Salvage for the Saint Read Free Page A

certainly one such type. She was the type whose features in rather earlier youth might well have seemed a little underformed, a shade on the doughy side. But as the years swung by and bone structure began to assert itself, as the faces of her contemporaries took on an edge of hardness hers would simply have lost its excess softness to emerge as the example of perfectly sculptured beauty it had now become.
    Yes, a woman like that came into her own between twenty-five and thirty. Especially if she’d managed to keep a healthy skin, unraddled by the clogging attentions of the multitudinous offerings of chemico-cosmetic quackery on whose efficacy the greater part of credulous womankind have been induced to pin such a pathetic faith.
    Arabella Tatenor had certainly managed the miracle of dermal preservation, though whether she’d done so by shunning face goo or in spite of using the stuff Simon couldn’t tell. Her skin was smooth and clear with a healthy pink glow. She had the eyes to go with it, too, translucent blue like the Saint’s own; and above them was the spun copper sweep of her hair. He wondered about her colouring; maybe there was a strong Irish, or at any rate western fringe Celtic, contingent somewhere in her pedigree. But it must have been some way back because there was no trace of Irish in her speech. He’d known at once that she was American, or at least predominantly American. It wasn’t so much from any strongly marked accent as from her choice of words. She’d said “that sort of notion”, which had a transatlantic ring, and she’d referred to the “desk clerk” where a speaker of pure British English would probably have said “receptionist”, and of course she’d said “vacation” rather than “holiday”. The Saint was sensitive to such minor differences of idiom even though his own international background meant that he had himself long since adopted a style of speech which freely mixed the usages of Britain and the US. He noticed, for instance, that she pronounced “asked” in the American way, and “clerk” to rhyme with “lurk.”
    Yet at the same time there was a good deal of English English in her pronunciation. It had hardly any of the strident nasalisation of much American speech. Boston was the first likely area that came to mind, but to the Saint’s ear she sounded still more English than that.
    “Fitzpatrick was my name before I married,” she remarked, latching on to his thought with near-clairvoyant accuracy. “A solid New England family and filthy rich. When I was fourteen my parents sent me over here to raise the tone of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. And then on to Oxford.”
    “Where you took a brilliant double first in Byzantine history and molecular physics while ruining the academic dedication of countless slavering male students,” hazarded the Saint.
    “Where I got bored after two terms of Eng. Lit,” she corrected, “and took off into the wild blue yonder.”
    “Much to Daddy’s disgust, no doubt.”
    “Much.”
    “And then?”
    “I travelled the world. Bumming around, mostly, I guess you might call it. Having a ball. Until the money ran out. I have some expensive tastes, and after Oxford—well, the milk of parental generosity just kind of dried up.”
    He grinned as he made another open appraisal of her expensively tailored figure.
    “I imagine your style in bumming around might be comparable to Gloria Vanderbilt.”
    She fielded the grin and returned it to the accompaniment of a reproachfully levelled forefinger and the same mischievous twinkle in her eyes as he had seen there before.
    “Don’t you make a mistake,” she warned, “of thinking you have me all figured out and labelled and docketed. Because let me assure you, you haven’t, Mister Saint, not by a long chalk.”
    The Saint erected a momentary barricade of arms and elbows in front of his head in mock terror at her stern finger-wagging warning.
    “OK,” he said penitently. “Maybe