Any Given Moment (The Alexandra Chronicles Book 3) Read online

And it was true, she did look like Katharine Hepburn, though her eyes were green instead of blue, and her hair various shades of brown instead of red. This past year, when the BBC had hired Elizabeth to Americanize a history series and be its host for Amer­ican PBS audiences, one of the London tabloids had called her the "Katharine Hepburn of Academe. A Real Yank Media Star at Ox­ford." They had run a BBC publicity still of Elizabeth, a faculty photo of her in her somber black teaching robes, and a candid of her in a bathing suit at the indoor university pool, which they had obtained God only knew how.

  "You wrote the Duchess of Schellingford biography, didn't you?" Mr. A. W. Babcock said, looking up from her passport.

  "Yes," Elizabeth said, thinking how posturing as an intellectual added at least fifty years to anyone's age, certainly to young Mr. A. W. Babcock's here. She wondered what had scared him so badly in adolescence that he had to hide, too.

  "And now you're working on the Countess of Derby?" He was reading upside down from her form.

  "Yes, but you would know her better as Miss Farren, Elizabeth Farren, the comedienne of the Drury Lane."

  "What are her dates?"

  "Seventeen fifty-nine to 1829."

  "Ah, the time of Mrs. Siddons perhaps?" he asked.

  "They were friends," Elizabeth told him, in a voice that prom­ised they could be friends, too if only he'd get on with it and find her those letters.

  He cleared his throat, put her faculty card down on the counter, and met her eyes again. "You're teaching at Oxford."

  "Just one course, at Balliol."

  "An American teaching British history at Oxford," he mur­mured, shaking his head in world-weary disbelief.

  She shrugged, smiling, as if to say she couldn't help any of it: her American citizenship, her B.A. from Princeton, her Ph.D. from Columbia, her teaching posts, her best-seller, her decision in fifth grade to be smart instead of shy.

  "There's a curator in rare manuscripts who's a Hepburn fa­natic," Mr. Babcock said. "Maybe he can do something for you."

  "What an insipid little twit you are, Babcock," a voice said.

  Startled, Elizabeth turned to see a rather peculiar-looking man limping over.

  "Professor Robinson," young Mr. A. W. Babcock said, Adam's apple rising and falling in nervousness, "this is Mr. Thorp of rare manuscripts."

  "How do you do, sir?" Elizabeth said respectfully.

  "Professor, ha!" he snorted. "You're not old enough to change the twit's nappies. Katharine Hepburn of academe, indeed. Ha! Phooey! Come along."

  No one ever claimed that rare manuscript curators were any more normal than academics, and so Mr. Thorp and Elizabeth got along just fine, particularly after she went to see the Katharine Hepburn pictures he kept in his tiny office. By late afternoon, Elizabeth had donned a blue cloth surgical gown and mask, and latex surgical gloves, and was happily sorting through undated let­ters from the late eighteenth century in the document rehabilitation room. The technician assigned to her was very good; they had already found two letters written by people who had known Miss Farren well.

  At four o'clock they called it a day since the technician needed to pick up her child at day care by half past. Elizabeth needed a fresh start and fresh eyes anyway. She had been up until three the night before reading student papers, and she had learned over the years—the hard way—that examining documents with a tired mind and body only prompted unholy errors that could take months to catch.

  Elizabeth flagged a cab and headed across the city to pick up the latest episode of the TV series for PBS. As she always did when arriving at Broadcasting House, she thought of her first visit here, in early 1988, when she had arrived just in time to see two medics carrying out a victim of Legionnaires' disease. Elizabeth never failed to remember what she had thought while watching the stretcher being loaded onto the ambulance: how strange it was to be in the middle of an event she knew someone like herself would be trying to research two hundred years later. It always made her feel like leaving a note.

  "Professor Robinson," the BBC security guard said, greeting her.

  "Hello, John," she said, signing in. "How are you?"

  "Cannot complain, no I can't."

  "Good, I'm glad," she said, putting the pen down.

  "School's out, is it?" he asked her.

  "After a paper or two, I'm a free woman."

  "I only wish it were true," he said, pouting.

  "Now John," Elizabeth gently scolded, walking briskly toward the elevators.

  "Well, well, if it isn't the one and only and highly memorable Elizabeth Robinson, Ph.D."

  She had almost walked into Bill Staugher from PBS in New York. "Hello, Bill," Elizabeth said, holding out her hand. "On a buy­ing trip?"

  "Maybe, maybe not." Bill squeezed her hand and kissed her cheek.

  "Did you see the new episode?" she asked him. "It really is quite wonderful, even if I do say so myself."

  "King George the Third?"

  "Yes," she said, eyes sparkling.

  "I've got it here," he said, patting his briefcase.

  "I hope you like it as much as I do."

  "I'm sure we will." And then his expression turned to one of concern. "So," he said, lowering his voice, "what do you think about the news from New York?"

  "Well," Elizabeth said, making a face, "they say they can't fund another program on the same period, but I told them, for heaven's sake, it is the American Revolution, after all, one would hate to think that's the only part of the series PBS wants to skimp on—the part most relevant to their audience—"

  Bill cut her off and took Elizabeth by the arm to pull her aside. "I meant about ICA and the Hillingses." Dorothy and Henry Hillings represented not only Elizabeth's books, but also her TV and film rights through ICA. It was they who had instigated her BBC deal.

  "Are you referring to the merger with ICA?" Elizabeth asked. "Because Dorothy wrote to me a while ago and said it was a good thing."

  "So you haven't heard."

  "Heard what?"

  "That ICA impounded the offices of Hillings & Hillings and caused Dorothy to have a heart attack." Elizabeth blinked, trying to take this in. "Is she," she finally managed to say, "alive?"

  "Yes, she is. She's at Lenox Hill Hospital. And the doctors say she'll be okay—but I'm not sure if she and Henry will ever be fine again, if you know what I mean. The whole thing is really quite a mess."

  "Any given moment," Elizabeth murmured.

  "Excuse me?" Bill said.

  She looked at him, eyes starting to fill. "That's what Dorothy always says, 'At any given moment your whole life could change.'

  "There was a flicker of a smile from Bill. “So you'll make the most of every day?"

  "No," she said, blinking rapidly, "so I won't give up." Elizabeth looked around. "Excuse me, but I must find a telephone."

  2

  "I love you, darling," Henry Hillings murmured, kissing his wife softly on the forehead. But she was already asleep.

  Although more than fifty years had passed, it seemed to Henry that Dorothy looked very much the same as she had that first afternoon at the tea dance at Grosvenor House during the war.

  He had been able to tell right off that she was new to London, because she had been wearing her Canadian Red Cross uniform instead of her "glad rags," the civilian clothes the other women changed into the minute they were granted leave. He could also tell she was new because she had been talking to Potty Harper when he had first seen her, and everyone knew that although Potty came to tea dances to find a "good girl," he'd do his damnedest to make her a "bad girl" by nightfall, and, failing that, might simply attack her in a doorway if he'd had enough to drink. But then, a war was on and they had all been so starved for passionate attachment, that when granted leave, the soldiers flocked to London to blow their pay on the best women they could find. And why not? "Who would outlive this war?

  Henry was different from the others. He was in U.S. Army Intelligence and his country was not yet at war
. The British, the Canadians, the Australians had already seen many of their comrades slaughtered. Even Potty Harper, it would turn out, would not see his next tea dance.

  That night a group of them had gone to dinner, and Henry could not seem to keep his eyes off of Dorothy, although she did her best to ignore him. They were just getting their food when the sirens started. Though startled, they obediently filed out of the restaurant—carrying their plates and glasses—following the maître d' to the underground station near Marble Arch. There they nestled against one another on the cold, damp cement platform, trying to eat in the dark but not succeeding well at all, as they listened, trembling and cringing, as the bombs continued to fall. Henry finally fell asleep and awakened to find the old man next to him asleep on his shoulder. "When Henry's eyes adjusted to the faint glow from the dim emergency lighting, he saw that Dorothy, sitting on the other side of the old man, was dozing against his shoulder. Remembering Doe then, Henry thought, she had looked almost exactly as she did now in this hospital room.

  Noble. Strong. Exquisite.

  Irresistible.

  Indeed, she had been that. And still was.

  Henry smiled to himself when he remembered asking her, as they had been leaving the underground, if he had, in some way, offended her.

  "Not you in particular, sir," she had said, "but your country. It is beyond our comprehension why America has not joined us against—"

  Henry had taken her by the arm to face him. "But I am here," he said. And then he had kissed her. And she had kissed him back, and he had felt as though his life had finally begun.

  "Let me know if there is any change," Henry murmured to the private nurse he had hired to stay through the night.

  "You'll be at home?" she whispered.

  "Yes, and don't hesitate to call." After one more look at Doe, he left. "Excuse me, Mr. Hillings?" an aide said at the nurses' station. "A Joshua Lafayette is here to see you. He's in the waiting room."

  "Ah, yes, thank you," Henry said, continuing down the hall.

  In the green room with its stubbornly uncomfortable furniture, a tall young black man in a dark suit was sitting on a couch with a bulging briefcase open in his lap. Joshua Lafayette was a bright and ambitious attorney whom Henry and Dorothy had met at Lincoln Center when he was still at Fordham Law School. A chance con­versation about the ownership of a runaway dog turned into an interesting conversation over a drink at the Saloon across the street. A year later, the result was a job with the distinguished communi­cations law firm that handled Hillings & Hillings. Josh had come to handle so much work for the Hillingses over the years, that Henry wanted him to run the agency after their retirement.

  When Joshua saw Henry he shoved the briefcase aside and jumped up. "How is she?"

  "She'll be all right, thank you, Josh," Henry said quietly, taking his handkerchief out, dabbing at his nose, and smoothly depositing it back into his pocket. "So—what did they say?"

  Joshua shifted his weight and looked straight at Henry. "They say there was no mistake. The order to impound the offices came straight from the top, from Creighton Berns in Los Angeles."

  Color started appearing in Henry's face.

  "I told my contact," Joshua continued, "that I found it very difficult to believe that the new lCA chairman, on his first day of work, decided to impound the offices of Hillings & Hillings with­out a word of discussion with the Hillingses. She said she couldn't believe it either, but that's what it looked like. Everybody's been fired, Henry. Compensation packages were hand delivered to their homes. I don't know what's going on, but I do know there's not a single person at ICA who knows anything about your agency or how it works.

  After a moment, Henry said, "He sent flowers, you know."

  Josh looked a bit startled. "I'm sorry, what?"

  "Creighton Berns sent flowers to my wife. He impounded our offices, fired our employees, won't take my phone calls, but he did, mind you, send flowers to my wife after he caused her to have a heart attack." His eyes narrowed. "I'll have his head, I swear to God I will."

  "Do we file?" Josh asked.

  "Not yet. We take him to court now and he'll drag it out for years and try to bankrupt us in the process. In the meantime our clients will get jilted on representation, and he'll try to ruin our name by claiming that we were the ones who tied up everything and everybody in court. No," he murmured, shaking his head, "I know the kind of creature this Creighton Berns is. But what I've got to know is what he's after. Even a reptile like Berns wouldn't risk compromising his reputation and the reputation of ICA—not un­less he was after something big. Something very big." His eyes shifted to Josh. "We've got to find out what it is."

  "How do we do that?"

  Henry's face cleared and he smiled. "Don't look so glum, my young friend." He touched Josh's arm. "Doe's going to be fine and"—he dropped his voice—"I'll get this son of a bitch, you wait and see."

  "But how, Henry?"

  "Don't you worry about that."

  "I have to worry about it! You're my client and Creighton Berns is one of the most powerful men in communications right now." "Yes, he is, and you have a long life and career to think about, and I don't want you involved in this any longer."

  "Forget it, Henry. You can't get rid of me."

  He studied Josh's face for a long moment. "Your firm's not going to like it."

  "My firm doesn't have to know anything until you're ready to sue. And God knows, Henry, it's not as if ICA's going to hire me." They stared at one another intently.

  "So you're in," Henry said with the beginnings of a smile. Josh nodded. "It's going to mean a lot of work on our behalf. I have to take care of Doe, and I don't want her knowing anything about what's going on. Understand?"

  Josh nodded again, clamping a hand on Henry's shoulder. "And no one on the outside is to ever know that I had any prior knowledge of what is about to happen," Henry added.

  Josh looked at him. "What is about to happen?"

  "Well"—Henry smiled—"you'll just have to wait and see."

  3

  Seventy-three-year-old Millicent Parks put the list down, took a sip of her tea, and said, "So what is it, exactly, you wish me to do?"

  "I want you to send this letter to every client represented by Hillings & Hillings," Henry said, passing her a legal pad. "You can skip Elizabeth Robinson, because I've heard from her—she's al­ready on her way here from England. The letter explains what happened, how it happened, and that you want to organize a com­mittee to talk to ICA about the way they're handling the transition of your representation."

  "Fine," Millicent said, passing Henry a plate of cucumber sand­wiches. They were in the living room of her suite at the Plaza. Millicent was wearing her hair the same way she had for forty-five years, still piled high on her head, only it was white now.

  He took a sandwich and swallowed it absently, as though it had been his first thought of food for quite some time. "And then you'll ask them to attend a meeting in New York. Here is the date, time, and place."

  "Sheridan Square? Why Sheridan Square?"

  "It's just a place where the meeting can be held that isn't con­nected to me.”

  "Oh," Millicent said, nodding and scanning the list. "Very clever, Hill." Long before she had hit the best-seller list in 1950 with her first novel, Millicent Parks had merely been the severely spoiled wife of Henry's roommate at Yale. Later, after her husband, Tommy, was killed in the war, Henry and Dorothy made an effort to keep in touch with her. When Millicent was at a loss about what to do with herself—she had no children and a good deal of money—Henry encouraged her to finish the novel of high society she had started years before at Vassar.

  Time went by and the drafts of the novel continued to improve under the editing of the Hillingses. Four years later, A Dark Garden was finished and Henry, using his father's law firm as the operating base, negotiated a publishing contract for Millicent. A Dark Garden was published in 1950 and sold like crazy. Hill and Dottie, as Mi
l­licent had always called them, had then formally founded the liter­ary agency, and the Hillingses had been looking after her interests ever since—which was a good thing, since Millicent's charming rogue of a second husband very nearly took her to the cleaners.

  For over forty years—through seven books, a third husband, the adoption of a daughter, widowhood yet again—the Hillingses had never steered Millicent wrong with their advice. And now that poor old Hucky was dead and her daughter had moved to Moscow (of all the ungodly places), Hill and Dottie were just about the only people in this world who could lure Millicent away from Bridgehampton, Long Island, where Millicent had a palatial Victorian home on six acres.

  Frankly, after reading in a popular gossip column that "Milli­cent Parks, aging grand dame of the purple prose set, bestowed her presence upon the gathering in a manner befitting the Queen of Hearts," Millicent decided the world could go to hell in a hand basket for all she cared, and that if anyone really wanted to see her, they could damn well come to her from now on.

  In this case, however, her duty was clear. The Hillingses had been cruelly treated and the "new" ICA had to answer for their actions. To impound the offices of two of the most distinguished literary representatives in the world? What on earth kind of world was this? But Millicent knew that today's world was indeed quite different from the one she had grown up in. She wasn't even sure exactly how one fought the vermin of the world today, a world that was so distorted and obscured by the media. How could anyone know who the enemy was until it was too late? Saddam Hussein, Creighton Berns—what difference was there between their goals and their manipulation of the media?

  Of course Creighton Berns wasn't a murderer (at least not yet, although he nearly had become one with Dorothy's heart attack), but there was no earthly reason why some ridiculous little upstart should get away with humiliating three of the finest people in the history of American entertainment—Ben Rothstein and Henry and Dorothy Hillings—and overthrowing their institutions in the pro­cess. No, it had to be dealt with, Millicent knew, fire with fire; this would be a battle for public opinion.