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fidgeted anxiously, convinced he was facing a verdict that would either make or condemn the rest of his literary career. Finally the tension was broken by Dingle striking a match dramatically. The assistant leaned solemnly forward to light the pipe for his employer. Then, like Vesuvius, after exhaling a large plume of white smoke Crosby rumbled, “Bingham and Crosby are not only men of the letter but also of our word. We will still publish, and we will publish ahead of Tuttle and Doubleday. However, you must guarantee that your biography will contain some new and hopefully salacious insights into Banks’s early, morally dubious forays that will create enough hysteria amongst the scandalmongers and newspaper gentlemen to sell the godforsaken book!” He swung around to the portrait of his deceased partner: “Forgive me, Bingham, but if we are to survive and become a ‘modern’ publishing house, then we must surrender to the bestial demands of the gods of commerce,” he said before wiping his brow with a large purple silk handkerchief as if he had himself been sullied by such a declaration.
    D’Arcy stared at him aghast. “But every such event and proclivity is already embedded in the manuscript, sir!”
    â€œThen find something else!” Crosby thumped the desk for emphasis, one precariously balanced manuscript falling with a bang to the floor. No one dared to pick it up. Softening, the publisher turned back to D’Arcy. “My dear young man, research is the portal, but imagination the messenger,” he concluded with an air of pompous sagacity—an impenetrable remark that left the young biographer even more perplexed.
    Crosby rose with a dramatic scraping of his chair against the floor, then balanced his portly front against the edge of the desk. He had, D’Arcy noticed, become considerably plumper since the last time D’Arcy had seen him. The publisher was again staring reverently at his deceased partner’s portrait as if he were engaged in some kind of preternatural communication. “And Mr. Bingham tells me to tell you he expects the delivery of the completed and . . .
enhanced
 . . . manuscript by the end of this month. Thank you, young Hammer, that will be all.”
    The young biographer walked straight to his fiancée’s townhouse. As he marched down Great Marlborough Street an intense fury began to build from the soles of his fashionable buttoned boots to the crown of his high top hat. Had Clementine betrayed him? Could she have been so foolish as to reveal to her uncle the subject of his secret dedication? He had to discover the truth. All the previous trust, the confessed intimacies of his ambition whispered to the young girl, seemed cheapened. As he examined the nature of their courtship—her passive yet delightfully innocent amazement at his passionate enthusiasm for the eighteenth-century botanist and his exotic adventures—D’Arcy could not envisage that Clementine would be capable of such disloyalty. As I have said, D’Arcy was young and still in the naive throes of the kind of egotism we all fall victim to at the beginning of our careers, and to D’Arcy’s great disservice, Clementine had convinced him of his own genius. Any man would have fallen in love.
    At twenty, Clementine was twelve years younger than he and utterly without guile, or at least he had thought so up until then. D’Arcy had been smitten the first time he’d laid eyes upon her—at her uncle’s table seven years earlier, when she was a mere thirteen years old and he a cynical twenty-five-year-old—the year in which he later fell out with Horace Tuttle. At the time he was in the middle of a protracted love affair with a married woman (who shall remain nameless on these pages at least, but suffice it to say that the woman specialized in the seduction of gullible writers and I am shamed to confess that I was one