Cupping her mug of warm tea in her hands, Ellen relived her first day of working for Allegra Howard and what had followed. It hadn’t gone quite as she had expected. In fact, it hadn’t been like she had expected at all.
She had brought Allegra breakfast, right on schedule, and had found her reclining on her chaise longue already, neatly dressed in a pale lilac skirt and white blouse, open at the neck. Her fine hair had been expertly whipped into a chignon, her skin powdered, her lips coated with the kind of dry orange-red lipstick that looked like it had gone out of production in the 1950s. Ellen could not imagine how or when Allegra would have found the time to put together such a glamorous appearance, because she herself had been up since six thirty, getting Charlie off to school and choosing something to wear that seemed appropriate for Allegra Howard’s research assistant, deciding that supermarket jeans and a secondhand man’s shirt simply wouldn’t do. Finally, Ellen had settled on a faded khaki linen skirt that she had found languishing at the back of the wardrobe and a once-white T-shirt that was now mainly gray, but had at least been designed for a woman to wear. She’d felt self-conscious as she showered, aware of the other people in her house. She heard the sound of Sabine’s TV as the woman caught up with the markets around the world before she went in to work, and Charlie skulking about in his room, refusing to make an appearance until at least five minutes after he should have left, whereupon he would grab a piece of white toast from Ellen and munch it as he walked down the street. Most disconcerting, she had become aware, as she stood in the shower, letting the warm water run in rivulets over her shoulders and breasts, of the sound of Matt’s shower draining away above her, and had realized that he was standing naked over her head at that very second.
Ellen had then switched the shower to cold for a moment, after which she’d briskly rubbed herself dry, hoping to chafe off all her foolishness along with her dead skin cells. It was just being near an actual man, she’d reasoned. Something about having Matt in the house, combined with reading Allegra’s latest work, had combined to create these… very stupid, very foolish feelings. They weren’t even feelings, they weren’t even ideas of feelings. It was just that Matt was a young, attractive man, and she was a single woman who hadn’t had any kind of meaningful male contact since long before Nick’s death.
Her body had responded to Matt’s proximity just as a flower opens its petals to the morning sun. These little flutters of desire that she felt when she looked at him, or thought about him, were physiological reactions, nothing more serious than sneezing when you get something up your nose. That was the reason behind all this foolishness. That, and that she had seen him with his top off.
In any case, soon, she’d told herself, she would build up an immunity to him, just as she had to her mother’s cat whenever she went home to visit and sneezed her head off for the first hour at least. The rush of blood to her cheeks whenever he looked at her, or the hazy half-remembered dreams would fade away like a crop of hives.
Ellen had considered her flushed face in the mirror, her cheeks still ruddy from the cold water, her eyes bright with the prospect of something to do. In the meantime, she might as well enjoy it. A harmless secret crush on a man a million miles out of her league wasn’t hurting anyone, and while a part of her felt a little as if she was being unfaithful to Nick for even thinking about another man, another very tiny, dark part of her that she was barely aware of was immensely relieved that she was still capable of feeling anything at all.
Allegra had examined her breakfast without comment and dismissed Ellen with a single wave of her hand.
“Return at ten and we will begin,” she had instructed Ellen.
Ellen had returned to the kitchen, where she sat silently as Matt rushed around, pouring coffee down his throat in a single gulp and flapping about where he had left his mobile phone until she noticed it on the windowsill. And just as Sabine popped her head around the door to say goodbye and before Charlie came crashing through to grab his daily bit of toast, Matt had bent his head and kissed her on the cheek, calling her a star.
Then all at once the kitchen had been empty again, and Ellen had been left alone with the sound of her heart pounding. She couldn’t decide if it was the kiss on the cheek, the compliment, or the fact that in a few minutes she was due to start her new job. Or perhaps it was the shock of having her peaceful house filled with strangers and life again, talking, eating, laughing out loud. No, shock wasn’t the right word; the surprise, the surprise of finding that she rather liked it.
“So.” Allegra had repositioned herself on her chaise longue, her legs up, neatly crossed at the ankles. She motioned for Ellen to sit behind the burr-walnut desk that Simon had arranged to be brought in. “You’ve read the first few chapters of The Sword Erect. Your opinion?”
“Oh.” Ellen sat rather nervously on the amber-colored leather of the heavily padded desk chair, thinking of the departure of the last PA over—what was it?—artistic differences? “You want my opinion? On… on your book?”
“Well, I certainly don’t want it on the price of eggs.” Allegra scowled at her. “Of course I want your opinion on my book. Simon told me you have read all of my books—how does The Sword Erect compare?”
“Well…” Ellen hesitated, aware that she was anxiously knotting her fingers together like a schoolgirl caught out on a difficult math question. She felt her mouth dry up, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. No one had asked her opinion on anything in years, but for Allegra Howard to ask Ellen what she thought of her book was like Shakespeare dropping by and asking if she liked his rhyming couplets.
“Good God, woman, it’s a simple enough question,” Allegra snapped impatiently.
“I’m sorry… it’s just, um, well—you know. I feel a bit… self-conscious, because after all what do I know, really?” Ellen chewed on her lip as the question hung awkwardly in the air.
“Let us hope you know something,” Allegra exclaimed. “Simon told me you had an excellent eye and an instinct for fine-tuning a story. He promised me that if I came to stay here in this… house that you would be useful to me. So—be useful. Tell me what you think of the book so far.”
Ellen took a deep breath, feeling a level of anxiety that she had experienced before only when telling Nick that she was pregnant with Charlie. It had been an accident, one of those things that happened despite the number of precautions used; Charlie had arrived at least two years ahead of schedule in Nick’s life plan—before they had the house, the business, and their lives together well established. Ellen had worried that Nick would not be happy, that he would blame her somehow, but after he’d had a few minutes to let the news sink in, he couldn’t have been more delighted. Her fears had been foolish fears then, and Ellen was sure they would be again. People were not nearly as frightening as she often believed them to be, even artistic geniuses like Allegra.
“It’s a real page-turner, that’s for sure,” Ellen blurted. “I couldn’t put it down and when I ran out of pages I was very disappointed. I’m desperate to know what happens to Eliza at the hands of that dreadful man who accosted her as she was trying to run away from the clutches of Captain Parker.…”
“But?” Allegra observed down the length of her aristocratic nose.
“But? There is no but, I think it’s brilliant in every respect.” Ellen smiled at Allegra, as if the intensity of her smile might somehow incite one in Allegra.
“Oh, Ellen, please don’t insult my intelligence. Of course there is a ‘but.’ I know it, Simon knows it, and you know it. It’s just that Simon and I can’t decide exactly what the ‘but’ is. That buck, I’m afraid, has been passed to you. You must see the flaws with that keen eye of yours. What are they?”
Ellen swallowed and took a moment to frame her sentence. “Well—I know it’s only your first draft—and I probably usually read your second or even third draft for copyediting purposes—”
“You don’t. I only ever write one draft,” Allegra argued.
“Oh well, it’s just that it seems that this book is a little lacking in…” Ellen lost her nerve.
“Lacking in…? Spit it out, woman!”
“Substance.”
Ellen spoke the word quietly, as if she were revealing an unpleasant secret.
“Substance?” Allegra’s tone was neutral, her expression implacable. Miserably, Ellen realized that she was required to elaborate.
“Well, what lifts your books above the others,” she battled on, “is the historical context, the attention to detail, the way that you bring alive the sights and sounds of another age. The characters… the plot is brilliant but—correct me if I’m wrong—but I think The Sword Erect is the first book you have set in the English Civil War. It’s such a rich and interesting time, yet you skirt around it almost as if it were incidental, and…” Ellen faltered. For a moment her passion and interest had swept her along, but now she remembered that she was standing in her former dining room, telling one of the greatest historical-romance writers ever how to do her job. How could she, Ellen Woods, who had never done anything more than read books and correct grammatical errors, even presume to tell Allegra where she was going wrong?
“Of course that’s just my opinion, and my opinion is hardly worth knowing; in fact, when I think about it I’m not altogether sure that it’s right anyway.”
“And?” Allegra questioned.
“And?” Ellen repeated the word as the faintest echo.
“You told me that I was treating the backdrop of the English Civil War as if it were incidental and then you were about to add something further. What?”
“It hardly matters.” Ellen squirmed, wishing the voluminous folds of the overstuffed leather chair would swallow her up and spit her back out in her world, the world where she existed in simple suspended animation and read and daydreamed and waited for her husband to come home and her real life to begin at the touch of his lips on her cheek.
“Ellen.” Allegra enunciated her name with such care that it sounded as if it should have a good many more syllables in it. “If you and I are to work together, then we must be straight with each other. I know that you are sitting there wondering how you could possibly have anything to say to me about writing, and I understand why you would feel that way. But let me assure you, one does not become as successful as I have without listening to criticism. I might hate it, but I can take it, and I am not in the habit of shooting the messenger, only torturing them a little. Yes, you are little more than a housewife with barely any experience of the creative arts but you are my reader, you are the person I write for, and now that I have an opportunity to meet you face-to-face, I want to know what you think. You need not be afraid.” Allegra’s mouth hinted at a smile. “Not very afraid, anyway.”
Ellen braced herself.
“Your characters, especially your female characters, usually have something else about them. Wit, intelligence—bravery. Something else apart from their beauty and perfect bodies that makes the reader wish they were them. I know that in the end everything will come right for Eliza—knowing that is sort of half the fun of reading about the other things that happen to her—but at the moment I wonder if she is just a little bit too passive. Look at Helga in your Viking trilogy—despite being sold as a slave and ravished by her new master, she always maintained her dignity until he had no choice but to fall in love with her. And Caroline in The Pirate Lover. Beaumont snatches her from the docks when she is lost and locks her in his cabin to have his wicked way with her for weeks, but she challenges him, constantly. She doesn’t let her circumstances change who she is. Although Eliza puts up a bit of a fight and runs away, she just seems to lurch from one ravishing to the next. I started to feel sorry for her, and I’ve never felt that for your heroines before.”
Allegra nodded once and then was silent. Not for a few seconds or a few minutes but for almost half an hour. For almost half an hour Ellen sat in the chair and waited for Allegra to speak, unsure if she should stay or go—or even if she still had a job. Finally, her thighs cramping from being clenched for an extended period, she moved to stand up. But just as she moved, Allegra spoke, forcing her back into the chair.
“You’re right,” she said simply. “You are quite right. I’ve been relying on all the clichés, all the things that make a work of art no better than pulp fiction. Sex sells and I know that; I’ve become little better than a whoremonger.”
“Oh, well, I wouldn’t go that far…,” Ellen began.
Slowly and with some difficulty, Allegra stood up, straightening her vertebrae one by one.
“Ellen, can I confide in you?”
Ellen gripped the arms of the chair, not absolutely sure she wanted the responsibility of being Allegra Howard’s confidante. Still, unable to refuse, she nodded.
“Of course.”
“Ellen, I’m seventy-two. Last year my home was destroyed by a flood, nearly everything I’ve ever loved, all my memories, all my photos, my works of art—they were all swept away in a river of muck and sewage. I didn’t think that it mattered. I always believed that mere objects weren’t what made a person human—that it was her feelings, her experiences and memories that made a person exist. But when I was alone in my hotel room I realized that without my things, my photos to look at or my books to pick up, my memories were slipping away from me. And I’m slipping away with them, a little more each day. I’m vanishing.”
“No, no—you couldn’t be more alert and sprightly,” Ellen assured her.
“Sprightly.” Allegra pursed her lips. “It is always the curse of the elderly to be either ‘frail’ or ‘sprightly.’ I don’t mean that I am suffering from dementia, I mean simply that I have reached a crossroads in my life. After seventy-two years of knowing who I am and what I want and what I do, suddenly I’m no longer sure, suddenly I’m afraid. With this last book I’ve been writing by numbers, papering over the cracks and hoping that no one will notice or care—but if you can see it, then so will everyone else, and I’ll be vilified as a fraud. They’ll see that I don’t feel like a writer anymore. They’ll see that I am not a writer anymore. My creative fire was quite drowned in that flood along with everything else. Ellen, I am finished.”
Ellen sat across from Allegra Howard and looked into her pale blue eyes. “No,” she said. “No, you’re not finished. You’ve taken a knock, you’ve had a setback, and when you’re… a more mature person, then, well, it’s harder to move on from them. When my husband died, I couldn’t imagine another day, another hour without him in the world. If it weren’t for my son, I would have happily curled up and waited for my heart to stop beating. But I couldn’t do that, I had to keep going, and somehow I’ve got through my first year, and then the lodgers happened and working for you and for the first time I feel as if… there is a future.”
“There is a future for you.” Allegra looked down at her. “You are young and beautiful. But for me? My future is behind me now and suddenly I find I don’t have the energy to keep going. I don’t have a husband or a son to keep going for. After all of these years writing grand romances, I forgot to find the time to have one myself. I just can’t do it anymore. I just don’t want to.”
“But you do have someone to carry on for.” Ellen stood up, her legs on fire with pins and needles, and came around the desk, only just resisting the urge to touch the older woman. “You have me and all the tens of thousands of people who have read your books. We need you, Allegra. We need the next Allegra Howard book and the one after that. You give us… hope. And even if what I said about your book is true, that doesn’t make it a bad book; I still couldn’t put it down. I still couldn’t wait to find out what happened to Eliza.” Ellen smiled. “It still made me daydream about having my own Captain Parker crazy with lust for me. All it means is it isn’t as good a book as it can be—yet.”
Allegra twisted her mouth into a knot of a smile.
“Let me help you fix those things,” Ellen went on. “I know a little about history, and what I d
on’t know I can find out. I can find the facts and backdrop and you can weave them into the story and make Eliza a true Allegra Howard heroine. Fearless, defiant, and undefeated by whatever life throws at her—just like you.”
Allegra looked into Ellen’s eyes and slowly one featherlight hand floated upward to cup Ellen’s cheek in its papery palm. “I believe that you might just be a very passionate person, Ellen Woods,” she said solemnly.
“Who, me? No, I’m just… normal.”
“A passionate person with a whole undiscovered universe locked away inside.”
“Really?” Ellen was skeptical.
“Really, and I hope that you and I will work very well together. The question is, where do we start?”
“Here,” Ellen said. “Well, not here in my dining room. Here as in London during the Civil War. You see, it was a Parliamentarian stronghold throughout the war. With Eliza intent on escaping from Captain Parker, it’s natural that she would head here, to a place where she would feel safe. Imagine the historical figures she could encounter, perhaps even Cromwell himself. She could become a sort of seventeenth-century poster girl for the cause. And I thought if the captain followed her into the enemy’s lair in order to win her back, then—” Ellen stopped herself. “I’m sorry, of course it’s not up to me to think of the plot.”
“Nonsense. Keep talking,” Allegra said, easing herself back onto her seat. “Keep talking. I will see the pictures.”
The Home for Broken Hearts Page 10
