The Plain Old Man Read Online Free Page A

of an Alexander Kelling who was some kind of attaché to the Court of St. James’s shortly after the Revolution, when John Adams was minister. I believe they didn’t last long. She and Abigail didn’t get along very well.”
    “Abigail Adams always felt she was slighted in London,” Sebastian Frostedd, who was sitting next to them, put in. “But I can’t imagine anybody had the gall to slight Ernestina. Then of course the Kellings were rich and the Adamses weren’t. That’s bound to create ill feeling.”
    “Surely not with Abigail Adams,” Sarah protested. “I thought she’d have been above that sort of thing.”
    “Nobody is.”
    Sebastian stretched out a hand to the muffin stand Heatherstone was passing around. A cabochon ruby in the massive gold ring he was wearing caught a deep crimson spark from the candles the servant had lighted, for the sun was beginning its downward slide and the sky had grown overcast. April showers again tonight, Sarah thought. She hoped it would be fine tomorrow. Guy and a couple of his friends were coming early in the morning with a truck to move Sir Marmaduke’s mansion from the sun parlor over to the auditorium. She and Guy ought to be out there right now finishing those bushes instead of dawdling over the teacups.
    Still it was pleasant to dawdle and actually there wasn’t all that much left to do. In a way Sarah was sorry they’d had only the one set to paint. That didn’t mean her work was over. As decorations for the auditorium Emma wanted great massed arrangements in osier baskets, for which complicated foundations would have to be constructed out of plastic dishpans, chicken wire, tape, and that spongy green stuff which takes up water and keeps cut flowers fresh.
    Emma’s plan was to have Sarah cut and arrange the greens during the day tomorrow, then go out toward sunset and pick vast numbers of tulips and daffodils from the garden. These would be immersed up to their necks in water overnight for some esoteric reason Emma had learned at the garden club. The following day they’d be taken out of the water all fresh and turgid, another garden-club word, and popped in among the greenery. Getting the baskets ready sounded like a day’s work in itself.
    Two days. One to pick and one to pop. Sarah was dreamily trying to remember how many for the foyer, how many for the refreshment area, how many for the orchestra when she realized Ridpath Wale had joined them, coming on little cat feet as was his wont.
    Ridpath was their John Wellington Wells, another exemplar of Emma Kelling’s flair for casting. He projected to a dot the image of brisk businessman-cum-sorcerer. The first time Sarah had watched him rehearsing his potion-brewing scene with Alexis and Aline, she’d got a flash of sudden terror that he was going to pull off a workable spell. At the moment he’d joined Sebastian and Guy in front of the Romney, and was gazing up at the late Ernestina as if he wouldn’t mind trying to put a spell on her.
    “Gad, that’s a beautiful thing,” he sighed. “I’d give my eyeteeth to own it.”
    “Well, offer Emma a few hundred thousand and see what she says,” Sebastian told him. “What’s the going rate on Romneys these days, Sarah?”
    “My husband could tell you better than I. I do know Madam Wilkins paid forty thousand pounds for the painting exactly like this which she bought for her palazzo back in 1907. Unfortunately, hers turned out to be a fake.”
    “Emma’s is authentic, of course.” Ridpath managed to turn a declarative sentence into a mocking question.
    “Absolutely,” Sarah informed him, turning a simple adverb into a pretty crisp rebuke. “In the first place, this portrait has never been out of the family since the original Ernestina brought it home. In the second, we’ve had it authenticated up, down, and sideways by about twenty different experts over the years, mainly because of that copy at the Madam’s. Mrs. Wilkins tried to claim Romney