Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (2 page)

As my husband was observant as well as solicitous, he redirected the fussing to a mini-intervention on my abuse of mood-altering substances.

“Really, darling—
three
of these? All at once?”

I carefully extricated three Lipton tea bags from the tangled web that dangled into my teacup. “Yes,
three!
” I replied more grumpily than I’m proud to admit. “I can’t be expected to stay awake through a Monday morning staff meeting on any less caffeine than that.”

“Well, then?” asked Wally, directing his gaze toward the two bags of chamomile tea that remained steeping in the same cup.

“You know what Monday morning meetings do to me on a good day! And with everything else that’s going on today, this should be just enough sedation to keep me from snapping before the meeting is over.”

“Really, Dolly—I’ve never known you to have nerves like this. I’m concerned enough to think that you should see a doctor.”

Wally squeezed me in a hug and then squeezed out all the tea bags and handed me my teacup. The cup was actually a gift from
him to celebrate my getting my current job. It had holograph pictures of Henry VIII’s six wives on it. The wives’ images came and went, ghostlike, as the tea in the cup went from hot to cold.

My disproportionate fondness for that teacup has always perplexed Wally. He knows, of course, about my Henry VIII obsession; that’s why he purchased the cup. What he has no way of knowing is the story of my otherworldly encounter with the shades of the Big Man’s six wives or the impact that their advice to me has had on both our lives. The portraits on the cup remind me of my faraway Tudor girlfriends and of my various family members and friends who are, in a way, their counterparts here in the real world. At times I long to tell Wally about my memorable night with Henry VIII’s women, and that I live in something of a parallel Tudor universe. I am unable to, though; the Tudors—or, to be perfectly accurate, Ann Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I—made it clear to me when I met her that telling tales out of Tudor School is against rule number one.

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ Wally,” I reminded him, hoping to end the reverse-curtain lecture with some feminine mystery. It worked.

“I’ll be dreaming about
this
in my philosophy all day long,” Wally said, tapping me fondly on the behind. “Although I’m sure it’s not exactly what the Bard meant when he said that. And anyway, if you aren’t in better spirits by tomorrow, I may just have to spank it again.”

It seemed to me that it would be a win no matter which way my spirits went. As it turned out, however, there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in
my
philosophy as well.

Chapter Two

Meeting and Greeting

My commute to work involved some very pretty English countryside, and the morning was so fine that I opened the car windows; the drive revived my spirits nicely. My appetite had returned by the time I sat down at my desk and raised my office teacup in a toast to no one in particular.

“‘Now for the tea of our host, now for the rollicking bun, now for the muffin and toast, now for the gay Sally Lunn!’”

I hoped that a little Gilbert and Sullivan for my breakfast order would make a change from the Shakespeare-awareness that had recently overtaken our little college. A major Shakespeare festival was in the works. It had subsumed pretty much everything about academic life lately, at least in the humanities; everyone was all about the comedy and the drama. In keeping with the drama portion of the theme, a tempest in a teapot was brewing among our support staff that morning. Staff meeting refreshments set up, the ubiquitous tea and buns, promised to be disputatious.

To begin with, our two administrative assistants, Katie and Merrie, were both in a hormonal haze. This was not unusual, because of the rather dreamy, romantic nature they shared. In their little world, love conquered all; the work ethic certainly did not stand a chance. We did not ask too closely about Katie’s man, who was by all accounts a questionable choice. Her bestie, Merrie, was there for her, though, to support her through her various romantic trials.

Merrie, a petite little thing at well under five feet, was a gal who liked them tall. Her true love, all seven feet of him, was
chief of college security. Merrie’s swain made it a point to visit our department daily on his rounds. The distant sound of his heavy shoes clumping along the corridor that morning was like starter’s orders to Merrie.

“I am
so
excited about him! I think he might just be the one, you know! Golly,” she said, “I’ll bet he’s got his escutcheon with him today!”

“I think you mean truncheon, dear,” Katie said patiently. Correcting Merrie’s grammatical lapses was not in Katie’s job description, but it may as well have been.

After a truncheon sighting, Merrie was pretty much useless the rest of the day. The relationship made us all feel well looked after in terms of security, if not well served on the administrative end.

“I shouldn’t be expected to handle the bun detail while I’m battling morning sickness!” Katie said, looking like she was about to lose the battle.

“I can’t do it, either,” said Merrie. “It’s almost time for my scheduled tea break, and
he
will be here any second now. I will
not
see my man with his truncheon stood up!” I had a feeling that eventually she would, one way or another, but I declined to comment. The crisis seemed insoluble until the dean’s assistant, Amy, handily resolved it.

“I will take care of the tea, and the buns are a done deal. I baked some myself last night!”

“Leave it to you, Amy!” I said. The old-fashioned term doughty-handed always came to mind when I witnessed an example of Amy’s solid, no-drama efficiency. That and her porcelain-skinned milkmaid looks spoke of her rustic roots.

Some of our staff considered Amy a country bumpkin and wondered how she had secured a position in credential-aware academia with only a lot of horse sense to recommend her.

Sex and a soccer star named Lester were at the bottom of it.

Chapter Three

True Love’s Course and the Source of Divorce

Lester had wed the pulchritudinous Amy when he was the star of the soccer team here at our college, and she was a waitress at a local village eatery. Amy was able to keep up with him socially—though barely—as he worked his way up to soccer coach for his home team. Lester’s career really took off from there; he rose to prominence in the international soccer community in what seemed like no time flat. It wasn’t long before he outgrew the sweet, simple Amy, who was not inclined to change her down-home ways. Eventually, the two divorced, with Lester using his connections at the college to swing a good job for Amy, thus reducing his alimony payment. Lester moved on to bigger and better things, at least in the bustline department, with his second marriage.

In the Jeeves stories, Bertie Wooster’s deserving Aunt Dahlia warns him against girls with oddly spelled names such as Gwladys. She might have sung a similar siren song about Lester’s second wife. Like the moon pulling at the ocean tide, Gladous had a downright magnetic effect on testosterone seas.

Gladous probably deserved to have been warned as much as warned against—at least according to my would-have-been stepdaughter, Lizzie.

“Lester raked Gladous over the divorce court coals even worse than he raked Amy over them!” Lizzie told me once. “I’d like to see him try to get the better of
me
that way!”

It occurred to me that a woman sometimes “scorns what best contents her,” but I wasn’t about to point that out to Lizzie, who
dallied with Lester herself whenever she visited England but preferred to keep the exact nature of the relationship a mystery.

Letty, Lester’s third and current wife, had recently become our department head. In a stunning example of life imitating marriage, Letty took on this position after none other than the aforementioned Gladous vacated it.

Letty’s special area of academic expertise was fashion history; stage and screen producers of costume dramas clamored for her consulting services. Photos of celebrities dressed in period best to which she had given her blessing filled her office. The woman was certainly in her element with the upcoming Shakespeare festival; as she was often heard to say, “The play’s the thing!”

The
plays
are the
things
would have been more accurate, if less literarily fortuitous. Our little university had fallen on tough times, and that Shakespeare festival that I mentioned was intended to bring attention, cache, and funds our way. Personally, I thought it a long shot. Nevertheless, our department’s role in the festival would form the bulk of the agenda at our morning staff meeting.

Chapter Four

Puck’ll Chuckle

Our department had never been involved in theatrical doings as grand as those now being planned, but we had helped out over the years in the various productions that the college had put on. My Wally was known to lend a hand to the cause on such occasions, and he knew some of my work associates passingly well.

“I don’t mind getting ‘bear’ for a good cause,” Wally had said puckishly, rustling up a tame bear for a production of
The Winter
’
s Tale
. That act of ursine kindness had made him the go-to man for theatrical livestock. He’d had to put his foot down once or twice, though. “I cannot and will not participate in animal body part procurement on a nonessential level,” he had insisted when approached to supply lizard leg, dog tongue, frog toe, and so on for the weird sisters’ cauldron in
Macbeth
. I knew that one of the plays we would be discussing today was
A Midsummer Night
’
s Dream
. Hard to know what Wally would have to say if getting Nick Bottom suited up meant that he would have to contribute a piece of ass to the production; I chuckled at the thought. As our all-girl department gathered at the meeting table, I chuckled as well at Wally’s nickname for the assembled contingent: “mixed bags.”

“We’ll be talking about work soon enough, Dolly; the meeting will be starting in a few minutes. You still have time to take a look at this catalog, though. Lots of new items, and several lovely pieces marked down. Some of them just struck me as so ‘you’ that I circled them for you in red ink. Tell me what you think after the meeting!”

“I shouldn’t have to, Blanche,” I said, laughing. “You could just read it in my palm!”

Hard-pressed to make ends meet on an academic salary, Blanche had taken to reading the odd palm and to selling jewelry as a franchisee. Her sideline had become quite successful, as evidenced by the preponderance of baubles, bangles, and beads in our department.

“Necklaces are the way to go, Dolly,” advised Gladous, peeping into the catalog companionably and offering some expert advice. “The right lavalier does wonders for the cleavage, you know.”

“Enough about cleavage, Gladous; I am calling this meeting to order. Time to get down to business!” Letty said, gathering her papers about her. Once things were underway, Letty announced that she would be introducing two guest attendees at the meeting. I already knew both of them.

Chapter Five

The Rest of the Guest List

Marge, running a little late and entering the room as Letty made her opening remarks, seated herself to my left upon her arrival. “Heard from Uncle Harry lately?” she whispered convivially. Marge was a niece, several times removed, of my former fiancé, Harry, as well as an active member of our college’s board of trustees. I inquired politely about Marge’s two unprepossessing sons, and Marge then settled in with one of Blanche’s jewelry catalogs hidden behind her meeting agenda. A large, ornate brooch seemed to have caught her eye.

Our other guest attendee sat next to Marge. A woman of substantial girth, she went by the unlikely nickname of Demi, an abbreviation of her full and unpronounceable Italian moniker.

“How is Wally’s sheep-rescue project going?” she leaned toward me and whispered as Letty made her way down the meeting agenda.

“The flock is prospering finely,” I whispered back, “thanks in no small part to you.”

Demi was a woman of substance in more ways than one. She was present at our meeting today as a board member and as a primary funding source for our college. The woman’s pockets ran deep, and she could be generous when she wanted to be. Wally had charmed financial support from Demi for his animal charities more than once. He referred to her as
paisana
whenever they spoke and as
buy-sana
once he was safely back at home with me, her check in his hand.

The meeting made its way to what was more or less the seventh-inning stretch, and I fell to thinking of all that was on my home plate. I had a bevy of company coming to stay at the house, and in fact, I needed to pick them up at the airport as soon as the meeting was over.

As the proceedings concluded, Gladous was kind enough to kick me under the table and bring my reverie to an end. I sprang into action, grabbing my car keys and making a dash for the door.

“‘They stumble that run fast,’” Letty reminded me. “What’s your hurry?”

“‘Time and the hour runs through the roughest day,’” I pointed out. “I have a plane to meet!”

Chapter Six

Burr Puts a Burr under Dolly’s Saddle, by Golly

There were two preoccupied spouses in our marriage, I thought as I drove to the airport after leaving work. My husband had seemed a bit restless of late, like something was bubbling up in him, and he could barely contain it. I wondered what it could mean.

His work life was the first and most obvious thing to come to mind. Wally had come to the Cotswolds to bring his world-class veterinary research skills to an ovine variant of mad cow disease that was threatening the very fiber of the wool business across the globe. He had, as he said, pretty much unraveled that tangled problem, and sheep, as Bach said, might safely graze again. Now he had only a bit of cleanup work left to do.

I wondered if Wally had received some secret call to his next world-improving feat of veterinary, medical, sanitary, or engineering brilliance. It wouldn’t be the first he’d had since we’d married and moved to the Cotswolds; he was quite in international demand. He had said no to all the professional calls I knew of on the pretext of being caught up with his sheep. But I knew he also did it to allow me the opportunity to develop and birth my magnum Tudor opus in the conducive quiet of the country.