The Thin Pink Line by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Author:Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626816077
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2015-01-29T16:00:00+00:00

At the end of the month, Dodo invited me to come with her for a long country weekend. It was curious how she’d come by the loan of the estate, which happened to be Duck’s End, Colin Smythe’s place. He’d offered it to her in a fit of gratitude over her ingenious saving of the American version of Surf the Wind. Somehow, she’d gotten another bestselling author to write a scathing letter to the New York Times concerning their reviewer’s scathing review of Colins book and the Times, in a most democratic fashion, had duly printed it.

Apparently, reviewers, contrary to their own inflated self-beliefs, don’t matter very much. Oh, sure, books have to be reviewed, if only to have an alternative to advertising, but it just doesn’t matter very much what gets said. “Attention must be paid,” said Willie Loman, referring to something else entirely, and he was right but that was as far as it went.

If we were going to be weekending at Colins place, then he was going to be weekending in the South of France, but before leaving for the airport, he’d been kind enough to take us on a little tour of the estate’s more notable features.

The country estate proved to be everything one could want from such a place, even if it did have that unfortunate name. There were all kinds of lovely stone and brick-colored roofing on the outside that made it look more like it should be on a hillside on the outskirts of Florence than thirty miles outside of London. On the inside, the halls had Middle Eastern runners rather than carpets, a great hall with a fireplace that stretched up half of one barn-size wall, and there was even a genuine suit of armor, an unusually small one that Colin said was rumored to have belonged to Rizzio, the little Italian who had hung out with Mary Queen of Scots, that association leading to his untimely demise at the hands of her jealous husband’s men.

Of course, when I, who have always been fascinated by the life of Mary, expressed undue interest in this detail, Colin quickly conceded that it might just as easily have belonged to a dwarfish distant cousin of a distant cousin of Henry VIII. He hastily added that he’d acquired the estate itself for a song from an MP who’d had to step down from his post and then rapidly sell his home in both disgrace and financial disarray following the disclosure that not only had he been caught out in the usual acts of buggery and/or marital infidelity, but that he’d compounded his crimes against the Crown with further acts of misuse of public funds, expense account fraud, acceptance of campaign monies from known criminals and just plain all-around bad judgment.

“I hate to have my fortune grow on top of someone else’s misfortune—” Colin shrugged “—but sometimes circumstances can’t be helped and, anyway, he did need the cash from the sale fairly quickly if he wanted to escape out of the country in time to avoid that awful prosecution.

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