axel and Ellery had arrived fifteen minutes earlier, but Axel said he’d spotted a barn on the property that had looked particularly interesting—“Afternoon light,” he’d called as he exited the car—though she’d had the sense a wish to be alone was more his motivation.

She’d seen the look on his face when she told him the news. Dammit, why did she value his opinion so highly? But her decision wasn’t going to stop her from doing the
interview with Dr. Albrecht. The way she looked at it, the sociologist had some interesting things to say, and Ellery was a reporter. She could always give another writer her notes. Besides, she was starving.

“So you think they are literature?” Ellery said, grabbing a stray carrot.

“I suppose if vun
vuz
going to eliminate them from the hallowed world of literature, it would be for their overused plot drivers; the central conceit of characters overcoming impossible odds to fall in love; and happy endings—”

“Exactly.”

“—in vhich case you’d have to eliminate Chaucer, Jane Austen, Dorothy Sayers, and half of Charles Dickens as vell.”

“But wait,” Ellery said, thrown for a loop, “what about the sex?”

“You’re right. Toss out Shakespeare, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth too.”

“But—”

“The characteristics you identify vith good literature—unadorned, complex prose, dark themes, moral ambiguity—are constructs of the twentieth century. And,” she added with a sly smile in Ellery’s direction, “very male-driven.”

Ellery frowned.
No, that’s not right.
“Shakespeare was dark.”

Dr. Albrecht waved her hand. “Shakespeare could do anything. That’s like basing expectations for your nephew’s soccer league on David Beckham.”

Sociology, literature, soup and soccer. A real Renaissance woman here.

Dr. Albrecht used the side of the knife to bulldoze the mountain of vegetables into a waiting bowl. She reached for a bag of onions.

“That’s going to be a lot of soup,” Ellery said, darting her hand in to grab another nibble. She was strongly hoping the eating part of the day would begin soon.

“I’m expecting a lot of people.”

“Ah. But you have to admit, some romances aren’t very well written.”

“Some literary novels aren’t very vell written. A lot of them, in fact. Or have you had a different experience?”

Ellery flushed. Scads of books came across her desk for review every week that could be described as nothing short of dreadful. “I-I-”

“I encourage my students to agree on vhat defines a good novel before they begin to pass judgment. About the only thing they can all agree on is that the story should capture ‘true’ human experience. Now, admittedly it’s been a long time since I vuz a young girl, Miss Sharpe, but as far as I know, falling in love still falls under that umbrella.”

Ellery thought of Jemmie and Cara in sight of that hill. She thought of all the times she had turned to find herself in the sights of Axel’s lens, his eyes twinkling as he caught her unaware. She wanted to believe Dr. Albrecht, but the woman who had battled her way almost to the top of the literary journalism world just couldn’t.

“But is it worthy of a novel?” Ellery asked.

“If people read it and love it and find true human experience reflected back from the pages, who’s to say vhat is and isn’t vurthy?”

“It’s just…” Try as she might, Ellery couldn’t formulate an argument to counter that. “I guess I never thought about it that way.”

“Most don’t.”

Dr. Albrecht was nearly halfway through the onions before Ellery recalled her manners. “Hey, what am I thinking? Let me help. I can help chop.”

“Not a problem,” the older woman said. “You have notes to take.”

Ellery looked at her notebook, where she’d written exactly four words: “Shakespeare,” “soccer” and “Axel’s eyes.”

“Right.” She crossed out that last entry.

A large pot of broth was simmering on the stove, and the waves of garlic and onion scent were filling the kitchen. Ellery shoved her hunger aside, and as she considered what to ask next, she let her gaze drift to the kitchen window and down the winding road that had led them here.

“Are you aware that a scene from a very popular romance novel takes place no more than a quarter mile from your house?”

Dr. Albrecht’s face broke into a wide grin. “
Kiltlander
. Oh, yes.”

“You
read
them too? I mean, not just for research?”

She laughed. “Vell, I’ve certainly read
Kiltlander
. Could hardly put it down.”

Ellery leaned over, knocking her notebook on the floor and speaking low and fast. “So, does she leave or doesn’t she? They were just within sight of the mound twenty pages ago, when Jemmie’s nemesis arrived and then it was an escape on horseback till they were cornered in an empty church, and someone now has taken Cara hostage
and Jemmie is offering his life in exchange for hers.”

“Oh, I remember that scene. It gets vurse before it gets better,” Dr. Albrecht said apologetically.

“But they’re not going to hurt Jemmie, are they? I mean, the man’s been after him since the start of the book—earlier, even.” Ellery caught a quick breath and felt the words tumbling even faster from her mouth. “This cannot be how it ends. Is Cara going to pick to stay and try to rescue Jemmie, or is she going to go? The women in the Rosemary Readers said there’s more to happily-ever-after than ‘happy’ and then their eyebrows got all weird and they wouldn’t say anything more. If Jemmie dies for her, I’ll kill him.”

“I don’t know,” the sociologist said with a waggish lift of her brow. “They did sacrifice a lot of people on the top of that hill.”

Ellery moaned, and her hostess laughed. “I don’t think you need to vurry about Jemmie dying. But Cara and Jemmie have other pretty big hurdles to get across—vun in particular.”

“What?”

Dr. Albrecht’s face grew serious. “There’s a child.”

Ellery’s head split like an atom in a thousand directions. Where do they have a child? In the future? In the past? Is it Jemmie’s? Was Cara pregnant when she arrived? Or is it Jemmie’s by another woman? Had he lied about his virginity? Ellery fought every instinct to grab the book and run for the bathroom right now.

“What happens? C’mon, you have to tell me.”

“I can’t tell you, or rather, I shall not. The pleasure in any romance comes from the not knowing.”