Before Midnight

As Mr. Brown's son's fondest dear

/ earned enduring fame.

"I call that fudging. Considering how many Mr. Browns have had sons in the course of history, and how many of!the sons--"

"Pah." Wolfe turned a page. "Nell Gwynn, the English actress."

I stared. "Yeah, I've heard of her. How come? One of her boy friends may have been named Brown or Brownson, but that wasn't what made her famous. It was some king."

"Charles the Second." He was smug. "He made his son by her a duke. His father, Charles the First, on a trip to Spain in his youth, had assumed the name of Mr. Brown. And of course Nell Gwynn was the mistress of Charles the Second."

"I prefer paramour. Okay, so you've read ten thousand books. What about this one--I think it was Number Nine:

"By the law himself had earlier made

I could not be his legal wife;

The law he properly obeyed

And loved me all my life."

I flipped a hand. "Name her."

"Archie." His head turned to me. "You have somewhere to go?"

"No, sir, not tonight. Lily Rowan has a table at the Flamingo Room and thought I might drop in for a dance, but I told her you might need me, and she knows how indispensable I--"

"Pfui." He started to glare and decided it wasn't worth the trouble. "You intended to go, and undertook to shift the responsibility for your absence by pestering me into suggesting it. You have succeeded. I suggest that you go somewhere at once."

There were three or four things I could have said, but he sighed and went back to the magazine, so I skipped it. As I headed for the hall his voice told my back, "You shaved and changed your clothes before dinner."

That's the trouble with working for and living with a really great detective.

Chapter 2

Since I got home late that night and there was nothing urgent on, it was after nine Wednesday morning before I got down to the kitchen for my snack of grapefruit, oatmeal, griddle cakes, bacon, blackberry jam, and coffee. Wolfe had of course breakfasted in his room as usual and gone up to the plant rooms on the roof for his morning session with the orchids.

"It is a good thing, Archie," Fritz remarked, spooning batter, his own batter, onto the griddle for my fourth cake, "to see you break your fast with proper leisure. Disturbed by no interruptions."