Wicked Women Read Free Page A

more than a farm house. It grew, like a living thing. It began as a single stone structure, without windows, this room here, we believe, back in the ninth century. There’s a dwelling here in the Domesday Book: 1070-ish. See how thick the walls are? The farmer, his family, his hangers-on, the animals, all sheltered in here together. A few good harvests, no wars and some clever barter, and the humans can afford to separate out from the animals: they get to live above them. That way you get the warmth but not the stench. You build a staircase up the side of the structure: even get windows with glass. Later you build out and the farmhands and servants live apart from the farmer. You enclose the staircase. You build a big hall and panel it; you begin to get grand. A major upheaval moves the animals out to stables and byres: the servants move up to the attics; the family moves down. You send the farmhands to war and ask the monarch to stay: you get given land, or buy it. Now you’ve got more land, you’ve got more trees and can afford to heat the place. You get more confidence: separate bedrooms for the kids. An elegant frontage gets built in the early eighteenth century, and bathrooms in the twentieth. Farming’s no longer the family business. Second half of the twentieth you sell some of the land off. So, yes, it’s historic: it’s also a mess. Some of the improvers had taste, some didn’t. The bathrooms being a case in point. Wretched little things tucked under the eaves.” The Wilcoxes looked at her blankly.
    “None of the doors are flush,” said Rosemary.
    “We could soon replace them with something more modern,” said Harry. “You could really do things with this house.”
    “Look at the state of my heels!” she said. “There are actually cracks in the kitchen floor.”
    “Those are flagstones,” said Harry. “We could tile them over easily enough.”
    “I expect what moved your editor to send you over to me,” said Defoe, “was the documentary on TV last week. I was the nuclear expert he saw, sitting in a Moscow hotel with my face in shifting squares, electronically blurred, to no real purpose; experts are never in real danger. Everyone needs them. The chambermaid always survives the palace revolution. Someone has to make the beds. In my hand I held an anti-rad flask, and in it was a helping of Red Mercury, looking just like goulash. I tilted the flask, and it sloshed around as would any oily stew in a cooking pot, only with a paprika tinge, which is why I compare it to goulash, and why it is called Red Mercury. Hoax or not? A fictitious substance devised by the Russian Mafia—and in fact goulash? Or a real and dangerous addition to the nuclear arsenal, a substance so secret governments deny its very existence. A new element which will give the terrorists’ A-bomb in a suitcase the fillip required to turn it into an N-bomb in a golf ball, capable of destroying life for miles around—with one quick fizzle, one flash of radiation so profound it kills all living things, while leaving buildings, highways, transport, microwave towers, post-office towers to you—and water supplies untouched.”
    “You’re very good at this,” she said, admiringly.
    “I earned my living at it for twenty years,” said Defoe. “I should be.”
    “One thing,” said Weena, “wouldn’t the water supply be contaminated?”
    Defoe brushed the comment away, and accidentally brushed her breast. “I’m sorry,” he said.
    “That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t have a thing about body space. I’m the touchy-feely type, as it happens. Aquarius. You’re Taurus, aren’t you?”
    “I’m a man,” he said. “That is all the definition I need. Where was I? Red Mercury, fiction or fact? Oddly, until the stuff was in my hand, I had assumed it was a fraud, a con. But there was a kind of reluctance of movement in the stuff, something about the sluggish way it shifted in the flask, as I said earlier, like chunks of meat