Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy L. Sayers

Author:Dorothy L. Sayers [Sayers, Dorothy L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery & Crime
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2010-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

‘Harriet, I’m afraid I have an urgent job to attend to today. I hope to be back in time to escort you to the Shearman party, but I must complete the errand however long it takes me. Will you go as arranged? I’ll join you there if I can.’

Harriet looked up from the morning paper. ‘Of course, Peter. I was thinking of working in the London Library today anyway.’

He hesitated in the breakfast-room door. Then he came across and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

I wonder what that was about? thought Harriet. Something important, obviously. No doubt Peter would tell her about it, by and by. She turned her attention to work.

Her life had turned inside out, she considered. Before she married Peter her professional life had been relatively easy, and private life was full of intense, seeming insoluble difficulties. She had been compelled to keep parts of herself firmly locked away, and manage like a motor engine running on only half its cylinders. And now her private life was almost ridiculously easy, she was waited on hand and foot, and the inner tigers were sleek and purring and prosperous, and as if to maintain some secret fundamental balance, as if to modify the ‘happily ever after’ cliché, and keep it in the realm of the real, work had become impossibly difficult.

Defying Miss Bracy, who was knitting in a meaningful fashion, working an increasingly elongated sweater, Harriet stared out of the window, her fountain pen idle in her hand. Miss Bracy’s knitting advanced in inverse proportion to Harriet’s manuscript, and if this dawdling went on much longer the unfortunate secretary would be able to clothe a regiment of relatives. Harriet applied herself to analysing the problem. A detective fiction, she told herself, might be born in a moment of inspiration, but it had to be worked out with almost scholarly calm and detachment.

Very well; but the sort of calm and detachment which had done very well in the past was less than adequate now. Her new approach had begun with Wilfred, that self-lacerating character, of whose agonies – for they had entailed agonies of her own – Peter had said, ‘What does it matter if it makes a good book?’ The blackness and despair in the book she was writing now had surprised her; clearly it was a subject she had not been able to afford to write until she herself was safely anchored ‘out of the swell of the sea’. But that very safety had changed the rules of the game; it was now worth writing only if the result was very good. How good did it have to be? There was no limit.

If Peter thought that the job was to project a dream of justice, an ideal that had to be kept alive in a very unjust and dangerous world, then the first thing she had to do was to convey the disruption, the hideousness of murder, ‘murder most foul, as in the best it is’, the intolerable violence done to rightful expectations.

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