Today's excerpt is from
The Dickens With Love. This is probably my most popular holiday story. When I wrote it, I was trying to -- first and foremost -- write something that wasn't a mystery and didn't have a cop in it. ;-) But also that captured the themes and motifs of a Dickens Christmas story. If you know your Dickens, you'll understand why this story works so well with readers -- right down to the apparently Catch-22 ending.
There is a holiday coda for it
right here.
Today I am giving away three copies of
The Dickens With Love to the three randomly chosen readers who can come up with the titles of three or more Dickens' Christmas stories. Three three three. Get it?
BLURB:
Three years ago, a scandal cost
antiquarian “book hunter” James Winter everything that mattered to him: his
job, his lover and his self-respect. But now the rich and unscrupulous Mr.
Stephanopoulos has a proposition. A previously unpublished Christmas book by
Charles Dickens has turned up in the hands of an English chemistry professor by
the name of Sedgwick Crisparkle. Mr. S. wants that book at any price, and he
needs James to get it for him. There’s just one catch. James can’t tell the
nutty professor who the buyer is.
Actually, two catches. The nutty
Professor Crisparkle turns out to be totally gorgeous—and on the prowl. Faster
than you can say, “Old Saint Nick,” James is mixing business with pleasure…and
in real danger of forgetting that this is just a holiday romance.
Excerpt:
The Hotel Del Monte sat on twelve
lushly wooded acres in the middle of some of the most expensive real estate in Southern California. The hotel’s secluded location and
small size, the rambling, pink stucco Spanish style ninety-two-room complex and
its tranquil and luxuriant gardens full of trees, ornamental ponds and fragrant
flowers made it one of the most romantic settings in Los Angeles. No long, anonymous corridors lined
with room numbers. Most guest rooms and suites had private entrances and opened
directly onto the hotel’s gardens. If I was a guy in the market for a
honeymoon, Hotel Del Monte would be my first choice.
I asked at the front desk for Room
103 and then headed out through the ancient sycamores and tree ferns. I crossed
a small arched red and gold bridge from where I could see the graceful bell
tower on the other side of the small lake where the swans were taking shelter.
The rain pattered on the leaves of the lemon and orange trees lining the
cobbled path, glittered on the petals of the rose bushes. It smelled good, like
walking in the woods. The city seemed very far away.
I found Room 103 without too much
trouble, ducking into the stone alcove and knocking on the door. Rain dripped
musically from the eaves and ran down the back of my neck.
I shivered. I needed a raincoat, but
with only about fifteen to twenty days of rain a year, there were better things
to spend one’s pennies on. Like books. There was a 1924 edition of Gertrude
Chandler Warner’s The Box-Car Children I had my eye on for this year’s
Christmas present to myself.
The hotel room door swung abruptly
open. An unsmiling, dark-haired man stood framed against an elegant background
of pale cabbage roses and ivy. He was about forty. Tall, rawboned, lean. He
wore faded jeans, a cream-colored sweater over a white tee shirt, and
horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a bookish angel.
“James Winter?” he inquired, looking
me over like he’d caught me cheating on my chemistry quiz.
“Professor Crisparkle?”
My surprise must have been obvious.
“Is there a problem?” he returned sternly.
“No. Not at all.”
The problem was he was gorgeous. It
was a no-nonsense brand of gorgeousness, though. Far from detracting from his
dark, grave good looks, the glasses accentuated them.
I smiled my very best smile—despite
the rain trickling down the back of my neck—and offered my hand. After a
hesitation, he shook it.
His grip was firm, his palm and
fingers smooth but not clammy or soft. An academic, but not one of the ones who
never left his ivory tower.
No wedding ring.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” I
meant it. I was sort of nonplussed at how much I meant it.
“Come in,” Crisparkle replied, moving
aside.
I stepped inside the room which was
cozily warm and smelled indefinably expensive, a combination of fine linens,
fresh coffee and cut flowers. A fire burned cheerily in the fireplace. The
remains of the professor’s lunch were on a tray on the low table before the sage
velvet sofa. Soothing classical piano played off the laptop next to his lunch
tray.
Corey and I had stayed at the Hotel
Del Monte on our one year anniversary. The rooms were all furnished in romantic
country-French décor—each unique but with the famous signature touches of Alicante marble, vintage
silk or chenille upholstery, and original artwork. It was the best weekend of
my life—or maybe it seemed that way in contrast to the following week, which
was when my entire world had shattered.
“You must have brought the rainy
weather with you.” I smiled again, not bothering to analyze why I was
displaying such uncharacteristic cordiality. “Have you seen much of the city
since you’ve been here?”
“The book is on the desk.” Crisparkle
nodded at the writing desk near the white French doors leading out to a private
patio.
Not one for chitchat, was he? Maybe
it was an English thing. In any case, I lost all interest in rude Professor
Crisparkle. The only thing in that room for me now was the faded red leather
book lying on the polished desktop. As I approached the writing table my heart
was banging so hard I thought I might be having my first ever panic attack.
A book. Not a manuscript. I’d been
thinking that Crisparkle and Mr. S. were playing fast and loose with their
terminology, but no. It was a bound book. All the more unlikely, then, that
this could be the real thing. Hard enough to believe a manuscript had been
lost, let alone an entire print run. Impossible, in fact. And yet, as I reached
for the thin volume, finely bound in red Morocco leather, I noted that my
hand was shaking. Well, scratch a cynic and you’ll find a disappointed
idealist.
I drew back as I realized that I was
in danger of dripping on the desk.
“Could I borrow a towel?” I asked.
Crisparkle gave me a funny look, and
then disappeared into the bathroom.
I took a moment to remind myself of
all the possibilities of any such appraisal. The novel might be the real thing,
but it was more likely to be a forgery. It might be a modern forgery or it
might be a contemporary forgery. Knowing which would depend partially on
discovering the book’s provenance—the documented or authenticated history of
its ownership—of which I so far knew nothing.
The professor reappeared with a
peach-colored plush towel and I scrubbed my face and hair, tossed the towel to
the fireplace hearth and sat down at the desk. I still didn’t touch the book,
simply gazing at the gold lettering on the front cover. Miss Anjaley Coutts
surrounded in gold-stamped holly and ivy.
That wouldn’t be the title. So the
book was a gift and Miss Coutts was the recipient. Why was that name familiar?
Who was Miss Anjaley Coutts? Not Mrs. Dickens or a sister-in-law. Not a
daughter. Not an alias of Dickens’ mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan, because
he didn’t meet her until 1857. Who then?
“It doesn’t bite,” Professor
Crisparkle said sardonically, and I realized that I’d been sitting there for
more than a minute, unmoving, staring at the cover.
I threw him a quick, distracted look,
and then delicately edged the book around to examine its spine. Gold lettering
read The Christmas Cake / Dickens / MDCCCXLVII.
The Christmas cake?
I carefully opened the book and
turned the flyleaf. On the frontispiece was a hand-colored etching of a truly
sumptuous cake—topped by a sly, smiling mouse with crumbs on her whiskers. I
looked at the title page: another smaller illustration of an elderly man and
woman who appeared, to my wondering eye, to be getting sloshed on the Christmas
punch. And the words The Christmas Cake in a familiar, faded hand that
most people only viewed through glass.
I turned the page and stared, feeling
decidedly light-headed, at the first sentence. Our story begins with a
fallen star. But the star is not the story.
I was vaguely aware that Professor
Crisparkle spoke to me, but I didn’t hear what he said, and I didn’t care. I
was absorbing—devouring—the words with my eyes.
Roofed with the ragged ermine of a
newly-fallen snow glittering by starlight, the Doctor’s old-fashioned house
loomed grey-white through the snow-fringed branches of the trees, a quaint iron
lantern, which was picturesque by day and luminous and cheerful by night,
hanging within the square, white-pillared portico to one side. That the many-paned
window on the right framed the snow-white head of Mrs. Dimpledolly, the
Doctor’s wife, the old Doctor himself was comfortably aware—for his kindly eyes
missed nothing, so it was that he spied the falling…
I read for some time before I finally
raised my head. I no longer saw the hotel room. I don’t think I even saw the
book or the handwritten pages anymore. I was seeing benevolent old Doctor
Dimpledolly and his amiable missus as they opened their home to a coachload of
strangers stranded on Christmas Eve.
“Satisfied?” Professor Crisparkle
asked dryly.
I snapped back to awareness, blinking
up at him, dimly taking in the details of elegant nose, long eyelashes, soft
dark hair…I couldn’t tell what color his eyes were behind the horn-rims. That
mercurial shade of light brown that looked green in certain light and gold in
other. He seemed so awfully stern, so awfully strict, reminding me of an
uptight schoolmaster. But that was right, wasn’t it? He taught chemistry like
Mr. Redlaw, the professor of chemistry in The Haunted Man.
As I stared at him, it occurred to me
that Professor Crisparkle didn’t like me much.
Didn’t like me at all.
Why? Not that I was universally
beloved—hardly—but what had I done to earn such instant dislike from an
out-of-towner?
I said slowly. “It looks…very
promising.” My voice nearly gave out. Promising? Who was I kidding? I
knew, knew in my bones, this was the real thing. I said more solidly, “I’d have
to examine it more closely, of course. To be absolutely sure.”
He gazed at me with an expression of
utter contempt.
No, I wasn’t misreading him. I
repeated uncertainly, “I’d like to spend a little more time—”
“I’m sure you would.”
Color heated my face at that dry,
ironic tone—and I wasn’t quite sure why. I said evenly, “It certainly looks
authentic, but you never know.”
“You don’t, do you?”
Again: barely concealed scorn. Too
obvious by now to politely ignore.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
“There is no mysterious client, is
there?”
“I didn’t say he was mysterious, but
of course there’s a client.”
“What is the name of your client?”
“I’ve already told you he wishes to
remain anonymous.”
Crisparkle said, looking me straight
in the eyes, “After we spoke on the phone, Mr. Winter, I did a bit of checking
up on you with your colleagues in the ABAA. You have quite an interesting—and
not entirely admirable—past.”
I’m not sure why that struck home the
way it did. I’d certainly heard worse, but hearing it from Crisparkle—knowing
the stories he would have heard about me—was, quite simply, humiliating. I
managed to say, “There are two sides to every story, Mr. Crisparkle.”
He didn’t answer.
After a painfully long pause, I said,
“I take it you’ve decided not to permit me further access to the book?”
He said, as though it gave him great
satisfaction, “You take it correctly, Mr. Winter.”
So why the hell had he permitted me
up here to look at it at all? Curiosity? Or had I blown my one and only chance
when I pretended not to know for sure that the book was genuine?
I wanted to shout out, it’s not
fair. But when was life ever fair? Instead, I expelled a long, shaky breath
and managed to keep from saying all the furious, foolish things that wouldn’t
help my cause anyway. I could hardly bear to take a final glance at the book.
Leaving it lying there in the shadows of reflected rain and firelight, knowing
I would never see or hold it again, was like physical pain. I felt it in my
core of my body like a physiological reaction to grief. I felt ill. I felt like
crying.
Rising, I began gathering my things.
Surprisingly, my hands were quite steady now.
I dragged on my coat, still damp with
the earlier walk in the rain. All the while Crisparkle stood there watching me
in an icy silence like a head butler waiting to expel a grubby tradesman.
I went to the door of his suite and
he followed me, still unspeaking. I had my hand on the knob when my anger
overtook me, and I turned to face him.
“Not that it’s any of your goddamned
business, but I had nothing to do with Louis Strauss’s forgeries, let alone
murder. I was never accused or even implicated in any wrongdoing. I merely had
the misfortune of working for Strauss. So did several other book hunters. The
difference is, they didn’t stay in the business. I stayed because this is my
passion and my life.”
“Ah, I see,” he said
mockingly. “Why, then, do you suppose so many people say the unflattering
things they do about you?”
“Because I was too good at my
job. And I was…arrogant. Nearly as arrogant as you.”
His expression altered
infinitesimally right before I quietly, carefully, shut his hotel room door.
Buy it at Amazon
It's in audio too!
